Manchester was dark and drizzly. I was slowly meandering from Victoria train station to Chorlton Street station to catch a coach to Liverpool for my flight to Cork, Ireland.
On the Manchester streets, people looked frightened to death, it was only a few weeks after the Salafist terrorist attack at the MEN Arena.
Even the beautiful, ornate, window frame above struggled to offer any solace. And the normally beautiful, late Victorian, neo-Gothic Rylands Library was drenched in overcast darkness:
Have just read on the Internet that the Rylands Library contains personal papers and letters of amongst others, Elizabeth Gaskell. Can remember reading 'Mary Barton' years ago, it dealt with the suffering and kind of noble, sentient dignity of the Manchester working-class. It was a kind of literary version of Engels' 'The Condition of the Working Class in England' which I'd also studied back then, in my mid-20s in the late 1980s/early 1990s.
The hotel building below would have also, in past times, offered some charm, but not today.
Walking through Manchester on a Friday afternoon no longer felt like north-west England, it felt more like somewhere in Africa or the Middle East.
Had never seen the building below, for a modern piece, it looked kind of interesting:
When I finally got to Chorlton Street coach station, I had an (almost) nightmare-type experience. A Middle-Eastern, Salafist-looking man (with long beard and no moustache) was sat down with his head in his hands. Suddenly, at the top of his voice, he screamed something out in support of well-known Salafist terrorist groups. For a split second, I thought "Oh no, this is it!". Thankfully, it wasn't.
How I despair at the way political-'correctness' (cultural Marxism/globalisation) is destroying (or has already destroyed) my homeland.
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