There are musings that linger on the pages of my notebook for weeks on end with “blog” scrawled next to them – ideas and rants I think (when writing them) need a “public” airing. I’ve forgotten most of them now, and will probably only re-discover them in years to come when I trawl through old journals looking for a spark. Other ideas, meanwhile, have passed their sell by date and are now completely uninteresting: the excitement has quickly sapped out of Big Brother, for example. I was actually in danger of giving a toss for a moment when the evil force that was Grace lurked in the house. Still, some things still need to be said.

Well one, anyway. I had to pop over to Bolton a few weeks ago. Well I say “I had to”. I didn’t have to. But I had an excuse to get me out the office for an afternoon, so I made the most of it. There’s an exhibit starting at Bolton museum next week all about homelessness, with a part of it focussing on The Big Issue in the North and the Homeless World Cup. I had to take over the trophy which the England team won last year, so it can be proudly displayed alongside the vendor bib, copies of the magazine, photographs and general homeless “stuff” that’s there. I could have posted the trophy, of course, but it’s so precious I didn’t want to take the chance and had to deliver it be hand. Honest.

I used to live in Bolton. I lived there four years or so, while I studied at Bolton Institute – not a mental asylum (although at times we did wonder) but an ex-poly now university. At the time I quite liked it. It was close enough to Manchester to be interesting, far enough away to have some character of its own. The moors are close and “The Institute” was a good place to study, it survived without the big university’s pompous attitudes and politics, and was a good mix of college drop-outs, wanna-be hippies and middle-aged ladies studying for the hell of it. Actually, that’s precisely what I liked so much about that place and the time – I was there for the hell of it, with no disenable goal or intention of doing anything in particular afterwards. I think this is the only way you can study Literature and Creative Writing and get away with it.

I haven’t been back to Bolton in years. Though on the train there, I suspected nothing much would have changed. And in a way, it hadn’t: the same grim faced mothers shoved prams off the dilapidated platform with fags hanging over their babies faces, the battered kebab shops greeted me from across the road outside the station, all in need of a lick of paint, and the high street was the same jumble of charity shops and £1 stores I remembered. But get this – there was a “gateway” to Bolton - one of those “millennium” bridges crossing over the railway tracks – like they have in Salford and Newcastle and every other fucking “regenerated” town these days. Utterly pointless, especially as there was nothing wrong with the industrial age stone bridge it had replaced. And even worse, as I turned the corner into the one nice road which Bolton town centre has, the crescent where the theatre and the museum sit, I noticed the streets signs supporting the legend “welcome to Bolton’s cultural quarter”.

Why have modern council planners decided that if you call something a “quarter” it atomically makes it more interesting? One museum with a small art gallery and a theatre now constitutes “a quarter”? Is the Pizza Cabin on the corner outside the theatre included in this area I wonder? Or the hideous 1960’s grey concrete car park? Or the pasty shop where you can buy a local gastronomic delight – a pasty barm? Pasty Barms are part of Bolton’s Cultural heritage, I suppose, since they do seem to be oddly unique to the town. I mean, full marks for the investment into Bolton, it needs it. But why so unimaginatively spent? There seems to be this idea that by copying things that have already been done elsewhere a billion times you automatically “regenerate” an area. “ Oh, I know, we’ll have one of those nice millennium bridges as a “gateway” and rename couple of streets as “a quarter”, that way the people of this piss-poor town will really feel valued.” Never mind the grim face chain smoking old women who lurk outside Kwik Save and the bored teenagers kicking shit out of each other at the bus stop. God forbid that any money should be spent on something that’ll actually do something for the local community.

Having discussed this week’s blog with SD, who’s now curled up on the sofa looking so cosy I’m just going to have to disturb him in a minute for the sake of it, I have to add his thoughts to this which are on a similar slant: New Islington. (“New” anything in fact). If it’s not a “quarter” then it’s “new”. We live in the birthplace of the industrial world, but do we celebrate it? No. We rename it “new”, as they’re doing to Ancoats or rather “New Islington” as it shall hence forth be named. As if by adopting the same name as a posh North London suburb will wipe the last few decades of neglect.

It’s this constant mimicking of other places and other ideas that lacks so much creativity in our town and city centres, a repetition of the same mistakes made by planners in the 50s and 60s who are responsible for such monstrous creations are the piss titled Arndale. Both Bolton and Ancoats have a heritage that could be celebrated, but they’d rather have quarters and bridges and call it “new” and try and forget about all the poor bastards in the impoverished estates, who shoot up night after night just to relieve the mind numbing boredom, while they listen to the ever growing babble of twatts with layered hair waffle on past their windows on their way back from the deli.

Hey ho. That as they say, is progress. Rant over. Time to go and disturb the peaceful looking S.