Dickens/The Portico

Last week I went to the Portico Library in central Manchester for the first time. If I was going to dream up an ideal library, it would be the Portico.

Tea at the Grand Tazi

Alexandra Singer is a new Manchester-based writer with a remarkable story of her own - in 2008 when she was just twenty five, she suffered a near fatal neurological illness that left her in a coma for three months, and she was then told she would never walk again. While she was in hospital her brother found the manuscript of a novel she'd written - but had little memory of. Her story has a happy ending: tomorrow (March 1st) Tea at the Grand Tazi is published by Legend Press - and Alexandra is on the road to recovery.

Best of all, her novel is great...

Rabbit

The first few days back at work after a holiday are always hard. As I trudged to work this morning, my head still full of Scottish beaches, I met a rabbit. This is not normal: I work in the centre of Manchester practically. But my route does take me along the side of Peel Park, a green haven and the oldest public park in Europe.

The rabbit hopped quite confidently up a slope to my left and onto the footpath in front of me. It was a wild brown rabbit, large and plump, with powerful back legs and a cotton wool ball for a tail. It stopped. I stopped too. Its nose twitched. 

It seemed entirely unconcerned by my presence, as if it didn't consider human beings anything out of the ordinary. Perhaps it was an escaped pet? Perhaps. But last time I was in a pet shop, the rabbits were all freakishly cute, with long fur and ears that flopped downwards instead of pricking up. Their big needy eyes pleaded “take me take me take me”. This one had short, dull fur, coloured for camouflage, and he ignored me totally. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him.

He lolloped casually under a hedge and onto the campus, towards a stretch of lawn left unmown to attract wildlife. He (I’m sure the rabbit was a he) nibbled at some clover, and sniffed the air some more.

What does it mean to see a rabbit in the morning? I wondered if it was an omen. His fat haunches disappeared with a flash of tail under a line of shrubs in front of the student shop, and he left me standing there, alone.

Just another creature going about its daily business, I suppose. I pushed the strap of my bag back onto my shoulder. Then I went on my way, towards the noise of traffic, my computer and a nice cup of tea in my hutch.

Riot/carnival

I woke up this morning with one word on my mind: carnival. Which was peculiar as last night was anything but – young people on the streets of my city and many others, smashing up shops, burning down properties. 

Riot. The word strikes fear into people’s hearts. The Prime Minister has authorised the use of plastic bullets.  People are calling for the return of the death penalty, for people wearing hoodies to be arrested on sight, and vigilantes have been patrolling the streets looking to give the rioters a good kicking. Even the liberal-minded Independent newspaper bears a headline “The end of civilisation as we British know it”.

Yesterday I met a young guy with a weatherbeaten face in the street. He was wearing a hoodie and hurrying towards the sound of a police helicopter and assorted sirens in the direction of Salford Precinct. My colleague was carrying a large cardboard box full of first aid kits for an adjacent office block. The guy in the hoodie grinned. “Did you get them from the Precinct?” he said. And he bounded on up the road. For him, the opportunity for a bit of rioting was clearly a break from the norm, a chance to get up to some mischief, to do something he’d perhaps thought about but never dared: to help himself to goods from shops. There was a gleam in his eye. He was hurrying because he knew there was a limited window of opportunity.

That’s what I suggest this rioting is all about. It’s not the end of civilisation. It’s a temporary suspension of the norm. It's a carnival (though I know that might sound shocking when people’s livelihoods have been destroyed, and people have been injured and even died.) But that’s how some of the great thinkers and writers of the last century would have described the last few days. During carnival people can do all kinds of things they don’t normally do: challenge authority, smash things up. It functions as a kind of safety valve. Last night was a kind of carnival, when teenagers, kids, young people did some of the things they’d never normally do. And because there weren’t enough police on the streets, not initially anyway, they could. Today, or tomorrow, the window of opportunity will have shut.

Society may be just the same after this period of carnival, or it may change, particularly for those young people, and hopefully for the better. For more about carnival theory, in relation to a Curious George story, read this fantastic blog post.