In Stalybridge and in another life.

Yesterday in the early evening I sat at Stalybridge Station in the buffet bar again, waiting for the poetry group people to turn up. I was a little early as I had come from Manchester. 

There is just not quite time to go home from Manchester after the Italian class and back again to Stalybridge in time for the poetry thing on the last Tuesday of the month. So I hang around in Manchester for a while, finding things to occupy my time, and then make my way to Stalybridge. Yesterday, however, I left Manchester a little earlier than usual as it was NOISY!!!! 

Manchester is, of course, a university city and yesterday turned out to be Student Takeover Day. From 6 til 9 students could get discount in all sorts of places. I imagine it's part of Freshers' Week. Back when I was a student in Leeds, the activities used to be confined to the university campus. Now, in Manchester anyway, they take over the whole city centre. In every square and on every corner there seemed to be a DJ and HUUUUGE loudspeakers belting out music at top volume. Well, I think it was meant to be music. 

I could just about accept that but when I found that almost every shop also had music at unbearable volume as well I just had to escape. I took refuge in Marks and Spencer's cafe for a while but eventually I decided to just get on a train and head for the hills. 

One favourable consequence of that was discovering that the station buffet has wifi. So I fed their password into my iPad and caught up with my electronic communication. When we are Galicia I have a collection of wifi cafes whose password is already in my iPad and so I connect automatically. Now I seem to be building up a similar, if smaller, collection for the Manchester area. 

We were a small group at the Stalybridge Stanza poetry group last night. Someone suggested that it was because Manchester City had a match going on. (This match against Roma was another factor in the noise of city centre Manchester. There were an amazingly large number of people out selling match scarves! At the top of their voices, of course.) But are there really so many City fans among the poets?! Be that as it may, we had a pleasant evening and my autumn poem was well received. 

In a former life, when I was a teacher of French and Spanish, I used to have immigration as one of my topics on the advanced courses. Included in that topic area were the people who hand over their savings to sharks and pirates so that one or two of their family can make the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean in search of a better life in Europe. A futile quest and a dangerous one. As if it were not dangerous enough to travel across the Mediterranean packed far too many into one small boat, now the journey is made even more perilous as the sometimes pirates ram the overloaded boats for reasons which are hard to understand. Here is an article from today's Guardian newspaper about such a disaster. . It is worth noting that now some of those would-be immigrants are refugees from Gaza. 

The turmoil continues.