It was my turn to go to the bar. If anywhere is fair game for strangers to talk to you, then it’s at the bar.
“They’re crap.”
Realising the guy was talking to me, I needed him to repeat what he’d said as I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. He’d taken me by surprise as I hadn’t given him much notice. “Them,” he nodded to me, “they’re overrated.”
I had to glance down to remember that I had on an old Stone Roses t-shirt, now exposed since I’d taken my jacket off to drape over the chair where my friends sat.
“You reckon?” I asked him.
“ Yeah, one okay album and that was it.”
I wasn’t that big a fan to take up the gauntlet, but offeredwith a shrug, “That doesn’t really mean anything though, does it? Not really.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we can talk objectively and intellectually about it, but music is subjective. And emotional. “
You can talk like that when you’ve had a few beers and not feel a prick.
“We don’t choose who we like. Me and you could have the exact same upbringing. Same house, same family. Same life experiences. Yet have totally different tastes in music. We don’t choose who we like. We just like them. “
At that we were interrupted by the barmaid coming to serve me. He turned back towards the man who was stood on the other side of him, I made my order.
He still thought The Stone Roses was crap. I still thought they were okay.
Sometimes things come together and lead somewhere else.
This morning I saw a meme which asked:
My first thought was ‘teen spirit’ but that was just me being facetious, when that decade was out I wasn’t yet in double figures. I read the replies and among the more popular ones were ‘incense’ and ‘pot’.
I’m also currently reading Where Shall We Run To ?, in which the author Alan Garner remembers his early childhood during the war years.
Although set in a different place (Alderley Edge, around fourteen miles from Manchester) and a different time, it got me conjuring up things from my own childhood in the seventies which I’d long since forgotten.
Grasshopper hunting in the long grass beneath the tower blocks / the symbiosis between nettle and dock leaf that strangely every child knows / curling playing cards, nearest to the wall wins / split the kipper / and more / and more
Always the memories from that period are daubed in colour; always it’s summer.
Since the publication of Fifty I’ve continued to write poetry and among the new stuff are two short pieces rooted in that season: one is called Summer of ‘88, (an important time in the history of my wife and I), and the following one, which for all those who were there needs no explanation.
On Friday we went into Manchester city centre, and on finding a spot in a car park we were treated to this view.
Beyond those two more modern towers, I pointed out the Victorian tower to my daughter, Millie.
“See that tower there, that’s part of Strangeways prison.”
“A prison?! That’s a prison?In Manchester?”
You learn things about your own city every day. “Yes.”
“People are locked up in that tower?” she continued.
“No, that tower is inside the prison grounds.” People have referred to it as an observation tower though it’s actually a ventilation tower.
“It’s called Strangeways?” she asked.
I remember being struck by that name when I was about her age, thinking it referred to the kind of people it housed. Why say they were people with ‘strange ways’ and not ‘odd behaviours’? Or perhaps ‘weird habits’? In actuality the name comes from the area it is in, an Anglo-Saxon description of ‘a place by a stream with a strong current’.
Much more poetic.
“It became famous throughout the country in 1990 when a riot took place there. Prisoners broke out and climbed up onto the roof.”
“What for?”
“I think they were protesting about the conditions there. I know it started when a prisoner grabbed hold of the microphone in the chapel during a service.”
“How long were they up there for?” Millie asked.
“It was a few weeks.”
“Couldn’t they shoot them from the tower?” her brother helpfully suggested.
“I can remember when it was going on. We’d be going home from Manchester on the bus and you could see the men up there, circling police helicopters and all that. People would take sandwiches and go and watch it with the kids.”
This was an absurdity that caused Millie to laugh: a picnic at the prison riot. Mancunians.
“What happened to the prisoners?”
“Well , the ones on the roof eventually came down. Bit by bit. They couldn’t stay up there forever.”
“And then what happened?”
“They got longer prison sentences.”
“What, so they were in prison, broke out onto the roof and then got put in prisonfor doing it?”
“Pretty much, yeah.“
“What was the point of that?” she asked, perhaps not unreasonably.
I could have mentioned the inquiry into the protest, the resulting recommended reforms, or the fact that there were many injured prisoners and officers as well as one death. Instead, I offered another memory of the time:
“Not long after it finished, I started a job at a warehouse on Derby Street in Cheetham Hill, not far from the prison. I was only eighteen. A couple of workmates told me that when the rioting was going on there was a man up on their warehouse roof.”
“One of the prisoners got out?”
“No, it wasn’t a prisoner. It was a man who’d climbed up onto the roof because he wanted to go into Strangeways with the prisoners!”
“So there’s prisoners on a roof wanting to get out of the prison and there’s a man on a roof wanting to get into the prison?!”
Light was falling fast. I was looking at the conifer framed against the sky at the edge of the garden, I was thinking of the black poplars that used to mark the perimeter of my primary school. I was thinking of lots of things.
Jen’s car pulled up, headlights signalling her arrival. I left the bench I was sat on to help with the shopping, greeting her with “You know, I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.”
“Over what?”
“The killing of John Lennon.”
Her eyes rolled. Him again.
“You’re always thinking of something,” she’d said to me once before. “I can see when you’re not there.”
I took the bags from the boot, trying my best to be present.
* * * *
There were more shadows in the morning. More distractions.
8.00am was the earliest I had ever been in Wetherspoons. I told Jen (by text) to relax – I was only on coffee. I was devastated to learn that I’d forgotten my glasses. I’d brought a book to pass an hour or so but would have no chance making out the words in the gloom without straining my eyes.
Instead I had to reconcile myself to passing the time by watching the old men who were wiling away the minutes until their beer was available at nine. They were all men and all ‘of an age’. One entered while I was watching, hunched over, going table to table with the aid of a stick to greet those who had already staked out their spot for the day. What do we call them? Friends? Drinking buddies? Cronies? How well did they really know each other? If one stopped coming in would he be remembered? Would the others know enough to check up on him?
The odd newspaper came out with a flourish. Cricket got a mention along with hose racing.
I tried to picture them at school, what they were like as kids. What hopes for the future they had. What dreams. Lines from a Cat Stevens song came to mind:
We’re getting older as time goes by / A little older with every day/ We were the children of yesterday.
Without looking up from their papers they threw down lines that were only occasionally picked up by another.
“Supposed to piss down this morning. Got in just in time I reckon.”
“Did you see that Putin? All his trouble with those Wagnerists . . . Wagners . . . whatever they’re called. Them anyway.”
“That submarine wasn’t safe.”
“Of course not – they died.”
“You wouldn’t have got me in it. They want to leave that wreck alone. Titanic, I mean. I’ve just read that the guy driving it was making a fortune out of it.”
“Driving the Titanic?”
“The fucking submarine!”
“No good to him now. They want to leave that wreck alone.”
Another man came in, a bit younger than them. The comparison hit me – a bit younger than them but about my age.
Maybe that’s how all of these guys started out: with a coffee and a book. Maybe Jen has saved me from all that. Maybe. You can’t read the future.
(What hopes for the future they had/What dreams)
The clock hit nine and the mood visibly lifted. The woman behind the bar brought trays of beer to the tables, the different glasses placed in an order to correspond with her route, obviously learned by rote.
The new arrival had taken a table near to me and now also got himself a beer from the bar. He then whipped out a laptop from his bag and started up some kind of zoom call. The face that appeared in the ether asked him how he was doing.
“Not been a good weekend for me, to be honest. My best friend has been put on life support.”
Jesus. It was time to tune out. I got up for a refill. One of the men nodded to me on the way to the coffee machine. A crony, maybe. Would he one day be able to check up on me?
Back in 2018 I did the morning walk to primary school with my daughter for the last time. Today she finished high school. The wide world is opening up.
There has only ever been two English clubs to do the Treble, and both of them are from Manchester. United did it in ‘99, and now my own team, City, have emulated that extraordinary feat.
Although this time around it fell to United to try and prevent us. We had already bagged the league title, (number three on the bounce), and then we were up in the FA Cup final against the reds.
My family went to watch it with the family of one of my oldest mates (meaning how long we had been friends, not his actual age!), a guy I used to go to the game with right back in our school days, which included some very bleak times, at City’s now demolished former ground, Maine Road.
Barbecue, beer and a 2-1 derby day win against our Manchester rivals. Next up was the Champions League final and a chance for immortality. Everywhere I went, in the days leading up to this game, people who knew I was a City supporter, or strangers who spotted my son’s City shirt, would hold up a finger: “One more!”
Things were building. We dared to dream. But having made the final before, only to lose to Chelsea, we knew that anything could happen. At the beginning of the season, if someone would have said “You can win the league title and also the FA Cup – against Manchester United at Wembley, we’d have snatched their hands off. Of course a double would still be quite an achievement, but to be this close, this close that we could almost touch the Holy Grail of a historic treble . . . to fall short would have be crushing.
On Saturday night the game took place in Istanbul against the Italian side, Inter Milan, and we pulled off a cagey 1-0 win. Expectation and apprehension had taken a toll, but despite not being at our best we ground it out. There were nerves, there was relief, there were unrepeatable exclamations. But we did it.
We watched this one at home. A neighbour had given us a gender reveal canister to let off (a male blue of course) and as he let his own off in his adjacent garden we followed suit, blue confetti colouring our lawns. We celebrated long into the night, a fitting end to a remarkable season.
Last night we went to the parade in the town centre. 200,000 fellow supporters descended on Manchester, a sea of blue in defiance of the weather forecast. A hot, sticky day was said to ‘possibly’ lead to thunderstorms. We gathered under clear skies, the atmosphere electric, as we waited for the three open top coaches, carrying players, staff and trophies, to arrive, We had an hour to go as clouds started to drift towards us.
Eventually we would seek shelter beneath that covered section of Market Street.
We knew it was coming, this is the Mancunian way Rainy Manchester and all that.
Fans still found vantage points in anticipation of the players’ arrival. They still clung to them as they were threatened to be swept away.
Heralded by some dramatic flashes of lightning, the heavens opened.
This guy remained up there throughout, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette at one point as the storm raged.
My son James and I, like everyone else unwilling to lose our place on the parade route, sheltered beneath a flimsy football flag. We were all dressed in short-sleeved football shirts. The flag began to succumb to the deluge, clinging to our shoulders and backs. It was like we were camping out in a monsoon.
But the fans sang on. A clap of thunder drew ironic cheers. Manc songsmith Noel Gallagher had prophetically said that if City won the Champions League, and in doing so claim the Treble, we would all celebrate in typical Manchester weather, getting pissed wet through, but the rain would taste like champagne.
I never experienced any Moët & Chandon, but still we were going nowhere. Word reached us that the start of the parade had been put back from 6.30pm to 7.00pm. Then 7.15pm whispered through the crowd. Waiting in vain for a break in the weather, the club then decided that everyone had waited long enough, getting thoroughly soaked in the process. They were on their way.
In solidarity with their supporters, some of the players stripped to the waist, dancing defyingly through the storm.
An iconic shot of Jack Grealish, who has seemingly been on a never-ending celebratory bender:
Quite early on: It’s only water.
There are more extreme photographs online of people absolutely drenched to the bone, whereas I was mostly trying to keep my phone dry in my shorts pocket. As the coaches passed, heading towards the stage set up elsewhere in the city for the concluding show, fans who had been huddling in shop doorways headed towards the cover of Market Street.
We followed.
Only in Manchester can you go into a doorway for shelter and come out again with a pair of handcuffs.
As the crowd dispersed in several streams, some heading for the final stage show while others were satisfied to now go home and dry off, we once again met up with my friend who had been in another spot along with his son and sister.
Sporting five different City shirts between us, standing before a mural of the famous Manchester bees.
And of course now the weather turned for the better. It might have rained on our parade, but everybody stayed and everyone loved it. Let’s do it again next season. Yes?
City Jackdaw 