Black and White Town

Here comes the action,
here it comes at last,
Lord give me reaction,
Lord give me a chance.

You feel guilty walking around Manchester. You feel guilty for being able to leave. For most, they are stuck in the glum.

I am staying in an outlying small town, called Irlam, which is a twenty minute train ride into the city. I wake up today to realise that it hasn't changed since my last visit.

One bit.

Mind you, I love Manchester. I would come here over any sun-infested tropical island any day. But you feel guilty because people are trapped; trapped within the dreariness and the go-nowhere jobs and the muck and the grime. It would be different if I didn't have a return ticket every time... but like I said, not much has changed. Even so, that's not to say there isn't fierce pride and confidence that exudes through everyday life here, that lies dormant within every Mancunian, whether they be hugely successful pop stars or work at the local newsstand.



Manchester is the original black and white town, where dreams of bigger lives fall by the wayside early on, and to be quite honest, they seem to be okay with that. Most of the people I've met know with a precise certainty that they are never leaving, and their renowned sense of humour and dry wit serves as a buffer to the opportunity that a person like me has. This is How It Is, and to think one person, one insignificant mound of flesh and bone, has the power to change How It Is, well... I'd choose to live within reality, Thank You Very Much.

Still, I see the clash between innocence and bleak reality firsthand, as I walk to the train station my first morning in my beloved home away from home. I am staying with my cousin Paul, and sometime after he leaves for work in the morning, I leave his Irlam home to go into the city. He gives me a key so I can come and go as I please. Five minutes into my walk to the train station, I am struck by a young boy, who might be ten or eleven years old, just sitting on his bike in the middle of the deserted road, staring, motionless, into the grey sky.

He looks incredibly bitter, and he decides it takes a special type of person to put up with all this... and to think that we've put up with this for hundreds of years, and fought for this, for God's sake... well, the walls are forming even as I look into his forlorn eyes. He will never leave, and he dares you to question the resolve of the English, because every boy at some point stares off into the distance, eyes glazed, and accepts his fate on this God-forsaken island, one that for some reason the Nazis wanted with a passion.

What were they thinking?!?

This is in the back of everybody's mind, from the eighty year old miser who hobbles up to the bowling green, alone and unhappy on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-September, to the ten-year-old boy in the United shirt, stopped short in the middle of the road, transfixed by the clouds and the rain. They were not able to take this island, and they never will.

England will live, whether we like it or not.



TJH