This evening, under sodden, slate grey skies, Levenshulme is strangely festive. The car park of the Al-Waalis Restaurant and Banqueting House (formerly the Palace Nightclub) is awash with colourful Sari-clad wedding guests, swaying under hastily hoisted umbrellas to the beat of the ceremonial Asian drums that I think are called Dholls. Just yards away, but separated by an unbridgeable cultural divide, the usual half-dozen regulars of Hennigans Sports bar eye the scene through Embassy Regal fumes and with borderline-beligerent indifference.
Back in my street, a pair of young Chinese revellers have balanced a timer-enabled digital camera against the roof of a parked Nissan Micra, and are attempting, amid much wobbly-legged hilarity, to photograph themselves arm in arm, champagne flute glasses aloft in their free hands. They don't seem to care about the torrential rain, which is surely going to play havoc with their unseasonal golf-style knitwear and is splashing their pink champagne across the cobbles.
Back in the house- an unusual, disconcerting sensation that I struggle to recognise for a moment before realising it is...silence. Charlotte and Frankie- exhausted by the end of term, which seems to have been going on for several weeks now but is still not quite upon us- have taken to their beds. I have the house to myself and, as is customary when this rare circumstance arises, am overcome by the boundless possibilities afforded by domestic serenity- read a book? Watch a DVD? Squander away the evening blasting away little coloured squares on the tiny but horribly-compulsive free video game that came with my posh new mobile phone and which has been nearly causing me to miss tram stops and end up where we will all end up if we are not careful, in Eccles?
After perhaps 20 minutes of rabbit-in-a-headlight hesitation, I settle down with a plate of reheated soya meat spaghetti bolognese, and watch a sprightly BBC4 documentary about the Documentary Movement in pre-war Britain. And I'm glad I do, because otherwise I would have never found out that Benjamin Brittain and WH Auden together wrote the soundtrack for 'Night Train', (the classic grainy black and white movie which followed the GPO overnight mail express from Glasgow to London, you will recall the action shots of leather satchels bulging with province-bound loveletters being snatched from the grasp of the traincarriage at 80mph by ingenious, metal-limbed, awkward-elbowed, mechanical, lineside contraptions), or that the war against Hitler was essentially won by a half-dozen jovial-looking pipe-smoking chaps in checked blazers and cardigans who survived the Blitz by holing themselves up in tiny Soho studios, feeding themselves with spam and powdered eggs and rattling out hyper-real homages to the Stiff Upper Lip of the Common Englishman , featuring firm-jawed postmen in smoky locker rooms reciting scripted lines such as 'Here- which of you blighters have had my boots? Come on now, own up, play the game!'
And now.. now the only sound outside is the occasional night train (clattering down the very same Glasgow-London line that Benjamin Brittain and his pipe-smoking pals made famous), and the silhouette of the Inspire Community Centre (formerly All Saints Church) is just visible against the darkening Stockport Road skyline. Which means that it is very nearly my bedtime, so I'm off, either to watch Newsnight, or smash to virtual smithereens tiny coloured virtual squares, or read an erudite but breezily-written account of the history of the Basque People, or finish off the last of the reheated soya spaghetti bolognese, or daydream about night trains and pipesmoking poet-documentarists and awkward-elbowed mechanical contraptions of bygone eras, or possibly all five at once. Good night.
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