The downhill shalom

So dear reader,

What of these times we live in? Firstly, I hope this missive finds you well.

And me? All in all, not bad... y'know, industrious enough [I'm feeling like what in football jargon is referred to as a 'good pro,' ideally without the imminent free transfer] though lacking a smidge in the momentum and inspiration departments, hence the intermittent service.

We have, and will have traveled both near and far, but mostly near: from beautiful telly (no, really: a rare, rare thing - TV that's a bit special) to The / A Beautiful Game in the space of a week, via a steaming heap of fresh horse manure for the allotment. And work, and Life, and normality, and b-o-o-k-s and the Sunshine Cafe - yes, those too, mm.

Good times are these - at least, quite good. I may even push the boat out this week for Everton vs Sporting Lisbon or (if I'm feeling logistically awkward) Loughborough Dynamo vs Leek. And I am childless on Wednesday, which leaves me free to visit the new People's History Museum. Happy days.

Furthermore, Sam received [gratefully] a new t-shirt from M and Q in Canada a couple of weeks back. The box-heckling result here in ST6 being: "sod the downhill slalom (initially - auspiciously? - mistyped): what we really want to know is what the cuddly mascot's up to!"

So thanks are due to them too. See? Times're not bad at all. They're quite good, in fact. The itchy question is: where do we go from here, or will we be swept away on the crest of some unforeseen (or all too predictable) wave?

One contemplates the next six weeks with interest, foreboding, and - most of all - mixed feelings.

Yours in hopeful anticlimax,

M.

Monarchists

With Groundhog and I thwarted in our efforts to watch Leek play Kidsgrove, what better way to occupy ourselves than to case out one of the few pubs in the Potteries (maybe the only one) to appear in CAMRA's National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors?

"Hmm, I'm a bit scared," confided one of us - I'll not say who - as we chiselled our way around the knot of terraces and unannounced dead ends that lies just outside Tunstall.

The Vine - "offering an unspoilt atmosphere," claims the signage - is curiously uncelebrated by Stoke-on-Trent's thousands of hostelry historians. Effectively the three-room bit of an end terrace, it is rather out of the way.

Gently drifting dialect filled the building, and we ventured into the lounge bar area, where a regular was propping up the bar. Eventually the friendly veteran publican appeared, wiping his hands, from somewhere out back, looking - I like to think - as if he'd been busy with his Airfix.

Pints of Walker's Smooth - respectfully topped up - in hands (and New Year's resolution amended...) we perched behind a laminate-top to gauge our surroundings. A conversation bounced around the pub's three rooms, mostly concerning the pressing issues of the day*, i.e. whether the dominoes and darts teams would be playing at home or away this week.

A perfect opportunity to make a mental note of the reasons why The Vine is ace:

1. It is tiny and extremely local, yet survives.
   
2. It has an ancient embroidered sampler on the wall proclaiming it to be 'the best little pub in Stoke-on-Trent,' where such an object would normally read 'suffer little children...' etc. Indeed.
   
3. It has what appears to be the publican's back room at the rear of the building, and the pub is small enough for 'the wife' to be involved in all of the conversations while she knocks back a cuppa out back before taking over at the bar
   
4. Though there are no cask ales, the fizzy keg has proper old-school crappy beer in Ansells Mild.
5. It won an award for best external hanging baskets in the 1986 Garden Festival competition. How do I know this? Because the yellowing certificate is still displayed, proudly, 'pon the wall.
   
6. The memo board is covered in all the exciting news and results from the Potteries' dominoes scene.
7. The curtains are a really good three-tone 1970s orange.
8. The regulars warm themselves by a gas fire like my mum and dad had in 1984.
9. There are loads of black and white photos of regulars gone by, all old-school Potteries looking, hair swept up and brylcreemed into the perfect square (symmetry with the jaw), c. 1957 and beyond.
10. Loads of 1982 royal wedding china and framed photos of the queen in her coronation year. I must admit, Monarchists make good pubs.
    

Go there. But don't go alone if you can't hold your own at cribbage.

(* and earlier, in May St Chippy, the gathered customers were reassuringly, vehemently angry about the way in which their workplaces' shop-fronts had been put through and their Muslim colleagues abused during the EDL affair last weekend.)

Coinage

Much water has lapsed under the bridge since last I typed. Most of it rather too introspective, concentric or just plain rantrospective (boilers, plumbing, cars, careers on which one doesn't break even) to 'do' here (leave that to the poets, eh?)

Still, what can now be made official is that - all being well - we'll be doing this again next year. And yet the birthplace of #1 has been razed. Hopefully also gone are the Entinox pipes that have to be both snorted from and held into the wall at the same time. And with them, say cheerio to the gaffer-taped linoleum and floral seventies wallpaper... the list could go on.

And the parking's more chronic than ever, but I will not, shall not - I refuse to - turn this blog into a place to talk roads and parking spaces (leave that to the Sentinel, eh?)

To be honest, I nearly shed a tear as we shuffled by the taxis, ambulances and smiling families. Sam's was a difficult birth, though not life-threateningly so. None the less, it was his place of birth. And there is (was) something about the old-style maternity unit that's very democratic by 21st century standards, perhaps enforcedly so: everybody in it together, for better or worse.

In that space everybody could hear you scream.

With the private rooms, the all-day visiting, and the LCDs blinking out car-seat adverts disguised as public information films, I dare say some of that will be lost. By and large, mothers will agree, it's A Good Thing. But I bet there won't be the [compulsory] state-sponsored camaraderie that was such a striking feature of that ward.

Or maybe there will - but that's a post for another time.

I am sometimes accused of negativity

but the best place in the world is anywhere on a bright autumn morning.












In this case, Stoke-on-Trent.

*whistles, hops, doffs cap*

What would Cedric do?

...with Stoke?

Every now and again, with a peckish tap of the ENTER key, the Web brings you something fragrant yet tantalising from the back of the fridge.

The Potteries Thinkbelt, a kind of radical/situationist university dreamt up in the 1960s by Stone-born architect Cedric Price, seems visionary even today, and appears still to be tickling today's architects to some degree.

The idea, so it goes, was to mobilise learning by using north Staffordshire's recently-closed railway lines. Educational facilities would be shunted about, combined and recombined in Hanley, Tunstall or Pitshill like Duplo with a doctorate - a kind of anti-university.

The dream was to create something that would never date, since it would be extensible, reconfigurable and generally open to erudite tinkering.

Given the age of the proposals, it's a shame there don't appear to be more remnants out in cyberspace. A search of Stoke libraries' catalogue promises to be a foregone conclusion, but we'll see... oh - WAIT!

(EDIT: hats off to Culturing Stuff. I'd missed this.)

Computer:

Bread. Sliced, white. Margarine.

I wonder what Captain Picard's enviable Earl Grey dispenser would make of that? I'd imagine he might well reply that such a treat is no way to explore the Delta Quadrant, or indeed The Nether Potteries.

What of recent times and climes?

There have been no colourful trips on the 21 - it's been too long old friend. No major angst (well there was, but it was just the the product of an over-anxious mind and has been noted as such), just a fair bit of work stuff (upbeat but busy), and only the odd straggle of mildly interesting annotation in my diary. And therefore, no Sketches From Boz.

The Pittshill of Despair? Far from it. Today I abandoned our only child to Serco ... sorry... Stoke-on-Trent LEA, for the first time. He didn't love it but he didn't hate it either. And for a little while at least, there's the promise of some lonesome time on two weekdays, for the first time in what seems like forever.

I spy some room for a little dérive. Maybe riding the 6A from end to end and back again (and again), or something equally daunting / thrilling. I should probably do a course, but the chances of me abandoning learning in favour of cash or much heavier learning during the next year are too high, whatever the alleged flexibility of the colleges.

I started at Longton Library, where the extremely nice librarian helped me to find a choice volume. "Thing is," she said, "these things get sent to us, and then just disappear when they haven't been borrowed in three years or more."

But there it was, virtually unthumbed: happy days in the town where nearly-new books go to die.

Brand values

As you ascend from Lime Kiln traffic lights towards Hanley, you pass a hand car wash facility on the right, which merrily proclaims itself to be "the best hand job in town." In fact it's pretty much adjacent to the venerable horse-trough from which this blog takes its name.

Today, while queueing interminably to turn right, I noticed that Soap Suds also carries signage for a well-known local taxi firm. Also printed on the sign were the logo of Staffordshire's only Premier League football club, and the initials of the club's well-known firm, the N40.

I find this discouraging. In passing, I was mildly shocked by it. I can't think of any other business that would identify itself so obviously and officially with that sort of stuff.

Bizarre, at best, no?

As daylight wanes

My cycle route from Stoke station to home is indirect but almost entirely off-road - a pleasant diversion at this time of year, certainly. On reaching Westport Lake I bear south east along the sheltered railway cuttings, a stretch that features three short tunnels. It's been getting on for ten by the time I make the journey, just as daylight wanes in earnest.

Infrequently, an unspectacular ritual - like my laboured homeward trundle - throws up an entirely surprising and beautiful sensation. The tunnels to which I refer have been reinforced with corrugated steel in recent years, and so are much reduced versions of the prolonged brick arches that once contained and channelled the billowing steam of blackened locomotives.

By day, they're a wholly predictable tale of lightly scorched tarmac, intervals of broken glass and hastily-sprayed appendages (though the greenways are fine on the whole). But in the half-light between day and night, you can't see the tunnel walls or the black surface beneath you; there's no time for your eyes to adjust (and I have tended to forego the lights since I don't use the road and the light lingers longer on the towpaths). You just pedal towards the horseshoe of light, visually dispossessed of all but the shining front edges of handlebars and spokes, until you emerge once more into the muted light and sleepy vegetation of the greenway cutting.

What makes this really compelling is that at least one of the tunnels absolutely teems with bats. Amid the gloomy chill they're all about you, coming straight at you - dancing, so it seems - but of course they'll never collide. And as you approach the shining tunnel-end, their intense flickering and dotting lends a vivid filmic quality to your own feeling of movement, especially when allied to the steady cranking of pedals.

It's a fleeting experience lasting mere seconds, defying easy description, but beautiful.

Night rider

Last Tuesday night, I trudged through the drizzle from the station to Hanley following another giddy evening of teenage rampage.

It's a forty-five minute wait for the Glorious XXI at that time of night and it makes as much sense to walk up to the bus station via the Coachmakers: "we've got a visitor," riffed the couple at the bar as I necked a swift half.

In damply pixelated daydreams the waiting area at Hanley Bus Station is easily transformed into a 1980s platform game - one has to vault the onrushing "spare a smoke" folk and splat several randomised drunks, all whilst dodging some half-programmed fist-shakers from the Street Fighter auditions.

While I counted my golden pennies, a senior gent breezed out of nowhere, enquired keenly about which bus I was awaiting, and seemed delighted to inform me that, "you'll have no trouble with that one, duck - Pawel's on tonight." Producing a dazzling golden pocket watch from within, he was able to add that I'd only be waiting three and a half minutes (precisely).

He was absolutely correct. Acknowledgments duly exchanged, we both took separate seats on the bus, me surrendering £1.70, he twitching his cap and bus-pass.

On passing Cheque & Pawn (auspicious), an appreciative rumble broke out amongst the kindly old fella and three of his peers - a spontaneous outbreak of positivity that I guessed could add years to their lives, though I've no idea what prompted it.

I inferred that all were ex-PMT workers who had never stopped riding the buses, keeping time, or doing that thing that bus drivers do when they pass one another - even when sat in the very same saloon and deprived of their drives.

I'm not sure why, but I love those moments.

Meanwhile, the boy awakens...

Social Shrapnel

And so we have our modest furrow near the bottom of the Scotia Valley, complete with soon-to-be murky pond, bodged-up greenhouse and weather-beaten shed-thing.

Currently it's throwing up rather more pottery than produce (see the makings of a fab mosaic once Sam's a little more careful with his hands) but let's give it time - every window sill in the house has been colonised determinedly by gutsy seedlings. There may even be enough celery to prompt a whimsical jaunt to Stamford Bridge later on in the year.

The best thing is the number and variety of connections that are quickly cemented via the twin media of seed and frogspawn. There's even a nice fella with a Harris Hawk and a fire engine (Sam impressed).

With its recycled aesthetic and general cobbled-togetherness, the sum of the whole doesn't seem to pair gracefully with the quasi-marketese guff du jour that is 'social capital' - rather it's earthier (clearly, inherently) and more instantly uplifting. Plus of course, no hint of a large bank loan.

And now, this looks interesting (via White Llama)

Whodathunkit?

Message received from Meanwhile's economic advisor...


Hey Meanwhile,

Did you watch Newsnight on Friday? I highly recommend Paul Mason's 'Road to Wigan Pier' piece. He spends most of it in Stoke listening to locals. The basic message seems to be:

• Stoke is screwed - but actually they're used to that so relatively it's not so bad.
  
• The rest of the country might look like Stoke soon and is in for a big shock
• Stoke-on-Trent is the future. Whooda thought it?
  
  

This is a judiciously-edited and sober piece of the provinces. Mason's Road to Wigan Pier - via Hanley - begins fourteen minutes in. The taxi driver's contribution is excellent.

Nonbussed

"Deeply fascinating" debates on the new rail timetable have some distance to run perhaps. We'll not go into that right now. Not much, anyway...

Upon inspecting the new destinations on Stoke station's departure boards this morning, my first thoughts raced straight to Ninian Park, Whaddon Road and Ashton Gate... with no need to change at Birmingham. Wu-hoo!

This is wonderful news. Our horizons seem instantly expanded and the service seems generally better on paper. A nice empty Pendolino to Manc at 7.45 replaces the crowded four coaches at 7.36, but - nnngh! - the return journey is now totally out of sync with The Glorious XXI, making it infinitely more difficult to arrive home in time for Sam's bath.

And there's no improvement to the Longport service. Many northbound trains in the morning, with crap all coming back. Not that one would ever expect it - nice new information screens, but barely a departure to display... (it would seem all the Londoners want to visit Kidsgrove instead)

And now the last train home is even earlier! FFS! It's a very personal slant (ok, an unpolishable rant) on the issue, but there's surely mileage in the idea that this stuff - that is, being able to access opportunities afforded by adjacent big cities at night, be they work, education or leisure - is fundamental to persuading people to live and stay in Stoke.

This is England

At least, it is today. Painted, chipped boundary walls, shoulder-high. Next door's dog soiling the back yard (just out of shot). Chimney pots. Plant pots. Sheds and prefabricated garages. Gable ends and hotch-potch bathroom extensions like the connectors in a fragmented jigsaw. Redundant pegs and plastic shower caps on the washing line. And skies that should be leaden, but aren't.

Now Pirates Get PMT!

[clarification for outsiders]

A truism, perhaps, but it's great fun when toddlers reimagine everyday stuff.

Last Friday, as Sam and I were plotting a course to the library, we briefly watched some workmen erecting Burslem's new bus shelters and scoffing chocolate hob-nobs ready for the Saturday switch-on of the lights.

Slinky windbreaks, so they are. Steely curvacious numbers with wavy wanderings printed on the glass. Each one has its own lofty spike which I take to be an aerial for the bus info feed. About as burlesque and suggestive as a bus shelter can possibly get. Appropriate for Burslem.

Well, maybe.

It appears they're also designed to echo the old Ceramica shop. Prepare for a letters-page boreathon in the Sentinel...* Luckily, two-year old skippers have no time for such petty seditions!

"A PIRATE SHIP!" boomed the potty-training privateer, perched with outretched finger 'pon the foc'sle of his speedy caravel. And a very sci-fi pirate ship at that, if slightly landlocked there in its berth beside the Methodist Mission. Indeed, a sci-fi pirate ship with live bus information!

And thus was the precedent set for the remains of the day. Cool day. The bus stops aren't bad really - maybe a bit slimline for the demands of the Potteries microclimate.

And expensive? Fuck it. Motorists are far more subsidised than bus users anyway. Not a point you'll see made very often in the Sentinel, although I do remember one comment to that effect by Tom Whiteley a couple of years back.

Credit where it's due, see! But as for: "*" ... ok, ok, I'll give it a rest...

Hymn to PMT

Hanley, 5.45pm.

Five lads, beered and bullshitting, mounted my homeward bus at that very special stop outside Cheque & Pawn, and thence lunged for the back seats.

A polyphony of choking and coughing commenced in earnest as the chari passed Staples. Small lakes (no solids) formed in the time it takes to reach Pets at Home - possibly the shortest geological period yet recorded.

By the time our young gods alighted at Commercial Street, there were damp little tributaries running all the way to the disabled seats, and - bizarrely - the strong smell of oranges. They all remembered to thank the driver: "traaa, mate."

Those boys need feeding so that they have the energy to learn about what beer is.

Being the sympathetic type, I was inspired to produce the following, which I'll proceed to devour at work over the next couple of days [edit: microwave FUCKED! This CANNOT be!]

Scaleable, simple piquant chick pea lunch thing

Many, many chick peas, soaked (like, 60% of it)
Lots of green beans, chopped
Some carrot, diced
Some shallot, chopped
Paprika, much
Cumin, some
Garlic, two cloves - um, whatever
Some root ginger - damn, I ran out
A few revolutions of the WC2006 souvenir peppermill
Mustard seeds
A little passata
Olive oil

Chuck it all in the frying pan and cook severely until it looks and taste nice. Disco!

Line thy stomachs, my children!

My kingdom for a window seat

Early.

One of the things I erred briefly about when I left behind my last job in the Potteries commuterland to work "up Manchester way" was the travelling.

So it transpires, twelve months on, that driving can be a faff sometimes (and, oh, the guilt of a Guardian reader!) but mostly the train service is very solid indeed, if expensive. In fact, some mornings it's an unequivocal pleasure. At worst, it's still preferable to wearing some Londoner's armpit in lieu of space for a hat.

Hopping on at Stoke, I can almost always secure a window seat before the chattering hoardes besiege the Quiet Zone at Congleton. For these forty revolutions of the clock (sometimes fewer), reverie is mine, punctuated only by the prodding enquiries of a ticket collector or the sudden snagging of a curious conversation.
















The recent bad weather has only heightened this waking daydream feeling, even if the permanent way was really made for anything but. Northbound, we've Mow Cop and Bosley's Cloud resplendent in teetering silver. An ethereal flash of wending canal. The Dane whispering and winding far below us.

Later, we're retracing our stealthy slide-path, this time all wrapped up in provincial shadows and with only pale reflections of ourselves for eye contact. There are blue-chip cellphone accents and pinched corporate letterheads, things that only ever pass through Stoke on fast trains.

There are heads-in-notebooks and 3G wireless cards blinking neurotically. There are four seats, four Windows desktops and barely a waking moment as we shoulder-charge the A500 at Longport.
















One face - uplit as if with a child's torch - scrunches briefly as a door beeps and plunks, letting in the cold Staffordshire air:

"How long to Euston?"

Anomienous

Journalists at the BBC have finally nabbed the exclusive that many of us here in the Potteries had been hoping to keep to ourselves until - OoooOh - at least 1993.

The results of their survey show that Stoke-on-Trent, our very own town(s) that time forgot, is(are) in fact the most marvellous place(s) on earth, most of the time. This is based, apparently, on the relatively low pervasiveness of anomie (feeling feint? wiki it instead).

This might have seemed a little strange to the researchers in question had the state of local politics been accounted for. As it goes, the vital signs seem to go uncorroborated by any kind of living, breathing survey based on attitudes - no matter, see a nice video here and get yer sweet, sweet schadenfreude here!

They'll be dancing in the streets of the Mother Town (or, at least, its hinterland).

Whatever. They'll also sigh knowingly and offer up a "right y'are then, duck," before ambling off down Waterloo Road with a wary chuckle. Still, we/they can rest contentedly in having the strongest sense of 'belonging' of any (ahem!) 'local radio area' in the UK - a finding that has spurred the most unlikely comparison between Burslem and Bayswater.

I've blogged about this before, from my own perspective as an outsider who is both peeping and creeping in with my swagbag full of anomie and dislocation. It's fairly clear that all is not well in Stoke-on-Trent generally. However it's great to see something so bluntly (if inarticulately) positive all over the national media, especially after this and other recent media beatings.

Incidentally, Bramhall, where I sometimes haul my trolley of job-related oddities, is supposed to be the UK's most 'rooted' community... *adjusts collar*.... spot the mysterious connection, folks!

In fact Sam and I were interviewed by Radio Stoke (token male at toddler group, see) on this very issue, but before I could slavishly reprise Benedict (or even Brett) Anderson, Sam had lunged at the terrified reporter yelling "scary biscuits!" at the top of his little voice.

Which is probably about right as an erudite response; for my part, I just blathered twitchily about knowing and trusting our neighbours, the toddler group being very welcoming, and so on - though I'm still not sure I'd commit to that fortnight in Benidorm out of 'street solidarity'...

Postscript: Curiously, a quick bash on 'anomie stoke-on-trent' chucks you this beauty...

NOM NOM NOM: that's the sound of the Police...

Ahahahaha snooort! Pure GOLD!!!

I should probably let it lie, but this recent front-page outrage is a Sentinelism of the highest order.

Revealed: Contrary to popular belief, officers of the law in Stoke-on-Trent are a bit partial to a sandwich and banana for their scram. Quite awesomely, the MASSIVE headline comes complete with shocking illustration: the offending carrier bag photoshopped into some innocent bobby's hand, or, "our mock-up of how an officer may look doing his shopping at Asda."

Um, right then...

So has some jilted journalist at the Sentinel picked up a speeding fine of late or something? Poor soul. An earnest paragraph acknowledges that the Force is investigating the alleged naughtiness. And, if you press your ear to the cold steel gates outside the back of Hanley police station, you may just detect a weary sigh carried along on the breeze from the copper canteen.

To underline the daftness, even the send them back brigade over at thisisstaffordshire.co.uk is failing vociferously to detect any sort of problem whatsoever...

Brilliant.

Sentinelism

Pic via Wayne Williams on Facebook.

Now then - this may become a recurring theme here, but the terminally slow-news-dazed Sentinel today gets to table the idea via a suggestive whisper (a sentinelism!) that sacred landmark and undisputed fount of civilisation Burslem town hall is about to be wiped off the face of the planet.

Fffrrfff!

Is this mischievous or just a bit rubbish, or both? Do readers swallow it? I dunno, but fortunately for the rest of us, Northcliffe Newspapers has plenty of highly entertaining previous - and that's without even bringing the Mail into the equation.

While the subject of the article is valid enough, is it too much to hope that if (or when) Stoke's governance improves seriously, one or two of our city's opinion-formers might just have to raise their game too, or at least find a new story that's actually worth fucking about with?

Burslem by night

There's a teetering, unspecific restlessness about Burslem at night, when the drone of traffic has passed and the streets are all but left to the cats, even if it's just the anticipation of nothing in particular.



Thanks to the jaundiced uplighting and fractured textures of blistered gable ends, Queen Street really does seem to twitch and tense its sinews in the cold night air.

[With apologies for the limitations of my compact camera...]