My wife, a lifelong devotee of Coronation Street was naturally devastated about the death of Anne Kirkbride who played Deirdre Barlow in Coronation Street. This tragedy was not reported in her paper of choice, the Guardian, so it was left to me, skimming the red tops at the tobacconist, to break the sad news to her.
As I have admitted before, I have started watching Corrie myself to get an insight into what life is like in the grim, frozen post-industrial welfare safari park that is the North of England. As far as I can make out about one fifth of the population is a homosexual, most folks are on welfare or earn their living selling drugs, selling stolen goods or shipping stolen goods in white vans but a few work in factories making underwear. Everyone in the North lives in a house with a partner and some kids who belong to one half of another couple living elsewhere down the street. And someone gets murdered in the street every six months. It is all very baffling.
But now I read of “the pusher” a serial killer stalking the canals of Manchester. Apparently one young man a month has perished in these filthy waterways. Newspaper reports say that in dredging the canals to clear out the syringes, condoms, bottles and other essentials of every day Northern life, the old bill are now fishing out stacks of bodies. All male.
The police do not think that a killer is on the loose. They just say that the victims were all pissed or high and fell in. Other folks say that some of those perishing just found life too boring which – having now watched Corrie for a year – I can fully understand. But the rate of mortality makes even Coronation Street seem like a safe haven.
As if life in the welfare safari was not bleak enough it now seems as if it is plagued by a serial killer as well. Fearing for his safety, my Manc slum dwelling pal Brokerman Dan, is likely knock on my door at any moment claiming both economic and political asylum here in the hard working South.