north of manchester

You’d think they were talking about shifting to Bolivia.

Honestly.

Sat here in my Ramsbottom living room, a tad short of thirty miles from Manchester, a good half of the voices reaching me over the past day have been Media.

And oh so many of them have been broadcasting out from London, talking in veiled, shuddering terms of the proposed shift of BBC departments from London, to gasp, Manchester …

… that’s … the North, isn’t it ..?

Hello. Mr Ms Media Person … we can hear you, you know.

And we can understand, in spite of the accent.

Husbandthing is employed by the BBC and is based in Manchester. He [mostly] leaves in the morning and returns [mostly] in the evening. Hang on, this morning he left for London … he was going to catch one of those new-fangled flying machines from the place where they keep so many, just outside Manchester. It reaches the bright lights of capital city in less than an hour. Tomorrow he’ll catch another one back in the late afternoon, returning home, the other side of Manchester, in time for his daughter’s early evening carol concert.

That’s right, ye veiled shuddering broadcasters, the new fangled flying machines travel in both directions.

However, should you choose to travel up by automobile, take care. Don’t be like the BBC person who sent an urgent package for BBC Newcastle to Husbandthing in Manchester, assuming he could just pop it across (I kid you not).

Listen carefully – drive up the country, and when you reach the M62, turn left.

All right, I know, there are serious considerations to uprooting, but for heavens sake, the moves aren’t going to happen for five years. If you’re not happy, that’s 60 months to find a different job beneath another of capital city’s bright lights.

I am not talking with smug complacency here. Husbandthing’s job is not entirely safe in the cutbacks, however, he is the veteran of several redundancies and the package that goes along with these ones would go a long way to help boost the deposit we are saving for the move to a home with sufficient bedrooms for both flavours of children.

And in honesty, were he made redundant, he’d pick up another job (yes, we have more than one fine job here in the North) and then move back to the beeb and up into a space opened by someone who decided that a move to the North would explode their brain with the altitude (something, strangely, that has yet to happen on any of their many winter skiing holidays).

Yes, please, if you have any feelings that a move to the North would be insufferable then please don’t do it. You would be insufferable. Stay in London, where I can avoid you.

And if you do decide to slum it terribly, if you pack your ridiculously huge 4 wheel drive and your nasty, double-parking-outside-schools-because-your-children-are-the-most-important North London attitude, don’t come to Lancashire, don’t come to Ramsbottom.

There is a place for you. It’s called Cheshire.

Oh don’t worry, you might see me. I’ll pop down a couple of times a year to glean from your charity shops and buy your Alderly Edge bakery out of Florentines and those giant stuck together chocolate bomb things.

You’ll notice me, if you listen carefully. I too have a Southern accent, but I don’t talk through my nose.

Or my London.



Postcard of 'The River' by Hetty Chapman and Karen Allerton, that’s tacked above my computer chair. Click to see better