Rainy Manchester. Rainy, god forsaken Manchester, with its glass towers and multiple football teams. With it's musical history that it clings onto like someone who used to be cool. With mile after mile of terrace and suburb surrounding a concrete nucleus in which nothing gets done. With its university fostering some of the most influential minds in recent history whilst also harboring a significant portion of average minds. Manchester sits snug in the borough of Greater Manchester, an egg inside an egg. Wigan, Bolton, Bury, Rochdale, Oldham, Tameside, Stockport, Trafford and Salford all circle the city like the moons of Jupiter, yet with less fantastical names. It has its own airport, street lights, public transport system and a rich sense of community through advertising. It is Manchester in which I first cut my teeth as a rookie reporter, writing up stories on traffic disasters and unnecessary surgeries, reviewing bands in dingy basements who didn't even know I was there. And like many others I had returned to the north of England, head empty and spine perforated. This was England post-recession, post 9-11, post-Diana, post-Thatcher, post-Industry. It was time to scry the zeitgeist from wi-fi hotspots, Bitstrips, competitive cooking shows and so on. Manchester was as good a place as any. London was expensive, Liverpool was cold, there never seemed to be enough light in Bristol, Birmingham was stuck in a perpetual state of 1979 due to factors known only to myself, Newcastle had poor drainage, I had been banned from Chelmsford, Durham and Sunderland, Bradford had disagreeable architecture, Belfast had it's own thing going on, and I couldn't seem to find a decent curry anywhere else save for Glasgow, but why would a high-tech media sociopathologist running a brain limb across the meme sphere want to move to Glasgow? So Manchester it was. Acid rain on an acid house.
And so I stride along the streets, twisting my neck to and fro, rummaging in bins for clues. A wizard, a psycho-geographer, a bum. I am none of these things. I am a metanoid thirsty for information, mouth glued to a hose connected to a car with a bomb in it. The year 2014 is nearly here, isn't it. The year in which the Queen dies. The year in which the internet is turned off in what is known as Intergate. The year in which China begins to populate the moon with annoying robots. Yet before all that must come January the first, New Years Day, a champagne and mephedrone binge. Probably. If not, why not? And why wait? This is winter and it is hot.
