I am surprised by the tangibility of
Manchester’s city-feel, a palpable shift in the texture of
existence as we step through the train station. It feels like I’d
expect it to, sort of hard-edged and slouchingly alert.
Its
looks come as more of a surprise, and I realise how little notion I had
of what this city would look like: Full of pretty red-brick buildings
like Victorian fire stations, as it turns out, with sweeping curves of
glass and concrete radiating from the train station. There is an
incongruity to everything, a glaring ‘That’ll Do’ attitude to the
fitting together of architectures.
It
strikes me that perhaps much of the difference between the feelings of
different cities can be accounted for by which bits of which decades
have got lodged, and continued to resonate there long after
they’ve slipped from view in the rest of the world. I’m surprised by
how much of the Eighties still seems to linger here; not the
plasticky pop-and-leg-warmers Eighties people seem most nostalgic
about, but the slightly grimy making-do-in-spite-of-the-Tories
Eighties that I mostly remember living in. We gaze into a bookshop with
a train-set running in the window, advertising the
mini-shop upstairs which still sells Hornby model kits and parts. The
set is decorated with cows in all sorts of unlikely locations, which
makes me think of Kolkata, but the fact that many of the cows are
parachuting makes it seem rather less like an Indian city scene.
Very
pleasingly, free buses shuttle around the city centre, and we take
one two stops down the road to get to the coach station. Next to us a
very small South Asian boy with enormous eyes practises his smile on us
enthusiastically. He hasn’t quite got the hang of it yet, but the
message gets through.
As we locate our
coach stop so we know where we’re going, the heavens open and by the
time we jog to a nearby café it is torrential. It only gets harder as
we munch on some deli-ish food and refuel on fresh juice, so that by
the time we leave there is nothing we can do to keep our selves and our
bags from being soaked through on the short run back to the overcrowded
bus shelter.
-Arriving in Kolkata→