Old Ham

Oldham is a strange town. By day it is occupied by people who hold doors open for you if you are burdened with parcels or bags of shopping, and the old-fashioned politeness of Oldhamers was a vivid contrast to the rudeness of Rochdalites, who think nothing of slamming doors in your face.

Oldham is a strange town. By night is a different place, as I found every morning for 20 years as I picked my way from Mumps station to the Office across pavements strewn with broken glass.

Oldham is a strange town. It has a football club as its saint, to whom allegiance you have to swear if you desire to become resident in the borough. Oldham also had a composer of classical music once, but he couldn't stand the place so he left, and the snub was so great that all memory of him was erased from the municipal record.

Oldham is a strange town. It has extremes of poverty, too much grubby and snivelling petty crime, and a higher proportion of people of Asian origin than a lot of other towns, and occasionally local tensions break out in the form of riots.

Oldham is a strange town. Its municipal fathers and mothers noted the falling revenues in council tax, and instructed their salaried minions to find a solution. Easy! said the salaried minions. The answer is more boozers and night clubs, so that our hope for the future, the young people of Old Ham, may enjoy great merriment and sow their wild oats, meanwhile filling the municipal coffers with gelt. And so every bean shop or run-down pub applied for a night-club licence, and was granted it, for the lure of the 24-hour society with its promise of endlessly renewable loot-bags was too great to resist for the rulers of this borough, whose brains, were they put into the scales and measured, would have had problems if they were pitted against a pea.

Oldham is a strange town. Its municipal fathers and mothers are now reaping a whirlwind whose seeds they didn't understand that they had sown. Drunkenness and violence are now endemic on Friday and Saturday nights in a town where every other premises is a pub or a night club, and the salaried minions have now been instructed to find solutions, such as making everybody queue for two hours in a snake and only allowing them two drinks.

Oldham is indeed a strange town. And it is run by an exceedingly strange bunch of people, who all appear to be suffering from terminal short-term memory loss. But they sowed the wind, and now they are reaping the whirlwind.