England is a rainy place and the forecast for our vacation in Manchester was for plenty of precipitation. Thusly I decided to buy some waterproof footgear. I figured Cabela's would be the place to find such shoes. When did Cabela's in Sun Prairie become a Bass Pro Shop? Has it always been so?
The folks there are smart and ensure that the area within a 20' radius of the check out is awash in junk food and snacks. My recent excursion there yielded two salt & vinegar snacks. The first was a bag of Uncle Buck's Salt & Vinegar Fried Pork Rinds.
They were a light-medium brown in color with some darker spots. Their surfaces were bubbled and cratered as pork rinds are. The aroma in the bag was mainly of fried pork but I caught a trace of vinegar tang in there too.
The skins had a light crunchiness to them and a delectable pork taste. Salt seems to have been applied with a light touch while the vinegar, fumaric and citric acids were given an even lighter touch.
Tasty pork rinds that needed a fair bit more vinegar sourness.
The copyright is 2023 for Coyote vs. Acme and this is because, although it was completed then, Warner Bros. shitcanned it in favor of a tax break. But, as also noted in the credits, fans agitated for its release and this resulted in it being sold to another distributor. Now it's finally in theaters.
Wile E. Coyote in his never-ending pursuit of Road Runner yet again sees Acme products backfire on him resulting in injury and humiliation. He sees a TV ad for the cartoon injury law firm Avery, Jones & Maltese and he travels to Albuquerque to enlist their services. We learn that the lawyer he approaches, Kevin Avery, is keen on yet another simple settlement for his animated client but Coyote rejects this and forces Avery to file a much larger suit alleging long, sustained malfeasance on the part of Acme Corporation which is the world's largest company. Their lawyer, Buddy Crane, offers a modest settlement but Coyote refuses.
I should mention that the movies opens with an animated Peter Lorre smuggling evidence of Acme's wrongdoing out of the building he works at before trying to effect an escape. He fails and his hand is forced: he jumps down one of those round, black holes that you can roll up like a map and is cast seemingly into oblivion.
Fate forces Avery's hand and he takes on Coyote's case. Hijinks ensue.
John Cena's chiseled face and muscular body make him a perfect evil lawyer for Acme and foil for the dumpy, out of shape Avery. The only thing missing was a scene where he asks someone "Do you like Huey Lewis and The News?" Tweety Bird works for Acme and Crane confronts him after Tweety's plan to capture Road Runner fails. Their exchange was laugh out loud funny.
Tweety: "I tawt I taw."
Buddy: "You tink you taw? I don’t pay you to tink you taw, I pay you to taw."
Tweety: "I did! I did taw!"
Buddy: "What did you taw? What did you tee?"
Coyote has a hidden motive and, just like in the Looney Toons of old, he also has a warehouse full of gadgets and tools with him wherever he goes. And things backfire on him constantly.
The interplay between live action and animated characters was wonderful and I was happy to see so many Looney Toons characters involved, even if only in a brief cameo.
Daffy Duck is in a home for the insane and he is played much like his earliest incarnation in the late 1930s - nutty with a predilection to manically bounce around. The movie is at once reverential to the original Looney Toons but also keen to bring the characters into the 21st century. Foghorn Leghorn is Acme's CEO which is just perfect for the blustery bird with the big ego. When he is being arrested, he asserts that he is a cage-free rooster.
I laughed aloud several times during Coyote vs. Acme and just had a blast.
I found Hope to be a lot of fun and enjoyed how it confounded my expectations.
It begins with a fairly lengthy introduction in which a group of Korean rednecks who were going out hunting find a mauled cow in the middle of the road near the Korean Demilitarized Zone which, we are warned, has many minefields. The cousin of one of them, Ko Sung-ki, happens to be the chief of police of Hope Harbor and he is brought in to examine the bovine tragedy. Everyone reckons the incident to be strange since the animal wasn't eaten at all, just clawed to death.
The rednecks, er, hunters, head to the farm where the cow is from while the chief constable, Ko Bum-seok, goes back to town only to find a monster ravaging the town and slaughtering the population. He joins with others who have taken up arms but even their high powered rifles are powerless against the creature. Just when things look bad in a terminal way, another police officer, the lovely Im Sung-ae, appears with a grenade launcher that helps matters. For my part, I had those mines in mind and figured the beast would stray into a minefield and meet its end. But no. Instead it is hit by a large tanker truck and killed. This was a long scene and director Na Hong-jin did the right thing by not showing us the creature until he needed to. It was pure kinetic fun with Bum-seok being frustrated at every turn yet surviving his encounters with the creature. Oh, the lady officer's frustrated cussin' was funny.
It was also noteworthy that the editor let the scene in town play out before cutting to the hunters arriving at the farm and finding it having been laid waste. They eventually discover a spaceship in the woods and we come to understand that the creature was an alien. This is reinforced by a grotesque, but funny, scene in which a scientist resorts to a chainsaw to autopsy the dead creature that ran roughshod in Hope Harbor. Our peace officer heroes encounter another hunter, Yang-bae, who claims to have killed one of the aliens. Upon further examination, it was an immature alien that he killed which leads Bum-seok to conclude that this was the child of the alien that had killed so many in town - it was out looking for its child.
Our fellow humans converge on the woods where they encounter more aliens who are also impervious to bullets. Out of nowhere a new group of hunters appear on horseback. They seemed to know about the aliens and to be out for some extraterrestrial blood sport. Huh? The aliens kill everyone save our ragtag group of police officers and friends.
There's another long scene in which one of the aliens chases someone on horseback as the other survivors race away next to him in a police car. Sung-ae launches more grenades as Bum-seok attempts to get the man on the horse to jump from his equestrian perch onto the car.
If the appearance of those hunters on horseback was surprising, then the sight of an enormous spaceship emerging from the clouds all aflame and crashing into a mountain was downright astonishing. The aliens recognize it and the movie ends with them having a confab on their next moves.
For me, Hope was just a blast. Laced with plenty of thrills, chills, and spills, I appreciated that scenes were allowed to play out without constant intercutting to allow us to keep tabs on characters in a wholly different location. Seeing from the get-go that these aliens, the mature ones, that is, are impervious to bullets had me wondering if humanity would come up with a clever solution or if all hope was lost, so to speak. Sung-ae had some funny dialogue while the motley group of characters were all distinctive and had me rooting for them until the very end. The stuff that came out of left field may have left me pondering things but they never detracted from the fun.
I am glad to see that it remains in theaters here in Madison.
Trailers:
Finally something I'd go see.
While this is playing next month at Cinematheque, I will be at Gamehole Con when it screens. So I hope that it actually plays at a Marcus theater instead of being tantalized by a trailer only for the film to never hit a commercial screen in Madison.
I recall when the film adaptation of The Girl On the Train came out and found my interest piqued. Not enough to go see it but enough to put the story on my to-read list. Here we are 10 years later and I've finally read the source novel by Paula Hawkins.
I began it in our hotel room in Manchester after I'd finished a history of the city we were visiting. Reading a little each night before bed added up and I polished it off on the flight home across the Atlantic. Although nearly 400 pages, it seemed to go by quickly. I think this is due to a combination of narrow pages and Hawkins' plainspoken, straightforward prose style.
The story centers around Rachel Watson, a woman in her early 30s, who takes the train in to London every weekday. The train usually stops at a certain junction or spot near the home of a couple that she names Jess and Jason. From the comfort/remove of the train car, our voyeuristic protagonist fantasizes about their personalities and lives as she sips a can of premixed gin & tonic or a spot of wine.
Rachel's fabulation is an escape from her life which lies in ruins. She and her husband, Tom, tried to have children but Rachel proved to be barren. Turning to the bottle for relief drove them apart and Tom sought comfort in the arms (and legs) of another woman, Anna. After their divorce, Tom kept the house while Rachel moved in with a friend, Cathy. Despite this, Rachel still longs for Tom and calls him at least semi-regularly, much to Anna's annoyance.
A couple months previously, Rachel was fired from her job. Afraid to tell Cathy and her mother, she keeps up appearances by traveling to the city where she wanders, works a bit on her CV, and continues her relationship with the bottle.
It turns out that Jess and Jason are really Megan and Scott and that their house is just down the street from Rachel and Tom's former home. While Tom had meant to sell the house, he ended up keeping it and having his new bride and mother to his child, Anna, move in. Thusly, the train rides provide Rachel ample opportunity to ruminate on her failed marriage and relitigate episodes from it which are, perhaps, best forgotten.
In fairly quick succession, three events transpire. First is that Rachel spies Megan from the train kissing someone who isn't her husband; second Rachel has an episode in which she gets very drunk and blacks out, remembering only tiny fragments of that night; and lastly Megan goes missing only to turn up dead. Did the unknown man Rachel saw kissing Megan do the dastardly deed? Or perhaps a jealous husband avenged the wrong done to him...?
The plot unfolds by alternating chapters narrated by the women here. Rachel's are given pride of place but Anna and Megan's are important as well. Rachel is a drunk with low self-esteem due, in part, to being overweight - a stark contract to the svelte Emily Blunt who plays Rachel in the film adaptation and she is a highly unreliable narrator. Anna's stories demonstrate just how much of a pest Rachel has been and fills in details that Rachel leaves out. We get to know Megan as a very troubled soul and not the carefree stunning blonde that is Jess.
Rachel is like a tipsy Miss Marple. We learn of her failures and foibles but come to understand that she is really a well-intentioned person. She goes to the police to let them know that she'd seen Megan kissing another man but they see her as a troubled soul and don't take her particularly seriously. Feeling terrible for Scott, she contacts him to let him know his wife was having an affair. There are a myriad of these kinds of encounters. Is Rachel helping? Or hindering?
Many times Rachel admits that she shouldn't do X but goes and does it anyway and this reader just rolled his eyes. I had a hard time enjoying Rachel as a character as she is just so pathetic. Witnessing someone so tethered to a past that is unrecoverable, someone who engages in so much self-sabotage is uncomfortable. (I wonder if a thin and beautiful Emily Blunt is more empathetic.) Thankfully the chapters featuring Anna and Megan take the edge off.
The lives (and a death) of all three women are intertwined and I liked how Hawkins wove them together. This is one of those rare books for me where the inner lives of women are put front and center and I enjoyed the mix of vulnerability and strength in each of the characters. The male characters, by contrast, don't come off well here. Scott comes across as tragic, hurt figure for much of the tale but he eventually resorts to violence. Tom is portrayed as something of a victim for most of the book but we come to know that he is truly evil by the end. Mac is deceitful and abandons the woman he impregnated. That he dies of an overdose seemed an excessive addition that merely served to further slander an already unlikeable man.
There were definitely times when I felt I was reading the book just because I wanted to know who killed Megan. But, by the end, I was enjoying getting to know the women characters and how their lives were entangled and what secrets they were hiding. The Girl On the Train reminded me that we all keep secrets and that sadness often lies behind smiling faces, that happy couples are sometimes not all that happy.
Forgiveness is a motif here as is its limits. Who deserves forgiveness and when? Do you have to solve a murder to earn it? The failure of two marriages and the revelation of another doing poorly hit a bit close to home. It's not that these fictional matrimonies were analogous to mine in any detail, it was more the martial conflict that brought back bad memories. This makes me wonder if and when I will ever be able to be confronted by marital conflict and not have flashbacks.
In the end, The Girl On the Train was a good read. Not great, perhaps, but certainly one that captured my attention with its mix of mystery and probing into the lives of all-too flawed characters.
Skip. Your blogger. And it’s 2026. Nearly snack time. I’m ‘aving ‘oops.
Like those salt & vinegar peanuts, Hula Hoops are a KP Snacks brand. I am seeing a pattern emerge here. Do they own Walkers too?
These Hula Hoops are thick potato cylinders. I'm not sure if the "Big" in Big Hoops refers to the thickness of the cylinder walls or their diameter. Their appearance reminded me of fried calamari.
I threw one in my maw and my mouth received a big, solid crunchy reception. These 'oops are dense! I didn't taste any extra salt but they did have a mid-level tanginess. The spud flavor was a nice earthy-sweet combo with whatever that taste is that reconstituted shaped potato paste has. Oxidation? Some kind of chemical reaction that happens when spuds are heated then cooled and heated again?
With a decent dose of vinegar or other acid, these aren't bad.
Our trip to the United Kingdom wasn't simply a holiday, er, vacation. It was a last hurrah, of sorts. Well, not last, really, but, because my ladyfriend is to soon experience a profound alteration to her life, let's say, the trip was a last bit of fun before she has to deal with some trials and tribulations. And so I wanted to make sure she had the grandest time, that her every whim (more or less) was catered to.
Having noted some tough times ahead for her, I will confess that my ladyfriend is an addict. A meat pie addict. Madison has, perhaps, a few places where a chicken pot pie may be had, but that's about it. Have a hankering for a steak and ale pie? Forget it. So, being in a country that has a long tradition of putting tasty things in a pie shell, she was like a kid in a candy store. Thusly our first dinner was to be savory pies. She found a place called Pieminister in the Northern Quarter which fit the bill. Being close to a pub that I was keen on trying sealed the deal. Also handy was its proximity to a butcher's shop.
Our walk to the Northern Quarter revealed more wonderful Victorian architecture. Or maybe Edwardian. Or just neat buildings with pediments. Also prominent was public transit. The hotel was within spitting distance of the St. Peter's Square tram stop.
But there were buses everywhere as well. Yellow double-decker buses of the Bee Network with the city's mascot emblazoned on it.
I think fully half the buses had ads for the new Shaun the Sheep movie on them which isn't surprising as it is a UK production and involves sheep which are everywhere in the countryside. I don't recall when the industrious insect became the city's mascot but it surely was back in its industrial past when those dark satanic mills were running at full bore employing the unwashed masses and their children too.
Walking by Piccadilly Gardens I spied this bus.
Was The Who song of the same name about this very line of buses? I was always under the assumption that the title was just a fun, late 1960s thing and not named after a real company. Had I been wrong all these years?
The answer is no. I looked it up when I got home and found that these magic buses are a product of the 1990s.
The Northern Quarter seems to be the trendy, hip-hop-happenin' part of the city centre. While walking along Tib Street, I spied a bit of a poem in the pavement.
I saw bits elsewhere on the street too but surely missed more as I was often looking up to admire the wonderful architecture...in search of ghost signs. Investigating further, I see that it belongs to a poem called Flags by the British-Ethiopian author of verse, Lemn Sissay.
Our first stop was The Butcher's Quarter so we could get some real food for our hotel room, food that wasn't a biscuit or a salt & vinegar snack. Walking in, the air had the butcher shop smell, that aroma of fresh meat.
It was a bit weird to peer into a display case of sausage and not see any brats. Another display case held a myriad of pork pies, Scotch eggs, and other distinctly British delectables (and non-British ones too).
But, being from Wisconsin, it was the cheese case which drew my lady's attention. Upon seeing it, I proclaimed, "Cheese, Gromit!" and did Wallace's hand gesture.
I'd only heard of 3 or 4 of the varieties on offer but the gentleman behind the counter was quite knowledgeable about them all and quite generous with the samples. In addition, a hearty thanks must be given to the friendly Chinese Welshman who had come into the store shortly after we did and identified the name of the one of the cheeses as being Welsh and pronounced it for us.
After apologizing for the lake of drool on the floor, my lady bought some cheese and we quickly made our way to dinner.
The look on my ladyfriend's face when we approached Pieminister was of sheer, unadulterated joy. If she were to ever quit her job and pursue another line of work, it'd be as a piemonger. Her enthusiasm made me very happy, her eagerness to dig into a savory filled pastry would not be denied.
She ordered a steak and ale pie while I went with the steak and ale and Stilton pie. Pieminister is a casual, nouveau pie place and you could put add-ons onto your pie such as a skewer of small sausages or, as I did, Yorkshire pudding. I mean, they give you a small boat of gravy so I had to.
It was delicious! While I'd heard of Stilton before - likely from Monty's Python's cheese shop sketch - I don't think I'd ever eaten any. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was a blue cheese with a lovely sharp, moldy taste.
Our final stop of the evening was one that I had scouted out before we crossed the ocean: Fell Northern Quarter.
Housed in an attractive older building, Fell NQ is a taproom of Fell Brewery in Cumbria which, I later learned, is an area north-northwest of Manchester. My attraction to the place stemmed from a post online stating that it had a nice selection of ciders. You see, in addition to the goal of drinking less coffee and more tea, it was also my intention to drink less beer and more cider.
I made my way to the bar and looked at the big board. It was disappointing to see so many American style IPAs - hazy, West Coast, blah blah blah. But there were other options and I immediately went back on my pledge to drink more cider by ordering a Gose for me and a ginger beer for my lady. The bartender was a young woman in her mid-20s. She was tall and thin with a beautiful warm, thin face. Clad in a halter top, I admired her willowy figure as she filled my order and thought that she must make good tips. Then I recalled that you don't tip at pubs over there.
The place had a smattering of fellow folks enjoying libation. One table off by the bar had several people at it chatting and laughing while a couple tables away from us were two guys having a more serious sounding conversation. In the other direction sat a young man and his dog in quiet contemplation.
While the Gose was quite tasty with a nice sourness to it that didn't taste lethal and just the right salinity, I felt guilty. And so my final nightcap was a perry.
This was a Ross-on-Wye Yellow Huffcap perry and it tasted quite dry and delicious. The yellow huffcap, as most people know, is a type of pear. (Ahem.) On each sip the tannin dryness would fade allowing a scrumptious pomaceous flavor to emerge.
Our trip was off to a fine start.
On the way home I noticed this restaurant.
What an odd name.
A pub close to our hotel (and next to another pub that gave a 10% discount to CAMRA members) advertised this:
Back in our room, we busted out the cheese and some cream crackers too.
Cheddar. (I don't know where the Isle of Mull is.) Not unexpected but a classic. A young cheese, it was mild and creamy.
This stuff was a soft cheese. Mild and creamy.
The Red Leicester proved to be the big hit.
Think of Colby. Then give it a nutty flavor. And to top it off, add very mild herbal overtones. We are going to seek this stuff out here in the States.
The first salt & vinegar snack that I sampled in the UK came in a family-sized sack - The Real McCoy’s Salt & Malt Vinegar Coated Peanuts. McCoy's is a brand that belongs to KP Snacks, a British company that dates to 1853. According to the internet, it started out making jams, pickles, and such but transitioned to peanuts in 1948.
This was not my first salt & vinegar peanut rodeo having tasted Planters' version. Unlike those, these came coated in a fluorescent yellow shell. I neglected to check if they glowed in the dark.
The tangy cocoon was nice and crunchy with a medium-low level of vinegar tang. If you pour some in your hand and throw them back, you get a nice sour on your tongue. The malt vinegar flavor was delicious. Eating these was like eating Tootsie Roll Pops in that you get the tangy shell before you get to the nutty centre.
A surprise to no one, the skies were cloudy and grey at London when we landed.
But Heathrow was alive with the bright lights of stores attempting to inveigle the constant flow of travelers making their way through the terminal as announcements blared through the overhead speakers into stepping inside. Some folks wended their way to their destination which may have been a restaurant or the toilets while others had looks of steeled determination on their faces as they tacked a course to their departure gate...or the toilets. Harried parents struggled to herd their young children while kids in their gap year ambled more casually.
Our layover was somewhere around 4 hours as we had taken an earlier flight and, once we cleared security - sadly my passport did not get stamped - we set out for a bite to eat. One of my goals for the trip was to drink less coffee and more tea. Truth be known, I had none of the UK's favorite/most iconic drink while in the country last year and felt guilty, like I had slighted my hosts. And so my first drink back on terra firma was tea.
It was delicious and perked me up for perusing the stores in my search for salt & vinegar snacks, another of my trip goals. I will admit that I had a list of the ones I sampled last year with me so as to avoid re-snacking. While I found many a sour tasting treat, I also found myself unable to resist Lucifer's biscuits as the combination of ginger & chilli was quite tempting. However, Lucifer is also known as The Great Deceiver...
I don't know how far it is from London to Manchester, but it's not a great distance as our flight was less than an hour in the puddle jumper. Sitting in a cramped seat with little leg room was a bit of a shock to me after the comparative luxury of being in World Traveller Plus.
After collecting our luggage at Manchester Airport, we hastily made our way to The Station to catch a train to the city centre, a.k.a. - downtown, where an aparthotel room lay waiting for us. My ladyfriend quickly bought us tickets on her phone as we stood outside the gates to the platform. We had just a few minutes before the train departed. Since both tickets were on her device, we were unsure as to how we would each get through as you had to present the ticket to a scanner to get the gate to open. She flashed one ticket and we both ran through as if we were Schwarzfahrening.
The train was quite pleasant with seats plenty comfortable for the 20 minute ride to Manchester Picadilly station. Jethro Tull's "Locomotive Breath" popped into my head and I felt the excitement build inside me. I'd never been to Manchester nor ridden a train in the UK previously and my vacation with my sweetheart was to properly start soon.
My first sight of Manchester's streets was of London Road and, um, another street. Why Brits post street signs on the side of buildings instead of near traffic lights perplexes me. It's bad enough your street patterns were laid down a thousand years ago which makes wayfinding challenging but you make finding out where you are exactly something of a chore.
The temperature was much more to our liking than the 80+ temps in Madison as it was only in the low 60s. And it wasn't raining. Yet, anyway. The air smelled pleasant enough with all that coal burning having gone the way of the dodo. And no car exhaust either. It just smelled like old buildings, I guess you could say.
I would later discover that it was a routine street scene with modern and Victorian era buildings sitting side by side comfortably - or not.
Our aparthotel was in a newer building right by St. Peter's Square and our room was on the 18th floor facing east affording us a splendid view of the city.
We were in a fancy new joint, apparently, as there was this control panel right by the door.
It looked like something from 2001: A Space Odyssey with its slick black surface (I didn't measure to see if it had a 1:4:9 ratio) and backlit buttons. Plus the thermostat dial at the bottom gave off vague HAL eye vibes.
"Turn on the air conditioning, HAL."
"I'm afraid I can't do that, Skip."
"D'oh!"
One must insert their room keycard into the slot at the top in order to turn on the lights. Also note the Do Not Disturb button just beneath the card slot. Pushing that lit up a red light on the card reader panel outside the door. No more hanging signs. "WC" is surely deliberately retro for such a modern setup - water closet. The button to the right of WC turned on the bath towel bar drier thingy, something I didn't encounter on my last trip. But, in a place that rains all the time, I suppose it's the only way to ensure you have a dry towel.
It seems that the appliance company was started by a fan of Red Dwarf as they were all labeled "SMEG".
At least they weren't from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation and endowed with Genuine People Personalities. Unlike my rooms last year, this one included a coffeemaker in addition to a kettle. But, just like most places last year, this brewer only made espresso. Combined with the SMEG kettle, I could whip up Americanos. Gah! At least I came to the UK this time knowing that "batch brew" = drip coffee.
I am unsure how England went down the espresso route. Lattes, flat whites, and so on. Coffee culture there revolves around espresso. This wasn't immediately apparent to me last year as the first coffeeshop I went to, the wonderful Leicester Coffee House, has pour overs. After that, I never saw those 2 words put next to one another nor was "drip" ever seen on a coffeehouse menu. I went into the Costa, their Starbucks, as far as I can tell, by the Clock Tower and tried to order a pour over which I was told they don't have. Drip coffee? The friendly young lady behind the counter stared back at me with a blank expression that no doubt belied her true feelings: effin' Americans.
One of the really nice things about Britain is that they have wonderfully soft water. I don't know where Manchester's water comes from but it ain't from limestone pour overs deep under ground like here in Madison. The tap water tasted, well, soft with a gentle mineral flavor and no chlorine. I bet this is one reason why their beer has that soft, mellow, doughy malt taste. I know just the person to ask.
The little refrigerator in our room came with two small bottles of semi-skim milk. This is the rough equivalent to our 2% milk as it has 1.8% milkfat. Their whole milk is, if I recall correctly, 3.7% milkfat while ours is 4%.
I unpacked the bag with all the snacks to determine just how out of control I let my insatiable appetite for tangy tubers get at the airport.
Nine. Oof. One more than last year. I was pleasantly surprised to find one brand named after me. Ahem.
My ladyfriend also bought plenty at Heathrow including some heather honey biscuits so we were set on snacks.
Our trip as originally planned wasn't going to include Manchester but the hotel rate there was just too good to pass up. And so we went from an itinerary that was a lot of London, a dash of Leicester, and a bit of York to one that was largely to be spent in England's third largest city. It would be my first time in the north and this made me think of the Ninth Doctor's quip where he sounds all defensive, "Lots of planets have a north!" It occurred to me that I didn't know where the north begins. Is it north of a motorway like here in Wisconsin?
As I discovered when pondering England's geography, Christopher Eccleston is from Salford, a city in the Greater Manchester area that abuts Manchester itself to the west/northwest. Hence the rebuttal to Rose. Whoo. It's difficult to get a grip on all the English regional accents. Last year a gentleman from Wolverhampton and my tour guide from Birmingham both agreed that there are Black Country accents that they can barely understand. This is akin to someone from Milwaukee being unable to understand the accent of someone from Washington country. I guess when you have a small country, things get squished together and regional variations exist cheek by jowl.
Despite York holding the promise of medieval goodies galore, I didn't mind the change of plans. My ex-Frau and I had planned on going to Manchester back in 2024 but a combination of her mental health issues and the severe deterioration of our marriage put paid to our vacation plans. Going there with my ladyfriend would close the circle on a real low point in my relationship with my ex-Frau and the missed opportunity that resulted from it.
In preparation for the trip, I picked up a book on the city.
I do not recall why I chose Hylton's tome but tend to think because it was on the shorter side and would simply give me a good overview of the city's history as opposed to a more lengthy, perhaps more definitive, text. Start small and move on from there. Because British Airways didn't load my suitcase onto our flight from Manchester to London, I do not have the book before me as I type. But here are some of the highlights for me.
Manchester started out as a Roman outpost. During the Middle Ages it was a market town and processed wool. Despite being Britain's third largest city today, it was a backwater town for most of its life which surprised me. We get some stories about the city taking the side of the Parliamentarians during the English Civil War but, generally speaking, things don't get moving until the industrial revolution.
As Hylton notes, Manchester became a, no the, powerhouse of England's cotton industry. The cool, damp air was good for spinning as it made the threads less prone to breakage. Growth was rapid and the factory work drew people from rural areas. A large section of the book is dedicated to describing the plight of these early factory workers.
They lived in slums and the owners of the means of production were proud to be putting rather young children to work in their dark satanic mills. The living conditions were appalling for many of them with cellars being particularly bleak as there was often no windows to be had and no way for fresh air to circulate. Rain accumulated on the dirt floors as did raw sewage from their neighbors above. I was thoroughly unsurprised to learn that Manchester is the subject of Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and Hylton provides some choice quotes that, alas, I cannot reproduce here.
In addition to factory workers (lots of them being Irish) living in squalor, all the coal being burnt turned the city's air into a nasty miasma. Manchester sits in a hollow so it's pollution was never in a hurry to go anywhere and so it was happy to infest people's lungs and cover the city in a layer of soot. If I had the book at hand, I would provide some colorful quotes that describe just how nasty the air was.
The city didn't get a Minister of Parliament until 1654 when Cromwell and pals were in power. However, as soon as the king was restored, the seat went away and Mancunians didn't get a representative again until the 1830s, a fact that really bolstered the backwater image in my mind. The Peterloo Massacre was described and this brought the Doctor Who story of the same name to life now that I had the backstory.
One thing I didn't know was that the American Civil War affected Manchester greatly as the city's cotton industry got a lot of its raw material from the South. The North's blockade really put a spanner in the works for Manchester.
The city built a completely man-made canal to hasten the process of getting goods to and from the port of Liverpool. An early railway was built to take on the canal industry. In addition to goods, it found success (eventually) in hauling passengers as one of the very first passenger rail services.
The book is a bit light on the 20th and 21st centuries but it read a lot like the sorry tales of so many American Rust Belt cities with deindustrialization hitting it hard. I don't recall the book mentioning population totals during this period but I found a website indicating it went from a high of around 725,000 people around 1930 down to around 400,000 in 2000. It has since rebounded to somewhere in the vicinity of 590,000.
At first, the text along with some commentary from my tour guide in Birmingham last year gave the impression that Manchester is a very blue collar city, rough around the edges, and perhaps not quite as friendly as England's second largest city. (Although I've not yet written about it, I found Birmingham to have a surfeit of Midwest nice.) I got the impression that it would have a Milwaukee-like vibe to it. But, as the book notes, the city went from a manufacturing powerhouse to an economy largely based on commerce and business services which sounded very much like Chicago's transformation.
Hylton includes Mark Twain wry comment, "I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable." Would the city be dull and lethargic? Was it still the Naptown of Britain? If so, would a bargain hotel rate be worth it?
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A couple days before my ladyfriend and I were set to leave, I got an email saying that British Airways was looking for people to take a different flight than the one we booked as they had overbooked it something fierce. With approval from my travel companion, I chatted with an agent got us onto a flight that left O'Hare a couple hours earlier and got us upgraded to World Traveller Plus (pronounced ploos) which is luxury economy class.
Never having flown in anything other than a seat for the impecunious proles, I was looking forward to the upgraded amenities, whatever those ended up being.
First and foremost among them was lots more legroom. My knees would not have to be pressed against the seat in front of me as they had about 6" of clearance. Ooh la la!
Each seat had a remote control for the screens that were a mere foot or so away from our noses. The ultimate in economy class luxury. We would truly have a flight of ease.
We got hot towels which were handed to us from a pair of tongs.
We also got a little kit for the flight which included a pen, lip balm, compression socks, a toothbrush & toothpaste, and a sleep mask.
The food was an upgrade over what the saps behind us got. Oh, and I believe the flight started with the option of wine or orange juice. Our flight attendants were very nice and the 8 hour trek across the Atlantic Ocean went smoothly and fairly quickly for me as I was able to get 2-3 hours of sleep and lose myself for long stretches playing Mahjong.
We landed in London and Heathrow was, as expected, a zoo, a zoo we were to contend with for almost 3 hours. After watching security test my ladyfriend's shampoo (or was it body wash?) for explosives, we grabbed a bite to eat and went shopping.
