Bye bye bye bye bellulah

Time to go. It'd be three months next week, but I'm off tomorrow for a month anyway. I wanted to try this for a while to see what it's like to blog and what the bloggy world's all about. And, I've had sooo much time on my hands for the past 9 months, from tomorrow I won't have nearly as much time to myself. I'll still enjoy visiting other blogs and a big thank you to everyone who came here and especially to the wonderful people who commented, I'll be lurking.

Matootoo on the open road

I just bought my first car, for £100. She's called Matootoo.

So it goes

De La Salle and not MGS (Mostly Going South), that's what made the difference. Have you read Stuart Maconie's Pies and Prejudice? .....Manchester is big-headed, good-hearted, full of itself, opinionated, even-handed, arrogant, musical, over-confident, but comes up with the goods, even if they're not the exact goods you really want.

The Free Trade Hall, the Halle Orchestra, GMEX, Deansgate, Afflecks Palace, Placemate 7, Piccadilly Radio, Manchester United, UMIST, Joy Division, the Hacienda, Friday's, Saturday's, the Underground Market, I'm in love, I'm in love with the girl on the Manchester Virgin Megastore checkout desk, the Buzzcocks, The Smiths, Gordon is a Moron, Anthony H Wilson, The Communist Manifesto, the Trades Union Movement, the Royal Exchange, Caroline Ahern, Fat Bob, Pauline Calf, Queer as Folk, Shameless, Oxford Road, Eighth Day Vegetarian Cafe, Canal Street, the 41, the 112, the 263 and 264, Peterloo, Suffragette Movement, Trams, RNCM, both Old Traffords, the Stone Roses, What do you call 12 Mancunians in a filing cabinet? Sorted., The Hollies, 10cc, Mark E Smith, Anthony Burgess (Xaverian), MCFC (I suppose, if you like that sort of thing), The Apollo, Marc Riley, Mark Radcliffe, Piccadilly Gardens, Frank Sidebottom, John Cooper Clarke, Alistair Cooke, Manchester Town Hall, St Peter's Square, Albert Square, MRI, Ringway, Christie's, the Palace Theatre, the Refuge Assurance building.

That's what I think of when I think of Manchester.

(Apologies for the blatant Salford thefts, but what the heart wants)

Still by Steve

Steve was one of my first friends. He told me that the big girls had come back for the Spacehopper when it disappeared after 3 months and he read my cards and told me I would die aged 88 (murder victim). We had a secret club in Sandra's garage, the password was Nastursium, hope it's OK to give that away now, I had such trouble remembering it at the time, and payment for entry was a bag of sweets to be shared around and he would read out his made up stories of bloody death and creepy carnage. He introduced me to Joy Division too, which was a very good thing.

Now he's telling stories to a much wider audience in posher surroundings. I'm sure he'll Still accept lemon bonbons as payment but I expect the password's changed.

Break a leg, Steve.

Olive

For years I thought her birthday was the 8th August and sent cards, presents and flowers and phoned her on the 8th every year and I never forgot because it was the same day as a good friend's birthday and my cats were born on that day and I remembered phoning her to tell her on the day.

Then, when she was 90 she told me that actually her birthday was the 10th and this year she was having her ears pierced as a present to herself because she'd always fancied it and why not?

The past being a different country, Olive has been and is still my translator. From a time when most people knew their lot in life and made the best of it and were happy with an absence of trouble, rather than aching after lives led by other people. Working 'in service', then a hat shop, visiting disfigured soldiers in hospital during the war, raising a family, holidaying at the coast, a trip abroad to Austria in the 1980s. Everything else is details. Olive feels incredibly lucky to have had such an untroubled life and to still be enjoying every day. Of course it hasn't been untroubled, but she always had a loving husband, a home and enough money to pay bills and feed her family, who stayed close to home and had families of their own.

What more could a young working class girl ask for?

Over the past 15 years, since Arthur died, she's taken up painting and won a Commended in a regional competition; worked, until the last year or two, in the local Help The Aged shop; regularly attend concerts in Manchester city centre; won a Best Garden competition (with a little help from her weekly gardener); fostered pets; knitted jumpers for Kiwi oil-slicked penguins, and been an all-round wonderful Grandmother to me.

Next week I'm going to visit for a couple of days. Yeh! Just the two of us for two whole days and nights. I'm going to ask her everything in case it's the last time I ever see her. Although it'll be just as nice to just be together, she's that sort of person.

PS: The first time I ever Googled for people, my grandmother was the only member of my family with a virtual presence, she was listed as an official knitter for Trafford Borough Council.