A Trip to Manchester
Feb. 9th, 2007 06:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhythmaningI have just spent a couple of days working in Manchester. Over the years, I have spent a fair bit of time in Manchester and thereabouts, but I haven’t spent much time there at all in the last five years.
I travelled down by train. It was a beautiful day – bright sunshine, frosted hills, cut across by thick patches of fog. I do love travelling by train, sitting there watching the world go by. (OK, I did a bit of work, too.)
The train was exactly on time; at one point, the train was stopped in a station for fifteen minutes because it was so early, and we sat outside Manchester for many minutes because we were still early, and the platform wasn’t ready. I sat looking out of the window at a sunlight Manchester. Indeed, looking down over Manchester, te train on a viaduct. The city seemed filled with building works and cranes, new buildings going up all over the place. There was a hideous building – I have no idea how new it was – a Hilton hotel, which looks like it will fall over – it is top heavy with flat faces. Below the buildings, below the viaduct, there were streets; but the streets seemed to be on different levels – two or three – and then below the streets there were canals.
I had forgotten there were so many canals in Manchester; but from the train, quietly waiting for another train to leave Piccadilly so we could edge forward and then leave, I could see the water glinting in the frost all over.
I had a long meeting – two and a half hours, talking about some of the detail of the project I’m working on. The other day I tried to explain to someone what I was doing, and it was very hard. When I was employed, I used to say I was a project manager (which is actually quite a meaningless job description – very project is different, and requires a different approach. For me project management meant asking questions to make sure that other people were doing what they needed to do, trying to make sure that people were talking to each other and that everybody knew what was need and that they weren’t going to get a shock when the project was late); sometimes I would say I talk to people and ask questions; and if I was feeling particularly philosophical (or mischievous; you choose) I would say I was helping other people do their jobs more effectively.
On this particular project, I am help a company do its job more effectively – I am looking at the processes they are using with a view of helping the company simplify what it does, freeing up people to do other things that help the company. In terms of a job title, this would be management consultant, or business analyst, or any number of similarly meaningless words. Basically, I am talking to people who work for the company so I can understand what they do, and see how they cold do it better. Everything I need to know they know already.
I am still amazed that people are paying me to do this. (OK, they haven’t paid me yet, but they have promised that they will…)
So I spent two and a half hours in this meeting, trying to get to grips with the way they do things at the moment – the ins and outs of how this particular department works. It was very complicated, very detailed, and quite hard to pull together – all the detail obscuring the bigger picture. By about three o’clock, I felt like my brain was overflowing. I went for a walk, to think about something else, to let all the information I had scribbled down – pages and pages of notes – filter through my brain. It really felt like if I carried on, something would be lost as it flowed out, pushed out by the new information being crammed in.
The offices I was visiting were in the centre – well, near the centre: central Manchester seems pretty compact. My hotel was just around the corner, and after an hour of writing up what I had learned, I went to the hotel to do some work – it felt a bit easier than working in the borrowed space of a client’s office.
Like many of the older buildings in Manchester, the hotel used to be something else. Wandering around the city, I saw old mills used as offices, factories used as flats; and an insurance building used as a hotel. The building is large, red brick, and like many old insurance buildings, inside it was covered in large glazed tiles. (There is a bar in Edinburgh in a former insurance office covered in rather splendid pictorial tiles; indeed, it is called Tiles.)
My room was on the mezzanine floor; to my surprise, the lift went down. This worried me: the reception was at street level, so I imagined my room being in the dungeons somewhere underground, below the kitchens, below the dregs. I was surprised when I looked out of the window and I was about fifteen or twenty feet above the road: there was another storey at least below mine. The view may not have been great – the room overlooked a carpark, a canal and the railway viaduct (I could see planes in the sky, too, thereby covering most forms of transport. No horses, though). The canal was way down, and there were two levels of roads visible; and then a whole bundle of buildings now looking like they were flats and offices.
The room was large, too. I lay on the kingsize bed; and then I lay on the other one. Because there were two kingsized beds in the room. One was more than big enough for me. Two seemed like such a waste.
I did some work, recording what we had talked about, and then I ran a bath. Hot water always seems important in hotels: non-stop hot water on tap. This hot water was very hot – just off boiling, I’d say. And the bath was a decent size, too. (The last hotel I stayed in, the bath was small; I sat with my knees up.) I stretched out in the luxurious heat, splashing about.
I had supper with a friend and her partner. I hadn’t been to their place before – since I haven’t stayed in Manchester for several years. By chance, it was near the hotel. I stopped off at the small Sainbury’s to pick up a bottle of Chilean cabernet sauvignon. They cooked pancakes; they had wanted to cook pizza – indeed, they had wanted to cook pizza the Heston Blumental way, which would have been interesting (apparently, it is really good pizza). Unfortunately, although Sainsbury’s stocks several types of Chilean cabernet, not to mention wines from most wine-producing countries and some I didn’t realise produced wine, they don’t stock yeast. So no pizza (which apparently needs yeast). The pizza would have been interesting – I saw Blumental’s tv programme where he investigated pizza, and it looked like extreme cooking – he used a blow torch to get the pizza cooked (though that was in one of his experiments – not the final recipe; for that he simply super-heated a heavy frying pan, and cooked the pizza on the non-cooking side. He must suffer a lot of burns). But the pancakes were excellent.
The pancakes were filled with a salmon and ginger mix; a cool crème fraiche sauce; and a red salad. The red salad was great – tomatoes, red peppers, and strawberries in balsamic vinegar. I have tried strawberries and balsamic vinegar before, but never as a savoury. And for pudding, we had more pancakes – with lime and sugar, and with maple syrup.
I like pancakes.
We drank a bit too – a few glasses of rioja, mostly, which was very nice. (The Chilean cabernet seem to have got chilled on the way there!) And we talked, about all sorts of things – what I was doing, what they were doing, the environment, the state of the education system, the redevelopment of Manchester (all those new buildings! all those cranes! all those mills now housing the up-and-coming instead of the impoverished mill-workers!); and so on. All the kind of things one talks about at dinner with friends you don’t see often.
I slept badly. I usually sleep badly in hotels. The large, empty bed; light spilling; the difficulty of getting the temperature right. Hotel rooms always seem to get stuffy at about 4am; maybe they are all set to warm up at that time. So I woke up; and I tossed, and I turned. I thought I might have been disturbed by the railway line I could see, but it barely registered (perhaps a low, occasional rumbling At six am I gave up and switched on the tv. I never watch breakfast tv; the last time I did so must have been in a hotel about six years ago. Normally I listen to the radio, but the hotel didn’t really cater for radio listeners, and since the iPod has taken over my life, I didn’t have my walkman radio (it is actually a diskman with a radio attached, and it seemed a bit strange to carry the diskman just for the radio, but that is what I should have done. I shall have to get myself a little radio to carry around if I am going to spending time away). I had a shower (girly though it might sound, I really needed to wash my hair) and went to breakfast.
There are not many things that a hotel has to do well, for me. They have to check me in, check me out, give me a comfortable bed and lots of hot water, and, sometimes, give me breakfast, too. Usually, I prefer to have breakfast somewhere away from the hotel – a café somewhere – because I dislike other people at breakfast, and hotel breakfasts are usually expensive, and the coffee is lousy, and I tend to stuff my face with things I wouldn’t normally eat because they are there on the buffet. This time, breakfast was included in price, so it seemed churlish not to have it. Breakfast was good – the coffee came quickly, the cereal was what I might normally eat, and the wholemeal toast was just as I would like it. I was tempted to have the waffles and maple syrup – I love waffles – but this seemed a little too much like supper the night before, and far too greedy.
On that basis, the hotel was good; it did all the things I asked of it.
I worked a bit before the guy for whom I was working arrived and we had a pre-meeting meeting in the hotel lobby. Then we wandered over to the clients, and spent another three hours talking about what we were doing, where we were going and what we were trying to achieve. I drew some pictures on a white board, someone else drew some pictures, I scribbled down what we had drawn, and we came up with a plan for the next couple of weeks.
One of the outcomes of the meeting was that there wasn’t anything for me to do in Manchester the next day. It was too late to cancel the hotel, but I could change my train for an earlier one. After the meeting, then, I went onto the internet and booked a different train back the next day (I love booking trains on TheTrainline; it is so easy! Though quite why they sting you for a £2 card fee I don’t understand. How else are you going to pay for something on the internet? I have no idea if it is cheaper to book train tickets on the internet or in real life – but if you go to the GNER site, you don’t have to pay the card fee; I don’t know about the Virgin site – but both GNER and Virgin only show their own trains, reasonably enough, whereas TheTrainline shows all possible trains).
I went to Piccadilly to pick my tickets up. It was a lovely afternoon, and I needed some air and exercise. I took my little camera and photographed some of the things I saw along the way; I explored a bit, nipping down alleys and staring at the sky. Manchester seemed very photogenic in the sun; it might not be so attractive in the rain and drizzle that I have been told is the usual weather.
The ticket machine didn’t recognise my request for tickets, which concerned me a bit, but I reckoned it might just take a bit of time from my paying for the tickets to them making their way to the ticket machine. (It had been an hour, which I had thought would be enough; but clearly not.)
Back at the hotel, I did a bit more work, and then I headed back to Piccadilly, on my roundabout way to Chinatown for supper. The tickets appeared without a fuss this time. It was cold outside now that night had fallen. The streets weren’t busy, though there were a few blokes wandering around in their tee shirts. Me, I had four layers on. And gloves.
I ate in a restaurant called East, which my friends had recommended. In fact, they had recommended several, but that was the only one I could remember. There are so many Chinese restaurants in Chinatown that if I didn’t know what I was looking for, the choice would have confused me: I’d have ended up getting frustrated at my inability to make a decision, and found a fish and chip shop somewhere. I am glad I didn’t: I had a very good meal. I sat at a table for one, reading the Economist (really). The guy on the table next to me was eating for four: he had a dish of king prawns, a duck dish, a beef dish, some noodles, and some vegetables. I think he was put there to make me hungry; and it worked. I had to stop myself leaning over and stealing food off his plates. (This is something chopsticks are designed for – nicking other people’s food.) I restrained myself.
I ordered king prawns in satay sauce as a starter (just because my neighbours king prawns looked so good); the prawns were delicious, though the sauce was a bit gloopy. Then I had beef with green peppers in black bean sauce, which was really good, though a little hotter than I had expected. And two bottles of Tiger beer. All in all, it was exactly what I needed.
I was on a 7.45am train the next day Again I slept badly, so I got up early, and I was checked out before seven. A taxi took me to Piccadilly, where I had breakfast in Starbucks and seriously considered getting out my laptop to play on the internet. (I do like wifi.) Instead, I sat and read the paper whilst I had my coffee and croissant, and wandered down to the platform to wait for the train.
Piccadilly has been largely rebuilt: it is full of steel and chrome, and shops. It looks like an airport. The platform I was waiting on, though, was outside the body of the station. It was cold; the sky was crystal clear. The trains going into the other platforms reflected the rising sun – beautiful red and oranges shining off the moving glass and steel. I kept thinking about getting my camera out, but believing I was about to get on a train stopped me. I watched the moon set behind a large white building. It got light. The 7.45 to Edinburgh didn’t arrive. We were told it was fifteen minutes late. It still didn’t arrive. I stood on the platform, listening the Miles Ahead.
When it did – twenty minutes late – it was a great journey. The weather was beautiful. I moved from Miles to Duke, listening to Black, Brown & Beige. This is beautiful spiritual music (it was originally written in the thirties, I think; the recording I was listening was the full version from the fifties; and Ellington went on to adapt the score for his Sacred Music concerts in the late sixties – I have all three recordings, I think). I have often said that I don’t like vocal jazz, but of course there are exceptions; and a very large one is Mahalia Jackson singing Come Sunday. Perhaps it is because she was a soul singer rather than a jazz singer but she makes this record: her voice is haunting. There is a near-acapella version – Jackson in rehearsal, with just the occasional piano chord from Duke Ellington to guide her. It is just stunning.
I sat on the train, working, listening to this glorious music, watching the countryside flow past the window; and in a few hours, I was back in Edinburgh.
I travelled down by train. It was a beautiful day – bright sunshine, frosted hills, cut across by thick patches of fog. I do love travelling by train, sitting there watching the world go by. (OK, I did a bit of work, too.)
The train was exactly on time; at one point, the train was stopped in a station for fifteen minutes because it was so early, and we sat outside Manchester for many minutes because we were still early, and the platform wasn’t ready. I sat looking out of the window at a sunlight Manchester. Indeed, looking down over Manchester, te train on a viaduct. The city seemed filled with building works and cranes, new buildings going up all over the place. There was a hideous building – I have no idea how new it was – a Hilton hotel, which looks like it will fall over – it is top heavy with flat faces. Below the buildings, below the viaduct, there were streets; but the streets seemed to be on different levels – two or three – and then below the streets there were canals.
I had forgotten there were so many canals in Manchester; but from the train, quietly waiting for another train to leave Piccadilly so we could edge forward and then leave, I could see the water glinting in the frost all over.
I had a long meeting – two and a half hours, talking about some of the detail of the project I’m working on. The other day I tried to explain to someone what I was doing, and it was very hard. When I was employed, I used to say I was a project manager (which is actually quite a meaningless job description – very project is different, and requires a different approach. For me project management meant asking questions to make sure that other people were doing what they needed to do, trying to make sure that people were talking to each other and that everybody knew what was need and that they weren’t going to get a shock when the project was late); sometimes I would say I talk to people and ask questions; and if I was feeling particularly philosophical (or mischievous; you choose) I would say I was helping other people do their jobs more effectively.
On this particular project, I am help a company do its job more effectively – I am looking at the processes they are using with a view of helping the company simplify what it does, freeing up people to do other things that help the company. In terms of a job title, this would be management consultant, or business analyst, or any number of similarly meaningless words. Basically, I am talking to people who work for the company so I can understand what they do, and see how they cold do it better. Everything I need to know they know already.
I am still amazed that people are paying me to do this. (OK, they haven’t paid me yet, but they have promised that they will…)
So I spent two and a half hours in this meeting, trying to get to grips with the way they do things at the moment – the ins and outs of how this particular department works. It was very complicated, very detailed, and quite hard to pull together – all the detail obscuring the bigger picture. By about three o’clock, I felt like my brain was overflowing. I went for a walk, to think about something else, to let all the information I had scribbled down – pages and pages of notes – filter through my brain. It really felt like if I carried on, something would be lost as it flowed out, pushed out by the new information being crammed in.
The offices I was visiting were in the centre – well, near the centre: central Manchester seems pretty compact. My hotel was just around the corner, and after an hour of writing up what I had learned, I went to the hotel to do some work – it felt a bit easier than working in the borrowed space of a client’s office.
Like many of the older buildings in Manchester, the hotel used to be something else. Wandering around the city, I saw old mills used as offices, factories used as flats; and an insurance building used as a hotel. The building is large, red brick, and like many old insurance buildings, inside it was covered in large glazed tiles. (There is a bar in Edinburgh in a former insurance office covered in rather splendid pictorial tiles; indeed, it is called Tiles.)
My room was on the mezzanine floor; to my surprise, the lift went down. This worried me: the reception was at street level, so I imagined my room being in the dungeons somewhere underground, below the kitchens, below the dregs. I was surprised when I looked out of the window and I was about fifteen or twenty feet above the road: there was another storey at least below mine. The view may not have been great – the room overlooked a carpark, a canal and the railway viaduct (I could see planes in the sky, too, thereby covering most forms of transport. No horses, though). The canal was way down, and there were two levels of roads visible; and then a whole bundle of buildings now looking like they were flats and offices.
The room was large, too. I lay on the kingsize bed; and then I lay on the other one. Because there were two kingsized beds in the room. One was more than big enough for me. Two seemed like such a waste.
I did some work, recording what we had talked about, and then I ran a bath. Hot water always seems important in hotels: non-stop hot water on tap. This hot water was very hot – just off boiling, I’d say. And the bath was a decent size, too. (The last hotel I stayed in, the bath was small; I sat with my knees up.) I stretched out in the luxurious heat, splashing about.
I had supper with a friend and her partner. I hadn’t been to their place before – since I haven’t stayed in Manchester for several years. By chance, it was near the hotel. I stopped off at the small Sainbury’s to pick up a bottle of Chilean cabernet sauvignon. They cooked pancakes; they had wanted to cook pizza – indeed, they had wanted to cook pizza the Heston Blumental way, which would have been interesting (apparently, it is really good pizza). Unfortunately, although Sainsbury’s stocks several types of Chilean cabernet, not to mention wines from most wine-producing countries and some I didn’t realise produced wine, they don’t stock yeast. So no pizza (which apparently needs yeast). The pizza would have been interesting – I saw Blumental’s tv programme where he investigated pizza, and it looked like extreme cooking – he used a blow torch to get the pizza cooked (though that was in one of his experiments – not the final recipe; for that he simply super-heated a heavy frying pan, and cooked the pizza on the non-cooking side. He must suffer a lot of burns). But the pancakes were excellent.
The pancakes were filled with a salmon and ginger mix; a cool crème fraiche sauce; and a red salad. The red salad was great – tomatoes, red peppers, and strawberries in balsamic vinegar. I have tried strawberries and balsamic vinegar before, but never as a savoury. And for pudding, we had more pancakes – with lime and sugar, and with maple syrup.
I like pancakes.
We drank a bit too – a few glasses of rioja, mostly, which was very nice. (The Chilean cabernet seem to have got chilled on the way there!) And we talked, about all sorts of things – what I was doing, what they were doing, the environment, the state of the education system, the redevelopment of Manchester (all those new buildings! all those cranes! all those mills now housing the up-and-coming instead of the impoverished mill-workers!); and so on. All the kind of things one talks about at dinner with friends you don’t see often.
I slept badly. I usually sleep badly in hotels. The large, empty bed; light spilling; the difficulty of getting the temperature right. Hotel rooms always seem to get stuffy at about 4am; maybe they are all set to warm up at that time. So I woke up; and I tossed, and I turned. I thought I might have been disturbed by the railway line I could see, but it barely registered (perhaps a low, occasional rumbling At six am I gave up and switched on the tv. I never watch breakfast tv; the last time I did so must have been in a hotel about six years ago. Normally I listen to the radio, but the hotel didn’t really cater for radio listeners, and since the iPod has taken over my life, I didn’t have my walkman radio (it is actually a diskman with a radio attached, and it seemed a bit strange to carry the diskman just for the radio, but that is what I should have done. I shall have to get myself a little radio to carry around if I am going to spending time away). I had a shower (girly though it might sound, I really needed to wash my hair) and went to breakfast.
There are not many things that a hotel has to do well, for me. They have to check me in, check me out, give me a comfortable bed and lots of hot water, and, sometimes, give me breakfast, too. Usually, I prefer to have breakfast somewhere away from the hotel – a café somewhere – because I dislike other people at breakfast, and hotel breakfasts are usually expensive, and the coffee is lousy, and I tend to stuff my face with things I wouldn’t normally eat because they are there on the buffet. This time, breakfast was included in price, so it seemed churlish not to have it. Breakfast was good – the coffee came quickly, the cereal was what I might normally eat, and the wholemeal toast was just as I would like it. I was tempted to have the waffles and maple syrup – I love waffles – but this seemed a little too much like supper the night before, and far too greedy.
On that basis, the hotel was good; it did all the things I asked of it.
I worked a bit before the guy for whom I was working arrived and we had a pre-meeting meeting in the hotel lobby. Then we wandered over to the clients, and spent another three hours talking about what we were doing, where we were going and what we were trying to achieve. I drew some pictures on a white board, someone else drew some pictures, I scribbled down what we had drawn, and we came up with a plan for the next couple of weeks.
One of the outcomes of the meeting was that there wasn’t anything for me to do in Manchester the next day. It was too late to cancel the hotel, but I could change my train for an earlier one. After the meeting, then, I went onto the internet and booked a different train back the next day (I love booking trains on TheTrainline; it is so easy! Though quite why they sting you for a £2 card fee I don’t understand. How else are you going to pay for something on the internet? I have no idea if it is cheaper to book train tickets on the internet or in real life – but if you go to the GNER site, you don’t have to pay the card fee; I don’t know about the Virgin site – but both GNER and Virgin only show their own trains, reasonably enough, whereas TheTrainline shows all possible trains).
I went to Piccadilly to pick my tickets up. It was a lovely afternoon, and I needed some air and exercise. I took my little camera and photographed some of the things I saw along the way; I explored a bit, nipping down alleys and staring at the sky. Manchester seemed very photogenic in the sun; it might not be so attractive in the rain and drizzle that I have been told is the usual weather.
The ticket machine didn’t recognise my request for tickets, which concerned me a bit, but I reckoned it might just take a bit of time from my paying for the tickets to them making their way to the ticket machine. (It had been an hour, which I had thought would be enough; but clearly not.)
Back at the hotel, I did a bit more work, and then I headed back to Piccadilly, on my roundabout way to Chinatown for supper. The tickets appeared without a fuss this time. It was cold outside now that night had fallen. The streets weren’t busy, though there were a few blokes wandering around in their tee shirts. Me, I had four layers on. And gloves.
I ate in a restaurant called East, which my friends had recommended. In fact, they had recommended several, but that was the only one I could remember. There are so many Chinese restaurants in Chinatown that if I didn’t know what I was looking for, the choice would have confused me: I’d have ended up getting frustrated at my inability to make a decision, and found a fish and chip shop somewhere. I am glad I didn’t: I had a very good meal. I sat at a table for one, reading the Economist (really). The guy on the table next to me was eating for four: he had a dish of king prawns, a duck dish, a beef dish, some noodles, and some vegetables. I think he was put there to make me hungry; and it worked. I had to stop myself leaning over and stealing food off his plates. (This is something chopsticks are designed for – nicking other people’s food.) I restrained myself.
I ordered king prawns in satay sauce as a starter (just because my neighbours king prawns looked so good); the prawns were delicious, though the sauce was a bit gloopy. Then I had beef with green peppers in black bean sauce, which was really good, though a little hotter than I had expected. And two bottles of Tiger beer. All in all, it was exactly what I needed.
I was on a 7.45am train the next day Again I slept badly, so I got up early, and I was checked out before seven. A taxi took me to Piccadilly, where I had breakfast in Starbucks and seriously considered getting out my laptop to play on the internet. (I do like wifi.) Instead, I sat and read the paper whilst I had my coffee and croissant, and wandered down to the platform to wait for the train.
Piccadilly has been largely rebuilt: it is full of steel and chrome, and shops. It looks like an airport. The platform I was waiting on, though, was outside the body of the station. It was cold; the sky was crystal clear. The trains going into the other platforms reflected the rising sun – beautiful red and oranges shining off the moving glass and steel. I kept thinking about getting my camera out, but believing I was about to get on a train stopped me. I watched the moon set behind a large white building. It got light. The 7.45 to Edinburgh didn’t arrive. We were told it was fifteen minutes late. It still didn’t arrive. I stood on the platform, listening the Miles Ahead.
When it did – twenty minutes late – it was a great journey. The weather was beautiful. I moved from Miles to Duke, listening to Black, Brown & Beige. This is beautiful spiritual music (it was originally written in the thirties, I think; the recording I was listening was the full version from the fifties; and Ellington went on to adapt the score for his Sacred Music concerts in the late sixties – I have all three recordings, I think). I have often said that I don’t like vocal jazz, but of course there are exceptions; and a very large one is Mahalia Jackson singing Come Sunday. Perhaps it is because she was a soul singer rather than a jazz singer but she makes this record: her voice is haunting. There is a near-acapella version – Jackson in rehearsal, with just the occasional piano chord from Duke Ellington to guide her. It is just stunning.
I sat on the train, working, listening to this glorious music, watching the countryside flow past the window; and in a few hours, I was back in Edinburgh.