City Love: Manchester

I'm a coastal girl, a small town coastal girl. This is my comfort zone. It's where I grew up. Where I'm raising my kids. Where I am happy.

But I do love city life...

I love being a city tourist.

On the weekend I visited Manchester, for work related stuff. It was sunny, it was gritty, it was buzzing... I loved it.

I had to navigate my way from Victoria station to the conference centre on Lever Street. Anyone who knows Manchester would tell you this is a piece of piss. But for me, the girl who gets lost in a camping shower block (not once - but twice!) this was a challenge.

The distance was 700m, I'd memorised the street map from Google  I had some map thingy on my phone. I was organised. And guess what? I did it! I got there.

But that wasn't the best bit. The best bit was walking through Manchester's Northern Quarter and falling a little bit in love with this city.

I don't claim to know much about all our cities, but I do know that every city I visit is full of such a mixture of life I could sit and watch it slowly tiptoe into the streets and then burst open all day long.

We all know London is pretty special as a city right? But there is something about the soul in northern cities that blows London out of the water.

Manchester isn't a pretty city; it's gritty, dirty and busy with promise. Just like the Manchester accent, it hits you somewhere else, that you weren't expecting.

I found myself on Thomas Street on a sunny afternoon. I'd passed vintage clothes shops and second hand book shops with speakers blaring opera music onto the street. I'd narrowly avoided being trampled by a tram and just missed out on being the landing mat of a "jump artist". Eventually I was strolling among the Northern Quarter, watching cafes and delis spill onto the street and catching sight of the city's sub cultures celebrating their subtlety in record shops and specialist art shops.

The city was exposed inthe sunshine outside bars and bistros.Wooden tables were overflowing with chalk boards, funky teapots and coloured glasses. Different accents, unusual laughter and foreign language filled the air above N4. The young, old, trendy, reserved and outrageous flowed  from indoors to outdoors, off the kerbs and into the gutters. Pockets of culture exploded into the open and I very much wished I was  part of it.

I wish I had taken out my* tab2 and captured some of the buzz in snapshot. But I was too busy enjoying it, absorbing it, drinking it and breathing it.  I don't get to cities much, I have to get my fix when I can.

*Not mine, my 5yo's sons.

Caitlin Moran and a registry office Up North

I was holding out for a bigger wedding, you know, I thought we'd probably tie the knot just after we won the Euro Millions. But as the years went by, I started to get a little impatient.

It was only when my sister quoted me a bit of Caitlin Moran that the penny finally dropped...

"Six years and a £19.99 engagement ring later, and it’s our wedding day. It was – initially – going to be in a register office in London, followed by a reception in a pub.

In boring, empty mid-October. Everyone could have got the bus home. It would have cost less than 200 quid. We could have knocked it all off in five hours flat. Oh, I wish we’d had that wedding." 

Caitlin Moran How to Be a Woman.

When I read this, I thought, "yeah, why not just do that?" It's so simple, so easy, so right, and in the day and age of the Twenty Grand Wedding, quite original!

Caitlin Moran didn't get married like this. In the end she opted for a monastery, a  red velvet dress and ivy in her hair. She herself insists "It was a bad wedding!"

And no wonder she looks back nostalgically on  their original wedding plan. It would have been really cool wouldn't it? Whatever decade.

For a start registry offices in London are usually found in beautiful listed buildings,  not  like the purpose built council breeze blocks found on the edge of leisure centres or disused libraries that we have up here.

Chelsea and Middlesbrough Registry Offices

And then there's the pub. Well it's London  so  what kind of pub do you want? You can have your pick...  you want one which only serves crisps that are hand made, freshly rock-salted and arrive in a brown paper bag, there you go. You want one with live folk  music and real ale served in a dimpled pint mug, then have that. You want tatty velvet sofas and vintage etched mirrors, then they have that too and more! And in any of those quirky, cosy, rustic taverns a bride wearing a subtle wedding dress and a groom in an open shirt and braces wouldn't look out of place.

Where as here, among the barely dressed spotty teenagers and the barely alive old boozers, you would get less attention walking into the local pub with a sandwich board saying "twat" than you would in a wedding dress.

But I still would have done it. Bought a round of pints and peanuts for the guests and had our first dance to the jukebox (unfortunately it only plays James Arthur nowadays) and demanded a lock in at the end.

But it would have been a bit inappropriate to take the kids. And I really haven't got the stamina to keep drinking past 11pm these days, so we opted for registry office and family meal - you know "somewhere nice".

And I don't regret the decision, in fact I am really looking forward to it. i think it's going to be pretty good and actually rather cool, in a non-London kind of way.

Plus,  if I had one of those big weddings, I know, like Caitlin Moran says, I would have let myself down and probably the whole of humanity down too, you know just by being a bit of a wedding twat...

"Weddings are our fault, ladies. Every aspect of their pantechnicon of awfulness happened on our watch. And you know what? Not only have we let humanity down, but we’ve let ourselves down too.

Weddings do women no good at all. They’re a viper’s pit of waste and despair. And nearly every aspect of them reverberates badly against the very people who love them the most: us. Our love for a wedding is a bad love. It does us no good. It will end badly, leaving us feeling cheated, and alone.

Whenever I think about weddings, I want to run into the church - like Dustin Hoffman in the Graduate - and shout ‘STOP! STOP THE WEDDINGS!"

Caitlin Moran How To Be A Woman