I love the Merseyside Maritime Museum, not merely because it is well done but because it gives such a potent sense of what Liverpool was like when it was a great port indeed, when the world was full of a productive busyness and majesty of enterprise that it seems utterly to have lost now. How I'd love to have lived in an age when you could walk to a waterfront and see mighty ships loading and unloading great squares of cotton fibre and heavy brown bags of coffee and spices, and when every sailing involved hundreds of people sailors and dockers and throngs of excited passengers. Today, you go to a waterfront and all you find is an endless expanse of battered containers and one guy in an elevated cabin shunting them about.

 Once there was infinite romance in the sea, and the Merseyside Maritime Museum captures every bit of it. I was particularly taken with an upstairs room full of outsized ships' models the sort that must once have decorated executive boardrooms. Gosh, they were wonderful. Even as models they were wonderful. All the great Liverpool ships were here the Titanic, the Imperator, the RMS Majestic (which began life as the Bismarck and was seized as war reparations) and the unutterably lovely TSS Vauban, with its broad decks of polished maple and its jaunty funnels. According to its label, it was owned by the Liverpool, Brazil and River Plate Steam Navigation Company Limited. Just reading those words, I was seized with a dull ache at the thought that never again will we see such a beautiful thing. J.B. Priestley called them the greatest constructions of the modern world, our equivalent of cathedrals, and he was absolutely right. I was appalled to think that never in my life would I have an opportunity to stride down a gangplank in a panama hat and a white suit and go looking for a bar with a revolving ceiling fan. How crushingly unfair life can sometimes be.

 I spent two hours wandering through the museum, looking with care at all the displays. I would happily have stayed longer, but I had to check out of the hotel, so I regretfully departed and walked back through central Liverpool's fine Victorian streets to the Adelphi, where I grabbed my things and checked out.I had a slight hankering to go to Port Sunlight, the model community built in 1888 by William Lever to house his soap workers, as I was interested to see how it compared with Saltaire. So I went to Liverpool Central and caught a train. At Rock Ferry we were informed that because of engineering works we would have to complete the journey by bus. This was OK by me because I was in no hurry and you can always see more from a bus. We rode along the Wirral peninsula for some time before the driver announced the stop for Port Sunlight. I was the only person to get off, and the most striking thing about it was that this was patently not Port Sunlight. I tapped on the front doors and waited for them to gasp open.

 'Excuse me,' I said, 'but this doesn't look like Port Sunlight.'

 'That's because it's Bebington,' he said. 'It's as close as I can get to Port Sunlight because of a low bridge.'

 Oh.

 'So where exactly is Port Sunlight then?' I asked but it was to a cloud of blue smoke. I hooked my rucksack over a shoulder and set off along a road that I hoped might be the right one and no doubt would have been had I taken another. I walked for some distance, but the road seemed to go nowhere, or at least nowhere that looked Port Sunlightish. After a time an old man in a flat cap came doddering along and I asked him if he could point me the way to Port Sunlight.

 'Port Sunlight!' he replied in the bellow of someone who thinks the world is going deaf with him, and with a hint that that was a bloody daft place to want to go. 'You want a boosel'

 'A bus?' I said in surprise. 'How far am I then?'

 'I say you want a boosel' he repeated, but more vehemently.

 'I understand that. But which way is it exactly?'

 He jabbed me with a bony finger in a tender spot just below the shoulder. It hurt. 'It's a boose you're wanting!'

 '1 understand that.' You tediousdeaf old fart. I raised my voice to match his and bellowed near his ear: 'I need to know which way to go!'

 He looked at me as if I were unsustainably stupid. 'A bloody boose! You want a bloody boose!' And then he shuffled off, working his jaw wordlessly.

 'Thank you. Die soon,' I called after him, rubbing my shoulder.

 I returned to Bebington where I sought directions in a shop, which I should have done in the first place, of course. Port Sunlight,

 it turned out, was just down the road, under a railway bridge and over a junction or perhaps it was the other way round. I don't know because it was now pissing down with rain and I tucked my head so low into my shoulders that I didn't see much of anything.

 I walked for perhaps half a mile, but it was worth every sodden step. Port Sunlight was lovely, a proper little garden community, and much cheerier in aspect than the huddled stone cottages of Saltaire. This had open green spaces and a pub and pretty little houses half hidden behind drifts of foliage. There wasn't a soul about and nothing seemed to be open neither the shops nor the pub nor the heritage centre nor the Lady Lever Art Gallery, all of which was a bit of a pisser but I made the best of things by having a long slog around the rainy streets. I was a bit surprised to see a factory still there, still churning out soap as far as I could tell, and then I realized that I had exhausted all that Port Sunlight had to offer on a rainy Saturday out of season. So I trudged back to the busstop where I had so recently alighted and waited an hour and a quarter in a driving rain for a bus onward to Hooton, which was even less fun than it sounds.

 Hooton offered the world not only a mildly ridiculous name, but the dumpiest British Rail station I ever hope to sneeze in. The shacklike platform waitingrooms were dripping wet, which didn't matter a great deal as I was soaked already. With six others, I waited a small eternity for a train to Chester, where I changed to another for Llandudno.

 The Llandudno train was gratifyingly empty, so I took a seat at a table for four, and contented myself with the thought that I would soon be in a nice hotel or guesthouse where I could have a hot bath followed by a generously apportioned dinner. I spent a little time watching the scenery, then pulled out my copy of Kingdom by the Sea to see if Paul Theroux had said anything about the vicinity that I might steal or modify to my own purposes. As always, I was amazed to find that as he rattled along these very tracks he was immersed in a lively conversation with his fellow passengers. How does he do it? Quite apart from the consideration that my carriage was nearly empty, I don't know how you strike up conversations with strangers in Britain. In America, of course, it's easy. You just offer a hand and say, 'My name's Bryson. How much money did you make last year?' and the conversation never looks back from there.

 But in England or in this instance Wales it's so hard, or atleast it is for me. I've never had a train conversation that wasn't disastrous or at least regretted. I either blurt the wrong thing ('Excuse me, I can't help notice the exceptional size of your nose') or it turns out that the person whose companionship I've encouraged has a serious mental disorder that manifests itself in murmurings and prolonged helpless weeping, or is a sales rep for the HozeBlo Stucco Company who mistakes your polite interest for keenness and promises to drop by for an estimate the next time he's in the Dales, or who wants to tell you all about his surgery for rectal cancer and then makes you guess where he keeps his colostomy bag ('Give up? Look, it's here under my arm. Go on, have a squeeze') or is a recruiter for the Mormons or any of ten thousand other things I would sooner be spared. Over a long period of time it gradually dawned on me that the sort of person who will talk to you on a train is almost by definition the sort of person you don't want to talk to on a train, so these days I mostly keep to myself and rely for conversational entertainment on books by more loquacious types like Jan Morris and Paul Theroux.