Mersey Wylie

Well, it's been a long week and it ended with a long day. I arrived in Williamson Square at 7.30am to find my colleagues Sarah and Nici already there, people delivering market stalls, marquees, tables and chairs and a crew building a stage... World Mental Health Day had begun!

By 9.00am stallholders were arriving and by 10.00am things were buzzing. At 11.00am we were joined by the Lord Mayor, Tony Concepcion, and by Luciana Berger MP, both of whom gave speeches from the stage and then went round and spoke to stallholders and punters alike. We had over 20 stalls providing information on mental health support for all ages, genders, sexual orientations and cultures, along with closely related information about welfare rights, housing, domestic abuse and more.

This is the 2nd time this week that I've spent time with Luciana Berger, the new Shadow Minister for Mental Health, and it took me 90 minutes to accompany her round the site as so many people wanted to talk to her, tell her their problems, make suggestions about mental health policy and express their enthusiasm for Jeremy Corbyn! She even had a go at the circus skills tent and proved to be a dab hand with a diablo!

Throughout the day we enjoyed performances by singer/songwriter Dominic Dunn, the incredible Polish folk song and dance troupe Mazury, wandering minstrels Blunderbuss and Badger, exuberant drummers La Bomba, the ever-entertaining Mersey Swing dancers and today's blip subject, snapped just after she came off stage, Mersey Wylie...

If you think her name and/or face look familiar then you're probably about my age! She is, of course, the daughter of Liverpool music legend, Pete Wylie - him out of (The Mighty) Wah! (Heat)! And she's certainly inherited his musical talent.

Here's a clip of her playing in St John's Gardens, about a minute's walk from my office... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sT45z9PzC1A

The finale of the day was The Big Choir Off! We had 15 local choirs singing together to a very enthusiastic reception. What's not to love about hundreds of people singing the Pharrell Williams hit 'Happy' or Jackie Wilson's '(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher' in harmony? Terrific stuff!

All the packing-down and tidying up was completed by about 6.30pm but as I caught the bus home I realised that the last time I'd sat down was about 10 hours earlier!

Over the course of the past week we've had over 40 mental health related events taking place in Liverpool and, although it's hard to assess it all properly at the moment, the feedback has been very positive indeed.

I need to get some serious rest before we start planning for 2016's festival but before I do I want to thank everyone who gave their time, their skills, their funding or their support to make this year's free programme of events so successful. In particular I want to thank Sarah and Nici who've worked tirelessly and with amazing good grace and humour to make it all happen. You're both wonderful! Thanks also to Chris at Threshold for organising the great stage line-up today.

To end the week, how about something by Mersey's dad? His best known song is probably, and justifiably, 'The Story of the Blues' but I'm going to go for the rather less well known 'Talking Blues (The Story of the Blues Part 2)' which is, unfortunately, still as relevant today as it was back in the Thatcherite early '80s... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPXJk-OTF3o