Vote: The worst thing about Liverpool

What is your least favourite thing about our Marmite city?

Saturday night taxis

Alas, the Saturday night taxi debacle. Be it slut dropping in gay town or raving it up in the basement of Heebies, you’ll be having the time of your life. But your night is always instantly ruined by trying to get home. Walking aimlessly around town for hours to be told time and time again that it’ll cost £25 to go to Smithdown is complete bullshit and gets on all of our nerves. We know for an actual fact it’s £7 with a Delta, if that Delta even exists, let alone arrives. Even walking to reliable China town for a taxi is hit and miss thanks to the mighty battle to get to the front of the taxi rank queue. You end up walking half way home before flagging down an overpriced hackney cab. The only way forward is staying out until 6am in grimey Tiki Joe’s or going home with a guy who lives in town. And we all know which option we’d prefer.

It’s in the North

The only things the North has that makes it better than the South is that everything is cheaper, cash machines give out fivers and you can buy cheesy chips. The weather is a whole issue in itself: not only is Liverpool pretty damn North, meaning winter starts in late July, but it’s also by a river. Rather than just being freezing all the time, you’re also at risk of GBH caused by the wind if you’re even slightly unbalanced. Not to mention the fact this means there’s tons of stupidly long hills. Ever tried to make it back to a lecture from town in a rush up Brownlow? Not happening, chuck. Also, the higher you go towards Scotland, the harder the accents are to understand, and Liverpool is no exception – there are actual Scouse dictionaries you can buy. They’re longer than you think.

Dog poo on Smithdown

Can anything ruin a morning more than stepping in the shit of an unknown dog? The beauty of Smithdown is ruined by the unregulated fouling of its historic streets. The glory of Liverpool is destroyed by this shit-scented stain of societal behaviour. Worse enough is the horror of your unexpected footfall in a steaming mass of faeces dumped outside your front door (and at 6 foot intervals along the route to the bus stop.)  Worse still is the fear of what beast of hell cooked up this monstrosity to ruin your day and instilled within you a never-ending ability to smell that cankerous odour forevermore on your footwear. For more fearful than the feeling of the warm, moist poo sinking round into the groves of you boot sole is the inherent question of what evil little beast created the shit.  Was it that demonic yapping Chihuahua of No.43, in its miniature pink dog-hoody and diamanté-studded collar? Or the silent greyhound at No. 7 trained to eyeball the students of the road and send stabs of ice down their spine? What culprit laid its festering trap upon the pavement? And what, dear god what, did its breakfast entail to create such a nostril dissolving scent? God forbid it rains – and it always rains up here – leaving you in danger of being lost in a tidal wave shit storm.

Clean your shit up

The lack of serene places to poo

It’s approaching 11am in the Sydney Jones and you’ve just finished that yard long coffee you bought from the hatch. Working hard on your essay reading, you notice a wavey feeling in your stomach and you buttocks begin to clench. It is time to poo. This is an inescapable nightmare for all Liverpool students, the campus toilets offer little besides uncomfortable aromas and awkward experiences. We all need to do our business, but some of us view the toilet as more than a functional experience: it’s a place for personal contemplation, a site for a brief spot of meditation (or guiltless Facebook scrolling). Toilet time doesn’t count as procrastination, making it some of the most precious free time you have at uni.  To have that spoiled by hearing someone come in and mill around impatiently outside, or even worse come in and unleash a torrent of plop next to you ruins this valuable me time. Being caught short in L1 is an equally distressing experience. The lack of public toilets mean that you end up having to go a minor expedition, ending up desperate in forgotten corners of Marks and Spencer before finally coming across the shrine you were after. This is not pleasant, Liverpool needs to up its game of thrones fast.

The shitty temperature in the library

The drastic temperatures of the grove wings in the SJ are enough to grind the gears of any student. Why can’t the library ever get it right? The Grove Wings during winter resemble the Sahara desert in August, or the intense rays of a Scouse sunbed. Not only is the heat uncomfortable but it’s distracting too. What’s more, when you combine the task of walking up two flights of stairs to get to your fave spot and the overpowering heat, you begin to look like you’ve just had a heavy sesh at Chibuku. Oh and then you bump into your library bae. Cute. In the summer months, the temp is reversed and the grove wings mirror the coldness of a Concert Square bouncer’s heart. How can they get it so wrong?

Havin a meltdown in the SJ

Halloween

Everyone hates how busy it gets on Halloween. We get it that the go-to-clubs will be fuller than normal, and it’s inevitable the queues are going to be longer than any ordinary night out. But why is it that you cannot breathe walking down Concert Square? How can it even be that ridiculous, it’s like every man, woman and child in Liverpool have been summoned down to the streets. Even Baa Bar generates crowds to rival that of V Fest. It’s just silly and ruins the spontaneity of deciding where you’re going on the night. It gives us anxiety having to plan ahead what we’re doing on Halloween and booking an event. Because you know if you don’t, you’re going to have a shit night squeezing your way through sweaty crowds, waiting in line for over an hour, only to end up in Walkabout.

Aggy bus drivers

You can’t visit this red brick city without encountering at least four grumpy bus drivers. As if it isn’t annoying enough having to pay over £300 just to get to uni every day, you’d think for that amount of money you’d get more than a monotonous greeting grunt as you get on the bus. You try your best to brighten up their day by saying “thank you” at the end of a cramped journey through Smithdown, but you’ll be lucky to get anything back. Some of them even grab you if your pass doesn’t scan properly. For over £300 you expect a bit more – why it’s so difficult to be anything but moody and rude?

Chips and gravy

Why do people choose to have gravy and chips as their end-of-the-night food in concert square? Who invented this monstrosity that’s taken over the North? Any half-intelligent individual knows that chips are dry and you dip them in a sauce of choice. So why do Northerners insist on drowning their innocent potato fries in a swampy lake of sub-par brown liquid?  And why do they get so aggressive when you suggest the combination isn’t worth three Michelin stars and a starring role in the Pride of Britain awards? I mean, Southerners don’t get angry when you fuck up the clotted cream and jam on scones combo – they just accept that some (Northern) weirdos put the jam on first.  Chips and gravy do not go. Don’t get us started on when you add in cheese. Rumour has it there was an incident last year when someone bumped into a monstrous creature scoffing their gravy and chips and the victim ended up being soaked in the gravy – it wasn’t pleasant. The love for it is not deserved at all.