It’s a foggy day. I like fog, it is possibly my favourite weather of all possible weathers.
Preston is pretty foggy, and damp overall, which is why it has all the cotton mills. Cotton’s explosive, so you really want to spin and weave it in as damp a climate as possible. Preston is not only damp, it’s apparently damper than all other places in the region, so even though it’s a bit of a schlep from Liverpool (up the coast to the Ribble Mouth, then up the river to the city and the docks), it made sense to build the cotton mills here. The cotton that was spun here was grown in the Americas, shipped here for spinning and weaving, the completed cloth was taken by ship to West Africa, traded for slaves, who were taken to the Americas and traded for raw cotton, which was brought here for spinning and weaving, and so on. Globalisation is not an entirely new phenomenon.