Friday, January 30, 2009

Travelling light


If you have a taste for sights, and buildings constructed with the material of deep history, if what pleases your eye and your soul is austere, colorful gardens, or dream palaces made of artistic aesthetics, if you appreciate quiet people, sophisticated men in contact with a superiorly intellectual world, and if you want to loose yourself in the meanders of an inner search, just don’t go there.

Cause this is the city of red bricks, humid walls, a sky covering only the pallets of grey and black, a city with a hardcore industrial philosophy and life style, a not an unjustified fame for criminality, and an annual average of rainy days which can outdo the competition. Its population is divided in two and a civil war is long standing and ravaging the area. Cause Manchester City and Manchester United are the absolute rulers and governors!

I am secretly proud to have been a Mancunian for a while in my life. In Manchester every time you get off a bus, the common practice is to turn your eyes to the driver, smile and say the wonderful: ”Cheers mate!”. This greeting is pronounced with a little bit of provincial accent, and a special emphasis on “Ch” and “ma”. I had the chance of saluting the bus drivers some hundreds of times, getting off and on Oxford Road, the ultimate passerelle for the 80,000 students studying in the four universities that hold an enviable position among their European counterparts.

The truth is that there I wasn’t
quite a model of a student. I hardly remember what I learnt - if I learnt anything at all. When it is the good mother European Union that pays, studies are not much of a pressure. What I certainly remember though, is my final paper bearing the pompous title “Study of the Translation of the Bible through the centuries”. And I presented a quite memorable spectacle as for about two months I was carrying with me at least two bibles and other religious paraphernalia, in all the bars and clubs and those accessories of mine certainly did not match with the drank or behaving-like-a-drank self I was at the time.

Manchester is the city that opened the door to capitalism and Industrial Revolution. This is probably the reason why until today it incorporates the very best and the very worst taken to terrifying extremes. Its night-life is the worthy child of Manchester’s scene of the 1980’s, this landmark in the history of music, with the necessary accompaniment of enormous quantities of alcohol and equal quantities of drags, while its two football teams carry their supporters to an ecstasy, comparable only to the diabolic possession of men and women found in the ancient tribes of Mali and Timbuktu.

In my story, Manchester is one of the most carefree periods of my life, though in the general happiness scale I am now higher than I was back then. My own Manchester makes me think that the road to personal completion is a series of good timings. There is only one good time for terrible hangovers and around the clock folly, only one good time for light spirited flirting and rave dancing, only one good time for future investing hard work. And once this good time is over, we are only left with our unaccomplished desires. And any unaccomplished desire is very heavy to carry in our luggage, cause after all one of the things that define good travelling is to travel light.