Hermit Comes Home

You may remember some time ago I wrote about what could have been the best job in Manchester – living as a hermit in the tower of the Manchester museum. Refresh yourselves here, if you feel the need.

Well, I have news on the hermit front – he’s arrived! That’s right, it was actually true and not just a stupid idea. Well, it may still be a stupid idea but it is also true.

Our resident hermit, who, it has to be said, must be sweating his little Hermit toes off in this weather up in that tower, moved in over the weekend and he’s already been busy blogging- his only form of communication with the outside world. Highlights include a rather detailed description of the gunk he’s had to clean out of his temporary home, the museum’s loft apartment apparently not having been used much in the last century or so. “The bodies of insects, dead skin cells, droppings, mould, minerals deposited by passing traffic, city grime, dust,” are some of the delights he moved in with. Nice.

The purpose of his residency, as we briefly glossed over before, is something to do with purpose and existence and killing the planet – a nice upbeat project to give a man living on his own for a month. He’s also been tasked with questioning the purpose of the actual museum collection and, rather alarmingly, seems to be doing so by threatening to destroy most of it. I quote: “Each day over the next forty days I will choose an object from my collection and offer it up in a spirit of sacrifice. The object will be announced through a variety of media, including this blog. I will then destroy it.” Blimey. Way to protect our heritage, Mr Hermit.

The idea is that people put forward an argument to say why the objects should be saved and, if our secluded friend deems the argument worthy enough, he will save the artefact in question. Quite how he’s been given so much power is beyond me, but never mind. It’s all about questioning things, apparently. I’ve got a few questions of my own at the moment, which I shall reserve until more offerings from the hermit come forward over the next few months. Rest assured, we’ll be monitoring his progress. I’ll leave you with a photo, not of the hermit himself but of his first item up for sacrifice – a human skull.

For Better or Worse

For most people one spouse is quite enough, thank you very much. Having one person getting in your way in the morning, wanting to watch different programmes on the TV and eat different things for tea is plenty. One woman in Manchester, however, is apparently quite happy with all of those little foibles as she is positively collecting husbands. Five in fact, at the last count. That’s a lot of TV arguments.

Not content was she with having married, and never divorced, four of the unlucky fellows but she recently picked up number five, a soldier, and signed the book once more. It was only on the drive up to Scotland for their honeymoon when she revealed to him that she was already married – four times – that the police were called. One wonders what the conversation went like: “Darling?” ”Yes darling.” “I’ve got something to tell you...” followed, presumably, by something beginning with ‘f’.

It’s worth noting that her vocation is listed as ‘former glamour model and adult film actress’ and also that she was jailed for the same offence (that’ll be bigamy) for six months in 2002. There is, apparently, nothing to stop this husband-collecting vixen. Apart from another jail term, presumably, which she now faces. Unless any of the male guards are particularly susceptible to her apparent charms, in which case she might just have number six in her sights.

Big Breakfast

The nation’s ‘obesity crisis’ is never far from the news these days, with the waistlines of our youth and, indeed, the whole population being of grave concern to us all, apparently. After all, if the world needs saving from a collision with Mars, as also recently reported, it’s not going to be a race of fatties that’s going to do it, is it? No. No it’s not.

Such cholesterol and calorific concerns are far from the mind of an enterprising cafe owner in Bolton, however, who is some way to earning himself a record from the people at Guinness. Mario Frappola’s cafe, the inventively named Mario's Cafe Bar, in Westhoughton, offers a full English breakfast to apparently rival no other. At £10 a time customers with clean enough arteries and a strong enough desire to try and fill them as quickly as possibly can receive the following, served on a tray (no plate being big enough):

10 sausages

10 eggs

10 rashers of bacon

10 slices of toast

5 black pudding slices

Tomatoes

Mushrooms

Baked beans

And if you can eat it all within 20 minutes you get it for free. The British Heart Foundation are, unsurprisingly, concerned. “Not a good idea,” was their verdict and Mario has, by way of recognition, started making customers sign a form dissolving him of any responsibility should their circulatory system pack up after sausage number 10. No one has yet to complete the challenge yet, however, so I’m sure there will be plenty more takers. As far as we know no one has died trying yet either.

Eggs at the Ready

Unless you’ve been locked in a cupboard for the last week (apologies to those who actually are locked in cupboards, but kudos for maintaining an internet connection) you will have heard the news that the BNP have managed to actually get one of their people voted into something. The circumstances are somewhat convenient, it has to be said, in that most people couldn’t be bothered to vote for anyone, in light of the recent discovery that MPs have been stealing our money, and so the few BNP supporters out there seized the opportunity of our collective lethargy and voted in not one but two of their representatives.

So BNP leader, and one of the elected individuals concerned, Nick Griffin tried to talk to some people of the press in London yesterday and got driven off the streets by a group of people with opposing views, who waved banners, chanted slogans and threw eggs at him. Strange that the humble egg has become a universal weapon in such circumstances but I suppose it is entirely built for the job, being strong enough to throw yet fragile enough to break on impact. Incidentally, is this actually egg emerging from Mr Griffin’s right ear?


I digress. The point is, he’s giving it another go tonight in Manchester, presumably in the hope that those who oppose the BNP’s policies are a bit more subdued up north. The pub they’re holding the conference in has already been mentioned on the web. I suspect he’ll be thankful if he gets just eggs.

Cigarettes and Alcohol

I don’t seem to be able to leave Messrs Gallagher alone recently, this being the third time I’ll be writing about them in four posts. Difficult to ignore today though as they are set to play the first of their three concerts in Heaton Park tonight (the others being this Saturday and Sunday – they presumably have things on Friday night). Here's a picture of one of them actually in a park:

Heaton Park is, for readers unfamiliar with Google Maps, a large park to the north of the city centre right next to the M60 and there’s a lot of grumbling going on today – mainly in the MEN, it has to be said - about the hassle this is all going to cause. This little diatribe in particular has caught the imagination of many of their readers. I got about halfway through and gave up – don’t they have editors over there?

Anyway, will there be lots of traffic? Will the thousands of people cause untold disruption? Will Oasis play any decent new songs? The answer to only one of those questions is certain.

Roll With It

Following my report of tenuous pub marketing a post or two ago, I thought I’d follow suit with a tenuous Manchester story of my own. It concerns a certain Mr Gallagher again, not in the locale of his native Burnage this time but in the altogether more southern environment of his new stomping ground in London, namely one of pubs around Primrose Hill. Not papped falling out of a club or punching a photographer this time, as was once the norm of his media coverage, rather an unwitting victim of the new Google Street View. That’s right, ‘Our Liam’ was one of the many thousands to be caught on camera by the closest thing we’ve seen to a real Big Brother. He was sitting outside his local at the time, enjoying a pint, when the little camera car went past. How or why someone discovered this is nearly as troubling as the fact it happened in the first place but I won’t dwell on that – here he is, captured for all to see, blurry face supplied by Google. We got a four year old to do the Photoshopping again, as you can see:

Close up:
His ‘people’, incidentally, have confirmed it is him. Quite likely, apparently, that he would be sitting outside the pub in the middle of the day drinking pints. The lucky git.