Dazed In The Life

I’m in Manchester today, shopping. Or at least, I intended to. It’s an odd feeling wandering around the middle of a city you’ve never visited before at the best of times. It’s downright confusing at Christmas: “Dammit, I’ve walked past that 15-foot luminous snowman six times!” Rather helpfully, they have lots of maps with “YOU ARE HERE” marked on it dotted on practically every street corner (although they may as well have footnoted the You Are Here with a Lost, for all the good it did me).

Manchester is strangely overwhelming actually. Maybe it’s because I’m a Red-Blooded Scouser at heart but this city seems to glare at you. There are Pizza Huts, Starbucks, McDonalds and Greggs encroaching on every side. It took me an hour to find an internet café and yet there is no obvious lack of fast-food outlets – these people have their priorities. I was mildly surprised to discover that, while only comprising a population of about 500,000, Manchester has its own light-rail system like our beloved LUAS in Dublin, a city twice its size.

Not only that, but it seems as though Manchester is a city with grand designs and ideas far above its station. It must stem from the certain football team resident here… Anyway, it has its own China Town, its own Gay Village, and its very own, very frightening and very – for once – mapless shopping hub in the Arndale, which isn’t so much a shopping centre as a purchasing planet. If you imagine placing The Square, Blanchardstown, Liffey Valley and Dundrum Shopping into a blender, mixing them up and dumping the entire messy glob into Grafton Street, that’s pretty much the effect of the Arndale and Market Street. I had to postpone any shopping until tomorrow. Today was merely the reconnaisance.