Manchester is underrated. Actually no, it probably comes quite rated, by and large. Mainly by Mancunians. Manchester is underappreciated. Wait, that doesn't work either, because most people appreciate it. I think what this boils down to, the nub of my own ill-conceived views, is that I had the impression that Manchester was a disease-ridden bomb site with people who talk like characatures of sterotypes of charactures and with check-in gates at every road or rail link into the city to check your 'northern' credentials before you are allowed within this town walls. I was on the bus trundling and stopping like an asthmatic marathon runner with a stitch back into town from Grace's sisters house on Sunday, and I couldn't remember where any of these hilariously incorrect prejudices ever came from. I concluded it must be because of the music scene. From the ages of 11 through to the present day where I still let, to some extent dictate my views on life as if I were a middle aged welsh couple and The Fly magazine were the Daily Mail or Express. Essentially, in modern culture, the Manchester 'scene' of music receives about five million column inches a second about how thriving it is. Wrong. It's about as thriving as it is good. Pretty much every drivelling slice of Northern Quarter shite like New Order, Oasis, Elbow, Doves, the Happy Mondays and so forth ar about as useful as ambassadors for the city as Prince Philip or CJD are as ambassadors for Britain. Manchester does not deserve the burden of housing the scene it inspired. To it's credit, there wasn't as much flag-waving town pride as I was expecting, in fact, far less than you get in South Wales which is embarassing. Aside from a gratuitous and contrived Oasis-themed window display in HMV, and a forgiveable, but obligatory spin of 'Step On' in one of the bars, it was largely unnoticeable. It could be that the flatulent slurring of Wonderwall only happens after 3am, or during the summer months, but I was satisfied at the lack of it, none the less. I hereby decree that the following should be used as the officially recognised qualitlties of England's third city, rather than biscuit-faced acoustic troubadours and fat men on drugs.
Firstly, Quality Save, which only exists within the confinements of the city walls, and is an Aladdin's Cave of Gold, if your definition of gold involves hilariously cheap soup, coke and the sort of European import sweets rarely seen outside of Calais Hypermarkets and travelling fairground lucky dips. These delights often involve failed sidelines from known brands, but sometimes you get obscure when-did-this-happen marketing strokes of excellence, like chicken cup a soup with croutons and herbs and basically it looks like Hugh Fearnely-Whittinstall sneezed into a mug. I've never seen it anywhere else, and I've only got one left. I had every intention of cramming my travel bag with an infinite number of bargain products, and set sail into the smog, but I didn't have enough space, and besides, I committed to powder-based pasta which proved disgusting and didn't cook properly. My fault. Other interesting things about Quality Save, which for anyone living in South Wales, is essentially an infinitely superior, bite-size Hypervalue, are a number of notices dotted around the till area saying lies along the lines of "please check your change because our cashiers are thick but this piece of paper gives us a licence to fleece you to the tune of pence". This is a neat strategy, and evidently how the business gets away with charging 30p for a bottle of Lilt. I only visited one Quality Save, but I'm informed by Google business search that there's one on every street corner almost. The one I checked out in was near Picadilly. I spent about £10 and literally had to force the bags full of crap I bought into my travel bag.
Secondly, the Manchester Tram Service, which I didn't even know existed, and appears from my brief two-day stint in the city, to exist of one tram, one line, and no passengers. i'll be the first to admit that I didn't exactly explore every last side alley and cross every esplanade, but it did appear to be utterly useless and a waste of time. But, I might be wrong, and either way, I applaud the effort, and did make me think I was in Gothenburg or San Francisco for, I don't know, half a blink of one eyelid, and that's an applaudable concept. What I'd do, if I was town planner, which I'm not and never going to be, is the get rid of all the buses, because they're vile, dilapidated sickening vehicles of filth, almost entirely populated with stinking jerks and scarf-waving university fuckfaces, and replace them with trams. Althought not just trams, but trams with a anti-fuckface device on each door meaning only people allocated tickets and use them. And I'd have all the tickets.
Thirdly, Rusholme, AKA The Curry Mile, AKA Las Vegas if the only thing you want to gamble on is the contents of your stomach. This boulevard of disturbing nightmares has a degree of notoriety outside of Manchester, but it's much, much more exciting in the flesh. Again, my tourist insecurities resulted in me not even bothering to get off the bus and look at any of the literally hundreds of neon-clad fast food joints, international take-aways and warehouses of kebab flesh and mint sauce. One day, however, I will go back, and gorge myself until I sick up my own intestines. Peering through the glass at the cavalcade of crap being filtered into plastic trays, one extra large should probably do that. But, Grace and her sisters house was the other side of Rusholme, which meant the fourty minute bus journey hurtled through Rusholme every time. It looks a lot less glamourous in the day-time, like a drag act in a dole queue,
Lastly, and I could add a lot of other exciting things to this list, like a bar with a space capsule you can sit in, that permanently looks busy and empty simultanously, a man with pig tails that he'd overgelled to the point he could walk around with his hair permanently horizontal, a woman who liked Leonard Cohen and had an anal sex fetish, a poster advertising a 'post rock night" (in 2008!), a statue of fat Queen Victoria, the indeciherable man who IDed me at the train station pub, local bands who inspire their girlfriends to make tapestries based on their song titles.. But
I'll reserve point four, for the AMC cinema, which I have a fondness for, merely because it was a near out-of-body experience to be in a cinema that wasn't Cineworld, and also because it had a carpet that looked like it had been modelled on 1930s wallpaper, a really quite awful memorabilia stand in the lobby where crappy Attack of the Clones plastic figures were up for grabs, and being poked around with by a suspicious bald man. The cinema itself resembled a modern 'reimagining' of a crap cinema, in that it was crap, but looked like it was designed to look crap, and therefore in strange kind of way, made it look good. At 5pm on a Saturday though, the screen was full of no-hoper teenage losers who laughed at penis jokes and very little else. But at least they didn't throw anything, but I imagine inbetween getting up, walking around, swapping seats, talking to their friends and shouting "it's bigger than mine" at all the penis jokes, there wasn't much time. But it's a cinema experience I won't forget in a while, not least because of the Quality Save sweets and Dandelion and Burdock.
