Walk: Completing my walk outside the M60, Sun 23 Feb 20

I am remarkably bad at following speech and understanding complex structures and

ideas. This is why I feel my reviews of poetry readings are so unsatisfactory, and why at
events like the local Labour branch meeting for new members I was at this morning I
don’t really have intelligent questions. And yet I write, I have strong opinions, and in
unfamiliar physical - as opposed to intellectual environments - I navigate very well, even
without maps. Which is relevant only inasmuch as it allows me to make a vague
observation about familiarity, superficial knowledge and big picture versus detail. So I can
usually repeat a walk without the need for a map or directions after a single pass,
because it’s now familiar to me. Now that familiarity is relatively superficial. In big picture
terms I know the broad ‘shape’ of the walk, and in terms of detail I know some of the
features along the way. As well as, of course, the transient details that fascinate me,
which I think I can be good at documenting. For instance the man just now climbing steps
to a front door with a cat on his shoulder, the men melting new tarmac in place around a
utilities access cover, and the small dog in a bright coat and small child in a bright
snowsuit I navigated round. For ideas that means I’ll probably get a decent hazy overview
of the subject, but have a tendency to latch on to small aspects I recognise, am familiar
with, or which interest me. I’m easily distracted in other words. On a walk that matters
less, but greater familiarity solidifies and expands that knowledge. The same with ideas,
but there I’m less confident and less willing, or able, to take the time to increase that
knowledge, to repeat the process and learn the important steps along the way. Which
may explain in part why I return to the same subjects so frequently.

Anyway, that Labour meeting. I grasped and more importantly retained only a fraction of
what was said. But more relevantly, explains why I’ve only been able to start this walk just
after half past 12, with a quick diversion home. As you might expect if you follow these
accounts my plan is to walk out to Hyde and resume the M60 circuit back to Gatley, then
home from there. Also, and unrelated, having spent some time proofreading a book I plan
to self-publish around April, I intend to try and fit in a lot more of these small
observations.

 And while writing all of that I’ve gone from Manley Park to home, and from home to
Platt Fields. That’s close to an hour.

From Platt Lane across Wilmslow Road to Dickenson Road, past the closed and
shuttered Hardy’s Well with a Lemn Sissay poem painted on one wall. A colleague in a
previous job had a project to photograph all the public Lemn Sissay poems around
Manchester. Shahrose Convenience Store under refurbishment. Blown down wood panel
fence. Knightbridge Solicitors. Birch Polygon street sign broken, the lost portion replaced
with a knitted rectangle supplying the missing letters. Doing a good job of replicating the
font, the size, as well as the outline of the sign. Mr Compensator Claims Management. NE
Anson Parade 1924. One thing I love about these accounts is the occasional jumps in
time and place. Especially in the book I’m editing where walks on different days and in
different places are stitched together to create an almost hallucinatory and dynamic
portrait of place and time.

Impressive mosque away to my right. Homeopathic Healthy Herbs & Radionic

Alternative System. Bhondon Saree Centre. Longsight Market, not open today but usually
colourful and active. Layered and weathered A4 posters thickly sellotaped to lamppost.
Stanley Grove. Low Bridge. Magpie crackling in tree. It’s a little cold but walking I don’t
feel it. And while it’s windy it isn’t as bad as through the week. The sky a combination of
tall dense clouds and clear patches with lots of sunlight. For a little on Pink Bank Road,
new to me. Part of a quieter route to the M60 in Hyde. Iqra Mosque, Industrial and
Residential Holdings. Elgar Street, which I’m not taking. Speedboat on trailer. Park I’m
pretty sure I don’t know. Fly-tipped settee. The whole somehow neglected. Windchimes.
The street ahead I have walked once. I won’t be on it today. Mount Road Vets. Love
Crispy Chicken. Cross for Buckley Road.

Roads narrow, roughen, turn to dead ends with littered footpaths and alleys leading off.
A park I passed through on the Gorton Heritage trail in 2018. Gorton Thai Boxing. Short
left uphill to Hyde Road. Wood Oven Warehouse. All well-trodden by me from here. Road
Widening Scheme. There are far better uses of money: housing, drug treatment, giving
communities a more active stake in where they live - including immigrants and refugees,
universal basic needs - though that’s more central government, developing public
transport and walking and cycling infrastructure. Friendship Avenue. Roebuck Television
repair shop. Hills emerging ahead as I climb. Longendale I think. Not today. I’ll turn right in
a while. This might be part of my route when I walk to Sheffield later in the year. Cross the
road, because much as I dislike going over the M60 by the roadside pavement there’s no
chance I can use the pedestrian bridge. Too high and narrow and the sides too low for
me.

Hawthorn leaves exploding. The trees weighted with ivy. Denton Golf Club. Tattered
white plastic bags on branches, some reduced by time to stubby streamers. Over the
motorway. No further heights to cause anxiety. Audenshaw Reservoirs. Denton Station.
Community Notice Board. Hair This Smooth Should Be Illegal. Small dams of twigs
gathered in gutters from wind and rain of recent storms. Terraces with permanent traffic
noise from the M67 and local and feeder roads. Hallard Upholstery The Manchester Sofa
Company. ‘Moores’ in white brick on tall red brick chimney. Factory now housing local
businesses. Church Lads & Church Girls Brigade. Plenty of standing water in places on
streets.

Ceramic tiled pub. Laundrettes, grocers, restaurants, pharmacy, optician, florist, estate
agents, dangerous driving, taxi rank, takeaways, tiles and bathrooms. Quick stop to grab
lunch to go, then carry on. Not too far, if I chose, to leave the city. Downhill. Pass Watson
Street where I came out to cross Hyde Road on my walk up the Tame Valley. Cross the
Tame. Over the road the path I took to Jet Amber Fields. Flooded paddock to my right.
Then uphill where I’ll join the Peak Forest Canal and resume my circuit. The bins tumbled
last week upright and neatly ranked. Mill Lane. Another ceramic tiled pub.

 Join the canal in better weather than last week. It’s the first of the two places where the
towpath swaps sides. Through a largely industrial area. Mallard slows and splashes down
on the water. Large, friendly dog. Sheds and greenhouses over the canal between the
water and a lorry park. The towpath switches back. Steep woodland down to the Tame
Valley at my right. The drop recedes a little, replaced with a slight rise that levels off
before the valley falls again. Among the trees above me a tent in the woods. My first
assumption is someone homeless, but it might be something else. Birdwatching or
wildlife photography perhaps. Moss, gorse, bracken. The drop returns. Vertiginous steps I
hope never to take. Although I’m interested in the path they lead to in Haughton Dale. I’ll
check my maps at home for possible walks.

Moorhen unusually calm as it quits the path and swims away. Gentler fields at the right
now. Cows out from their winter barns. Sleeping duck quacks at me as I pass without
stirring. Unihemispheric slow wave sleep, where half the brain sleeps and the bird can still
watch for threats. Onto the last section of canal. A field of geese. Beetham Tower and
Deansgate Square far in the distance. A more panicked moorhen runs and flaps across
the canal.

Houses close in and roads gather. Walls grow and come nearer. Railway viaduct, tall ivy
dripping trees. Then up the path beside the Woodley Tunnel to Woodley itself and the
walk back down to Stockport. Posters for The Organist Entertains with Nigel Ogden from
Radio 2 “The Organist Entertains”. Woodley Civic Hall. Cilla’s Fitness. Sun ahead milky
through formless clouds. The clouds elsewhere have more identifiable forms and there are
wide areas of blue. Bredbury. Shale garden. Pama House ‘keeping you connected’. Line
of parked traffic going my way. New builds. Last time I was here and paying attention the
site had been cleared and groundwork begun. The Old Curiosity Shop. What you see is
what you eat.

Morrisons and a junction next, and the approach to Stockport. Kids Eat Free from 3 pm
with any one adult meal. The bus says Stockport but I think it’s going to Marple. The pub
on the corner, The Travellers? The Travellers’ Call. Nearly right, and makes sense on a
junction. Now the road drops more sharply, and the gardens angle up to large houses. So
many roads unexplored. White and purple heather, crocuses, winter jasmine, massive tree
on precarious bank. Then everything slows and levels. Bollards shaped and painted like
the eraser ends of pencils by a school. Not far from where I’d come out from the Goyt
Valley walk. House called Hilbre, presumably named for the islands.

Just after 20 to 5. Sunset in a little less than an hour. Take Your Litter Home
handpainted sign. Welkin Road. Cross the Goyt twice in quick succession. I have my
route planned but from here the roads bristle with possible ways home. Dizzying
Gormenghast-industrial buildings - varying rooflines, strange angles, enclosed bridges
between buildings, haphazard outlines. Blackbirds flurry deep in bushes out of sight. The
M60 right there across the road. DFS, Harveys, Currys PC World, Range, KFC, Pizza Hut,
The Carphone Warehouse - weird branding to be stuck with. Angled tumbling building,
the front wall of the upper storey missing, the wide front beam decaying. Huge board
filling the gap. Only the lower fifth of a digital billboard working. Just the small print where
it’s present. Cross the Goyt a third time.

Boujee Mobiles Vapes. Through Stockport to the Mersey. Swan With Two Necks pub.
Just past five. Shops closed or closing. Grandad’s Fish & Chips. Debenhams. Cross the
main road past the Travelodge, the Pineapple Inn, under the Stockport Viaduct, tall and
long, impressive. Cross to the Trans Pennine Trail along the Mersey. High and brown and
rushing. Handelsbanken. Plane on the approach, wheels down. White water round a tree
swept here and come to rest midstream for now. Sinking light greys the world, though the
sky seems unchanged. Remnants of a factory front over the river. Then left and over the
water on the pedestrian bridge to stay outside the motorway and onto the last part of the
circuit. Green painted building. All roads from here.

 St Augustines Road [‘I dreamed I saw St Augustine / Alive as you or me…]. Hygge
Unisex & Kids Hair Salon. Are The Other Beans Toast? For some reason the Rita’s
‘Rowdy’ Enchiladas ‘Food Love Stories’ advert enrages me. I think it’s the smug,
performative middle-classness of it. It makes me think of those weird self-satisfied team
leaders I’ve encountered so often in different jobs apparently wholly and un-ironically
dedicated to the corporate philosophies, and seemingly unwilling or unable to imagine life
outside of capitalism. Or those people I encountered as a student for whom university
was just a check box en route to marriage and home ownership in a list of things you’re
supposed to do. Which is a lot to project on a pretty well staged photo and some cringey
copy, I know.

Ten minutes after sunset and rapidly darkening. Biz Space. The North West Mountain
Bike Centre. Gatley / Cheadle / Cheadle Royal. Little Peeps. Sophie Dee Dance School. A
fairly busy day and weekend. What’s this WK Kelloggs stuff? Is is branding for a healthier
line of breakfast cereals? Murky park, bright lit petrol station. New Laughs Have Landed
Now TV. Bullocks Finglands coachways. Bare brick fireplace surround. Birds calling to
roost. I’m glad I’ve managed a decent walk today. Yesterday I only got about four hours
total in. There was another good edition of the Peter Barlow’s Cigarette poetry reading
series yesterday afternoon. It would have made sense to mention it during my opening
when I talked about my difficulty absorbing, understanding and retaining information and
used reviews of readings as an example. I could edit it in there, but nah.

People in various restaurants. I’m close to the end of the circuit and the start of my walk
home. It’s been good so far and a much better day for weather than last week. And this is
the junction, even sooner than I thought. 10 past 6. Turn right and head for the M60 and
my walk home. A fortnight and a day since I passed here in the other direction on a
Saturday morning. Three weeks of long local walks circling outside the M60. Back over
and inside the motorway. I’ll get the tram from East Didsbury, not too far ahead. Over the
Mersey again. Boundary river. The historic boundary of Lancashire and Cheshire, and may
have been the boundary between Northumberland and Mercia. Cars stream both ways
beside me. Kingsway. In my headcanon it’s a route to chase privilege and authority out of
the north back to Cheshire, to Mercia and all the way back to London marsh. Fuck off
home, we’ll have no crown-lickers here.

Past Parrs Wood, cinema, takeaways, restaurants, tenpin bowling, the clock tower at
the Tesco’s, and the tram. But nothing on the line today thanks to improvement works.
There’s the path beside the line that takes me into Didsbury, to Barlow Moor Road, and
the way home, though. Quiet and dark now. Cross Palatine Road, the anchor of my
geography. Bean & Bear Little Dog Day Care. Albert’s Restaurant, bustling and lit. Bright
Horizons Day Nursery & Preschool. Manchester College Fielden Campus. Didsbury
Central Mosque - a former church, a fine building. Disney’s The Lion King on stage.
Prestigious Detached. Utter fuckwit almost runs me over pulling suddenly across traffic
and onto the pavement to park. Spire hospital, Princess Road and Southern Cemetery.

National Express, perhaps from London. Cross to Nell Lane. The flower shop on the
corner. Between the old and new parts of the cemetery. I walk this often. In winter it’s part
of one of my regular walks after work when I work from home, and a route to the Mersey if
I want to join near Didsbury. It was also part of one route to the airport when it was one of
the few walks I could manage with my hernia through last summer and early autumn.
Another anchor I guess, though one I don’t consider as much. Some trees in full blossom.
My hayfever won’t kick in until around June, the grass pollen. Chorlton Park. Chorlton
High School. St Werburgh’s Road. Christian daughter of the last pagan king. A nation
moving to guilt and the monotheistic death cult responsible for so many crimes. Divine
right.

Newspapers & Mags Here. Phones, accessories and vapes. Stained glass in porch
windows. Give Way. Coloured lights over back porch. Vehicles parked ready to start road
resurfacing tomorrow. Liebestraume. Cycle in a front room, lights flashing. Some comings
and goings on foot and by car. Marlborough Road. At the crossing of Clarendon Road just
a minute or so from the community centre where I set off from the Labour meeting a little
over seven hours ago. Park Drive, a short road with a slight hook at either end. Standing
water in places on College Road. Turn the corner past the former college now an Islamic
centre. Onto Wood Road. For Sale. 20 speed sign. White vans. Sound of a baby crying.
Stained glass in a row at the top of bay windows. Carlton Road. The Carlton Club. A large
Uber taxi. A tech disruptor, where what’s disrupted are pay and working conditions. The
‘flexibility’ beloved of neoliberals.

Before I left this morning spent time catching up on reactions to Bernie Sanders’
convincing win in the Nevada caucus. And yesterday took great joy in Dick Van Dyke at
94 endorsing Bernie. And home now, desperate for a piss. Before dinner, Doctor Who, a
bath, then bed. 5 past 8, seven and a half hours. A relatively minor walk by my standards,
but hugely enjoyable, and a better day than the last couple of weeks.