Joel Golby wrote a column for seven years about rental opportunities in London. It was brilliant. He was brilliant. He basically wrote the book on brilliant. Anyway, he’s dead now, I think, so it’s time for another overconfident white guy who really likes long sentences and a surreal meta-commentary on his own work to step into the gap, nay, the vacuum left by –

What is it? It’s a column, ideally weekly. If it’s not weekly, just pretend the title is different. It’s a column about the state of renting in Manchester. Manchester today is about where London was in 2016, which is when Joel started writing his column. By this I mean at least three people have told me that ‘London is coming to Manchester’, and they’ve said it with the same defeated tone that the Gauls used to speak about Rome. The pain. The exhaustion. And mostly the surrendering to the inevitable. London is coming. You will be assimilated. Do not resist.

Where is it? Here, to start with. With luck it’ll become so popular that I can rent a new domain name, a few electrons on the Internet I can call my own. Oh yeah, you rent domain names. You didn’t know that? Yeah, you can’t buy a domain name. You can have permission to use it for a while. You can buy a whole top-level domain, sort of. Hey, guess who owns the top-level domain .amazon? Reckon it’s any of the places where you’d find the Amazon rainforest? Of course it fucking isn’t.

What is there to do locally? Read this, I suppose, but you could also check out the other nonsense I’ve been writing for years on the Internet.

Alright, how much are you asking? Literally nothing. I’m doing this so I have one tiny corner of my life that is very stupid. But if you’d like to buy me a coffee, you can buy me a coffee. And since I live in Manchester, that’s actually much cheaper than usual. You’re actually getting a better return on investment here, which is a phrase that I truly believe landlords say in order to reach climax.