Without Bradford there’d be no ÔDouble VisionÕ!

Date Published: 21-Feb-2013

I’m thrilled to bits that Bradford City will be at Wembley this Sunday for the League Cup Final. My connections to the West Yorkshire town run deep and personal.

Indeed, without Bradford this colyoom would not exist.

Back in 1992, I’d been living in Bradford for three years, just finished a novel and felt pretty finished with England too. The great British public had elected their fourth consecutive Conservative government. Well, if they wanted Tories they could bloomin’ have them. They deserved them, but I wasn’t going to stick around.

So I walked into a travel agent and asked for the cheapest flight out of the country. £39 bought me a one-way flight to Malaga. Luvvly jubbly. Walking out of the airport I stuck out my thumb and looked for a new life in Spain.

After hitching around Andalucía, I headed for Barcelona. I knew the place well and hoped I might feel I belonged. However, after a tremendous Summer in Catalunya I found myself hitching over the Pyrenees into France.

Throughout my teens I’d hitched around France and felt such an affinity with the place that it already felt like home. But the Goddess of the Road had other ideas. Despite arriving in the south-westerly corner of the country on a Sunday and sticking to ‘D’ roads, slow and void of traffic, I found lift after lift propelling me northwards, until in a single day I’d reached Poitiers.

Then I was in Roscoff, boarding a ferry to Cork.

Six weeks later I was walking from my new home in Salthill to the Westside, where I was starting a job as a Youth Worker in the Rahoon Flats.

As I turned out of Highfield Park I saw on the side of the Rahoon flats a huge mural of a city skyline. Stunned, I recognised it immediately, as it was the last place I’d truly called home.

How bizarre! I’d taken a one way flight to Spain, hitched randomly through three countries and ended up in Galway, which was apparently twinned with Bradford.

The question that most perplexed me was ‘Why?’

Why was Galway twinned with Bradford? I couldn’t think of two less similar places. Bradford is in the centre of the country; Galway’s on the coast. Bradford, like Rome, is built on seven hills; Galway’s pretty much flat. Bradford has the largest Pakistani population living anywhere outside of Pakistan, while Galway’s population back then was completely white.

Bradford is a heaving melange of so many global cultures it’s hard to keep track. Galwegians think their city is multicultural, but it’s not really.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.