Threads, I call them, when you’re writing them down, ideas or memories that immediately join with another.
I recently heard an elderly lady remonstrating with a young lad about manners, and how “we knew how to behavewhen we were young.” I’d heard similar stuff when I was growing up. No doubt she had, too. I think the glasses we wear to look back with are often rose-tinted.
I remember one woman telling me all about her generation. It sounded like some kind of Golden Era, and my young self back then was thinking yes, but Hitler was your generation, too
Of course I didn’t say that. I was a polite lad and I kept my mouth shut. But I realise now that I was cherry picking individuals while she was generalising.
Anyway, this memory trail led to me to another point in time a bit closer, around 2006. I was going to go and watch a Scottish girl who was about to appear in a small gig in my home city of Manchester. A young singer-songwriter who was starting to be name-checked a lot in music magazines, her debut album was imminent and I was curious to check her out, but for one reason or another I couldn’t make it. Soon the album, This Is The Life, arrived and it persuaded me that I’d missed out that night.
She’s recorded several albums since, but on that first one is a song called Youth of Today, where she defends this generational issue from the perspective of youth. This is a live version, recorded on a French TV show.
But then, conversely, in another song on the album,,she approves of the old idea of celebrity in the form of the iconic stars of the silver screen, as opposed to today’s obvious example of the WAG. Not sure who she had in mind, but “you know who you are.”
For those of you who may have struggled with the Scottish accent in the last video, this one includes lyrics!
I’d been in Leeds for three nights. Catching a train, I was leaving behind a patchwork of blue sky and white cloud. The people I was destined to meet were warning me about the typical Manchester weather that lay in wait for me.
Sitting there, seeing the world rapidly passing by my window, it was hard to fathom. After all, Leeds isn’t that far away from Manchester, is it? They’re both northern cities.
It was a concern too, for the people I was to meet were fellow Prestwich Heys fans at a home game for us, and a lot of rain normally meant that the game would be off due to a waterlogged pitch.
I was meeting my wife and children there, too, for our football games are a family affair. I sent a text to Jen, enquiring about the state of weather, and her discouraging reply prompted my own: I’m in light trainers, bring my boots with you.
They’re walking boots, I should add, not football boots. God forbid that I was intending to play!
We hit the rain just before Stalybridge, and the skies got darker and the deluge heavier the closer I got to Manchester, a familiar, dispiriting dark pall hanging over the place I call home.
We arrived and I donned a waterproof jacket before alighting the train. Immediately on leaving Piccadilly Station I stepped into a large puddle, almost strategically placed to snag the unwary. I’d been in Manchester thirty seconds and my foot was soaked. It truly felt like home.
We have one large golfing umbrella which Jen was going to bring with her, and now back on home turf I planned to get another so all four of us would be covered. That’s if the game went ahead.
The game will go ahead, was the welcome comment added to our supporters’ messenger group. With the new drainage the pitch is holding up well.
With time on my side I took brief shelter in a Starbucks close to Piccadilly, sitting with my latte at a bar situated against the large front window of the shop, perfect to watch this wet world go briefly by.
And that world going by appeared serenely oblivious to the weather we were experiencing. Girls in short skirts and crop tops, guys in shirts and summer shorts, hailing each other and hopping between bars. I watched them as I drank.
The generational shift. Sometimes I think I’m still cool, but I’m not. I’m getting old. This world is yours.This wonderful, swarming, metropolis is yours.And you won’t realise it until you are sat here one day, like me, maybe disapproving, maybe in relief, passing the baton on yourselves.
I could wile away the time here, people watching, being all philosophical and a touch fatalistic, but I had somewhere to be. I calculated what time I’d need to leave to make the match, finished my drink and set off. The heavy rain had thankfully subsided into a light drizzle, and, as if the city wasn’t wet enough, I paused briefly to watch the fountains in the grassless Gardens.
Sports Direct. That’s where I’d get my umbrella from. It was just five minutes away so I headed in the direction of the store. Again oblivious to the current conditions, I encountered along the way a man with bleached blonde hair and high heels, further enhanced by blue cut-off denim shorts and a black net stocking top that showed off his nipple piercings, singing loudly “I know he loves me . . . “
Yep. I was back in Manchester.
I got my umbrella and I got the bus, meeting the family in time to make the match with half an hour to spare. We filed through the turnstile, the kids talking football and my wife talking catch-up.
It was great, I thought, after being away for a few days, to return to a place I love doing what I love with the people I love.
In the midst of this sentimental reverie, standing pitch side, the clouds opened up again. But my umbrella didn’t.
No wonder those bastards wouldn’t let me try it by opening it up in the shop! Bad luck my arse!
But it couldn’t dampen our enthusiasm. The match started and we cheered on our team. The pitch was perfect and so was the moment, the one working umbrella covering our children and my son’s friend. And once more I thought of the generational shift, of these young supporters, just beginning, perhaps, a lifelong association. The lifeblood and the future of this, our adopted club.
I’m sitting in the garden, once again, this time reading Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine.
It’s summer. I can smell summer; taste summer. My jackdaws are lining up along the neighbour’s rooftop, tethered by the sun.
It’s in the autumn I’ll think of my father; my grandparents, see the young ghosts of my brother and I playing cricket in the ginnel, dwarfed by walls I can comfortably peer over.
For now, it’s my children, playing with the dog as I pause to watch, mid-sentence, laughing on the threshold of a great beyond.
I’ve mentioned this man before on City Jackdaw, usually around Remembrance Sunday, but I feel that I should mention him again as today is the centenary of his death.
He is my Great Grandfather Albert Cartwright, of the Lancashire Fusiliers.
This is him with his wife, Ada. Maybe they had the photograph taken on his enlistment in 1914 because, you know, just in case . . .
He died at home, on this day in 1919, after being gassed during the second battle of the Marne in 1918. He was just forty. He lies in an unmarked grave at Phillips Park Cemetery, not far from Manchester City’s Etihad stadium.
That battle marked the beginning of the end for Germany. He almost made it safely to the end of the war.
He almost made it to 1920.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been injured. This photo, of course in black and white, shows Albert wearing his ‘hospital blues’, uniform they were given while recovering in hospitals back in England.
His war record states that he died on New Year’s Eve, though his death certificate says it was the 30th.
Perhaps it was either side of that midnight hour, when twenty four hours later the city would be ringing in the New Year, while his newly widowed wife Ada and his children, my Grandmother Lilian among them, would be grieving their loss.
It was a loss that reverberated down the years with my Gran.
And so, even further down the line, I remember him now, and always ❤️
Yesterday was a special day in our home-it was the third birthday of my son James. For those of you who are familiar with my post Boonless In Southport (19th June) you will know just how much he is obsessed with balloons. Mention it being someone’s birthday, anyone’s birthday, be them seven or seventy, and his immediate response is “Boons!” So, of course, first thing in the morning he was confronted with balloons everywhere-helium filled, resting against the ceiling, tied to chairs and door handles, and breath filled, covering the floor in a carpet of colour. His presents and cards weren’t even afforded a second glance.
Cue Sinatra: For I only have eyes, for boons.
He loved being the center of attention for the day, offering long-lashed, bashful eyes in response to the obligatory ‘Happy Birthday’ song.
I have a diary, as I expect most of you do. Along…
Today, as I am sure you will be aware, is the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. I intend to watch the many programmes commemorating the event today, my thoughts no doubt turning to my two Grandfathers who took part in history’s largest ever land invasion. I know next to nothing of their own, personal D-Day stories. I know very little of their time during the war full stop. Like so many, it appears that they didn’t speak too much about it. And by the time my own curiosity had grown, it was too late.
One of them died of cancer before I was born, the other died when I was twenty years old, at a time when I had yet to fully develop my great interest in history, and in particular my own family history.
I do wish I had asked. Either them, or other older relatives who may…
My daughter turned eight years old today. On greeting her and wishing her ‘Happy Birthday’ this morning, she told me that she said a prayer last night in bed:
“Thank you for being seven, and thank you for all my remembers.”
I loved that last bit-thank you for all my remembers. Her way of summing up the past twelve months of her life, all of the memorable moments in the cavalcade of chronological events.
The other day I was watching her younger brother James from the kitchen window. He was out in the garden, studying a bird perched in a tree above him. He was serious and rapt, the hint of the handsome man he will be painted there on his face, and I found myself confessing a sad, wistful thought to myself:
I wish I was younger.
I have four children, and their arrival into the world was spaced…
City Jackdaw 