I was disoriented when I woke at about 7.30 this morning – something was funny about the light. When I went into the bathroom the window looked white – surely it cannot be snow?
The kitchen window gives a good view of the sky to the west. Sure enough, it was white, though not the clean bright white of snow, more like the opalescent lining of a seashell. Very odd
By the time I got back upstairs it was raining so hard that it was not even making a noise, just a solid sheet of water
The same trick of light was happening over towards the east as I came in on the bus nearer to mid-day. The tops of the hills were bleached almost white by pale but intense sunshine piercing the high thick covering of the sky
An extraordinary – for the time of day & year – number of people on the bus were going all the way to the airport. One man – 40-ish, unattached, some kind of skilled or semi-skilled job – made his purpose clear: He was getting out of this ****, having heard the weather forecast for the next 4 days. Not coming back till next week Tuesday
The bus is a good illustration of how the effects of an airport on the surrounding area go beyond the obvious. It gives us country bumpkins an almost 24-hour, reliable bus service. If you have mobility problems it provides a really good way of travelling independently all the way into Manchester itself – transfer to the train is very easy at the airport, then there are free buses (available to all, not just pensioners) which take you to almost anywhere you might want to go in the city centre. Even if you are fully fit but the weather is foul you can make the same journey without getting wet (except for the first leg to the bus stop itself)
And to think, when I was a child, going in to Manchester was a Major Event. It even made for a story in the local paper when a Senior Lecturer bought a house in the village from which he was going to travel in to Manchester every day by train
