I still have plenty of time to get to Levenshulme within the window Sally gave me. The A6 has slightly more powered traffic on it than the roads around the centre. I recognise the smell of burnt ethanol mingled with the saliva generating aroma of biodiesel. Motor vehicles are still outnumbered by bikes though.

The address Sally gave me is on a street that runs parallel to the railway line. It’s a dead end with a park, converted to allotments, at the end. This street runs north to south, so it’s not so good for catching sunlight on the roofs. A lot of them, however have basic green roofs, boxed off and with sedum grass sprouting from them. I just hope the waterproof membranes are good enough.

The house has frames in the front garden, for peas I guess but bare now. There are still some onions and leeks in the beds around the frames though. It seems that every piece of earth that can be reached has been planted. I don’t know how many people are completely self sufficient, but a fair few must be getting close to it. It’s like the whole dig for victory thing from the second world war, only it’s going to go on for longer this time. We are, let’s face it, entering the post pollution society. Considering how far they’ve got in Manchester in such a short time I’m optimistic about what can be achieved elsewhere. This was the world’s first industrial city, responsible in a way for the advances that have led to so much pollution, perhaps it can make up for that by becoming one of the first truly eco cities.

Sally’s short and tiny, with a pretty face and short black hair. She’s wearing some sort of one piece that’s splattered with paint. There’s a moment of recognition, for both of us. She nods and smiles, a little coy, “The wanderer returns. Come in.” There’s a short corridor with the stairs at the end, but we take an immediate right into the front room.

I’m not the greatest with names, and I still haven’t placed Sally though I’m sure we’ve met. And spent long enough together for me to remember the face at least.

“You don’t remember me do you?”

“Well, erm, no. I recognise you but I can’t remember why.”

“I’m Keith’s sister. You spent a week helping me find a flat once.”

“Oh, right.”

“You don’t remember? You did that sort of thing often?”

“Often enough, I guess.”

“Keith’s dead.”

I have a horrible feeling I’ve got of to a bad start somehow, her pronouncement is so cold. “Last year.” she continues, “They said that he might still be alive, if they could have had the right drugs. But the world situation put a stop to that.” She’s started fretting, little movements like she’s pacing on the spot. She clasps her hands together, drops them to her side, puts them behind her back. “Sorry. I’ve been trying to think how I’d tell you about it ever since I got your email saying you were back in town. I think I fucked it up didn’t I?”

She tries the smile again, a little more nervous this time. I’m at a loss for words, which is bad. What she needs right now is reassurance of some form, but we stand across from each other, not quite ready to make a move. “Tea?” she asks.

“You have tea?”

“Nettle tea. I quite like it.”

“Yes please.”

She leaves the room and I take a seat. I have a feeling I made more of an impression on her than she did on me and wants to be remembered better than my sad old synapses are able. Thinking about it I do remember Keith having a sister, but I swear she was blonde. There are photos on the mantelpiece, maybe they’ll give me some information. One larger picture is a family portrait, Keith, a mousey Sally and their parents. Keith is sitting with the others around him. He does not look very well, what I first thought was a crew cut could be something worse. Tucked into the picture frame are a couple of other photos. One shows Sally in a baggy T-shirt on a beach, looking off to her left, the sea reflected in her sunglasses. In the other she’s with her brother, who looks much healthier, out on the town in a bar I think I recognise. The Sally in this picture is the blonde one I remember.

“Tea.” she announces as she comes through the door. “It will need a while to brew.”

We sit across from each other, trying not to watch the tea brew. “So. You said you had something for me?” I manage after a while.

“Keith kept some of your stuff. And your other friends put him in charge of looking after the stuff you posted back.”

I’d set up a post box, long distance, and passed the details on, and posted backups of my pictures and writing to it. I hadn’t even thought about checking what had made it, I’d just assumed it had been a failure.

“How much stuff?”

“There’s a shoe box of disks, just about. They’re in the basement somewhere, we can go and have a look.” She’s blushing, and I’m getting that feeling again. Looking for something to do, she pours the nettle tea. It’s quite nice. I’ve drunk worse, and stranger, in the last few years. “I haven’t checked the post box since Keith passed. There might be some more stuff in it. And I’ve hardly seen any of his… your friends since the funeral. Everyone’s so busy now, wrapped up in getting along. There’s my neighbours, I guess, but we just don’t seem to have the community everyone else talks about.”

“It can be hard getting to know people.”

“You never seemed to have that problem. Not from what I saw and read.”

“I’ve always had trouble talking to people, they don’t seem to have any trouble talking to me. I’ve never really understood how that works.” I pour myself some more tea. “Do you live here alone?”

“Yes. I have a spare room.”

“You’d rent it out?” This has headed off in an odd direction, but I was going to start looking for somewhere more permanent than the hotel anyway.

“I might.”

By the time we’ve finished the tea we’ve agreed terms and I’ll move in tomorrow. It’s not as if I have much to bring. “Shall we go and see if we can find your stuff?” she suggests.

We head down into the basement. I have to duck under beams that she’s too short to be bothered by. The basement has about the same footprint as the first floor, which makes it larger than I’d expected.. There are a lot of boxes along one wall and a work desk along what equates to the front wall. Canvasses are stacked on the work desk and leaning against the boxes- lots of paintings, oils or acrylics I think, of local buildings grand and small. “You did these?”

“I just started again. I think we’ve reached the point where people will pay for art again. I’ve done some shop signs as well.”

“Nice. I like the town hall.”

“Thanks.” She starts lifting boxes down. I notice that none of them are higher than she can reach. She’s stacked them herself, maybe she really hasn’t had that many visitors recently. “I think it’s in…. That box there.”

Sally hands me a shoe box. I lift the lid and it is filled with dvds, cds and thumb drives. I think they all got through, which is a hugely greater success rate than I’d expected. The ones I thought were most important, or most sellable, are backed up online or in other disks in various European banks, but this collection will add depth to them.

“Let’s put that in your room.” Sally suggests after I’ve stared at the inside of the box for a couple of minutes. “Then you can go and collect all your stuff.”

My room’s on the first floor, with the bathroom between it and Sally’s. It has a double bed, cupboards and not a lot of floor space. There’s a second floor, with a tiny studio making the most of the skylights. I can live here quite easily. Again, I’ve slept in worse over the last few years.

There are schemes all over town to promote self sufficiency. Manchester’s ecological sphere of influence is shrinking inwards. It proudly proclaims itself to be approaching carbon neutrality and trumpets the aim of becoming a net exporter of energy.

In the city centre the tallest buildings have all been eco-tarted in some way. Several years ago the Cooperative Insurance Services tower was partially clad in solar cells. The company also mounted wind turbines atop an office block, but it never seemed to get enough airflow and they were idle more often than not. They’ve obviously mapped the wind patterns around town since then because there are now several buildings with windmill blades spinning madly on their roofs. They generate a low hum that’s strangely relaxing. They did try to put a turbine on top of the Beetham Tower, the city’s tallest building, but they built it too big and the skyscraper wasn’t made for the strain. So they didn’t even mount the windmill on the tower and erected it in Heaton Park instead.

Solar is popular on lots of the buildings. Production of photovoltaics was interrupted for several years as it became hard to transport the raw materials around the world, but solar thermal has flourished. It’s not so hard to produce evacuated glass tubes, so a lot of buildings have arrays of them fitted on any south facing surface. Mostly they heat enough water during the day for evening showers or to keep the house warm during the night, but I hear that more than one workshop inventor is working on a Stirling energy to generate electricity using the heat.

Within a few streets, in any direction, of my hotel there are terraced streets running East to West. That acreage of south facing roofing has been put to good use. As well as providing a community heat source the system that’s been set up provides the heat to distill and clean the water supply.

Trying to scale back on infrastructure to better cope with circumstances it was decided that the cleaning of tap water wasn’t a priority. It was a waste of energy to have every drop pure enough to drink when most of it was used for other purposes. This meant boiling all your drinking water or finding other ways to purify it. Most houses now have a brown water tank- from showers, washing up etc. to be used in the toilet or on the garden- and a clear water one. The clear water tank is usually fed by evaporation distillation of tap water using waste heat from the house and solar heating.

I cycle around randomly up and down streets, as much to get used to the fixed wheel as to explore. As long as the back wheel is turning the pedals are turning. If my legs stop going around they’ll either lock the back wheel or get kicked off. If I lean forward it takes some of the weight off the rear wheel, making locking it up easier. Then I can lean back and put more force into the braking. It’s an interesting experience. I can see why no-one wanted to take this strange bike on.

At the end of one of the streets there is a two storey red brick building. An old factory, probably. I do a circuit and find the front door. It’s double wide and has huge stalks of corn painted on it. Above the doors a sign in exuberant graffiti writing pronounces ‘Ethanol!’. Set inside the bigger doors is a smaller one for individual entry. It’s cracked open and I can see movement through it. Despite years of experience and that old saying about the cat I can’t fight my curiosity and pop my head through the door.

It smells a bit like a brewery, a bit like the floor of a forest. There are big vats, with lots of plumbing, that go up through the space that would have been the first floor . The roof isn’t a roof. It seems to be a framework with tables on it.

“Here for a few gallons?” a woman in overalls asks me. “We won’t have a new batch for a few days.”

“This is a brewery?”

“And distillery. But don’t go drinking any of our shit. You’ll go blind.”

Now it all makes sense. They make ethanol biofuel. The big vats brew “beer” from plant waste- I can see a pile of straw and paper in one corner. I don’t see any sort of pressure cooker, so I guess they’re breaking it down with enzymes. “Are those things on the roof solar stills?”

“Yes they are.”

The solar stills distill the brew, strengthening it. No doubt, as there are several of them, they are set up in series, each one strengthening the product of the previous one. At the end of the process they should have alcofuel concentrated enough to run a car on.

“Almost a shame I don’t have a car to run on it.”

“Oh, you should try next door. They convert cars to run on this stuff.”

“Maybe when I’m rich enough. Sorry for popping in like that, I’m just nosey.”

“No problem.”

Next door, as promised, there’s a workshop where they convert cars to run on ethanol. I never did learn what it takes to do that. There are five cars, all small ones, being worked on and a couple of motors mounted on frames and connected up to generators or pumps.

I carry on my learning reconnaisance, round and round the streets, until it starts to rain. Then I sprint back to the hotel as fast as I can. On the way I pass communal composters and a pick up from the ethanol shop collecting paper and other cellulose waste. There’s a workshop making new computers from old. Lots of stuff is being traded second hand and refurbished. Capitalism is alive and well, just in a very different way to how it used to be.

The whole terrace of houses had been replaced with Easter eggs. That’s what it looked like. Or maybe pine cones. That’s probably what they’re meant to evoke- pine cones standing on their fat bases in the sun- but I can’t help but see easter eggs. The kind that were filled with toffee, they were always a little too elongated to be properly ovoid. It doesn’t help that they’re brown. I’m sure that’s part of the pine cone motif as well, but it just reminds me of chocolate.

I’m still a few streets from where I’m heading, the address sent to me by Sally from Keith’s email address. But I have to know how they came to be here. They’re set further back from the street than the houses they’ve replaced, I reckon, and each has a small garden out front. In many cases the garden extends around the egg house, as they’re detached from each other, to further greenery at the rear. The gardens are mostly given over to practical plants- herbs and root vegetables, one garden is filled with the familiar large leaves of potatoes.

I must be looking lost, or confused, because the guy working in the garden I pass half way down the street steps up to his gate, “Are you looking for someone?”

“No, I…. Well, not on this street. I was just surprised by these buildings.”

I guess he’s in his fifties, greying but still lean. When he stands up straight he’s a little shorter than me. He gives me that ‘You’re not from around here.’ look. I’m getting used to it, but I’m worried that there’s sometimes hostility behind it. I can understand it, there’s not been a lot of movement within and between countries unil the last few months. And, of course, so much of the troubles of the last few years started with strangers coming to town. But this guy is curious, maybe a little defensive, nothing to get too nervous about.

“Where have you come in from?” That he would understand without me mentioning it is a little unexpected. He smiles, “You have the look.”

“The look? I just got back from France a few days ago.”

“Where in France?”

“Paris when it kicked off, Apt most recently.”

“That’s where the last of them were rounded up, wasn’t it?” he steps back and opens the gate, inviting me in. ‘Rounded up’ is far too tame to describe the events down in the south of France, but I haven’t found the right words for it yet either, and I was there.

“Yeah.”

“You chase trouble?”

“I guess I do. Did. I’ve come home now.”

There is a large bush of Rosemary inside the gate. I rub the leaves and savour the smell. There’s a patch of squash taking up the rest of the front garden. “Are you self sufficient, then?”

“Off this small a patch? Not likely. But I have an allotment on the old park. It’s still not enough, but I do well off it. But you were really interestedc in the house.”

“Yes.” There’s a little, cartoony, porch. He opens the door and beckons me inside. The room is circular, as I’d expect, with a spiral staircase in the middle. It’s split, with a low work surface, a breakfast bar even, into a living room and kitchen. There is ample light from several portholes high up on the wall. “It’s a little poky, but not much more than the old place. And I don’t have much crap left to fill it up with any more either.”

“How did a whole street get replaced with these things?”

“It was burnt down, in the riots. These pods were a quick and cheap way to replace them. They bulldozed the rubble into the house’s own basements, concreted them over and dropped these in their place. They’re manufactured locally too, lots of recycled materials. I think it was a bit of a publicity stunt, the factory that produces them has never been so busy.”

“There’s two bedrooms upstairs and a toilet through that door there. The walls are about this thick” he does the cliche fisherman thing with his hands, “so it’s warm in winter and cool in summer without needing any heating or air conditioning. I miss my old house, and all the stuff I had in it, but this place is a good home. Would you like some tea?”

“Well, I….”

I’m beginning to think that I may have happened upon a lonely man looking for any sort of company he can find when there’s a knock at the door. “It’s open!” he shouts.

A black boy in his early teens or late tweens comes in. He’s wearing a hoodie and jeans and carrying a box under his arm. “Mum said to give you this mister Robinson.”

I admit, I take a step back when Robinson pulls the from the box. I’ve seen a few guns in the last five years, and their arrival rarely bodes well. This one is practically a toy, a skinny little child’s drawing of a gun with a skinny barrel mounted on a small wooden frame and stock. It’s still too bulky to be an air rifle, perhaps a .22. I make a guess on how quickly I can get out of the door and over the gate.

Robinson lays the gun on the counter and lays a box of shells and a telescopic sight beside it. “Thanks Sammy.” The boy notices me, or acknowledges me, for the first time. He cocks his head to one side, curious at my presence. “Oh, Sammy, I was just telling mister?”

“Jones.”

“I was just telling mister Jones about my house. He’s just got back from France. I’m sure he has a few interesting tales to tell. One day.”

“One day.” Who am I kidding, I’ve got the book deal already. That one day had best be soon to justify the advance.

“I’m going hunting tomorrow.” Robinson answers my unvoiced question about the gun. “Sammy’s mother is a gunsmith, self taught, she looks after my gun and packs the bullets for me.”

I’m beginning to relax again, the explanation seems plausible enough. The gun may even have been legal, back in the days when that mattered. “What do you hunt?”

“Vermin mainly. It’s pest control and a source of meat. Two birds with one stone.”

“Birds?”

“Well, squirrels mostly. There are still lots of greys in the city. American invaders, it’s quite apt. How are you with a gun?”

“Far more experienced than I’d like. And quite a good shot, to be honest.”

“Join me tomorrow, about noon.”

“Okay. I never did like those little grey bastards.”

“I should be going.” Sammy announces, “Shoot lots of them mister Robinson.”

“Okay Sammy. Tell your mother thanks. I have a new batch of wine if she wants to pop over for a drink later.” They both blush, because they both know what that really means.

After the boy leaves Robinson puts the ordnance back in the box. “He’s a good kid. His father left when he was just six. And his mother and I have been…..” he puts the box on a shelf above the sink. “I wish he’d call me George. I offered you tea.”

“Yes.”

When the kettle is on he comes back around the breakfast bar “Is your name really Jones?”

“Robert Jones.”

“There was a Jones who kept, what’s the word? Blogging, from France. He got quite a following. When the network was up long enough to read it.”

“Yes. I spent a lot of time with him.”

“And then one day he just walks down my street. Who would have thought I’d have a brush with fame today.”

“I’m not that famous.”

“You’ll do.”

“Do you often strike up conversations with strangers and then invite them to use you gun?”

“Not often. But then again, strangers don’t often walk down my street.”

Note This is a first draft, but I’ve decided to share my NaNoWriMo progress as I go along. We’ll see how I get on. The idea is to write a travelogue of the narrator’s return home after being far too close to some momentous events. How his old home has changed whilst he’s been away, and what kept him away so long, will be revealed as he feels like making it known. Any comments are welcome. There are bound to be loads of continuity errors before I go through and do the second draft, but it’ll help to have them pointed out.

My taxi is powered by a well known local kebab chain. In fact all the motorised cabs in the taxi rank had a rosette around the filler cap championing their source of biodiesel. I’d have taken one of the pedal rickshaws, but my baggage is heavy and I doubt they would have been able to haul it.

“Are you up from London then?” the taxi driver asks.

“No. I’ve come over from Europe.” This surprises him, I see the twitch of his head as he looks at me in the rear view mirror.

“Were you there long?”

“A while.”

I used to say I never planned to leave Manchester- until I went travelling for a month that turned into five years. A lot has happened in those years, a lot that has kept me away from home. Which is a shame, because a lot of interesting and important stuff has happened here whilst I’ve been away. Less spectacular, but arguably more important, than the stuff I was nearly part of. I’ve made a living covering the events in France and elsewhere, but I want to write about something positive for a while. And I want to meet all my old friends, and find out whether they’ve still got any of my stuff.

There aren’t many vehicles on the road. Buses, other biodiesel or ethanol powered vehicles, some electric cars and bikes. Lots and lots of bikes. Some sections look like old snapshots from India or China, the two wheeled masses blocking much of the road. I can’t help wondering where my bikes are, this would be so much more relaxing to ride through than the old days of constantly dodging motorised road users.

Most of the cycles flocking around the taxi are quite basic, old school even. Lugged and brazed steel tube frames in the traditional sit up and beg arrangement, quite a few of them single speeds. I get the feeling there’s a factory, or at least a workshop, somewhere nearby turning these things out. I shall have to investigate.

We move out of the centre at pedal pace, which isn’t much slower than the old motorised pace. I’ve booked into a hotel in Rusholme, not that far from one of the branches of the kebab chain that powers my taxi. So that’s dinner sorted. Through snail mail and email I have told people I’m on my way, but you don’t just turn up on someone’s doorstep after five years away. So I’ll set up camp in the hotel and then go visiting.

The taxi driver accepts Euros, and offers change in a variety of currencies. “What’s a Levy?”

“It’s Levenshulme money. One of those LETS things? Local shops and people take them instead of real money.”

The list gives exchange rates. This is a taxi, so I expect them to be somewhat less than I’d get elsewhere. And we’re not in Levenshulme, so I should go for an even more local currency. I’ll take it in Curry Mile dollars please.”

Tipping generously gets me some help carrying my bags up to my room. They’re heavy because everything I want to keep from the last five years is in them. Turmoil has done wonders to cut down my hoarding instinct, but I’m still a sucker for comics and books. Most of one bag is made up of mensuels and samizdat one sheets I haven’t got round to reading yet. I have a week’s worth of clothes, two very small laptops, a number of peripherals, some very clever cabling and a few mementoes. Everything I left in Manchester, if it hasn’t been further dispersed, is spread around the homes of friends or in a self storage container I arranged remotely and don’t really know the location of.

The hotel is actually three terraced houses, and the rooms are more like bedsits. My room is the top floor of the middle house, a bedroom, bathroom and storage room. I share a hallway and the front door with the two rooms downstairs. I plug the laptops in to charge and head out for food.

The Curry Mile isn’t as gaudy as it used to be, there’s a distinct lack of neon. It’s still nowhere near a mile long either but it doesn’t really have anywhere to expand into. The menus have some interesting additions. “Rabbit kebab?” The man behind the counter gives me a look like I’m from outer space. Evidently they’ve been selling Thumper in a naan for a while now and only an idiot wouldn’t know about it.

“Yes? You want one?”

“Sure, why not.”

The rabbit chunks on the skewer look like darker chicken meat. It sizzles satisfyingly when he puts it onto the coals. “Where do you get rabbit meat from?”

“Local grown. A farm in Cheshire.”

I want to ask more, but he goes back to kneading dough into naan. So I stare out of the window at the stream of cycles, chip fat taxis and electric cars that are passing by. It’s odd to be back.

The rabbit is tough, but very tasty. It’s not as if I’ve never eaten it before, it was just a surprise to find it in a kebab shop.

Now I want to sleep. It’s been nearly four day’s journey to get here from the south of France and I have that wiped out but not really tired lethargy of sitting around for extended periods. GMT is only seven o’clock. I could go out or I could go to sleep, but I don’t really want to do either. So I decide to do some wireless sniffing.

I’ve accumulated a bag of kit that’s larger than both laptops combined, just for the finding of and connection to wireless nodes. But I don’t really need any of it, because the lights on my little keychain sniffer are all green. Urban networks always have better coverage, but too much time spent in valleys and small towns have left me paranoid. There are more than enough open nodes, so I pick one and I’m away.

It turns out Manchester, and the Northwest in general, has a good wired and unwired network. Connections to the rest of the world are spotty as always but they’re getting better slowly. I’ve even had a few emails from the Divided States, where I seem to be getting ever more readers. I fire off a few replies and tell Manchester in general that I am here, then start on my notes for the day.

I don’t know when I fell asleep, but when I roused it was dark outside and the computer screen was filled with 3s where I’d slumped against the keyboard.