M is for Manchester

any words have been written about Manchester, in the north of England (definitely not to be confused with Manchester, New Hampshire, or Manchester, Bolivia). It was a key town in the Industrial Revolution in England, becoming a major textile centre. Subsequent development meant that it blossomed into the world's first industrialised city, and hosted the world's first railway station. Rutherford first split the atom at the University of Manchester, and the first programmable computer, Baby, was developed over the road. More recently, Manchester has been home to a vibrant music scene (giving birth to the likes of Joy Division, New Order, Morrissey, Simply Red, Oasis, James, Badly Drawn Boy, Doves, etc.) and many sporting franchises, with Manchester United Football Club being perhaps the most famous, having a reputed hundreds of millions of fans worldwide.

More pertinently, Manchester has been my home for a good number of years (nine, in fact), and even though I've moved away and gone back and moved away and gone back and moved away... I still consider it home, even though I'm a Southerner by birth. It's a city which I have a love/hate relationship with, and I'm going to tell you a bit about it.

I first visited Manchester in 1995, when I was 17. It was winter, it was cold and the rain was horizontal. The sky was dark, even though it was mid-morning, and the daylight was scant when it did arrive. I was attending a university open day at UMIST, an old university trying to become new. We were shown around a huge, domineering red-bricked building, filled with mazy, dark corridors laid out with scuffed green lino and wooden locker-lined walls. When the wind blew, the single-paned windows rattled in their frames, and papers rustled on desks. It was grim.

The degree course it offered sounded good, though, and so a few months later I found myself applying for a place there. And then this happened:

(Apologies for the OTT Americanisation).

How nice to know that in three short months I was off to live in an IRA bombing target. This just added to the poor imaginings I had of the city: not only was it a gun- and knife-crime hotspot (Moss Side, anyone?), innocent-looking Mancunian vans in crowded shopping centres suddenly injure hundreds of people.

Needless to say, I moved there in autumn of 1996, and it was as grim as I expected. The incessant rain soaked to the skin, the chill wind penetrated to the bone, and the gloomy darkness of Manchester winters penetrated right to my heart. I lived a park's width away from Moss Side, and shared the streets with all sorts of shady characters and drunken yobs. I counted myself fortunate not to have been mugged until my third year there; we weren't burgled until later than year. My car wasn't broken into until the fourth year. Inner-city life in south-central Manchester, amongst the curry houses, world-food supermarkets and dark and dirty backstreets was depressing, survivable only through the escapism of time spent with friends. In 2000 I graduated university, had no career plan, and stayed in Manchester working nights in a Salford casino. In a way I graduated from the dirty, poor underbelly to the clean, rich underbelly; both equally sleazy.

The dawn of 2001 took me away from Manchester to a foreign land. It was still dirty and poor and I didn't speak the lingo, but the Sun shone daily, and life was good. It's amazing what a burning ball of hydrogen in the sky can do for your outlook on life. Two years passed in a flash, and I found myself back in Manchester, back in south-central studentville, back in the darkness -- environmentally and mentally. The next two years dragged, but nothing untoward happened: I'd learnt to avoid potentially dangerous situations, I walked around with the minimum of cash on me, I'd sold my car previously. The backstreets of Manchester were plagued by scallies at that time, but you just took the long way around, or you kept your head down and avoided eye contact. My cache of university friends slowly dispersed, but I gained a scant few new ones to help keep me afloat in that sometimes rocky sea.

The mire ended when I got the opportunity to go overseas again, this time for a longer period, and once again to a city bathed in sunshine eleven and a half months of the year. My whole demeanor changed, life was good again, I was confident, happy and carefree. All good things must come to an end, though, and all too soon, seemingly, it was time to apply for jobs. Few jobs were available, because it was a difficult time of year, and even fewer jobs were attractive. I applied for just three, one of which was in Manchester. I had my reservations, but after all, I knew the city and the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. They were offering much better pay than I'd had before, which meant that I didn't have to live in the scally-infested backstreets of Rusholme and always have that worry of personal safety hanging over me. They offered me the job; I thought about it, and accepted. The project I was to work on sounded interesting, and that helped me overcome the feeling of dread that arrived with the knowledge that I would be moving back to a city that I didn't like so much. I touched foot on Mancunian soil again. It was damp soil, because it was raining. It was dark soil because the day was overcast. It was hard soil because the day was freezing cold. Goodbye sunshine, hello rain. The obscuring black mantle of depression settled once again over my mind.

It didn't stay long, though. Of course, during my time previously in Manchester, I'd had some good times. Some of those involved walking in the countryside. Manchester is ideally located for access to the Peak District and to the hills in Derbyshire. Edale is a particularly pleasant location, as is the Hope Valley. Closer to Manchester, Marple is a leafy little commuter village with some old-world charm, cobbled streets, canal walks and a country park. That's where I headed. I could afford the hike in price from studentville to commuterville, and I eventually settled on a very nice apartment right on the canal. The journey to work was no more than an hour, door-to-door; I could walk down the canal in one direction and be in industrial Manchester, I could walk down in the other direction and be in open countryside within minutes. And it worked... I could work in Manchester, go out in Manchester, explore Manchester, visit friends in Manchester, but live outside Manchester... and life was good. No feeling of doom and gloom. And I managed to keep it that way for the two and a half years until I left again. This is where the "love" of love/hate comes in. Manchester is an amazing city -- it's beautiful, the range of cultural experiences is large, there are lots of things to do and it's easy to get around (especially now that there's a tram to Chorlton!). Manchester is great, as long as you don't have to live there.

The corollary to this story is that now I live in London... and wow. Simply... wow.