Notes From The Overground

It just seems like five minutes ago that I was regaling you all with Whitley Bay stories, but a quick glance at the date at the top of the post there reveals it was more like 25 days.  Where has the time gone?  Oh yes, now I remember- first of all there was the...

1  Visit of my entire family to Manchester

I've always wondered who actually lives in all those super-modern canalside city-centre apartments that have sprung up on the sites of disused cotton warehouses over the last fifteen years.  The only person I know who lived in one was a Glaswegian drinker called Neil who became briefly notable for buying a pair of media glasses, developing a taste for Caffe Latte, and starting a new, self-consciously urban, life somewhere in the Piccadilly Basin.  Two months later he was reported to have returned to his former diet of kebabs and Boddingtons, and to be living, like everyone else I know, in a small, cramped, freezing terraced house in the southern suburbs.  

The answer to the mystery, as I have now found out, is that a lot of the super-modern canalside apartments have no-one living in them at all, and are instead let out at surprisingly competitive rates to savvy visitors.  Among them a few weeks ago was a four-strong delegation of my relatives.   After some teething trouble involving those new-fangled intercom systems (which for half-an-hour had my sister and baby Oscar trapped inside their space-age apartment while my mam tried in vain to contact my dad on his mobile to find out the alarm code on the corridor push-button thingy) we all adapted to canalside life quite swimmingly.  In no time at all my mam and dad had visited every museum the city had to offer (apparently the Imperial War Musuem is 'a bit on the depressing side'; who would have guessed?) and also found time to become acquainted with the hidden rice 'n' three curry cafes of the Victoria backstreets.  Abby and baby Oscar, meanwhile, were more taken with the arty teahouses of the Northern Quarter. 

The one outing we all went on was to the bus museum at Cheetham Hill, which apparently is a Manchester institution although I know nothing about it, possibly because it's hidden away in the backstreets behind Strangeways and run (from the looks of things on a shoestring) by volunteer enthusiasts whose idea of a thrilling Sunday afternoon out is to dress up like extras from 'On The Buses' and while away the hours riding back and forward to Victoria on the free vintage shuttle bus and eating pie, mushy peas and gravy in a reproduction of a 1960s drivers' canteen while leafing through a thirty-year old edition of 'Bus Illustrated' that they've just bought for 50p from their mate on one of the stalls.  This sounds like I'm taking the piss, but I'm not.  The truth is that me and Abby both felt we were among kindred spirits, and as if to prove it we set about rifling through every single shoebox in the makeshift fleamarket in search of a postcard featuring an orange number 53 bus (because we once made up a song about an orange number 53 bus and have been slightly obsessed with them ever since).  We didn't find what we were looking for, but after some time a bloke in full Inspector's uniform emerged from the shadows and promised to get us a pristine postcard featuring the famed Rusholme to Old Trafford cross-town service from the museum's extensive archives, or as he put it, 'round the back'.  We felt like we had been inculcated into some sort of secret society.

 

2  Survival Sunday

Well I suppose I'm going to have to mention Survival Sunday- which, in case you don't know, is the name given to the last day of the Premiership season when typically the title has already been won already by either Manchester United or Chelsea so the attention of the nation is diverted to the desperate battle among a handful of stragglers aiming to avoid relegation and so retain a foothold on the lucrative top-flight gravy train.

I have never taken much notice of Survival Sunday, which typically ends with one or another of an unchanging rollcall of charmless provincial outfits (Bolton Wanderers, Wigan Athletic, Middlesbrough, Hull City..) clattering through the trapdoor, only to return a year or so later, still managed by the same dour gum-chewing Yorkshireman.  This year was different, as for reasons amply documented elsewhere, once-proud Newcastle United had somehow found themselves down among the deadmen with just ninety minutes of the season to go.  I spent the ninety minutes in question holed up in Stockport pub with thirty or so south Manchester based members of the Geordie diaspora.  Our efforts to effect an unlikely away victory at Aston Villa by swearing at a sunkissed plasma screen and drinking insane amounts of strong lager proved about as effective as the efforts of the players on the pitch, which is to say not effective at all and in fact ultimately embarrassing.   I can't quite remember the details, but as far as I recall there were twenty minutes of pointless midfield fumbling, at the end of which our full back stuck out a leg and diverted a hopelessly-off-target Villa shot into his own net for what proved to be the winning goal. After that events become ever more hazy, but I do remember a City fan buying our table a round of drinks because he felt sorry for us, and being shunted helter-skelter through the deserted backstreets of Heaton Mersey on the shoulders of my mate Skipsey, who had decided the best way to deal with relegation trauma was through the medium of piggybacks.  The next morning I woke up with a bruised arm and spend the best part of the afternoon fast asleep in Fletcher Moss Park.

 

3  The Trip to That London

Now this was a more civilised affair altogether.  Charlotte and Frankie (absolutely wisely) had left me and the Geordie diaspora to face the rigours of Survival Sunday alone, but we were re-united last week to visit Charlotte's brother on his canal boat.  We set off from Levenshulme at half-past nine in the morning, and via the wonders of the Pendolino (it leans over markedly to one side at bends, instead of slowing down from 150 mph, which is a techological innovation I chose not to think too carefully about as it strikes me as downright asking for trouble) we were at Euston for lunchtime.  Thereafter our progress became more stately. First of all there was a tube ride to Uxbridge, during which Frankie became excited beyond words at the first sighting of an overground underground train, if you know what I mean, between Neasden and Dollis Hill.  Then we slowed down to a near-stop, aboard a narrowboat which Charlotte's brother expertly navigated through a number of locks, through an overnight mooring, and eventually to Little Venice, a curious quarter where the Grand Union Canal fights for space among the thronging organised chaos of the capital.  Above us, Paddington-bound red buses rumbled at great speed across a concrete flyover, while on the opposite banks, eyeing each other with equal measures of disdain, stood handsome chalk-white Regency-style merchants houses and a 1960s local authority concrete jungle of towerblocks.  In between were to be found the boat-dwellers-  a curious mixture of hippies, well-to-do retired couples , hireboat party animals and daytrippers, who, it appears, are regarded as harmless eccentrics by the yuppies and the estate kids alike, so enjoy free passage on either side of the divide.

Frankie was of course oblivious to the deep-seated socio-cultural divisions blighting our nation's capital, and divided his time between the lottery-funded playarea under the towerblocks and the vastly more expensively appointed kids area of Regents Park. I didn't ask him which one he liked most but I suspect the boat-themed climbing frame under the towerblocks may have just edged it.

We're back in Manchester now (in one piece, those Pendolino people maybe do know what they're doing after all), and recovering from all the excitement.  Something more close to home I imagine next time  (but possibly still including swings and  buses, which as our extensive research has established, are to be found everywhere)...

Comments

[beth]

Crikey, you have been having a right old time haven't you!

Sorry about that relagation business. Still - not the end of the world, is it?

[abby]

Eeeeeee, I just got excited all over again about the bus museum. I am still waiting on the archival number 53 bus photos but it will be gala day when they arrive. I hope that you're not too swanky for buses now that you're a tilting Pendolino traveller.

[jonathan]

Now we're back home I can assure you the Pendolinos are once again just the long red streaky things that whoosh past our back garden every 30 minutes and make the old Victorian windows shudder in their casings. Meanwhile we're back to the delights of the intersuburban bus service, which on Saturday saw me and Frankie crisscross Manchester's southern reaches using not just a pair of 169s, but also a 197. One for the connoisseurs there and for any passing habitues of the Cheetham Hill transport museum.

Oh and relegation... the truth is I'm actually quite relieved that the whole sorry story has at least ended definitively. Also as someone who grew up in the 1980s (when we were habitually rubbish) there was part of me that never could never really take all these high-octane matches against Manchester United and the like entirely seriously. This part of me finds the prospect of sparsely-attended home game with Grimsby Town comforting, like an old blanket. I'm sure this says something rather revealing about me that a team of pychiatrists could have a field day with, but there you are...

[Ben]

Piggy-backs might have made me feel better. God knows, I couldn't have felt much worse that day...

Still, the fixture list's up so I've been infected (ridiculously) with something approaching excitement for the forthcoming season. Will we never learn? etc etc

[Tim]

Pendolinos rock, so to speak.

[Skipsey]

My memory of the piggy back incident is that I ran as fast as I could down Heaton Moor Road, with rider in place, and, having badly misjudged the Becher's Brook-like jump that is the kerb outside Kro, threw the pair of us onto our faces in the middle of Shaw Road.

We're lucky we're not dead man.