A letter home: Grover’s view as a Mutant Abroad

by Gerry Black on 5.04.10

Hydrophobia: fear of water. Or rabies as an excuse to avoid swimming

As you continue your fledgling ping-pong journey between library and toxicity, consider the fate of the humble mussel, deigned recently to be a soon-to-be early casualty of increasing acidity in the world’s oceans. As their existing shells are said to soon start slowly dissolving to a point as thin as your chances of fitting in back home during Christmas break, consider this: our armour against outside influences is rarely what we think. Especially when we’re defending ourselves from the imaginary threats from the past, and the glorious bastion of good times that is Memory.

I came back to Manchester in September to meet friends I hadn’t seen in up to 20 years, returning from around the country to the spawning grounds of the Oxford Road corridor and its environs. Yes, I was absolutely 2 years old when I studied here: you may remember me in a rush-fuelled Self-Stroller nicknamed ‘Little Fury Much’ barrelling down Oxford road wrapped in a nappy made from Bacardi Breezer labels* shouting ‘WHeeeeEEEE!’ as I freewheeled past the BBC in case there were talent scouts at reception. Or nannies.

My friends, delightfully, had changed less than the city’s Drinking Map. Where asking for directions to a late bar- any late bar – years ago may have resulted in a middle-fingered hint or a tight-lipped fist, the 2009 version turned out to be a double-handed open-palmed 10-digit finger buffet of choices; I swayed along to the sound of the Smiths and elegant supping in the Tiger Lounge and places I can’t remember in the delightful height of drunken safety; found Hulme again and the One Tree Island crew where the only wrinkles are on the drumskins, and can only suggest that you try to suggest reasons – any reason- in return that I shouldn’t move back while finding and building bigger lists of your own of places that may be better and untried, because I will be back to visit your burgeoning cradle of Oomph as soon as I can stop smiling enough to pass the Weird Passenger test at Schiphol and hop a flight out of Holland.

Just as many of you might, I met my first love in Manchester, and met her again in September after >koff< years, within 100 feet of the place my jaw dropped to its knees in delight in first seeing her. The wonder of this reunion was compounded by the fact that we went to see The Chameleons, our soundtrack of first love, in The Academy that same night, and we wrapped up the years and the night in a paper-folded curry in All Saints’ Park with smiles in the dark and no tears, kissing or regrets. But the joy of being able to do so was eclipsed entirely by the earlier reunion of nearly 10 of us exMancriates, up to 20 years later, in our old local (The Salutation, which miraculously survived the Drinking Map’s cartographical rewrite). Time’s imagined acidic qualities had done pretty much fuck all to either faces or optimism. Only insight and outlook had expanded: kids had been born or borne, careers built, lives led, cars bought, sold, painted, stolen, loves and businesses won and lost, but we were and are all still essentially precisely united, despite being untied by time’s tricky fingers in the thread of passed years.

Which has WTF to do with you exactly? TFing point is your people, your shell: your people, people. I’m no time machine, and can turn the tide about as much as Canute could, acidic oceans notwithstanding; but I was rabid in trepidation before my return, and hydrophobia metaphors being what they are, I found the waters of your city well worth the gurgle, despite feeling initially lacking a shell that in the end I didn’t need. You should be, by the way, outdoors right now, discovering what you don’t know about your city, drinking it in, swimming in the joy of friends. So go make some more if you haven’t already.

Why wait 20 more years to find out they might be the best part of your future?

*If you do, then it is true: the acid you have now is better than back then. Thankfully, so is the psychiatric care available free on your wonderful NHS. And Bacardi Breezer in those days was called ‘Thunderbird’.