Last night a friend and I went to a screening of The End of the Affair (1955) in St Lukes church in Liverpool. The choice of film, with it's portrait of Catholic guilt against a backdrop of war torn London, was echoed by the setting - St Lukes is also known as 'The Bombed Out Church', a casualty of 1941. At times Deborah Kerr's onscreen urban world of strange new London streets, hewn from rubble and shadows, seemed to segue into our own; I half expected her to wander out from behind an overgrown pillar, to prostrate herself in front of the overgrown altar, unused for decades. When humans make rain fall from the heavens, we do not nourish or bring life - it doesn't nurture, it kills. But then, even though the church is no longer used for religious ceremony, I would like to think that some of the things that happen there now could be perceived as a new kind of worship - people coming together to make music and to celebrate life, rather than a preoccupation with ritual, an infatuation with death. The sunflowers that stood around the old walls were like cheerful sentries. It made a beautiful frame for the black&white world of the film, which was all clipped English accents (why does nobody talk like that any more! 'oh darlink - i think - i must punctuate - every three words - with a pause - and remain curiously atonal - even when declaring love.') and burning eyes and understated emotion. And the clothes....

The Bombed out Church is one of my favourite places in Liverpool. For many years it was a half-shell of a place; sometimes, as kids, we would run around the outside and jump up on tiptoes to try to peer through the gaps where there used to be windows. In 2007, a group known as the Urban Strawberry Lunch collective became artists in residence and since then the half-building has been given a new life, with all sorts of things going on - urban gardening, lots of film showings, and musical events happen on a regular basis. If you're local, I suggest checking them out.