Livre d'Or

Thank you for being all helpful. Yes, talking to other people in Manchester is obviously the way to get to know the place better. The only person I know personally is syllopsium, but certainly getting some local recs from him is a great idea. And the only way I'm going to get to know people is by going to social events regularly; if I could make it to the Manchester synagogues more than a couple of times a year I'm sure I'd have loads of recs from the other congregants, and possibly even some friends I could hang out with.

Is Manchester better than other great UK cities? I love it better, but then perhaps I could form an attachment to somewhere else too. London is too big and Cambridge is too small for my tastes. I imagine I would probably like Liverpool or Sheffield, but I don't know those places well. Leicester or Brighton, perhaps. Or somewhere that is lovely but I haven't thought of. You know I'm completely enamoured of Edinburgh, but Scotland isn't much better than continental Europe in terms of geography. Indeed, most places I'd want to be are less convenient for Cambridge than where I am now; Leicester might just about work.

Commuting from Manchester to Keele: it's doable, just, I have quite a few colleagues who have partners who work in Manchester or even themselves have split jobs, working for the NHS in Manchester and the university here. It's about 50 minutes on the train city centre to city centre, but then there's getting to the station and neither Crewe nor Stoke is exactly convenient for the university or the hospital. I'd probably be looking about 4 hours commuting a day if I lived in Manchester, and that's a big hit on quality of life as well as being expensive.

Commuting by car I think is a bit more realistic; Google maps thinks you can get from the centre of Manchester to Keele in just over an hour, assuming you can actually do 70 along the M6. I assume that if I moved to Manchester I wouldn't actually live in the city centre, more likely out in the suburbs to the south side of town; Manchester's suburbs are a better connected and less dispersed than London's. I reckon I could probably find a 40-minute each way commute if I learned to drive and if I picked the right location.

This may also be the solution to the living with you problem. Hypothetically if we found you a job on the south side of Manchester, which is a lot more likely than in Stoke, we could find somewhere perhaps halfway between. And we'd have a good chance of a decent social life in Manchester. That would still be a bit incompatible with my preference for living in cities, but might be a plausible compromise. I don't know. This is a vague long-term hypothetical, not my plan for the next 12 months.