Normally I ‘wobble on,’ as someone once said though I personally don’t agree, about the worse than dreadful craftsmanship (if you can call it that) of the Chinese and their hamfisted attempts to produce manufactured (and I use that word lightly) goods so it is with a heavy heart and a rarely experienced degree of reluctance that I give you Oldham’s attempt to take back some of the manufacturing jobs that they lost to China.

Please note the precision and excellence of construction, the care and attention to detail and most of all the quality control.

As the sign says – well the bit that is the right way up that you can read – “Oldham is working for a co-operative borough” or words to that effect, while pondering just how many ‘work people’ (you can no longer call them ‘workmen’ in such a forward looking place) working ‘co-operatively’ it took to construct the sign I was also trying to work out what that strap line actually meant!

Are they suggesting that the entire area become some sort of enormous workers co-operative where more examples of this type of constructive freedom, that comes with this sort of endeavour, can be experienced you know like streetlights buried upside down and footpaths that foul dogs!

Here are some interesting (I promise) facts about Oldham

I didn’t visit Oldham when writing my latest block busting book ‘The Cats Travelogue’

Oldham is in England

England is in Europe

Oldham is a large town in Greater Manchester

Oldham has little early history to speak of

Oldham was a boomtown of the Industrial Revolution

Oldham was among the first ever industrialised towns

Oldham was the most productive cotton spinning mill town in the world at the height of the industrial revolution Oldham spun more cotton than France and Germany put together

In late May 2001 Oldham hosted 3 days of race riots

Oldham is a bit run down (see picture below of the railway station in 2010

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China, Dogs, The Cat’s Travelogue, Oldham, Manufacturing, Crafstmanship, streetlights, Race Riots