Round about last September we got this crazy idea in our heads that, rather than me commuting eight miles cross town every day to Manchester's fashionable Westside, we would all decamp once and for all and go and actually damn well live there. After only a small amount of prevarication, we took the plunge and made appointments to see some local estate agents. A bright green sign duly appeared outside our front door, and a picture of our crumbling but charming Victorian terrace- priced for a quick sale at £1XX X99- appeared on Britain's most popular website, rightmove.com. The smart money had us out of here by Christmas, unpacking during the January Sales, and sipping aperitifs outside of the European-style cafe bars of Manchester's fashionable Westside (not that our chosen suburb actually has any such locales, but we were letting our imaginations run wild by this point) well in advance of Easter.
Of course the smart money was reckoning without our exemplary sense of comic timing- and sure enough, approximately 48 hours after the appearance of our bright green sign, the phrase 'Credit Crunch' started to creep into the British English lexicon, courtesy of the BBC Evening News Economics correspondent (who suddenly seemed to be getting slightly more airtime than he had previously been accustomed to). Potential purchasers (who had hardly been knocking down our door in the first place, although whenever they did we scrubbed and tidied the house to within an inch of its life,half killing ourselves in the process) suddenly dissappeared off the radar entirely.
Not that any of this stopped us from planning our new life. By early summer Frankie had been accepted into a tiny village-style school over on the Fashionable Westside (it was underneath the M60 concrete motorway flyover and wedged between a Car Body shop and a council estate, but we were ignoring such inconvenient details as they got in the way of our fantasy that we were the stars of a BBC2 Reality property show, albeit one that seemed to be taking slightly longer than the usual half an hour). Oh, and also we had a house to move into (a crumbling but charming Victorian terrace, obviously). The move itself, however, appeared further away than ever.
This is the point, I imagine, where you expect me to announce that, in an unexpected twist, we received an offer out of the blue and are due to start our new life on Monday. Well, no. The more mundane truth is that we have decided that eight months of attempting to flog a dead horse is quite enough. The signs came down last week and we are staying where we are.
You know what though? I think we are both dead relieved. Because in the brief moments when it did seem like we might actually be about to move (such as the day the shiny-shoed young buck from the second estate agents came round and talked a very impressive game about chain-building and a burgeoning investment market, whatever either of those mean) we actually started to feel a little bit sad about the aspects of M19 life that we would miss. Aspects such as:
....The double-decker 192 bus to Manchester, which runs every five minutes from the end of our street, all day and most of the night, and which has a poem written about it (it's called 'The Owl on the 192 bus'- go on, google for it now, I'm not kidding)
...The night-time freight trains, which run every hour or so from the other end of the street. These don't have any poems written about them as far as I know, but they do rumble past in a most pleasingly evocative fashion, in the process sending just the slightest shudder through the house's ancient foundations. I think this is what the estate agents who sold us the house meant by 'numerous characterful features'.
...The launderette on Albert Road where on Boxing Day the old Irish lady plies the clientele with sherry, served on trays in little plastic cups
...The antiques market on the A6 with the cafe hidden away in the basement, where on Sunday mornings the antiques dealers go to haggle over the price of battered grandfather clocks over bacon, sausage and black puddings.
...The 'Easy Call' internet cafe, where the hubbub of Arabic conversation lulls you into deep concentration and the TV is tuned in regardlesss of the hour to Bayer Leverkusen versus Munich 1860 on some Syrian channel- and where the bored Polish countergirl only charges you one pound for an afternoon's worth of surfing, even though the handwritten poster just behind her head says it's 50p for each 30 minutes.
...Hennigans Sports Bar, where Arsenal fans from Sierra Leone and Zimbabweans in Chelsea kits mingle amicably over pints of Guinness (well, most of the time) with flush-faced second-generation Irish lads in United shirts
All this... but what really made me realise we had to stay was the school Frankie has got into in M19. We went round last week, and the place is exactly like the one I went to in suburban Newcastle, right down to the tall, elegant Victorian windows and the wooden 'apparatus' that folds out from the wall of the main hall during PE class (you know, the one Samina Din fell head first off during second year and had to be rushed to to Newcastle General in the headmisstress's orange mini). As if this was not enough, the nice reception teacher we met turns out to have been, in a previous life sometime in the mid 90s, the girl who worked next to me answering phones at the Gas Board in a cavernous call-centre in central Manchester.
On such coincidences are life-changing (or life-staying-more-or-less-the-same,despite-the-temptations-to-throw-it-all-away-and-start-again) decisions made, my friends. Oh yes- the imaginary pavement cafes of Manchester's fashionable Westside can wait. M19 here we stay.
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