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This year’s summer holiday is underway. But rather than the less exotic climes of Asia or South America, I’ve brought Penny to the great North-West of England: land of my mother and home of my soul.

We started with one of the world’s great rail journeys, St Helens Lea Green to Liverpool Lime St.

Liverpool is virtually unrecognisable from the drab, rundown city of my youth. Billions of pounds have been spent in the city centre, mostly for the better. Sadly the new Museum of Liverpool Life is a modern architectural statement in utterly the wrong place, isolating the three Pier Head “graces” including the famous Liver Building. It’s these historic and beautiful buildings whice now seem out of place, which is an architectural crime.

So what’s the best possibly way to enjoy the historic centre and waterfront of a maritime city? Take the Duck Bus tour on the roads, which then splashes into the waters of the splendid Albert Dock!

The museum of slavery was disappointing, a bit of a mess which didn’t give a clear narrative and bizarrely appeared to play down the role of slaves themselves in it’s abolition.

But the Albert Dock is an ideal spot for lunch and people-watching amid the largest collection of Grade I listed buildings in the country.

Penny commented in one of the more noticable things about the city: all the girls are dressed to kill and beautifully made up, just for a Sunday afternoon’s shopping.

It’s now an attractive and accessible, human city that I could probably live in, if it weren’t for one important point. There’s no way I’d ever allow my kids to grow up Scouse.

The council have been installing new architectural lighting in the underpass at the top of Trafalgar Street.

What they should have done is use mostly soft white/off-white lighting to illuminate the impressive ironwork struts and arches, with perhaps a single colour to pick out either the brickwork niches on the south side, or the archways on the north (the ones that haven’t been boarded up and ruined, that is). The lighting units themselves should’ve been hidden within the supports.

That’s how architectural lighting should be: subtle, to highlight the interest and beauty of the structure, and in this particular place they could’ve added real warmth and character to one of the entrances to our city.

Instead, what they’ve done is install cheap, tawdry and multi-changing coloured LED strip lights. They’ve been bolted to the lovely brickwork in ugly strips, with the wiring and casings all visible. They’re not even one long unit – but several, much cheaper ones that don’t even all change colour at quite the same time.

It’s garish and tacky, like a bad nightclub. Why does EVERYTHING have to be colour changing LEDs?

The photos don’t quite do the effect justice – the lights don’t even continue to the top of the road because it’s low to the pavement and in daylight.  So it’s like a disjointed dotted-line of metal that begins and ends abruptly. That’s why these things should be hidden!

Does no-one with any sense of aesthetic look at these plans first?

The Energy Healing Centre in Trafalgar Street are frauds and charlatans, promoting all kinds of utter bullshit from auras to gong therapy. But this particular pile of bollocks really caught my eye:

Faint praise, indeed…

I was quite underwhelmed by the Sky Mirror. Firstly, it’s not very big. There are several of Kapoor’s mirrors, the biggest being 5 metres across. This one is less than half that.

Secondly the beauty of the sky mirror is supposed to be it’s incongruity. Reflecting a blaze of blue sky into an urban scene. A perfect circle of colour and freedom against drab architecture.

Put the mirror into a natural setting and it loses that impact and contrast. Site it near some bushes, next to one of the most startling and surprising buildings in the UK and it’s dwarfed and utterly out-shone by its surroundings: the Pavilion Gardens is not the right place for this sculpture at all.

The installation in the old vegetable market is different. This is on another scale entirely. Two huge red earth works, like alien turds 7 feet high, appear to have burrowed out of the ground leaving a perfectly oval crater. The rubble is piled nearby.

The deep scarlet red implies something like flesh and blood, the size itself and technical execution is inspiring though like much modern art although it looks cool it doesn’t have a lot to say.

The faint suspicion of pretentious twaddle lingers when you learn of the title: The Dismemberment Of Jeanne D’Arc.

Far better was the installation on the ground floor of my building, created by the Youth Offending Team. On the theme of Seven Deadly Sins, it was laid out like an empty flat – with hints of the occupant’s sins and crimes, repentances and regrets: a briefcase of forged money and drugs, TVs showing static and imploring “Why does no-one listen?”, a bathroom cabinet with medicines re-named things like “I Punched Someone Just For Fun”. It was bleak, but strangely hopeful – these were people who felt they were excluded, had moved into crime but were now coming back having identified their own weaknesses and sins.

As a counterpoint, recent news articles of the MPs expenses scandal were pasted in the kitchen. Are MPs as full of remorse and as willing to accept a penance as these young people? And isn’t everyone a sinner on some level anyway?

Of course it had it’s moments of cliché. But these aren’t artists, they’re just disenfranchised young people finding their voices. It was more powerful and thought provoking than anything that Anish Kapoor could create, but sadly not worth the £2 million the mediocre Sky Mirror commands.

Centrepiece of the Brighton Festival