Dig a hole in the road and you can leave it there as long as you like, as long as you put up a barrier around it and make it look important. This has been here on Princess Street for weeks. Not often under such portentous skies, though.
Autumn has hit in Manchester too, of course. These steps are to be found on Princess Street, as one arrives in Manchester city centre on the walk back from work (my walk, anyway). I think of them as the wonky steps because they are, aren’t they? Why those slopes or mini-ramps are present I have no idea. Accessibility-wise they would only take, say, a pram or bike up to the first platform, with three-quarters of the steps left to go after that. Maybe the builders were just having a creative moment back in the 1970s.
In Manchester, at some point in most weeks in the autumn there will be an influx of visitors from some European place or other, because either United or City will be at home in the Champions League — or lately, if it’s United, some lesser competition, but they did make the CL this time round. Today it was the fans of FC København (or Copenhagen if you like). They seemed an agreeable enough bunch, but didn’t see a win: United took the game 1-0.
The guy’s still asleep, it seems. Quite a few of the doors of premises on Cross Street, if they haven’t been opened by this time in the morning, are occupied by rough sleepers most days.
Photographically this was one where I was planning for someone to walk past. The coffee cup’s usefully placed too.
I could have been taking a photo of all sorts of things here in this Manchester back alley. But I’m going with the eyes in the background.
Seeing as the garden in question is on the roof of Big Hands, the micro-gig venue round the corner from my office — and no, I’ve never noticed them before — perhaps Roof Garden Dummies is to be the name of some emergent punk/student band, to be appearing (possibly) on a digital feed near you at some point in the second half of this decade. If I was in The Zone, I might consider founding them myself. But possibly Kraftwerk already did it.
No one seems able to leave any empty Manchester space empty for long. Cathedral Gardens is particularly prone to being built on by some temporary structure or other, if it’s not the ‘Davis Cup Fan Zone’ (that was last month) it’s whatever this twelve-hi-vis operation might become. Probably the ice rink; for after all, it’s nearly Christmas.
Apparently “Mood” is the gender-neutral fragrance of the season, if the large stall in the Arndale Centre, exclusively devoted to tempting us to buy it, is anything to go by. But one might advise them to be a little more subtle when it comes to pumping out the scent. By the time I had walked past I was already sick of it.
The Conservative Party can’t even do incompetence competently — and by now, they have had lots of chances to practice it. Brilliantly, some idiot lets slip that the proposed high-speed rail link to Manchester is likely to be cancelled, in the very week that the party are holding its annual conference…. in Manchester. Frankly, I am so disillusioned about there being any prospect of genuine change in the trajectory not only of this country, but the human race, that I have largely stopped caring, but let’s at least document the existence of a political opposition to these clowns: unfortunately, sticking posters to lamp-posts seems to be the extent of it.
Someone else’s art. It was nice, too — when I walked back past this on the way home (it is by the Chinese Arch in Manchester) it was finished and looked good, perhaps it will feature on here at some point in the future.
Being 42 