Mars isn’t the Red Planet, Nibiru is. Planet X, the Frightener. I’ve been informed that it’s on its way by the World Wide Wait. 2012 the shit will hit the fan, so don’t be alarmed if you encounter the Mothman on Deansgate sometime soon; he is the harbinger of cataclysm. In this cock-headed age of internet social networks and forums, it’s possible to waste a significant fraction of one’s week doing absolutely piss all and learning about the end-times. Chatting to people you haven’t seen in decades or indeed ever. The UWS forum is particularly troublesome; wondering if anyone responded to that post you made four hours ago. Sometimes there’s discussion on the UWS forum about sayings and expressions people can’t stand. One I personally dislike is “nailed on”. It makes us sound like northern cavemen. What happened to all that other slang we had? Things were sound, people piped, blimped and zapped. A geezer was an ice-cream, to stop something was to loz it. To get away was to smishe. You either didn’t do it at all or you did it Full Lock. Was it really so cool that today’s New Manc has turned it into a cliché and an embarrassment to use? Where once we zapped we’re now back to nailing? Charming. I’ve actually been accused online of making all the old slang up. It’s gone, along with the magic of United Road Cantilever. But United are still there, as unpredictable and frustrating as ever, even in magnificent victory. I’ve just watched that Tottenham match at Old Trafford where we suddenly decided to score 5 goals in the second half for reasons that were never made completely clear. I’d suggest Asian gambling syndicates were involved, but my bodyguard’s taken a month off and I kinda don’t give a fuck anyway. Actually, this past few games at OT have reeked of conspiracy. You know it makes sense. Dramatic comebacks against Villa and Spurs. Gets ‘em all riled up. And then the 2-0 against Portsmouth after we let ‘em knock it about a bit in a cold funereal cauldron. It’s a nailed-on conspiracy is what it is. Now I’m using expressions that I don’t even like…Taped the match on the DVR, ‘cos we went shopping in 88-degree weather while it was on live. AC on Full Lock. Came home and did a nice barbie; spicy sausage, chicken drumsticks, burgers, asparagus (you cockneys will know what that is) and the full-term pregnant missus joined me in a protein-fest while we watched the Reds. As you can imagine, when the half-time whistle went we were seething, saying stuff like, “Ferguson better lash a full tea-set in the Bulgarian’s face in that bastard dressing room!” I resisted the temptation to fast-forward until I saw something interesting and dug in for the second half drinking a Bud Lite (in case an emergency dash to the local maternity ward was on the cards). When we came back from 2-0 to sink Everton in April ’07 we went mad with joy, but somehow this Spurs turnaround was muted. Why? We’re 3 points clear with a game in hand and in the EUFA Champs semis…but United fans love good football, and we hadn’t been hitting the spot in that department. Ironically, the Scousers would probably settle for anything that leads to a league trophy right now but they’re playing out of their skins. Until we slapped Tottenham we’d been playing shite for a while. The 5-2 was a – what? You what? You’re asking yourself, “What is this balloon doing, trying to write about football? Where’s the nonsense and the weird stuff?”
You want nonsense and weird stuff, do you, you cunt? Alright then, let’s ‘ave it…
Hell is a city. Especially a city like Manchester. I mean, right through the 60s, 70s, most of the 80s…we were sidelined and misunderstood by the arse-lingerers of Fleet Street and Television Centre. Back when the only cool cities in Britain were London, Liverpool and Glasgow. When the Manc accent was regarded as a faceless patch in the quilt of “oop north”. Teddington Lock, Middlesex…what did they know of the exploits of Vinegar Vera? Come to that, what do YOU?
When I came back to Manchester a few weeks ago, it was just for a few days and anticipation of being ashamed or proud of the place in front of an American never occurred to me. Americans are out of the loop and so an emotional investment was not required. Not like meeting a cockney, when you waited for the norf-sarf comments. Worse. We primed the brain-pump with 2 days in the Borough of Kensington. Not easy to live up to, I know. As we rolled into Piccadilly at 8:30 AM (worst possible view approaching the city centre: Why?) the station was echoing futuristically, its foyer thick with balcony banter and tannoyspeak. We walked into the air and I suddenly felt that thing. That grip in the guts when you remember all the verbal advertising you’ve done for the old place. The pressure of being judged, and of having your entire city judged with it. We walked down the ramp, under the weirdly neglected balcony looming at the base of the undulating glassy wave above us. These things are what make Manchester Manchester. The assorted to-do items littered busily through the heart of the centre. It’s comical, but we imagine it confers a “big” or even “exotic” vibe on the place. It really doesn’t, but it does do something; it exposes the stainless, streamlined ferocity of the Mancunian landscape, with its moon-age daydreams, cast-off industrial protuberances and other space debris. The American was only there for 24 hours, but the trajectories we took were among the worst possible. A brief glimpse of Eastlands from the slowing train had hit me like an omen, a blue space-ship over a charcoal shanty town. The temperature had dipped for the weekend, but it warmed up again and felt completely comfortable by Monday. The Yank and I were both thoroughly convinced the climate really was colder up there that fateful Saturday. It lent a barbaric, primal air to the place. Then I remembered those mild vapours that convect between Penines and Irish Sea; momentum-fed by the North Atlantic Drift, breaking the region into a mosaic of smaller and smaller and smaller truths: Pit-head-mimic skyscrapers, classic commercial buildings and stone towns strewn across green blankets intersected by dry-stone walls. Too knackered to hit town after the match, the delights of the core catacombs evaded us. Restricted to the crud-accreted eastern edge of town, plus Blackfriars, Ordsall, Old Trafford and Kearsley, his conclusion: “There was a sense of lawlessness like a frontier…it was too far from civilisation…the people looked less evolutionarily evolved than the people in London”. You fucking what?! Hilarious.
Writing isn’t always fun, ‘cos you don’t always have an idea what you’re gonna write about when you sit down. It’s happening to me right now. The deadline for this is tomorrow and I’m stumped. You have to be able to impress the ones who know what’s going on. Maybe you know what’s going on. I wouldn’t be surprised if you did. Well, it’s your lucky day! We’re now having a very personal conversation, just you and me. Should we talk about Planet X and AIG? Do you really give a shite? Or should I just carry on pouring my heart out as the day tips inexorably towards Monday morning like a sinking galleon? There was a ten-pager about Planet X on the UWS forum recently. Some lads I’d thought were proper earthy showing their paranormal colours. The truth is out there, they say. Planet X is a huge red orb, a gigantic looming Frightener that will appear in our skies sometime in the next few years. When Earth comes between it and Sun ye shall know terror and raining fire. The twin giant leeches of savagery and entitlement shalt dominate thy landscape. Thine pants will be soiled, thy cloth touched and global follow-through events commonplace; humanity will shit itself.
Life isn’t a movie, a soap opera or a sitcom. It rests somewhere between NBC and HBO but many people labour under the naïve notion that it can only be one or the other. Thus, they manufacture a “Friends” like scenario; kinda like “Coupling” (itself shite) minus the booze and the sex-talk. It’s a puritan’s dream and the antithesis of everything we loons live for. They are closet boozers who act middle-aged when they’re 25. Those most in fear of going mad are the rigid straights; their path is continually corrected like that of a flying saucer, erratic in its precision but lacking the emotive force of true humanity, trampling the feelings of those around it as it meanders on its Five Year Plan. When Planet X arrives these arrogants believe it is they, the entitled ones, who will survive the cataclysm. They call themselves The Indigo Children. If the Frightener does hit, I give you my oath I’ll be on your side; I’ll slaughter those spoilt Indigo bastards with gun and blade till my dying breath. I get the impression half the UWS forum will, too.
How is this season gonna end? The end lies in the future, which is as yet unformed. Scientists have managed to send a photon into the future. Being fluid and open, it received the photon physically. But the past? The past is congealed and cannot be changed, however many sly edits to Wikipedia you make, or new “Madchester” documentaries appear on YouTube. If they could seal me in a steel capsule and propel me like a silver bullet into the cholesterol heart of East Riding (what the fuck happened to Humberside since I flew the coop anyroad?) on May 24 I could know the answer today. But like today on my DVR, I don’t want to press the fast-forward button. I want to roil and soil and heave a vile curse upon the House of Scouse. For these are the great days, the end-times of a domination stretching back decades. The end-times indeed, when a crimson globe will appear in the sky, as big as the sun. When dogs and cats are living together and the crème de la crème are whisked off to secret bases deep under the Rockies. Or the Penines.
I have to cut this short, as my wife is LITERALLY in labour (not joking here, Mr. Mitten) and we’re heading out the door to the hospital. Something large and round is pressing to appear. Something red and painful that will change my world forever. It ain’t Planet fuckin’ X that’s for sure, but it will definitely be a Red.

If you’ve fondled the erect ear of a Blackpool donkey you know what twelve inches of rock-hard gristle feels like. Unfortunately we got something akin to that rammed up our arses on March 14. Getting stuffed is not fun. What was anticipated as a grand ol’ day at the seaside ended up as Grimsby revisited – bummed hard by the Scousers and sent home with faces like smacked arses. And to make it worse, I was there in person; flew the pond on a spot of business. Stayed in some top notch Kensington hotel right a-facing Hyde Park. Rode the Underground and savoured the quality of Londone Towne; like a wonderland after that frozen wilderness of plastic McMansions and Wild West strip malls. A rampant week-long piss-up. The Liverpool game at OT smack in the middle of the trip. We clambered onto a deserted 6:36 AM Euston train for the two-hour jaunt to the tundra. It’s been two years since I was at a match; the 0-1 loss to West Ham at OT, when Tevez did the biz for the Hammers. Saw the goal on a telly while I slurped my Budweiser at the onset of half-time. But this one would be different. For one, my Yank workmate Brian would be amazed by Manchester and by Manchester United. For another, we were poised to destroy the Scousers and leave their season in bloodied ribbons. Unfortunately, little of the above came to pass.
The walk from Piccadilly station to Blackfriars was chilly and quiet. A dead city, not yet resurrected from Friday’s infusions. Uneven pavements, funky too-modern buildings. Fuck all Olde Worlde grandeur as far as the eye could see. Mancs probably think this blasphemy against Prince Charles is cool. The eastern edge of town, where rinky-dink shops blared crap music and ugly bastards strolled to mysterious ends, lent teasing possibilities of a world long gone. But we were there to see United. On a pilgrimage, walking those same streets where 19th Century Scuttlers swarmed like cockroaches while machines were introduced to the equation. “Machines the likes of which had never been seen before,” I told Brian, lost in a haze of drunken waffle. Lost in a book called Gomorrah I was currently reading, by a man with a death sentence hanging over him. “It kicked off a cotton fixation that quickly spread …In Naples they import silk and cotton from China. Little people cram into sweatshops and churn out designer masterpieces for Armani and Gucci. Those Neopolitan sweatshops were invented in Manchester. Our machines conjured fabrics and textiles the world had never dreamed of. Style was the key and criminals had it sewn up. Be it Scuttlers or Camorristi, speed is the essence and the gun is King”. I gave my Yank mate a running commentary, non-stop waffle on the state of the Republic and the parallels between Vesuvius and Salford smoky tops. He seemed confused; why would I would be proud of descending from sweatshop denizens and peasant criminals? My dad gave us a lift from Blackfriars. Through Ordsall, where brooding houses hid evil secrets. Where a generations-old army had weathered the transition from seafaring to coca-mochacinno in glazed designer outlets. Early morning docks; steel-cold air and iron cranes towering over the water. Glass-panelled scaffolding clustered and wisped like a futuristic vision. Brian forced to endure my adolescent rantings regarding Scousers, Salford, aliens and Planet X. I tried to explain that this was Goat Country. Where Ferguson is rumoured to sit silent in a Quays condo. A carnivorous leprechaun on his shoulder whispering team selections into his ear with a raspy tongue. I told the Yank where the bodies were buried; I had to lay it on thick. To impress our visitor from the New World. I pointed out the hairy necks and dusky skins of the natives. Explained that much mafia had trickled into the area from exotic ships. How you didn’t insult Family. Showed respect for the black sign of Lucifer. Obeyed an ancient tendency to organise and take control. The innumerable squads, virile and vigilant, very cool indeed. Manchester had arrived in the public imagination late but our thing came from deep underground and was never going back down. Proper Salford has always been behind the times. Part of a previous, more polite tradition, shrouded in history. Shiny dress-shirts and man-pants matched with shoes and short haircuts. Till the plastic sportswear overcame the resistance and wore them down like a dying breed.
“There’s nothing like this in London,” I spat, knowing that was untrue and the East End was yet another parallel in the waffle machine. The mass of claims and counter-claims urban man makes on behalf of his tribe and its animal range. Mine was a finger of land extending west from town, between Irwell and Ship Canal. That collarbone of concrete, those barracks and crash-barriers. OT its Tower of Babel. Lofting a high structure is the aim of any tribe worth its salt. Indicates the natives’ ability to make the desert bloom. The Quays crane forest, with its crop of ripe concrete and steel hung high, testifies to Salford’s fertility in these ball-crunching times. Then a thought hit me, the first sober one in days; maybe I was proper schizoid and in full-on denial? About my sanity as well as this place. I bought a UWS off a lad near the bridge. Pointed out my article to him. “I fuckin’ pissed meself all the way through that!” he said. Good. At least two of us get it then.
And suddenly there it was.
The Northeast Quadrant rising like an immense clamshell, fusing the two stands in its smouldering grip. The Yank cocked his brow and I grinned as if I’d built it myself. In a giant sweatshop that catered to parallel universes. But there was only one Old Trafford, or only one per universe. It was a poor facsimile of the old cantilever, but at least it was big; we’d been to Stamford Bridge for a mooch two days earlier, providing a deliciously humiliating contrast to this. My earlier schizoid diagnosis soothed at his astonishment, but I needed alcohol to fully convince me and so did he; a lifelong American fascination with United perched on the brink of fulfilment. Rapid gulps of Fosters and Guinness brought spangles of sunshine. It was gonna be a top outing, this. We went in Platts, where I hoped to see some cockneys we’d met in Soho. They told me I’d get free ale all day on the strength of my book. That one of their mates heralded it as the greatest thing he’d ever read. No such encounter occurred. We got sparklingly drunk and filmed the roaring hordes on Brian’s Flip camera. It wasn’t easy getting up at five for the train after yesterday’s skinfull. I’d been to meet my new publisher and we’d ended up on a bit of a crawl. Very messy.
Inside OT, K Stand Top Left, right next to the Originators of Casual Culture. A bit discombobulated; something was missing. The Liverpool fans looked loud but were so far away I couldn’t rightly judge. Until they ALL started singing, “He’s Crackin’ Up…” All I hear these days are tales of season tickets rescinded and turfing out. Lads lobbed onto the forecourt for standing, singing, swearing or something. It’s nothing new; Derby at OT in April ’79. I was 13. Derby came out and warmed up in advance of the Reds. Their little section singing, “Come on Derby! Come on Derby!” The entire Stretford responded with a thunderous, “Fuck off, Derby! Fuck off Derby!” I’m on the ledge giving Vs-a-plenty. Screaming my head off. Copper dragging an unfortunate urchin along the gangway grabbed my outstretched wrist and yanked me along for the ride. Turned with terror-eyes to Steve K, who was pissing himself, the heartless cunt. Back of the Stretford Dibble produced his little black notebook and pencil stub. I actually gave him my real name; too honest by far (In July ’87 I gave a London tube inspector my real name. A dragnet sweep for jibbers and no request for ID forthcoming. Had to pay a fifty-quid fine. Returning from a month in Cairo. Carrying a bag of dirty clothes and mystic thoughts. I had a lot of cash in my shoes and a small chunk of sandstone in my bag. I was very nervous. It had been chiselled off a wall in the Valley of the Kings. Worth a lot of money. Later gave it to Siân, a bird with a circumflex accent. Could have sold it for a fortune. If you’re reading this darlin’ please get in touch; I want it back). I can still hear the Stretford giving it, “Ray Wilkins, King of all cockneys!” while I stood wondering what would happen. Got thrown out and had to walk home. Crying like a girl from anger. One big difference between then and now is that terraces didn’t have numbers corresponding to every space. These days they own YOU, not just your seat. Fortunately, K Stand Top Left allows for some considerable obscenity and violent threats. These were very much required as Liverpool scored their first, then their second, then their third…If I’d been in the main stand I’d have got nicked, definitely.
Maybe it’s all part of some grander scheme in the matrix. Some journey unfolding from the coils of our steaming brains. Written in tissue, in neurons, in parallel futures. Bad turbulence on the skylark to some unknown footballing Utopia. Either way, it’s shite. Especially when we get leathered 4-1 by the Scousers. I rode that donkey’s ear all the way back across the Atlantic and it was a rough ‘un, believe me.

I’ve just watched Inter v. United at the San Siro and the comedy of lucky saves it truly was. I asked myself, should someone who writes in a distinguished fanzine such as this be permitted to comment on an important match he witnessed via television? The rest of the UWS guerrilla writing team are probably in some ritzy Milano nightclub now, surrounded by a phalanx of armed riot police. And here was I, in my little computer room, tapping away, while Meatballs and Danny Loki swung their hammers (yeah…I know). I bet House of Style was Top Boy in his dead good keks and acceptably labelled jacket. Probably went over in his BM on’t’ ferry wi’t’ lads.
Gorra Love that House of Style, eh? The cunt. He’s been spreading vicious rumours about me living in the middle of nowhere wearing Adidas tracky bottoms (sans Trefoil if you don’t mind!) with my brains allegedly done in from too much acid. All based on a night I spent with him in town two years ago. Rest assured Mr. Style my brain is perfectly fine (sometimes) and there’s plenty to do here on’t’ border of Massachusetts and Connecticut. It’s an interesting study in the geographic economics of marijuana culture, for starters (Ooh shit, drugs again). Headshops are illegal in MA but not in CT. The CT border towns have capitalised on this for generations. The decrepit boulevards of Enfield are littered with ruined 70s-era headshops; cheesily “futuristic” glassy structures with angled walls and bad signs looming out front on once illuminated stands. In between the Jiffy Lubes and Taco Bells a new cohort of headshops is exploding. Most are owned by Massachusetts lads eager to exploit day-trippers from their home state. The whole area is a trip if I’m honest. You can fall out of bed and make money, but not from drugs, of course. From being a forty-three year old bloke who never misses a United game (on telly) with an opportunistic eye. Recently I dismantled a huge wood-fired furnace and dragged it up through the bulkhead of a townhouse in a horrific slumdog neighbourhood. The intention was to sell it and drink the proceeds. Sizzler, Crusher, the Master and Polish Bazyli helped, thank fuck. The thing weighed over 3,000 lbs, a sick tangle of heavy glass gauges, copper pipes, asbestos plates and solid iron. The whole time the guys were supping Twisted Tea and Sierra Nevada pale ales. At eight in the morning. I bet House of Style doesn’t sup owt at daft o’ clock. Probably washing his fucking BMW or ironing his socks at that time on a Saturday. When work ended we retreated to the living room to watch United live. I was wearing one of my three pairs of Equipment bottoms, the black ones. We trashed Bolton at theirs. Mr. Style will be thrilled to hear that Bazyli related some stories to me from Kraków, a grim place where boneheaded thugs hack each other half to death with machetes and spikes on a regular basis. After the match we went on a tour of the local headshops in the Master’s minibus. In no time, Crusher is menacing the poor bastards manning the headshops, asking them if they know such-a-body or thingamajig – all known felons from up in MA. Crusher’s just got out of the Big House following an incident with a remote-controlled plane he built himself. It almost decapitated a local building contractor. The guy wanted the land behind Crusher’s lot for construction. Crusher wanted to build steel sheds on it to house his heavy equipment. The plane went right through the guy’s front window and was completely embedded in a wall. Christ, not even Kezz back in Prestwich ever got that out of control. Though I could be wrong…
I spent many happy times with Kezz, from the age of 5 onward. He was a rare torpedo of a man. Hellbent on never slowing down and leaving a trail of twisted flesh and bone in his wake. He’d have liked Crusher. Kezz died over a year ago now and I think of him every day. I still recall the nights he machined seven shades out of the opposition before the rest of us even got a look in. Then there was the first home game of the ’84-’85 season. Watford at OT. I’d monkeyed out high into the Scoreboard Paddock rafters, only to drop to what I believed would be at least a broken ankle. I landed on Kezz and immediately began to share the cans of Tennents Super with him that I’d secreted in the zipped pockets of my snorkel parka. Another time he appeared at my Lower Broughton flat, completely befuddled from days on the piss, when he’d prowled like a panther among the population. That was the late-80s. I was living in a mock-Georgian bedsit crawling with weirdoes and loose women. My telephone was the public one in the taxi place across the road. I was working for agencies, lying to the landlord about fat cheques due any day. One assignment was at a frozen “kebab” factory. Huge silver vats of shit-coloured slime intersected with ovens and inexplicable mixing apparatus. A gang of Salford kids running riot. Every two minutes someone would burst through the plastic doors on a pump-truck and get splattered with massive gobs of this filth, which reeked of plastic and bad turd. This would result in a five-minute “food” fight (I use the term very loosely). St. Trinians it fuckin’ wasn’t. Red to the bone it certainly was. Kezz used to shake his head at such tales; he couldn’t understand why I lowered myself so. But the torpedo that was Kezz has passed us by and only the craters remain.

* * * * * *

We patrolled Enfield in the bus. A plain dildo-like glass pipe was passed from man to man as our vehicle crunched through the filthy snow of New England. The Master had haggled the terrified bastards down to almost nothing for a two hundred dollar pipe shot through with coloured tendrils like a superball. This was no time for mellowing out on the Northern Lights; we were tokin’ on AK47, the crème de la crème. Grown last summer by the Master who, funnily enough, owned a couple of rifles (and a couple of acres) bearing the very same moniker. We had an appointment to keep at a den of testosterone-fuelled iniquity called Maximum Capacity Sports Bar. The event? Midget Wrestling (Google it, smart-arse). MC don’t have bouncers; they pay the local police to post four armed officers on the weekend and even more if the midgets are in town. The midgets bring crowds and crowds mean money for Master and the boys. MC is an evil place. The front carpark was pulsing with comedic malevolence. Latino gang-bangers from Springfield in baggy jeans. Metallic peroxide bimbos in silver hot-pants stepping across the ice on heels. Construction workers getting smashed after work, and unemployed landscapers blowing their savings. Crusher walked through the lot like it wasn’t there and the Master wasn’t far behind him.
To be fair, “Midget Wrestling” is a lie. Only one of the four little people going at it was actually a midget. The rest were dwarves. “Dwarf Wrestling” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, though. Kezz would have loved the dwarves and the midget and I wished he could have been there. I knew I had plenty coming to me from the furnace I’d taken out of that hovel so I went all out. Scored some Eve (MDEA) off Jamie the Wannabe Wiseguy and dropped three at once. That ethyl group attached to the nitrogen adjacent to the benzene ring takes the empathy down a notch but it’s a bastard to bring off if pharma is your thing. I know I’ve struggled with it myself. I was soon bopping about in my House of Style-sneerable Stockholms and Adidas tracky bottoms. Partying like it was nineteen-eighty one. Jamie stayed well clear of us; Crusher and he have some outstanding issues regarding snow tyres and remote-ignition starters. Jamie’s connected but Crusher is a mountain of a man and barred for life from getting in the ring with the midgets; he doesn’t know his own strength. The “midgets” soon appeared, dressed in tiny leotards to accentuate their tight bodies. Launching themselves off the ropes, somersaulting and drop-kicking one another spectacularly. Then they brought in the Budweiser bottles and staple-guns. Stapling beer mats to each others’ heads and smashing bottles on same, real blood pouring. The crowd was frothing with perverse glee. When Crusher jumped in that other time, a midget grabbed his balls and he smashed the little guy over the neck with a corner stool. Instant lifetime ban. But even the cops were afraid to move on Crusher and he knocked out the AK like you read about. Soon fights were breaking out everywhere and I wondered what the United fans were doing at home after the Bolton match.
Which brings me back to tonight. Here, watching the match on telly while everyone was there in the San Siro. Mulling, mullered, over that House of Style and his lies; see, it wasn’t a pair of Adidas Equipment trackies I wore the night I went out with him in town. It was actually a pair of cords I’d borrowed off my dad that were three inches too short. Infinitely more of a sin than the sans Trefoil horrors I would’ve thought. But what do I know? Maybe short cords are less of a sensation than wrong labels among the middle-aged casuals of Manchester? But hear this, House of Style: I will be at OT for the Liverpool match and FULLY KITTED OUT from the premium outlets of Clinton Crossing, Connecticut. I shall gleam like the nose-cone of a heart-breaking spacecraft, squeaking and mincing as if aloft on the erect prong of my spite. Be up for it on the forecourt House, ‘cos I’m spending some dollars at that Crossing gaff. If you want me to pick you summat up, let me know and I’ll hand off the bag. KnowhatImean?

It’s fifteen below outside and there are fox tracks in the snow by the slider. The cats are incensed by the scratching noises emanating from the walls and ceilings – mice coming inside for the winter. At least I hope it’s mice. I’m withdrawing into my usual hibernation mode. I hate the cold. Portsmouth and West Ham are playing on telly but the missus is insisting on Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares. So I’m in here tapping away and dreaming of the tropics. Dreaming of prehistoric Madchester and cradlin’ a Heineken and a cold margarita.
Now I’ve switched to Corona and tequila shots. I’ve spent most of today creating and studying a spreadsheet, describing the relationship between being an utter cunt and being a Liverpool supporter. It took me five seconds to make and five hours to accept. The fact is, this is an important season for us. It’s an even more important season for the vermin. They are the mice (or rats, if you must) and we are the cats. They know we’re on the trail and a special effort is being made. Question is, are our lads putting in the same? Either way it is immaterial to me. My house is rammed with a foot of snow and I have to go out and shovel it. Then I’ll come in and watch a compendium of United goals on YouTube. Do some beak, leather a bottle of tequila and get blasted like a teenager. I should probably slow down. There’s a recession on, apparently.
This alleged economic downturn has sent me and the boys sniffing around for extra beadage. We’ve even got on our bikes. Norman Tebbit would’ve been proud. I woke up in a strange bed in a strange hotel recently, with a plastic name-tag round my neck and one sock on. There were fourteen text and voicemail messages on my cellphone at least half of which were threats; my pregnant wife accusing me of playing away. It wasn’t pleasant, reading of my impending castration while viciously hungover. Italian women are like that. Very paranoid and malevolent.
As the mauve fog cleared, I remembered where I was, and why. It was the day after we’d played Aalborg at OT. I was with Danny and the Master in West Virginia. We were on a business trip. Initially we’d planned to return to New England the same day but I’d insisted on catching the United game somewhere. I knew ESPN screened UEFA Champs matches and it was standard cable fare. We settled on a hotel bar; a lousy game with Tev and Roon hitting the spot. Me going mental, ordering tequila shots and getting in a proper state. I had a cloudy recollection of the Master thrusting a key-card at me saying, “don’t drive, you’re too messed up” or words to that effect. Which was true; I hadn’t drunk that much booze since who knows when. So we spent the night in the Quality Inn with some of my wife’s imaginary supermodels (Christ, if I’d shagged half of these women in real life I’d be giving George Best a run for his money by now).
We’d gone down to West Virginia to buy up a load of cheap winches. Acquired from a Tractor Supply warehouse by a Scotch-Irish gang we sometimes drink with down there. We sell them to a fearsome maniac known as The Crusher. The Crusher broke his neck four years ago in a mental truck crash. Dan had called me at 3 in the morning with the bad news. Crusher was peeling out of a party in the wee hours, shitfaced. Got his supercharged pick-up to about a ton on a pitch-black dirt road but hit a tree stump. He was thrown sixty feet from the vehicle and admitted to Baystate Medical Center in a hurry. He made a miraculous recovery and was working with us on construction inside a few months. Crawling round in the dirt on his hands and knees. Sanding skirting-boards and rolling out the walls of the Master’s sister’s new house. Pumping iron in his garage. A real man, if I may say. He bears a fat red scar down the back of his neck from surgery. He’s not the same but it would have killed an average homo like you, you soft English cunt.
Crusher fastens our winches to the handlebars of local quad-bikes for extra income. Being superhuman, the Crusher easily manages to service ten quads per day, and that’s just on the weekend. His real job is supervising an aeroplane tool shop. The average quad weighs about 600lb and these winches are good for 3 tons. They have an electric cable that can be easily attached to a nearby tree in the event of a quad being swallowed by mud or quicksand. Comes in very handy in these parts. Everyone has a quad and uses it daily. The woods and swamps are endless.
The plastic nametag was another story. It came from a conference being held in the hotel the night we collapsed there. It was a New Age cult. Fuck knows what they called themselves. After the match we just kind of drifted in. There were diagrams of Zodiacal Ages on easels. Aquarius and Leo, Mayan pyramids and Russian shamanic symbols. I approached the velvet rope and delivered a bullshit introduction as to who we were. I was awash with United’s European triumph (such as it was) and we were welcomed to the freak show. It could have gone either way; Dan resembles a hippie but the Master looks and sounds like a young “Big” Pussy Bompensiero. Unfortunately I don’t mix well with pseudo-scientists. I quickly found an argument to get into. I don’t remember it but the guys told me I’d successfully convinced a gaggle of weirdoes that Atlantis was very likely the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan and not some sunken mystery off the Azores, as they’d spent their lives trying to prove. I’d based my claim on the concentric arrangement of the Aztec capital as described by Plato in his Timaeus and Critias dialogue. But that’s not important. What is important is that those fucking Scouse bastards are at the top of the league and we’re not. Those two games in hand better be winners or we’re fucked, simple as. The Aalborg game had angered me and the Aquarians caught the brunt of it. I went to bed in a massive huff, thinking about Scousers and hippies and what a lot of shithouses they were.
On the way back from Virginia I explained to the lads the significance of Manchester. I was horribly ill and procured a four-pack of Boddies from a Maryland liquor store to regain sanity. Then I told them. About United and the triumph of hard science over superstition and magic. How our fair city had dragged Europe out of the Middle Ages and introduced important mechanisations which led to vibrators, wanking machines, United Road cantilever and, ultimately, Wikipedia.
Back in New England Dan got stuck on the Crusher’s driveway in a snowbank when we delivered the winches. Ironically we had to winch him out of there. The Crusher had some bad news; his cat had been killed by a fisher cat. Fisher cats are giant martens that live in the northern states. They can attain a length of four feet. Huge claws and high intelligence makes them the most feared critters in town, even worse than coyotes. They love this cruel tundra. There was some good news; the Crusher had crippled the fisher with a gunshot to the back legs. Then he’d poured petrol on it and set it alight. According to Mrs. Crusher, he’d whooped with joy as it pulled itself round his back yard engulfed in a fireball, the horrible little cunt. I love animals but as a cat owner I heartily condone the torture and mutilation of fishers. They are evil bastards. Worse than Scousers and almost as ugly and slippery.
It’s New Year’s Day, the Ultimate Sunday. I detest Sundays but New Year’s Day is the cumulative pressure valve of an entire year, whatever day it falls on. It’s the day when we’re forced to scrub up and have an early night in anticipation of the workday that inevitably follows. Personally I’m gonna stay up till dawn tonight and drink myself silly, but I’m special and hopefully you are too. Fuck turning off the fairy lights and the illuminated wreaths. I don’t wanna work, I just wanna bang on the drum all day.
As I finish writing this one of my cats has dragged a mouse from under the baseboard heater. Its guts are hanging out and she’s gone straight back down the basement for her second course. I’ve just put it in a plastic bag in the kitchen bin and wiped the blood off the oak floor with a Clorox tissue. That’s what we’ve got to do to Liverpool these next few months. Wipe the floor, trash them and obliterate all trace of their gay little sleigh-ride. We can do it.
Dan just called. He’s sober tonight. Hasn’t touched a drop. He’s been plastered every night for at least 8 months; beer, vodka, pot, you name it. He’s still alive. Obviously the doctors are very wrong. By their calculations Dan should go into seizures tonight and very likely die a horrible death. In fact, he’s merely suffering some very bad palpitations and a lot of anxiety. Not helped by the fact his husky fell down the steps today and fucked its legs up. That stupid fuckin’ mutt. Dan’s going to work tomorrow morning at eight. I’m gonna still be up from tonight at that time tomorrow. I’m special. I think that’s gonna be my New Year’s Resolution: Remember You’re Special. I’ve just checked the fridge and I have a shitload of ale and tequila. Olivia Newton John has just come up on my I-Tunes and I’m letting her rip. Xanadu. Reminds me of a red-haired Scouse bird I nemmed a long time ago. I’m staying up all night, so fuck you and a Happy New Year. You special cunt.

It’s the cold season here in New England. We got two feet of snow last week and there’s more on the way tomorrow. They tell me the economy is dead but I don’t watch the news so I know nothing about it. I only know what works. What works is a plastic dish out front on a pole. It picks up both Fox Soccer Channel and Setanta. Right now it’s half buried in white stuff but it still works. I see every single Premier League game without fail. Not that I watch them all live; I’m often away playing lumberjack. A few months ago I decided to buy a woodstove and chop my own timber. Chainsaws and axes are therapeutic to wield, especially when it’s crisp out. It’s cheaper than oil and even a little romantic. Or maybe not; hours spent alone in the woods contemplating a lifetime’s mistakes means you’re more likely to embark on a death-binge as go on some candlelit dinner. Nine hours sawing and splitting logs is good for character building. It makes you somehow believe it’s OK to poison yourself, so long as you don’t overdo it. But I can only speak for me.
Jack the chimney-sweep installed the stove with me along with his sidekick Joe. The two are approximately 52 years young and have a deceptively firm grasp of English Punk Rock. They loudly recounted Buzzcocks songs during a Saturday afternoon boozing session while we fitted the stainless-steel chimney liner. Fortunately this house came with a real fireplace or the stovepipe would have had to go through the wall. I reciprocated with a blast of Iggy and Jim Morrison, which blew them off the stage like an aural acid flashback.
The guy at the hardware store informed me that Jack’s the only man in Connecticut who’s shot a State Trooper and gotten away with it. So I went up to Jack’s house and shouted “Open up, this is the State Police” loudly through his front door for a laugh, but Jack wasn’t laughing. “Bullshit,” he said, when I asked him. “I shot at him, I didn’t fuckin’ hit him.” The next day he phoned me from his cellphone; he was in the hardware store and wanted a description of the guy who’d told me about it. “C’mon…I wanna scare him,” he said. He laughed then, the sick bastard.
There’s a difference between shooting at and simply shooting. This past few months have seen us take some strange chances and survive by the skin of our teeth. One-nils and nil-nil draws? There’s a pattern there and it’s not a pretty one. We punctured those few inferior defences but Villa’s kept us out. It’s no coincidence they’re jostling the top four. We might win this league through grim determination, not exactly a United trait.
Jack owns fifteen acres of prime woodlot. Logs are his business and he keeps a pile out front under a tarp. People take bundles, leaving cash in a dish with a lid on. He and Joe have stacked an immense pile of logs in his basement to season. They sit by the wood-furnace drinking beers and doing bong hits. Much of the talk centres on Electric Blue, a local strip club. They go there for entertainment when they’re feeling generous. Joe’s girlfriend is a stripper there. She’s known as The Amazon. He’s only a little guy but she’s about six-one. He got in a fight recently with a massive black pimp dude. Jack couldn’t believe it; Joe kicked the guy’s arse. Now Joe’s on a court order. He has to stay out of fights for a year. He’s already broken it once and is paying the price.
These guys are an analogue of the mad bikers I used to live with 45 minutes north in Massachusetts. Difference was, Mass was more rural. A mate in Mass owns 40 acres of wood, 166% larger than Jack’s lot. The Mass crew are based right outside Springfield, home of Smith & Wesson and the infamous Mardi Gras strip club, the biggest and wildest east of the Mississippi. Electric Blue is a shed by comparison. The girls are OK, though and with Hartford a fifteen minute drive away now anything is possible. Hartford makes Springfield look like Kabul.
And Manchester makes Liverpool look like Kazakhstan but they’re up there twiddling their ‘taches and we’re shaking them off like dogshit from a wellie. Those malevolent men in their Liverpool Machine want shooting down but we won’t get the chance for weeks. It’s not right. Instead, we had to make do with pasting Chelsea at OT on Jan 11. Gave their cockney Jake legs a slap and sent ‘em down the M1 smarting in horror.
There’s a plastic McMansion up in the woods right behind Jack’s house. Some rich guy thinks he’s a big-shot owns it. His son is around 16 and likes to wind Jack up a bit with his mates. They knocked some of his dry-stone wall down and stole all the apples off his trees. Even told him how sweet they tasted. Jack told them he’d cut their vitals off with a sword if they so much as came near his yard again. They told Big-Shot and he came for a word. Drove down in his SUV, his driveway was so long. The guy told Jack he was “connected”. Even showed us his driving licence to prove he had an Italian name. Unfortunately, Little Joe was there, Brahms and Liszt. Told the bloke in that garbled drawl that he was Napolitano and to shut the fuck up. It’s just a gigantic version of Top Trumps, really, or “I’m from Salford an’ I know people”. In Joe’s case it was “You’re a fuckin’ finocchio!” It was nice to see Big Shot’s oversized motor scampering back up to the plastic mansion with tail between legs. Then we went back downstairs and sang Punk songs to each other between beers, bong-hits and tequila shots. I don’t ever wanna grow up. It’s ace being permanently immature.
Is it just coincidence that the year we can catch the Mickies honours-wise is the year they finally got their shit together? Don’t accuse me of being obsessive, either. Their 19th would be analogous to their 5th European Cup in Istanbul; staying just out of our reach. We’re all getting older and we deserve to see United get one over on the swines before we’re too decrepit to jump about in glee.
When Joe broke the conditions of his order he did it in style. He went with the Amazon to New York to see The Sex Pistols on their 2008 world tour. Unfortunately it was a Sex Pistols tribute band and not the Sex Pistols at all. To make it worse, I was the tout who sold him the tickets. Joe set a fire extinguisher off and sprayed the bar staff and the tribute band with it. Then he attacked the other patrons with a bottle, calling them “dumb fuckin’ idiots” for knowingly going to the show. He drove home OK but crashed his vehicle into a pole right around the corner here. Lost control in the ice. Most importantly, he retained possession of the Buzzcocks t-shirt he’d purchased at the door prior to his outburst. He’d’ve been scot free but disagreed with the attending officer on the point of his sobriety. For such a little guy he’s got a proper temper. A judge sentenced him to ankle bracelet house arrest. He now lives with Jack and his elderly mother. He doesn’t mind; it’s cold out there and full of finocchio yuppies and wank tribute bands.
This time of year is the acid test. So far we’ve managed to go half way round the planet, come back and still dish it out to the opposition. The games have been competitive and we’ve shown complacency during prolonged passing spells. It’s scary how good we might be, but it’s worrying how the rest of the pack has been energised. We had a little slip up right at the start against the Geordies, and we drew at Stamford Bridge. The Emirates was a bastard but Wenger knows it was a mere blip for us – unlike Arsenal’s recent results. Anfield will be avenged on March 14. City at home on May 9 could shove them into the Championship. It could all still end perfectly for us this season. Someone needs to dent Liverpool’s confidence worse than Everton did in the league. It’s a shame we don’t face them till mid-March because we’re the men for the job. One thing’s for sure; footballers play a hard life. Between now and March 14 United will have played 15 games, not including FA Cup fixtures beyond the 3rd round. Who will trump who by then, Salford or Bootle?
Next week is Super Bowl and I’m taking Jack and Joe up to Mass to meet the crazies. The Crusher always throws a bash in his quadruple garage, with plenty of snowmobile and quad action. He lives across from a frozen pond and we race the machines across it. Mental midnights on Super Sunday. Crusher’s got a full-blown bar with neon signs, beer pumps, tons of spirits and loud music. He’s a Michigan boy, the world capital of frozen pond racing. Builds all kinds of engines himself and used to be a pit man for a pro auto-racer.
As I write this I can hear a coyote howling out back. They’ve been loud lately. The snow has alternated with warm spells and it’s confusing the hell out of them. Me too, if I’m honest; the Crusher’s pond has got me scared. There’s twenty-four inches on the ground right now because today is the tomorrow I referred to in the first paragraph. I’m drinking 3 Monts Flanders Golden Ale and looking forward to the rest of the season. If that dish doesn’t die I’ll be sound as a pound. If it does, there’s always wood to cut, songs to sing, tequila to drink…one day I’ll wake up and the snow will be gone. They call that the Silly Season here, but that’s college basketball, not mushrooms. A whole other world, dude.

And so I continue on this American election night. My sordid serial confession of Manchester and Salford. Unseen crannies where Engels feared to tread. The old stomping ground’s had some right attention lately. Jazzed up and glorified by latter-day Wiki-trendies. Some of us don’t need Wiki to discuss the place. We lived there, cried there and loved there. Saw United do nowt for years in a magic envelope of community and belonging. Migrated from unvarnished centre to developing glade. Suburbia. Prestwich is a microcosm embodying the larger fault line where red meets blue. Where Salford meets Jew. A borderland from Rainsough to Cheetham Hill. Fear breeds anger which breeds hate. The borderland was rife with it; mixed United and City. A fractal of the larger war. The red side runs west from Bury New Road to Rainsough. Hillier terrain, crazier people. Houses warmer and more welcoming. The blue sector is east of Bury New Road. A thin slice of land between Heywood Road and Heaton Park. Straighter streets and hostile bricks. Big cold Mancunian vibe.
Cheetham Hill maisonettes were a cracking playground in the 70s. My cousins and grandparents lived in adjacent blocks down the ginnel right off the top end of the Village. The Kildakin pub directly behind. Forced there by Salford slum clearance. Spent many a weekend watching turkeys hung upside down with slit throats in the abbatoir. Dodging cars on Saturday afternoons. Plenty of blokes wearing red and white. Blue and white. Feather cuts, centre-partings and star jumpers. Nuts ‘n’ Bolts Gary Glitter in Jack Regan pint pots. Smelly feet in platform shoes. Begging for cash in the precinct with Cousin Trev. Wearing “spaz boots”; cola cans crushed and anchored beneath the foot. Clomped echoingly around the Village at Bonfire Night. “Penny for the spaz, Mister?!” Pair of laughing urchins in need of a slap. But the maisonettes themselves were the business. Grey. Four or five floors. Several blocks distributed about a vast sloping wasteland broken up by multicolour metal playgrounds; witches hats, roundabouts, climbing frames, swings and slides. Ancient ruined shops trembling under turrets on the cobbled road to Broughton. Ragged ‘em stupid of Bengal matches and creme eggs. As a kid I thought the place was called Cheetah Mill. A nod to the African cats patrolling the area and the textile history surrounding it.
The tower-block obsession started early for me. Dragged into futuristic Otis elevators by Mother and aunties. The valves in the heart of Salford. Unimagined heights, unfinished towers appreciated in a new light. Bizarre totems of bristling scaffolding. Unsheathed to reveal gleaming hives. Brand-new. Posh, even. Women gabbing about the Courts’ intended names in affected voices: John Lester, Poplar, Walter Greenwood and Eddie Colman. Spot the odd one out. A class-micro-system emerged; which block ‘ave you been assigned to? We escaped it but everyone else didn’t. Thank fuck; it was a treat in the 70s to eat yer tea halfway up a Silk Street canyon. Shouting across to someone on the next block. Balcony banter on a fine spring evening. Lights switching on here and there; people coming home from work in town. A familiar pattern to the trained eye. The Cheetham branch were different. They all lived on the ground floor, a novelty in itself. There was a Narnia inside those maisonettes; fire-escapes built into the backs of the wardrobes. Through the hanging coats was an otherworld of silent untrod corridors. Explorations of inner-city anarchytecture and language. The word “spaz” was common then. “Spaz chariots” weren’t just sky-blue invalid carriages. Reliant Robins fell under the cosh. And then some. Playing footy in Greengate. Newbank Tower carpark. A future member of The Bong Gang shouts, “over ‘ere, next to this spaz chariot!” I died laughing. It made sense as a name for just any car; we all used buses or we walked. From Kersal to Salford Market. From Cheetham to Great Clowes Street; past the queer concrete slopes of Brentnall Primary School. Past scarfed-up pre-match hordes on the shelved façade of The House That Jack Built. Regan pint-pots-a-plenty in the shadow of Hanover Court. It was the only way to reach other members of the displaced tribe. When we finally acquired telephones we instantly sussed we could dial for free by clicking the pips. Cos we were dead ‘ard from up north.
Maisonettes and flats come in many shapes and sizes. On the bus home from OT we did a circuit of Hulme. Me and Kenny. Bulging eyes in 1979. Amber windows beaded with lashing rain. Gigantic forms loomed in the night. Immense curves in grey concrete. Incredible Crescents. Another time, running through Longsight with Mickie B. Scoring weed down the Moss. Buying single ciggies from a corner shop. Bus to the Apollo. You shoulda seen us go, go, go. 1982. Tracksuit bottoms. 16 years young. Opposite a single skinny block, puny with glass balconies. Its twin shivering off over Gorton. The weed knocked us non-smokers sick. The road to Belle Vue was another education; Fort Ardwick, all along the watchtower. Brown/grey pebbledash. Opposite Hyde Road bus depot; a gigantic cavern where diesel particulate underwent endless Brownian motion. I learned signwriting in ’88 with Harry from Fort Ardwick. Bouncer from the Marsland pub. A bushy-haired bearded lion. Later moved Glaswegian Jamie from his Fort Beswick flat, Ardwick’s twin. In with a nice bird off the top of Lightbowne Road. Not far from Viccy Ave East. Under his bed was a stout chair-leg. “In case anyone gets cocky” he explained. Quite. What a terrifying shithole. And then Queen’s Road opposite the Irish Centre. Those weird little square maisonettes. Nearly moved into one but didn’t. Met Les from Cheetham there. Very naughty boy. He’d cut yer nose off to spite yer colostomy bag. Drank in the Kildakin and lived in that enchanted colony from childhood. Specialised in kiting. Enlisted young lads who lived in “drums” in Crumpsall. First time I’d heard anyone but my dad use that expression. Little teams zapping handbags round Prestwich Village and Broughton. They got invited back to a luxury flat by some wide-boy. Mein host turned out to be gay. Les made him strip and down on his knees. Put a pane of glass against his face and booted it. A very unpleasant business.
Soul and Glam-Rock gave way to Punk and New Wave and things altered. Jaded tower-blocks spewed semi-detached enclaves packed with mad reds. Expatriate Salfordians amid privet banter. Clublife evolved. Two distinct populations multiplied separately. I’m not talking about the Bees Knees and Playboy neither: Hipsters in Hulme’s Factory and the Roxy Room crowd in Pips. The Factory was full of students but Pips was hammered with working-class intelligentsia. Chalk and cheese. Replica footy kits binned for Adidas Kick and Fred Perry. Fucking beautiful but scary. We were underage and in there. Swingin’ wedges dyed auburn. Baggy thick cotton shirts and Stan Smiths. I remember putting a tenner on the bar and taking my eye off it. A girl pocketed it like lightning. She knows who she is. That was money back then; I accused the barman of nicking it. Propelled onto my ear in Fennel Street by two bouncers. Spent the night goading them from safe distance. Tried to catch me to no avail. “You’re fuckin’ dead, you CUNTS!” I warned. They calmly waited; lions playing possum. I gambolled off to Piccadilly, disgruntled but buzzing. Nutted a pseudo-Manc I’d scrounged 50p off for a bus home. A despicable act and the only time I’ve done it. The scrounging, that is. I’ve nutted plenty of Factory-faced cunts in Piccadilly. Nah, only joking. Kind of. There’s plenty of Wiki-wankers today’ll tell yer they were into The Fall and Joy Division in ’79-‘81. Fucking liars; proper lads were into Buzzcocks and Magazine. Roxy and Bowie. Nowt against Prestwich’s finest. Just the truth, that’s all. Mark Smiff was beyond us back then. So let’s keep it real, eh?
Early ’83 meant Equinox acid. Laughing tackle with few visuals. By June Manchester was immortal. Superman from the Dam blowing away all contenders. Little firms doing the ferry. Smashing the market to fuck. The Factory and Pips were changed or gone forever. Clueless wankers filled the Hacienda. Lager louts spewing everywhere else. City’s Kool Kats in Placemate Seven. And it was Red Hearts off Fast Tony in late ‘83. Smoking contests with Dave D. Fucker took advantage of my clear lungs. Summer 1984 Edgeworth festival arrived. An array of product; Unicorn, White Lighting, Black Cat and green microdot. By October Smiley Mushrooms ruled the roost. The nylon mesh variety put blotting paper out of business. Physical chemistry enabled much higher dosage. Spring ‘85 was Pink Panther. Glossy and glamorous. Stone-Age memories jangling into a new kind of fun. The flats in P/wich were of a different nature. Old drums partitioned into units. Now you’d hear the Fall and Joy Division coming out of doorways and windows. Easter ’85, walking with Martin B past Tomo’s flat. A carrot tossed from the gutter up against the window. Carrot goes straight through like a torpedo. Laugh? Spent that night lay comatose listening to Magazine’s “Secondhand Daylight”. Had an out-of-body experience. Thought the floor was the wall and I was halfway up it. Images of Regent Square amid a grey haze conjured by amphetamines, weed and Salford accents. Old infatuations die hard. The horrid Donald Duck appeared that summer. Guaranteed bad trip, or worse. Banged out at UMIST. The scourge of P/wich. Gaggles o’ lasses up fer it night and day. The Fanny-Bulge Firm. Not to be confused with the Cameltoe Clan. Nice pint of Holts in the Waffle Machine. Very different clientele from the Crumpet Factory. KnowhatImean? Many migrants from the multi-storey matrix. Much mafia. We went to town in late ‘85. The clubs looked different loaded up on Red Lentils. Now we just needed the DJs and the rest to catch up. Like watching paint dry. Spent ’86 abroad while Dambusters returned with ever-greater refreshments. In ’87 it went live; the straightheads cottoned on. The Queerbeast finally began to dance ecstatically…but so what, that was years ago?! Alright, back to the election… Some African cat’s gonna rule the world…

So, then – to business. United. And Ronaldo, that snide ponce. And Ferguson, the begging, clever, Scotsman that he is. We’re all here saying, fuck it, let him go, but Fergie knows the score; even if we have to act like needy little bitches to squeeze one more season out of the thin-bloodied show-pony. Football moves at a different pace than it used to. The biggest clubs can no longer expect “loyalty” from the biggest players; they have their own designs and ambitions which often don’t include eking out a rain-lashed existence in some freezing northern outpost full of celebrity-spotters obsessed with Coronation Street and United. But just remember; no matter how big you are, there’s always someone bigger to rein you in. In this case Glazer is the big boy and Ronnie’s the slave. But if it means we can equal the Mickeys’ league honours and do the business over Chelsea and Arsenal again this year then so be it. It’s not about loyalty or respect anymore. This is the big time. Ron wants out, we want him here and that’s that. Yes, it is a bit upsetting; a young hunk like that just fucking us off like some skanky old trout from the Ritz. But if you’ve never fucked over some skanky old trout from the Ritz cast the first stone. KnowhatImean?
And Glazer. Ooooh that ‘orrible little man, eh? Who does he think he is, signing Tevez for a British record fee?! Anyone’d think he didn’t have debts to pay. Buying bloody good players for the bloody good of the bloody club when there’s debts to pay! OT’s evidently Chickentown, occupying a lowly eighth place in the Premiership season-ticket price scale. But Number One in attainment (ditto Europe). How we ever regained that “richest club in the world” status last season I’ll never bloody know. The pressure has been transferred from the players onto the executive branch ‘cos Mancs just love to moan. You’re not allowed to slag United players anymore. The “proper lads” won’t allow it. But Ronaldo has single-handedly reversed this trend with his off-field behaviour. Traditionally, Old Trafford was always a bad do for them wot didn’t pitch in on the pitch. That disconcerting rumble was legend; it was the sound of a full-house. The discontent of armchair fans whose armchairs were situated above United Road Paddock. The moody Anfield grandstands never slung shit at Liverpool players because the shit slingers were sat at home with the wireless and the attendance was 24,000. If we don’t win the games the players earn their weekly wage either way but the club loses those Euro boosts. Players who don’t do the business are a drain on spending and Ronaldo does the biz like Top Cat. Simple as that. Someone’s gotta get it in the neck though. So you’re all dithering between slagging Ronnie and slagging Malky. Are you with me, you beautiful moaning cunts?
There was a time when being the richest club was a source of pride. We rubbed it in their faces. From the moment they gingerly trod that forecourt in their escort, to the minute they scrambled onto their trains and coaches. Worried, exhilarated faces against glass as they moved off back to their slumdiums. These days they rub it in our faces like being the biggest is a thing of shame. And you sit there shit-scared of saying owt negative about any United player. In your reissued Adidas Stockholms (or Dublins if you’re colour blind) and your (possibly) snide Lacoste polo off eBay muttering about how “plastic” it’s all become compared to the 80s. Look at yerself.
Being sports fans you’re probably superstitious twats. Perhaps you indulge in rituals, the stupidities of which escape you in your fear of defeat. Maybe you salute a reeking jock-strap allegedly worn by King Eric. Or perhaps you sing a special song every week before the game. A Stretford End ditty salvaged from the 70s, bearing inaccurate stanzas unnoticed even by “proper lads”. Forgive me; I’m sure I’m mistaken. Belief in paranormal powers helps sports wallahs believe they’re winners, degenerate gamblers as they often are. I’m no gambler; I consult my periodic table before making wagers. It’s a science like all tangible things, I tell myself. Then I bow before my signed Bert Trautman X-ray and fidget with my rat-bone effigy of Kenny Dalglish. I keep King Kenny tucked next to my unwashed scrotum along with a carved soap (on a rope) likeness of Drogba. And a poem-engraved toilet bowl freshener. The poem’s about 1999 and all that. These talismans in my trousers endow me with confidence and without them I am nothing. I would probably also stink. Why would a grown man have such voodoo stuffed down his pants? There’s a story in it.
These lucky charms were thrust upon me as a result of being from the Salford corner of the Salford-Ardwick-Blackley Inner-Quadrant Triangle. That’s right; an important segment of our landscape uniting parts of Q1 and Q2 and making mincemeat of every place outside it. This is Goat Country. Where heart and soul dovetail and knit. Superstition and clannishness galvanise the tribes who live there. After all, even pseudoscience is science of a kind; astrology for instance. Wise Bangladeshis predicted cholera plagues in the Middle Ages by unknowingly gauging the moon’s influence on flooding deltas; floods bring plankton loaded with shit, and I mean shit, to the people. Shit is a terrible thing. That’s why we need toilet bowl fresheners. With poems about Barcelona engraved into them.
What? You want me to talk about more relevant stuff, cunt? Back to my roots and all that? United? When you accuse me of wandering, just remember: Manchester travels as far as it needs to make a point. As United illustrated when they entered European competition against the FA’s wishes in 1956. And the chronology of your personal mobility? Eh? Shall I grab you by the scruff of the knackerbag and demand to know what brand your trike was? Did you have a Chippy? Progress to a Chipper? Or were you one of them alternative Tomahawk tossers? And then you got a Chopper for Christmas, did you? Thought you’d finally “arrived”..? But what if I claimed ownership of a Dragster? Big fuck off gear-stick with a knob on’t’ end and a concertinaed leathery bit down at the bottom? You’d cack yer keks, wun’t yer? Fuckin panty-girdle. Nah, only kidding; I had a yellow second-hand Chopper. Paul Clough who lived on our street had a Dragster. Lucky fucker.
The gorgeous Triangle accent drips Soul and soot from that brickish jungle. But life is uncertain there and people let you down. If you tow the line and show loyalty, you get shafted. Look at yer mate Ronaldo. A prisoner of yer enemy Glazer. That’s why I decided to become part of something worthwhile. That something is a motley band of Britishers who devote their lives to acting the cunt around the world. It’s very popular, a mafia for people who don’t want to grow up. Maybe you’re a made man in it. The fact you’re reading this suggests as much.
The day I earned my button I still remember clearly. I’d been kicking beads up to a neighbourhood “tough” who’d been weighing in a local “face” who’d been bunging a “respected man” in the area a butty and so on, since I was 6 years old. My car-washing and paper round (massively boosted by carol singing at Christmas) had caused a blip in the paystream and the Mister Bigs started to notice. They reached out to me one day. I was hoovering out some tight get’s car down our street (probably Paul Clough’s dad; no wonder he had a Dragster). Lads on Choppers flirted me a business card with directions scrawled on the back in what appeared to be mascara. They were funny like that back then; it was a joiner’s pencil. I was ordered to a rendezvous behind Piccadilly Station. Some Q2 youths wearing patent leather slip-ons they’d found in a skip blindfolded me with an oily rag. They took me to a basement somewhere naughty. There, I was given the full issue; rat-bone effigy of Dalglish, carved soap-on-a-rope of Tony Adams, later changed to Drogba (by which I mean a different soap, not the same one further carved; you’d never manufacture Drogba’s hair and features from Adams’ you fucking idiot) and the toilet bowl freshener, sans poem. I was told under no circumstances to engrave any old poem on it. I had to wait until United hit their greatest heights ever and use this as the material for the verse. A scalpel was provided. A hairy meathead yanked out the waistband on my Tesco-issue council shorts and shoved the lot inside, exposing and maiming my recoiling winky with knowing relish. I was told to leave my booty down there permanently and reveal it to no-one. They pricked my trigger finger with a little United badge and made me swear an oath of allegiance to the addictions Manchester and United bring. It entailed running away from home, of course. A dilapidated shed in Clayton became my winter palace while I summered on the graceful banks of the Irwell at Greengate, puffing a corn-cob pipe like Huck Finn under a leaden sky. The Triangle was my oyster but it was no Bryan Robson free role; I was assigned to a capo, an ageing alcoholic from Ancoats who would intermittently grab my leg and squeeze it painfully. It kept me conscious over the barrage of alcohol, LSD, amphetamines and cannabis we self-administered on an hourly basis. He called it “The Krabb”. The grip on the leg, that is, not the drug cocktail; the cocktail was a Nameless Thing in a then unreported world; the plastics hadn’t wrote their books or made documentaries about “lads” at that point. It was quickly revealed to me that not only were there dozens of other crews operating out of unassuming hollows across the city, but that we were connected to other such groups in other cities. All reds.
The Boss of the Family was known as The Goat-Necked Boy from Tinseltown but I never heard anyone call him that to his face. We lived on shoplifted bars of cacao- lard and milk gargled on doorsteps at dusk. Wore over-pressed school uniform trousers; shiny like a pigeon’s psychedelic neck. Snatched from suburban washing-lines in places where 14-year olds dwarfed us on our malnourished Inner-Quadrant goat-legs. To say we jibbed the turnstiles was like saying we breathed air. We were forced into crimplene and acrylic market-wear by our substance addictions. But we never stopped going to United. While Plastics continued to pursue the discontinued designer gear of Casual culture we spunked every ha’penny on remedies for our ills. The Goatfather commanded a legion of red soldiers both fearsome and strange. It takes years to claw your treacherous way up (or down) to the more respectable echelons of the organisation. It demands the stomach of a rat and the footing of a mountain ungulate.
Being made is only the beginning. You have to start at the bottom in companies like this; my first responsible assignment was selling buckets of canal-slutch to tramps; posh cunts that they were, they grew herbs in it. Rosemary and basil. Stuff peasants like us didn’t know about (Madeira’s probably crawling with it). These were real gentlemen of the road who lived in the foetid green belt between Victoria Station and Collyhurst. Slutch was a form of polluted mud first catalogued in Salford by my great-nan. My mother uses the word freely but always with proper respect to geologic prerequisites. Other Triangle vocab includes “scrawp”; a cross between a scrape and a cut. “Rammy”; filthy as bleedin’ ‘ell. “Teeming”; a meteorological observation which has become quite fashionable. Even the plastics know “skrike” ‘cos they’ve read it in Wikipedia (and now have the gall to use it, the plastic twats). How times have changed; they’d have no more been caught saying “summat” than a cockney saying “lad” fifteen years ago. But they all say it now don’t they? They even drink bitter. The Inner-Quadrant Triangle is rich with these expressions and behaviours. They are being adopted by plastic outsiders much like the Adidas reissues and for the same reason; an attempt to obliterate the sick secrets of their uncool sterile adolescence.
But I digress. I graduated to selling knocking certs to alkies in the old Yates’s around town. I even took a few quid off our boys in the Auld Reekie and Portland Bars; “insider” info on horses being smuggled in from Eire. All nonsense, and the currency was ale, with some shrapnel for Ancoats who kicked a piece up to Goat-Neck. All it took was some simple calculus and a turf map. The weight and form of the gee-gees was balanced against an ability to mentally coalesce a mass of soil and climate data: Bingo. It was then I discovered the belief in magic held by the gambling depraved. How I laughed, while secretly drawing faith from the cornucopia of fecal and bacterial masking products in my undercrackers. Next, a musty old office in Stevenson Square became the “Manchester School of Business”. Definitely not to be confused with the globally-recognised Manchester Business School off Oxford Road. Innumerable Africans enrolled into our curriculum. Bamboozled by Air Mail, letterheaded paper and crude brochures promising a (completely unrecognised) diploma should they complete our business course. They surrendered their rand, their Ugandan shillings and Nigerian pounds. I controlled the operation from a glass office. Overlooking a typing pool populated by the daughters of barrow-boys and ex-dockers. Boss-Goat started to call me “son” and to place his arm about my neck, itself maturing into as fine an example of Capra aegagrus as one could hope to see. 1985. I was 19 years old. Didn’t know how to wire a plug but I could build a bong using candle-wax, a plastic bottle and a Bic pen. We’d beaten Everton in the FA Cup Final and all was well; for Christmas that year Goat-Neck presented me with the coveted Trautman X-ray; there were some jealous young footy-orphans round that dinner table then, I can assure you. Laws were passed and Africa kicked us out. I was already on another trip; hoisting furniture round town with the Whit Lane Warbler, an old Salford legend who filled pubs with a voice more mellifluous than Dean Martin’s. Got away with it for years. Became something of a professional grafter. Even went to America to live. I wasn’t half starting to enjoy it all. Then suddenly last month I was called in. Hand-picked for a special goat mission. Sexy beast.
Outside Paris in a secret vault sits an object known as the International Prototype Kilogram (IPK). It is made from a platinum-iridium alloy and along with its six sister copies is used for global calibration of mass. Without it human civilisation is doomed. Goat-Neck in his stupendous megalomania decided he wanted it on his Beswick mantelpiece. An elite team of 8 boys was assembled from the ginnels and rat-runs of the Triangle. These were lads with long experience of pilfer and patter. Collyhurst’s Colin Blaney was made Captain and Mike Duff Counsellor. Duff is, of course, an honourary member of the Family, being an Unred. And undead, some would say. The rest were blaggers and tea-leafs who’d smashed windows for Lacoste and Rolex before Ronaldo was born; Greengate, Ordsall, Weaste, Ancoats and Openshaw. I wasn’t happy; like Ronaldo I craved the balmy climate and luxurious culture of another place. But orders was orders; Captain Blaney whipped us into shape with a merciless regimen of jumping jacks and flying saucers. The papery alien craft with their tart sherbet cargo had us lean as butcher’s dogs and ten times as hungry. Duff organised mass kiting blitzes to raise the fare to France; this was no time for jibbing. Openshaw provided some smack and the Salford lot crocheted some boss pillows; we enjoyed a restful journey. By the time we hit the Gare du Nord that day in our shiny school pants and Tuf Weatherman we were clockwork sentinels. We sounded like it an all; our collectively secreted toilet-fresheners, bone-effigies and carved soaps (on ropes) created a scented-yet-stinking cacophony. Like industrial music but quieter. You had to be there.
Finally it was business time. Arses twitching we pressed on in formation; Blaney up front, scoping and blimping; two Salford lads way out on either wing, banging out the moodies. Duff brought up the rear, disappearing into book shops while the remaining 4 of us clinked along with our thoughts. The IPK was contained in a glass case, criss-crossed by lasers in a non-repeating chaotic cycle. We each popped a dozen saucers and bounded into action, jump-jacking our way over the wall and through the hall to the Kilogram. We replaced it on the weight sensitive alarmed plinth with an exact replica. Indistinguishable from the real thing. My suggestion that we just give that to Goat-Neck and save ourselves the mither earned me a fat lip and a black mark. In no time we were back in Paris, supping ale and talking about what a cunt Ronaldo was. That’s when Duff realised; the focus for moaning had shifted back onto the players from the executive branch. Those poor wage slaves. Shafted again.
Blaney fingered the hold-all the IPK was in and shook his grizzled head. We were getting fucking gypped royal by that Goat-Neck bastard with nowt to show for it. Someone suggested we weigh the Kilo in. That earned some laughs.
“I’ve been clankin’ around wi’ this lorra nonsense in me trolleys since I was four year old,” Blaney said.
“Yer what?” countered Duff. “Me rat-bone effigy’s fused ter me nutsack, it’s bin down there that long!”
Despite misgivings we continued to observe the code of silence between ourselves; one must never under any circumstances reveal the identity of one’s personal effigy for it will lose its power. Same goes for the poem and the carven soap likeness. But now I am speaking out. Our worldly goods totalled a few crumbling sanitary devices for Armitage Shanks while the big boys had International Prototype Kilograms and numerous sports franchises. We decided that Goat-Neck and Glazer really were to blame for our and Ronaldo’s predicament. “Let’s not boo the wop cunt this season like we planned then, eh?” one of the Salford lads said. “It’ll only make things worse for us and better for them.” The rest concurred, including Pete from Ancoats who, as far as I could discern, was an albino gorilla. Duff got himself into such a state he collapsed in the Rue in Montmartre and demanded the last rites. Blaney threatened to piss on him if he didn’t get up. He did a Zebedee and vomited on the lad from Ordsall. There followed the sickening slap created by the meaty expanse between primary and secondary knuckle upon contact with boat-race. Openshaw tried to intervene but Weaste put the head in like you read about. The white gorilla somersaulted across the table sending our absinthe bottle flying onto Greengate’s napper. Before long the IPK was rolling in the gutter; fortunately noticed by Captain Blaney and straight back in the bag. After more debate of this type we returned to Manchester. We were from generations of United slaves, destined to pay homage like pigeon-panted dossers awash in a stink of booze, drugs and mayhem. We had no choice but to honour Goat-Neck with his prize. It’s in the blood. Ask Duff, he’ll tell yer. Loyalty is for local boys like us. The rest is claimed by the lions.
So next time yer wonderin who you hate most, Kenyon, Glazer or Ronaldo, just remember where yer loyalties lie. Then you’ll see the dirty truth; we’ll always get shafted by the big boys. It’s just the way of the world. But weasels is as weasels does. The least we age-old goat-slaves can do is stick together. And when we bring undreamed silverware back from Europe it is only us of a certain tribe who cry real tears. Us of the beat-down sense of self and United Triangle bondage. But there’s still nowt wrong with giving the fucking players some stick, eh, mard-arse? We’re riding high but we’ve known much failure in previous United epochs. We’ve got talent to spare these days. A wino on Salford Precinct once asked my ol’ feller, What have I got to lose?
He replied, “You? Nuthin. Gerron with it”. United used to be that wino. Nowadays they go into Europe and return with weird silver footballing yardsticks.
Or as unbooable Ryan Giggs might say: That Kilogram looks fuckin mint.

The lads who used to work the hatches at OT were a sound lot. They lived all over the area and were mad lushes. Skulking the concrete corridors, planning parties. Clinking pockets loaded with miniatures hoisted from the bars. Get-togethers involving severe inebriation. Woke up one morning after a party in a Hulme crescent. Been there with Geoff from Israel; a dishonourably discharged Falklands War vet. He loved the OT pies as much as I did and once beat me in a pie scranning contest. Geoff’s student sister lived in Old Trafford. We’d played Monopoly there on mushrooms before hitting Hulme. The party was a tense affair. Moody people thronging the halls. Someone knifed to death there that night. No-one was dancing so Geoff stood up, his back to the gas-fire. Started doing that daft pedalling move with his feet on alternate tip-toe. Blade-villains gawping at his gall. Looked stupid as fuck. Pissing myself. Passed out in front of that gas fire on my back. The next morning I took a shower. Found a sticker on my cock saying, “This Belongs to Ian.” Charming. I hoped Geoff’s sister had affixed it; redhead. Nuff said.
By late-’86 even the half-wits had turned to LSD. It was rampant. I wouldn’t know, being otherwise detained on various foreign business. I’d given up on humanity and was suitably cynical. Dragged to clubs to see the truth. The divvies buying bulk gear off opportunists and undesirables. Cut to fuck or plain snide. The lads were seasoned, amused, bang-on. Drifted away from the mid-80s terraces like disinterested sharks from a dying reef; bigger fish to fry. Among them were some classic animals; H. Built like Captain Scarlet. Broke a pool cue over a lad’s head in the Forresters one Saturday afternoon. Mouthpiece on his way to watch his team play City at Maine Road. It was par-for-the-course; The Forresters was smack on a main drag into the city centre. All kinds of minibus chancers came through on Saturdays. Little casual firms annihilated with growing frequency. H broke another bloke’s jaw in the same gaff. Him and the Bingo Player. Going at it with some woe merchants over control of the pool table. Bingo Player unexpectedly floored with his assailant poised over him ready to do serious damage. Suddenly from nowhere H’s brogue takes the guy’s head off. Another one was smashed up that bad he had pieces of metal embedded in his scalp. Fuck knows where they came from. Lad reckoned H used a big bunch of keys. Bollocks; H’s fists were like train buffers. No need for accoutrements.
The Bingo Player looked down on me for attending footy matches. Twenty two blokes chasing a bladder, he called it. He went to all the Salford bingo halls with his missus. Used it as an alibi. Checked in and then out with us. Antique dealing, flagging, bribing menks from Prestwich Hospital to rob bottles of spirits from off-licences. On the lash, banging out the moodies. Battering those who’d took the piss. Blitzed Carr Clough. Took over the herb there, before Kersal moved in and pushed back the border. Playing pool with Moss Side pimps on Broughton midweek afternoons. Taxis and trains through Strangeways Oriental signage. The Golden Mile where Boddies brewed. Up to the Maypole meeting an accountant who’d been bought for a court case. Plied with booze in a smart suit and tie. Ended up puking in the Bingo Player’s bathroom – a flat in Newbank Tower. Rum as. Kids broke in when he was out at Bingo; cracked a gas main with a sledgehammer and filled the flat with vapours. Nearly blew Bingo sky high. Turned Newbank into the Towering Inferno. A local prank. Autumn 1989. Out the window flocks of magic mushroom pickers grazed grass bankings between blocks and carparks. Greengate strangeness. A futuristic panorama while smoking Sputnik and playing Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal at high volume. Urban decay peppered with cosmic swedes.
Lifting filthy stone by moonlight into diesel-stinking vans was hard. So was the furniture game; massive desks and computers trundled through Manchester’s hulking office-blocks for bent dealers. Big wedges pocketed and ale guzzled. A tough life. But drugs was different; easy money from little packages. Fucking cakewalk sometimes. The situation was wonderful. Parties extravagant; cucumber sarnies loaded with acid tabs. Ornamental brass coal buckets and wine chillers literally full of white powder. Three or four K’s of sulphate. Everyone having a dab. Heart attack territory. People freaking out during police raids. Hard at it with weed grinders and pollen presses. Cutting big blocks of Sputty with crap Leb. Increasing the margins. Thirst, hunger and shelter keeping us alive long enough to address that fourth drive: Getting mullered. Distribution was key. Wasters buying decent motors. Music and fashion followed; hundreds of screen-printed t-shirts from the lads down Strangeways. Cul-de-sacs in Boothstown stacked with boxes of snide trainers. Bought and worn by queerbeasts in clubland. Lads had clothes-racks pitched in hospitals, in factories, in post offices, even. The giant octopus of Manchester graft had the city in its technicolour clutches. The fruits of sin. Ploughed back in; Bingo Player got delegated to broker a deal between some snide-grafter types and a well known gang. A chunk of Sputty that would choke a killer whale. Phone calls were made. Meeting on McDonald’s carpark. Halfway home the Bingo rolled a spliff; it was snide. Cue Starskey and Hutch U-turn to their boozer. Kicked off worse than the Forresters; the money-man was stabbed. Shot. A lead pipe broke his head. Spent the next month in Crumpsall with a 24-hour police guard. Heavy mob cruising in a Merc, looking for the Bingo Player. But whatever. It’s old news. And you have the piping on your vintage Fila tracky to mend, I know.
I wasn’t there for the fun of it; unsuccessfully spent months saving for America. Dead-end jobs. Spunked it all on football and beer. Driving out to the Lancashire wilderness with Rob. Total steroid head in a flash motor with false plates. Living in hiding at his bird’s, hence the night-shift. Graphic tales of impaling and carrying her round the house; anabolics hadn’t affected his wedding tackle one bit. Large as life in the works canteen. Wanted everyone to know it. Offending Accrington sensibilities. One eye out for the Bill. He was a monster killing machine. Scared of nowt. The boss’s son-in-law was an archery fanatic. Would talk yer ear off if you were stuck next to him. Making sofa cushions on’t’ night shift. Shooting glue between foam slabs from a Star Trek gun. At his Salford house Rob said to me, “Archery? I’ll fuckin’ show yer some o’ that.” Produced a large crossbow. Shot it right across the street in broad daylight. Arrow embedded in a GPO pillar box. Shocking. Then one night he didn’t pick me up. Disappeared into the penal system, muscles an all. The car lobbed in a container and flirted to New Zealand. The following day I started stacking shelves at Sainsbury’s. Funny, cos I’d been lifted in there just a fortnight earlier. Pissed with a bottle of brandy under my snorkel. Security guard grabbed me inside the shop though, not outside. Case dismissed. I went in the boozer in my Sainsbury’s uniform. Clip-on tie and plastic ID badge. Laugh? Stayed in the pub all day and binned the attire. Back to the OT hatches with a vengeance. Selling pies and ale to foreign humans.
This was the time of the big herb drought in South Manchester. If they were lucky they knew someone from our neck of the cloughs. Bird from Chorlton whose boyfriend was inside for dealing; needed to earn some beadage in his absence. Decided she could impress her posse with our product. Pablo from the Ostrich dropped a slab of Sputty on her. She said she used to go out with Ian Brown. Shat on him by accident during sex. Trapped his dick in his zipper when giving a blow-job. White pants blooming with claret. He wasn’t made of stone. We named Pablo after Escobar. Thought he was big time. Knew people outside Manchester with large chunkage. Bingo Player not pleased about the Chorlton piece. “Pablo’s mine” he explained. He later reneged on a big deal. People fell out. Inevitable. The out-of-town firm daren’t come over the hills to recoup their losses for obvious reasons. Pablo got caught in the crossfire; it came out of his mortgage. Another sort; Jan from Didsbury. Came to the Ostrich a drought victim. Gonna prove she had connections to those in the southern quadrant. Bingo Player kept pulling his cock out of his elasticated waistband every time she looked away. Thrilling stuff. Dave B reckoned it was blatant fraud; Bingo’s constant playing with himself had falsely inflated things. Bingo’s missus had a mate whose married boyfriend worked at Heathrow. Managed baggage-handling for a major carrier. The Bingo got in his head, menaced him into considering very bad deeds. Bloke came around for a while then disappeared. A broken man. Lost everything.
It was a queer do. Boozin’, druggin’, dancin’. Becks ‘n’ hugs ‘n’ Northern Soul. Ricocheting between the hatches in A&B Stands, to Sainsbury’s, to out in the sticks, to the Bingo Player’s flat where we watched the lights of town through the window like starving weasels. Proto-Madchester wasn’t a layer cake, it was a marble cake; chaotic bands of intensity and violence permeating its depths high and low. Like sperm racing to penetrate the egg and exploit. Each one a different animal. Killing machines with false plates going down in the night. Drug connections rupturing and houses repossessed. Middlesex family men playing away in rough neighbourhoods. Clerks, nurses and foremen bribed with fancy t-shirts to monitor racks of tie-dyed textiles. Lads in comas surrounded by coppers. Poring through the Psychedelic section in Piccadilly Records. Fondling second-hand trainers on Salford Market; only worn once by a professional athlete. This culture was outside the norm. Borne on wings of invention. We’d grown out of wondering why the media had passed us by. We just did what we did. And then it caught us up. People jumped on the bandwagon. Now they make films about it. I’m thinking of writing one myself. Me and a million other tadpoles. And their dogs.

The late-80s was a time of contrasts and piss-poor football. United were crawling across that horrific trophy desert between the 1985 and 1990 FA Cups. Finishing 11th in the table was accepted with typical Tatlock resignation. 87-88’s second place behind the Scousers barely registered a blip on our footballing landscape. The collective Manc unconscious feared it was simply a mirage. Just like the one we saw dissolve after 10 amazing games in ’85. I spent 1986 in the Negev desert. With English lads watching the World Cup. Passing out from the beer and the heat. New Year’s Day ’87 it was OT. Hurling abuse at Geordies. I cannot recall other games. It wasn’t pretty.
In February ’88 it was luxury yachts in south Florida. Swimming with the manatees, drinking with pirates and smoking Killer Green Bud (KGB). By June I was pneumatic on the pavements of Ruislip with Spurs fans and Gooners. Tottenham was a different planet to Arsenal. Cheap sportswear bought for the job. Arse struggled to let go of cords, cardigans and designer shirts for the sake of navvying. They looked like granddads. Futuristic means waste means plastic. Arsenal detested shiny silk and Tottenham hated dowdiness. Mancs and Scousers nicked hundreds of Euro rail passes for the ’88 Championships. It was plastered all over the London tabloids. The media had finally worked things out and busily informed the Capital what was really going on. Cockney mates from Israel took me on some proper jollies and vice versa; July weekends in Bournemouth. Fighting Scousers outside shit clubs and copping for proper sorts. Saturday nights at Band on the Wall, tripping, speeding and dancing. Cockneys eyes popping at the scene. In September I moved back to Manchester. The novelty lasted 2 years. United were shite but it didn’t matter. Just going to matches was reward enough. Working round town on the furniture. Wheeling dollies and trucks down deep corridors in the heart of the city; Bruiser, PG, The Whit Lane Warbler and Bashem the United steward. How he held a job at OT I’ll never know. I first met Bash on a caravan holiday for underprivileged Salford families. Bruiser said they needed people to keep the kids in line and it was all paid for. A mass of shaggable single-parent units. Bruiser just wanted a boozing partner for the trip. So it was Miami to Mablethorpe in the space of 6 months. Bruiser lived off Liverpool Street and Bashem on nearby Ruthin Court. Bashem’s mam ran the City pub on Oldham Street. She once described him to me as the afterbirth of her daughter. It turned out he was an unexpected twin. A wafer-thin specimen who could dodge the radar of early-60s ultrasound and drink for England.
The trustee of the community fund lived in one of the newish houses that had replaced Edgehill Close. The most notorious maisonette in Greater Manchester during the brief period it stood. The houses weren’t much better. Diamond Lil was a Glaswegian maven of urban economics. Bleached hair and leather-clad long legs. Big rings with real stones in. Boyfriend with a leather jacket. Bruiser had burst his nose with a 2 by 4 when they were lads. But we were all big boys now. The lot of us boozed in the Clarendon Rec, Flat Iron, the Winston and the Brass Handles pubs along with others; DJs, grafters, market traders and mad lads. The boyfriend would put Tony Christie on the juker and describe it as “proper Quality Street music”. Personally I prefer KGB over chocolate when it comes to sounds but there’s no accounting for taste. The Winston, AKA The Waxworks or Fraggle Rock, was right near Ruthin Court and Lil’s house. The vault was arranged eerily similar to a classroom; small tables in rows. Packed with mischievous children of the Universe. Summer on Churchill Way. Pure bone-white Jack Russells gambolling among the council plants. Guns ‘n’ Roses and the bluest skies. Then it was autumn.
Mablethorpe was shocked and awed. We flopped pints for a week confronted by an angry silver sea. Not sure what the kids got up to, like. 12-year olds taking the piss royal. Bashem made me a caravan curry. Ridiculous amount of hot powder in it. A failed practical joke; I wolfed the lot without fuss, my brain having acquired immunity to chilli many bardos previous. I sold my Walkman that last night, desperate for beer money. 22 years old. In the Camp Disco a monumental sight greeted me; Bruiser, his missus, Bashem and the rest, dancing proper. Like dynamic fluid. Stylised, kinked and evolved on the streets of Salford and Cheetham Hill. Northern Soul. I ran away, horrified at my relative lack of skill and coordination. Drank and watched that alien Lincolnshire sea alone. The beautiful East.
Back home we grew closer to the conspirators. Split our time between PG’s crew in town and Diamond Lil’s firm. Ran errands and decorated Lil’s house. Me and Bashem with paste and brush going at it like pros. Bashem quit the furniture when PG called him a cunt once too often. A cultural misunderstanding between Manchester and Glasgow. I grew accomplished in the art of computer-moving and code-cracking under PG’s wing. Plus stale beer supping in the Cross Keys, Pen and Wig and Mark Addy. Late-night taxis from town to my Lower Broughton flat or the Precinct flophouse cost next to nowt. From Bashem’s 15th floor pad we could see into the Flat Iron. Like hawks waiting for early doors on the lash. High-rise living felt like Continental or summat. Industrial Butlins. I signwrote the Precinct’s mobile chippy that was infested with money spiders. Painted vinyl banners for Renault in Blackfriars and the odd shop or two. But there was more than mahl-sticks and sable bristle. This was sunny Madchester. A constant stream of booze, drugs and money. Lil’s fridge was permanently stocked to the gills with purple tins. Tennents-a-plenty. She told us to help ourselves and regretted it instantly. Autumn 1989. The fund took the Salford families to Pwllheli. I drove a hired minibus to Wales on a scoping mission. Bruiser, me, a local vicar and a gaggle of decent birds whose other halves were gangsters and imprisoned blaggers. Me and the Warbler joined the actual holiday a day late having attended Cousin Michelle’s wedding on the Saturday; a big do just days after Uncle Norman’s Salford funeral. Michelle’s dad. They lived on Edgehill for a while in the 70s. The Pwllheli bus went all round coastal creation.
We thought we knew what to expect this time. We didn’t. Pwllheli wasn’t Lincolnshire; there were Scousers there, quite a few at first. In our absence Bruiser and Co. had made some Scouse friends. Singing “Matchstalk Men” and everything, after hours. United by poverty, Strangeways and Walton. Every morning 300 poor Salfordians stampeded for bacon and eggs. Served by the lingering Redcoat petals of September. A Scouse cracker I could have nemmed if not for my stupidity. And a Sicilian girl whose boyfriend lived in Miles Platting. She planned to go there when the season ended. I wrote “knuckle mafia” on a RizLa+ packet and insisted she gave it to him. It was the beginning of the footy season 1989-90. One morning Bruiser took a spherical Butlins bread roll out of the breakfast hall. Lobbed it to a swan in the lake outside. Unfortunately clocked by a Salford urchin. Having completely twatted all their Scouse peers they were hungry for victims. The following morning every single Salford kid smuggled several bread rolls out. The swans were blitzed; bread rolls bouncing off their bills and heads. I love all animals (except people) but was laughing too hard to stop the little fuckers. The Queen would have been livid.
Finally the towers beckoned and we boarded the coaches home. Our driver was a large man with a wild expression on his face. Bruiser calmly and gleefully explained who he was; he’d once entered the Mariner pub with his two brothers. Demanding protection. The inter-personnel dynamics of Salford publand were instantly triggered; they were confronted by a sensational marine beast that cut them down in short order. A tattooed dervish with orange hair and an Old School ‘tache. It was Uncle Norman. Bruiser – a capable man in his own right – giggled in manly admiration; Norman fucking pasted ‘em. On his own.
As we pulled away a radio was turned on. It was Derby Day and the chatter was instantly silenced. Kick-Off was imminent. A Scottish commentator – possibly ex- United or City or both – was rhyming off all the derbies. Saying no derby held a candle to the Old Firm; there just wasn’t the hatred and passion outside Glasgow. The game was seconds old. His proud statement was interrupted by the situation in the North Stand. United’s lads were dispersed and things settled down again. That wasn’t a pleasant coach ride. 5-1 to the Losers. The Hughesers. What a volley. The coach stopped in a tiny Welsh town and I nemmed a book about the SAS for the remainder of the trek. Quite proud of meself. Until a ten-year old dragged an antique wooden barometer aboard. An intricately carven monolith with a glass gauge set in the top. His mam was dead proud. Other kids appeared with preposterous booties; stacks of useless postcards, pies, deckchairs and a car radio. The usual. None of them had been “awked” – nabbed and turfed out – and they spent the rest of the ride wincing at the match commentary and “rawling” about in their seats. All future members of the United community.
Those kids will be in their late-20s and early-30s now. Moaning about Glazer’s debt and TV’s love of all things not United. It goes with the territory. But recall the late-80s and the debt grows sweeter; our initial northern English convulsion diagnosed as lingering Tatlockism. A typical old Albert’s response to irresponsible money matters. It’s all just numbers. It’s not real. Ask anyone involved in the world of finance. Remember the late-80s. Do you really give a fuck about the debt if we win the Double again this year? Honestly? I knew it.

Regress with me, me hearties, to the days of olde; when Coventry and Wales had that same bizarre Admiral kit/tracksuit. White bands running vertically up the front of each leg onto the shirt and curving away down the arms. A darker, thinner stripe running along the centre of Big White. Fucking shite. Especially the Coventry away; purple-brown like a savoury vinegar crisp bag. It was a novelty then to own a football kit from another city, excepting arch-enemies. Football was life. It enlightened, salved and saved us. Today we never tire of discussing those childhood footy fixations. But some fixations have a shelf life; the white away kit with the black stripes down one side, for instance. The sports merchandise equivalent of Bowie’s Quicksand. But it’s old news, mate, so sling yer ‘ook.
Young vandals ran riot in 1977. Doc’s Red Army won the cup. Tib Street Joke Shop became a skateboard store overnight; Fibreflex decks, Gullwing trucks and Kryptonic wheels. The aromatic reek of grip-tape adhesive. Elvis died and “Way Down” released posthumously. The Stranglers’ “Straighten Out” was in the charts. Streets alive with junior hooligan chatter, shit little cars and rancid furniture; Crazy Trev’s parents assembled a wardrobe/dressing-table in his bedroom one Saturday. Trev’s magic marker was employed immediately they left; giant cocks and bristling scrotums splayed comically beneath wobbling tits and hairy fannies. “Man Utd” and “Scouse shit” scribbled on pristine white formica in a few hysterical seconds. Toilet paper wouldn’t budge it. He was straight downstairs to Mother’s cleaning supplies. Returning confident with bucket and various detergents. Frantic wiping did nowt. Foam all over his crotch, he vigorously lathered his groin, desperately skriking for comic effect. Fucking head-the-ball. A sellotaped array of Pink Final pics temporarily obscured the graffiti. Months scrubbing secret sins followed. Tunnelling to freedom behind dot-matrix newsprint of Stevie Coppell and Gordon Hill.
Trev’s CB handle was “Red Devil”. Nerve-stretching missions for broadcasting accessories occurred nightly; hop catlike onto window-sills. Occupants watching telly within. Rapidly unscrew the ariel from its mount. I’d be handed sections, nuts and bolts, cacking myself; flickering screens and curtain-muffled conversation sent me mad with terror. Silently dismantling free-standing 60-foot antennae with spanner and screwdriver like an SAS man on speed. Redneck mechanics from across the Valley in Clifton hunted Red Devil relentlessly following on-air verbals. The sly fox always evaded them.
But it ends, innocence. Usually with alcohol to help it on its way. Stolen beers behind Prestwich Church Institute was my first with Cloughie and Tiz. A virgin taste of emotional freedom. It grew habitual, Saturday ritual with Kenny; the offie was my responsibility ‘cos I looked the oldest. 2 litres of French wine in less than 20 minutes. We called it “pump action to the pedestal”. Behind privets on Bury New Road. Or we’d ascend the reservoir, an ancient world of cobbles and concrete. Highest point in Manchester. Supped our summers away talking football, fashion and bollocks. 1980, 81, 82…Girls sent us in and out of love every other week. The Rezzie afforded an unobstructed 360° view. North was nowt to write home about. South was town, not a bad picture. But east and west were the biggies, the latter somewhat bigger than the former: Victoria Avenue East and Salford Precinct. High-rise estates. Viccy Ave flats glowed white on summer evenings and we asked ourselves, where the fuck is that? We knew where the Precinct was. Forever hazed in an orange particulate sunset like the pyramids. We had no intention of approaching “the Old Country” hostilely.
The alien worlds east of Heaton Park were a training ground for Merseyside. We played it like The Warriors; nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Teeming with lads game as fuck. Blackley was a 2-level business; Riverdale high-rises at lower and those big bastards way up higher. Riverdale was a starting point. Piping (staring) contests. Some warm-up running and flapping. Its inhabitants frequented the Belmont and Lithuanian Club on Middleton Road. One night four of us got steamed by fifty of the fuckers. Kezz and Crazy Trev covered in bruises like nothing I’d ever seen. We knew a couple of them from the match and they let two of us go. Illustrating why we usually went east of Prestwich looking for fun and games and not west. And then on with the mission; there was a youth club halfway up Viccy Avenue. Close to an enchanting maisonette that glowed with near-Continental splendour. We were quickly surrounded by many curious specimens in Puma and Adidas. Fortunately they were peaceful. Some of them knew us or knew of us, thanks to birds from school. Onward and upward to those white megaliths. We knew when we got there it would be a different story. We never made it. Despite several missions up the Avenue our bottle always went; we were fortunate to return unscathed to the glade of Prestwich Clough for drink and song. The Avenue turned us back with tails between legs but Kezz always pushed it to the limit. Two-thirds of the way up we’d decide to abort before an inevitable sandwich manoeuvre trapped us. Observed the entire way by unseen agents. A couple of years later I saw Victoria Avenue East up close; in a car driven by Dave-D-. Himself, me and Dave-B- passing a joint around with Talking Heads on the stereo. A boring Sunday afternoon in faded Levis and winter snow. By then we were 18. Fighting people for nothing seemed ridiculous. The cosy brown embrace of methadone and Moroccan was a double-bubble inscrutable and fearless. Tower-blocks were a fixation that trumped old away kits like Bewlay Brothers trumped Quicksand. No pun intended.
Trips west of Prestwich were fraught with horror. It was Salford, a savage realm where murder and mercy were inversely correlated with regard to cocky fuckers like us. Being from there originally might afford us a night of trouble-free mayhem. All batting for the same team. But not often. This was the era when Kersal was at war with the Precinct. And we were at war with Kersal. And Whitefield and Bury were at war with us. A diminishing technological relativity that began with Pendleton’s Roman-like superiority and ended in the Ecky Thump and lagging dress-sense of tribal black pudding land. Sometimes a load of us would cram into a car and drive round Kersal flats. Themselves no small potatoes in the Greater Manchester high-rise league. If Blackley was a training ground for Liverpool then Liverpool was a training ground for Kersal. The flats were loaded with Reds and the single pub, the Castle, was a notorious den of glam-rock iniquity; older 70s wallahs who didn’t give a fuck. It was their younger lot we both identified and tangled with. They dressed in the very latest and were proud of it; Gold cords, leather Mickey jackets and St. Etienne shirts. Saw nights with dozens going at it – the bottle game. This was no place for small groups to explore. You went team-handed or you got seen off royal. When the Precinct attacked the Kersal funfair in 1980 our borderland was unpoliced; the Kersal Boys were off defending their turf against a mob estimated to be 150 strong. One lad was stabbed and killed. The estate that towered in the west reinforced its sinister image through such shocking acts. To meet them was a conundrum; the coolest accent and always dancing. Why would happy people do such evil things?
On our way to the Derby in ’81 we took a detour. Kenny wanted to demonstrate how town resembled Birmingham from an alleyway off Chapel Street so we humoured him. We passed some Kersal and they chased us down narrow factory ginnels. There’s a posh bridge there now with a spike and cables. They caught us up and Crazy Trev copped for a prize punch. A neck-slapper off Jimmy Jones. On the forecourt we merged with a giant team in tennis shoes and Patrick cagoules. Off to patrol the surrounding area, splitting into groups amid loud chatter. More Kersal, but they accepted us warmly. Obviously hadn’t heard about the neckslap incident. Trev was still MIA. He spent the day with older Prestwich lads having joy and fun. City on the run. The forecourt was like a supersized blunderbuss back then. Its flared muzzle spitting gobs of designer thugs by the barrel-load in all directions. They were’t’ days.
Now it’s all same old same old. Using semi-illegal software to defeat Ticketmaster’s captchas and buy up vast numbers of Madonna and AC/DC tickets. Employing Photoshop to bang out sweatshirts emblazoned with Yankees and Patriots logos. Banging out the moodies at the tailgate parties outside gleaming stadiums. Then there’s the dull commute between office and clinical trials. My office is an abandoned farmhouse in the sticks. The trials take place in a gigantic shopping mall in the city. My most recent product is very interesting; the Love Bomb. Took me years to perfect but I’m there now. Burned midnight oil as I dripped solvents from separatory funnels, distilled and concentrated on roto-vaps, tweaked by microgram amounts of Ololiúqui analogues. Not a test-tube in sight. It’s a myth. We professionals use centrifuge tubes. I drop Love Bomb on blotting paper and toxicity testing begins. That’s where the shopping mall comes in. Teenagers. You’ve gorra love ‘em. I was one myself once and it was fucking great.
It’s not easy being an international criminal mastermind. I still pine for those simpler times. Touring the skateparks by bus and bicycle; Stalybridge’s asphalt wonder. Hard Surf in Middleton with its terrifying Pandora’s Box. The indoor gaffs at Salford’s Rialto and Bolton. Even the Precinct had some decent paved bankings. OT looks like shite in those old pics but we thought it was a futuristic paradise. And the drugs. Oh, the drugs. But you’re too hard for the SAS and you think I’m a divvy, I know, so I’ll shut up now. I could never know what you “proper lads” know, but let me guess: That old yellow and blue Arsenal-style third kit was your real fave. And you’ve always loved the Bewlay Brothers…fuckin’ nice one, Cyril.

After Pod Boaters became Adidas Jogger became Stan Smiths became Kio’s became Năstase became Kickers became Korsika – essentially when Adidas ran out of ideas and started making shoes that actually looked like shoes – Casual was over: November, ‘82. By spring ’83, we’d abandoned foreign trainers for Hush Puppies and took LSD instead. It began in rejection from the door of the Hacienda – packed with students at the time – cos we looked too much like “Perries”. Bollocks; Perries were wedge-headed Northern Soul hard cases from mid-70s clubland who happened to bear a passing resemblance to us. We, on the other hand, were just old-fashioned football hippiegans trying to offload Superman acid on the knobheads in the Hac. As time passed, the drugs and music took control, and life became a day-to-day trip peppered with paranoia and euphoria depending on whether it was giro day, or we’d pilfered enough to hit the spot through an extended shoplifting binge. Psychosis was very normal. I may have believed I was James Douglas Morrison for several weeks in the spring of ’84. Psychologists probably have a name for that class of thing. The acid was great, but speed kills – as those old 70s Perries told us back at school. Months of psychotic comedowns involving the hallucinating of snakes, lizards, assassins, etc, and Father ordered me to find employment and get my shit together. I’d rather have died, but he found a job for me working with a crew of old blokes he knew by blood and geography. It was mid-’85 and I was 19. My musical tastes ran to Robyn Hitchcock, Green on Red, The Lipstick Killers, and The Rain Parade, a band that sounded like the Stone Roses et al before such sounds had been discovered in Manchester. The new job was a mystery; moving furniture around the big office blocks in town: Washington House next to the Mark Addy, St. Andrew’s House off Chorlton Street, Victory House near the Mancunian Way, Albert Bridge House (guess where that is, you twat*), and many more, all the way to Liverpool. We even worked in Chester House once or twice. And boy did we move furniture. We moved much of it onto our wagon and the cunts never saw sight nor sound of it again. It was taken to a Gypsy’s near the old Factory club in Hulme, or a warehouse in Strangeways, and weighed in. Filing cabinets, desks, chairs, you name it. My second day on the job, we weighed in a load of cabinets and spent the afternoon in Kicks in Piccadilly: “Bitter, 40p a pint, till 4:00 every day” said a sandwich board outside. It became routine; Paddy would pile the pound notes in the middle of the table, and I was advised to keep ‘em coming. Pissed as arseholes wasn’t in it. Paddy was an Irish bundle of genes discernible from a great distance; rubber-ridged yet strangely handsome features, an old brown suit and tie, and hair – moulded, wavy, grease-laden – the likes of which could only belong to an Irishman who made his living selling stolen furniture to Gypsies. And never a Hamlet out of his mouth. Paddy had us weigh in sacks of waste paper at a recycler in Ancoats ran by some very naughty boys. He could never resist planting bricks among the paper, despite multiple warnings from a bloke with a face and Collyhurst accent combo that funnelled your guts into your shoes.
Soon after that, I flew off to Miami and returned determined to become a signwriter. The first job I ever did was for a second-hand car dealer from Oldham sorted out by Jeff, one of the grafters from the Forresters pub in Prestwich. We once tried to prise the Manchester United sign off the wall of The Cliff, as I was living on Lower Broughton Road at the time, and I painted signs in my flat while I smoked Sputty and listened to The Only Ones and The Droogs. It was the right size and everything, so fuck ‘em. Every week from ’88 to ’90, I went to the match with Bruiser, one of the removals lads from Salford. I wore my snorkel hood, bent my knees, and paid in the Scoreboard kids’ turnstile till they posted a dibble on it. We used to hang round till kick-off, and drain every single plastic beer glass that “real fans” had abandoned to scamper up the tunnel dead on three when the roar went up. “It’s called free beer, what’s the matter wi’ yoh?” we’d growl at them. Wankers. Bruiser’s son found me a job behind the bar in A and B stands, which the Scousers tried to rag, and I fought the cunts off. That was free beer, an’ all. And free miniatures, and the odd pound coin that fell into my pocket (about one every four fucking minutes). The following season I still had my plastic employee’s pass with the photo, which I used to gain access to all areas through the employees’ door at the Scoreboard Paddock corner. Free pies, free beer, the full Montezuma. We knew a steward from Cheetham Hill called Bashem who would let us into the away fans’ area at half-time; we’d stand amidst them and booze and then give them loads of shit as they abandoned their ale and scampered parkward, heads spinning round at our suddenly louder accents. Pissed out of my mind, I would leave Bruiser watching the match and do an entire magnet-shaped lap of OT just because I could, picking up pies and beer off the lads working the hatches perforating the subterranean concrete circumference of that magnificent cantilever, bouncing off the Stretford wall and back all the way around to the Stretford Paddock on the other side. Occasionally I’d surface for air and a live update on the reds’ progress, completely disoriented with conversation and ale, never quite sure which tunnel I was emerging from; was it the Stretford end of United Road, or had I already doubled-back and was in the main stand? The evils of the drink, I blamed it on.
When gentle Paddy died, the crew took a turn for the most alarming. One of the younger lads, PG, took control. PG was from Possilpark in Glasgow, and sometimes took me up there to do business of one form or another. It was an interesting place. He also took me in a tiny pub in Ancoats, down a narrow street (named for a radioactive substance) hulking with factories and other strange structures, where they served alcohol around the clock. PG’s mates from childhood frequented the place, and it wasn’t long before I realized that life was like a box of chocolates – just as Mr. Gump said. This was no fuckin’ tin o’ Roses, me hearties, I can assure you of that, and furniture was rapidly usurped by a variety of other more lucrative commodities. Our visits to the gypsy was replaced by visits to other places, fronts for skullduggery ran by blokes with that same arse-twitching face and voice. It was exciting for an adrenalin addict. When the rest of the world caught us up in ’88-‘89 and started doing acid themselves, things became even better. One night, one of PG’s mates, having taken a dose, had his Collyhurst flat door smashed in by a TAG team at the wrong address. The bloke could’ve given a grizzly bear a run for its money, the thought of him tripping most incongruous. The 80s became the 90s. I moved into Ruthin Court on Salford Precinct with Bashem the United steward, and having spent that first evening at a techno night in the Brass Handles, found myself dangling from our fifteenth-floor window-sill tripping my brains out. Never really grew out of that 1984 Lizard King phase, to be honest. The flat was utterly devoid of furniture save a stereo, a couch, a kitchen table, and two mattresses on the floors of the bedrooms. Bashem and I ate our breakfast when most were stumbling home to bed, and our lunch at three in the morning. My Madchester was a kaleidoscope of stolen telephones, watches, designer-chairs, snide perfume, and “Adidas” trainers, viewed from the top of a tower overlooking Old Trafford and the Quays. My life bifurcated into two realities; one in town at “work” and one back up the New Road in beautiful Prestwich, where I’d spent at least half of my life by that time – itself subject to a bifurcation of its own; the Prestwich Boys had encamped in two main pubs – the Forresters on the New Road, and the Ostrich on the Old. The Forresters mob were mainly grafters, working markets and concerts and knocking out snide perfume at Strangeways on Sunday mornings, and they were degenerate gamblers. The Ostrich lot, my lot, was drug dealers, thieves, extortionists, and general undesirables, a nickname given to us by Meecey the Blue from the Forresters after an unsavoury incident between denizens of the two pubs. Big Andy was our captain and giant joint-rolling champion, and he would savour a ten-skinner held between his large well-inked fingers, contemplating scams and schemes, 24/7. With homemade tats festooned across his throat and face from when he ran away with Silcock’s as a kid, Andy led us into the good honest world of flagging. Flagging entailed crowbarring York stone flags from public thoroughfares and selling it to bent builders – in our case a bloke with a guts-into-shoes Ancoats accent stationed near the Bradford gasworks – who sold it on to bigger builders rejuvenating the London Docklands. It went against all my principles of Manc-Cockney thermodynamics, but Andy was very persuasive, especially when he threw you a lump of doctored-up Sputnik the size of half a Milky Way wrapped in twenties for your troubles. The Yorkie had been largely replaced by tarmac in the late-70s, but there were many nooks and crannies still bearing vestiges around North Manchester almost a decade later; entries, parks, side-streets, and even cellars. We chose to flag east of Bury New Road ‘cos Salford meant murder. Little did we know, Quadrant Two held a similar punishment, but it was close to our builder and we mixed with Salford more than those aliens from the Heartlands. Andy’s size and strength meant he could jump into a walled-in back-yard in Newton Heath and have eight big flags up to me (and from me down to Dave in the van) in no time at all. I once saw Andy pick two flags up simultaneously as if it were one, before he realized what he’d done and dropped one directly onto my foot for a laugh, like he was dealing a bad card. But the biggest laugh wasn’t flags, it was gargoyle’s heads. A church in Salford close to where Andy lived was being renovated, and one night after the Cyprus Tavern we loaded up a car-boot a few times and weighed in some real live gargoyles. Historical oddities from a bygone century. Andy told his girlfriend we were late home that night ‘cos we had to help Clayton Blackmore out with a lift after his car broke down. It was a cracking story enhanced massively by ketamine and barbiturate-infused hash. Those were good years, and sometimes I wish I hadn’t stole gargoyles from Salford churches. But I do regret not managing to rip that fucking sign off the wall outside The Cliff…

* I know, I know…

Until the summer of 1990 I must confess to believing the stroboscope a complete waste of time. My first real encounter with it had occurred in December ’83 while collapsed insensible after a mugfull of Leb-infused coffee in a mate’s bedsit. I was electromagnetically slapped from my Rimbaudian slumber and forced to endure several minutes of blinding white light that pulsed chaotically. One of the lads had rigged a computer up to a strobe, before proceeding to dance around the room to B-Movie’s “Nowhere Girl”. We thought it was shit. Computers were yesterday’s news and strobes were distractions for simpletons.
When Manchester went Mad in 1990 – became that bizarre poet-hooligan-intellectual-grafter-student-musician hybrid I call the Queerbeast – my imagination recoiled from the weirdness of reality; there was no longer any need to fantasise; everyone had finally decided to join us at the crater’s edge, and it was game on. Despite clubbing it several nights a week, I couldn’t name a single famous Madchester DJ or House tune to save my life. I only ever met two DJs; a stocky kung fu roughneck from “the” Ancoats, who threw nun-chucks and back-flips as I signpainted a steakhouse-nightclub off Albert Square that opened in the late spring of 1990, and a black lad with a ponytail who regularly drank in the Flat Iron on Salford Precinct in early ‘91. They were both natives, and they sounded like it. An all-pervading urgency gripped Manchester back then, as we locals fumbled for purchase on the beadage generated by the Queerbeast. When World Cup Italia kicked off, we made a couple of bizarre new friends: The Jew and the Pakistani, who seemed to have their fingers in everything; snide England football shirts, construction and roofing, child’s toys, witness protection. You name it, they were dealing in it. Some outsourced from the Orient, and some made in England. They had the cash and we were the gears in the machines of their personal launderette. Having passed my test a week earlier, I was enlisted by Big Andy to drive to Tottenham with the press-stud machines for the England shirts. It was a grey M6-M1 day packed with traffic, all moving at high speed in the absence of cameras. The snide machines were heavy duty, and we didn’t even have to touch ‘em. We called at a greasy spoon immediately after dropping them, and as I sped toward the M1 Andy stripped his butties of fat and mine of protein, busily redistributing the macromolecules to his advantage, thinking I wouldn’t notice. When I sank my teeth into that oily mattress I noticed, but bacon’s all about the lipids, so why moan? We were back in time for the Egypt game in the Jew’s luxury flat, him shouting and urging England to kill the Egyptians for their crimes against Israel. The Pakistani was displeased at our defection to the Promised Land; he found Andy a “job”, minding a woman who’d grassed up a member of the “heavy mob”. She was in a house in Miles Platting fitted with an emergency alarm button (wired to a local nick), two Rottweilers and a couple of pickaxe handles. Andy declined that suicidal earner, sensing the maelstrom-mangle of Q2 lapping at his heels. There were distractions from the workaday inanity, of course, such as Gentlemen’s Mornings, where you shagged strippers onstage while United’s firm cheered you on. Meanwhile, the industrious others hurriedly knocked out World Cup swag. “The other teams’ aren’t as good” – explained Al in the Forresters, opening his jacket to proudly display a freshly-printed “The Nightmare Returns” t-shirt with its tricolour font, and a picture of a bulldog smashing out the barred window of its Mediterranean prison. When Al said teams he meant teams; mobs, crews, sets, firms, all skilled at injecting vibrant jelloid inks into fabrics via the magic of UV light and rotary presses that they kept hidden away in lock-ups and industrial units. But UV was one thing and strobes were quite another, I would learn. We were in our mid-20s and jaded by clublife, the overgrown youth cauldrons that charged a couple o’ funt (pounds) to put you in among the pigeons – our crew – like a mess of dolled-up muscular Cyclopses; ingrown bristles polka-dotted like glowing boils on unshaven jowls and throats, awkward patterned shirts, swilling Newkie Browns in the Cyprus with pockets full o’ drugs. Thistles dressed as flowers, contemptuous of the semi-flares, preferring £9.99 Salford Rugby League tracky bottoms from the souvenir shop on the Precinct, leather jackets from flea markets, old style Adidas trainers, cashmere jumpers, and strange shirts nicked from everywhere. What a sight. Cosmopillocks of both genders swarmed clubland, a hint of Estuary in their voices, prime targets for “nemming” (ripping off, shagging, etc). One night, Andy tore a corner square off a red Rizzla packet and knocked it out as acid to some pseudo-Manc Queerbeasts. They came back an hour later for more: “Brilliant, that, mate!” We weren’t past hijacking the mic and belting out a brief Dino or Tony Christie before being dispossessed by DJs or shouted down by the Estuary voices belonging to people who didn’t realize what mechugannas they were dealing with. We provided refreshment to lads like Blue Chris, who was put in a coma last year on Derby Day, and introduced to the Young Guvnors, who tried to communicate to no avail. Wayne turned up, a City legend, freshly deported from Oz after he crashed a stolen jeep on acid, and was met at Ringway by GMP for further interrogations; he’d twatted some chancer on CCTV on the all-night bus, made a proper mess and fucked off to the antipodes where his own insanity snared him and sent him home. Swinging from Wayne’s 6’6” neck and supping champers swiped from a Guvnor King and one of his many wives, raising the subject of plastic Africans and embarrassing everyone. And then it happened; the strobe came on, obliterating what had been until then dark amber space full of coiling marijuana smoke and trippy soundwaves, instantly zapping us into the 25th Century. A flickering mass of dancing baggies took my breath away; it was a Roses tune, an airy Olympiad guitar riff that competed for our attention with the strobe before the two fused and paralysed us in amphetamine-THC suspension. Eventually the riff squelched back into that throbbing bass and the strobe disappeared, causing me to physically collapse into my own legs as if my spine had been vaporized. Never has sound and light held me so buoyant before, I reflected, as Mani’s swift swamp anaconda dragged me out of my tree for final engulfment and blackout. Vague memories followed, of a Rainsough Fagin sending two little scallies in a stolen motor to deposit me on Andy’s couch and then excreted into a Salford pub the following noontime. But it wasn’t over. An old bloke in tweed got up and put “Made of Stone” on the juker, and I knew the Queerbeast had vanquished the city then. The rest of that year was an exhilarating rodeo on the scaly back of the Beast, the ill-lit booths and boozers serving to camouflage the wheeling and dealing amid Madchester’s spectator sportsmen, every one symbionts or parasites on the gigantic weird flanks of the bucking bronco from Manchesmagoria. And every one believing they were really pilot fish. The stroboscope began to penetrate even the most traditional pubs, who set an evening aside for music and dance, anxious not be left behind by the cultural eyewash of electronica and Ecstasy.
League Cup Final day 1991 found me sign-writing buses in Blackpool, working for shady yuppies who lent me a brand new Vauxhall Astra for efficient propulsion to my artistic pursuits. Yuppie left a nice jacket in there, with little packets of white powder and shotgun cartridges in the pockets. I stole it. Mine was not to wonder why, but I concluded they were dickheads either way. I spent that evening with my missus of the time in a flat in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, playing cards with Ian Brown. Some lads arrived from Wembley (I imagined they were the rest of the band, but imagination was no longer a requirement, remember), having seen Sheridan’s scorcher sink the Reds. They cosied up with a spliff to take away the swedeful of mither football had become that day. The yuppie’s jacket was full of shotgun cartridges, and how I wished one would accidentally fall out to impress my famous Q3 counterparts, but no, it wasn’t to be, and being Q1 I wasn’t about to do it on purpose.
The following year against Forest we went in a van. Andy had a ridiculously large brown paper bag full of whiz from which we snozzled deeply. The driver, Swill Briggs (deceased) drove at 100 MPH with successive cans of Holts precariously balanced on his dashboard the whole way there, his eyes bulging toward Wembley like a migrating penguin suddenly gifted with flight. Numerous joints were rolled and passed around, and their contents discussed in increasingly detailed and competitive attitudes. Arriving at the designated boozer in London, I did the rounds, knocking out the product in my best grafters voice (which is better than any you’ve ever heard, you cunt). At one point, speeding, stoned, and pissed, I fell down a short flight of stairs, destroying a large table full of drinks and wetting the giant paper bag in the process. It was snatched from me and stuffed into the spare tyre by a disgusted Andy. I’d obtained tickets for the lads off a groundsman who got them off a well-known player. Sixty quid a fucking pop. Andy snatched one for fuck all outside the ground, screwing it into a disrespectful ball in his cyclopean, vandalized hand, absent-mindedly firing it at the turnstile attendant as he bent someone’s ear vis-à-vis his latest scheme for domination of the amphetamine market. Dave-B- and I stumbled into Wembley, but midway through the first half, some cunt and his cunt of a kid tried to pretend we were in their seats. A steward was summoned and tickets presented. He scrutinised our coordinates and pointed high over our heads to where we should have been. We followed his finger, and saw our mates, distantly performing Navy semaphore, trying to guide us in. As we lumbered up the rear spiral stairs, there was a vague roar. United had scored, but I was too pissed to register. I collapsed in my seat, and upon awakening assumed the scoreboard was broke. I pointed out the southerners’ ineptitude to my neighbour, a middle-aged man who looked at me like you would a dog turd. If Forest turned up we certainly didn’t bump into them, which was a shame cos Andy had fancied slapping their legs and had invested considerable energy into questioning our capabilities all day to wind us up like angry toys. JB made a bid to wreck a boozer in Staffordshire on the way home when he realised there was no in-house strobe, but we stopped him after a couple of smashed chairs. I finally collapsed on the plywood latrine in a back corner of the van (which had been hired on my licence as it was the only clean one out of ten), and my jeans were soaked with piss from the spillover of urinating in cans when I woke up. When the t-shirts, the drug-dealing, the clubs, the violence, and the music became too much, I knew I had to “smishe” – get away. And off to Cairo I went, on a one-way ticket; returns were for shithouses. But then again, so were strobes in 1983. Things change, but not all things. In case you’re wondering: Could Andy, Chris, Wayne, or Dave-B- name a single DJ? Could they fuck, you fucking Queerbeast!

The bachelor herd was an interesting place while it lasted; the stench of testosterone and fear, jogging along in unison avoiding soiled memories of people and places long vanquished. As we all aged it dissolved, like an increasingly smaller pill in the blood of an animal. It became embarrassing, grown men in clubs, trying to pull birds ten years younger. So we left the herd for foreign parts, married ourselves off, and began to grow slowly senile. Middle-age; will we vanquish that, too? People used to believe the brain ceased to function properly around age 42, but that’s bollocks. It’s not that it’s stopped working; it has simply exceeded its working memory, and like a shit computer requires an extra four seconds to retrieve facts and formulas. In a freakish twist, midlife seems to dish up distant memories much more readily than yesterday’s, from the compendium of games stuffed back there. Like the time we twisted the steel supports under our entire row of seats at the City Ground when we knocked Forest out of the FA Cup in ’90. The 3-5 against West Brom in December, 1978. Or the Goodison Park semi-replay later that season. How proud I was to bring the match programme into school the very next morning. No-one else in the entire school could prove they’d been to Goodison, and I was only a second-year. I’d actually been given the programme by a bloke I discussed football with on my way to school who walked his dog round the flats, and who’d actually been to the game. I could have gone, but my old feller went ballistic when I asked him. Said the geezer was a fiddler and no way. But I’m pissed as I write this confession and a blackout may lead to embarrassment later. Maybe I’ll even claim attendance at that game in a future UWS. It’ll be my tough shit, and I’ll be crucified by the anorak-hoolies of these weird times. Worse things happen.

It’s a funny thing, middle-age; back when my mates were keeping pickaxe handles, table legs and baseball bats behind their doors and under their mattresses, I was too blissed out to feel the need for one. But now, as the darkness comes, I consider a steel box in a drawer by the bed. There’s a black Smith & Wesson .40 in there, similarly chunky to what Hutch used to carry back in the 70s. Automatic, with an illegal 15-round clip. Only cops are allowed clips holding greater than 10-rounds, and it was indeed a police officer who sold me this one. Any cunt decides to come in my house tonight will be in for a nasty shock, especially if it’s an OK Corral job and he’s counting off my bullets. Then I give my swede a wobble and snap out of it; surely I could never own a gun? But what turned me from an acid-drenched scally to this balding psychopathic Walter Mitty? Time.

Aye, the FA Cup run of 1979. It all ended in tears, literally, in my case. The pickaxe handles, baseball bats, and designer gear were waiting right around the corner. Along with mobs of nutters and working-class paragons of cool. Midas was one such chap. Midas is an old boy I bump into once in a blue moon. Been to middle-age and back again. I met him in Torquay. A proper rum cunt who’d crack a beer at 9:00 am and start the storytelling nice and early. Told me he lived on a vicious council estate till he was 7. Came home from school one day to find his mother crying. His old man sitting in silence. On their bed upstairs lay thousands in cash, a lot of beadage back then. The old man had robbed several local electric and gas payments gaffs in the same day. With his gang. Balaclava and shotgun still lay in a fucking hold-all, from which Dad had conjured a cash blizzard all over the bedroom 10 minutes before Midas arrived. His mother needed weeks to get over it, by which time she was installed in a nice semi somewhere not council. She got over it.

He was a Mad Dog, and travelled for years down the skin cancer corridors and scally flight-paths us wanderers are apt to trammel. Made the proper shoplifting transition from designer gear to alcohol and books on shamanism as the 80s progressed and he neared middle-age; one step ahead of the herd, as a survivor should be. But once back in Manchester Midas moved into a tower block (I like towers and was often found kipping in them back then. Sometimes it was Salford and sometimes somewhere else; for instance Bredbury Brian from the signwriting course at East Manchester College introduced me to the Collyhurst towers in 1988. We scored some wild (natural) herb from the pub in the flats and adjourned to a high abandoned pad with great hard acoustics. We skinned up and enjoyed a nice infusion while surveying town, preparing for a night on the piss. Our soles’ shuffling deliberations on the cold floor while the tower threw white light onto Oldham Road clucked with each raucous expectation: We were having a fucking drink. A vacant flat so close to Band-on-the-Wall could come in very handy, where you could crawl on all fours if necessary {you can sleep on council plastic tiles when you’re 23}). Midas didn’t have a pickaxe handle behind his door. He preferred the chrome-plated wonder of General Electric; a section off a vacuum cleaner hose with well-sharpened ends. Said it couldn’t be classed as a weapon if the filth steamed the gaff. Hollow aluminium; oh-so rapid to swing. Cookie-cutter ends to jab faces with. Very nasty. I introduced him to some friends of mine. Tommy from Eccles, a top chef who once accidentally killed a feller. Knocked him out cold as he fell into a canal. Tommy used to snatch factory wages, but he ruled that no-one could be harmed under any circumstances. Broke a bloke’s legs after he hurt someone unnecessarily, he reckoned. I shagged Tommy’s niece, who was married to a mate of his, and we all had a little “talk” in a club in Swinton about that. I didn’t shag her again. Tommy’s brother Steve was at the talk. The two of them were never matchgoers but knew every fucking detail of every game and person connected with the club and football in general. Q1 to the core. Steve invited me down to Torquay one dog-crazed summer in the early 90s. Met me off the National Express with Tommy and a Scouser. I had 29 quid on me; under the impression Tommy had found me employment in a hotel kitchen. Steve and Scouse asked me to accompany them, immediately, to a pub on Dartmoor which they planned to rob. Sunday afternoon takings were massive, apparently. Tie the couple up who owned it and back across the toy prairie. Not too many roads going in and out of that target, I immediately concluded. Very easy for a helicopter to locate the vehicle of interest. None of us were sailors, but I had learned how to tie a knot or three in Miami when doing the yachts. I declined, and got the beer in again. Then cigs. The triad would not include me. Within an hour my money was gone, I‘d no job, and had lost the respect of those with evil intentions. Story of my life, really.

That’s when I met Midas. Driving round Torquay in a Jag, selling snides to Scousers, while Steve was hoisting tons of slate, brick, and various metals. Grafting his bollocks off wasn’t Midas’ cup of tea. He was around the same age as Tommy, but kept himself up to snuff with plenty of exercise. Hardcase in his mid-40s. Midas had a season ticket all those years ago, which was pretty rare then. He used to go to OT in style, while we were swilling second-hand ale in the Scoreboard End or K Stand. The first time I saw the car we were out for a drink. He turned the key and Hot Chocolate’s “I Believe in Miracles” exploded from the speakers. Never batted an eyelid and I never said fuck all about it either. Then I realised it was not the radio but a tape, and I said fuck all about that an all. I was still getting over the car. It was a very nice one.

But middle-age, it’ll make yer buy a daft car and talk shite. Cling to things long gone; there’s a bloke in Jizzington with 1200 pairs of Adidas trainers. He owns over 600 Lacoste items. Buys them on EBay off other “collectors” around the world. There’s a feller in Twatley has an entire room in his home dedicated to wardrobe space for his 980 pairs of shoes, leisure shirts, and other designer gear. It’s almost finished his marriage; his missus is left high and dry many a week ‘cos he’s blown his wad on a couple of Fjallraven jackets and a pair of rare Clarke’s hiking shoes discontinued in 1982. This is important news because people can malfunction and they need to be able to spot the danger signs. Why am I telling you this? I’m not sure, but it’s something to do with knowing you’re closer to death than life. The hair withers in its follicles, the belly grows by an order of magnitude, and the mind (what’s left of it) begins to grasp at distant straws. Like that bird, nemmed in a pub in Sedgeley Park in 1987. Got her in the shithouse and yensed it while sapheads pissed on’t’ stones oblivious feet away. Or the redheaded fiancée that would phone me and arrange to meet in a local park. 1991. Long coat and fuck all under it but susssies and the full issue. Going at it in the bogs, while citizens walked their dogs outside and chatted about the weather. What a turn-on on an unemployable Tuesday afternoon. I missed the Cup Winners Cup Final through her. Watched it on telly in The Ostrich.

But that was a long time ago, and irrelevant. Since then I’ve left the urban and immersed myself in the rural. It’s a trip, and I can’t make my mind up which is best. City v Country? I have an inverse relationship with the two as I travel north or south from Manchester. As I go north I want to live more in the country; barbarians can only be tolerated in low-density populations. As I go south I want to live more in the city; see above. But I went west, which is a whole other world: Sprawl; neither one thing nor another, but loaded with mad canines on motorcycles.

Do I attract speed-dealers or are they everywhere? Nutters have always been in my life and America is rich in midlife head-the-balls. Take Danny for instance. The two of us painted houses together for three years. He’s almost killed himself too many times to remember. Nowt to do with United, like. Full of scars from mad wheelies and corkscrews on his Harley or his quad. 51 years young. Danny showed me his guns one night not long after I moved into town. A locked steel toolbox, accompanied by another, unlocked and plastic. The guns were in the toolbox and the ammo in the plastic. There was a silver Brazilian Cortes revolver with a wooden handle. 9 barrels instead of 6, but it was only a .22 – very quiet and enough to simply injure rather than maim or kill; a stainless-steel Luger with adjustable sights. A .45. You could see your face in it; a semi-automatic .40 black Smith & Wesson cop gun. No safety-catch no nothing. Illegal 15-rounders, bought off a cop; the “Cannon” as Danny called it. A silver .38 revolver with an inlaid wood handle, a giant version of the Cortes, but a six-shooter. Smith & Wesson again.

It wasn’t a bad collection, as the times we spent firing them proved. You couldn’t miss with the black cop gun. 15-rounds of solid hammer, like a comet exploding over the New England taiga, blasting eardrums for a considerable radius. That and the little Cortes were my favourites. Danny offered the Cortes for sale when he saw how much I liked it. But the Cortes had one weakness; a hair-trigger. A man who imbibes of myriad drugs and booze on a daily basis as I do should never own a hair-trigger, even if it is only a .22. A gunsmith could sort it, but somehow the hair-trigger seemed part of its personality, and I couldn’t bear to force change. But this was all my arse; truth was, I didn’t like the idea of having one in the house. It’s all part of being grown-up, I mumbled. But then I got old. Needed to prove something to myself.

We had mental barbeques in his backyard. Fifteen choppers parked in a line and blokes having motorbike jumping contests over a massive fire. Plus shooting contests; plastic milk containers full of luminous dye blasted off the fence after sunset. The fence trailed with multicolour rivulets the following acid-hungover morning. You can do that when you’re way in the woods. You can’t in Prestwich Clough. Danny had more guns, which he showed me in time. Several frighteningly automatic shotguns, and a couple of what he called “antique” shotguns (AKA “shotguns”, if you’re British). Foxworths. He also had a customised Ruger 10/22 rifle, a scary one. It resembled a fully-automatic machine gun, and I got quite giddy. It was a semi. 50-round banana clip, folding stock and everything. Firing that thing was fulfilling but expensive; the cost of ammo was similar to other guns, but the rate at which you discharged it was not.

Guns are evil, though, and should never be part of your life, unless you’re a Harley-riding meth trafficker. Why paint yourself into a corner; buy a house, get paranoid as fuck, buy a gun to defend it, there on the frontier? Better to live as a nonentity, like I did back in ’87 with Tez H. No work, no dole. A proper mystery. His sister moved out of her Rainsough council flat and we moved in, without telling anyone. There was a couch and a mattress, what more d’you need? We painted a giant mural on a wall in the lounge. Took us a week, but it was a cracker; wild animals in vibrant colour arranged amid lush foliage. Our artistic competitiveness drove the thing to another level altogether. Exotic plants and animals always fascinated us Brits. It’s like a deficiency that must be filled. Tez fucked off to Alicante to avoid a court appearance and I stayed on. Just made it out the window one morning when some dolled-up bird from the council came in the front door, showing it to a prospective couple. I always wanted to knock on their door and ask what they thought of the mural. But I digress. The late-80s weren’t the sanest of years and I was often absent without leave. Working on the roads in London, or grafting oil paintings on the beaches of Spain. Running with the shrinking bachelor herd, the stinking, terrified clutch of young lads who ranged across the globe from our various headquarters to avoid being mangled by that hoax called marriage, mortgage and sprogs. We collectively recoiled from responsibility, always heading into the sunset on the Magic Bus to Greece, the non-stop to Bangkok, or across the Atlantic to points weird. While you were all sorting your lives out, we were staying beyond the curve, forever young.

And then one day we woke up and looked in the mirror. Our faces were lined and weathered. But we had homes and nice cars, which we lacked as kids. Some of us were in Sydney, some were in Cyprus and some were outside radio contact. I was in the USA. Much spacetime had come between me and the city I love and I didn’t know who I was anymore. I had somehow married an American girl, a keeper of the evil Sicilian eye for when I misbehaved. The Manc accent was still there but the sensibilities had fragmented and drifted apart like a primeval landmass. People are the same wherever you go, they say, but that isn’t completely true. The personalities are all there, but the ratio of those personalities is vastly reconfigured. This is what gives cities and regions their character, and by fuck I miss Manchester. There’s nowhere on earth with that particular blend. Like a rare whisky or a new protein constructed by genetic engineers. Take four scientists and give them a trundle-wheel apiece. Send them to the four corners of Great Britain and Eire, and have them proceed to walk inward. They’d merge at the centre-spot at OT and all their dials would display the same digits to nine decimal places. Manchester is a reverse organic maelstrom where the cream has progressively expelled the dregs through some slanted centrifugal cycle. That’s why I’m not there anymore; I failed to make the grade. Or I loved her too much. Take yer fuckin pick.

I’ve been meaning to share something with you all for some time. It’s a hypothesis of mine called “the 4 Quadrants of Manchester”. The 4 quadrants are sectors, regions in Greater Manchester County, which possess definite identity and character, fault-lines in the ancient crust of our city. Just as Paris’ arrondissements are arrayed as a gigantic snailshell, in a tight clockwise spiral around the central core, so are Manchester’s degrees of suchness concentrically packed, like jam roly-poly about its lively heart. These 4 self-organising quadrants evolved slowly over time. Most importantly, the quadrants are not equal, and their lay-out is neither physically nor technologically symmetrical. A quadrant’s inhabitants may sound completely unlike each other in different regions of that quadrant, but ultimately there is a commonality which is continuous until it hits the border, where it is suddenly converted into something else altogether. You can feel it when you pass from one to the other. None of the Quadrants are perfect, and some are a load of old toss, full of wannabes and hair-splitters, anxious to be considered true Manc (like you, you cunt), whatever that is these days. Quadrants aren’t defined by place or area names, but I will use place names in this essay, for the convenience of supporters of Manchester United, the greatest in the world. If you bought this fanzine at the match, support a team additional to United, and you’re not an away fan, you might want to ask yourself what you’re doing. I’m going to blow the lid on the whole affair here, so fasten yer seatbelts and let’s have no whingeing (you know who you are). And I know I’m ripping Meatbag off by saying things like “like you, you cunt”, in brackets, but he’s my hero, even if he doesn’t live in Q1, which is where we’ll begin.
Q1. This is the heart and soul of what it means to be a Manc. It is by far the largest quadrant. Q1 originates in (and completely encapsulates) the city centre, extending south a very short distance into Ardwick, Longsight, Victoria Park, Chorlton-on-Medlock, Rusholme, Moss Side, and Hulme, before swooping across White City and the Theatre of Dreams into Salford Quays and around the outside of Eccles. Trafford Park and the Ship Canal are within this mixed-use environment. Q1’s western border is a series of frayed tendrils undulating in a strange American glow. The silhouettes of Barton Bridge and the Trafford Centre shimmer in the setting sun, among the assorted red precincts of Urmston, Flixton, Irlam, and Cadishead. The gas refineries and flowing motorways bake in a Los Angeles-style heat-haze, where the radial spoke of 602 meets 60 and 62. This is the heavy-duty extension whose ultimate roots lie in Salford Docks and OT itself. Beyond that, one may feel it, hear it, extending along the edges of Boothstown, Worsley, Little Hulton, Swinton, Clifton, Stoneclough, Whitefield, and Unsworth. It then travels across the magic mushrooms and green slopes of Heaton Park to embrace all of Blackley and New Moston. Q1 is the business, the heart and spirit of the city. In a clockwise rotation from Moss Side to New Moston, there’s a similarity that is difficult to pin down, a wonderful sense that we should relax and laugh, and be happy in the world. Q1 is where proper Manc accents are heard (be it Moss Side, Salford or Collyhurst), and the architecture, the plants, the dogs, and the churches actually feel alive. But here we find the first truly interesting fault line; Q2. East Manchester is an awkward place, populated by cavemen and other throwbacks, not to mention the Council House. Q2 isn’t the same as Q1, no way. Q1’s side of the border with Q2 contains New Moston, Moston, Collyhurst, Harpurhey, and Ancoats where it rejoins central Manchester. Q2, at the other side of this invisible force-field between worlds, contains Failsworth, Newton Heath, Beswick, and Openshaw, before finally giving way to Q1 in the form of Ardwick – back where we started, just south of town. Q2 spreads out to the direct east in a filthy uninformed haze towards Steel City, where you might smell Clayton, Bradford, and Gorton, unparalleled shiteholes where illiteracy, backwardness, and time-warps-within-time-warps are rampant. Of the many troubling parts of Q2, Openshaw appears particularly prone to this time-warp effect. Humankind may never know why this little corner of inner-city Manchester suddenly expresses a radically altered character from its neighbour, but it does. The gasworks factor, Fort Beswick, incredibly ugly streets, and the blue nature of certain people certainly don’t help. It’s more like a charcoal drawing, by LS Lowry withdrawing from crack, than reality. This section of Manchester frightened the life out of me when I was a kid; it felt evil, the product of a malevolent subconscious landscape made flesh. The fixtures appeared new yet old-fashioned, like a world in doom and used to it. The indelible stamp of those structures remains, like a ghost in the memory banks; the steaming wet bricks, gasometers, low railway bridges, unfashionable clothes, and hopelessly out of style work-vans carrying men with unacceptable hairstyles and amounts of facial hair. Fucking weird. Q2 progresses from this urban nightmare into the putrid hollows of Droyslden, Dukinfield, Audenshaw, Ashton, Stalybridge, Mossley, Denton, Hyde, Mottram, Hadfield, and Hattersley. Yorkshire is at the end of it. It wouldn’t be a lie to include Oldham and Rochdale in Q2, so let’s do that, shall we? Thankfully, the whole ordeal peters out when it hits the bleak moors, and the less said about that the fucking better. As you can see, the coiled quadrants can come to resemble a pile of dogshit rather than a tremulous gelato, once we venture outside the lush realm of Q1. But there is an exception: Q3.
Q3 is what people refer to as “South Manchester”. It includes yer Hazel Groves and your Stockports, parts of which threaten to overlap into Q2 (as does Levenshulme). For the most part, Q3 describes a quite gorgeous patina of tree-lined avenues and attractive rows of well-kept shops. It’s almost as good as London. The only problem is the people. For reasons that have never been made completely clear, they seem to think they’re a cut above. The denizens of Q3 are ignorant tossers who make ridiculous claims like, “my mates went to Prestwich and everyone in the pub was staring at them ‘cos they ordered pints and they were women.” Just for the record, if you go in a pub in Prestwich, and you’re an unknown, everyone will stare at you. They don’t care if you order pints of liquid LSD in Prestwich, or if you’re a chimp, but if you’re an unknown chimp, that’s a different matter. People from Q3 think flying to New York is still a big deal, while north Mancunians practically live there. You can always spot them on the plane going over; they think they’re on the fucking Mayflower. Q3’ers labour under the extraordinary notion that they speak “properly”, but I have news in that department, too; when inhabitants of both genders from Levenshulme, Fallowfield, Whalley Range, Withington, Didsbury, Northenden, and Chorlton-cum-Hardy exaggerate their “posh” accents, they succeed only in sounding like wizened, bisexual brothel-keepers and other plastic purveyors of the sleaze industry. Mutton dressed as lamb isn’t in it. The soot, the mills, and the poverty shine through crystal clear, and Salford produces far better-spoken individuals than these clowns. Q3 is obsessed with bigging up its “ethnic” diversity, yet they wouldn’t be seen dead in the Moss unless they’re scoring heroin. But their sense of verve and desire to be cosmopolitan via high connectivity with the city centre earns them a “Manchester” tag, bringing us to Q4, which most certainly fucking doesn’t, not that they care.
Q4 is hell on wheels, with knobs on, and is boring into the bargain. It composes all remaining areas to the west and north of Manchester, mainly far-flung satellites and bizarre hybrid new towns, like Partington, Altrincham, Leigh, Astley, Wigan, Ashton-in-Makerfield, Kearsley, Farnworth, and Bolton. These outliers are hotbeds of contradiction and treason, often quite blatant in their disregard for the greater metropolis to which they belong. Partington was created by mating Salfordians with people from Wythenshawe. Those individual areas are full of excellent people, but some species weren’t meant to fuse. The result is the highest concentration of scumbags, blackmailers, and litigious weasels this side of Dallas. Only the magnificent presence of Q1’s gargantuan industrial structures provide any form of redemption in this quadrant, which is really a nonentity in most respects, so I won’t bore you (and them) with further descriptions of Q4. They are not real people.
Finally, we must address the oddballs and unpigeonholeable remainder. Miles Platting is an enigma, there’s no doubt about that. The place resonates in the endless rain, and its space-age council hovels are pulsating hives of thievery, strangeness, and a palpable urban reek that both satisfies and terrifies in equal measure. Miles Platting is the electric fence between Q1 and Q2, straddled masterfully by the bard, Michael Duff, to whom I hasten to whisper: Come over to the bright side, Mister, don’t fall in the Q2 cesspit; you’ll end up like Rab C. Nesbitt. Note the use of (yet another) semi-colon there; I’ve got a degree, and I live in America; how can I possibly be wrong? You may accuse me of not being fluent enough with the kind of connectedness prevalent between north and east Manchester on this topic, but I do have eyes in my head and a nose for queerness, and as you pass from the one to the other, the unmistakable stench of the Quadrant Borderland fills the nostrils and causes the eyelids to tighten. The Wythenshawe “annexe” is another anomaly, certainly not Q2, Q3 or Q4 material, but physically disconnected from Q1. And then there’s Stretford. What do you do with Stretford? And Old Trafford, not the Theatre itself, (which is in Q1) but the place? Difficult to say. I wouldn’t want to insult them by putting them in with Q4, but Q1 is too good for them. And Bury? Is it Q1? You tell me.
To recap, Q1 is boss. Q1 and Q3 are quite nice in parts, but Q3 are a deluded lot of cunts whose attitude more resembles that of ignorant cockneys than it does Mancs. Like Londoners, they rely on mainstream sound-bites and clichés for effect. Q2 is horrific. Q4 is a mixture of sly criminals, weird ne’er do wells that fit no known categorisation, and sometimes violent sheepshaggers.
And I don’t want to see any feedback either, about the fact that Newton Heath is in Q2; it’s a sulking shithole, and if you’ve got a problem with that, then consider Bernard (Q1) Manning’s story of a drunk who entered a boozer and declared to one half of the room, “you lot are a load of bastards” and to the other, “and you lot are a shower of cunts”. A big Irishman stood up and shouted, “Hey, I’m not a bastard!” to which the drunk replied, “well get over there with the cunts!” I will say to you who declare, “Hey I’m not a Q2’er!”, “well fucking move house then, you shithead.”
I hope I’ve been of some help here today in guiding you all to your spiritual homes. Sad blue cunts like to harp on about The Theatre of Dreams not being in Manchester, but let them, for as you can now see, the man-made borders are illusions, and the real diagnosis overrides any such nonsense.
There; the hypothesis is now a proof, and I defy anyone to contradict it convincingly. The most important aspect of this hypothesis, though, is that I’m not being paid to write it. I’m writing it because it’s true. I haven’t lived in England for 14 years, but I’ve got a good memory. So, thanks all, and, as ever, it’s been real.

When FC United of Manchester broke away from Manchester United of Manchester they were buoyed by a sense of power and rage. A very definite belief that Eric Cantona was coming down the mountain to lead them to some unprecedented crazed Sodom, unleashing a firm stream of piss all over the shiny jackboots of the Glazer regime, was born; the Glazers weren’t United, we were, and as such we could fucking well go off and re-form United as we saw fit. The whole thing quickly ran away from most logical people, and the hardcore calculations fell into increasingly militant hands, until a lunatics-have-taken-over-the-asylum type atmosphere came to dominate. Simple mathematics were replaced by anti-capitalist fervour, and nobody cared about “success” or glory. This was the best possible soil for the FC thing to succeed as an independent species, and its champions moved like a column of leaf-cutter ants, securing the paperwork and putting their ducks in a row. When they achieved their miraculous objective, it was proper news. Amazing. They’d built a separate entity from United, one that had a team, a name, and an account elsewhere in the world of football, and they’d just gone and done it like that, all their own work.
Manchester United is like a multicellular organism, one with vast numbers of aspects and tendrils; each of its sub-groups and their attendant suites of hangers-on, parasites, saprophytes, mutualists, and organisers, constitute a complex, dynamic ecosystem, interconnected via nutrient and energy flow, waste disposal, and the distribution of various functions which determine cell-type. Cells in this case are supporters’ groups, fanzines, hooligan gangs, day-trippers, lifelong straight members, and others. Sometimes, complex organisms spawn offshoots, simpler versions of their parent, which find fertile ground in which to begin a new, uncertain existence. Plants are especially capable of this, via an amazing “alternation of generations” which sees gametophytes become sporophytes which in turn spawn gametophytes, which become sporophytes, and so on. It is a magic cycle, billions of years old. Football clubs were not considered capable of this offshoot-spawning feat until FC came along. The pioneers that they are, FC made United look like a married middle-aged bloke, who, after years of side-shagging, arguing and irresponsibility, had inadvertently impregnated a casual fuck, and was now faced with an unannounced, but not unwanted, child. FC made the rest of the football world look like married, mortgaged, ball-less mugs, shackled to their dreary destinies with no hope of combating the downward commercial slope their footy was adrift on. And the bastard child? They loved it, and didn’t care who knew it. Somehow there seemed nowt particularly weird or wrong about it. I mean, it wasn’t like they had any public responsibility to MUFC or anything. That was Glazer’s job. But, like all of life, the FC story carries its own inherent truth about its absolute independence from the parent organism.
FC fans have manufactured a sense of satisfaction among their delirious number based on the fact that something unavailable to MUFC is very much available to them. That something is the atmosphere and camaraderie of the terraces, the ability to get pissed and smoke hybrid herbals, while denying the evil Glazers their (sometimes) hard-earned cash. Old Trafford’s remaining faithful admire this and continue to complain about the poor atmosphere and the day-trippers who are nicking arse room off more deserving fans. By doing this they admit to their impotency, which drives FC’s sense of righteousness up even higher, like a homosexual who elicits an admission from a heterosexual of the occasional bisexually curious thought; it confirms that we’re really all FC fans underneath, and it’s only a matter of time till we all wake up, inject a massive amount of monies into the FC coffers, and really, truly, madly, deeply resuscitate red Mancunian footy as only we Mancs properly can. We could aim for the lower divisions, nothing too fancy, and eke out football’s dying years in style. We’ll all be happy and gay and a facsimile of the glory eras of the 1970s and early 80s will be ours, providing we’re not too old and decrepit to enjoy it by then. But nobody really talks about the supposed focus for all this: The game itself.
Last season, when it became obvious MUFC were actually making a serious bid to win the league, the migration happened in reverse, and the source of sustenance was the football, not the boozing, smoking, or ability to stand up unencumbered by stewards. Everyone wanted to be there when we slapped that big meaty back-hand across Chelsea’s smug face, and it was clearly evident that trophies trumped piss-ups all day, every day.
A famous Scottish ecologist designer called Ian McHarg once made an important discovery about pathology and health in systems. McHarg noted that organisms who failed to adapt to environments, or failed to manipulate environments to their advantage, suffered pathologic dysfunctions wherein vital behaviours, nutrients, and psychological attributes evaded them to the point of extinction. On the other hand, organisms that did succeed in adapting or manipulating environments prospered and contributed health to those systems, generating complexity and efficient energy flow via food webs. One form of adaptation is relocation to more favourable environments. It could be said that FC constitutes a sub-population of organisms that, upon discovering their inability to live with a set of conditions, were forced to re-establish themselves elsewhere, thereby qualifying as healthy. Health, of course, would mean complete independence, with the new environment providing all necessary sustenance. All the minerals, metals, vitamins, psychological climate, and reproductive functionality must be present for FC to enjoy health, as understood by McHarg. But is that the case? Are FC getting their zinc budget filled, or is it just any old iron? FCUM’s tendency to frequently return to OT for sustenance, particularly when silver is on the menu, suggests their newfound habitat is somehow deficient in at least one vital element in the footballing periodic table.
But the castration of our footy fans, via in-house CCTV and the switch to a “family atmosphere” at grounds, counteracts any logic vis-à-vis the supposed focus for all of this. If watching world-class football continues to be shit with no signs of improvement, will a secondary migration occur, one that really will push FC into a higher realm of attainment than they currently occupy? And if this comes to pass, will it be an act of parasitism, or a dream come true? The second law of thermodynamics dictates that, if you took a swimming pool filled with one half hot and one half cold water separated by a glass partition, upon lifting the partition the two sides would mix, and eventually the temperature of the water would be a uniform lukewarm affair, as the cold water will have absorbed the energy from the hot. If a further fifteen thousand United fans were to be absorbed into FC, would the same thing happen to the respective atmospheres at the two clubs? Would United’s atmosphere become even shitter than it is now, while FC’s already warm jamboree was enhanced greatly? And would the character of the people composing the migration represent the last of United’s true atmospheric “heat”?
This is not to say that FC is our parasitic twin (in the same way that it is incorrect to say the same of Manchester’s relationship with Salford), because they spawned themselves like a plant spawns its offspring, and like a plant spawns its offspring there’s always the possibility that offspring will prosper to the point of self-fertilising with its parent one day in the future. For that to happen, vast numbers of “gametes” would have to be released from MUFC, to fuse and form part of FCUM, and push them into this mythic place midway between numbers 1 and 92 of League clubs. The question is, will playing (and possibly beating) Grimsby, Wrexham, or Notts County, be enough to satisfy lads who were at the Camp Nou in ’99, Rotterdam in ’91, or OT on literally hundreds of occasions when United have fought epic battles with the best in the country, if not the world? If the answer’s no, then the great empire of Manchester United, like most great empires, will have been defeated and extinguished by in-fighting between its most powerful factions, one of which is its new owner. If the answer’s yes, English football may be transformed forever, as other clubs (like Liverpool and Chelsea) follow our lead and begin the systematic destruction of Glazer’s, Gillett and Hicks’, and Abramovich’s little profit schemes. Like symbionts, United and FC’s true fans provide each other with the raw materials needed to survive; one provides growth in the form of warm bodies, and the other provides metabolic energy via its raw and spontaneous atmosphere. The acid test will come in the final third of each season, when FC begin to suffer from that cyclic silver deficit, and the trickle back to the big house occurs again, hungry for the glitter of that which is not gold, but is instead an affirmation of our superiority as a world footballing force. To stretch the metaphor further (and why the fuck not?), United is the plant, and FC are the chloroplasts. Each has its own DNA and therefore its own specific function. But what is more important, matter or energy, dumb flesh or kinetic song?

When FC United of Manchester broke away from Manchester United of Manchester they were buoyed by a sense of power and rage. A very definite belief that Eric Cantona was coming down the mountain to lead them to some unprecedented crazed Sodom, unleashing a firm stream of piss all over the shiny jackboots of the Glazer regime, was born; the Glazers weren’t United, we were, and as such we could fucking well go off and re-form United as we saw fit. The whole thing quickly ran away from most logical people, and the hardcore calculations fell into increasingly militant hands, until a lunatics-have-taken-over-the-asylum type atmosphere came to dominate. Simple mathematics were replaced by anti-capitalist fervour, and nobody cared about “success” or glory. This was the best possible soil for the FC thing to succeed as an independent species, and its champions moved like a column of leaf-cutter ants, securing the paperwork and putting their ducks in a row. When they achieved their miraculous objective, it was proper news. Amazing. They’d built a separate entity from United, one that had a team, a name, and an account elsewhere in the world of football, and they’d just gone and done it like that, all their own work.

Manchester United is like a multicellular organism, one with vast numbers of aspects and tendrils; each of its sub-groups and their attendant suites of hangers-on, parasites, saprophytes, mutualists, and organisers, constitute a complex, dynamic ecosystem, interconnected via nutrient and energy flow, waste disposal, and the distribution of various functions which determine cell-type. Cells in this case are supporters’ groups, fanzines, hooligan gangs, day-trippers, lifelong straight members, and others. Sometimes, complex organisms spawn offshoots, simpler versions of their parent, which find fertile ground in which to begin a new, uncertain existence. Plants are especially capable of this, via an amazing “alternation of generations” which sees gametophytes become sporophytes which in turn spawn gametophytes, which become sporophytes, and so on. It is a magic cycle, billions of years old.

Football clubs were not considered capable of this offshoot-spawning feat until FC came along. The pioneers that they are, FC made United look like a married middle-aged bloke, who, after years of side-shagging, arguing and irresponsibility, had inadvertently impregnated a casual fuck, and was now faced with an unannounced, but not unwanted, child. FC made the rest of the football world look like married, mortgaged, ball-less mugs, shackled to their dreary destinies with no hope of combating the downward commercial slope their footy was adrift on. And the bastard child? They loved it, and didn’t care who knew it. Somehow there seemed nowt particularly weird or wrong about it. I mean, it wasn’t like they had any public responsibility to MUFC or anything. That was Glazer’s job. But, like all of life, the FC story carries its own inherent truth about its absolute independence from the parent organism.

FC fans have manufactured a sense of satisfaction among their delirious number based on the fact that something unavailable to MUFC is very much available to them. That something is the atmosphere and camaraderie of the terraces, the ability to get pissed and smoke hybrid herbals, while denying the evil Glazers their (sometimes) hard-earned cash. Old Trafford’s remaining faithful admire this and continue to complain about the poor atmosphere and the day-trippers who are nicking arse room off more deserving fans. By doing this they admit to their impotency, which drives FC’s sense of righteousness up even higher, like a homosexual who elicits an admission from a heterosexual of the occasional bisexually curious thought; it confirms that we’re really all FC fans underneath, and it’s only a matter of time till we all wake up, inject a massive amount of monies into the FC coffers, and really, truly, madly, deeply resuscitate red Mancunian footy as only we Mancs properly can. We could aim for the lower divisions, nothing too fancy, and eke out football’s dying years in style. We’ll all be happy and gay and a facsimile of the glory eras of the 1970s and early 80s will be ours, providing we’re not too old and decrepit to enjoy it by then. But nobody really talks about the supposed focus for all this: The game itself.

Last season, when it became obvious MUFC were actually making a serious bid to win the league, the migration happened in reverse, and the source of sustenance was the football, not the boozing, smoking, or ability to stand up unencumbered by stewards. Everyone wanted to be there when we slapped that big meaty back-hand across Chelsea’s smug face, and it was clearly evident that trophies trumped piss-ups all day, every day.

A famous Scottish ecologist designer called Ian McHarg once made an important discovery about pathology and health in systems. McHarg noted that organisms who failed to adapt to environments, or failed to manipulate environments to their advantage, suffered pathologic dysfunctions wherein vital behaviours, nutrients, and psychological attributes evaded them to the point of extinction. On the other hand, organisms that did succeed in adapting or manipulating environments prospered and contributed health to those systems, generating complexity and efficient energy flow via food webs. One form of adaptation is relocation to more favourable environments. It could be said that FC constitutes a sub-population of organisms that, upon discovering their inability to live with a set of conditions, were forced to re-establish themselves elsewhere, thereby qualifying as healthy. Health, of course, would mean complete independence, with the new environment providing all necessary sustenance. All the minerals, metals, vitamins, psychological climate, and reproductive functionality must be present for FC to enjoy health, as understood by McHarg. But is that the case? Are FC getting their zinc budget filled, or is it just any old iron? FCUM’s tendency to frequently return to OT for sustenance, particularly when silver is on the menu, suggests their newfound habitat is somehow deficient in at least one vital element in the footballing periodic table.

But the castration of our footy fans, via in-house CCTV and the switch to a “family atmosphere” at grounds, counteracts any logic vis-à-vis the supposed focus for all of this. If watching world-class football continues to be shit with no signs of improvement, will a secondary migration occur, one that really will push FC into a higher realm of attainment than they currently occupy? And if this comes to pass, will it be an act of parasitism, or a dream come true? The second law of thermodynamics dictates that, if you took a swimming pool filled with one half hot and one half cold water separated by a glass partition, upon lifting the partition the two sides would mix, and eventually the temperature of the water would be a uniform lukewarm affair, as the cold water will have absorbed the energy from the hot. If a further fifteen thousand United fans were to be absorbed into FC, would the same thing happen to the respective atmospheres at the two clubs? Would United’s atmosphere become even shitter than it is now, while FC’s already warm jamboree was enhanced greatly? And would the character of the people composing the migration represent the last of United’s true atmospheric “heat”?

This is not to say that FC is our parasitic twin (in the same way that it is incorrect to say the same of Manchester’s relationship with Salford), because they spawned themselves like a plant spawns its offspring, and like a plant spawns its offspring there’s always the possibility that offspring will prosper to the point of self-fertilising with its parent one day in the future. For that to happen, vast numbers of “gametes” would have to be released from MUFC, to fuse and form part of FCUM, and push them into this mythic place midway between numbers 1 and 92 of League clubs. The question is, will playing (and possibly beating) Grimsby, Wrexham, or Notts County, be enough to satisfy lads who were at the Camp Nou in ’99, Rotterdam in ’91, or OT on literally hundreds of occasions when United have fought epic battles with the best in the country, if not the world? If the answer’s no, then the great empire of Manchester United, like most great empires, will have been defeated and extinguished by in-fighting between its most powerful factions, one of which is its new owner. If the answer’s yes, English football may be transformed forever, as other clubs (like Liverpool and Chelsea) follow our lead and begin the systematic destruction of Glazer’s, Gillett and Hicks’, and Abramovich’s little profit schemes. Like symbionts, United and FC’s true fans provide each other with the raw materials needed to survive; one provides growth in the form of warm bodies, and the other provides metabolic energy via its raw and spontaneous atmosphere. The acid test will come in the final third of each season, when FC begin to suffer from that cyclic silver deficit, and the trickle back to the big house occurs again, hungry for the glitter of that which is not gold, but is instead an affirmation of our superiority as a world footballing force. To stretch the metaphor further (and why the fuck not?), United is the plant, and FC are the chloroplasts. Each has its own DNA and therefore its own specific function. But what is more important, matter or energy, dumb flesh or kinetic song?