ROCHDALE ROAD 7.17AM I’d been out the night before in The Millstone pub, one of my favourite places in Manchester. I was watching the delicious chaos unfold before me when I noticed a woman that I’d had a drink with a few months earlier. Her name was Michelle, a born and bred Mancunian, who was drunk and sad. Her long, sequined dress wasn’t comfortable on her, and she had to walk with care in her high heels. We ended up […]
ANGEL MEADOW 7.37AM It wasn’t the Shortest Day after all. Never assume. I’d always thought that it fell on a fixed date, like Christmas, and didn’t think to check this basic fact. However, as I stood in Angel Meadow, I still believed that it was the Shortest Day. The unfinished moon lingering in the crisp, clear sky should have caused me to pause and wonder, but I’d decided that it was the Winter Solstice, and so therefore it was. Angel […]
SADLER’S YARD 7.20AM When my kids were little I used to love building them sandcastles. Hours would be spent constructing walls, towers and moats. I even used to dig channels to aid the sea in its inevitable destruction of something I’d been proud to have built. And then tomorrow, the beach would again be the same, but changed, as new fathers elbowed their children out of the way during their quest to achieve as much as they could before the […]
WHITTLE’S CROFT 6.17AM The rain was bouncing off my hood, the tippy-tap noise being my only company in this small side street tucked away behind Ducie House. I saw no-one and no-one saw me. If I’d been more of an animal than my modern, city self I’d have gone to shelter on higher ground. The lemming leaves lay dead on the ground, except for two which remained like young lovers looking into the sunset on the last night of their […]
DANTZIC STREET 6.48AM It’s funny what things you notice in adverts, that lodge in your brain and then are played back to you in coincidental, real life moments. I’d seen that the Milk Tray Man was being resurrected, which is an odd idea when you think about it. A stranger, a loner, breaks into the house of a single woman, and leaves some cheap chocolates for her, signifying that she’s not only being watched, but that her home is also […]