Dear readers — you may notice that today’s newsletter is a little different. To explain why, I’m going to have to take you through your screens and into Mill HQ's tastefully decorated city centre offices. Usually, our Monday round-up of news, gossip, sold-out macrame workshops and unaffordable three-beds in West Didsbury are the result of a collaborative effort between myself (Ophira) and the inimitable Jacks 1 and 2. Each week begins with a heated argument about who will write yet another update on Andy Burnham’s rumoured power grab, and who will trawl through Reddit to discover what Mancunians are angry about today. Not this week.
You see, everyone else at The Mill planned their time off properly, and they’ve all gone to their families for Christmas. Jack D is back in Salford, Lucy in Didsbury, Jack Walton has returned to Thanet to flounder among the “ghastly, virus-addled plebs… swallow[ing] jellied eels in some dilapidated phlegm-strewn seaside slum,” (to quote The Times). But I, regrettably, chose to polish the remainder of my days-off off back in October, when I spent the wettest month of the year in a hole-within-a-hole in north west Wales, a town called Tanygrisiau. It boasts one pub and no pool table.
The barren offices of Mill HQ.
And so, as a result, today’s newsletter comes from me and me alone — as I sit in our empty offices and contemplate the lack of foresight I so brazenly displayed just months ago. I hope you enjoy it.
A Christmas present for you 🎁
Our friends at Manchester Building Society are up and running with their gorgeous new branch in the city centre. Now they’re settled in, they’ve launched a Festive Regular Saver, available in branch only.
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Working hard or hardly working?
Last week it was announced that four GMP officers have been dismissed and a further two have resigned, out of a total of 28 members of staff served misconduct papers since September of this year. The misconduct? “Abnormal key stroke behaviour,” or “key jamming” as it appears to be colloquially known.
The concept of key jamming is simple. When working from home, staff can create the illusion of being hard at work by simply leaning an object on their keyboard, and then going off and doing something they deem more important. Quite reasonable behaviour for say a journalist, I’m sure you’ll agree, but less so for a police officer. The GMP report on the matter states that each member of staff was found to have spent “thousands of minutes” pretending to work — which by my calculations amounts to a minimum of 33 hours, or 4.125 working days. Deputy Chief Constable Terry Woods has assured the public that he means it when he says he’s “serious about ‘rooting out’ and ‘booting out’.” Key jammers of the world beware.
🎁 It's too late. You were going to knit your nephew a scarf to match the hat you made him last year, but it's too late. You were planning on ordering your wife a bottle of that perfume that you like a little more than she does, but it's too late. You can still go into town and get some bits from TK Maxx you think, tonight or maybe even tomorrow, but you can't, I'm in town right now and it's horrible, and there's nothing left on the shelves, you've left it too late.
But it's not too late to give The Mill. With a heavily discounted gift subscription, your chosen giftee will receive insightful journalism about Manchester, not just on Christmas, but all year round. It's a gift so good no one would guess you only thought of it last minute.
You can get 44% off a normal annual subscription, or you can buy six month (£39.90) or three month (£19.90) versions too. Just set it up to start on Christmas Day (or whenever you prefer) and we'll do the rest.
Asleep at the wheel
In further work-shirking news, Phil Brickell, MP for Bolton West, has accused the Office for Students (OfS) of being “asleep at the wheel” over their lack of action in response to The Mill’s investigations into the University of Greater Manchester. Brickell has stated that he’s “gravely concerned that the glacial speed at which the OfS is moving has caused significant harm – not just for the staff and students but for the wider town,”. We’re always happy to get a mention in the nationals, so we’re well pleased to have been cited four times in this article on the subject in the Guardian — who even note at the bottom that our investigation was a winner at this year's British Journalism Awards.
Eating humble pie
It’s that time of year — the World Pie-Eating Championships descended on Wigan over the weekend. However, this year's contest was of a startlingly bad standard, with the winner — 24-year-old Wigan born Tom O’Neil — taking the crown with a time of 62 seconds: that’s two seconds over a minute. For reference, last year I had the misfortune of attending the annual extravaganza, and I was almost sick as I watched the 2024 winner swallow a meat pie in all but 15 seconds. Piemaster and competition judge Tony Callaghan was deeply unimpressed with this year's result, dubbing the winning time “ridiculous”. However, he refused to loosen his strict ‘no lubricants' policy. “I will not allow gravy and I won’t allow any lubricants, don’t come to the competition if that’s what you want,” he told the BBC. “[Y]ou eat a pie as it is, you don’t stick it in a bowl of gravy, that’s for Southerners.”
This week's weather
Tuesday ☁️ Mostly cloudy and dry aside from a little localised drizzle early in the daytime. Max 9°c.
Wednesday 🌥️ Colder with occasional bright spells, although still quite cloudy. Max 7°c.
Thursday 🌤️ Dry and breezy with sunny spells but feeling cold. Max 7°c.
Friday 🌤️ Dry with variable cloud amounts and sunny spells. Lighter winds but feeling cold still. Max 6°c.
Weekend 🌥️ Remaining settled with dry days and nights. Feeling seasonally cold with frosts at night.
Home of the week
I am in love with this Home of the Week and if I had £200k going spare I would live in it. It’s a two-bed flat in The Redbricks, the 1940s Art Deco estate in Hulme.
Christmas To-Dos
👻 I imagine you know what you’re doing over Christmas by now, but do you know what you’re doing in that awful period between Boxing Day and New Years Eve? If you’re at a loss from the 26th to the 30th – often known as Climbo, Twixmas, and another name that I shall not let taint this newsletter – then you should head to the Octagon Theatre in Bolton, who are putting on a production of A Christmas Carol from now until 10 January.
🚜 I appreciate that this one’s a little out the way, but I sincerely recommend the Christmas Eve Tractor Run over on my side of the Pennines. As someone who is both not an eight-year-old boy and has no tangible interest in tractors or any farm machinery for that matter, watching hundreds of honking tractors driving through Todmorden the night before Christmas is a highlight of my year, every year.
🎁 Want to give something thoughtful, local and completely sustainable this Christmas? Buy them a heavily discounted gift subscription. Every week, your chosen recipient will receive insightful journalism that keeps them connected to Manchester — a gift that keeps on giving all year round.
You can get 44% off a normal annual subscription, or you can buy six month (£39.90) or three month (£19.90) versions too. Just set it up to start on Christmas Day (or whenever you prefer) and we'll do the rest.
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