BROUGHTON STREET, CHEETHAM HILL, 7.41AM I was driving home and Joni Mitchell came on the radio. “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.” I sang along, of course, and then, when I’d got back and made a mug of strong tea, I was stirred to look revisit the folder of pictures from Not Quite Light that have had no work done on them, that are forgotten and perhaps destined to be […]
OLDHAM STREET 7.35AM The previous night I’d begun to read The Manchester Man, written by Mrs Linnaeus Banks and published in 1876. It details the life of Jabez Clegg, who was rescued in his cradle from the flooding River Irk, and adopted by the kind and hard working Simon Clegg, and Bess, his saintly daughter. This act of absolute altruism is set against the conditions of work and life that Mancunians had to exist in during the early 19th Century. […]
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 […]
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 […]