Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

life force . . . energy.
    To the south of Manchester is the Cheshire plain. Human settlements in Cheshire are among the earliest to be found in the British Isles. There were villages here, and strange yet direct routes to what became Liverpool on the vast and deep River Mersey.
    To the north and east of Manchester are the Pennines — the wild rough low mountain range that runs through the north of England, where early settlements were scattered and few, and where men and women lived solitary, often fugitive lives. The smooth Cheshire plain, civilised and settled, and the rough tussocky Lancashire Pennines, the brooding place, the escaping place.
    Until the boundary changes, Manchester was partly in Lancashire and partly in Cheshire — making it a double city rooted in restless energy and contradictions.
    The textile boom of the early nineteenth century sucked all the surrounding villages and satellite settlements into one vast moneymaking machine. Until the First World War, 65 per cent of the world's cotton was processed in Manchester. Its nickname was Cottonopolis.
    Imagine it — the vast steamed—powered gaslit factories and the back—to back tenements thrown up in between. The filth, the smoke, the stink of dye and ammonia, sulphur and coal. The cash, the ceaseless activity day and night, the deafening noise of looms, of trains, of trams, of wagons on cobbles, of teeming relentless human life, a Niebelheim hell, and a triumphant work of labour and determination.
    Everyone who visited Manchester both admired it and felt appalled. Charles Dickens used it as the basis for his novel Hard Times; the best of times and the worst of times were here — everything the machine could achieve, and the terrible human cost.
    Men and women, ill—clad, exhausted, drunken and sickly, worked twelve—hour shifts six days a week, went deaf, clogged their lungs, saw no daylight, took their children to crawl under the terrifying clatter of the working looms, picking up fluff, sweeping, losing hands, arms, legs, small children, weak children, uneducated and often unwanted, the women working as hard as the men, and they also bore the burden of the house.

A horde of ragged women and children, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and puddles — neither drains nor pavements —standing pools in all directions — the dark smoke of a dozen factory chimneys ... a measureless filth and stench.
    Engels, The Condition of the English
    Working Class in England (1844)

    The rawness of Manchester life, where nothing could be hidden out of sight, where the successes and the shames of this new uncontrollable reality were everywhere, pitched Manchester into a radicalism that became more important in the long run than its cotton trade.
    Manchester was active . The Pankhurst family had had enough of all talk and no vote, and in 1903 went militant with the Women's Social and Political Union.

    The first Trades Union Conference was held in Manchester in 1868. Its purpose was change, not talk about change.
    Twenty years earlier, in 1848, Karl Marx had published The Communist Manifesto — much of it written out of his time in Manchester with his friend Friedrich Engels. The men were theorists made activists by their time in a city that had no time for thinking, that was all the frenzy of doing — and Marx wanted to turn that fiendish unstoppable energy of doing into something good . . .
    Engels’ time in Manchester, working for his father's firm, opened up to him the brutal reality of working—class life. The Condition of the Working Class in England is still worth reading— a frightening, upsetting account of the effects of the Industrial Revolution on ordinary people — what happens when people ‘regard each other only as useful objects’.
    Where you are born — what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own — stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say. My birth mother worked as a machinist in a factory. My adoptive father laboured as a road mender, then shovelled coal at the power station on shift work. He worked ten hours at a stretch, did overtime when he could, saved the bus fare by biking six miles each way, and never had enough money for meat more than twice a week or anything more exotic than one week a year at the seaside.
    He was no better off and no worse off than anyone else we knew. We were the working class. We were the mass