hmpf | Never mind; the Met Office has a page about it.

Sorry, should have googled first.

Now all I need is some hilly country west of the city... if there is any available, that is.

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From:

muladhara

And I should check all your posts before I comment.

My hometown and the surrounding area is very hilly, by the way (see previous comment about the bottom of a valley).

From:

hmpf

Aren't you to the north-east, more or less?

BTW... I still have that Bowie question...

From:

muladhara

Yes, but only very slightly from where Manchester is. But I'm not going to push you on it.

I know you had a question about Bowie, but I've completely forgotten it. Apologies.

From:

hmpf

And a canal question (which I'm researching right now, without much success) Wish I could find the map of Manchester I brought from my visit last summer!

The canal question being: what would be the best location for a fairly large number of boats to assemble for a kind of party, in the Manchester canal system - a basin of some sort, I imagine. I know I've *been* to some places where I thought "yes, this might be a nice place for my fic" - but as I don't have the dratted map anymore, I can't find out their names.

From:

hmpf

No prob. I've listened to a lot of the Bowie you burned for me, btw, but I'm not quite as familiar with it yet as, I imagine, you would be.

I'm looking for two songs in Bowie's pre-1974 work that fulfill the following conditions:

1.) They have to directly follow each other,
2.) and not just on a CD, but *on the same side* of a vinyl LP, and
3.) they need to have themes of madness and/or (nuclear) destruction. (Or, in a pinch, other themes that are relevant to Sam's character. Time travel, whatever.)

From:

muladhara

Ah yes, of course. I think Hunky Dory's the best bet (and not saying that just 'cause I'm biased, lol). It's got some interesting stuff on it. Will have to try to remember to stick it on while I'm working one day...

From:

muladhara

Hmm, good question! I don't know offhand, as I'm not familiar with the shipping canal system, but I'm going to the library tomorrow, so I can see if I can find something about it there (like a map, for instance, that I could scan for you). I can also see if my Google-fu's working, and see if I can dig up an internet resource?

From:

hmpf

My google-fu clearly doesn't work today, because yeah, I've tried that! The names of all the canals are oddly absent from the maps I've found so far; whereas the sites that have the names, don't have maps. HOW USEFUL.

But if nothing springs to mind immediately for you, really, don't bother - I'll figure something out, I'm sure. I probably just need to keep searching a bit longer. :-)

From:

hmpf

Oh, yes, that's actually one I haven't converted to mp3s and put on my mp3 player yet. Maybe I should do that now... I tried Aladdin Sane and The Man Who Sold the World and Ziggy Stardust first, because they seemed the most obviously thematically relevant... and there's certainly quite a few songs on these that would fit, but I'm drawing a blank on finding two consecutive ones (that would also have been on the same side of an LP). Granted, I'm not entirely clear what some of the songs are about, so some of the ones that are before or after the more obvious ones may actually be relevant without me having noticed.

From:

hmpf

Right, I think I've got it. Bridgewater Canal, Castlefield Basin. :-)

From:

muladhara

\o/ Just the Bowie for me to sort then c:

From:

hmpf

Actually, I may have just found the perfect combo:

Life on Mars (duh!) & Kooks.

Life on Mars needs no explaining, and Kooks... well, parts of the lyrics are kind of perfect for the part of the story the song's going to appear in - namely, the morning after the day when Sam has come back from a year's stay in a mental hospital for believing he caused WW3, and just a little while before Annie kinda sorta "inspires" him to believe he's just dreaming again. The song's kind of like her pleading with him to "stay".

From:

hmpf

And, well, you know, "Kooks"... it also fits their mutual pact of semi-make-believe insanity. (Sam and Annie in my story is kind of... complicated, and not very healthy.)

From:

muladhara

I was going to suggest Kooks anyway (based on stuff we've said before, but also because I thought it just fitted at the time), but I couldn't decide whether to go with the preceeding song or the following. But yes, both those sound like a good choice to me c:

I'll still stick the CD on and have a listen though.

From:

hmpf

I think Kooks was the last song on that side of the record. As I need two consecutive songs on the same side of the record, it will have to be Life on Mars.

From:

enlight-bystand.livejournal.com

Unfortunately there isn't much to the west, it's relatively flat out over the Cheshire plain and Merseyside/Southern Lancashire. Manchester climbs (rapidly) into the Pennines to the East though.

From:

hmpf.livejournal.com

Yeah, I found that out, too, later that night. Very inconvenient... I need a place that makes some sense as a site for a refugee camp in a period where people are afraid Manchester might imminently be nuked. So, I figured, there should be some hills or rather valleys to provide shelter from the potential blast wave, and it shouldn't be in an area where the major fallout would be likely to come down.

The latter's more important than the former, of course - if you're far enough away, the blast wave isn't going to matter so much. So I just need to find out how far exactly "far enough away" is in this case.