I WAS followed by a crow today because I had a fish in my hand.

The fish was a fried fish from the chippy called the Hut on Liverpool Road into which my good friend, a Scot, by the name of Steven Lindsay, has in a spirit of civilising progressiveness encouraged the sale of the battered sausage. It’s ‘a belter, a Glasgow delicacy,’ as he describes.

The crow was noble in its devilish darkness, its head swivelling from side to side each time laying a black eye upon me and my haddock. It looked healthy as hell too, with a sheen on its feathers as rich as a polished jackboot. As Mark Garner of Manchester Confidential says, when birds look at you like that, they remind you of nothing less than their ancient relatives, dinosaurs, in this case a big predatory T-Rex.

The crow hopped from wall to wall on Longworth Street never taking its dead vision from me as though Hitchcock were directing it. A woman in her mid-thirties was walking the other way. “It’s following you,” she said with a strange smile, “is it your familiar?” She was dressed completely in black, like the crow. The only difference was she had platinum dyed hair and very black mascara.

The city was looking interesting in the late afternoon winter. It was half three, the light was failing and in the cold air every building seemed outlined in ink against the tarnished silver sky. Yet it was getting a bit scary down on Longworth Street. I swear that as soon as the woman spoke the crow gave her look, bobbed its head, and flapped away arrogantly. I was left alone with my fish and a slight chill down my spine.

Writing the time as half three, reminds me of something. I had a typical Northern European misunderstanding on the weekend. I was conducting tours of Chetham’s Library at 1.30pm and 3pm. There were a couple of Norwegians on the first tour who’d arrived a little early. They’d arrived at 12.30pm. This was because they’d rung me in the morning and asked me when the tour was starting. Half one I’d said. In many Northern European countries people think half one is half twelve, an hour earlier, in other words half the hour. In our island logic it clearly can only mean a half hour after the hour.

The Nordic guests were still delighted to come on the tour of these almost 600-year-old buildings: as were an American woman and her daughter who were looking up universities in the UK. The daughter wants to do a Masters in building conservation over here. When Michael Powell, the librarian, revealed letters from the Heywood collection signed by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, they shook their heads in astonishment.

The 3pm group loved the buildings too. As Michael, with his trademark sardonic delivery, was entertaining the guests while showing them remarkable materials such as a medieval bible in manuscript from the 1300s and the utterly lovely first edition of Saxtons’ Atlas of England and Wales from 1579, one woman noticed something about her friend. She thought he looked like the founder of Chetham’s School and Library, Humphrey Chetham, so she got him to pose behind Michael’s back and took the picture. “It’s the nose and the eyes,” she said later. David, as her friend was called, seemed happy to go along with the description. He was Humphrey for a day. 

This reminded me of the time when I was taking a large group around Manchester Art Gallery and we stopped in the Pre-Raphaelite gallery. As I was talking I saw four people detach themselves and walk to a Holman Hunt picture. This was The Shadow of Death and features Christ with his arms raised in a Y-shape. It depicts him in his pre-Messiah days when he had a proper job and he’s stretching after sawing wood in his carpenter’s shop, ominously in the Hunt painting, his shadow on the wall behind is reminiscent of the crucifixion.
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The wandering four from my group split. One took a picture, while, with Christ’s Y as the first letter, the other three made the MCA of the Village People’s disco blast. It was hilarious - if irreverent.

On that second Chetham’s tour were a father and daughter from Perth, Australia. They have relatives in Hartlepool and had seen Chetham’s Library on an Australian travel programme. Robert had called me in the morning to see if there were any spare tickets. There weren’t, but he seemed desperate to come along and when he said he wanted to drive from Hartlepool to Manchester and back for the tour in a day, I had to say yes.

The English (rather than perhaps the Scots’) sense of distance isn’t long. Two hours in each direction is perhaps the upper limit for most. When I grew up in Rochdale I never went out in Bury, all of six miles distant. Then again there wasn’t much there that Rochdale didn’t have aside from a better fish market and no teenager goes six miles for fish. Even when the crows leave you alone.
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Robert’s daughter is studying at a Sydney university. Previously she’d stayed with friends on that side of the country but way outside Sydney and she said: “We’d drive six hours each way to get some city life.” I guided a journalist from Colorado once and he lived two hours from the nearest shop. I like to live two minutes from the nearest shop. And bar. With a national park and the Pennines within ten to fifteen miles. Convenience is so convenient.

TWO crazy and fruity stories from a Manchester hotel manager the other day. 
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My friend had been called by the PA of a company that uses the hotel frequently and asked if a visiting company director could be ‘looked after’. This means an upgraded bedroom, a free bottle of bubbly or wine and maybe some chocolates. A couple of days after the visit, the manager was called back by the PA and said, “What did you think I meant by ‘looked after’? I didn’t mean send an escort to his room.”

Apparently the director had gone for a jog in the morning and returned to the room. Just as he was about to shower there was a knock on the door, so still in his jogging shorts he answered. There was a beautiful young woman outside who pushed her way in, kissed him passionately on the lips and moved towards the bedroom. “No, no, please no,” stuttered the man and ushered the surprised woman out.

After calming the PA of the company down, assuring her that the hotel would never send a prostitute to a guest’s room, the manager checked the CCTV. He saw the escort enter the room and quickly leave whereupon, clearly confused, she checked her phone, shook her head and walked round a couple of corners, knocked on another door and this time didn’t come out for a while. What had happened was she’d originally gone to room 412 when she should have gone to 421. Not good with figures in this sense of the word.
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He had an even more disturbing story. A maid one day came down from one of the rooms and said, “There’s a body in room 238.” The manager took a concierge to investigate and there in the darkened bedroom there was a prone figure. “You open the curtains and I’ll call the emergency services,” said the manager. When the curtains were opened the body turned out to be a sex doll. This was removed to the office where a short time later a call was received. A male voice said, “I left something in room 238.” “We know you did,” said the manager, “lots of people leave things like gloves and hats but not what you left.” “I wouldn’t have left her but we’d had an argument,” said the man about an inanimate plastic doll. “May I come and get her?” “Of course,” said the, by now, bewildered and bemused manager, “but I advise you don’t leave the doll in bedrooms for maids to find and think they are dead bodies.” “Right you are,” said the man as though he’d just had a conversation about buying teabags.
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On a more savoury note had some fabulous fun with Belgian guests recently in Tatton Park as the snow fell. The picture below show several incentive tour buyers hosted by Visit Britain about to scoot through the deer park on all-terrain Segways. Ha, this was fun including a tremendous and dramatic fall I suffered when being too cocky on the way back to the start point. Proper head over heels as I tried to take a bank too sharply. The good news was that it was in full view of everyone. My how they laughed at me.  

The Belgians took several pictures of the red deer sheltering in the park. With the snow falling it was pretty as picture. The day before we had gathered in Cloud 23 for a champagne reception, 23 floors up in the Hilton Hotel even though the guests and me were staying over the Midland Hotel. Good job we hadn't had the champagne before the Segwaying otherwise I might have tried to do a wheelie somersault on my machine.

On Friday last week I took artists and festival organisers on a Peterloo Massacre tour for a project for Manchester International Festival (MIF) next year, which will also be the 200th anniversary of Peterloo. Fabulous people seen in the top picture below. This is the best thing about a specialist tour. People are on the tour because they want to learn things and they want to talk about them. An energised audience is always the best.

Of course, it is the performer’s job (guides are performers and entertainers not academics although they need a bit of that too) to get the most from an audience, but there’s only so far one can go. Faced with a group of teenagers who have been told to come on a tour after maybe a four hour drive from Oxford where they had already been subjected to a morning tour simply isn’t easy. Similarly with a Malaysian group recently who didn’t really want a full coach tour, they just wanted to get to the Manchester United bit so they could take pictures and tick the visit-to-Britain box for stadia.

With the MIF group it was blast, loads of fun, lots of questions, lots of to-ing and fro-ing, despite the topic.

This Wednesday I conducted a tour for the Alliance Business School. It involved post-grads from China, the USA, the Czech Republic, Spain and Australia. I said, “It’s a shame you aren’t studying the weather because on this tour it’s going to throw itself at you in five different ways: rain, hail, snow, wind and sunshine.” Actually I was wrong we got sleet too. 

A PSYCHIC medium called Lee came on my Chetham’s tour on Saturday. He’s a pleasant man, very gentle and gracious and had previously come on my Mayfield tour. I am naturally of a sceptical cast of mind but it’s always interesting listening to those who consider themselves in touch with ‘the other side’. Turns out he had three ‘experiences’ or ‘visions’ or ‘manifestations’ at Chetham’s  – not sure of the right word.

By the main gate he saw a group of young boys seemingly at play. The costumes he described could have been those of the ‘poor boys’ admitted in the late 1600s. He thought these spirits were happy in themselves. Then in the Baronial Dining Room he saw a group of gentlemen from the early 1700s having a serious meeting but again nothing threatening.
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However, in the Audit Room, which already has a hell mouth carving of a demon eating a sinner (see picture below) and a burn mark supposedly from Satan, he found himself standing next to a beautiful young woman from the nineteenth century in a striking red dress to which something terrible had happened. Oh dear. 

This echoed Lee’s Mayfield tour experience. He’d ‘seen’ a dead man from 1968 walking up and down one of the platforms his soul stuck in time and lost up there. There was nothing troubling about him though. Meanwhile in one of the old parcel offices in the depot he sensed 'a very dark presence’ and that something awful had occurred which was hidden from him.

Now like I say I am of a sceptical mind but when you are alone in these ancient, on the one hand, and abandoned, on the other hand, places, you can’t help things playing on your mind. Why can’t all ghosts be happy ghosts, just hanging around because they so enjoyed it down here and can’t let go.

By the way the diesel pump in Mayfield is becoming a celebrity on the tours. It’s a seventies entity in vivid yellow with a Total tag for Total Oil. It’s a handsome devil too and in the quiet of the vast Mayfield depot, in my mind’s eye, I imagine it comes alive and hops around the depot when nobody is there. Matt Wilkinson, a photographer, came on the Sunday tour and took some marvellous images, including one of the diesel pump, below. I particularly like the picture at the top of this page too of the rows of iron pillars receding into the distance, like something from the Lord of the Rings..

It was my birthday on Saturday  - 27 January. And that of Alice in Wonderland’s Lewis Carroll. Or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, as he was called when he was born in Daresbury, 21 miles from Manchester in 1832. There’s some sort of connection in that. There’s something very ‘down the rabbit hole’ and ‘through the looking glass’ about my occupation of writing on lots of different things from food to architecture to politics, taking people into places they’ve never been and into places that may have been closed for decades, while writing on imagined or illusionary buildings and projects.
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27 January is also a very sombre day as it marks the liberation of Auschwitz and is thus International Holocaust Day. I took the family to Auschwitz several years ago, everybody should visit. It never leaves you and nor should it. Alice and death camps. 27 January, it seems, is absurdity and horror. I suppose one way or another every day is, somewhere in this imperfect world. Not the most cheerful of thoughts but pertinent given what Holocaust Day represents. 

​2017 ended and 2018 began with public tours on the Discover Manchester programme. This is where a group of guides under the heading Manchester Guided Tours have teamed up to provide tours everyday at 11am: that’s every day including Christmas Day. They’re excellent value, under £10, and the tours provide a general introduction to Manchester rather than being themed on a specific subject.

For the guide it’s a voyage of discovery too, as you have no idea who might turn up and where they might come from. The two small groups I picked up from the 11am rendezvous location outside Central Library before and after New Year, included people from Germany, Canada, Belgium, USA, China, as well as closer to home in Preston, Prestwich, Stockport and Manchester.

For these tours my usual route is St Peter’s Square, Central Library, Town Hall Extension, Albert Square, St Ann’s Church, Royal Exchange with a finish at the Cathedral, or at the rear of the latter, at the National Football Museum. This route hits several prominent city centre buildings while also covering a richness of history that no other provincial city can compete with in the UK. Yeah, I know, that’s a bold statement, but I stand by it. Come on the tour and you’ll understand why. It’s also a route that takes guests inside a lot of buildings, which as well as providing occasionally welcome shelter, provides a more comprehensive tour than simply keeping on the streets.

On 2 January there were two guests from Lubbock, Texas. One of this pair lives in Cologne for the time being and was showing his friend some other parts of Europe with a non-traditional itinerary of Dublin, Manchester, Antwerp and then back to Cologne. “What’s Lubbock, Texas, like?” I asked. “It’s got the Buddy Holly museum, is in a cotton growing area, is very flat, has a quarter of a million inhabitants but it’s four hours from the nearest  major city,” said one of the friends. “You could describe it as the most disappointing city in the USA,” said his pal with a grin. “Wow,” I said, “they should market it that way, people flock to places with a point of exception. The city authorities could have a campaign called ‘Lubbock, it always disappoints.’”

Strangely enough this observation from citizens of the city made me want to go to Lubbock. Places that seem dour to the natives often have something worthwhile to experience for visitors. Part of the paradox of tourism is that residents feel contempt for qualities visitors find fascinating. Not that I'm a big Buddy Holly fan. 

My last tour of 2017 had included an extremely dapper gentleman with a bow tie.  When I'd asked the guests where they hailed from, our dandy self-described as an Indian Italian Scouser working at Manchester Royal Infirmary. I said not only are you the first Indian Italian Scouser I’ve ever met but you’re the best dressed Indian Italian Scouser I’ve ever met. The two Canadians on the group were visiting because the male half of the couple was a football fanatic who supports Everton Football Club passionately through a family connection. He was here to visit the National Football Museum and the two Manchester clubs before attending a game at Goodison Park in Liverpool.

Couple of final points.

The best thing I overheard in a Manchester pub over the New Year was while waiting at a bar, and a man said to his lady, “I look on life as a comedy which is my tragedy, you look on life as a tragedy which is your tragedy.” It sounded Wildean and profound, although I’m not sure it is profound at all. I'm still trying to sort out its meaning but it had fine ring to it.

Meanwhile there was a pleasant tweet from Allied London about the long derelict London Road Fire Station. This was posted on New Year’s Eve. It read '2017: Planning Permission obtained, a year of historic tours with @JonathSchofield and a special collaboration with @wallpapermag #WallpaperComposed - featuring a enchanting performance from @JescaHoop here's to an historic 2018 #HouseOfLondonRoad.'

​Truly, taking those tours around that venerable space incorporating the living memories of people who had lived and worked, there were some of my favourite moments of the past two years.

So in a few days I will have completed my first of sixteen walks for Manchester International Festival. These sold out second quickest after Bjork apparently. That's 480 people I'll be taking around. 

It just shows that publicity is everything. The brochure and website of this incredibly well-regarded festival has worked its magic on my tours. I can't wait to start. There will be a few surprises for people but then on a tour called Rabbit holes, Radicals and Pioneers, there'd have to be.  

A curious incident happened on a Haunted Underworld tour. There was one young woman who from beginning to end had her fingers in her ears and her eyes tight shut and was being guided round by her friend. 

When the terrors of the underground had been negotiated and the screams had faded I asked the woman whether she'd enjoyed it. 

"Yes," she said in the fresh air above ground, "tremendously."

"But you didn't see any of it or hear any of it?" I said. 

"I know I was too frightened to look but I still thought it was brilliant," she said. 

Saturday 7 March 2015 and I had two tours, a full to bursting Haunted Underworld tour and a more modestly proportioned Tour of Uninteresting Objects. 

The backdrop was less delightful. A small number – maybe 300 or so – EDL were bothering the city centre. The tiny, ridiculous yet noisy EDL - the so-called English Defence League; not my England, not my defence league so how dare they adopt England’s name. There were police everywhere, fences to corral them and a helicopter overhead. Mostly the EDL seemed interested in occupying Walkabout sports bar and drinking gassy alcohol based on Continental lagers.

As a tour guide the main practical problem was the helicopter. Jeez those things are hard to project over even with a foghorn for a voice - as I'm proud to possess.

The two groups were very diverse, the EDL would have hated them. The Haunted Underworld tour included people from across Manchester but also Aberdeen, the Isle of Man, Romania, Spain and Turkey. The two Spaniards, both women, had settled in Manchester and were respectively an architect and a civil engineer.  They were skilled workers doing their bit, enjoying life in Manchester, although they felt Manchester was needlessly demolishing old buildings.

This confused me a little as this isn’t happening so much at present. Century House was the one the Spaniards mentioned but we disagreed about this, after all the adjacent buildings were pigsties, the worst of the eighties. Still the council and the planning department does have to be closely monitored over its ideas about the city centre, it needs to be watched with a beady eye in case expedience is allowed to destroy heritage.

Latest sketchy plans for the area between Bootle Street and Jackson’s Row appear to not include the Sir Ralph Abercromby pub, a two hundred and some year old pub, one of two surviving structures from the time of the Peterloo Massacre in the location where it happened.

The EDL meatheads were bothersome on the second tour. There was an anxious moment as a group, or to use the correct collective noun for EDL a lump, of them loped past the tour party at St John’s Gardens. It was a curious day all round for the Tour of Uninteresting Objects. As I talked close to the Commercial Hotel on Liverpool Road, one of the oldest, and probably the very oldest, railway hotel in the world, a drinker, about eight pints in, came over the road to listen. He swayed slightly and squinted a bit but didn’t interrupt. He fell off the kerb at one point. Maybe it was my delivery.

There was a Chilean couple on the tour with a baby. The man worked at the University I think, or it may have been the hospital, the woman was studying at the University, and they’d been here eighteen months. 

“We love Manchester,” the woman had said. 

“There's so much to do, it’s a great city to live in,” the man said. 

“Our little girl,” said the woman looking down at the baby strapped to her chest, ”was born here. I’m so proud to say she is a Mancunian.”

It was said with such evident pride it made me smile and wonder. Here were recent immigrants who had a clear sense of identity already. Here were two ‘foreigners’ settled in Manchester with a young native in their arms who will share two cultures as she grows. 

Meanwhile the streets of the city had been bothered by ‘natives’ of my Britain, people who seem lost and marooned, who seem stuck out-of-time, impotent. The EDL men and women (mainly men) I saw seemed blind to the advantages and opportunities an open and pluralistic society offers them. They’ve turned inwards, turned ‘the other’ into a problem and in the process turned themselves into a greater problem. 

The urbane Chileans and Spaniards on my tours appeared to embody what I would consider my British values better than would-be nationalists of my own country. In limited numbers fortunately the EDL moved through Manchester’s Saturday streets, trapped in narrow hatreds, their faces angry, their hands balled in fists, just a mere misplaced stare away from violence.

But they were a hornet on a buffalo's back. An irritant, a distraction. They and that helicopter. Manchester's city centre is back to normal now as colourful and diverse as ever. 

I did a public speaking engagement in Fumo Restaurant recently. I was sat opposite two fine Hungarian chaps who were attending a conference in the city. 

One was a huge Manchester United fan. There were three hotels that delegates were staying in and as fate would have it he'd been allocated Hotel Football - the new hotel opposite Old Trafford stadium owned my past Manchester United stars such as Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville. 

"Do you want a Quays or a Stadium view?" the receptionist had asked when he'd checked in. In his charming accent and imaginative English our lovely visitor said, "I couldn't bloody believe my lucky stars, I fell to my knees and thanked God for this privilege, and shouted so very loudly, "You are an Angel sent from Heaven, please the Stadium view!" I leave the curtains open so the big red neon sign of Manchester United can sleep with me."

IT was late 2001.

He looked like some sort of cleverly put together puppet of a softly spoken young middle-class southern lad. In fact he was probably described in ‘the counties’, as upper-middle class, a nuance which is impossible in the North of England.

He was called Damian, I think, and was impeccably neat with a slight frame and a voice that seemed trained from the cot for Radio 4.

“What’s your idea?” I said.

“I’m concerned about the demise of Polynesian peoples on low-lying islands,” he said enunciating every syllable.

“Should global warming involve an increase in sea levels then whole cultures may disappear,” he said with the look of a man riven by personal tragedy.

“Sounds serious,” I said. “So where will you go?”

“I’m going to the island of Fukayu-up. I’m going to record the experiences and lives of the women – the mothers - and how they are facing the possible extinction of their society. And you? I can tell you have a North Country accent.”

North Country? Bless him, the decayed description of a retired vicar in a Jane Austen novel. (By the way I may have made up that island name).

But I had to admire his cunning. Dying cultures – good one, ticked lots of boxes. I’d have to watch Damian.

You see, we were at war.

We were the last men standing in Radio 4’s ‘Journey of a Lifetime’ competition. Several thousand people had entered the annual comp giving details of why their dream journey should be selected.

The prize for the sole winner was a fully financed BBC trip to their destination. On return home, weather-worn and heroic, their travellers tales would be broadcast on Radio 4.

After two interviews already, in the home of co-sponsors the Royal Geographical Society close to Hyde Park, it had come down to this, me and Damian. There was no second prize.

“I want to go to Manchester.”


My rival looked puzzled.

“ I have an old Times Atlas of the World,” I said. “One day I found tucked away in the Bolivian rainforest, on an Amazon tributary, another Manchester. It’s the oddest, most inaccessible British city namesake in the world. The nearest road appears to be at least two hundred miles away, the only access is down a river called Rio Manuripi. I want to find out why it’s there and if the place still exists. The last record seems to be a decades old Bolivian airforce survey.”

He was getting it now.

“And of course, next year there’s the Commonwealth Games in Manchester , and that fits as well,” he said. “Are you going at this from an ecological angle or an anthropological one?”

“Neither. Timing's perfect with the Commonwealth Games and it should be a lot of fun,” I said. “I’ll take United and City footy shirts, bottles of Vimto and gallons of Holt’s beer. Me and the villagers will have a great time. Just getting there will make great radio.”

The panel consisted of Richard Bannerman, Editor of Documentaries at the BBC, a man I forget from the Royal Geographic Society, and Benedict Allen, the broadcaster and explorer who had an accent that made Damian’s look common.

When it was my turn I gave everything. I sold my dream hard. I described how I would deliver pure, bloody, broadcast magic to drip mellifluously into the ear of the charmed Radio 4 listener.

Then towards the end, on the spur of the moment, I came up with an idea. On my return I would aim to organise an exhibition in a museum in Manchester with the photographs and memorabilia I’d taken. Good one, I thought to myself.

After the interview, Damian and I sat around awkwardly for a while, until I was called back in.

“Is your time frame of three weeks long enough?” the panel asked. “Have you fully understood the perils of rainforest travel, the disorientation, the loneliness, the potential health hazards and wildlife dangers? Do you know what equipment will be needed?”

“I've already bought a hat,” I said weakly. "With a little mosquito net."

“Damian’s got it,” they said.

He went to his atoll. On radio he delivered a sober account of life on the low reef, although he didn’t seem to be concentrating on the women anymore, the cheat.

I got a couple of letters after the interview. One was from Bannerman saying ‘sorry’ but ‘the nature of your journey made it the more unpredictable of the two ideas’. Benedict Allen wrote to say he’d been rooting for me and hinted he'd been outvoted. He’d loved the exploring for exploring sake and doing it for fun – don’t give up on it, he wrote.

I'm thinking maybe next week. Anybody coming?