I hired a bike on my press trip to the Faroes - or rather the tourist authorities did. You see I thought I'd do a bit of self-guiding round the islands, which would make it easier for them as they wouldn't have to plan anything. And I'd have free time. The bike shop was owned by a man called Daniel. Or maybe the shop was called Danyul. "This is perhaps unique," I remember saying casting my eyes around the place. "Why?" said the owner of the shop who may or may not have been called Daniel. "Because I've never seen seen a shop that sells fully fitted kitchens and bicycles and nothing else. I especially like how you've stacked the bikes between the kitchen units." "I was worried I wasn't making enough money from the bikes so I went for the kitchens as well. It seems to work." "With the limited marketplace presented by a small population I suppose it pays to be flexible," I said. In the Faroes the roads are empty of traffic but filled by the wind. On the four mile hill out of Torshavn I was determined and beat a force 8 gale into submission. I was rewarded with a two and a half mile down hill to the most historic spot on the islands which turned out to be a medieval ruin with an ugly cap to save it from further ruin. I think I would prefer it ruined. The name of village was Kirkjubour. The ruin was a church, apparently the first stone building the islanders had ever built dating from the late 1200s. This seemed a tad late and maybe even lazy. Since there are very few trees on the islands and the whole place is filled with rock - albeit tough basalt - then building houses from driftwood and deliveries of timber from Norway seemed somehow avoiding the obvious building material - stone - all around. Better by far than the scruffy ruin of the oldest stone building was the trad house next door which the owners had left open for visitors to investigate. This was a delightful essay in the plastic nature of wood. It was a lovely place, a liveable place, warm. There were odd touches too, three stools were composed of whale vertebrae. Outside I sat on a wall and ate a sandwich as the ocean slapped on the rocks. To the south west islands dipped in and out of cloud. On one island a village of twenty houses only reachable by boat looked like the last place on earth. How strange to live in such isolation. The healthy stink of seaweed dankly perfumed the air. It was beautiful. I followed the west coast of Streymoy north past a village called Unpronounceable to the village called Howthehelldotheysaythat with three houses which made hamlets look tiny. In the first village was a school with a playground with the best sea view in the world. There was an abandoned football there that was either all the joy of youth yet to be bittered by experience or a small plastic sphere somebody had carelessly forgotten. The Faroese landscape makes you think epic thoughts, you can't help yourself. There seems to be a department in the Faroese government which artfully leaves kids toys about in villages, footballs, kids sit-on tractors and so on. You never see kids, you never see anybody in these villages, but you see toys and signs of life as though people have just left or are just about to arrive. It's unsettling. I cycled on. After a preposterous gorge, as though somebody had hit the coast with an axe, I continued up a very steep hill and disappeared into mist. This didn't bother me. The good thing about mist in June on the Faroes is that you don't have to worry about it getting dark. I'd seen on the map that four miles up the coast road there was a path which took me east back, over a single mountain to Torshavn. It was a wonderful short cut and armed with a mountain bike, I was looking forward to it. Unfortunately the map was a liar, the cartographer a clown. The map said a path followed a stream up to the ridge. I couldn't see the ridge because although I had come down out of the mist it was still covering the higher ground. Sod it, let's go I thought. Push the bike up and then ride down the other side. A third of mile up the non-path marked by the map-making liar I hit a snag. The grass path that was merely the same grass as elsewhere with oyster catchers, curlews, flocks of geese and ravens for company, hit the mist line. I stared at the fibbing map again and the path that wasn't there. It said the path followed the stream and I was following the stream so I must be on the right non-track I decided. Another ten minutes of toiling the mist cleared for 120 seconds. I couldn't believe what I saw. There was still no path but there was a seventy foot cliff with a waterfall. I looked back at how far I'd dragged the bike. I really didn't want to return that way and have to cycle all those miles and hills back to Torshavn. I looked at the cliff again before the view disappeared.
There were a couple of possible routes. It took me half an hour but I managed it although the bike and I reversed our relationship. It rode me. Or rather I carried it, which is the same thing. It was a heavy bike but by edging on ledges I got there, frequently going ahead to find a way and leaving the bike behind like an injured companion - one you weren't friends with any more because they are no help at all. Fortunately the mist was so thick I didn't know how far there was to fall. Ignorance can be an advantage. On the other side, buoyed by my derring-do, I started riding down the mountain. Idiot. The front wheel got stuck in a hollow and I flew over the handle bars but because the ground was so steep I landed on my feet. I landed at a speed just shy of Usain Bolt's PB and careened down the hill in the style of a comedy villain in a Buster Keaton movie. When I stopped, by throwing myself to my left onto some turf, I looked back. That arrogant machine had wedged itself in the hollow as though it were in a bike rack. I was on my arse and it was still standing. I hated it. I'd also been whacked on the knee by my camera swinging round. Jeez that hurt. I scrambled for the map. It was a least another mile and half of rough terrain until I hit a road. I had to go back for the bike. Then I hobbled, my knee in agony, out of the mist line carrying the bloody thing. I yelped and limped to a road and then freewheeled down into Torshavn. The hotel receptionist looked up as I entered the hotel with my lazy and murderous machine and placed it in the safe room. "What happened?" he said looking at my mud spattered clothes, worrying about his carpets. "I fell off the bike on the mountain," I said. "Were you wearing a helmet?" he asked. "Not on my bloody knee," I said hopping to the lift. "That bike hates humans," I shouted over my shoulder. THE flight is incredible into the Faroe Islands. The main airport is on Vagar, a separate island from Streymoy which holds the capital Torshavn. The picture above was taken at about 10.30pm on the June week I visited last year. It's light late in summer in the North. The Faroes are 200 miles north of mainland Scotland, 280 miles south east of Iceland and 480 miles west of Norway. In World War II its strategic position controlling access into the North Atlantic led to its occupation by the British. The airport you land at on Vagar island was was built by British forces. It's sited between mountains over the largest fresh water lake in the island which almost - as if imagined by Tolkien - runs right up to a cliff above the sea and then melodramatically overflows over the edge in a waterfall. It's a good introduction - as you fly past the lake and the waterfall - to the unhinged landscape of the Faroes and its Maritime Subartic climate. We careened over bridges and through tunnels amidst a bare almost primeval landscape of huge sounds between islands and mountains with rocky caps. John and I talked demographics. At the airport there was a taxi driver waiting to whisk me to my hotel.
The driver was a bull of man, proud of being Faroese, who was so big he found it hard to fit in his seat - let's call him John because I've forgotten his name. We were sharing the cab with a Scots couple in their sixties. Nice people. They'd come for the bird-watching. The Faroes is grand for that. Birds love the islands like sun worshippers love Balearics. And where the birds go people with binoculars aren't far behind. A harmless and peaceful bunch those twitchers. John the taxi-driver was the same as taxi-drivers the world over: direct to the point of bluntness but still an insight into how a nation and a people work. As we drove away from the airport we passed the lake pictured above and John said as we passed a turn off, "This is where people park before heading to jump off the rocks at the end of the lake above the sea. Problem is it's not so far down the cliff so they sometime miss killing themselves. You can see them now and then dragging themselves back up here to drive home again." John paused and with a smile said, "A bit wiser, maybe." And then another laugh. "Then they go home and have dinner with their families, say it was a quiet day. Who knows?" Later as we passed some sheep, I asked, "Do you eat a lot of local lamb and fish?" "No we export it mainly. It's easier to import the food from Denmark." The Faroes are a self-governing country under the sovereignty of the Danish crown. So much for local sourcing in the 21st century. We careened over bridges and through tunnels amidst a bare almost primeval landscape of huge sounds between islands and mountains with rocky caps. John and I talked demographics. I wondered about the claim in the tourist brochure that over 20 languages are spoken in the Faroe Islands. Since this is a very remote North Atlantic archipelago with a population of 49,000, many of whom live in Torshavn (18,000) I found it hard to credit. "My wife is Kenyan," said John. "Really, did you meet her because she came for work?" I said. John turned from the wheel and looked at me, seemingly driving for half a mile along a cliff edge without looking at the road. "Now why would a black woman from Africa be working here?" he laughed. "It's not easy to get to as you've found." "So how did you meet?" I asked. "I met her on an internet dating site and invited her over. That's one of the reasons there are so many languages now. Lot's of internet brides and girlfriends. Perhaps there's only one person speaking that language but I suppose it counts when the tourist people write their things." Later on the trip I would see a couple of Thai ladies, the odd Vietnamese, a Nigerian woman. In fact there were numbers of women from across the world. Now within the legislature of the laws of unforeseen outcomes who'd have thought the digital age would lead to demographic revolution. Within a tiny population such as the Faroes these internet brides and girlfriends, who all seem to have kids, are changing the mono-culture of the islands. Give it a few years and these lonely rocks in the North Atlantic might have one of the most diverse populations around, all because the internet opens a communication bridge between a windswept hillside in Streymoy and the packed suburbs of Nairobi. As we got to Torshavn, John laid down another slab of dry wit. "This is Main Street," he said. "One, two, three, four, five, now it's finished. It's a five second street for driving along." Torshavn was tiny, unspectacularly pretty, especially close to the harbour. The hotel was efficient but old fashioned. Over dinner I kept smiling at the taxi-driver's words. Tour guides, informal or formal, come in many guises and sometimes their unstudied insights into locations are worth several tons of official tourist literature. I stopped smiling and giggling to myself when I realised as I was on a press trip solo. Other people in the restaurant were wondering whether I was an axe-killer taking his final meal before taking terrible revenge on the innocent for his perceived grievances. Or maybe they thought I was a bird-watcher who'd spotted that day the rare albino puffin and was feeling smug. ON the tour on Saturday 24 April there was a big group of people from all over the place, near and far, Japan, Switzerland, Preston, Bury, Chorlton and so on. Brainy as they come as well, asking interesting questions, getting involved. The young women on the right in the picture above - green cardigan and dark coat open - had come especially to Manchester as Elizabeth Gaskell groupies. The pioneering nineteenth century novelist was long associated with Manchester and was one of the first from the 1840s to write about the new class of urban working poor while recording their relations with the new middle classes. "We're big North and South fans," green cardigan had said, when I'd asked what had brought them to Manchester. "The North/South divide," I'd said alarmed, "or the Gaskell novel?" Turned out it was the latter. As it happens, in the refurbished Central Library there's a first edition of Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton, on display with hand-written notes by Elizabeth Gaskell in the margin. After the tour the overjoyed ladies almost charged off there when I told them. I believe they went "woo-hoo". Tourism is as diverse as individuals that enjoy it. Paranormal addicts one day, Gaskell groupies the next. Has a first edition of Mary Barton been 'woo-hooed' before? On the same Saturday I took my second group of Didsbury Diners out, this time on a Haunted Underworld tour. This is a social group with several hundred members who use the meetup.com site to get together, plan and join events. A lot of people new to the city seem to be using it plus single people and those who generally want to explore the city and cultural, gastromic and other activities. In other words people who don't just want to sit on their arse and trawl through season three of whatever's the latest DVD hit. Good screamers too. The stories in the dark and the occasional 'incident' made them very jumpy. Thanks to Elaine, on the right in the foreground, for organising the group. I think the picture shows a rare photographic ability. I've managed to compose it with a large No Entry sign coming out of the group's heads. The first group of Didsbury Diners I met had come on the Uninteresting Objects tour on 12 April - along with lots of other people. We'd met at John Rylands Library and scooted through St John's Gardens, down past Granada and over the river at Prince's Bridge and along the banks of the Irwell on the Salford side to finish up at the Kings Arms on Bloom Street. As we scrambled down a muddy bank I feared for some of the heels involved. They took it in good part. Again it was a large group, mixed age, male and female, but it was mainly the women from Didsbury Diners who carried on the tour with a drink in the Kings Arms. A lively bunch, full of laughter and wit, they skipped off to Knott Bar for food after the pub. I wish they'd told me this at the beginning because the tour finished about three quarters of mile away and I could have varied the route to give them less of walk - especially since the heaven's opened shortly after we'd arrived at the pub. The lady third down the table on its right side in the picture above, brought something on the tour I'd never encountered before: a chihuahua in a handbag. You can see it - just - on her lap in the picture above. She hadn't told me this at the start of the tour, so it was a surprise to look down at one point during commentary and see big brown eyes staring at me from an elegant accessory. The uninteresting object we'd viewed at the Kings Arms is the country's worst royal coat of arms crammed uncomfortably under a gable too small to accommodate it. Look at the poor lion's face. It's in pain. It nowhere near fits as well as a chihuahua in a bag. Next tour: 1 May. The Original Pub Tour. 6pm. Click here to view.
THE other day, in the pub, a weird question was asked.
It was: "Have you ever done unexpected work totally different from your regular job? Surprise stuff." "What do you mean?" I said. "You know. Doing something that you weren't trained to do but was thrust upon you?" came the explanation. "Still clueless," I said. "What did you do?" "Where I used to live there was my regular newsagent and once I went in there and the guy was serving behind the till chatting away when he said he felt faint and rushed into the back room. "Could you take-over for a minute," he shouted. So I thought I've served in a shop before, and said, "All right," very casually, and took over for about half an hour. It was funny seeing people's shock as they came in. Made me laugh especially as I just made up prices on products that weren't marked." "Was the newsagent all right?" "He was then. Came back out and offered me a free Mars bar or something and a free paper. He collapsed about a week later and died in the shop," said my friend. "Dark," I said. "What about you?" he asked. "Well, I have no musical skill with an instrument and yet I played on several occasions with the Halle Orchestra in Manchester." "Really? Excellent. How so?" "I think I'd done a guided tour for them or their guests and the percussionist, Dave Hext, asked me to play. But..." "Go on." "This is a double bluff thing in a way." "Go on." "He asked to me play football with them for their football team for a few months, 11-a-side and 5-a-side. They were short of team members as they were touring abroad or something," "So you played for the Halle Orchestra?" "Yeah, when I tell people I played for the Orchestra, people say where did you play, I say centre-forward or wide right." "Better story, but mine was more heroic. Guiding gets you into funny situations," he said. MARKETING Manchester job on Monday for Thomas Cook Belgium. Actually it was a Visit Britain job but let's not split hairs.
Thomas Cook handles the tours from the Low Countries and France (I think) for trips to Premier League matches in England. This is the group above settling down to an express lunch at Damsons in MediaCityUK. Earlier we'd been on a walking tour of the city including Manchester Town Hall which has conveniently got the name Belgium and the latter's coat of arms on the Great Hall ceiling. Then it was the Royal Exchange, Spinningfields and a coffee in the Radisson Edwardian Bluu hotel, aka The Free Trade Hall. Away football teams tend to stay in this hotel when in town. The match the group were coming to see was Manchester City v Chelsea and so the latter team were staying over. We had a coffee and I discovered that most of the men on the tour wrote for individual papers and wrote about just one team. The man second on the right just writes for Anderlecht for example. As we were talking John Terry, the Chelsea captain, and Nemanja Matic came wandering past. It was a bonus for the football writers. I pretended I'd arranged it all of course. Terry was being interviewed; later I'm sure I saw the interview on Sky Sports, fortunately there were no Belgians falling over things in the background trying to take pictures. There was general agreement over what the final score would be in the match they were about to see: Manchester City 3, Chelsea 0. Some of the fellas wanted to put a bet on the result. Chelsea won 0-1. I hope they didn't bet too much. THE Haunted Underworld tour today - 18/01/14 - and the pre-Christmas Town Hall Clock Tower tour stand out from recent guiding experiences. To be fair the Town Hall Clock Tower always stands out - it wouldn't be doing its job otherwise, almost 300ft of height has to count for something. I had the best screamer yet on the Haunted Underworld tour. The lady in the black hat was wonderful - see the picture below. The slightest movement or noise in the dark and she gulped and yelped. She was a bag of nerves. If anything moved or there was a loud noise she hit the high notes at such volume we were all covered in a light drift of ceiling dust by the end. Screamers is just what ghost tours need. A screamer causes the fear to spread and that becomes infectious and then every member of the group becomes that wonderful word, 'jittery'. Very jittery. The great thing about the group was their good nature, easy smiles and desire to be entertained. On some ghost tours you can get some spoiling sour sceptics. Not today. I much prefer screaming women. By the way the lady in the red coat in the picture below was from Hong Kong - she won the prizeless award of furthest distance travelled to Manchester for the tour. I'm not sure whether she'd travelled all that way just for my tour, but we can pretend. "When you asked who came from furthest away," said one guest with a smile, "I was going to say Brighton. Glad I didn't now. It's just round the corner in comparison to Hong Kong." AND now for the bell. Before Christmas I'd taken a couple of groups up Manchester Town Hall Clock Tower. Most impressive of all, certainly most unusual, is standing underneath the hour bell as it tolls the hours. This is a mixture of the therapeutic and the terrifying. Someone also suggested the bell delivers an erotic experience but I'm not sure you could go that far. Unless you're a master campanologist. Or get off on being wildly vibrated. They may have a point. The hour bell has a name, Great Abel. Good name for a bell - Abel. The name actually derives from the Town Clerk, Abel Heywood, who presided over the construction of the Town Hall - architect Alfred Waterhouse's masterpiece. The bell could fit four fat men in sleeping bags under its immense span. On the second tour of the evening the group were in place just before 9pm. Then slowly the hammer on one side of Great Abel drew back before flinging itself forward at the huge lump of finely tuned hanging iron. It clanged nine times of course, from almost touching distance. It was overwhelming, it was pure sound condensed, it was breath-taking, shocking yet uplifting.
Then the noise amplified by the cunning neo-Gothic soundbox of the Town Hall spire threw itself out across the region. I have heard Manchester Town Hall bell on sharp winter mornings from ten miles away. And after the crash and clang came the most magical thing of the whole experience, a reverberation that went on and on and on. A low almost electrical hum, the sound waves of a tuning fork after it had been struck, but very low this time, very bass, vast, otherworldly. Space precludes mention of the other powerful elements experienced on the tour - the sweet clock mechanism, the huge clock face, the views from the balcony, the carved slightly sinister angels on the elevated balcony. You can read the story of how Manchester got this particular tower here. On that second tour as we came down the tower and into the public areas of the Town Hall there was a school awards event taking place. "What's going on?" asked the late-teen daughter in a family of four. "It's a Xaverian College awards," I said. "Oh dear," said the girl, "of course." "That's the one you were supposed to be at wasn't it?" said the mother. "It's the one I could have been at," corrected the daughter. The father, mother and sister of the girl all looked at each other. But there was no tension in the air. What they all had forgotten was that they'd booked to come up the Clock Tower on the same evening as the awards taking place 150ft below. They started laughing and the group joined in, mystified, but amused by the oddness of the exchange they'd witnessed. As we got further down the stairs and then towards the entrance the girl kept meeting teachers and pupils she'd known. One final point. Great Abel has words from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem Ring Out, Wild Bells from In Memoriam cast round its skirt - In Memoriam was an elegy to the premature death of Tennyson's best friend, and also, his sister's fiance, Arthur Henry Hallam. The lines read on Great Abel, 'Ring out the false, ring in the true'. Here's the whole poem. It's superb. The religious element you can take or leave because in most part these lines by Tennyson are as life-affirming as that last long, lingering reverb on Great Abel. RING out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying clouds, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind, For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind.… Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good. Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be. The Wikipedia entry on the poem didn't mention the Manchester Town Hall bell link with the poem. So I added it. A FEW weeks ago I met Valentino Castellani for a tour ahead of a talk in Manchester Town Hall. Castellani is a former Mayor of Turin. The Marketing Manchester talk was led by Bruce Katz from the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, an American think-tank focussed on the role of cities. It included the City Council Leader, Sir Richard Leese, and Mike Emmerich, chief executive of Greater Manchester's economic think-tank. Yep two think-tankers on one panel. Castellani's one of those people who through his character and brains are dogged by success. That could sound pejorative, that ‘dogged’, but I mean by it that Castellani seems a man for whom success was inevitable, that he couldn’t help but become ‘something’. His noggin is too full of grey matter. His smile is too personable. This is his biog. The official one, sent to me ahead of the tour. ‘Valentino graduated in Electronic Engineering in 1963 at the Politecnico di Torino (Turin), where he is now a noted university professor and alumni, and spent a year at MIT where he graduated in Electrical Engineering in 1965. He was the independent mayor of Turin from July 1993 to May 2001, when he led the centre-left coalition and helped to develop the first strategic plan ever completed by a major Italian city. In his role as mayor, Valentino focused on creating an international network for the city by actively building relationships with European cities such as Barcelona, Lyon, Glasgow, Stuttgart, Koln, Bilbao and Stockholm, in order to understand best practice from other urban areas. From 1999 to 2006 Valentino was President of the Turin Organizing Committee for the 2006 Winter Olympics.’ Valentino Castellani has another quality which became apparent on the tour. This is a quality that is always present in the successful people I’ve met. He was an enthusiast. The tour started at 7.45am – which is just about the earliest tour I’ve ever conducted. It finished at 9.15am at the Town Hall. As we walked Castellani was fascinated by the changes he could see in Manchester over the last few decades, he was also aware of the historical movements such as the Free Trade Movement (he felt "honoured" to have his picture taken under the statue of William Gladstone) and he wanted answers on industrial decline and the economy of Manchester now. He thought the Civil Justice Centre was simply astonishing. An aside on this. In the game of cities, in the battle for prestige, landmark buildings delivered for effect as well as for function, are important. They are a statement of city intent, a symbol of ambition and confidence. Continuing the aside, I wish sometimes when I read some of the more small-minded ranters on Manchester Confidential they could walk around with me on guided tours with overseas visitors. It might teach them to look beyond their own narrow worlds. These ranters remind me of CS Lewis’s Dufflepuds in the Voyage of The Dawn Treader. Contrary characters who are unable to agree with anything, even things which are manifestly for their own good. The expression, 'cut off their nose to spite their face' was invented for them. Anyway back to the theme. Castellani was also deeply interested in Manchester’s politics. Given the crazy oscillating nature of Italian politics, its party schisms, breakdowns, its coalitions and scraps, the fact that Manchester has been ruled and run by the Labour Party alone for more than a generation he found bewildering. He told me how he’d got into politics. “The centre-left party invited me. I was at the university and they had heard of me; perhaps 1,000 people knew of me in Torino. But the party wanted to make a break from the endless battles and intrigue in the city and they must have thought an engineer and an academic could be more impartial. The corruption and the conflict were making big problems in the city, destroying confidence, resulting in nothing being done. “So they asked me to stand. I got in at the first election with a majority of just a few people. Then I think I shocked the party. Instead of employing party friends in the city cabinet and key city posts – maybe sometimes as thanks for a favour granted, or maybe because it was thought they could help party leaders personally rather than the city which paid them – I employed the best I could from around the country. So the best person for transport was brought in from outside politics and so on. It worked and I got voted in the second time with a large majority.” Cronyism is the bane of politics, it stultifies, corrodes. It was fascinating to have an influential man from outside Manchester and the UK articulating this. Does cronyism exist in Manchester? Of course it does. Did Castellani eradicate it from Turin life. Of course not. But he became a symbol across Italy of the benefits of good governance. This is what tours do, they teach the guide about their own city almost as much as they teach others about the city. As I say I wish some of the naysayers and dufflepuds of Manchester could share the experience. A perspective on their own city would do them good. As we shook hands at the Town Hall, Castellani said: "If you're ever in Torino, let me show you round my city. Like you I'm very proud of it. We have our problems of course, but if you have a sense of identity it can be so strong, so helpful. Of course you have to be careful the identity doesn't stop you looking outside the city. We are all part of the world." "Instead of employing party friends in the city cabinet and key city posts – maybe sometimes as thanks for a favour granted, or maybe because it was thought they could help party leaders personally rather than the city which paid them – I employed the best I could from around the country." BUSY day Saturday 5 October. Three tours and the last tour the Chinatown Revealed Tour.
This involved taking thirty-one people curious about what makes Manchester’s Chinatown click on a two hour tour around the streets and in and out of the businesses. The tour had been organised with Bonnie Yeung of the Yang Sing Restaurant, the indefatigable daughter of Harry Yeung, the United fanatic who arrived here in the 1970s. It was also part of a deal with Manchester Confidential. Harry Yeung is one of the city's great characters. He told me a great story about his United obsession a couple of months ago. He was looking for a new house recently and stumbled across a very Modernist one in South Manchester. His wife wasn’t keen, but Harry was intrigued. So they went back for a second look. At which point the estate agent revealed that the house had been purpose built by George Best. The house was promptly bought, Harry couldn't help himself. Out came a big briefcase of cash from Harry's car boot. I asked Harry to repeat this story when he joined us on the roof of the Yang Sing during one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever done on a tour. Part of the deal for guests was that we would conclude proceedings with wonderful views of the city. The roof of the Yang Sing is the perfect height for this. The taller city buildings form a manmade terrain with the hills peeping through in the distance. On the Saturday we ascended we got crystal clear atmospherics too, you could see the field walls on the Pennine hills fifteen miles away. The problem was the access. This is via stairs and then up a twelve foot ladder in the attic. The ladder shakes and it’s a bit of a stretch to get over the trapdoor rim. Many of the guests didn’t like heights and some weren’t in condition, to put it diplomatically, for such acrobatics. Still most of them managed the climb and they were rewarded with those tremendous views, and then afterwards with tea and dim sum in the form of a Manchester bee made from cuttlefish, almonds and seaweed. What I didn't understand were people coming up the ladder with faces a picture of terror saying, "I really don't like this, I don't like heights." I kept saying, "Well don't do it then." But still they came. I admired that. "Sorry I didn't pre-warn you about the ladder," I said to the crowd when they assembled on the roof. "I confess I just forgot about it. Mind you, you have had loads of free food and as a bonus conquered a huge psychological challenge. Talk about value for money." I think that's called putting a brave face on it. On the way down one of the guests said, “Did you do a risk assessment for that?” “What do you think?” I said. “Thought not.” “Oh no, you’re not a health and safety officer are you?” I asked. “No, I’m a sexually transmitted disease data researcher,” he stated. “I wish you wouldn’t tell people that,” said his girlfriend. We met some very gracious people on our tour. Kichi at D&K Fresh Seafood was entertaining telling us about her alive and kicking eels, carp, crabs and lobsters. Vanessa at Ho’s Bakery looked like she’d taken a professional speaking course the way she handled the crowd packing out her family’s cake and pastry business. Finally Boss at ICFT was enthusiastic and informative as he described his bubble teas, “They’re like a drink and a meal together. They have an extra wide straw so you can suck up the tapioca in the bottom.” ICFT by the way means, I Come From Taiwan. Maybe we should all open businesses like that, with autobiographical names. Mine would be ICFR, I Come From Rochdale, or ILIM, I Live In Manchester or ITPULWTTF, I Take People Up Ladders Without Telling Them First. THE public speaking that flows out of guiding is a mixed joy.
On the one hand you usually stay warm and dry. On the other if you forget what you're talking about or why, you can't suddenly lead the audience on to another guiding location while you gather your thoughts. (This is a classic guiding ruse that also comes in handy when you have an over-eager guest who's interrupting the flow of the tour. It's a simple distraction technique. Always works.) Certainly when people are sat eyeballing you from a couple of metres away in some hotel function room or conference chamber it sounds unconvincing if you say: "Right, let's all stand and have a walk down to the lobby and back while I recall that very important point I needed to make and which the organisers paid me handsomely to remember." There is only one thing that happens should you lose your thread during public speaking. You feel the cold grip of shame - or maybe SHAME - on your neck. That's probably why public speaking tends to command higher fees than guiding. The opportunity for things going horribly wrong is so much higher. Still I love doing it. You have a limited duration in which to 'perform' and if you get it right people love you. This is largely because there's a genetic fear in normal humans about having to sit through endless minutes of dull public speakers bleating on and on. I emphasise normal humans. There is one guide I know who is such a committee man that he drove away everybody but himself after the third meeting of any organisation. He had a bewildering desire to hear his own voice picking through the bones of every point of order as though it were the Treaty of Versailles. I think during one of his endless forensic examinations of correct kerb heights in the city - or some such - I actually gnawed away my little finger. And my thumb. And the table. Another issue was his voice which was downbeat in the extreme as though he were informing us of a death in the family. Sometimes people don't fit their jobs. In the picture above I'm doing a public speaking gig. Or rather I'm compering an event at Victoria Baths, Henry Price's 1906 gem of a public building in Chorlton-on-Medlock. The event marked ten years since the BBC's Restoration programme granted £3.4m to Victoria Baths. This involved Manchester Central MP Lucy Powell unveiling a stained glass window - Aqua - but there were also performances and tributes from numerous others. I introduced these good people and topped and tailed with quotes, observations and drollery. There was also a synchronised swimming team Aquabatix. Before announcing these fine ladies I was asked if I could mention they'd swum for Disney, David Walliams and ex-President Gorbachev of Russia, the man who oversaw the dismantling of Communism. "Wow," I joshed during the event, "what a trio. Gorbachev, Mickey Mouse and comedian David Walliams all together, round the pool. Would have loved to have seen that." "Er, they swam for them at different times, not all together," somebody told me afterwards in a whisper as though passing on a secret. You don't always take everyone with you on your compering journey. Victoria Baths, by the way, is a symphony of Arts and Crafts tiles, and stained glass. It's gorgeous. Worth a visit, with the delight, not the devil, in the detail. The pictures below show off its joys. Back to the speechifying. This was a happy event, a celebration of the work of the Friends of Victoria Baths and the efforts of all the volunteers and other agencies in preserving this exceptional building after its formal closure 20 years ago. As Henry Owen John of English Heritage said, "Victoria Baths was the most remarkable example of a municipal swimming baths of the period." It's easier speaking and compering a celebration, no-one's looking for you to fail, and usually nobody's paid their own money to get in - money always sharpens the focus. Still there was one disconcerting element. The invited guests were separated from me by the full length of a swimming pool, and also in elevation, as they were all sat on the exhibition balcony. So no eyeballing then. But I thought, as I took the microphone and marched out in front of the audience, if things do go horribly wrong I could at least throw myself into the water. Distraction techniques are mighty fine things. And full immersion in a suit would certainly work. |
Archives
February 2025
Categories |
- HOME
- Calendar of tours
- GUEST COMMENTS
- Some tours in pictures
- Manchester books by Jonathan Schofield
- Terms & Conditions
- CONTACT DETAILS AND BIOGRAPHY
- VOUCHERS & DEALS
- Tour Diary: Confessions of a guide
- Saturday Walkabout Series: Music, Pubs, Ghosts
- Valentine's Day tour 14 February
- Sleazy & Sinister Mcr
- Heaton Hall and Park Tour
- EXCLUSIVE: Refuge/ Kimpton Clock Tower Hotel
- Chorlton tour
- The Tour of Uninteresting Objects
- Bombed & Besieged: Manchester at War
- This Mighty Manchester
- New Year's Day tour 2025
- Secrets of Ancoats & New Islington
- Lost and Imagined talk
- EXCLUSIVE Salford Lads Club and Middlewood Locks
- EXCLUSIVE: Chetham's Library and College House
- Whalley Range & Alexandra Park
- Knutsford Secrets
- Secrets of Didsbury
- Suffragettes, Women & Manchester
- Secrets of Strangeways & Cheetham Hill
- Trees, flowers and Mcr's Green Spaces Tour
- Death, Beauty & Beer Tour of Brooklands and Sale
- Secrets of Angel Meadow and the Irk ValleyAir, Scuttlers, Lost Churches and Hidden Stories
- Liverpool - in two parts
- Southern Cemetery Tour
- Truly Madly Brutal
- EXCLUSIVE TOUR: New Century Tour, perfection in design from 1963
- Halloween tours
- FREE - Ballads, battles and big ideas: Embankment, Salford
- The Secrets of Gorton Monastery
- Friedrich Engels And Karl Marx Tours
- The Secrets of Altrincham
- Manchester Cathedral tour
- Literary Manchester: A city in words
- The First Street tour – People, Music, Arts, Mills
- Stones of Manchester
- Manchester Necropolis: rattle my bones
- Secrets of Wilmslow 2025
- EXCLUSIVE: 'Boldest Building' Tour, Edgar Wood Centre
- Spinningfields Tours - Free
- FREE Scientists, sinners and graveyards: A Tale of Two Citie
- Architecture & Planning: why does Manchester look like it does?
- EXCLUSIVE Hallé St Peter’s & Ancoats Tour NEW
- EXCLUSIVE: Mayfield Station tours
- Secrets of Chapel Street & Greengate Park
- EXCLUSIVE: Ordsall Hall and Manchester Ship Canal tour
- Secrets of Worsley
- Stockport Secrets
- Secrets of Littleborough
- April Fool's Day Tour - The Incredibly Serious Tour
- Secrets of Cheadle
- Secrets of Fairfield Moravian Settlement
- The Pan-African Congress, Slavery, and Thomas Clarkson Tour: A Manchester Anniversary Tour
- The Death & Beer Tour 2022
- Secrets of Rochdale town centre
- Secret Tunnels Tour
- Magical Manchester Mystery Tour - by bike
- Peterloo Massacre: The Reality & The Drama
- Castlefield, St Johns, First Street
- The Secrets of Middleton
- The Day The World Got Smaller Tour
- Talk: Lost Buildings of Manchester & Salford
- Platt Fields, Birch Fields and Rusholme Tour
- The Prestwich Tour: The surprising Manchester series
- Some tours
- The Zoom Tours series
- Loyalty card/scheme
- First Wednesday Spinningfields Series 2020
- Exclusive: 35 King St & Georgian Manchester
- Secrets of the University of Manchester with interior visits
- Some Published Articles On Manchester's Present, its Heritage and Tourism
- Secrets of the Northern Quarter
- The Rollicking Pub Tour
- The Surprising Manchester Series: Old Trafford
- The Surprising Manchester Series: Bradford & Clayton
- EXCLUSIVE: Kampus tours, the abandoned warehouses
- Incredible Interiors
- Shock, Surprise, Prose & Verse: Manchester and Literature
- Ford Madox Brown and Pre-Raphaelite Manchester
- Podcasts
- Lost Graveyards and the Dead
- Return to 1421: The Old Towne and Medieval Manchester
- Suggested Private Tours
- Anthony Burgess and Literary Manchester Tour
- Great Northern Tunnel Tour
- 1840s Manchester: The Key Decade, talk and tour
- Burns Night Tour Monday 25 January
- Fire Station Tours: Calling Photographers & Sketchers
- Manchester City of Art Tour
- The Gallery
- The Ghosts of Afflecks & the Northern Quarter
- New Manchester Squares Tour
- The Manchester Guardian is 200 tour
- The Understanding Architecture Series
- FREE The Hidden Rivers Tour