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.

D is for Divorce

id you ever consider what the worst thing that could happen to you would be? You'd have to be quite a moribund person to mull over such a thing, but perhaps it could be a constructive exercise. Maybe a grizzly bear swiping a sharpened claw through your solar plexus, snagging a whole bunch of your entrails on the way out? Or how about having spikes driven under your fingernails by some hammer-happy Nazi torturer? Perhaps being left in the desert with nothing to drink while the Sun climbs to zenith? Losing your house and all your savings in an economic meltdown? Whatever you decide upon, it will be wrong, because there can be nothing worse than a messy divorce. Divorce is dying but without the relief of death.

One of my favourite books is "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert. It's not my usual cup of tea, but I really enjoyed reading it. In fact, I think it's the only book I've ever read twice. She begins the book by describing her rather sudden separation and divorce from her husband, and she uses some wonderful expressions that really spoke to me. She relates a phrase that her friend used to describe divorce. He said that divorce is like "having a really bad car accident every single day for about two years". It is kind of like that; it's like waking up each morning from a wonderful dream (that is, if you can sleep), having those few moments of fading bliss where the dream melts away and then being hit by a half-tonne block of metal on wheels. Sometimes it is a tangible pain. She goes on to describe the breakdown of the relationship between her husband and herself: "The object of your adoration has now become repulsed by you. He looks at you like you're someone he's never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion". This is one of the things that hit me hardest. In marriage (or should I say, in a successful marriage), you choose someone to be with for the rest of your life and that person gets to see you at your very best and your very worst, but they stick with you through both. They become part of you, they're like an extension of you. In Christianity (see "R is for Religion") this is emphasised more -- you leave your parents and you cleave to your wife (or husband), becoming one flesh... the spiritual picture is of grafting yourselves together. So that when your marriage breaks up (not that this is condoned by the church) this picture is reversed: flesh is ripped from flesh. What was once part of a single living organism is now two wounded halves. Sometimes it really feels like that, especially when the wound is fresh. And probably you'll always have an ache. As Elizabeth Gilbert so poignantly expresses, that part of you that you once knew intimately becomes unrecognisable and actually starts to detest you, and you it. Whereas when you woke up in the morning to gaze into your lover's eyes, now you're waking up trying to avoid them as much as possible.

I'm not really sure what happened during my separation and divorce. I don't really want to go into too much detail, but now that I look back on what happened I can see that we never really trusted each other and that weakness in our foundation early on lead to the downfall of the house we tried to build. I think my lack of trust in her was kind of twofold, firstly knowing that she'd cheated on a boyfriend before, and the second is my desire to be in control (of *my* own life, more than anyone else's) and so I wanted to do everything myself. Hers was due to a number of factors, not least having a mother who had married and divorced four times, thus giving her two different fathers in her early childhood, and meaning that there were always people coming and going in her life - her fathers, her mother's boyfriends, her mother's friends as she moved from job to job. So even from the moment we met, my ex-wife was subconsciously expecting me to leave her. And probably because of her control issues, she was continually looking for reasons to leave me, to anticipate what was to her something inevitable. But you know, we were kind of grown-ups about all this, in a sense... although in terms of maturity, we were clearly just kids (clearly with hindsight, of course). We realised that we each had these weaknesses, so like all romantics in love, we thought we could overcome these flaws through the power of that love. We couldn't, though. Only three months after getting hitched, she was walking out the door -- she needed space. Of course, being the sap I was, I told her that she should stay in the apartment, and I would go away for a few days. So she got space, she got control, we both convinced her to try it again, so we did... until the next time and the next time and the next time, until the opportunity finally arose for her to leave for good and she did. We couldn't reconcile, and I haven't seen her now for two and a half years.

We had effectively been in the process of separation ever since the day we got married. Probably even before then. I remember a night we were together just a few months before our wedding day. We were talking an evening walk around the neighbourhood, and as usual, we were arguing. Invariably she was the instigator of arguments, and, we reasoned, it was because she wanted to drive me out of my shell into some act of love and adoration of her, in order to reassure her that I did actually love her. I guess this is a grown-up version of the torment-the-boy/girl-we-have-a-crush-on game that many preteens engage in. Sadly this tactic was doomed to failure, since when someone yells at me (and boy, she could yell) I don't automatically think "Oh, how I love you... let me show you". I kind of curl up in a metaphorical ball, kind of foetus-like, and wait until the beating stops. Sometimes it takes a while. Days. This time she had been yelling at me for a couple of hours, as we were walking around the neighbourhood... you know, like couples in love do. I was being very on top of my game at this point, and I was quelling my survival instincts and looking higher, seeing that all this yelling was just a cry of reassurance. I tried to reassure her, I told her that I loved her and was committed to her -- all things she needed to hear -- but this particular evening she went further than she had ever gone before, and said the words "break up". We should have absolutely broken up at that moment; it would have solved so much heartache and embarrassment and humiliation later. Indeed, my head was saying "Yes, we should break up! Here's what you've been waiting for, my boy". But my heart, my incurably romantic heart, was still fixated on this, my first serious relationship, being forever. Stupid heart. Masochistic heart. To cut a long story short, I mollified her rage to some extent, convinced her temporarily that I was serious about her, and gave her some breathing space. So, yes, that was just a few months before our wedding, I seem to recall. My head was also thinking, "If you break up now you can say bye-bye to all those deposits for the photographer, florist, cake, venue, string quartet..." Stupid head.

I've never had to break up with someone before. Relationships just seemed to end, and we both knew it. I didn't know when to make that kind of decision. Do you give it your all until you find yourself married and tearing each other's throats out, or do you have a defined point where you realise that the situation is irretrievable? I guess recognising that point comes with experience. I have some experience now, and I think I could recognise it if I saw it again. For those of you who need a clue: if you find yourself hating someone -- even briefly -- it's probably a good time to break up. If you find yourself a slave to the relationship, it's probably a good sign to get out. If you find that when you're just sitting with your other half there are awkward silences even after you've been together for a while, think carefully about your future together. I mean, there are ups and downs within a relationship, of course, but when you know, you know. Listen to that quiet voice, and don't try to block it out with sugar-coated dreams of the future. You might end up married, and then divorced... with the scars to prove it.

F is for Family

or many people in life, families are their lives. Their parents, their siblings, their spouses or significant others, their children and nieces and nephews all mean incredibly much, and that's great. I've seen many families like this close-up, and it's incredibly heart-warming. My family, however, is not heart-warming in any sense of the word, really. Or even emotional to any degree. They're like a well-oiled machine. Everyone knows where the boundaries are, and no-one would even dare to get close (except me, perhaps, the black sheep of the family) for fear of upsetting the status quo, which has been in place for oh, at least 30 years.

I think I have a strange family. They're completely average in many respects, I guess... a 2.4 children family. White, middle-class, both parents having worked their way up from relatively mediocre backgrounds over the past 40 or so years. They were both university-educated when going to university was actually about education, and they've both had steady jobs and average salaries their whole lives. My dad was always the "career" worker, and we moved around a couple of times because of his job, which he'd held since leaving university. My mum trained as a caterer, and was able to find good work wherever we were, even though it meant leaving good (colleagues-cum-)friends behind each time. We lived in middle-class housing estates where the houses all looked alike. My brother and I went to "good" schools. I was always more academically-inclined than him, and went to a grammar school, and he went to the local comprehensive where he excelled at sport more than learning. And he was always more outgoing than me, and I think this is the root of the favouritism, I guess, that my parents make quite evident now... in ways that they're probably not even aware of. He is their ideal child, a son after their own heart. He owns a house, mortgaged up to his eyeballs, that he's going to have to work the rest of his life to pay off, he has a job which he doesn't enjoy, but which pays most of the bills, a credit card which is maxed out, he has a company car, he has a wife, and soon, a child, who will probably grow up just like him. Which won't be a bad thing, because he's a generally nice all-round good chap. But then there's me. I work short-term contracts, I don't have a house, mortgage or car because I move around way too much, I start to sweat if I have more than $100 on my credit card, I don't have a wife or child or any hopes of securing either in the short-term future. I had one of each, but the wife was too much of a nut to handle normal life. To my parents I'm probably too academic, too awkward and too goddamn carefree -- debts make you responsible, damnit! -- and I just enjoy life too much to be shackled like that. So we go through this charade, my parents and me. I call them every week or two to let them know that I'm still alive and still not married/mortgaged/permanently employed, and to hear the latest way they have conceived to tell me that they have actually done nothing in their lives since the last phonecall. There is no exchange of emotion, any sign of a controversial point of view from me is swiftly dismissed with an "Oh well", any disagreement is rapidly shuffled off the table of discussion. It's a routine, it's a performance, it's rote.

I have a family, but they don't know me, and I don't belong to it.