A sleepless night gave me an early start to my Friday. Through the long wakeful hours, I had woven together a plan of which only a man of my age could conceive. The time had come to deploy that long-ignored bus pass. I was going travelling with the hoi polloi, the great unwashed.

Several months earlier, I had sent myself an email to remind me of my intention to one day pay a visit to Stan in Manchester. That day had arrived.

Just two minutes after the 9:30 a.m. deadline, I climb aboard the electric eco-bus, my plastic photo card in hand. It scans green. I’m in. My first OAP journey is underway.

Arriving on schedule at the Wigan bus station, I have time to add a £10 extravagance – a Manchester train and tram extension to my card. That would wait for later adventures now the world is my very own oyster!

The dull forty-minute trip to Leigh takes me over familiar ground. Memories of my time working in that shabby town run through my mind as I watch the world go by outside my bus window. It was while I was working there that the Vantage service to Manchester was being built. I watched them lay down the bizarre concrete tracks.

Already parked in its bay, V1, the purple double-decker, was waiting for me. Though it would be an hour before I reached Manchester, I was looking forward to this stage of the trip. For part of the journey, the V1 runs along the guided bus lane; horizontal wheels on the sides of the buses push against the high sides of the track. Car traps, zig-zag cut-outs in the track, prevent opportunists from using these lanes though I know a few hapless ne’er-do-wells have tried.

The wisdom of Beeching had long since denied Leigh of its rail link with Manchester. Consequently, the V1 is a popular service, and only an idiot would want to drive into Manchester. The guided bus track now runs along the line of that vanished railway. Sad irony.

Stop after stop, the common people joined me on board the diversity express. Deansgate was the end destination for most but not for me. I was one of the last travellers as the female-gendered AI announced the next stop: Manchester Museum.

It was almost lunchtime and I was hungry. My plan was to find the museum café for basic sustenance; a cup of tea and a sandwich. My needs are simple and pragmatic. Just beyond the entrance, I followed the smell of the coffee – and the noise of the hordes within. Cries and shrieks echo around the lofty interior. I decided I wasn’t that hungry after all. Simple needs denied.

Quickly making the decision to start at the top and work my way down, I walked to the stairs. The queue for the lifts was several bodies deep. Childish impatience and parental irritation in abundance. Even on the stairwell, screaming children randomly running up and down, while blank-faced parents gaze aimlessly into the distance, oblivious. I had seen nothing yet already my thoughts were turning to escape.

Do I really recall, in those long-ago days when I was a child, museums were hushed, silent like churches? Sacred temples of learning and respectful contemplation and reverence. I put my rose-tinted glasses back into their imaginary tortoiseshell case and rejoin reality.

Dismayed by the scene before me; the museum of the dead. An entire level is given over to jars of pickled specimens and works of tatty taxidermy. Most, maybe all, killed by some long-gone scientist so he (and it would be ‘he’) could classify and display – the Victorian taxonomer’s wet dream. Cases of stuffed creatures, posed, as if in the act of performing a normal living activity. A grinning orangutan hangs from a branch. A zebra runs past a sparsely quilled porcupine. A squid, its long arms double-folded symmetrically along the length of its body to fit more easily into the glass tube of ancient formaldehyde. A case of severed bird heads, random species arranged with tidy precision. Why just the heads? A sad reminder of the past carnage to lubricate the wheels of the industrial revolution, the bones of a sperm whale hang rearticulated between galleries as if still swimming free. Butterflies, moths, beetles, colourful jewelled corpses pinned to cork boards. The display of death goes on and on.
Wending my way through the wailing hordes and back down the stairs, I stop at the image of a serene golden Buddha. His calm smile is captivating. The irony does not pass me by.

At the lowest level now, in all senses of the term, I am pushed along by the greatest concentration of push-chairs and child-sized visitors all headed for the ever-popular dinosaurs. I go with the flow, knowing I will never be back this way again. I had come this far, it would be a shame not to press on, see it through to the end. I would say hello to Stan the T.Rex and every child’s favourite.

I make for the exit, inevitably via the gift shop. I bought nothing. Almost outside, I spot a signboard next to the display of the bones of an unknown dinosaur nicknamed April. It’s an apology for the wanton looting of the British collectors of old. The woke world has come to the museum and it won’t be ignored!