Lost in Moss Side

Thinking of the estates of yore

The night of the first Nigel Benn vs. Chris Eubank boxing match, I arrived at London Heathrow on a business trip to get computer kit and software for NextStep Limited, a desktop publishing outfit in which I had a 30% stake along with a majority stakeholder who was a lawyer and a director of the United Bank of Africa. This was the 18^th of November 1990 and Margaret Thatcher was on her way out. Nowadays, I get mistaken for Chris Eubank.

Totally unaware of where I was going, I had some addresses to doorstep for the week or so that I would be in the UK. Out to West Ham, I went and my former schoolmate no longer lived at that address, so I made it back into London on the tube and then the bus to Hordle Promenade North in Peckham, an estate in my total naivety at almost 10:00 PM with £1,500 in my breast pocket.

I knocked on the nondescript door for more than 10 minutes, the tumult of excited television viewers inside meant I could not be heard and then my friend who no longer lived there but was watching the boxing match with his cousins came to the door as if to leave for his home and was met with my visage. Surprise and shock, he became my host for the fortnight of my stay, his place way out in Surbiton.

Peckham over 30 years ago was a different place from what it is today, one could say the housing estates of that time, a habitue of drugs, crime, and many other vices are centuries behind what it has become. A few days over a decade after my adventurous visit, on the 27^th of November 2000, Damilola Taylor lost his life to a stabbing in a stairwell of the North Peckham Estate. In early 1991, I did live on Sumner Estate for a few months, after my second return to the UK.

A long time from Gunchester

Earlier this evening, I called an Uber cab in the middle of Moss Side in Manchester having decided to go on a wander of discovery from Hulme where I had gone shopping for some African goods. All the while, I was on the phone with Brian, but some 30 years ago, not only would I have never ventured into this locality, but the E-Class Mercedes Benz that picked me up might well have found a forcefully new owner with the driver who dared to arrive to pick his fare fighting for his life.

Such was the issue of gang violence, gun and knife crime, illicit drugs and muggings in inner city estates, the aforementioned being considered one of the most deprived residential areas in Western Europe at that time. Crime in Manchester earned the city the moniker of Gunchester and Madchester.

Even in 1996 when I first visited Manchester, I could not get a black cab to take me from the city centre to a venue in Moss Side. Once again oblivious of the situation and in my naivety, I found a cab ride in a literally battered taxicab that in the old times I would think any self-respecting horse would refuse to draw.

Things have no doubt changed, for I walked down the side of the Heineken Brewery into Moss Side, by some interesting church buildings, the bethel of the Brotherhood of the Cross and Star and across the road was the Church of God of Prophecy where some churchly dressed madams of ethnic origin seemed to be gathering that I had assumptions to which Brian made an unprintable quip.

The Brotherhood of the Cross & Star in Moss Side

Church of God of Prophecy in Moss Side

I think I am lost

I went through a park with the mind that I would get to the upper reaches of Oxford Road and walk down between the University of Manchester and the Manchester Metropolitan University to get home. As I exited the park the street name looked familiar, and I imagined I was not far off known terrain.

Soon, I said to Brian, as I was regaling him with the history of Moss Side, “I think I am lost.” I pressed on up another street, thinking I would soon be in a place of safety before it dawned on me that I was indeed lost.

When I switched on my Google Maps, I had been walking further away from home the only familiar location I could see on the map was a restaurant I visited almost 11 years ago. I got there with a taxi; it was not a walk.

Unbeknownst to me, my mobile phone was also running low on battery, and it was just fortunate that I decided to call Uber because just as I sat in the taxi our journey was about to commence. My phone died.

Many notes to self

You can have your phone with you, but you must always ensure you have enough juice to embark on silly adventures for if you lose the ability to communicate or find your way, you could well be quite endangered. A dead phone is just as good as not having taken your phone with you.

While is it unlikely I would have been so totally lost in Manchester, it would have taken a loss of composure and asking the wrong person to be presented with dire circumstances and we should curtail evil imagination.

Brian who was already aware that I was lost in Moss Side did not get to speak to me until I had returned home some 15 minutes later. I could imagine he would have been beside himself with glee knowing that this usually orderly man had now got himself into a pickle, totally of my own making.

Note to self: Many to write.

I found the mug

Grandad ever watching

The mug, that mug, my mug has the inscription, “If at first you don’t succeed… call grandad.” I wish I could, he died many, many years ago, though I doubt he would have been able to give me the advice I needed to find my mug. Then what is to say his spirit was not with me aiding me in the quest for that missing artefact.

Blog - Now, where's the mug?

Then paranoia set in, having looked everywhere I thought the mug could be, I decided to take pictures of my office desk, the coffee table, and the kitchen, including the bin. Just in case the mug reappeared in any of those places, and I could reference pictures to see what I was missing.

Upending everything again

I checked my door, it was locked, went over my apartment again and then repaired to bed to sleep, but this thing still bothered me, where could be the mug be? As Brian knows, I would unlikely go to bed without satisfactorily resolving this riddle.

Back in the living room, looking under settees, behind the seats and every nook and cranny, but it just did not make sense. I even looked in the fridge and the freezer, just in case, in a moment of silliness that sometimes finds an excuse for my actions, I might just have, well really?

Back in the kitchen, I opened every cupboard, looked again in the dishwasher and then finally, I pulled open the door of the microwave oven, and there was the mug, full of the tea that I had tried to rewarm. I made tea in the afternoon then got distracted after a few sips.

How it happened

Normally, I would boil water and fill up the mug to warm up the tea, but instead, I poured lukewarm water out of the kettle into the mug and set it in the microwave oven for 90 seconds, where I forgot the mug all that while until I wanted to have some ginger tea before going to bed and hence, the search high and low for the mug.

Rather than get agitated about it, I could have just calmed myself down and eventually found the mug. I am sure this same thing happened sometime last year too. What I need to do next time if the mug is not in the sink, on my office desk or in the dishwasher is to check the microwave oven before having wild ideas about where the mug might have scampered off to without letting me know.

If at first, I don’t succeed in finding the mug, I just relax, use another mug because it is somewhere in my apartment, I just can’t find it yet. 

The mug.

Now, where's the mug?

Only me or others too?

Nothing can be as maddening, the thought that you might not be the only resident of your own apartment as a single occupant, for I cannot for the life of me find the mug that I had a cup of coffee out of this morning and then tea this afternoon.

After use, it should be in the sink filled with water ready for a rinse, it is not there and not on either my office desk or the coffee table. And this upset me no end because it starts the perambulation around my apartment seeking where it might be.

O sweet muggy

The bedroom, but why? The bathroom? Surely not! Maybe I forgetfully dumped it in the bin, now, that is crazy. Could it have slipped under the sofa? It has a handle, that can’t be the case. Now, if my door is locked, there is only one other possibility, Ratatouille, and that would have been when I had a nap in the bedroom. O sweet muggy, where are you? I cry.

It is not in the dishwasher, so, I am left wondering, where this mug could be, and it is not amongst the other mugs in the cupboard which brings me to an uneasy situation about things that have suddenly disappeared and then appeared again. My tendency is to discard them on the premise that they did really disappear at the machination of someone.

Believe yourself first

The other day, it was a straw hat, and I might have left it somehwre, but that is unlikely and maybe it is, I have done silly things before, some I cannot bring myself to recount at the sense of embarrassment that someone might take the opportunity to mock me about. Brian, my eyes are on you as I roll them at you.

Maybe, just maybe, for some reason or another, I cannot see the mug where it is because in the confusion, I have temporary blindness and unawareness to perceive where I did put it absentmindedly. What bothers me is as I go to bed, the thought that the mug is missing might just get me up in the middle of the night to assure myself that I am not thinking silly things. If there is a story after this, it would continue elsewhere.