I hate the autumn

I hate the autumn. It’s a season which belongs to the countryside. I’d like to be able to experience it entirely from behind glass if I could, ideally from behind my enormous Grade II single-glazed oculus which can never be double-glazed and so starts to gather condensation in October. In the city a falling leaf is only pretty until it lands, and then it’s litter, and soon after that it’s a slippery obstacle. Mulch. Piles of rotting leaves smell to me like the sweat of unhealthy men. On Oxford Road, the only road I ever seem to walk down these days, they’re pulling up the Victorian sewers. The smell is of bad teeth and ripe egg mayonnaise. Toilet roll is strewn across the street, not from the sewers, from Halloween. I missed Halloween. I’ll miss Bonfire Night too. The sewer renovations intrude on the pavements so everyone is walking shoulder to shoulder at mismatched speeds, clammy in clothes inappropriate for the weather, because everything you wear in autumn is inappropriate for the weather. The weather is inappropriate. When I was a kid I ploughed my bike through an enormous pile of dry leaves at the side of the road. There was a pile of bricks waiting in the middle for me and I went in a perfect arc over the handlebars and landed on my back. Autumn is full of surprises. How I hate it.

Oxford Road

Street Zero ...

Street sign reading ...

"National Grid Repairs

Delays expected for 52 WEEKS

Find alternative route"

!!! ???



Street Hero ...

Midday sunshine

Japanese girl

Red hair

Black dress

Peach stilettoes

... We salute you

'Lived in bars …'

I hear ya sister. Most of my time of late has been spent in drinking dens the length of Oxford Road and its surrounds, my second homes being Kro, Kro 2, Odder, Deaf Institute, Cornerhouse, Temple, Rain Bar, Peveril, Via Fossa, Taurus … It’s sinfully indulgent considering my appalling financial state and the wider economic crises but I have needed to be numb of late and, you know, I do love the night life.



Fun things have included the free comedy night at the Ape & Apple where, unintentionally, the most amusing thing was an inebriated loudmouth from Gorton attempting to tell me his life story by shouting over each and every act. There was some excellent material from the real acts though, lots of pony-tailed men for some reason, and some that just made you want to curl up and die.

In related news, my hobs are the cleanest they’ve been since I moved in because I have been eating out at every given opportunity: Pi, Lead Station, Panama Hatty’s, Try Thai, Great Wall, Croma … Honestly, I feel like Marie Antoinette. It’s going to be a lean Christmas I tell ya. Somehow I’ve also managed to lose weight at the same time. Je ne comprends pas but I love it.


Dear Oscar said, ‘Anyone who lives within their mean suffers from a lack of imagination.’ We would have got along so very well. I have flown in the face of the so-called recession these last few weeks by simply flinging fistfuls of my hard-earned in the face of ennui, misery and my general disbelief at the state of things. I have to say it’s been marvellous. I even indulged in retail therapy, which I never do. I am quite incapable of buying clothes which is why I always look like a pile of someone else’s dry-cleaning. I am able to purchase one or two nice items every couple of months by going to Oxfam or Ryan Vintage, anything more than this and I fail. I know exactly what I want to look like but nobody sells the clothes required, at least not in my humble price range. I did however manage to successfully procure a shirt three sizes too small for me in Top Man in order to make my arms look just-so buff. Basically I look like trade in it … perfect.


Musically I fared slightly better, eventually getting myself a decent Roxy compilation AND Marianne Faithful’s Broken English at long last (£3 from Fopp!). My pride and joy at the moment though is a rediscovered Among My Swan by Mazzy Star (also £3 from Fopp!) which sounds as ethereal and crystal-like as it did when I first heard it ten years ago. Must get ‘Fade Into You’ too, Hope Sandoval, I salute you. That, plus my gorgeous vinyl of Elbow’s The Seldom-Seen Kid, Magnetic Fields’ Distortion and Set Yourself On Fire by Stars, are all helping me to steel myself against an unkind world. Music was my first and it shall be my last love.

Food

Out with the old … looks as though El Macho, the Mexican place on Portland Street, has closed down. A shame. Was it our only Mexican restaurant? I can tick it off my list of places to eat at least, it having resided there since 1997. Also Monsoons is looking suspiciously abandoned at the minute. Monsoons, the take-away next to Spar on Oxford Road, is such a Manchester experience. It’s the best place to watch semi-respectable suits abandon all willpower to their hangovers of a Monday and eat burnt meat in the window with their fingers. Monsoons is also responsible for the greasiest, shiniest patch of pavement in the city. At night it’s pretty scary and the staff are bad-tempered. I can’t remember if the kebabs are any good, having been either blotto or vegetarian or both on all of my visits, but it smells great when you’re hungry. It will be sad to see it go. Maybe it’s just a refurb?



And in with the new …University Place is the enormous flying saucer cum steel drum erection on campus. The whole ground floor is seemingly devoted to eating, which is nice. The building itself is fairly unlovable and lit by mysterious means since it has no windows above the ground floor. What’s more it symbolises, to me at least, the University’s willingness to haemorrhage money in the name of image while such thorny issues as paying staff agreeable salaries remain unresolved. The Maths Tower that preceded Uni Place was, I grant you, an eye-sore in its own right but, typically, I quite liked it. Anyway, the food. Cheap, good quality, quick, and for the most part pretty healthy. The canteen is all of these and comes replete with the added thrill of school-canteen style rivalry to bag the cool tables. I’ve had roast vegetable tarts and mushroom stroganoff on separate occasions and they’ve both been lovely, as have the sides. I might even forgive them the architecture for those crispy, yummy roast potatoes.

Sound bytes

Finisterre
I know this is a hundred years old (released 2002) but the film, originally conceived from individual short pieces to accompany the Saint Etienne album of the same name, just came through the post on DVD and it is quite the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in ages. A montage of 24 hours in London filmed in nooks, crannies and jaw-dropping vistas all across the city soundtracked by the Finisterre album and punctuated with spoken interludes by various unseen Londoners on why they love/hate/idolise their great city. Magic. Get it.

Witnessed on Oxford Road:
Man wearing a camouflage army jacket with dark grey suit trousers, slip-on Vans in neon-pink and black checks, carrying a bag covered with a garish floral print like a roller blind from the 1970s. Huh?

Chris Jordan
Jaw-dropping photographs. The Abu-Ghraib montage and Hurricane Katrina images might be unsurpassable in terms of defining twenty-first century America. Any one of his images will amaze and frighten though.

From Manchester Lifestyle Hospital website:
“Cosmetic surgery procedures available: Breast augmentation, Breast reduction, Breast uplift … For further information visit www.baaps.co.uk”

Chalet Lines
Heart-breaking cover of my second-favourite Belle & Sebastian song. For some reason the very British references in this upsetting tale of sexual assault on a holiday camp are all the more moving in his sweet French voice.

Witnessed on Oxford Road:
Four scallies drinking in the street. Not surprising? It was Baileys. Huh?

MGMT remix
Unrecognisably filthy noise-mix of MGMT signature tune.

Pinned to my wall to encourage writing:

“Jack sweated so profusely while writing On The Road that he went through several T shirts a day … He started his book in early April 1951. By April 9 he had written thirty-four thousand words. By April 20, eighty-six thousand. On April 27, the book was finished, a roll of paper typed as a single-spaced paragraph 120 feet long.”
– Introduction to On The Road

“Once work gets a grip, depending on the work you do, it becomes the meaning of life for a while, as much an imperative as eating or sleeping. A career won’t be denied; it chomps away at your allotted twenty four hours and its hunger is satisfied only temporarily before the next urge, as sure as waves roll in from the sea … It has a life of its own.”
– Julian Clary, A Young Man’s Passage

“He had sold one painting during his lifetime. Three times was his work noticed in the press. But these are just details. The real Vincent Van Gogh is the man who has just done “five size 30 canvasses, olive trees”. To me, in context, one of the most moving and realistic descriptions of how a real artist thinks.”
– Alice Walker

Soundtrack:
Stereolab 'French Disko'. Never ever get tired of this, possible tune for October ... The Divine Comedy's cover of Ride's 'Vapour Trail'. I was expecting a pared-down chamber version of this track but they've kept the wall of swooshing guitars and brought the words forward and it's worked. Also a hundred years old I realise but, hey, I work. Am about to embark on a psychedelic trip around Britain in the 1960s, so John's Children, Floyd, Hendrix etc, I'm so bored of right now, right now.

The Trials of Life

Walking home along Oxford Road Thursday afternoon I see a sorry looking man, irreparably off his nut on something, lying in what might be his own piss on the pavement outside the something and Firkin (Fanny? Fist? Frottage?). Another guy is standing over him, holding a racing bike steady as he berates the prone man thusly: ‘I’ve been in a hostel mate, it’s not that bad. Fucking pull yourself together.’ Well he wasn’t very nice was he boys and girls?

I carry on walking and stop at the second-hand book man outside the Met Union building where I immediately spot something funny: David Attenborough’s ‘Trials of Life‘: Reader’s Digest Expanded and Enlarged Version. I think, surely you could have just left it as it was then, couldn‘t you? I reason I’m possibly the only person in the world who might find this funny and turn away smiling, only to find racing bike man glaring directly at me. I beat a hasty retreat.

At home the entire building is now under scaffolding with a platform invitingly placed right outside my window. The temptation is overwhelming, so much so that, distracted, I manage to burn the microwave popcorn that represents tonight’s dinner (I 'm usually much healthier than this). Moments later the fire alarm sounds throughout the building. This surely can’t be the fault of my few blackened kernels, can it? I finish eating anyway and amble down the back stairs and onto the street. Only half a dozen evacuees are waiting there so I give it ten minutes then head back up, somewhat guiltily. With the fire alarm still ringing I can think of no better opportunity to scramble out onto the scaffolding and run up and down. I could say I smelt smoke and panicked. Then I remember I have tickets for Sandra Bernhard this month and I’ve promised to feed the Pugling while Neil is in France and it would be mortifying to die like that man off the hilarious ‘Don’t drink and climb scaffolding’ advert. So I stay put. God help me if I come back to this flat drunk though …

Later the same evening I head to the Thirsty Scholar last minute to see my sister Clare do her stuff at the open mic night. (Managed to pop to the LGF on Princess Street first to exercise my suffrage. Green Party since you ask, I wouldn’t touch the rest with a sterilised knitting needle). At the pub almost the entire clan is in attendance: Ma, Pa, auntie Dee, Uncle John, sister Emma and boyf James. We accidentally get rollicking drunk and have a blast. Biased I might be but Clare utterly shines amongst the dreary boys with acoustic guitars and Melua-likes that tend to populate these things, although the couple with the banjo last night were excellent. Clare’s voice is huge and she knows how to control it, she really is preternaturally talented, it quite frightens me. She’s done a gazillion such nights now and is ready to make the subtle shift from open mic circuit to ‘unsigned’. Hopefully the forthcoming London gigs will be just the ticket.

Return home late, drunk and starving but resist the scaffolding.