It’s heartwarming to see the Ancoats streets being reverted to their former glories and lovingly covered with cobbles again. After generations of gradual desecration of our great city centre finally someone somewhere cares enough, to at least restore, if we can’t preserve, the heart of Cottonopolis. If you close your eyes as you weave between the buildings, you can almost hear the clogs of scuttlers and other types of Victorian ragamuffins pounding up and down the streets dodging the rain on the way to their mills and slums.

OK, what the builders are doing out there may be a poor imitation of an urban thoroughfare classic, but it beats the lazy mass coverage of tarmac every day of the week, and herein lies my point. Though the luminous clad chaps are doing an admirable job, it is ’setts’ they are laying down, definitely not ‘cobbles’. I just felt I ought to correct the widespread usage of the term ‘cobbles’. To even your average rock monkey these are quite obviously ’setts’…there is a huge difference as anyone in high heels or riding a bike will probably tell you…

Geologists define cobbles as ’rounded stones between 64mm and 256mm in size’. Those cobbles between 64 and 128mm are “small cobbles”, while those between 128 and 256mm are, surprise, surprise, “large cobbles”. Rocks bigger than 256mm are, apparently, boulders, and those less than 64mm are pebbles.

So now you know. This was a Geek Club communication.