Seems that the blue plaque at Widness to mark where Paul Simon "wrote" Homeward bound was actually Warrington bank Quay.
Seems that the plaque might have to be relocated to WBQ.
Being reported on BBC» Saturday breakfast News.
Is it just me that sees the irony of the Homeward Bound plaque living in the wrong home?
The background to this: Paul Simon, aged just 22, early one morning, was travelling back to Brentwood in Essex, from Widnes, changing en route at Lime Street.
He held the return half of a ticket from from Liverpool to Brentwood, but sensibly bought another to cover the leg from Widnes to Liverpool.
Sitting on a bench, he continued to work on the melody to a new song that had recently come to him - being on tour with his guitar, he'd been writing it at an entire series of Merseyside stations. Cutting through his concentration, the sound of his train approaching the platform prompted a flurry of activity from the passengers that awaited it.
He climbed aboard. Round came the guard on a ticket check. Seeing that Paul's ticket was an off-peak one, the guard asked him where he was heading to. Paul explained. Since Northern Rail's recently abandoned chosen course regarding excessing a ticket was sixty years into the future, the guard, rather than initiating criminal proceedings against the young songwriter simply said 'Ah, that's fine, no need to pay the excess on that one, you've got a long journey there, but you'll be in time for the 10am from Lime Street' and went on his way.
Sensitive to an echo that seemed to come from the future, Paul found his scalp prickling, and he quickly retrieved his notebook to jot down the previously elusive opening line of the lyric for his melody:
'Sitting at the railway station, got a ticket for my destination'.
The rest of the verse quickly fell into shape.
The outcome: he didn't have to spend the rest of the day worrying about getting a criminal record and being deported. Instead, anticipating that the song was a winner, he made his way along the London train - a cooked breakfast on the 10am from Lime Street was in order.
Sixty years later, we still have the song he wrote, and lastly, the tourist information people from an entire catalogue of towns in the north west are thinking that *their station* surely deserves a plaque too.
Mark
P.S. That's not based on fact, it's a fiction, a mere tale.
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