Strangers on a train

Travelling to Manchester

For the first few months of working in Manchester I was commuting by car and train. I drove from Bakewell to Grindleford, where I picked up the slow train from Sheffield to Manchester. This journey through the Hope Valley has to be one of the most spectacular in the country. Snow was piled high on the hills when I started at the beginning of April, but as the snow disappeared, the lambs emerged. Early morning starts never came naturally to me, but the ticket collectors on the train were cheerful and the birds in the woodland surrounding Grindleford station were full of happy songs. Gradually I came to recognise fellow travellers and some new friendships were established. I also had some remarkable encounters with old friends and connections. On my first early morning journey the person sitting beside me recognised my voice from my 8th Day days. I commuted to university back in the day, on the train from Todmorden to Leeds. Again I made friends and forged connections that became a significant part of my life. A train journey has to be a liminal space, a linear link between departure and destination. The track itself is a place where anything can happen, a boundary, literally a line in the landscape. Things happen for me when I travel. On one level it's because I talk to strangers, and I can't remember a time when I didn't, even as a child. It's about the opportunities that come from being on public transport too. Now my journey to work is on a busy bus, along the Oxford Road corridor. More buses than you can shake a stick at. Passengers mostly ignore one another, but share intimate details of their lives in loud phone conversations. There can be half a dozen different languages being spoken around me. It's fascinating but there aren't the connections I have experienced with train travel. My children bought me a senior railcard for my birthday last week, at my request. I am hoping to make good use of it in the coming months. I am a passenger.

Life Goes Full Circle

My amazing year of working in Manchester has connected me with old friends as well as new ones. I have looked at photos I brought into the Documentary Phtographic Archive back in 1982. I have listened to my interviews on a reel to reel Uher tape player. I have walked down streets and sat in restaurants that have particular significance for me. I have revisited some of the places that are still part of my dream life. Last Friday was my birthday. I am looking for the next job and I had been invited for an interview in Leeds. Not only did I have to find my way around the university buildings where I used to study, but I was also a baby's cry away from where I was born, at Hyde Terrace. Family legend has it that my dad had to cut the cable on the BSA Scout to free the frozen brakes and drive my mother from Wakefield to Leeds. It was the end of January after all. Leeds railway station is also part of my dream landscape, but not as it is, or ever was. Some things looked so familiar, others completely unrecognisable. There were university buildings I had never seen or ventured into, some of them really architecturally beautiful. The English Department held lectures in theatres allegedly used for the filming of Clockwork Orange. I thought I would come to the end of the coincidences and connections as my year in Manchester draws to a close,just because I felt there had to be a limit. But last Wednesday I went to a birthday celebration meal for some old friends, newly rediscovered. Among their friends was a someone I knew from 40 years ago, who came to my first wedding.It was so lovely to see her and to hear about her family. And then home for a lovely weekend with my family. Many happy returns.

About a Boy

Whenever I travel through Stockport I am reminded of someone I used to know. My journey home takes me along the Stockport Road on the Trans Peak bus to Bakewell. This retraces the route my sisters and I took back to boarding school in Matlock, a road that produced a sick and sinking feeling for many years after I had left school. I am over it now, and have been for some time. The bus route out of Manchester's city centre goes through Longsight and Levenshulme, where I once lived and worked. Those associations are for another day. There's an abandoned church on the left as the bus drops down the hill into Mersey Square. It's just a facade. That's where my friend first hugged a tree. He was an unlikely nature boy. He had gone to boarding school too, one where the boys were encouraged to do outward bound activities. He could live off the land. He knew how to rough camp, how to tickle a trout and gut a rabbit. He had been brought up in Northumberland, where his father was a doctor. He was only 15 when his father died. He left his school on the Lancashire coast and headed for the beaches of Morocco. Now I would call him an adrenaline junkie. Back then he was simply a junkie. By the time our paths crossed he had been addicted to heroin and speed. He had been to Borstal. He and his girlfriend had a baby son, named after him, but put up for adoption. His mother was a psychiatric social worker, and she needed to be. He never gave her a minute's peace. Stockport was one of his stamping grounds. There was talk of a gun, hidden behind a piece of street furniture in Mersey Square, but I never saw it. There was a mysterious left luggage locker key, once thrown out of the window of Stockport police station, to avoid confiscation and detection. It took some finding after the event. He and his friends were on trial at the Old Bailey, framed by the drug squad. Their barrister was fresh from the success of the Oz trial. Could he have been John Mortimer? I don't know and there's no one to ask. Alexis Korner wrote a character statement for one of the accused. They were acquitted, when the barrister proved that the police had fabricated evidence, though they were not innocent in any true sense of the word. His totem animal was a wolf. He once turned up at my parents' house in the early hours of a summer morning, claiming to be on the run. Luckily he threw stones at the right bedroom window. He disappeared from view. I heard he had sought sanctuary at a monastery in the Kielder Forest. His favourite book was Arthur Waley's translation of the Tao te Ching, The Way and its Power. Next I heard he was in prison for manslaughter. He had sold someone battery acid as heroin. He married his girlfriend from his prison. I don't know what happened next. Perhaps they will turn up on Long Lost Family one day. Each time I go through Stockport, I remember a bit more of his story. I share this much of it here just to show how much stranger truth is than fiction.

Hippy Gipsy Mother

A few years ago my youngest son started college in Sheffield, instead of staying on for sixth form at school. The director was telling him off and said 'You don't want to turn out like your hippy, gipsy mother'. My son nearly walked out there and then. I got a desperate call at work, and I managed to speak to one of his other tutors. I didn't want him to leave the course. He had only been there a couple of months. The situation calmed down. It wasn't meant as a compliment and it was also a strange assessment of me in the circumstances, as we had only met once. Rather than take it any further, I made a decision then to make light of it, to transform it into a kind of compliment. So when I saw this lovely Clare Leighton print in a local charity shop, I bought it, framed it and it hangs on our kitchen wall. I am reminded of my 'hippy gipsy' nature as I send off CVs and job applications. My archive traineeship comes to an end in March. I haven't had to face up to unemployment since I came back from Morocco in 1981. I have had a wealth of experience in some fascinating jobs - though the wealth hasn't been monetary. I'm hoping my adaptability and ability to cope with change will get me through the next couple of months. Sadly I can't read my own palm nor do I have a crystal ball. But I will carry this image with me in my search.

Harry Potter, hero myth

I'm back in Manchester, living next to the Nico Ditch, ready to start work again tomorrow after the longest break from working routine I have had since I went to India for a fortnight in 2005. It has been a lovely Christmas, back in Bakewell with family and friends. We sat about and watched lots of stuff on television, fire roaring in the grate, cosy and grateful that it was only wind and rain outside, not the -15 temperatures of a few years ago. The phone got fixed in time for Christmas and the fan on the central heating boiler turned out to need WD40 rather than a replacement.I even managed a couple of walks. We watched the Harry Potter films, including the last two, the end of the series. When the books were first published I had an ambivalent relationship with them. My older children grew up with them, aging as Harry and his friends did. Because of my own feelings about boarding school education and absent parents, I didn't feel comfortable with the Enid Blyton depiction of boarding school life. I discovered Philip Pullman's Northern Lights at the same time and found there was no comparison. With hindsight, I guess there was never meant to be. I had the same feeling about Star Wars and Close Encounters of a Third Kind back in 1977. I stopped reading the Harry Potter books with the Half Blood Prince. My friend Joyce had been a huge fan. She died of a brain tumour just as it was published and we put a copy in her coffin, her grave goods. I never had the heart to read it. A few years later I was studying for a masters in folklore. Harry Potter's story was being interpreted as a hero myth in folklore circles. I suspect there are a few theses out there exploring this. It was intriguing to see how J K Rowling had made use of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. In fact her own story had mythic qualities in her rags to riches success. In 2005 I was working in my local library. Young children were entranced by the early Harry Potter stories and films and couldn't understand why the later much darker books and films weren't suitable for them. It was an aspect of the success of the books that no-one seemed to have anticipated. J K Rowling wanted her characters to grow into adulthood, but she had developed a new audience who hadn't aged with them. I found the Deathly Hallows films uncomfortable viewing. All that danger, darkness, death and destruction. A real sense of evil and deception. I couldn't help thinking of recent news items of death and destruction, whether from wars or natural disasters, affecting the lives of so many, but especially children and teenagers. I didn't want to wallow in a fictionalised account, masquerading as entertainment. But then I wondered if this fictional version could actually help those experiencing the reality to accept and cope with the death and destruction around them. Love and friendships help those characters survive and win the day. There is a future. We see them sending their own young children off to Hogwarts. I know the books and films were translated into many languages and became a global phenomenon. Perhaps that recognition of the terrible times they went through and survived might just help. I have always believed in the redemptive power of literature. I just hadn't connected it with Harry Potter until now.

It's a new year, a new day

Somewhere in my many boxes of photos are just two photos of my wedding. Graham and I posed in front of this fireplace, signing the register. When I started work at the Greater Manchester County Record Office back in April 2013, I went to a meeting in this room. At that meeting was one of the partners for Archives+, the partnership I am working with, Marion Hewitt of the North West Film Archive. She was one of the witnesses at that wedding back in June 1984.The only other guest and witness was the often missed Maryann Gomez. I really felt that my life had turned the full circle of a spiral, and that twisting, turning ,spiralling feeling has stayed with me through 2013. Now we have arrived at 2014. The year I turn 60. The year I have to start job hunting again, after the lovely gap year of the traineeship in Manchester. I have five more years to do before I can retire. By retire, I mean when I might have time to be able do the things I want to do, so it's important that I continue to chase the paid work that answers some of those interests. Last night my son was playing at one of the pubs in Bakewell. He's the singer with a covers band called the Vipers. I hadn't seen them play since the summer, so decided to go to the first set. I then headed round to my mum's to see the new year in with her. My dad died in the early hours of new year's day in 2010, so it's a strange time. He loved a good new year's eve do and we often had gatherings at our house in Eccles.He was a great host and a good cook. After he went to work in the far east the style of our celebrations changed. Last night set me thinking about some of the New Year's Eves I have known. As a teenager I spent one hallucinating - not on drugs but with some sort of tropical fever. As 1971 became 1972 I rang the bells in a private chapel at East Down Manor outside Barnstaple. I was there with 8th Day friends, Mike and Jenny Slaughter, Brian Livingstone and Ross. We were invited to spend New Year with the Edgar Broughton Band and their friends and families. They were there recording a new album in a country pile. We went to the local pub. The local landed gentry had the unlikely name of Pyne Coffin.it was a magical end to a nightmarish few months and a meaningful new start to a new year. I was in Casablanca ten years later, listening to the ships in the port hoot the new year in. Ten years on from that, and new year plans were upset by a poorly daughter. Almost ten years on from there and it was millennium year. Lots of teenagers with us, walking home from a big family party in Over Haddon in the frosty early hours. One year I was home alone with a new baby. A couple of times I had impromptu parties for those of us who couldn't find or afford babysitters, with children welcome. Ten years on and my dad reached the end of his life in the early hours of New Year's Day, holding my mother's hand to the end. It was a full moon that night, a perfect New Year's Eve for a family get together, with memories of other times he had been the host. Back to last night. I didn't expect to hear Charlie's voice ringing over Bakewell as I walked home from my mum's but it made me feel that 2014 is one to look forward to.