I hated running. Really. I bobble at the best of times, don’t I; a bunch of pale meat with noodles for limbs. That’s why when I’m really motoring – which is more of a wonky canter, and even then basically a limp – I look like a fast pile of sticks, with some ginger wig in there.

So I hated running. It’s walking, which is the most boring pursuit in the world, but with a greater risk of death.

On account of my feet, I needed some shoes that might support my lollop. We went to the special shop to try some on. Proper runners get a gait analysis, which involves the travelator from Gladiators and a camera. I’ve never been on a travelator before. I didn’t really know how to handle myself. I couldn’t get up to speed, so I was kind of hopping about on it for a while. Then the attendant fiddled the controls and next news I’m going an even ten on some interminable scale of hell. Then, I turn round. Nobody told me not to turn round on a travelator, an I fell off it in front of the whole shop. Me, red as a dead-end road sign, wondering why I bloody bother.

Still, you improve. You notice the others out there, being smarmy about it. Far as I can tell, there are two ways to spot a runner. One is their shoes, and the other their calf muscles. I have two of the former and none of the latter. I rustle up and down the canal in shellsuit bottoms, hoping nobody notices.

So that’s how I’ve trained. Grumbling up and down the canal path, end to end, arse over noodle. Old Trafford and back. You have to dodge hissing geese and their children. And then, you get to like it. The breathing and your feet beating a metronome. Your clear head and your cold face.

And on Sunday I’ll run ten million millimetres. And I’ve chosen the NLT because reading and writing aren’t perks — they’re fundamental rights. Because one in six people struggle to read and write – in their jobs, at homes, in school. Because that equals 12.6 million people. Because the National Literacy Trust helps to develop, support, and enhance literacy skills. Because I reckon even a couple of hundred quid goes a little way longer than nothing at all. Because really, if you can read this, you’re a lucky sod.

Anyway. The point is, I’d be chuffed to bits if you read this and think about sponsoring me. I’ve set up a Just Giving page and it’s here or over there and thanks, I love you.

My throat lumps every time the wheels leave tarmac. The lurch as the tail section dips, the engines screaming, you wondering if the last metre of the plane will scrape the hard top, pull the plane back, the wheels off, the rear section open.

I sit on planes and see my death in so many ways. I fall and burn and break and splash. I tear and wheel and split and burst.

All of these things because I’ve paid for another human to take me up where humans shouldn’t go, and then to land safely at the other side. That isn’t a fear of flying. It’s being afraid of ineptitude. It’s being terrified of fallibility: the one bad habit we’ll always excuse.

Buy a flight and you’re paying for the advertising, the concept; the before and after. The airport ‘experience’ – all that marketing, the signage, the bright lights. Really the bit before flying is so high-concept you’re surprised more people aren’t disappointed to find that the modern commercial air fleet is old and ageing, all rivets and bulkheads.

As I get older, I realise the promise of future hasn’t quite come to pass. We’re not quite as tech as we like to think.

At the same time, this is the majesty of flight. A structured majesty, but all the same. It starts in corridors, beneath runways and baggage carriageways, all queues, all lines, all order. And then on takeoff, all this gets shat out of jet engines; blown backwards.

You can’t dress up a runway in customer service and fancy typeface. You can’t sugar the throttle and the thrust. A takeoff is all about precise engineering and managing the wind. It’s an untainted feeling, in so many different ways. You can tell me all about your special offers and in-flight menus and tellies and great deals on soggy bacon sandwiches, but Easyjet, British Airways, Ryanair, listen – not one of you can filter the feeling that your plane is flimsy and shaking, vibrating and rattling and grunting its way skyways; not one of you can market the exhilaration of making it.

Mainly, though, it’s the slow descent over a city by night that gets me. It’s one of the few things that leaves me genuinely, gormlessly, childishly astonished. It’s not the stadiums or the landmarks – it’s the street lights and the house lights, the cars and the traffic lights. It doesn’t matter the city, either. Everything flickers and glistens and sparkles, and on account of you can’t see people, you can think very highly of energy companies and energy grids – the hidden network of pipes and wires that handle so many watts, so many lights. It leaves me tingling and proud and feeling lucky. And that’s kind of ridiculous.

I could watch it for always. If a city by night were the last thing I saw before a messy landing, I wouldn’t bleat.

—

Also, happy new year!

Back then, 13 years old and sprouting limbs, I asked her out. She wouldn’t mind me saying her hair was kind of weird. It went all up and out — a hair-sprayed mushroom cloud – but she had breasts and tight blouses and spoke nine languages; wore a tightish navy skirt that framed her thighs.

That isn’t porny. I didn’t even know what a willy was for.

We were standing in the cold corridor — a brown plate-glass tunnel connecting old buildings. I fairly invited her to kiss me. She said no, but said I was sweet. I just don’t see you in that way, Matt, she said — a cliché as old as the chestnut. Then she and went off with all the popular boys; the boys who get their beards early.

As a geek, the breasts sure helped her transcend genres. I resented it quietly. I didn’t have breasts as leverage, and I played drums for the choir. In the last year of school, my face pocked with the ravages of underage smoking, I called her cocky.
She’s written all this in her diary. I must’ve been profound.

Anyway. I went to college and grew into my face. Went to university and got over myself. Stayed after university and went halfway bankrupt. My girlfriend, she went to college and uni and foreign countries. She got all long and ladylike, and pierced. We re-met on a MySpace organised school reunion. Her legs were still affecting. Apparently my jaw had come on quite well. I had a bunch of drawings on my arms. I was captivating; she was probably drunk.

So, romance isn’t dead. But moving in nearly killed it.

Packing’s bad enough, and that’s before you unpack a thing. I spent hours playing book Tetris; a few hours more deciding which old T-shirts to lob. Now, since the bulk of my belongings need plug sockets – I sold my acoustic drum kit to afford unemployment — I’m left with hundreds and hundreds of pounds of mostly redundant appliances and six bunches of holed socks.

It’s a strange thing that all boxes are designed to fit perfectly through door frames. It’s some kind of designer’s joke that knuckles aren’t included in the bargain. Designers, they like helvetica and breaking hands, and if mother didn’t want me to go, I’ve left little pieces of me all over the house.

We pick up the keys and get to it. No, not that. Moving house is not aphrodisiac — you’ve spent so long finding the place, you’d try and involve the estate agent.

It’s part of a gated development, our flat, which somehow evokes South Africa. I don’t really get on with exclusivity — even if it’s illusory, perceived, a blustery idea dreamt up in offices stacked on offices, the by-product of cocaine – and I feel especially twattish jangling key fobs about. But it’s a beautiful place, nestled at the affluent end of town for a price that doesn’t remotely match.

The rest of the time I’m wondering what to do if Manchester gets nuked. My first thought when it snowed yesterday wasn’t “snow balls!” but, “It’s started…”

Inside our flat, and things get wonky. That’s partly because it’s taken four weeks to plot where everything would go, and just four boxes of Suzanne’s shoes to smash everything. Elsewise, it’s mostly because girls think you lift boxes with the lid flaps. It’s because girls think black rubber doesn’t leave long stripes on laminate. It’s because girls think efficiency is hiding all your valuables.

Moving into a new flat is exciting, if you can see past an argument about where the forks are going.

She says I’m a draper, it transpires. Says I can’t go in a room without folding an item of clothing over a chair or a wardrobe door. I say, well, they’re dirty, these trousers. So you leave them out instead of putting them back in the cupboard, don’t you? Is this really what being adult is about?

No. She says if you walk into my flat you’ll find me at the end of a trail of dangling clothes and upended pockets; battering Metallica on Guitar Hero or eating all the peanuts.

By way of distraction, I say women don’t understand loft insulation.

At least she doesn’t write a blog about shoes or cup cakes or something.

What else? The new flat has a balcony that looks on to a segway of canal, with all of the boats and ducks and bridal paths that means. The balcony’s a metre wide and a foot deep, enough to stand and look out.

Stacked above the water, atop red brick arches, two train tracks are racked like steps. One line’s for passengers and cargo, one’s a narrower gauge, built for Metrolink trams. The architecture’s all brick and beautiful – it’s pure Manchester industry, but clean. If I write any kind of steampunk in the coming months, that’ll be why*

*I won’t — I hate that crap

My priority was a new television. On account of my car was stolen in September, I wanted something back from life, and the filthy robbing insurance company, and the impossibly useless Greater Manchester Police force, who didn’t even manage a phone call.

And here is the crux of adulthood: I’ve had my Clio reincarnated as a thirty-two inch LCD flat screen.

Suits, they’re for real men – men running for trains with cummerbunds flapping behind like some kind of heterosexual vapour trail.

Half the problem is they’re far too hard to get right. You see all these men in suits and you know they’re in the club. They’re the bonus you wear – a massive cotton-rich condom, designed to sheath six feet of dick. And like the rank banana jonnies you bought that time, lobbing sweaty quids in the machine and praying nobody came in the bogs behind you, they never fit right.

In the city centre, a suit equals value-added homogeneity. You accessorise a suit with a job in recruitment and a pair of tan brothel-creepers. Wear a suit and you’ll notice your forefingers start to point in the direction of anything good. Wear a suit, and you’ve suddenly got chalky lines appearing places you’d normally keep a pen.

Suits, they make your shadow broader; sharpen your shoulders. But really you’re only wearing a suit because you think rapists don’t.

And yet it’s Saturday morning, and I’m travelling up a long, ponderous escalator to try one.

It’s the longest escalator. I’m thinking, the suit I really want comes with a lance, not a brolly. I’m into a fortress of real men, thinking, they’re bastard everywhere and nobody wears a good one.

The suit shop is a foppish sort of hell. The walls were sewn on Savile Row. I’m wearing a hat, but the trilbys are smiling back at me. Boots and boots and brothel-creepers. Socks, with every day of the week stitched into them. Mannequins – totems of strange alabaster muscle. I might as well be inside Hugh Grant, rubbing my crotch, snorting Lynx deodorant and watching Die Hard films, back to back.

I do what you do when you don’t have a clue, and that is stand on the spot, turning circles.

A man spots me from a distance and snaps a tape measure shut.

I think he says, Tryen a suit!

I think so, I tell him, but I don’t have the first clue about suits.

He says other things, his voice thickly Scots. He turns a mean phrase, Captain Suit. It was a kind face once – you can tell that much – but it’s misshapen by the long pursuit of commission. You’re a suit salesman in a suit shop, fella. You didn’t even make the car lot.

Then his suity pal strolls over, another balding pleb; another indecipherable beady-eyed Scot. This one walks like a sad pigeon, scaffolding his belly with his belt. He says hello. I go red.

It’s the weirdest thing being measured on sight. I say I might prefer a slim-fitting one. That’s what the press-ups are for. Already they’re talking to each other about my tits and shoulders and noodly legs. Then, one of them, the fattest of the two, says, try the thirty-six.

Well I’m many things, but a thirty-six inch chest I’m not. How hard do you have to fall on a tape measure’s edge to draw blood? Look at my hair, Captain Suit. Look at my orange hair, you rotund, rolly savage. We’re lumps from the same gravy. Help a brother out.

I take my jacket off and pick out some flash grey number. He nods. When you’re ginger you accept from an early age that no colours look good. It’s grey, or it’s navy, or it’s turn the light off and pretend you haven’t noticed. Green for the rest. And black is far too severe – with skin this pale you’re nothing if not a photocopy.

I put the suit jacket on, shuffling the collar like dads do. It’s crushing my chest together and I can’t move my arms. Captain Suit and his pal are smiling and cooing and wanting for sausages, and I stand there looking back at myself from a mirror, all sharp lines and weird creases. I’m growing redder.

I’m a cross between Kate Bush and a dying flower. I’m going home.

The development, it opens up from the middle. Flats fall either side of the lifts, and the long brown corridors go every which way but home. It’s a maze after four pints, is what I reckon, and I’m already lost with the minotaur.

The estate agent struggles with the lock and opens the door, chatting on, already choking on his sales lines. Fabulous, fabulous, superb, tremendous. He walks cocky, the spoiled kid grown up. All he needs is the braces.

We go in and it’s all of those things for sure – the wood floor, the inter-dimensional telly. We walk through, quiet. You’re meant to be quiet in places like these. They’re not yours, so you feel like you’re trespassing. It’s never going to be yours, so you’re on the way up to tip-toes.

There’s a way to be when you’re looking at somewhere to live, and it’s deceptive, shifty. The whole thing is about lying. We’re lying, he’s lying, and the flat is nothing like the photos. You look out the windows, find yourself looking at the ceiling as if you’ll find a reason to sign the contract in the smoke alarms and the halogens. You judge hobs, weigh up bins, imagine where you’ll write. The estate agent, well he judges your relationship.

He says things about the lounge he’s said to others a million times over. Calls the kitchen new. Doesn’t seem to notice that the bedroom is the kitchen is the lounge. I think he calls the floor shiny.

My girlfriend mentions it’s small. Ah, but good things come in small packages, he says – a man proud of his proverbs and quick-witted besides. Then he smiles, smiling like we’ve never heard it before. Only I’m thinking good things don’t come in small packages, you urbanite bastard – letter bombs do.

But it is small, and expensive, so it’s not right. We don’t want to smell our food on our pillows, and if he mentions management fixing the bathroom tiles again I’m going to drag him to B&Q and grout his mouth shut. Then, I’m going to plug him into the mains.

He smiles at my girlfriend a lot. I must look as comfortable as a folded turtle. I’m biting my lip so hard I’m chewing my chin. There are many ways to kill an estate agent, and I’m listing them all. Then, sooner than he can pretend he’s sensitive about council tax, we’re out, away.

I give him a limp handshake so he thinks he’s won. And when he wheelspins away, my girlfriend laughs and laughs and laughs at the boys.

Recently I apologised in retrospect, via Facebook, for calling a boy a ‘panface’ at school – even though I got punched for the trouble back then anyway.I apologise when I’m ran over by rapid mothers and prams in town.

I apologise when I’ve only got a heap of twenty pences for my train fare; equally because I don’t want to weigh anybody’s pockets down nor embarrass anybody with how warm I’ve made coins.

I say sorry to snails if I catch them on my last cigarette outing of the night – when it’s too dark to notice much save the bench and how fucking weird bats are.

I’ve mouthed sorry to panicked drivers when my brother’s road-raged at them.

I’ve been told I put chewing gum in somebody’s hair once – fifteen years ago – and then spent twenty minutes fretting over how best to make amends.

I’ve apologised quietly in my book for even writing it.

Apologised to my (then) publisher for sending my final first draft because I know it’ll probably not be my final first draft at all. And isn’t.

I’m forever apologising to my mother for unmentionables; to exes for being unmentionable.

I’ve apologised to the goodly wing of my family for not believing; to the real men of my family for thinking feminism’s all right in principal.

For my dead hamster I only hold guilt and I can’t put Mum’s tortoise outside because of that time I found it being pecked to bits by magpies.

Probably it’s explainable; probably I could care less. Certainly I’m not keen to offend people close to me. But tell me honestly that it’s not my fault and I’ll send you an email explaining why it is anyway.

And the worst thing? The worst thing’s knowing – knowing absolutely that it needn’t be said – because the only times you really need to say sorry are when saying sorry isn’t nearly enough anyway.