LIVERPOOL October 9, 1940: the birth of John Lennon.
Liverpool December 9, 1980: the death of John Lennon.
Peter O'Halligan: in Liverpool cultural terms, that vintage port at the back of the cellar, which only a few people in the house know about.
Fitting, perhaps, that one of the city's original dream merchants should now become a wine merchant – or a glass merchant actually.
Confidential woke up early this morning to find a doorstep delivery of these two very special bottles of vino. They had been dropped off late last night. Instead of a card from the Milk Tray Man, there was a Post-it note saying have a look in the lupins.
Peter O'Halligan is back:
'This is constellated time!'Several glasses later and O'Halligan returns Confidential's call with an explanation. He has created a new season bookended by those two very defining number nines in Lennon's life.
“The Season of Glass,” he says, “will run from October 9 to December 9. From now on, it will fit into the cultural calendar of the city of Liverpool from now on.”
“Season of what? Does Uncle Joe say this is OK?”
Season of Glass. It is a poem by Yoko Ono, written in 1981. “It is the season that never passes.”
O'Halligan, artist and haiku poet, says the new season, “comes out of my work on time and the research done on Carl Gustav Jung's Magnolia Dream of Liverpool in 1927.”
“Go on..” replies our operative, reaching for a pen.
“...the research conducted since the 1970s reveals that the collective dream that it the Dream of Liverpool, is, amongst other things, a Swiss timepiece with a 32 cog movement.”
Our operative reaches for the corkscrew.
Now, where Lennon created the Liverpool Sound, O'Halligan created the Liverpool School, a place which first brought Jung's phrase "Liverpool is the Pool of Life," to widespread attention.
Jung Wine Peter O HalliganWhere, in New York, 1975, a rich Lennon sat in his Manhattan parlour, feasting on home made bread and singing about being a dreamer, at the very moment in Liverpool, O'Halligan and cousin Sean filled a Mathew Street parlour full of skint dreamers feasting on home made bread.
As Lennon said, he was not the only one.
Coincidences? Too damned right. Coincidences are the bread and butter of O'Halligan's world (read here to learn all about that).
Although their paths never synchronised and both came to Mathew Street more than a decade apart, Lennon and the O'Halligans were instrumental in transforming the dusty old warehouse district into a centre of the now.
All that is a lifetime ago and O'Halligan has no truck with wallowing in the past.
Those were the days, “no these are the days,," he says, "we are in constellated time!”
He says he has spent the last 32 years "waiting for the Liverpool Dream to percolate and it has done.
He says: "Even a medical centre on Edge Lane has the Pool of Life quote."
So what happens in this Season of Glass? What is this 32-cog Swiss timepiece? Explain.
“I can't say too much, but it will be revealed and demonstrated in increments over the coming months and years.”
In other words it's all a matter of time.
Any the wiser? No. But we have wine!
