gin-nurtered time waster.
©Elsie Anderton,
The Babylon Lane Tales 2012
The Babylon Tales
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the almost award winning blog from Manchester
I came here for a boy and the convenient lure of an MSc scholarship. That was 13 years ago. The boy is long gone and my student days are but a fusty memory of Blast-Aways, pot noodles and wrinkle free skin. Yet I am still here, despite my itchy feet and stubbornly Yorkshire soul. I didn't expect it to capture me and I didn't expect to stay.
And, yes: it's not the most beautiful of cities (thanks, Chloe Sevigny), lacking the grandeur and majesty of its northern neighbours, Leeds and Liverpool. Though unlike them, Manchester is a city built on fairness, reform and emancipation.
It's often rainy, sometimes seedy and always honest. It's charm doesn't lie in its architectural gems (obscured by the endless drizzle and tucked behind never ending, homogenised development), but the soft philanthropic heart that thumps stoically beneath its sturdy, industrial grim.
In a time where our politicians seek to isolate the already marginalised and when we are constantly told that society is dead, it is comforting that Manchester's foundations - firmly built on compassion - are not crumbling. Manchester's still giving.
This week Thirty One flittered past my twitter feed and then thudded through my letterbox. Thirty One is a collection of Manchester-made music, curated by DJ and writer Dave Haslam and including tracks from Elbow, I am Kloot, Mr Scruff, Delphic and Noel Gallagher. All proceeds go to CALM a charity formed in 2006, with the help of Tony Wilson, to combat the high suicide rates of young men in the UK.
Go here for more of my Manchester gushings, written last year for the Manchester Literature Festival...
I often spend Mondays feeling over-awed. Usually because I've spent the morning shouting at a 7 year old as I frantically febreze her uniform and kick her out of the door with a slice of burnt toast clutched in her clammy hand. The rest of Monday is normally spent sitting slack jawed and hunched over my laptop, as I desperately try to remember my name, what I do for a living and why I always leave the most mathematically complicated of tasks until last minute.
Today's awe was completely different. I spent the afternoon being celebrated as one of 400 Women of the Year at a hotel on Park Lane. In my real life apparently I am amazing - or so Sandy Toksvig kept telling me - and worthy of champagne and five star luncheons. And as lovely as this was, I still can't shake the feeling that someone, somewhere has made a mistake.
Perhaps somewhere out there is another, more altruistic, Elsie who got up and saved the world seven times before breakfast. This Sliding Doors Elsie probably found a cure for cancer, whilst I greedily ate her four course lunch. Tonight, as I make my way north after spending an evening buying unnecessaries in the V&A, the other Elsie is sheltering the homeless and singlehandedly fighting global warming. Poor other Elsie will remain an unsung hero (until next year at least), because Sheila in admin put the wrong address on the envelope.
This is not false modesty. It is very easy to believe that there has been some awful error, as I spent most of the day gazing open mouthed at my known heroines (Maureen Lipman, Shirley Williams, Shami Chakrabarti, Nawar El Saadawi, Camila Batmanghelidjh) and being humbled by the achievements and self-sacrifice of many of the other women I had never heard of before.
It's difficult not to be overcome with admiration when you talk to 106 year old Hetty Bower, a veteran anti-war campaigner, originally horrified into pacifism by the state of soldiers returning from the Somme and who can still be found protesting in Trafalgar Square. Or Naveeda Ikram, the first female British Muslim Lord Mayor (at 37 she presides over the council in Bradford). Or Karen Sorab who fought to set up the Rainbow special needs school in Wandsworth and the BeyondAutism charity to fill much needed gaps in community education. Or the seven serving military medics (known as the Sister Act) who fight, on a daily basis, to save and rebuild the lives of wounded soldiers returning from Afghanistan.
These women are truly amazing and I am utterly humbled and very, very proud to be included. Wow.
Skippy had her eye's tested yesterday. She's been complaining recently that the world looks spotty.
It went something like this:
Optician: Right Skippy, can you explain to me what these spots you see look like and when you see them?
Skippy: Well, yes. They look like spots. Everything I look at all the time is very dotty.
Optician: Ok. Is there anything else you can tell me? Is it more dotty in the morning, or maybe are far away things more spotty?
Skippy: Well, there is something else - Mummy I've never told you this before - but sometimes when I look at my hand I can SEE RIGHT THROUGH IT. I'm not sure if I'm imagining it though...
Optician (coughing slightly): I think it's pretty safe to say that's in your imagination Skippy, unless you have superpowers, of course.
In my next life, can I just have a normal child, please?
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I mock, but I do so from the comfortable position
Reading the free copy of Grazia I got in an International Women's Day event goody bag had me bristling this morning. Bristling.
gin-nurtered time waster.
©Elsie Anderton,
The Babylon Lane Tales 2012
The Babylon Tales
Promote your Page too
gin-nurtered time waster.
©Elsie Anderton,
The Babylon Lane Tales 2012
The Babylon Tales
Promote your Page too
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