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.

See, Stockport’s the bit that missed the toilet — bounced off the rim, the M60, the Manchester ringroad that is — and settled into the carpet halfway between the Pennines and the Cheshire set.

Stockport was where you shopped before you grew up and found Manchester. It’s a parallel world of discount shoe shops and roadsweepers and pastries, and most people wandering about it look fit to die any moment. It’s not really anything at all, which is why it doesn’t know what it is, and the second you leave you forget everything you did there — which is why you end up going again.

Like most of the North West it’s grey and distorts time, and you pay through your arse to park.

Stockport’s where I remember most things about my mother and father together. I remember buying trainers and shoes and wellington boots with them — ones that flashed and others that didn’t. I remember the sizing machine in Clarks that always seemed a small error away from completely mangling my feet. I remember getting my legs cracked for hiding in the suits section of Marks and Spencer while Mum tried her best to hold everything, family included, together.

I doubt Stockport’s ever gleamed — it’s not a paragon of new North West or future anything — and there’s not very much to thrill trade-unionists and industriophiles save a museum of hatting and other heritage-y things like tall brown call centres and car showrooms. What the council won’t tell you about is having your car broken into, and at weekends it’s some kind of grim safari with kids whose music taste and style is three years behind central Manchester.

But having said that, and because of the Victorians and silk factories and the water supply and the second world war, it has some positives, and the only one is the viaduct.

Stockport Viaduct on paper is nothing if not an abortion of a structure. But actually it’s just immense and beautiful and made out of bricks. You can’t see it from space but bless them they tried. It stands astride the M60 and backdrops the whole place — sums up history and stagnancy in big fuck-off italics, and it makes the Stockport Pyramid — the town’s other landmark object — look pathetic, pretentious and ever so try-hard.
And if all that’s left you lost for inspiring images, well, it’s practical too — come to Manchester on a train and you’ll go over it.

Fact: When a pilot threw his plane at the place in 1967 and killed seventy-odd people, I think he did his best to miss it.

Stockport Viaduct is over a hundred feet tall and it’s absolutely everything the Pyramid isn’t. The Pyramid, well that’s just this awful great blue glass thing just screaming out for another bad pilot. All it does is summarise how shit roads look by sitting and rotting in the middle of a massive roundabout, lording it up.

It’s a Jabba the Hutt of a building, or it’s the poor wife of the businesses who’ve fed its growth — and now it can’t go anywhere or leave the house because it doesn’t know what it’s for. It’s highly visible like a McDonalds sign, like a bomb going off, and it’s a lecture on the failings of 90s redevelopment. I think it’s even got a bank’s name on it, which says more than I’ll bother to.

People have two cars, drink wine with their prozac, subscribe to Sky Sports and still think the internet’s biblical.

It’s slippy when it’s cold and the train station wasn’t earmarked for improvements anyway, so nobody cares that Manchester voted against the conjection charge.

It’s good if you like nothing else in the world; good if you like looking at hills in the distance or watching fat women running circuits before and after school.

Where Mum lives, every house has its Wii, every man his chamois, and if you’re wanting to see a black guy you’ll have to watch Eastenders.

And then there’s this one house, sandwiched between another pair just like it, and its owners, well they keep a leggy shop mannequin in their window.

I’d tell you its name only I’ve forgotten — but it went and signed my mother’s Christmas card, didn’t it? It just stands there, quite shapely, big eyes on it, and it’s dressed in a skimpy santa outfit — the kind you’d expect a bigger girl to wear; the kind of girl who you reckon’s still got teddies on her bed at home.

What kind of a person signs a Christmas card from a shop mannequin?

Most times I don’t look at it — it’s just there, and they’ve adjusted the mannequin to hold a curtain open like it’s looking out at the morning or the afternoon or just nothing at all.

I’m told they’ve got two.