Salford


We'll meet again

I’ve just got back from a meander around Salford Quays looking for locations for the next page of comic art. It’s a good job I did, because the patch of wasteland I was going to use is now a building site for yet another batch of luxury apartments.

Anyway, I also got a few pictures worth putting into pic of the day-

Click on the thumbnail for the full picture



I wandered around the War Museum for a while, I haven’t been there since it opened (pictures from that visit 1, 2). There was a party of veterans there, being entertained by a pair in It Ain’t ‘Alf Hot Mum get ups.


Dirty Old Town

I met my love by the gasworks wall

Dreamed a dream by the old canal

I kissed my girl by the factory wall

Dirty old town, dirty old town

Clouds are drifting across the moon

Cats are prowling on their beat

Springs a girl from the streets at night

Dirty old town, dirty old town

I heard a siren from the docks

Saw a train set the night on fire

I smelled the spring on the smokey wind

Dirty old town, dirty old town

I’m going to make me a big sharp axe

Shining steel tempered in the fire

I’ll chop you down like an old dead tree

Dirty old town, dirty old town

It’s another grey day in Manchester, but I do love this city. (Okay, the song’s really about Salford, but I have a dozen versions, including one by Frank Black. It was a bit shaming to see how few other people were singing along when he did his gig in the Academy last year.)


Best Laid Plans

I was going to get around the lack of connectivity by coming into Easy Internet and using my pen drive to transfer comics and stuff to Spinneyhead. Of course, the USB slot they so kindly provide either isn’t working or just refuses to recognise the pen drive, so no dice there, I’m afraid.

Hopefully within the next week I’m going to load myself down with 35mm film and wander around the city centre taking pictures for a project I’m calling Look Up: Manchester above head height.. The intent should be fairly obvious from the name. I’m going to take the time to work out a route around town and do some research as a way to string the photos together. I may add a third strand which’ll basically be my day out taking these pictures and personal reminisces (“I remember when this was all fields y’know. Damn, that was good acid that day!”)

Other projects I’m brewing up include The Manchester History of the World, with a timeline stringing across the top of national and global events and across the bottom of Mancunian moments. The idea being to show what was happening here at these points in history and how, if at all, wars etc. impacted the people of Manchester and Salford. (Why Manchester? Well, because I live here of course. And because the Industrial Revolution stuff will be perfectly suited.)


The concrete and the clay

First project for my course is to do a piece introducing Manchester. So I spent most of today wandering around the Dirty Ol’ Town (no, actually, that’s Salford isn’t it) trying to see it in new ways. I’m also randomly phonecamming textures, colours and shapes.



Hearing- Fatboy Slim, Halfway Between The Gutter and The Stars


I’ve actually been paid to spend the whole day surfing. This borderline cyberloafing is for a purpose, I’m hunting for funding for a hospital project.
Things I discovered-
I was almost as surprised to find that a Procter & Gamble exceutive hadn’t sold his soul to satan as I was to discover the company participates in animal testing.
The Guardian is controlled by a Trust set up to get round death duties that would have shut the paper down.
The Countryside Alliance really are scary. They’ve got data on all their ‘opponents’ that would make a Police state envious.
There’s a man in Cambridge with a huge collection of old computers so that when the first museum of the PC is built they won’t have to hunt out rare boxes.
Cocaine production is one of the largest causes of deforestation in the Amazon. Angus Deayton and John Leslie have got a lot to answer for.
And finally-
It’s the tower blocks in Salford that make it rain in Manchester. Damn those scallies!



Easy listening- Grandmaster Flash Vs The Sugarhill Gang

No new prose today. I’m going to keep weekend posts limited to pictures and the play list so I can get on with some work. (So far today, the work has consisted of reading all the sections of the paper and watching bits of the Commonwealth cycling road race. Tomorrow it will include going off to Salford Quays to watch the triathlon then going for a bike ride if the weather’s nice.)