Mancunian Blues

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Cat

Travelling Blues

Well, it's about to hit 12am, I'm staring at a frighteningly blank screen and wishing that somewhere I could see Don't Panic written in large friendly letters.

I'm having a quiet week here in the Bluescave nestled deep in suburban South Manchester. It's the last week in June, and house contracts are up, so the students have evacuated back to where they came from, and it's just the locals and the occasional perplexed Post Grads lurking on the streets.

It's only now that I miss the student aura around Fallowfield and Withington. And it makes me wonder how Manchester doesn't fall about when they are here.

Firsly can a big shout go out to the idiot in the flash car drinking at the Vodka Bar (where the selfish people hang!!) who managed to ignore all the empty spots in the surrounding streets and blocked in the Bluesmobile. Sometimes it pays to believe in karma just for a few minutes.

Anyway, very little music in this Post, just some Mancunion Blues. When I first arrived in the rainy city, I would hop on a bus by my halls, and head onwards into the City Centre. The first place one goes through is Rusholme, rather exaggeratedly called The Curry Mile (it's a third of a mile at best!!). Traffic was always a little congested, so Manchester Council invented the 'Congestion Plus' project. They realised that the road was wide enough for two lanes of traffic each way, so they narrowed the pavement, and then made room for parking instead, limiting the road to one lane each way, and with rather abstract road layouts and drivers who obey parking rules only dreamed of by Dante. An hour of my day is spent on the bus trying to get though this spectacle of traffic management. Generating congestion is a good plan if you have somewhere else for the traffic to go, but all the other roads are packed and they decided to bottle neck the most crowded part of the busiest bus route in Europe.

Bus seating arrangements are generally designed to fit as many people in, while giving just enough leg room so the average person doesn't get DVT on their trip back from the shops. However the human population is growing and so what the figures say is an average height in the 1960s (the figures that they are most likely using) is perhaps an inch or two shorter of what the average is now.

When you are stuck next to a window with somebody who has indulgenced once too often in whatever Pringles are in fashion pushing up against you, in one ear you are hearing the sordid details of one girls love life that seems to involve more of a council estate than is possible in one calendar year and in the other you have the screams of a baby who's mother refuses to ever indulge in a dummy, your legs have gone numb, the temperature is reaching sauna levels and if you hear that Nokia ringtone once more you will flip, this is when you become self obsessed. You don't care that there are people starving, that people are being beheaded for no reason other than trying to help, that children are being stabbed for their mobile phones. You are suffering more than anybody else in the world, that's when you have the Manunion Blues.

Till next time,

Love peace and Blues

tjm

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