🇬🇧 Nanaland

Hello Adventurers, 

Populists these days love to punch down on immigrants; painting them as invaders, freeloaders, grifters, job thieves, and/or diluters of culture. However, I don’t give their nativist grudge much — if any — credence because it cynically presupposes that immigrants are a malignant monolith. Furthermore, that anti-immigrant gripe is lopsided; it obsesses ‘bout what immigrants get, and never acknowledges what immigrants give up; for themselves and/or for their families (whether pre-existing somewhere else or expanding in new lands thereafter).

Anyway, this issue of the newsletter concludes my time in the United Kingdom. Last week, I used Wales — in part — to personally examine the immigrant experience of my parents’ trade offs, trade ups, and my Dad’s deliberate trade back to the UK. However, this week I’m looking at things — being Mum’s Manchester — through my eyes, being those of a first generation Canadian — who also happens to be a UK citizen — who is very much a diasporic Commonwealth mutt (like, I’m ambivalent about being Canadian, and too removed from England to consider myself British…especially since what I know of England has mostly been experienced as family lore — relayed as storytelling ingested as banter ‘round the kitchen table — an ocean away from England).

If I understand correctly, it was the Mancunian DJ Leo Stanley who coined the locally popular ‘On the sixth day God created Manchester’ catchphrase — and when it comes to my personal timeline — I finally returned to Manchester 9,125 days since my last visit; spanking it this time with one marathon — augmented by some strolls with the missus and my uncle — that amounted to 61 kilometres by foot around the place in three days.

Industrial, bickering, gobbed in self-tanner, ever-changing (and yet somehow stuck in time…or at least in its working class ways), let’s go explore the grit and glory of Northern fooking England.

- Ben Pobjoy

P.S. Thank you to my uncle Foxy for not just letting me and the wife stay with him, but for hanging out with us most evenings. While I was bummed I didn’t get to see my aunties — sisters Catherine and Deb took a girl’s trip to Malta while I was in the Manc — I did get to see cousin Harry (now a man, but last seen as a baby). And I’m sorry I couldn’t squeeze in seeing cousin Elliot…but I promise you that I’ll hit Parbold on my next trip (as well as visit Runcorn and Bristol to see unseen fam there too).

TREK TRACKER

World by foot and/or footnotes

• Countries marathoned to date: 75-ish

• Marathons completed this year: 50

• Kilometres trekked by foot this year: 5,082.8

• Marathons completed since 2015: 894

• Total kilometres trekked since 2015: 79,639

• Next stops wish list: Cape Town, Chișinău, and Astana

RAPID RECAP

A speedy synopsis for time-crunched readers

• The Wildest Thing: You can gentrify Manchester all you want, but you can’t ever delouse Gorton🤪

• The Biggest Obstacle: Heavy rains and flooding turned our two train rides from Wales to England into a full-day odyssey of four train rides by way of unexpected detours (i.e. Llanwrtyd Wells to Craven Arms, Craven Arms to Shrewsbury, Shrewsbury to Wolverhampton, and Wolverhampton to Manchester…then a tram ride from Manchester’s city centre to Didsbury where we were staying)😮‍💨

• The Lesson Learned: In the North — as in much of England — everything is binary; deemed to either be ‘brilliant’ or ‘rubbish’🤣

FIELD NOTES: MANCHESTER, ENGLAND

Love, they’ll always tell you exactly what’s on their mind

Game of Thrones is basically a real-life documentary series about England’s posh south clashing with its comparatively rougher north, where sophisticated London is recast as King’s Landing and fleabag Manchester is dragged as Winterfell. For North American readers, it’s essentially the difference between hoity-toity Manhattan and working class Detroit.

Anyhoo, my Dad is from the south of England and my Mum is from the north, and I’ve longed loved straddling these different worlds via visits, in a kingdom increasingly fraying at the seams of its unity.

For the sake of time, we’ll fast forward through history and let Wikipedia give us the skinny on Manchester; it experienced a boom in textile manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution, and became the world's first industrialised city (and segued from being a landlocked place to a major seaport courtesy of the Manchester Ship Canal, which was once the largest navigation canal in the world). The industrialisation produced a minority of haves and a majority of have-nots…which is a tale as old as time. However, the architecture of the industry — from the factories to the mills to the storehouses — left an indelible mark on Manchester as did its labour movement which informs the mouthy and unruly working class character of many local Mancunians today, and likely for infinity.

While Manchester is largely deindustrialised today — and has been blitzed and bombed over the last 100 years — it nevertheless feistily knows how to take a licking and keep on kicking; retrofitting old spaces for new aims, and punching above its weight class by carving out an impressive amount of space — via undeniable influence — in and on popular culture (namely music).

Whether it is Paris, Chicago or Budapest, I love a city full of grand buildings from earlier points in time. I marvel at their exteriors from my marathons — appreciating their bygone masonry, intricate glasswork or exquisite metal work — and am often bummed that I have no means of getting inside of ‘em to go explore their innards. That said, I am a chronic trespasser, LOL.

Manchester is different; many formerly off-limit buildings can now be entered because they’ve been retrofit as reimagined spaces which now welcome the public. This affords us pedestrian folk the ability to swoon outside before we step inside. Mackie Mayor (pictured above) is an 1858 market turned contemporary food hall that represents the kind of slamming spaces you can now enjoy in these northern parts.

Furthermore, I’d encourage any visitor to Manchester to visit both the Manchester Cathedral as well as the John Rolands Library. Both are free to enter, offer temporary respite from the frequent rains, and big on the Hogwartsian vibes.

Anyway, do explore the hip Northern Quarter as well as roads and squares like Deansgate, Canal Street, St Peter’s, Shambles, and Albert, and pop yer head into as many buildings as possible! Also, I’d be remiss not to encourage you to inspect local estates and take note of how materially unified and visually cohesive they are. They differ from neighbourhoods in North America, y’know those with the aesthetically-challenged home extensions, the terrible aluminium siding, the Potemkin village-styled stuccoing, and that one asshole who always builds the modernist eyesore that has no relation to the surrounding homes.

I’m unsure why it happens, but — like clockwork — me and the missus always seem to find ourselves in the UK every October or November. As such, this means that we do a lot of our Christmas shopping there; hitting joints like Marks & Spencer, Selfridges, and Primark. Anyway, I typically find the husband chair and play Candy Crush as my wife pours over Christmas ornaments and matching sets of kids clothes for our nephews. I’m supposed to act interested, but my greater utility is that of man mule; I always have my knapsack on my back, and thus always carry whatever is purchased. And ‘we’ also have to go to Boots — known as a chemist in these parts — to repeatedly go look at every skin lotion, potion, and goop (despite me being perfectly happy to wash my savage self with dish soap).

Jokes aside, my wife is an absolute killer when it comes to identifying rad stores that’d somehow never land on my radar. The stand-out in Manchester — which was Christine’s find — was Fred Aldous, which is prolly one of the most thoughtful art stores I’ve ever been to. The main floor is expertly stocked with what I can only describe as accessible-to-all ‘maker inspo’ stuff like instructional books and craft kits whereas the massive basement is stocked with hardcore art supplies for more advanced makers. The whole place is so fucking sick, and we easily spent two hours in it. Like, if you’re a creative, you gotta go in and poke around!

What blew me away about Fred Aldous, is that they have a rotating artist in residence program where a local artist is invited to decorate the store, install public art outside of it, and collaborate on a kick-ass — and extensive — range of reasonably-priced items like notebooks, totes, tees, and home decor pieces. Not only is much of this stuff manufactured locally, but the store also puts out a free newsprint zine to promote the featured artist as well as present their capsule collection. Clare Birtwistle was the artist in residence when I visited, and I absolutely fell in love with her punchy patterned work (and would encourage you to follow her if you enjoy having your eyes smile).

If you’re a musicophile — like I am — then Manchester definitely warrants a pilgrimage. How come? Well, it — and nearby Bolton — have birthed musical acts like Badly Drawn Boy, The Buzzcocks, The Chemical Brothers, The Fall, Happy Mondays, Joy Division, New Order, Oasis, Simply Red, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, The Verve, and many more. In sum, they’re legendary and influential. Oh, and Manchester also produced music’s best graphic designer. And coined / created a musical genre too.

What scrambles my brain, is that you have places like New York — which birthed hip hop, and perfected punk and hardcore in equal measure — but New York has always had the advantage of having 8 to 10 times the population size of something like Greater Manchester, which is only ever inhabited by around 2 million-ish people.

Manchester isn’t huge yet its influence on world music is, and on my marathon I enjoyed trying to decode what it is about the place — and the people — that created the conditions for its musical supremacy. My estimation is that it has something to do with the deindustrialisation / loss of opportunity, the generational pre-war / post-war schism, Thatcherite austerity, young people always wanting to make their own scene, and everyone here seeming to have a chip on their shoulder as well as something to say.

Lastly, shout-out to my uncle Foxy for pointing out the birthplace of Factory Records to me on a walk (which is about 200 feet from his house), and then driving me past the former site of the Hacienda after dinner one night. I asked him if he ever went to the latter in its heyday, and he did! Cool cred certified!

Bit of a detour here, but I wanted to save the best for last: you must do a tour of Cheatham’s Library if you’re ever in Manchester. I don’t want to give too much away, but it is the oldest public library in the English speaking world. I typically hate guided tours — since my experience with guides is that they’re often dry, overly serious or meander down boring academic rabbit holes — but our thickly-accented Mancunian guide Mike (seriously try and seek him out through the CL website) was hilarious, and knew how to work a room.

Also, Cheatham’s is where Frederick Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, a book based on his stay in Manchester as well as his local study of the working class. It is considered a classic account of the universal condition of the industrial working class back then ala misery, sickness, shit wages, bad living conditions, dangerous working conditions, etc. To read it is to better understand Manchester as a whole — and for me personally — better understand my Mancunian grandparents’ laborious lineage. And more on that if you keep reading.

BEST LOCAL THING-Y

Catching a football match at a legendary stadium anywhere in Europe has always been on my bucket list. Why? Well, because I’m a fan of the game (it is by far my favourite team sport), I always wanted to experience European football’s distinct sporting culture, and because I’ve never experienced an enclosed live event — be it sports or music — with 70,000+ other people in attendance. And lucky for me, the stars aligned when I was in Manchester because one of the city’s football teams just so happened to be playing a home game during my short stay. So I bought scalped tickets online…and acknowledge that I was taken to the cleaners…but hey, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! And yo, cut me some slack because the teams over here are ‘clubs’ and fans are ‘members’, and buying a pair of tickets seated together is a pain in the ass if you’re an unregistered outsider like I am!

Most of my British friends and family are Manchester City supporters so I got an earful from ‘em when I said I was going to a Manchester United match at Old Trafford. Some warned me the team were shit — which is biased but currently true (they’ve been in a rut for a few seasons now) — while others told me my act was straight up treachery, LOL. No one seemed to hear my ‘bucket list’ caveat. Instead, they all just strongly told me how they felt. How very Mancunian of them.

On match day, you don’t need directions to get to the stadium; you just have to follow the red shirts. And so we did; following them onto the tram from the city centre, getting off when they did, passing supporters chanting and pinting pre-match at pubs, and then finally walking en masse down Sir Matt Busby Way (past the take-out joints selling a ‘Full English’ for £6, homeowners selling club kit off their front lawns, and counterfeiters — stood feet away from cops — selling knockoff merch outta duffel bags on club grounds).

On the approach, Old Trafford has stature, but inside it is cozy and old school; tight concourses where everyone’s drinking (I was shocked to learn you can’t drink in the stands), leaky piss troughs in the men’s washrooms, and concession stands with simple pub grub menu boards advertising $5 pints (I couldn’t believe the affordability of the beer…it is easily 3x that price in North American stadiums).

Anyway, we found our seats — as some generic music played over the stadium’s loudspeakers — and the game just sorta started. No national anthem, no announcer rah-rah’ing, no bullshit t-shirt cannons firing into the stands to hype-up cold fans pre-game…just the blow of the referee’s whistle proceeded by gameplay. Performance as pure product with no need for gimmicks.

And what a beautiful game it is to sensorially experience in person, especially in a coliseum like this; offering a pristine panorama view of the pitch, a free flowing game free of the annoying starts and stops that degrade North American sports (e.g. baseball, basketball, hockey, etc.), graceful players as firing atoms moving in Brownian motion, the ball as an otherworldly orb of fascination whizzing ‘round like a UFO, and field play rendered silent by the sonic swirling of continuous crowd chants (that mysteriously start, end, and restart anew from different sections).

Supporters oscillate between screams of love and hate — changing by the second, each full of obscenities — as they reckon to their mates that they could’ve made the play or put the ball into the net themselves. And when the ball does go in, man, it’s fucking electric. An indescribable atmosphere, which just needs to be experienced in the flash as well as in the flesh. Truly, there’s nothing else like it (especially since Old Trafford doesn’t have any instant replay screens). So be present for the power of it all…or you risk missing the action!

Then as now — as well as long before it and long after it — I was glad to have experienced match day last Saturday with my missus…which I’m ruminating on today, because this specific Saturday happens to be our fifth wedding anniversary.

I love many things about my wife Christine — her big heart, her loyalty, her kind nature, even her crazy willingness to spend three weeks with my weirdo family in the UK — but what I love most about her is how she tries to see the good in — or understand the draw of — absolutely everything (always doing so sans judgment).

I don’t know if it is because she is a journalist forever searching for truths — or if it is simply in her nature — but it is a beautiful way of being, and I’m blessed to be in the sun rays of this kind of company; everything feels brighter with her because she isn’t the type of person to throw shade, just one to always look for the light.

Anyway, United won their game as me and Christine continue to win our union. Cheers for all our victories.

*Be warned: you can’t bring cameras into Old Trafford — they’re prohibited, which I knew beforehand — but I talked my way in with mine.

POBJOY'S GLOBAL PRICE INDEX

This is an on-going documentation of how much things cost in different places around the world. Here are some of the things I bought around Manchester (all prices converted to USD):

• A one-way train ticket for a supposedly four hour / 225 kilometre-long train ride from Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales to Manchester, England (which proved to be much longer due to track flooding and requisite detours): $21.43

• A 12 ounce oat milk latte from a kiosk in Didsbury: $4.44

• Two scalped Old Trafford ‘Upper Level 300 / Halfway Line / Section N3404’ tickets for a Manchester United match: $314.44

MARATHON MUSINGS

On Gorton / for Mum

I had some trepidation about marathoning to Gorton because I was actively looking for my grandparents — who are both dead and long deceased — as I was simultaneously chasing a feeling I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Was it connection? Familiarity? Longing? Nostalgia? I don’t know. I just wanted something to fill the rift of the nothing left by their earthly departures, like from them being gone.

So I went out there alone — and by foot, and along a circuitous A-road — because I didn’t trust that historically grubby Gorton would be pleasant enough for the missus. That’s a lie. I knew I may get teary-eyed there, and didn’t want to be a baby man in front of my wife on our holiday.

Anyway, my grandparents were very simple working class people who occasionally lived very complicated lives. Nana Ethel was a lunch lady — I think at a state school cafeteria — and Grandad Gerry was a chippy, which is a slangy UK term for a carpenter. Each had prior spouses, each abandoned their kids at different points in time, each made other sets of kids, and each had either learned from their mistakes — or had run outta mistakes to make — by the time they became excellent grandparents to us grandkids.

I guess goodness sometimes sorta skips a generation? Or maybe it’s that time can have a mellowing effect on non-mellow beings? Yes. Maybe. Or maybe not.

When Nana and Gerry died, we learnt they had never been married, and that Gerry was in fact still technically married to his first wife (if I understand correctly). Any way you cut it, it’s the best: Coronation Street drama sprinkled with Little Britain humour.

In the 1980s, I loved visiting Nana and Gerry as a boy with my Mum and my lil baby bruv, with all three of us staying with them at their small council flat on Swindon Close. They chain-smoked hand-rolled cigs (which they sometimes made us grandkids roll for them, LOL), and they only ate brown, baked or deep fried foods (save for green mushy peas). Basically, they were everything my office parents weren’t / my suburban existence wasn’t.

To me, Nana and Gerry were complete oddities, just infinitely interesting to my kiddie brain (especially at a formative time in my life where most adults in my orbit did their best to lead by example so as to show us what good looked like). But Nana and Gerry indirectly taught me how to be who you really are (warts and all). They smoked, they drank, and they enjoyed singing out-of-key karaoke down at their local Working Mens Club.

My Nana developed a humpback — so I guess she was technically a hunchback by the time I came around — and she seemed to shrink four inches every time I saw her. She was small yet fierce. More accurately, she was feisty because she had a history — for better or worse — of being a fighter, as in being combative (which loved ones — not my generation — unfortunately bore the brunt of). But us grandkids knew her to be loving and proper; she’d have her hair in rollers every morning to get it right, and she never left the house in anything that wasn’t pressed. And I loved to hit the Gorton streets with her because she never babied me, always treated me like an equal sidekick, and reliably fucked around with me (making funny / animated faces at me when I was being annoying, and regularly gesturing a backhand slap my way). I think she could see my mischievousness before I could, and she liked it because she knew it well. That part of me, is her.

Nana loved being out on the town — whether on walks or on the bus, because she was a highly social creature — and she knew everyone in her small radius (which was her big universe). And everyone she knew — all of whom she greeted as 'love’ — was a misfit, a miscreant, a moaner with some melodramatic hardship (likely of their own doing) and/or someone running some kind of dole racket. And you know what? She didn’t judge any of ‘em. Rather, she always heard them out. Look, she was gossipy too.

Anyway, what I’ve come to learn, is that some of the most fucked-up people are some of the least judgmental people (because they know that to be imperfect is to be human). Nana was one of those types, and that’s some high bar empathy from someone who’d conventionally be deemed lowbrow.

Gerry on the other hand was gentle and quiet. He was observant, and always smoking cigs (right arm cocked at the elbow, and half-raised…holding a cig with an inch-long ash on it…that somehow never fell off). And he’d regularly pull a pound coin from my ear — like a sleight of hand magic trick — and give it me for a new toy in the market.

Born in England, Gerry grew up in India when it was a colony. And at some point, he joined the navy, and that’s how he ended up with the tiger tattoo on his forearm (it was the prize for winning a swimming race in Malta when he was stationed there). Gerry had a bit of a lifelong Teddy Boy hairdo — no pompadour, just a slicked back ‘do with the requisite sideburns — and he always had a comb on him (and regularly fixed his hair throughout the day). He taught me that no matter your lot, you should still take pride in yourself. Oh, and later in life he took to tending to bonsais. So weird and random…but likely a quiet practice to mute-out my loud and talkative Nana.

My favourite thing to do in Gorton — back then — was to go to Gorton Market with Nana, which was like three minutes ‘round the corner from her flat. In its original form, Gorton Market was mostly an outdoor market where vendors had foldable tables under temporary tents where they sold dollar store-like junk; loose socks, cheap toys, and off-brand house goods. We’d go most mornings — rarely to buy anything in particular — and mostly for Nana to just go talk to everyone. There was an indoor hall there too, but I didn’t like it much because it smelled fishy. And not like it smelled questionable, it legit smelled like ‘off’ fish. Chef’s kiss from the north, bb.

I didn’t care much though, because the main attraction there — besides Nana — was this one fibreglass kiosk at the market that made disgusting-but-delicious food. Nana regularly took me there to get a bean and chip butty for brekkie (which is a buttered bun stuffed with chips and topped with brown sauce and baked beans in a sweetened tomato sauce). Honestly, don’t knock it ‘til you try it!

Unfortunately, the OG Gorton Market is no more — which I knew beforehand — because it got rearranged sometime in the new millennium when a ‘Tesco Extra’ took over the property. FYI, that type of Tesco is like a Walmart Supercentre in North America, but this one in Gorton has lotsa security guards at the door to stop all the riffraff and apprehend the shoplifters. Anyway, the 2.0 Gorton Market is now a very small building on the Tesco grounds — mostly full of vendors, and with some food — and some car boot stuff in the parking lot.

New or not, Gorton Market remains refreshingly depressing; it is draughty and kinda downtrodden. There are lots of vacant stalls inside with mismatched paint and fucked-up walls. But some of the rented-out stalls do sell knockoff purses, low-cost school uniforms, cheap shoes, and used mobile phones. One grumpy-looking geezer — sat in the market — had a hoodie on with the following text printed on the back of the garment (which captures the vibe of the place); I’m not rude I just have the balls to say what everyone is thinking.

It was only when I was in the Gorton Market parking lot that I found what I was looking for on this highly personal marathon of mine: that reassuring feeling of continuity. Yes, much has changed — because Gorton has somewhat modernised — but the shitty spirit of it all still remains.

My grandparents weren’t there — nor did I see their ghosts — but the haunting people there were their people; the young couple arguing over savings versus expenditures, the non-athletic mother stuffed into spandex with the pram and the lit cig dangling from her lips, the shoppers haggling, the no bullshit vendors taking none of it, the guy pleading for forgiveness — over his phone — to someone on the other end, and all the grizzled people with their long and angry-looking faces. Each one of them presenting as salty, but yet I know these people to be the salt of the earth, for they are my grandparents.

One guy on a mobility assistance scooter — who could tell I wasn’t from Gorton — asked me, “What are you doing in this right proper shithole?” And I replied that I was visiting my Nana. I then asked him where he was from, and he proudly replied, “This right proper shithole!”

Me and him got talking — and for the hell of it, I asked him if I could buy a hand-rolled cig from him — and he waved me off, rolled me one (with no filter), and then passed me his lighter so I could fire it up. The cig was strong, poorly rolled, and the loose bacci fell out of the cig’s ass-end (and got in the gaps of my teeth)…causing me to spit just as a really old woman approached us, and asked if the nearby Harley Davidson motorcycle was mine.

“You know, I always loved how the fat-tired ones felt rumbling in-between my legs.” she said coyly before throatily chuckling and winking.

Dear God, please protect the Gorton wildlife. Don’t let gentrification endanger these colourful animals.

As a visitor, respectfully, it isn’t my place to confirm whether Gorton is — or isn’t — a shithole. But the pavement is still rough and uneven, a few cars on the residential roads sit on flat tires, some garbage blows ‘round, and there were quite a few broken windows. Said another way, Gorton remains perfect (just like I remember it being).

Anyway, the diasporic dilemma is the wonder of what could have been: what would my life have been like had I been born and raised in my parents’ lands (especially Mum’s north)? And why did we — over here — have to be so far from family over there?

These are questions for which there are no answers, but they nevertheless answer what immigrants — and their offspring — give up in exchange for the promise of what they may get elsewhere. And hopefully my existential questions inspire you to question the lack of humanity that underpins most anti-immigrant arguments today.

When I rolled up to Nana and Gerry’s estate building, I couldn’t recall which exact council flat was theirs. And it was serendipitous, because David just so happened to be on the street walking his chihuahua.

“Who ya looking fa?” he asked, with some suspicion.

“Ethel…my Nan’s place.” I replied.

“Right, you must be one of her Canadians…” He said, trailing off before he walked over to point up at her flat for me, adding, “I knew her well. We all loved her so much.”

How soon is now? I guess now can be eternal…so long as the spirit — and the memories — remain.

Love you Nan. Love you Gerry. Love you Gorton.

Forever, and from across an ocean; one that separated us but could never keep us apart.

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