There is nothing as lovely as a long train ride in a jet-lagged dreamy state. As we set off from St. Denys I drifted along enjoying the morning sunshine and the pleasant lilting voice of my fellow Scottish traveller. Someone once told me that the degree to which people reveal their thoughts is inversely proportional to the length of their train journey. It is true, by the time she alighted in Wolverhampton I knew her entire life history. As we emerged into the lovely greenness of Staffordshire the train gained speed. Crossing the border to Cheshire, suddenly I caught a glint -- the white water tower -- there it was, perched like a Victorian ornament on top of a wedding cake -- Congleton! I strained to see but we were through in a rattle of rail. On we sped along the Pennines to Manchester.
I first visited Manchester as a teenager. In my memory it is slaked with industrial grime peppered with the excitement of an adventure into the big wide world. I can honestly say I have never seen the sun shine on Manchester and this trip was no exception. One personal reason for attending the meeting was to see if all that Manchester rain would wash away my homesickness. By day three brisk tea was required to face the grey mornings, by day four I was nearly cured. But, Manchester is like Philadelphia, a dour industrial city with an imposing past, and when you come from there you always feel the need to defend it, to extol its burgher work ethic, tout its cosmopolitan King Cotton past, and…. when pressed by skeptics…. well…. at least its not Birmingham. The meeting itself was a success -- held in the The Palace Hotel and with receptions in Manchester Town Hall and other grand Victorian buildings of industrial weightiness. I saw a lot of central Manchester, largely because I am “geographically challenged” when it comes to maps and equally dazed by verbal directions. Lost at every turn, I wandered back to the hotel in entirely the wrong direction via Piccadilly Gardens where drunken boys spilled out of bars and pale damp Mancunian girls, braving the bracing winds with nothing but a fake tan on their bare legs, brought back amusing memories of my own teenage attempts to effect the impossible. Thank god for signs to the station or I might have ended up in Bury. One evening we took a collegial outing to another of Manchester's pleasures, East Z East, a fantastic indian restaurant, that had the added advantage of being at the base of my IBIS hotel on Princess Street, so at least on this night I did not get lost.
The conference over, I arranged to meet up with Big Bro and jumped aboard the tram for Salford Quays. Whoever picked the name “Media City” for the last stop on the line should be shot. But setting that aside, Salford was a revelation. In my memory, Salford was to Manchester what Queens is to Manhattan, a wasteland that, as the cab barrels along from JFK to the city, you close your eyes and think, “why have I come back to this”. But Salford is transfigured! The economic upswing of the previous decade has transformed it into a kind of modern Amsterdam with beautiful well-designed glass buildings dipping their toes into the canals and waterways.
Bro was waiting on the platform in the lashing rain with my sister-in-law, who is universally acknowledged to be “The Only Sane Family Member”. (God knows what made her marry into our line, particularly after becoming acquainted, in the biblical sense, with Bro’s feet). Bro was wearing something tweedy that looked like it couldn’t make up its mind whether to be a trilby, a deerstalker or a cowboy hat. Hats are a fetish in our family. At the height of the Cold War, my father, ever the rebel embarrassed us by wearing a Breshnev number. Bro claims it is male baldness in a biting wind and not foppery that leads to this bizarre behavior. I am not convinced. Arguing against this hypothesis our Dear Demented Sister, (DDS), who has voluminous hair, does it too. Her husband, “The Soul of Patience” has also fallen under our viral influence and I must confess that one Christmas I talked the “Long Suffering Husband” into buying me a hat that Ghenghis Khan would have been proud of.
Still it cannot be denied that a hat, any hat, however odd, was needed as we beat through the rain to the Lowry Museum. The Lowry was, when said and done, chock full of wonderful Lowry’s and, descending from a dynasty of Mersey Flatmen, I of course found myself particularly drawn to one of a large black barge beached in the mud of the Manchester Ship Canal. We viewed them all and then spent an equal amount of time in the museum shop buying ballast for the suitcase in the form of hefty books. Bro plied us with Gin and Tonics, and treated us to a wonderful dinner in the museum restaurant after which, merry and fed, we dashed off to see Loves Labors lost done in a broad Lancashire accent.
Next day, as the rain continued to slash down, I settled into Bro’s sofa and opened my laptop. There revealed in the browsing history, lay the full irrational extent of the homesickness -- all those listings of wind swept stone cottages in Wildboarclough. Bro was amused and I could see he was already weighing the prospect of a few holidays up there with some long hikes with a good pub at the end. The Only Sane Family Member tactfully pointed out that inability to drive and advancing age might prove incompatible with life atop the peak district hills around Buxton where snow regularly cuts off the roads in winter. The rain put paid to plans for a drive in the direction of “The Cat and Fiddle” to scout out “cottages I want to buy when I am rich”. So instead we set off for Quarry Bank Mill to learn how our ancestors, The Mather’s, wove cotton. Of course this also meant the added delight of drinking pots of brisk tea and enjoying generous portions of cake -- good old National Trust.
