America, America, for some reason a lot of you are falling in love with her all of a sudden. The reason is you’ve realised United can fill huge stadiums with soccer fans who love them. Australia might offer dozens of tribes supporting dozens of teams, plus a drinking culture fiercer than the UK, but the States is on a different plane. When you stop slagging Old Glazer and start pondering Old Glory you know this is where you wanna be. Would you believe it if I told you Manchester was where I wanna be? I do. I recently bought plane tickets for our annual holiday. Ringway is the destination. Before you start, just remember how many of you cocks annually set sail for New York, home of the world’s most overrated museums, to spend two weeks getting pissed in bars that might as well be in Toledo, Ohio…and lemme guess…you wanna go there, too, ‘cos America fascinates the fuck outta ya. Just remember this: I once saw an Egyptian artefact exhibition in Bolton that pissed all over anything in the Americas barring the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Now, where was I? Oh aye, our holiday in Manchester. I bought the plane tickets online. Buying anything online is a ballache, especially air tickets. Basically you surf 28 sites, all with IDENTICAL tickets at identical prices, until you manage to convince yourself that there really are no other options for that particular route. (Which means that making your website rank at the bottom of the third Google results page is actually better than the top of the first, and so-called search engine optimization is just a load of bollocks. Only joking. Kinda) Exhausted, you make a purchase, trying not to guess why all those direct-to-Manchester flights from places like Boston and Newark have disappeared. To make matters worse, we fly the day after United play Liverpool at OT, and even though we’re in Manchester almost 3 weeks, there are no home games scheduled during that time. Dare I take my missus to the Reebok and risk her being verbally abused (or worse) by a troop of Bolton baboons? My wife is American and quite feisty, but the Tonge Moor mob might be more tongue than she can handle. When I was a kid we were quite poor and took holidays in places like Liverpool, Lancaster and Macclesfield. I’m serious; my mother had relatives there and we would go for a week or two to explore those strange new worlds. So Manchester isn’t that odd to me as a holiday destination. It’s not like we’re going for the weather, after all. We get all the sun we need right here. It’s boiling in Connecticut at the moment, like an open-air sauna. A tropical shower every day whether you need one or not. Bokkle of coconut body-wash on the outside deck. My bollocks smell like cake mix. I’m an unsavoury caricature of something vulturous and oily, hunched over my keyboard with a sweat-chafed chode and twisted dreams of literary glory. But glory doesn’t come easy to those that choose the football life. Football labels you as a not-right in Britain. Have you ever watched a rugby or cricket player being interviewed? Footballers make them sound like nuclear physicists. I sometimes believe one’s first steps into the football world are the beginning of one’s personal degradation. And I don’t mean hooliganism. I mean playing it, watching it, caring about it. It’s a thug’s game, a thickhead’s refuge, unless of course your name’s Stephen James Coppell. That’s right; Scouse Steve, a forerunner to Scouse Mike. The degradation in character between the two mirrors the larger decline in the species as a whole. The footballing species, I mean, not the human race, though wider parallels do exist; our parents, and our parents’ parents. They seemed ancient to us as kids. The Salford slumdog culture forced them to act like responsible working adults from the age of 7 onwards. They had a dignity we lack (and which today’s scrotes lack even more). They imprinted olde worlde values on us that have faded. Each successive snide generation, like a carbon copy of the previous, is increasingly washed-out. Our grandparents had substance, but today there is only attitude. All we have is reality TV and celebrity for celebrity’s sake. Where Coppell spent his spare time studying economic history, Owen spends his watching 2001’s “The Michael Owen Cup Final”, in which Scouse Mike single-handedly beat Arsenal and propelled himself to the dizzy heights of vainglorious semi-literacy, football style. Mike’s Wikipedia page claims that the 2001 Final really has been christened such. But don’t blame it on Mike. Or, for that matter, Rio, the Boogie, or even the alcohol. We’ve all been complicit in this murder of the thug’s game. No-one is innocent. Now sit the fuck down; the Kuala Lumpan zookeeper’s son behind you can’t see. He’s come a long way and deserves an eyeful of Fergie’s scarlet wonders.
Aye, back to Manchester, where the air smells like wet dogs and you’re never more than six seconds or six feet away from a processed meal or an amateur historian. I’m not sure what’s worse, Pot Noodle or people off their noodle without a pot to piss in. But they’ll gab to you about Old Salford, Munich, Peterloo, Belle Vue or the Whit Walks till they’re hoarse and paralytic beyond coherence. I’m glad we’re going in September/October and not summer. I wish we were going in November. The gloom and pub carpet aroma seem to really take on a life of their own once the city’s fully enveloped by the onset of winter. Gothic spires with serrated stone combs, naked bulbs round Christmas Market stalls, illuminated trams and sleek but cumbersome buildings. I plan to get lost in the grey steel hovercraft of my joy, lost where I once got found, where I used to sleep, where I swore I’d die. I’ll bang on the gates of Media City, ask the builders for a job, and work me way up from there. By this time in 2012 I’ll be Mayor…the clock in St. Anne’s Square running smooth and true, like a Sherrat and Hughes shelf-stacker in 1972. I’ll flit from function to function in Adidas Black Shadow trainers and a Patagonia Rain Shadow coat. Young waifs from Moston and Fallowfield holding umbrellas over my head while I take bribes in Chinatown. A football man, a follower of the thug’s game, living in 10 Downing Street! Why not, we’ve got Piccadilly, Islington, Blackfriars and Victoria so we may as well go the hog, eh? To be honest, none of those London names can hold a candle to “Prestwich” or “Hazel Grove”. Imagine either of those as a tube stop. It’d be your clear favourite. You know it makes sense. But I’ll call it Downing Street, formerly the Crescent. If it’s student accommodation they’ll get turfed right out to make way for my cabinet. One of them snide Prime Minister’s gaffs arrayed on that wondrous Salford arc. Black door; I’ll paint it meself, no danger. Reunite the fractious Quadrants of Manchester and make them all equal. Bring Quadrant 2 into the 20th Century, and within 30 years the 21st. It’s doable. Then I’m roused from my dream by the missus telling me I need to start exercising again, ‘cos I’m a fat cunt. Or my one-year old Doctor daughter battering the cat with her plastic muppet blood-pressure cuff. Soon enough wife and daughter are in bed. It’s 2 in the morning. The heat is oppressive. My balls smell like Play-Dough in a moonlit super lemon haze. Summertime, when yellow turns to green and vice versa and it’s Joe Nine-Oh degrees all day every day and all night every night. A/C on hard…falling stoned into bed in a beautifully chilled bedroom. But I want to go to dark Manchester and feel the rain. Smell the wind. Amble metallic-green streets; drink in dismal vistas with a rheumy heart. Sing along to Marshall Hain’s “Dancing in the City” in the Black Lion on Chapel Street on a teeming Tuesday evening. Alleys that we run through, they’re still there, some of ‘em.
America, America…a place where you can’t whistle a decent tune without someone asking you to give an official performance. Exploitation of self, of nature, of other people and other races. They won’t take no for an answer, just ask Bryan Griggs. Griggsy giving the interview at the end of the MLS All-Star game was surreal. Our second shyest player being grilled by some gleaming toothed cowboy in a big suit before 70-odd thousand people. Only an American would insist on giving Giggs to the people on a plate like that. I think the man was on the brink of tears, to be honest. United States of a merry get, it got to him. The interviewer on the other hand was oblivious; he had no clue as to the effect that red crowd was having on all the players. I made copious notes while watching that match but unfortunately lost my notepad on a recent death binge. Words are a cunt of a business and books are animals; they have personalities and need exercise. Leave them on the shelf and they get stiff or plain crack up. Gotta open ‘em once in a while, do some book yoga. Writing is like a geologic process. When it’s on the computer screen it’s underground, dynamic, subject to change like the future. But once the printer spews it out, it is congealed and final, like the past. You never know if you’ve written anything decent until you’re holding it on paper in front of you. If it’s shite, editing can reconstitute the magma into something more appealing. Horror and depression transformed into relief and joy. The animal consumes you. Thank ye fates for Microsoft Word and for America. But Manchester’s where I wanna be, now and forever. I hope them builders at Media City have got an opening for a sweeper-upper, ‘cos I’m in like fuckin’ Flynn.
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