When it comes to Shabbat, planning ahead is, for many of us, chiselled into the DNA. So even though it’s another 11 months before Liam and Noel Gallagher make their presence known around my Friday night dinner table, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Should we eat early or usher in the Jewish sabbath as late as possible? Or should we junk the opportunity of listening to the siblings over the chicken soup and simply ship out for the weekend?
Sorry, when I said that I’d be spending Shabbat with the Oasis frontmen, and indeed the rest of the band, I didn’t actually mean they’d be in my house. Though they might as well be. Next July, Liam and Noel are playing the Manchester leg of their comeback tour in Heaton Park, which is a ten-minute walk from my home. So when Oasis juggernaut thunders into town for the scheduled five concerts, the residential streets of our normally tranquil – ie Jewish – north Manchester suburb will be throbbing with thousands of fans.
And the sonic boom of the concerts, as well as the rehearsals for them, will be inescapable.
How do I know this? Because it won’t be the first time Oasis has played in Heaton Park. Back in 2009, Europe’s largest municipal park was also the venue for a series of the Burnage-born band’s shows, and the memory of 70,000 fans packing the streets every night still lingers. The roads were snarled with traffic, the noise was inescapable and drunk concert goers urinated in front gardens. The mess was awful and the park, our lovely local park, became a mud bath.
At the time I was a columnist for the Manchester Evening News and in one of my dispatches I bemoaned that Manchester city council had allowed the park to be abused in this way. On getting wind of the article, Liam publicly rebuked me for it at one of the Heaton Park gigs. “Dedicating Cigarettes and Alcohol to Mrs Epstein from the Evening News since she thinks the likes of us shouldn`t be here." Nachus, believe me. And the start of my broiges with the Gallaghers for Noel then went on to pen a blog in which he called me a “joyless husk”.
Since then countless other groups and music festivals have been staged at Heaton Park and the organisation has vastly improved. There are more litter pickers, and yellow-vested officials in circulation (not their presence deterred someone at the two-day music festival Park Life from throwing up at the bottom of my road in June).
But when Heaton Park concerts fall on Shabbat, the optics are more stirring still. Black-hatted figures ushering children to shul mingle with concert goers in denim shorts, wellies – and, in the case of some, not much else – as they flood the arterial roads towards the park.
Does it spoil Shabbat? In truth, the people-watching is fascinating. But walking past countless portaloos on the way to Friday night dinner at friends’ houses is less appetising, and it rather puts paid to a Shabbat stroll in Heaton Park.
Don't look back in anger: Angela Epstein in Manchester's Heaton Park on a non-concert day
And the greater shame is surely that large swathes of this glorious rolling parkland are given over to huge outdoor concerts at all. If we are supposed to be thinking about the environment, and I believe we should be, why run the risk of damaging grasslands?
But we are where we are. There nothing else for it but to prepare for Shabbat Oasis-style. Making kiddush over the boom of Live Forever will, once again, be interesting. Guess we’ll just have to roll with it.
