Street Cred.

It's 20 years since I moved from the suburbs to the city so, strictly speaking, I should not be eligible to attend meetings of the Heaton Moor Jazz Appreciation Society. But there's not a lot of strict speaking at the society’s meetings which - with the exception of the mildly controversial 1970s jazz-fusion session last week - are as relaxed as a Ben Webster solo.  After that session I was walking to get the last train home when I caught the eye of the only other person on the street, a man in a fluorescent jacket who was working his way towards me picking up litter.

"I'm impressed that you're working so late," I said, feeling convivial after having consumed most of a bottle of Rioja.

"Oh, I'm a volunteer," he replied. "I don't like to see cigarette ends on the pavement." His grin was slightly maniacal.

"Oh, right," I said and hurried on to the station and the safety of the city centre crowds.

I'm fond of Heaton Moor - and some of its 'characters' - but those tree-lined streets of forbidding Victorian villas were built for a lifestyle to which I no longer aspire. Nowadays I prefer the benefits of centrality - high-density, low-maintenance apartments within walking distance of a plethora of cultural, social and retail facilities - to the relative isolation of suburbia. I mean, which suburb contains half a dozen greeting-card shops within a ten-minute walk?

Now, some of you might be thinking "So what?", but greeting-cards are one of life's essentials - not as crucial as water, food and sex, of course - but they are high up on the scale of social niceties: people like to receive them at Christmas, on their birthdays, anniversaries and to mark births, marriages, deaths, new homes, new jobs and so forth (a full list of categories can be seen at any branch of Paperchase); and people like to send them to demonstrate, with varying degrees of sincerity, their friendship, affection or solidarity.  Cards are big business, supported, as it sometimes seems, mainly by our household, where Facebook greetings are generally considered to be a bit of a cheap trick.

Ironically, however, Facebook promotes the sale of physical cards by automatically populating my electronic diary with the birthdays of 'friends'. Moreover, because my diary is linked to my partner’s, it shows her friends' birthdays as well. Some weeks the diary is crammed so full of little cake symbols that a planning meeting is called for. At the last one I was tasked with sourcing ten cards for up-coming birthdays, a job which, onerous enough in itself, was rendered more so by her instructions to select them carefully so that each would be subtly appropriate for its recipient.

Still, I thought, how hard can it be, given that there are so many card shops nearby? Therein, however, lay the problem: too much choice. The number of shops and the selection of designs is so great that the task consumed far too much of my time. Would a particular friend prefer not to have her actual age rendered in big, shiny numerals on the front? Probably, but I had to go through racks of possibilities to get there. In the event the expedition was largely successful but, the next day, I realised that my brother's birthday is not in the diary but in my head and I had to dash to the shops again.

Mission accomplished, I settled into a window seat at Cafe Néro, on the busiest street in town, to watch the crowds go by. Amongst the 'regular' people, I spotted a woman wearing furry slippers and a candlewick dressing gown over floral pyjamas. Weird, I thought, but less threatening than any midnight suburban street-cleaner. Perhaps she was unwell, or disorientated. But maybe she'd just nipped out to get a last-minute greeting card.