Leaf grief

I do this every year so just bear with me. I actually didn’t mean for it to become a tradition. But here it is. I hate the autumn. I don’t know what it is. Except maybe I do. It’s because September smells funny. And the light is awkward. And my music sounds … off. Is that it? I think I have synaesthesia when September comes around. It’s the weird moon and the weather that changes minute to minute and the sweat and shiver because your clothes are all wrong. The beloved portholes that are the windows of my flat in HMS Lancaster start to look inwards at this time of year and I refuse to look back. My curtains are drawn until March.

More specifically tonight it’s poverty and fomo and all this recycling that I simply can’t face. And Morrissey.

I went to the launch of a book about Morrissey earlier. I’ve organised and introduced an identical event myself so I know it’s not easy. But this was a bit of an ordeal if I’m honest. A mixture of introverted and possibly unenthused academics saying oblique things to an audience who knew better and whose enthusiasm wained in under forty five minutes such that there were barely any questions and in fact one open and lengthy criticism.

Proceedings were lightened considerably by These Charming Men who bookended the discussion with quite lovely acoustic renditions from The Canon. But I went there alone and my questions sounded confrontational in my head (they weren’t) so I didn’t ask them. The people in front of me sniggered and rolled their eyes and left.

Then again, maybe it was me. I’m starting to think pop music might have ruined my life. I’m pretty sure I would have written more than one unpublished novel if not for pop music. I might have written two unpublished novels. Boom-tish. ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ instigated two enormously pivotal moments in my life and I’m a bit annoyed about it now. Although it will sound just right in the autobiography I suppose.

I left the book launch and turned on my iPod and it went straight to ‘Meat Is Murder’. I skipped. It was Robyn, ‘Dancing On My Own’. I could do without the signs and symbols at the moment. I’m pained by the single unbroken martini glass that survived the party here on Saturday night, a party that was terrific fun but that more or less went completely wrong.

I have quit smoking though. For good this time. The last time I quit was on the roof of the Hawley Arms in the sweltering heat of last summer, with cider, when Amy was alive. I don’t miss cigarettes but it seems the world and his husband have taken it up again. I was definitely ready to let it go though. It’s twenty years since I smoked my first one. It was love at first puff. He hit me and it felt like a kiss. But even a kiss shouldn’t last two decades.

Chin up though. September didn’t break me. I managed to skip it with a healthy degree of denial, plus a trip to Berlin which I am going to do every September from now until forever, just to take the edge off. I shall tell all about the final day and night of my German urlaub anon. It will be heavily edited so that we can remain friends.

Anyway, now that I’m a student again September means the start of term. I’m into the second year of a part time MA in Novel Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. I’m actually doing this, and not just talking about doing this. So it’s back to a novel a week until Christmas. What could be lovelier? The reading list looks like this:

Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

Anthony Burgess, The Malayan Trilogy

V.S. Naipaul, Miguel Street

Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

Benjamin Black, Elegy for April

Nicola Barker, Small Holdings

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

Beryl Bainbridge, Master Georgie

See? We’re fine.

Coming up shortly: more Berlin, how to stay positive this autumn through retail therapy, and forthcoming exciting cultural events across Manchester.

I think I will buy pyjamas.

This on repeat please.

Flats and House, Part 2

I’d fallen in love with my current building a long time before I lived here. I used to project all kinds of fantasies of success, wealth and excitement onto the residents of buildings like these. The round windows, sorry oculi, I thought were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen, and now I have two of them. The gruelling experience of getting here almost ruined me though. The first time the flat came up I missed it by a day, so when it came up again a few months later I was ready. I viewed it the same day and, even though it was littered with bongs, a foul smell and depressing heavy metal ephemera, I could see its innate charm and agreed to take it right away.

There began a three month long trauma of incompetence, lies and rudeness on a scale that makes me shiver even now to think of it. The agency I dealt with are a collection of the most stupid, disorganised and obnoxious people I’ve ever encountered. The day I get my deposit back from them (ha!) I will phone the poor clueless owner of this flat and tell him the very same.

I had packed my belongings and taken the day off work to move. The evening before, and for the third time, I phoned to ensure the key would be ready for me at the allotted time and that the flat had been cleaned. My deposit and agency fee were paid already and I was told once more that everything was ready to go. While I was waiting for the van to arrive the next morning they called and said I couldn’t move in. The tenant had gone AWOL and hadn’t moved out, in fact he hadn’t paid any rent the whole time he lived there.



I asked why nobody had thought to tell me, or warn me, about the situation. I was told it was none of my business how they conducted their affairs with existing clients. Amongst other things not fit to publish here, I told them that a) he wasn’t a client if he wasn’t paying rent, was he?, and b) how had they managed to get in to clean the flat if he was still in there? ‘We haven’t been able to clean the flat,’ was their answer. ‘So the woman who told me last night that the flat had been cleaned was lying? ‘No she was mistaken.’

And so this went on. At one point I asked them if I hadn’t been staying with my kind and understanding sister and had literally had to leave the flat that day, what would they have done? I would have been homeless. ‘That’s not my problem,‘ said devil woman. I’m ashamed to say I almost cried that day. They were bemused as to why I was even angry. ‘A verbal contract is all that’s been exchanged here,’ I was told, as she neatly overlooked the thousand plus quid they’d had from me. It was another six weeks before they could evict the guy and I was able to move in, during which time I lived out of boxes, couldn’t pay rent to my sister because they had literally all of my money, and was repeatedly told I was in the wrong.


Without getting the violins out I was plunged into something of a depression and made to feel helpless and exploited, multiplied by the fact I was experiencing a domestic crisis and was doing this by myself. So I went to the Estate Agents Ombudsman. By this stage I had over 20 unreturned phone calls to the agency. Quite literally the same hour they were contacted by the Ombudsman I was telephoned by the manager and called ‘Sir’. So contact the Ombudsman if things go wrong is my advice! I filed a complaint during my moving-in week but by this time I was so relieved to be in, so tired of being spoken to like dirt, and suffering from such bad stress (manifested as insomnia, dandruff (!!!), and bad dreams when I did sleep) that I literally couldn’t fill out the complaint form and write the letter. In the end they admitted they had treated me badly and unprofessionally, to the point they sacked the woman in question. God forgive me but I hope that bitch is still unemployed. But I made it home.


The fact is though I can’t afford to live here, but I don’t feel that, at thirty, I could make a success of sharing with strangers again, moreover I simply don’t want to. I can’t move in with my partner, and every time I get on a bus something vile happens that makes the prospect of commuting twice a day depress me to the point I feel like self-harming. So I cling on, experiencing a deficit every month in order to be somewhere that feels like home. A few months ago, prior to arranging his remortgage, the owner offered to sell this flat to me at the absolute bargain price of 112 K. But this would require deposit and fees amounting to at least six and half grand and when you owe that amount and more in unpaid debts and no savings, well, you do the maths. There is nowhere in town I could live that is cheaper than this flat, and my flat is beautiful. What am I to do?

In m–my beautiful neighbourhood …

The bit of Manchester I consider the ‘neighbourhood’ is small, but since you can maybe walk across the whole city in half an hour I shouldn’t be greedy with my coverage. To my reckoning, nay, my specifications, the neighbourhood stretches east to the end of Whitworth Street, taking in Legends (once the Twisted Wheel) and the majestic London Road fire station (monkey’s favourite building in Manchester), then over the road to the back of Piccadilly Station (and if I am feeling greedy, a little further to the Star and Garter).


North is a little way up Princess Street past my friends’ Kirsty and Keith’s flat where they reside with their gorgeous city kittens Eric and Bo, up to the junction with Mosley Street where Koh Samui (excellent Thai restaurant) sits on your left and the City Gallery sits on your right.

Up west from my front door is, surprisingly, Whitworth Street West, to Great Marlborough Street where my sister lives, and The Ritz where The Smiths and countless others have gigged.


South is down Oxford Road, past the BBC, taking in Odder, Kro 2, 8th Day and, behind that, the Sugden Sports Centre, aka ‘the gym’.

I am happy here in this little island. I have two parks (Sackville and All Saints), an indie cinema, a supermarket, gay pubs, straight pubs, two train stations and food from around the world. It ain’t bad.

My flat is inside the labyrinthine Grade II, 102 year old Lancaster House, a building I had fantasised about living in for ages. Don’t imagine I own though, no no, I’m one of the down-at-heel rental neighbours bringing ‘character’ to the place. It’s having a facelift for the summer so is sadly about to be hidden by scaffolding (the tips have just reached my window). It’s not easy looking this good at her age. If you check the link you’ll see the big round windows belonging to my flat, four floors up (‘Four floors up on the Charing Cross road and never a job at the top of them’, says Uncle Monty). From here I can see the CIS, Portland and Piccadilly towers, the Minshull Street Courts, the Town Hall and the splendid mill chimney directly opposite, whose name and origins I have yet to find out but I will, I will. Yesterday there was a man right on the top hanging off a little platform. It must also be having a spring clean. I spend lots of time hanging out of my window and nobody ever looks up.


Soundtrack: Space singles, The Concretes