San Remo in Rochdale, The Cafe in the Greater Manchester Transport Museum and also thoughts on being intensely interested in things
Over the past three-or-so months I have consciously allowed myself to begin to explore the idea of feeling settled in one place, and inside of the safety of this novel settled-ness I have taken time to mentally unpick the ideal conditions in which the feelings of yearning to escape thrive, and the weight and importance of “special interests”(a term I grapple with in terms of... oh I wish there was a better term, sometimes I find it infantalising, but I am grateful for the coding and understanding it provides in conversations about neurodivergence) in these moments of yearning. I am going to confess, bravely, that my café brain has been fairly dormant for a lot of this time, there has been a sense of relative quietude from the constant whirring undercurrent of café-based thought. Wrestling with the proportions of how much space an interest can and should take up can be a confusing and changeable process; especially when you experience life intensely “interests first” inside of the context of a world where we tend to define what is a healthy amount of thinking about things by neurotypical standards.
When my louder interests go through periods of quietude I can feel a stark disconnection from one of the most consistent pillars of my understanding of myself, which I understood even before the frameworks of pathological knowledge as “I Am So Interested In My Interests”. There is a thing in this that I feel is immense; there is always somewhere rich to go internally if things aren’t great in the external world. I think the language of “superpower” is infantalising and please put it in the bin and never say it to me ever, but I find this part of this thing to be a lucky facet of a big complex thing that I am glad about on the whole. This project couldn’t exist without the conditions that my brain provides; a sense of obsessive internal psychogeography and need for categorisation and to just know every single fact about cafes; but I am losing steam with the output part of it all as my external world is currently just as rich and the need for internal retreat isn’t so strong. I am still here and still doing it! But, slower. And where to go with it?
Now that I am here at this point, my plan is to plan. To take intentional time to go further afield and explore different types of cafes, walk for longer, plan more oblique routes and think of ways to document them in a form that feels a bit less like a memoir, as at the moment I am excavating them directly from fossilised deep memory, which objectively affects the tone. I would like to create an interactive map of the cafes; guides of places to see in the surrounding areas that people could use as scores for their own visits to these places. I want to record the café sounds, and I want to experiment going to cafes in this way with others and inhabiting the dreamy wide-eyed psychogeographic space outside of my own company, have good conversations, record them, sometimes. maybe. I also wish to continue to inhabit that vast-alone space that it allows me fully, and with great regularity, to enjoy the freedom that exists within the commitment to something being an adventure, even within the boundaries of local-ness and having to book trains quite a lot in advance in order to afford them. Maybe I could even stay in a B&B with weird old carpets. Imagine! I would love that so!
And now, back to it.
Back in February, I visited Manchester and some of its surrounding places for a few days, and found it so good that I left thinking “Ah yeah I’m definitely going to move to Manchester forever soon”. In the months that followed, I introduced myself as “Hello I am Lib and I am moving to Manchester forever soon!” When I was paid each month, I saved every spare bit of money in order to complete The Plan to move to Manchester, but I think that was just grasping for meaning and answers and actually I probably won’t after all. But, Manchester is great! I did a lot of things which I really recommend, I went to the Trafford Centre, which I have mentioned in a previous dispatch. I had stayed with my friend Anna for a night as I was in Manchester For Business, but I decided to extend my stay and get a cheap hotel and see what it would be like to live there. I had the evening to myself, the wind in my hair, I was on holiday, I wanted to go on a tram, so I went to The Trafford Centre and was immensely excited by it. I got quite lost and found it so dizzying that I felt nauseous and couldn’t really sleep afterwards. But for anyone chasing the feeling of The Old Metro Centre, I don’t think that The Metro Centre was ever as intense as the Trafford Centre. That isn’t really part of this, but I do want to give an honourable mention to the cruise-ship themed food court.
The main café I am here to write about is San Remo in Rochdale, and I will in a moment, but I also wanted to mention a bonus unexpected café, which is the canteen in the Greater Manchester Transport Museum, an excellent museum full of buses and trams worth going to for the café alone! I really like this museum, and think it’s great especially for those who are fans of mid-century transport design; it has been open since the 1970s and is situated in an old bus depot in Cheetham Hill, ran by volunteers, who mostly seemed to be older men who are really dedicated to Heritage Buses. I love those people. There was lots to see, I was particularly enamoured by the light up Futuroute map, and the very Microsoft Publisher display on one of my favourite films, A Taste of Honey, filmed in nearby Salford.
The best bit was the café, which was the canteen when it was a bus depot back in The Past! There wasn’t much food available as we were there late in the day, but it’s absolutely the cheapest café at least in the whole of the Greater Manchester Transport Museum, if not Greater Manchester, or even the world! Beans on toast for 90p, why wouldn’t you go? The tables and chairs were not the mythological historical furniture I usually write about but fairly standard museum café fare, great all the same! For me, it was the gloss white paint over bricks, the tuck shop feel of it all, the hauntological aspect of thinking about bus drivers eating their lunches, and also the video they had playing of heritage buses in the background. There was also an old fruit pastilles machine in the back next to the window. All so good. Anna and I each had a cup of tea and some sort of Cadbury bar that is niche and usually found in the context of school lunch box, I can’t remember what it was, but I am sure she does, as she is most excellent like that.(She seems to think it was a Cadburys Snack Bar, and I am inclined to agree)
We had a good chat to the man behind the counter, who regaled us with tales of heritage bus open days and only as we went to leave he revealed he had worked as an entertainer in Pontins many years ago(I’ve never wanted to stay anywhere and ask more questions ever but we had to go). We did leave, each buying multiple tram drivers badges, and that is where I will leave my recounting of that day. What a great day!
Flash forward two days later to waking up post disorientated Trafford Centre(which absolutely did permeate my dreams) broken sleep, this was the day I had structured my whole trip around, finally visiting a café very high on my wish list, San Remo in Rochdale (with the hope of also visiting Sorrento but we will get to that). I walked from my hotel, leaving my cumbersome bag full of excellent tat I had aquired over the days safely behind the counter, to the beautiful Manchester Victoria station, where I hastilly bought a bottle of Fanta and ran over to the platform to get onto the train. I was meeting my friend Hannah from the internet later on before my return to Newcastle so my time in Rochdale was succinct, but I really enjoyed the pebbledash bin outside of the station. It was cold and rainy and I marched very purposefully downhill to the street where I would find this beautiful mythological café. I walked past a gym with a really good silhouette of bodybuilder onto the outside of it.
This is a café I had felt very drawn to in my research as the pattern of the walls is particularly distinct, and it was full of customers who I assume were regulars, it had the feeling that everyone knew eachother. I went in and asked for an egg on toast and a coffee and took my place on the free table which provided the best view of each segment of the café. My coffee arrived and I sat and enjoyed the view in front of me, grey and white gingham patterned formica tables, the chairs were brown leather with black metal frame, and some of the walls have a distinct monochrome plastic panelling. There was an area in the back which was more brown and wooden, and the walls are covered in pictures, many relating to Italy. There was plastic fruit slightly above my head to the left. My egg on toast came on a plate with a maroon border, I ate them, it was most excellent all around. The café has suspended ceilings with various texture of ceiling tiles, and rotating fans, which I really like to see.
My favourite part was the area around the till, I didn’t get a good photo of it as I didn’t want to disturb the people working, but they had posters for Pukka pies and really nice red writing. I can’t find the history of the place, and I can’t remember exactly what I pertained through chatting but it seems that(I could be wrong) a pair of brothers ran both this café, and Sorrento down the road, and now Sorrento is closed, that brother now runs this one. It has been open for a really long time, and I got talking to a woman who must have been in her late 60s about what I was doing, about her relationship with the place, she was offered a free cappuccino by the owner to sit and chat to me. She introduced herself, her name was Tunis, short for Tunisia, and she sat down and told me she had been coming to this café since 1966 when she moved over from Ireland. She told me a lot about her paintings, which she showed me on her phone, they were beautiful, she does those acrylic pouring paintings, and then as I left she added me on facebook, which I never use but obliged in the moment. I got a notification a few weeks after that it was her birthday, life continues outside of cafes! I hope she had a cake and a party! I left and did a quick loop of Rochdale to try and find Sorrento, which is the other 1960s coffee bar of Rochdale. Sadly it had closed, but I peered through the shutters and saw it all lying in there, dormant.
I then hopped on the train back to Manchester to meet my pals and then headed home and dreamed of my past dream of a future life in Manchester. What a time. See you next time!