Lost in Manchester - 14. New Year's Resolution. January 2010. Thomas

Christmas and New Year had passed in a hazy succession of hollow greeting card images. The outsized inflatable Santa sitting on his arse in front of the Town Hall, as if to say being fat and jolly was something to aspire to; the plasticky white Christmas lights spun across the bored city streets; the parade of extravagant window displays in the fashion stores, battling one another with tinsel and titillation, to see who could screw the most money out of you.

It hadn’t been a good end to the year. Things had snowballed. The airport development proposals were all over the press, and were now backed almost unanimously. Not three years earlier those same papers had gone to town on the developers for flattening a hamlet that stood in the path of the new runway. Now the economy had gone downhill and the story was different. Most sickening of all though was the party ditching their principles and jumping on the aircraft-shaped bandwagon. His stand and the airport protest was for nothing, and in the party he was increasingly irrelevant.

There was a moment on New Year’s Eve when it all came to a head. Ten individual ticks of the second hand as the clock approached midnight. In those ten beats he looked at himself, and at the festering dead-end Canal Street pub he was in. He looked fruitlessly around for a friendly face, and he looked at the moron from Big Brother he barely knew, standing in front of him, deep into a personal monologue of despair about his break up, and then he knew. Something had to be done.

And now it was January.

Since New Year his brain had been working overtime on a plan for change. Hours would pass as his brain debated one ridiculous idea against another. He was 35. He had to start making his life count, to use what he had, to change things. It was difficult though to get perspective. His mind was too thick with ideas, like oil oozing around up there.

Today he had walked the mile-length of Deansgate on some forgotten errand, dead to everything and everyone around him. The problem was that he couldn’t talk to anybody in the party about all of this, so he was stuck swirling the ideas in his head.

He turned off through an arcade, and flitted in and out of shops along the route. He thought of the faces of the party leaders, Gordon and Peter. He saw them at Council the day of the vote on the school bullying project. Watching them as they passively abstained on the vote and didn’t utter a word. They were why it had to change.

He wandered into a music store and vaguely browsed the latest albums. Whatever came from it, if there was a way to overcome their grip on the party, it had to make things better.

He looked across the rows of CDs and saw a face that he recognised but couldn’t quite place. A youngish guy, dark hair and good looking. His memory caught up; it was the guy from the pub. Cameron had introduced them, a few months ago.

The guy looked up and caught his eye, a faint flicker of recognition flashed across his face.

Thomas suddenly remembered those same eyes looking at his, while he told Thomas how short sighted, lacking in inspiration and out of touch politicians were.

“It’s Adam isn’t it?” he said.

The guy looked at him for a second like a rabbit in the headlights.

“Yeah. Oh...we met in the Loom didn’t we? Sorry, I can’t remember...”

“Thomas”

“Of course, yeah, hi again”

“You’ve not switched to digital yet then?”

Adam looked momentarily confused, but then looked down at the CD he was holding.

“Oh, right, well yeah, you know, I like the album covers...”

Thomas nodded.

“Are you all settled into the city now?”

Adam gave a so-so face. “Takes a while to find your feet, but yeah, getting there”

“Sure, sure”. Thomas was weighing up a question, and decided to ask it.

“Listen, this is a bit random, but do you fancy getting a tea?”

Thomas read the look in his eyes. Things had gotten a bit flirtatious that night at the Loom Inn. He probably should’ve known better. He recognised the creative excuse-generation process that was occurring in Adam’s head and decided to interrupt it.

“I do just mean a tea, I promise. I could really do with a fresh perspective on something”.

He saw the continued doubt.

“I’ll even get you an Eccles cake”.

Adam smiled. “Well, I guess it’s hard to say no to an Eccles cake.”

“Great. There’s a fantastic place round the corner.”

They climbed a narrow staircase from an unsuspecting door off the street and at the top emerged into a great domed chamber. The room was lit only by the muffled light sneaking in through the stained glass panels in the dome, and a modest glow escaping from the green and gold art deco lamps adorning the tables.

There were no walls in the room, only bookshelves. Thick, heavy, oak bookshelves stretching from floor to ceiling in every direction, so that the room was like a clearing in the forest.

Thomas went to order their drinks and cakes, and left Adam to take a seat at a thick wooden table in the centre. He returned and set the drinks down, leaving the tea to brew a few minutes.

“So how have you been?” Thomas asked. “You looked deep in thought back in the record store.”

Adam rolled his head from side to side. “It’s nothing really. Just my flatmate is hard work at the moment”.

“Yeah?” Thomas asked, inviting him to unload further.

“Oh, it’s nothing…” Adam started to say, before deciding to share. “He’s been taking too many drugs lately, he’s got a lot more messy, I’m getting calls from the letting agent saying he hasn’t paid his bills…”

”Time to get a new flatmate?”

“Yeah, maybe. Anyway, the floor’s yours. What did you want to talk about?”

Thomas took a second to try to think what it was he wanted to say.

“Ok. Well. Do you remember when we talked about politics in the Loom Inn?”

“Yeah, ish.”

“You were talking about the many weaknesses of politicians. Lacking a big picture view and not being brave or inspiring or really much of anything”.

“I can imagine saying that. I might have been a bit drunk”

“Well, isn’t that how all the best speeches start?”

Adam smiled.

“Well, first of all, I think you were right”.

“That’s good” Adam said. “I mean, it does often takes a while to absorb my arguments fully...”

“Indeed.”

Thomas shifted in his seat. “I’m not totally sure where to start, so let me give you a story”

“Ok”

“So there’s this Councillor I know in Lancashire, told me a sad story from up that way. It was about an old guy who was knocked down in the road and killed, right at the edge of the local park where he used to go to feed the squirrels every day. It was a small town where it happened, and you know in a place like that, everybody knows everybody. So, although the guy was a bit of a loner by all accounts, all the people in the town knew about him and felt the tragedy.

“So anyway, the town’s residents decided they wanted to do something for him, create a kind of memorial, and because he was known around town as the squirrel guy, they got together and they worked hard and fundraised and created this squirrel playground in the park, with things to climb on and nuts and so forth. And the Council matched every pound that local people fundraised.”

Adam nodded along, but was obviously wondering how he’d found himself sitting in a library on a Saturday afternoon listening to an Irish guy tell him about squirrels. Thomas needed to move the story along.

“Three months later then, a Councillor from the neighbouring town stood up at Council and said he had a petition from twenty residents in his town demanding the same amount of funding from the Council for a squirrel playground in their park.”

Adam rolled his eyes.

“I know. Completely true though. They hardly ever got squirrels in their park. But as a narrow minded politician, he and some other local idiots just decided they wanted their share. The point is he was blindly following a vocal minority. And it happens all the time. Our country is run by vocal minorities, and screw everyone else. The vocal minority runs politics because politicians let them”.

Thomas folded his arms and waited to see Adam’s response. Adam looked uncertain.

“Ok. So, should I be worried about this?”

Thomas rested his chin on his fingertips”.

“Ok, let me give you another story”.

“Does it have squirrels in?”

“No”

“Well ok then”

Thomas sat up in his chair.

“Ok. A year or so ago, there was this transgender girl, Claire. Male-to-female. Very convincing. She’d always dreamed of opening a café bar along Canal Street. Something different, you know. A bit classier than most of the bars down there. The kind of thing the village needs to be honest. So she’d been thinking about this for years, but she wanted to wait for her operations to all be done first. Fair enough. God, I remember chatting away into the night with her about it one time. And she’d dreamed up the name for it early on. I think maybe the name came before the idea of the café bar to be honest. She wanted to call the place faggots and teas”.

Adam laughed.

“I know, you like it? She worked so hard to get the money together, to convince the bank to give her a loan, then to find the premises, and apply for the license. Everything was falling into place. Now I said to her back then that the name might be controversial, but she had her heart set on it. What she did do though was she went around the village and asked people if they’d find it offensive, and she got together a list of 100 or more names of people signing to say they would take no offense whatsoever from the name, and she sent that in along with her license application to the Council”.

“Yet there’s no bar in the village with that name” Adam concluded.

“Indeed. The Council said no. The venture itself could go ahead, but she’d have to change the name. She came to me afterwards to see if there was anything she could do, and I had a look into the licencing committee minutes. It seemed that the Councillors had looked at it and said that 100 names don’t represent the city and that they didn’t want that language in their city. She asked about an appeals process but there was no process in place. She spoke to officers at the Council who told her that the Councillors decision was final. She tried to contact the specific Councillors involved, but they wouldn’t return her calls. Eventually I spoke to a journalist about it, who did a bit of digging too, and none of the Councillors involved would speak to him either. Nobody gave Claire a chance to speak about it. That was it. Done.”

“So what did she do?”

“She packed the whole idea in. She was so pissed off with being stonewalled. She said to me that if at least there had been some sort of debate about it, some sort of involvement of the community, and if real people had said they’d be offended by it, then she would have accepted that. That would’ve been fair enough. But why should a group of five out of touch pensioners get to decide what is and isn’t acceptable in her part of the city. Her village.”

“True”

“It drives me mad how many councillors are out of touch and lacking in ideas about how to deal with real city issues. So caught up in their own little megalomania. That desperation to get re-elected, that fear of rocking the boat, and that rush to give whatever they have to give, to keep their political friends appeased.

“The reality of it is that youth centre plans get pulled because they run too close to the back gardens of major party donors, and airport runways get built against all sense of long term thinking, because politicians need a positive story in an economic downturn”.

Adam nodded. “A friend of mine was at the airport protest in November”

“Oh really? I was there too.” Thomas replied, distracted from his point.

“Actually, she was organising...” Adam began, before a penny seemed to drop, “...wait...”, he paused for a second, “...did you speak on the radio?”

“Yes, briefly, with the organiser”

“Ali?”

“Yes, that’s right”

“Wow, she lives in my block. Wait though, she said that guy was a local Councillor”

Thomas raised his eyebrows in confirmation.

“Oh” Adam said is if he’d solved a riddle. “So this is all about you?”

“Yes. I’m one of the local Lib Dem councillors”.

“Ohhh” he said, sounding sympathetic. This wasn’t an unusual reaction when you told someone you were a liberal democrat.

“So we’re in opposition at the moment. Well, perpetually”.

“Yes.”

“I’m middle ranking in the party I suppose” Thomas said.

He decided it was time to confide, and leaned in closer, lowering his voice.

“The thing is we have two guys in charge who are making all the decisions and they’re not doing a great job. We’re not playing any real role in the city, and we’re forgetting our values.”

“Sounds like you need some kind of coup” Adam replied.

Thomas sat back. “I don’t know. I guess there are various options”

Adam looked sceptical. “Well what other options are there?”

Thomas considered it for a second. This was a good point.

“I don’t know if the group is ready for a new leader.”

“Well how much worse a job could you do?”

Thomas went quiet. His mind was whirring again. My name’s Thomas Delaney, and I’m here to recruit you. Could he do it?

Adam looked a little restless, then reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet, taking out a card from inside.

“I need to head off, but my mobile is on here. Let me know how it develops, and feel free to shout me if you want to bounce any more ideas.”

Thomas took the card, and thanked him. He wasn’t even sure if he’d said goodbye as Adam wandered away.

My name’s Thomas Delaney, and I’m here to recruit you.