Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone, without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own....

I was going to blog about my recent trip to the mainland, about the extraordinary development there and the mixed emotions that it evokes in me. Incisive comments about the march of development in China, how awe inspiring and terrifying it is in equal measure. About how your own relative wealth is jammed down your throat before you can scream "too much!! of everything!!! just stop it can't you!!!!". Shape shifting narrative about the unstoppable rise of the wild east....

And then City beat United 2 -1 AWAY and completed the double for the first time in 38 years, and the scales fell from my eyes and I saw with utmost clarity what's truly important.

It makes me laugh, being in Asia and seeing how the Premiership is so utterly commoditised out here. A friend in KL pointed out recently that if you watch Man U's premiership games, all the billboards in the grounds are for Asian businesses. Tells you exactly who's watching. The bit that is really poignant for me is that the "fans" of these clubs really do engage with the brand as a lifestyle choice. They could no more find Manchester or name Arsenal's home town than I could reliably locate Nanjing on a map.

Being a City fan to me is not a matter of choice, it's part of my identity. My dad, uncle, brother, mother, cousins and grandparents on both sides were/are City fans. I grew up listening to my maternal grandfather's tales of watching Ardwick AFC (as they were). I have been bored to tears by reminiscing between my dad and his brother about great City sides of the past. Their cat used to be called Bert, named after Bert Trautman, the German goalie post WW11 who nevertheless found favour with City fans for somehow managing to play out a game with a broken neck (I can only assume it wasn't badly broken - rather than that he was really good at playing prone). I watched the Division 2 playoff at Wembley between Gillingham Town and City that we somehow snuck in extra time - my cousin was so overexcited by it that he had to have his appendix out the next day. And on and on. The idea of not supporting City, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, is simply not an option, even when now they are funded by a highly dubious, discredited Thai politician and managed by a Swedish serial shagger who looks suspiciously like Mr Burns off the Simpsons. No - despite all of this, I'm City 'til I die, I'm City 'til I die etc etc.

Of course the real irony of this, and bear with me as I try to desperately link the two themes within this post, is that there would be no City or United had there not been the huge influx of people into Manchester as a result of the industrial revolution and the corresponding increase in population along the banks of the Mersey. Poor farm workers, my forebears very much included (apart from the German Jewish lot who turned up a tad later) moved towards the money and king cotton, off the land and into the factories (or, I'm told, for some, working below stairs in service in the better off Victorian households of well to do Manchester and its suburbs).

Not too hard to find parallels between that and the huge migrations and social changes that are all too evident in China right now.