Yes, I'm still for change - our politics requires it

I can’t foresee any circumstances that don’t lead to a General Election in the autumn. The most likely path to that is a no-confidence vote to prevent no deal Brexit. The next most likely is an emboldened Boris Johnson doing so proactively in order to demand a mandate from the public for his deal Brexit, probably a slightly different version of the same one he resigned over when it was Theresa May’s Brexit. For any of that to give Johnson a hope of resetting the system is a deal with Nigel Farage and the targeted hounding of the remaining grown-ups in the Conservative Party.

Labour knows what it needs to do. Get rid of Corbyn. In a stroke it removes the single biggest obstacle to making a case to the British people for a new approach to public services, investment in infrastructure and international leadership. It doesn’t necessarily follow that the membership will elect someone capable of it, but it is clear that the paralysis has to end. I found myself listening to John McDonnell in a Times Red Box interview talking about his economic strategy. I think it’s wrong, wreckless and undeliverable, but at least it’s coherent. But when he got on to talking through the politics of it, the Labour positions and contortions, the defence of anti-semitism and the lame response to it. All of it was just so utterly unattractive. A real horror show. 

So where does that leave me? As a wrap up from the EU election campaign, I heard murmurings that there was a move by some of the Change MPs to dissolve the whole enterprise. I got together with some of my fellow candidates from here, and from all the other regions, and we managed to persuade most of the candidates to sign a letter to Chris Leslie, as the campaign lead, to say don’t do anything hasty. We argued that we should at least try and keep the best of this campaign, namely the candidates and the activists we fell into this with, and see what we have to contribute. The end result of that was on Saturday when we had a get together here in Manchester.

Anna Soubry summed it up well when she said we have the right analysis and the right ideas. But it’s going to be hard in the future to build from where we are.  

So I came away inspired but daunted. I’m more convinced than ever of the need for a movement of the sensible centre ground of politics. As my friend Andrea Cooper said: 'we’re the people who did something.' As were those MPs who said ‘enough’.  I can take the sneers, I can bat off the insults, because I’m convinced I’ve at least tried to do something positive. An opportunity awaits.  

Why I'm still a Catholic

OK, so I'm blogging every day this month. So far I've ticked off a couple of common themes. That was easy. Rose Hill station, a tap in. A musical eulogy, round the keeper and into an empty net. Family life, a hard working team effort.

And yet there's something I do every week that I rarely talk about. Church. Faith. To be more precise, the Catholic Church, which I properly joined in 2007 and has been a part of me for a good chunk of my life. In the theme cloud along the side of this blog you'll see that I blog about Catholic stuff as much as I do about London, radio and food. And nothing like as much as I do about Blackburn Rovers, Manchester and the Labour party.

Part of it is a lack of confidence in what I believe, how I don't really live up to what it should be to be a practising Catholic, or have a thorough understanding of how to live an authentic Christian life, albeit an imperfect one. Though I do get that is the absolute cornerstone of our faith. It isn't about being perfect, it's not a zero sum game, it's who we are as flawed unique humans. And that a spirit in us all, an inner voice that says that you matter, you have value, you are loved. That's what made us. That's God.

I've even deflected personal responsibility for this piece of content, by making it subsidiary to something far slicker, a video from Alpha (top), a course I went on and took part in a couple of years ago. Alpha really changed how I thought about the whole religious experience, about what the essential message of Jesus Christ was and how it is as relevant today as it's always been. An idea that for all the horrors of the world, the response of kindness, humility, forgiveness and a readiness to confront injustice, we can create this on earth - God's kingdom as He intended - and it is an idea that Jesus died for. For us.

And also how it's above all else a social enterprise, a shared and collective experience of people gathered together in the name of Jesus. I actively, enthusiastically love that. There is something special about a parish. The gathering together of people of all shapes, sizes, ages, backgrounds and with all their burdens. Many of us might work in diverse workplaces, follow our sports teams with a mixed crowd, but where else do you get to look someone in the eye, having shared a ritual of such profundity, such power, such mystery, then say 'peace be with you'?  And that the same thing is happening all over the world in our universal church at roughly the same time, give or take. Or as Frank Cottrell Boyce put it - "each parish has the potential to be a neighbourhood utopia." That, for me, is a little bit of the Holy Spirit.

I'm sorry this is a bit crap. It's neither profound, nor answers the question I set.

Let me try and answer it another way. What if I wasn't still a Catholic? And what if I'm wrong?

Seriously, what will any of us have lost by taking these beautiful words of inspiration every week and to try and live our lives accordingly? What's the worst that can happen? I get to dodge the terrible car parking skills of my fellow church goers, I no longer have to endure the occasional dirge of a hymn I don't know, and drift off through a homily I can't follow because I'm not clever enough? It's imperfect, it's church, but I know I'd be far far poorer and less fulfilled if I didn't have it. That's why I'm still a Catholic.

Our family life, what you see and what you get

Birthday team photo 2016

At the centre of this month long experiment to do a blog every day of July is my own resistance to overshare.

When I started The Marple Leaf back in 2006 it was often confessional about parenting issues. I probably have overshared and there was eventually a reckoning for this when one of the kids got the piss taken out of him at school for something I’d written that a class mate’s dad had spotted.

When Twitter became a thing in 2009 I picked up a habit of sharing our weekly Saturday ritual of chaotic kid juggling between football, art class, lunch, shopping trips, going to the cinema, etc. I got loads of lovely feedback about that, much more than I did about pretty much anything else. In a trick borrowed from Twitter friend Jeremy Bramwell, I even numbered them kids 1 to 5. That’s stuck.

And how I pine for the days when we’d all do things together in such joyous family spirit. Take this week for example, kid 1 is in Ireland, I can’t tell you where kid2 is (it’s classified), kid 3 is in Cyprus, kid4 has gone to visit a friend in another city, while kid5 is off to his first concert. Rachel’s been to a Caritas event and I’ve been fulfilling my role as a Centrist (not very good) Dad at a workshop trying to reimagine our broken politics.

Younger and fatter, 2006

You never stop loving them, missing them, or making plans for things to do together. And I never stop worrying either. Given what happened to one of them in 2017, we always do what we can to make sure they get home safely.

On the plus side, the other thing we’re able to do now is afford a trip abroad with a portion of them while the others make their own plans. I think we’re still paying for our all-you-can-eat summer holidays for 7 to Croatia and Malta. But we have a plan this year to get away.

I’ve said before that as much as I enjoy watching Blackburn Rovers, the bond that really ties me to the season ticket and the commitment is that it’s time well spent with kid1 and kid3, or Joe and Louis as I call them. I know I wouldn’t go as much if they both moved further away to study, and maybe one of the reasons they haven’t is that too. 

The best we usually do is a Friday chippy tea, the occasional Sunday dinner, but life gets in the way. Last night three of us went to the cinema in Marple, I jumped at the chance to do so because I wanted to spend time sharing a moment or two. Not because I was desperate to see Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis’ summer feel good flick, Yesterday, but I do desperately crave such simple shared pleasures.

We’re watching them grow wings, they make us proud every single day. But you’ll notice that we don’t share as much of that detail as we used to. If you are reading this, and you cared enough and wanted to know about their wider lives, challenges and conditions, I think you’d probably know by now. Family get updates on those details on Facebook. But what we never do, either on here, or in person, is sugar coat it. Life is tough, keeping on top of it all is relentless, exhausting, but absolutely essential to everything we are and what our values are.

So, what you might occasionally see on here is a bit of the truth. Something selective, a trigger for something else I might want to say, but it’s not the whole story. It never is.

Happy 150th birthday Rose Hill station

Our wonderful little railway station is having a birthday party this weekend. Rose Hill will be celebrating 150 years of service.

There’s a poem to mark the occasion that takes us through the deaths of monarchs and the reduction of the station to a terminus and the closure of the through line to Macclesfield in 1970, despite having survived Beeching's axe in the 1960s. It's been a battle, but a renewed lease of life more recently has made it a valuable community asset.

In the time I’ve been using the station it has transformed from somewhere that felt truly at the end of the line to a welcoming hub. It wasn’t too long ago that the poor service was rumoured to be a tactical worsening to suppress demand and lead to eventual closure. Instead we’ve had the steady improvement of the soft infrastructure led by the amazing Friends of Rose Hill station group - tree planting, a mural, the re-opening of the waiting room and so many other delightful improvements. The curation of the station into its present form has also been supported by Tony Tweedie, the station master, who embodies the very best virtues of public service. In turn that accumulated investment of love, and comprehensive data collation about who is using the station, gave a moral imperative to some resolute and successful campaigning for a higher frequency service last year.

I've done a few blogs about it over the years, this one here harks back to the campaign over the missing mystery service in the evening and the leaf train. But I also wrote here about how much better for my mental health Rose Hill is than Marple station.

We still have a crappy train operating company with their dire rolling stock, and I shall claim to speak for the permanently malcontented when I say I thoroughly dislike the 150 Sprinters as much as I despise the soon to be extinct Pacer units. But at least we have this station to come home to.

I can see a bright future for Rose Hill, but I think in ten years time it might all look very different again. Greater Manchester’s shifting demographics require an explosion in high frequency public transport services to places like this, requiring something new and exciting, like a tram train. The case for that network to expand to Marple and Rose Hill is a strong one. The reopening of the Middlewood Way towards High Lane may be trickier.

So, thank you to everyone who has got this station to 150, the passengers, the dedication of the Marple public in supporting something worth defending, to Tony Tweedie, but most of all to the Friends of Rose Hill.

Simplicity, humility, charity, service and unity - thank you Harrytown Catholic High School

We’ve just got home from an emotional evening at Stockport Town Hall. Seeing our youngest lad get two gongs at the Harrytown Catholic High School Awards Evening was just fantastic, especially as one was for music. A couple of years ago he started getting interested in making his own music. We tried lessons, a crap guitar, but it was a proper MIDI keyboard and a download of FL Studio that propelled him to new heights. The sounds that come from our garage are like something else, like Giorgio Moroder has moved in for the night to do some electronic jamming with Kendrick Lamar. He’s had to work hard to catch up with the kids in his music GCSE class who have much better parents than he has, and have been mastering instruments and scales all their lives. So that was just brilliant.

But it was something else as well. Living round here as long as we have, knowing the families, knowing the twists and turns of their lives, the heartbreaks and the challenges, gives you a  glimpse of the importance of those moments for kids enjoying that walk of pride across the stage. Rachel taught some of them and has first hand experience of their journey. And I don’t know why but the kids with names ending in scu and ski get me every time. You know, coming over here, making friends, learning a language, putting up with bullying and the nasty stink of Brexit, coming to OUR COUNTRY, and achieving. I love it when I see them succeed.

Then there’s more still. Running a school in this climate is so hard. I was a governor of Harrytown for a while, and today isn’t the time to dwell on why that wasn’t an entirely happy experience. But I couldn’t be more delighted that the school has this week been awarded GOOD status again by OFSTED, proving that the improvement measures they required last time have been met. The head, the staff, the governors, the kids will have all made an enormous effort to get that kite mark of progress. Yes, it’s really important. Yes, it matters. But something deeper, more uplifting and joyous occurred tonight for so many families and for our community.

I think it deserves a prayer, the school prayer.

Heavenly Father, we gather together as one community in your name.

Give us the courage to live our shared vision that Christ is among us, at the centre of all we do.

Pour down your Spirit on Harrytown Catholic High School.

Renew in us the simplicity to recognise your presence at the heart of each person and the humility to put others first.

Touch our lives with your love so that we can share each day with each other and wide world in charity and service.

Unite us to live in the same spirit that moved Jesus to give his life for others so that ‘all may have life and live it to the full.’

We make this prayer through Jesus Christ, your Son.

Amen.

Mark Hollis - one half won't do

The death of Mark Hollis in February was a real shock to the system. Not because I knew him, or ever met him, nor that I was a lifelong devotee of his music. It was more about the outpouring of appreciation for a very special talent, and the manner of how he lived the rest of his life, seemingly in mysterious isolation. The appreciation of his work being gifted, rather than grafted.

Musicians approach fame and notoriety in different ways. Tragically, it appears to have contributed to the end of Ian Curtis, lionised and speculated on forever more for the tragedy and pain and the loss of all that creative potential. The mystery of Richie Edwards haunts all fans of the Manics, me included, tinged as well with deeper and more complex issues around anxiety.

The arch version of Mark Hollis' musical history is that the early stuff was a bit 'Duran Duran lite', but he matured, became a genius and then vanished. The tributes that flowed after his death were fulsome and touching. The best of them all was this here from Jason Cowley in the New Statesman, accompanied by a beautiful photograph by Kevin Cummins (above). In fact, I said at the time that I had sat down at the end of that week to write something about the amazing music, strange life and sad death of Mark Hollis, but Jason Cowley had saved me the bother.

But I actually loved the big sound of those early New Romantic anthems. It's My Life has been a favourite of that era ever since the very first time I heard it and assumed it was Roxy Music. Listening to the lyrics now too, piecing together what we know of Mark Hollis and his life, the ache of yearning, the trust of a pledge of commitment to a relationship seems all the more poignant - "one half won't do". 

I was talking to local switched-on cultural genius Neil Summers about him, including the embarrassingly similar memories of dancing to the pumping bassline and soaring optimism of Life's What You Make It. Neil had an idea to do a BBC4 documentary about the lost talent of Mark Hollis. He won't be the last, I'll bet.

But it was the exhalations of Elbow's Guy Garvey for Spirit of Eden that I suspect opened a doorway of discovery for many. I know it did for me. It is a work of extraordinary tenderness and beauty, a blend of styles far away from the bass and keyboards of earlier anthems, a fusion of prog rock, jazz and a touch of English folk. Brittle at times, but also majestic and life affirming. It's one of those pieces of music that you seem to find something new about it each time you listen. That the record company hated it when it was dropped on them in 1988 says as much about the music business in that era than it does about such a talent. That said, it was probably a clash that could have been foretold. His awkward interviews, his painfully bashful and very rare live performances, and his reluctance to take seriously the requirements to make a pop video were all indicators of someone not willing to play a game he probably thought to be ridiculous.  

You can't listen to any of Elbow's music without sensing the presence of Spirit of Eden all around it, something Guy acknowledges on a very special tribute to the record on BBC 6 Music, broadcast way before Mark Hollis departed, but repeated all too briefly in the aftermath of his death.  Please put it back on BBC Sounds. 

Snippets have emerged of the life Mark Hollis was living in the 20 years he was away from the music business, but I don't feel I want to know any more than the observations Jason Cowley shares: 

"There was nothing pretentious about Hollis in person: he was relatively inarticulate as a conversationalist but of course found himself supremely articulate in the language of music. Liberated from financial worry by the success of the early Talk Talk albums, notably in Italy and Germany, Hollis lived well and seemed to be content in his roles as father and husband." 

To seek more would be like a snooping voyeur, pressing our noses up against the window of something we didn't know what we were looking at. What we can know, and should celebrate, is that he had a musical gift. It's but one half, if that, of a life, of a whole person. The rest is mere speculation about someone who gave very little away, yet bequeathed so much. 

My mate Adil Bux #27

Due to the wonders of technology, but also due to sheer force of will and brotherly love I still manage to maintain a friendship that spans continents and dates back decades.

This is a series that celebrates friendship and tells a story about where that came from. And today's instalment is my mate Adil Bux.

I first met Adil back in 1988 in Perth, Western Australia, when he was a DJ and club promoter. In a crazy scene of bohemian characters, chancers and party animals I was drawn to this cerebral teetotal Muslim who shared a love of music and the wider hinterland. It was sort of my job to seek out characters, as a journalist, and his as a promoter and DJ to understand and discuss the wider music trends which I was mildly obsessed with at the time.

One of the things we did together was co-hosting a music show on 6UVS FM radio, where we'd generally talk, play records and interview pop stars. One was Kevin Saunderson from Inner City, who was massive at the time with his track Good Life. Hearing the opening bars of that track even now takes me back to the edgy highs of Limbo on a Saturday night.

Although we hooked up in London a couple of times when he was passing through, we somehow lost touch when he moved here in the late 90s and into the new millenium. There's a profile on him, here, in the West Australian, which covers most of his colourful life, including being a finalist in the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Awards in 2012.

The wonders of the internet brought us back together and with it two pieces of news - one that he was married to another old Perth friend of mine, Andrea Horwood, who was one of the first people to really show belief in me and who's determination and drive I have always admired. The other was that my old flat mate Roy Jopson had sadly died, a real life force who will always remain in our hearts, much greater than the horrible disease that killed him.

Now he has occasion to come through London a lot with his new business Nuut.com, we've made it a promise to get together as often as we can, as well as speaking on the phone and by all other means necessary. Sadly too, Andrea and he are no longer together. In 2017 I had a perfectly splendid day showing him around Manchester. We had lunch in Albert Square, and as it was in the days following the horrific attack on our young people at the Arena, respects were paid at Victoria station and in the flower bed of St Anne's Square. It was a symbol of all we shared that he knew so much of the heritage of the city, the music, but also politics and the twists and turns of our lives. Bizarrely, we topped it all off with a chance meeting with Graham Stringer MP.

Yesterday, we met up again and had a splendid lunch at Soho House White City, and we could have talked all day, even though him and his colleague couldn't always understand my accent. We talked about all sorts and laughed about even more. It's what friends are for. Safe trip home mate.

A blogpost a day - a month long experiment

I’m going to try an experiment with this blog. Before the days of Twitter I used to blog a lot more than I do now. It’s not that I’m less busy, far from it, but through July I’m going to blog every day. No matter how I’m feeling, whatever I've done, and possibly the window to do it will be on the commuter train on the way home. I’ve had a list of unfinished topics I want to expand upon for a while: the dominance of London, governance, Marple’s burgeoning restaurant scene, Stockport’s Underbank, being a Governor of a Sixth Form College, mental health issues, parenting, love, city branding, charity fraud, and possibly to get my writing mojo firing properly, there’s the small matter of my Masters thesis.

That’s in addition to the perennial subjects: commuting calamities, a few more in the 'my mate' series, book reviews, telly, films and my continued angst over which direction our progressive politics should take (and this month is significant). We've also got a couple of university open days to go to and not to forget Blackburn Rovers (we’re going to two pre-season friendlies in July). It might even lead me to better understand the purpose of why I do this, what I look to get out of it, and how and where it gets me into bother.

I'm doing this first one on the train back from a day out in London seeing friends. As usual the wifi doesn't work, that could be a subject for a blog, but I think I'm aiming higher than that.

Manchester policy, forward motion and our new handbook

We launched our new book at work last week - Transforming Policy and Research. It's a handbook to help academics navigate the way towards having a positive impact on policy. Loads of researchers I know do amazing work, far better than the kind of thinking that comes out of political parties and many conventional think tanks. Our task is to help them translate that knowledge, those insights, into a place where they can co-produce positive outcomes.

In that spirit, I invited along Elizabeth Mitchell from the policy team at Manchester City Council to speak to the audience. I'm sure many people listening to her insights and noting down her examples of good practice would have been thinking the same as me: why has this fantastically bright public servant committed her career to Manchester? I'm sure she would thrive in any central government ministry. The answer lies behind the premise of the question, I suppose. Why wouldn't you want to be in Manchester? Even with the punishing budget cuts and the apparent slowing of the progress of devolution, the city, the Combined Authority and the associated institutions are innovative and dynamic places to be. Much more so than a national government paralysed by Brexit.

In the latest issue of our bi-annual MetroPolis magazine, I touch upon these themes and the thought I keep coming back to is 'ambition'. It happens to be one of the pillars of the University strategy, which is in itself an example of that successful forward motion that good strategies are supposed to give you. There would be no point doing any of this if we were howling into the darkness. But we believe we have an opportunity to be part of a movement of policy enablers in our civic universities. It also coincided with the release of a sparkling new website, which rightly emphasises our key themes: public service reform, building a caring society, and creating future cities. We've also launched a section for Policy Thinkers, to broaden out our community of thinkers and practitioners.

Taken together, it's more than just a handbook, but a toolkit, a set of resources and structures that can bring together agents for change and better policy. It's also a work in progress, blissfully.

Brexit breakdown: 14 days that shook politics | Anywhere but Westminster

Ah well. He got the bit at the Change UK Manchester rally where the tech broke down. He included my speech in it. And he said, it's not bad, but it's not Frimley. Sums up the campaign pretty well really.

I always enjoy John Harris' analysis of where we are politically and socially.

A Life in Thirty-Five Boxes – Dave Haslam book event

Me and Joe really enjoyed Dave Haslam’s launch of his first mini-book last night, a series which he has dubbed ‘Art Decades’. The first mini-book in the ‘Art Decades’ series will be ‘A Life in Thirty-Five Boxes: How I Survived Selling My Record Collection’.

Partly I think it's because I always love listening to Dave when he tells stories. I've probably heard him in this kind of setting more than I've heard him DJ now, which is a testament to his own successful second act - I won't prolong that metaphor, too many have. We also heard about some of the slightly surprising things collected by his guest panellists; poet Tony Walsh, musician/artist Naomi Kashiwagi, and DJ/producer Mark Rae, including a crazy story about a trip to Chernobyl.

The blurb for the event explained how the core of ‘A Life in Thirty-Five Boxes’ is an exploration of our impulse to collect - particularly our emotional attachment to vinyl - and the notion that every record collection reflects our life story. Dave tracks how his own collection built up, how others have fed their obsessive collecting, including the man who tracks down multiple versions of Light My Fire by Jose Feliciano. It takes us all the way to the moment Dave decides to sell all his vinyl to DJ Seth Troxler, and waves goodbye to thirty-five boxes of records as they’re loaded into the back of a van.

He talks a lot about giving up the inheritance his vinyl collection represented - he was going to pass it to his children - but feared the tragedy of it scattering and breaking up. It reminded me of the parable of the rich man getting in to the kingdom of heaven, and it being harder than a camel passing through the eye of a needle. I have always taken that to be less of a denunciation of wealth, more of a statement that you can't take any of it with you, so give it back with love.

As is often the case, the Q+A flushed out some important points. Not least, the triumph of nostalgic revisionism. Dave touched on it in a challenging essay he wrote in 2015, here:

"The city authorities habitually give a nod to Factory Records, but I’m not sure they quite get important parts of the Factory story. The Hacienda wasn’t a disco version of the Trafford Centre. The Factory label, the club, those around and involved – from musicians to video makers – produced culture. It wasn’t an exercise in consuming but creating. In addition, like Shelagh Delaney, not only were they forced into action by despair at the cultural provision of the time, Factory operated outside the margins. One of the richest chapters of Manchester’s cultural history began when the lads who went on to form Joy Division began to meet up in a makeshift rehearsal room above the Black Swan Pub, near Weaste Bus Depot.

"This self-organised, independent activity still happens of course; actors, crews, artists, printmakers, musicians, freelancers hiring pub functions rooms, meeting wherever and whenever, trying to bring ideas to life. Isn’t it time these people were celebrated and encouraged?"

Since then I feel the city has become even more of a shallow memorial to the misunderstood past of Madchester. I like to think Dave's writing and his new publishing model is a subtle nod to how to use our past to tick on to the future, but as we walked out there was a poster for another Hacienda night (at Gorilla).

Viva Marseille

We had a tremendous time in Marseille. It all came about after meeting a lovely French bloke who worked in the hotels world. We wanted to go away in early June to somewhere neither of us had been before. He recommended Hotel Dieu in Marseille. What a glorious surprise the whole city was. As a port city you expect a certain grit, but it was nothing like as rough as I feared. In many ways it felt like somewhere that is changing and modernising, while trying hard to preserve its edge, without having the swish elan of Nice and Cannes, which I've been to many times before.

We took in the sights on the first day - Notre Dam, the harbour, Mucem. Then we headed for the small coastal town of Cassis on day two.

Getting around, as it is in so many European cities, was easy and safe.

To quote my favourite film, one ought to have a room with a view on the first visit. As you can see, we certainly had that. But we also treated ourselves to a real quality hotel, way above what we'd normally go for. Poached eggs at breakfast will never be same now we've had them cooked by a Michelin starred chef.

The only disappointment was Boullabaise. We felt obliged to try it, but fish soup is fish soup and wasn't worth the tourist premium we got fleeced with.

We have a few other European cities in our sites for visits soon. Recommendations welcome.

A recap on some great telly I've watched

Riviera, a real guilty pleasure

As we're getting stuck into the long awaited second series of Killing Eve, we're also going to have to face the inevitable sense of loss that will follow it when it ends. Just as we have following a ton of different series and boxed sets over the last year. Here's a bit of a flavour of my tastes.

Fleabag was as good as any comedy I've seen in the last 10 years. Very sharp, very well acted. The scene with Kirsten Scott Thomas was mesmerising and if anything the second series took it all to a new level.

By contrast, much as I was swept along by the last series of Line of Duty it was more miss than hit. Great one liners, good pace, but at times it seems to have disappeared up its own firmament.

Bodyguard was better and proved you can still create those moments of collective gasping both in the social media second screen, but back around the table at work on Monday.

The Walking Dead managed to redeem itself in Season 9, the time jump was a bad idea which betrays quite how over ambitious the whole enterprise is becoming. It's good that it seemed to have broken something of the cycle of plot lines and places. Conversely, the bridging of TWD with the alternate Fear The Walking Dead season 4 didn't work with Morgan walking across four states, and somehow managed to make a series with sublime promise lapse back into the ridiculous. Season 5 looks somehow better.

A strange zombie apocalypse diversion on Netflix was Black Summer, which was particularly brutal and fatalistic about the ability of society to cope with a shock like this. It ended on a bleak and very final kind of note, which strangely felt like a relief.

The algorithim on Netflix has picked up on my fascination for end of days apocalyptic drama. I was disappointed we can't seem to get hold of season 3, the final one, of alien invasion nightmare Colony. The first two were good enough and well put together.

Danish bio-disaster The Rain was better with subtitles than with dubbing into English. It was also in danger of running out of ideas as much as spending a meagre budget on limited locations and bad CGI. Still, decent enough and a similar evil biotech corporation loomed large in Sky Atlantic's Hanna, which had its moments.

I felt violated by the extreme violence of The Punisher and irritated by ITV's Paranoid, though surprised to see they shot some of it at my workplace.  I'm one episode in to the new season of Black Mirror, having been drawn in and spellbound by the intensity of the two mates getting carried away by a VR game in Striking Vipers. Warped.

A really guilty pleasure was a double series binge of Sky Atlantic's Riviera. The younger me was transfixed by Lena Olin when I saw first saw her as Sabina in the 1988 adaptation of my student era favourite novel Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. She stole the show then in her bowler hat, and again five years later as the ultimate femme fatale mob boss in Romeo is Bleeding. As the matriarch Irina Clios she also dominates every scene with a look, or a glance, in a lavish and preposterous romp that takes us back to the glory days of Dallas and Dynasty. And I spotted Doug Barrowman in the first episode.

I've written here in October 2018 about my penchant for sharply written Australian noir and a couple of series have capitalised on the wave with well-delivered follow-ups. The third season of Wanted was another step up in drama and plot twist and I do hope they are heading towards my old home of Perth for season 4. Canberra set Secret City took the geo-political stakes even higher in the follow up as my favourite new hero, Harriet Dunkley, made a seamless transition from journalist to jailbird to political SpAd.

A constant of that whole genre has been the corruption and laziness of the entire Australian police force. When I go back, please remind me not to be a victim of crime. I've seen the two Wolf Creek films with the villainous and sadistic Mick Taylor stalking unsuspecting backpackers and torturing them, I don't know if I'm quite ready for two entire series of more of this.

Similarly, Welsh noir took a dark turn with Hidden, which was gracefully acted and touched on the same unseen Wales, as I said here, that parts of Hinterland did so successfully.

Finally, as if we needed reminding of the incredible raw acting talent of Stephen Graham and the awesome combination of him being directed by Shane Meadows then Channel 4's The Virtues hit you like a steam train. Graham's depiction of lead character Joe wasn't even the stand-out, though him falling off the wagon was horrifically powerful. But Meadows seems to draw out a whole range of quite incredible close up, raw, believable and underacted performances. Helen Behan as Anna and Niamh Algar as Dinah brought such sensitivity and feeling to a disturbing and haunting storyline. I watched this a few days after finally seeing Meadows' bleak and captivating 2004 film Dead Man's Shoes. Sometimes telly can be like a snack to the full on glory of a sit down spread that a feature film offers, and sometimes it is a real treat.

The need for Change - a political howl

I don't know where we go from here.

I don't know what's going to happen in our broken political system.

I don't know what's going to break the deadlock over Brexit, or whether it can be stopped or not. I want it to be stopped, but I don't know whether we can or not.

What I do know is that the Tories are going to install Boris Johnson as Prime Minister and that Jeremy Corbyn is still the leader of the opposition. That is not an acceptable choice to lead our country.

What I also know is that I have never felt as at home politically as I did amongst the Change UK candidates and activists when I stood in the European election in May. Nor have I felt as inspired. I know we got absolutely creamed at the polls and that the experience wasn’t ultimately what I expected. I’m also disappointed at the swift break up of the parliamentary group, the shambles with the name and I do seriously wonder what can realistically carry on.

Let’s be clear. Those brave MPs who quit Labour over the toxic anti-semitism, the fudge over Brexit and the unpalatable state of the party were right to do so. Nothing has changed. It wasn’t premature to do so, something had to give. It was also disappointing that more didn’t follow. I genuinely don’t know what those MPs and members who oppose Corbyn expect to happen.

Taking it all in good faith, I did my bit and walked towards the sound of the battle. It was the usual rough and tumble, but also I believe we raised the Europe issue on another platform and LibDems and Greens reaped the rewards. Fair play to them, they worked hard for it.

But what happened in the locals and the Euros hasn't changed the mess in Westminster. The next question is what kind of ambitious realignment in the mainstream of politics is possible. If it can happen, then where might the different remnants of Change UK go next? And what kind of berth do the Liberal Democrats represent? The Liberal Democrats need an injection of serious political ambition, not to take a few seats back and to win a few hung councils, but to provide a serious government that isn’t Johnson or Corbyn, which a majority of the British people are horrified by. Maybe that's what Chuka Umunna thinks will happen now. The general in search of his army.

For those that have left, personally, I think it might have been worth waiting to see what the longer view was from a larger body of activists, candidates and the collective group, rather than to act individually, or to just walk away now, but you can’t fault them for acting swiftly and politics is often about the gut feel.

A whole series of blunders contributed to the disappointing campaign and plenty of other people have commented on all of that. Not least the leaked strategy note that seemed to regard the LibDems as an irritating irrelevance, ready for the taking. I’ve always felt they have been key to any new entity, but that culturally they need that injection of ambition and to have the confidence to get over the coalition government experience. My own frustrations with their local opportunism have also betrayed that lack of courage to stand up for what they believe. And yet when they do? Well, the result was clear.

I've reached out to the Liberal Democrats I know personally and have enjoyed some robust and forthright conversations.

But I feel two things at the moment, an urgency to act, and a deeper one not to waste time on a callow gesture. The alternatives just aren’t there. I recognise that a Westminster led group always had a better chance of building something through the centre and taking activists with it. The Renew party has attempted to build from the grass roots and got 45 votes in the Peterborough by-election.

So, it's going to be decision time soon.

Alice Webb - on leading the BBC in the North, digital change and what makes a TV hit

Alice Webb showing me round the BBC

I've always really enjoyed interviewing people in positions of leadership and at the sharp end of change. So you can imagine how pleased I was to be meeting Alice Webb, Director of BBC Children's and Education, and to have it presented so well in the edition of Met Magazine.

We covered a lot of ground, including leadership, digital change, the North, Netflix, The Bodyguard, Killing Eve and loads more.

You can listen to a podcast of the interview here, and a web page with the written feature, here.

There's a rich range of feature articles in this edition of the magazine, including a profile on Carol Ann Duffy, who has just ended her tenure as the UK's Poet Laureate, a piece covering employers’ views on the impact of degree apprenticeships, good work on research being done within the University to reinvigorate town centres, a feature on Manchester’s club culture of the 1980s and 1990s, and on the ecology projects academics are involved in around the world.

It is important that people know what we are doing and the impact we have, so a magazine is a powerful platform to profile such stories so colleagues can share them and demonstrate all the ways in which we change lives for the better, and how we shape our world.

My interview with Mark Garner of ManCon about Change UK

Manchester rejects hate, and why I'm for Change

Where we are today matters.
It certainly matters to me.
I first arrived around this very part of the city in 1985 as a fresh faced teenage Lancashire lad at the University of Manchester.
I was the first person in my extended family to go to university – but not the first to leave home. Grandads, uncles and cousins have put on a uniform and served their country in the British Army, as nephews, cousins and my own son have done since.
Anyway, I popped out for a pint of milk one Sunday morning from my halls around the corner and I walked into a riot in All Saints.
On one side of Oxford Road were Irish Republicans, egged on by the useful idiots of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and others who should have known better, on the other were the National Front. It was a tense, ugly and nasty encounter. The like of which I hadn’t witnessed before beyond skirmishes at the school gate and on the football terraces.
But it was part of a shaping of my political education. A mob politics that disgusted me. Frightened me.
It was the start of a move from dogma to dialogue, from problem seeking to problem solving.
So I have happy formative memories of here too. I was told I wasn't up to being an academic as my writing style was too journalistic.
I took the hint and fast forward 15 years later in 2001 and I find myself back in this very building as a business journalist to interview the boss of one of the region’s most interesting tech businesses. Being excited by the challenge of change, of new high tech jobs being created.
Because that's another reason why where we are right now also matters for us today.
This building which was built in the year of my birth 1966, forged in the white hot heat of Harold Wilson’s technological revolution – just down the road from where Rolls met Royce and where two scientists isolated graphene and won a Nobel prize for physics. An optimistic time.
Because I mean it when I say this matters today.
We are on the Oxford Road Corridor – funded by the European Regional Development Fund – good work, supporting infrastructure, learning and job creation.
Supporting scientists, like Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, like so many, standing on the shoulders of giants of science like Dalton, Rutherford and Turing. They are European Union citizens, collaborating, in many cases, under the auspices of European science programmes.
That’s the Manchester I fell in love with. The city I have devoted much of my working life to advancing. A Manchester that is welcoming, European, innovative and energetic.
But like I was on that autumn morning in 1985, I’m once again frightened by thuggery and the grim politics of far left the and the far right and frankly the bits where they all blur into one.
The politics of easy answers, cheap shots and hate.
You don't need me to remind you what happens when hate comes to a city like this. Tomorrow we will be remembering where we were two years ago when we heard the news about how they tried to blow apart our wonderful, tolerant, united city.
Manchester proved then it is better than this.
Britain’s better than this.
When Britain voted to leave I was gutted.
But I wanted to commit myself to something to make right what had gone very badly wrong.
My day job is to make the university I work for a civic university. Somewhere that is accessible to people from communities who don’t have the advantages, the social capital and the opportunities.
But I wanted to be part of a political movement too.
Our broken politics just stokes the fires of the division all around us.
Faith against faith, north v south, so called Somewheres versus Anywheres. This mythical mobile elite. That’s not how I see it, not how my family see it.
The only people who benefit from that division or the successors to those street thugs.
I want to stand on a platform to rebuild, reshape and CHANGE our politics. CHANGE the civic conversation.
This matters.
This campaign matters.
I was proud of my friend Ann Coffey when she left Labour.
And I’ve been prouder still of my fellow candidates in this election.
From Carlisle to Chester, from Crosby Beach to Colne. We’ve done our very best and done the team proud.
I’m proud to be a candidate. Proud to be in this team.
Because it matters.

(my speech at the Change UK pre-election rally, May 21, 2019, Manchester Technology Centre, Oxford Road, Manchester).

How to be happy at work - a podcast discussion during mental health awareness week

Wellbeing in the workplace can drive business success and yet stress and anxiety account for millions of lost working days each year. To mark #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek one of the Manchester partners of Grant Thornton, Paul Scully, joined a fascinating and challenging discussion with Dawn Moore, HR director of Morgan Sindall Construction and Infrastructure and Professor Marc Jones of Manchester Metropolitan University about better ways of working. I was delighted to chair the discussion and share a few thoughts along the way.

Change our country - Change our politics

I'm standing in the upcoming European elections for Change UK - The Independent Group. We have an amazing opportunity to create a unifying force in politics.

There was no plan for Britain to leave the EU, there was no way for the different false promises of brexit to be fulfilled, it is a symbol of our broken politics.

I wasn't initially convinced of the case for a new referendum on our future relationship with the EU. But it's so clear that parliament can't find a way through, so the government should have the courage to put whatever deal they can pull together to a binding public vote, with the option to Remain on the ballot paper. That way, it is clear what kind of Leave deal is being offered and we can therefore make a decision with far more clarity about what we want our future relationship with the European Union to be.

But there's something else worth fighting for. The capture of Labour by the hard left, and the marginalisation of progressive traditions in the Conservative party screams for an alternative. I've wanted this to happen for a long time. This is a great moment and I look forward to campaigning for the new politics.

 

The inside track on Game of Thrones

Now that I've made up for six years of Game of Thrones not being in my life, I thought I ought to share this fabulous day from earlier this year.

Our careers and employability team got Maisie Williams (Arya Stark from Game of Thrones) to come and talk to the students. She’s set up a new venture called Daisie - a sort of a social network to connect creative people with one another to encourage co-operation and collaboration on projects. Anyway, someone had to host the event and ask the questions, which was a great experience. 

She also answered loads of great probing questions from students on how to keep going, how to raise money for a tech start-up and lots about the final series of GOT.

The coverage on the University website is here.

The EU flag flies in Marple - and why we get the wrong politicians

A mate who works for an MP told me over a drink the other day how much anger he gets whenever he picks up the phone. Over Brexit? I asked. "Everything," he said. Housing, parking, fly tipping, schools, cuts, immigration, everything you can think of, and plenty more you couldn't.

I'm also reading Isabel Hardman's excellent book Why We Get The Wrong Politicians - a well written and incisive gallop through the problems of our failing political system. Politics is broken, but there is still much virtue in the intentions of people who work for our politicians, as well as among the much maligned political class too.

With that in mind, I popped into the office of William Wragg MP in Marple this afternoon. I thanked his staff for all they do, keeping democracy ticking over in the best way they can. They'd arrived at work recently to find that someone had stuck Bollocks to Brexit stickers all over the windows. At best that's a pain the backside and it will have taken them a while to scrape them off, distracting them from whatever else they do. At worst it must be very unsettling in the current climate. I made the point that I fully support the views of the people who want to resist this insane Brexit and that I'm massively disappointed in William's stance on this issue, but I'm sorry for the inconvenience that this has put his staff through. They seemed OK, and grateful of a visitor who didn't want to fight.

I did so also because I did "like" a tweet that pointed out the sticker stunt, but more so because whoever did it also hung an EU flag from the sign above the door. I thought that was funny. There has to be space to disagree well, not to escalate every slight and every action into a massive outrage on social media. But these are angry, edgy times.

The best food in Stockport

Like most people who live in the outlying areas of Stockport, we don't actually go into the town centre that much. Frankly, there's very little reason to.

When we do it's for a very specific purpose, a particular shop, or the excellent Light Cinema. In fact, that is an example of a building that is so much better from the inside than the hideous carbuncle of an exterior. I'd go so far as to say it's the best cinema I've ever been to.

We popped in to Stockport today to drop Louis at work and thought we'd check out the new Produce Hall and the work that's been done to the area around the market. It has definitely improved. Today being Monday, everywhere was closed, so we'll have to have another go later in the week. But from a pure place making perspective, the progress is really noticable and we've seen enough to make us want to come back.

What it did do however was send our fizzing tastebuds in the direction of Tyros, a sensational Lebanese cafe tucked away just off Tiviot Dale.

All three of us had wraps, lamb and two kinds of chicken. The salad extras are something else though; carrots, potato salads, possibly the best hummus outside of the Middle East. The service is not just friendly, but really enthusiastic for food, the love oozes out. And it's just such good value too - £5.50 for a wrap and two sides is incredible, really.

One fabulous previous visit was to treat Paul Lawrence before he left Stockport for a new job in Edinburgh. Paul is someone with real vision and a sense of how to build a place and all the good things now happening were started on his watch.

I've heard great things about Where The Light Gets In, but also that it's a lot of money for something I probably wouldn't appreciate. I like my food, but my palate isn't delicate, my choices unrefined. I value hearty every time.

So, there's more exploring to do, but when it comes to the town centre, I'll reserve a verdict on the Produce Hall for another day, because I've had it confirmed for now that Tyros remains the best food in Stockport town centre.

Confidence is a preference for the habitual routine for match winning Rovers known as Fist Pump!

We made a late decision to head for Nottingham Forest today to watch our merry men.

A week ago I wouldn’t have backed us to get anything from another team lolling about in mid-table, like Stoke City, with a newish manager and an eye on next season.

Something clicked in midweek against Derby County though; as soon as the ball flicked over Joe Rothwell’s heel and into his accelerating path, his control connected with his decision making faculties and he clipped the ball deftly into the corner. On such margins are games won, as are tap ins and lucky bounces.

That being Rothwell’s debut goal in a season of fits and starts was significant and it made him literally fit to start this afternoon and, I say this confidently in hindsight, certain to score. His goal came in a spell of intense pressure when he found himself within the range and lashed in the sweetest of finishes. He wouldn’t have had the confidence to even try that had he not lost his goal scoring cherry on Tuesday.

We know that Player of the Season shoe-in Danny Graham scores when he wants, and he certainly wanted it again today. But after some delightful twists and the deft drop of the shoulder, everyone in the ground expected Bradley Dack to stretch the net. At that moment he was everything I ever wanted him to be, but for minutes afterwards I was ready to announce on Instagram that Bradley and I were no longer in a relationship.

I hope that miss doesn’t knock his confidence in the way his other recent setbacks have. It shouldn’t, because Dack was immense in that second half. His trickery, his intelligent passing out to Adam Armstrong, and his offering of an option to Corry Evans and Lewis Travis, were everything we missed last week.

Rovers conceded 19 fouls today. 19. Only a few of them were what you’d call industrial challenges, the kind of roughing up we frankly don’t do enough of. No, they were what our Louis calls “Conway fouls”: forced collisions by players placing themselves in harm’s way. When we do it, Charlie Mulgrew often obliges with a free kick. Forest had one shot on target out of 22, which was our other fortune today.

So, the baby elephant in the room remains Ben Brereton. I watched him on the bench in the second half and he was like a coiled spring. When he finally bounced onto the pitch he was more like Bambi on ice, unable to challenge, trap, or control, let alone score a goal against his old team and lessen the burden of that price tag. He had the nuisance presence of a goalie coming up for a corner in the 98th minute; opponents don’t really know what to do with him, neither do his team mates, more to the point. It must be unbearable to be Ben, but I can see the future opening up for him once he’s scored, the trouble is there are no easy games in the Championship, with the possible exception of relegated Bolton at home on Easter Monday. Too easy?

I thought that Dack miss, and a fluffed one-on-one by Rothwell, would cost us. It didn’t. And I’m reluctant to be overly critical of our players. They take it to heart and change behaviour as a result. Since some wag on Twitter called Elliott Bennett “a fist pumping Liam Feeney”, the trademark celebration has vanished, though so too have the wins, to be fair. He put a shift in today, even some rough stuff when needed. It was good to have that back at the end. Very good indeed.

Getting to Ewood is an effort, and today was the day I snapped

It was quite an effort to get to Ewood on time for the kick off today. We even rang ahead to put in our order with the peerless Leavers Bakery on Bolton Road, picking up and then wolfing down our motley collection of steak, potato and butter as the whistle blew to start the game against Stoke City in the glorious Lancashire sunshine. "Thanks, love, see you next season," said the lady in Leavers, reminding us that there isn't another Saturday home game.

Next season, eh?

It seems she isn't the only one thinking ahead to August. We certainly are, and with some dread. I also get the impression that's where Tony Mowbray's head is. Those references to 50 points, the talk of a transition, the purchases of players he doesn't use, wrapping them up for a special occasion.

To be blunt, come August, the only players who played any part today that I'd be happy seeing start, I mean, really happy in the sense that I'd be gutted if they left, I could count on one hand and in descending order of affection: Darragh Lenihan, Lewis Travis, Ryan Nyambe, Adam Armstrong,  and at a push, David Raya. I feel dreadfully disloyal thinking of a team without Charlie Mulgrew and Danny Graham, the absolute bedrocks and saviours of this season, but frankly, something isn't working and they are of an age. Of my favoured five, they have the potential to become top, top footballers at the highest level, they have so much more to give our club. But in a sport dominated by agents, how long before these lads start getting the word that they don't need to be struggling among this dross?

Like at Sheffield Wednesday last month, I was most disappointed for Joe Rothwell, who once again huffed and puffed without ever seizing his moment in the absence of Bradley Dack. There's a good player in there that can have an impact, but I just don't think he's a clever player in the way that Dack or Travis is. When a loose ball fell to him early on and he scuffed a clear chance, it betrayed a total lack of confidence. Or that he's just not as good as I hoped he was.

I know it's a predictable siren cry for fans to demand they try the kids when other options don't work, and clearly they aren't, but how much might John Buckley and Lewis Travis have enjoyed pitting their wits against Stoke's Joe Allen (the Welsh Xavi) and Bojan (an actual Barca prodigy)?

On the whole I didn't think Stoke were much cop, but then seeing us lose to teams that fit that description has been the story of this season. Their young manager clearly has a different idea about what kind of team he wants next term, but they're seeing this one out with a bit more grit. A rare away win seems to prove my fear that all teams lacking confidence need is a game against Blackburn Rovers.

Which brings me back to my constant niggle. Once again we seem to adapt tactics to the style of play of the opposition and let them settle in to how they want the game to go. The way Amari Bell slows up play when we have a chance to break is baffling. And if the idea that playing League One quality bruisers in the middle would give us grit, then sadly the manager has a very different view of the abilities and possibilities offered up by Bennett, Evans and Smallwood, and of why Harrison Reed warrants a place on the bench, but not to play any part.

My patience snapped today. It snapped with the players I've mentioned just now. It snapped with Mowbray too. It takes some effort for us to get to Ewood, especially as there are other things I need to do on a Saturday to make it all work, both before and after. As I sit here now, it's been a long day. And yes, of course I question whether it's worth it. Because frankly, Blackburn's a long way to go for a pie.

Business awards are now a joke

Trophy shelf at now liquidated Noir Agency

A couple of months ago I did a talk at Alliance Manchester Business School about the challenging environment for the business media.
Before that I'd written something, here, about how no-one in the press seemed to feel any kind of duty to police the boundaries of the business community.

Most of the reaction to that was that it was a bit of an enjoyable whinge about how things were so much better back in my day. Sure, I fuelled that with a few tales and I enjoyed swapping memories with a few former muckers and occasional rivals.

That wasn't my intention though. It's much more serious than a nostalgia fuelled rant. It's about the reputation of Manchester as a serious city.

I can't remember the last time I went to a business awards ceremony. Actually, I can. It was the 2017 Business Desk Awards where I presented an award as my employer sponsored the large business category. But before that? I really can't remember.

Since I stopped being involved I've given them a swerve. I also refuse to be a judge, in case anyone was thinking of asking me.

Let me say one more thing before I say what I'm about to offload. Running a business is hard. I couldn't do it. In fact I haven't. I've worked with incredibly capable people and I've seen at close hand the weight of the decisions they make. I'll say something else. The last decade has actually created a phenomenally resilient, agile, occasionally ruthless, but actually quite a brilliant generation of entrepreneurs. The fact that the turmoil of Brexit hasn't sunk the whole of the British entrepreneurial class is a testament to how good they actually are.

They deserve gold medals.

Instead they get the devalued currency of the current crop of business awards.

I'm going to pass no comment on the story of Noir, a digital agency, except to share a few facts I've discovered this evening, ignoring the off-the-scale boasting on social media and their own website. 

They incorporated in September 2016.

They filed for liquidation in March 2019, owing £62,000 to creditors, including about half that amount to HMRC. 

In the intervening period they filed micro-entity accounts.

They won the following awards: ‘Best Brand Agency’ at The Talk of Manchester Awards, ‘Startup Agency of the Year’ at UK Fast's Digital Entrepreneur Awards, as well as being listed in YENA’s Future 15.

On February the 22nd the Noir Agency tweeted a story about what winning at the Manchester Evening News Business of the Year Awards meant to them.

Seven days before that on the 15th of February, the director of the business, Anthony Logan, had signed a legal document confirming that the business was bust. Papers were then filed at Companies House on the 21st of March.

They are facts.

Pretty much everything else I've read and learned is subjective, and open to any kind of interpretation, including clients, where the staff went for an awayday, where their offices were. It's impossible at this stage to dissect fact from fiction. And that's a problem, clearly. The people who've lost money here, staff who lost jobs, HMRC who get stiffed again, suppliers getting left to make up the loss of income, all of that is bad enough.

But the multiple award wins represent something worse. The triumph of style over content. The readiness to hand over awards to a business built on nothing. What checks did anyone make? Or did they just admire the swagger? It's become a feeding frenzy, a cycle of lies. The emperor isn't wearing any clothes.

I look at this nonsense now as a parent. Would I want one of my sons to be working for people like this? Oh, but they're award-winning, they must be good.

I came across another awards event recently where one winner had only been in business for a month.
If you care about standards in the business community and what our city represents then you should make a conscious decision today to stop going to awards events and paying the stupid amount of money for a ticket. You should not enter awards, you should refuse to judge awards, stop putting them on your own branding, you shouldn't sponsor them, support them, or give them any credibility whatsoever.

This is the equivalent of a major doping scandal in the Olympic Games. Except there's no governing body, just the credibility afforded to the competitions by those who patronise them. Only if decent people boycott these discredited, ludicrous charades will they be put out of their misery. Trust me, this would be an act of mercy.

If you are as tired of all the hate as me, choose love

Since when did you have to pick an ugly side in this culture war? The anger, the demands, the talk of civil war, uprising, hate and “yebbut” and “whataboutery”. It is possible to be sickened and saddened by Christchurch, Paris, Manchester and Sandy Hook.

You can also find it appalling that girls were groomed and abused by gangs of men from the same ethnic group, without becoming a racist. Ask Nazir Afzal, who prosecuted them.

It’s also possible to want Brexit and not be a "thick gammon racist". People are allowed another opinion. It’s not mine, but snooty isn’t a good look either.

It’s the same with the supporters of my football team, and presumably many others too. Catastrophisers versus ‘happy clappers’. I just don’t bother worrying about what anyone else says anymore. My first thought after our recent defeats is not, ‘someone is being wrong on the BRFC Chat forum, I must correct them.’

And since I started industrial scale blocking on social media, life is happier. I don’t care about what someone else says on social media, or whether someone expresses insufficient outrage for one atrocity, but not the other. It’s not about them, it’s about the innocent people going about their lives murdered in that moment of hate.

I’m on an anger diet for Lent. It’s better that way. Trust me.

I think I made a terrible mistake

In order to unwind during my campaigning in the 2015 General Election I started binge watching The Walking Dead. There was something raw and existential about a zombie apocalypse where rebuilding communities again was a constant struggle.

Like many things I did that year, I think I made a wrong choice.

I should have got stuck into Game of Thrones instead.

The Walking Dead has got stuck in a loop of ridiculous bad characters (The Governor, various roadside baddies, Negan, even Rick Grimes stopped making sense) and all played out in the same dull predictable location, despite supposedly having crossed two states. I said at the end of Season 7, here, that the structure had got dreadfully predictable, only the breaks, the premieres and the finale episodes had anything significant happen in them. It got to the point that after three pretty ropey seasons, I was on the brink of giving up for good. However, much as I've been transfixed by a huge leap in quality in season 9, almost everything new, terrifying and surprising about The Walking Dead owes a debt to Game of Thrones. In the season 9 finale, we were pretty much teased that Winter is Coming. Even the walkers in GoT are better than the Walking Dead, and that's meant to be the actual point.

While both series have drawn heavily from original source material, Game of Thrones is clearer a far superior show. The cast, the locations, the scripts, the tension, the high politics and even the moments of humour.

However, I know this now because the second stage of this terrible telly mistake is that I decided to catch up and so watched a 90 minute Game of Thrones summary and the very last episode of the last season. Partly it was after meeting Maisie Williams at an event I hosted earlier this year, but it was also after some fairly aggressive peer pressure at home.

About five minutes in to that final episode of Game of Thrones Season 7 and I realised that the whole package is better in every way and I have to say I am truly hooked. But, because I know what happens with the interweaving and over arching plots, I can’t correct my error by starting at the beginning because the surprise has gone. I'll enjoy season 8, the last one, no question. Bring it on. But I’ll literally never get that time back when I watched those lost episodes where nothing much happened between Rick Grimes and Negan and the Hilltop and the Kingdom. Never. But at least I never got into Lost.

Back in the pod - Cottonmouth Manchester

We recorded the first edition of the new format Cottonmouth Manchester podcast this month. I was chuffed to have been asked by Vaughan Allen, CEO of CityCo, and the pod host, to be one of two regular guests commenting on the news, Manchester culture, business and politics. I was doubly chuffed that alongside me would be Eve Holt, Chorlton councillor and social activist, and someone I've enjoyed working with over recent months.

The first one was pretty good, I think. I listen back and always judge it harshly, and know it could be even better. But now we know what's expected and what we're both like on the mic, then I think it's going to be great fun.

Deutschland 86 - the divided and the deplorable

We’ve just finished ten episodes of the excellent Deutschland 86, the follow up to 2016’s Cold War caper, Deutschland 83. Our hero Martin Rauch starts the series in exile in Angola, teaching German to kids, many of whom are displaced by a proxy war fought by Africans representing manipulative communist and western interests, until he is cornered back into action by his deplorable Aunt Lenora.

There are three great facets to the whole package; the acting, the script and the overall design. Because of the language (it’s in German), and the subtitles, I think I study the faces more and the expressions, the upper body leakage. The writing and story structure expertly manages to weave in real events from 1986; Chernobyl, AIDS, the Berlin nightclub bombing and the US retaliation in the bombing of Libya. But it also catches the style of the era very effectively with Mad Men style graphic titles, a sharp eye for punk fashions, especially in West Berlin, as well as big shoulder pads; all of which is complemented by snappy soundtrack, bookended each episode by the English version of Major Tom by Peter Schilling. Poignantly, just a few days after Mark Hollis died, up popped Talk Talk’s Such a Shame for the pivotal scene of one of the early African adventures.

This tale is darker, I’d say, than three years previous, where it bordered on Carry on Communism at times. The government of the DDR is even crueller and more corrupt than before. There’s certainly no playing it for laughs in how the Stasi treat the Fischer family.

Cynicism abounds and no-one really tells the truth about what they really want and what their purpose is. Everyone’s a bit of a shit, and a bit of dupe at the same time. The ending seems at once both hopeless and desperately sad, the ever presence of a wall that divides families, a people, a country. The hope however is in how their lives play out in Deutschland 89.

February in Berlin - no blog, no cry

February went by in a bit of a blur. So much so I didn't update this blog much. I've been a bit poorly, but nothing serious, I've moved offices at work and started a different role which I'm still getting my head around. I'm also moving into the writing phase on my MA and feel I'm wasting time if it's not about that. But there's something more. As I said on a Twitter thread today, I forever find myself stuck in a perpetual state of repetition. Whatever new outrage emerges about Brexit, Labour, the Catholic Church, Blackburn Rovers, Manchester or Marple, I feel I've said it all, or that all the things I care about seem to be combusting at once. 

Example.

I said in April 2018 that Labour can't get rid of anti-semitism, because Jeremy Corbyn doesn't understand the problem, or see it.

I said in September 2016 that I didn't fear a Labour split, but I actively want it to happen. That the party is wrong, nasty and lost to the far left. Same rules apply.

This month a group of Labour MPs did what I've been hoping they'd do and left the Labour Party. This is what I said in 2017 about a project of the centre, and it pretty much stands. 

And as for Blackburn Rovers - the underbelly has been exposed, which I was worried about in October, only now we can't seem to beat teams as ropey as Rotherham or Reading. More Travis, more Rothwell and a fit Lenihan should stop that rot.

Part of me is tempted to do what David Parkin does and knock out a reflective summary of the week on Friday. 

Anyway, one thing I did do in February was visit Berlin with Joe, Matt and Elliot. It was a great trip, a real living city. It had a vibe of London - but as if it was South Kensington, Westminster, The Mall, Hyde Park and six better versions of Shoreditch. We probably only scratched the surface as you'd expect in a two night break, but we did have the best burgers at a place called Burgermeister in Kruizberg and immersed ourselves in recent political history.

By a remarkable coincidence the new series of Deutschland 86 starts on Friday. Maybe that will get me writing about good telly again.