IT WAS no accident that Manchester, that gumptious and radical
heart of Victorian Britain, became the first industrial city and
the cotton capital of the world. It is situated 50km or so from
the coast, with its back to the hills, and on the brunt end of
southwesterly winds which, laden with moisture from the warm
Gulf Stream, dump their drizzle across the Manchester basin as
they are forced up and over the Pennine chain. Nowhere else in
nineteenth-century Europe was there such mild, moist air so
perfect for spinning cotton. With an abundance of it, Mancunians
have good reason for being connoisseurs of climate. A quick
glance at the clouds flitting across the sky each morning is
usually enough to decide whether to leave the brolly behind or
grab a mackintosh and galoshes. Growing up in the city’s hillier
northern fringes, your correspondent learned from an early age
to recognise the various species of cloud—from the low-lying
layered sheets of stratus, up through the billowy cumulus forms,
to the high-flying