FIVE boroughs helped to shape my Guardian career – and with a bit of luck another will inspire what’s left of it.

One of my close pals in the media is getting hitched in the Big Apple so I’m tagging along as unofficial photographer and toast-master.

And hopefully Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx and Staten Island will do as much for this jaded soul as Warrington, Wigan, St Helens, Crewe and Nantwich and Congleton ever did.

Seven days with Uncle Sam might blow away some of the cobwebs of leafing through too many papers and being permanently hooked up to the online media world.

For one, it will be a week away from daft surveys drafted by attention-hungry metropolitan myopics, such as the Royal Society of Arts and its ‘heritage index’.

Just because Warrington is actually a thriving, forward-looking town, with a future rather than just a decaying past, apparently we’re ranked 325th, or dead bottom, of the RSA’s ‘fascinating’ excursion into data journalism.

Quite how you trust a report which denies all knowledge of canals in the borough, despite boasting the Sankey Navigation (opened in 1757) is a matter for your own discretion.

No battlefields, they say? Winwick was the site of an English Civil War skirmish in August 1648 (‘Oliver Cromwell lodged here’ and all that).

And which then-Lancashire town promoted the country’s first public library, to sit alongside the museum next door?

Perhaps it was somewhere else that can claim to have a grammar school dating back to 1526, had paving before anywhere else in the red rose county, and launched the palatine’s first newspaper (hint – it wasn’t the Guardian).

As for a lack of famous ships, then maybe those afternoons I spent in Warrington Library swotting up on the ill-fated Tayleur, the iron ship launched from Bank Quay, which perished with the loss of at least 300 lives off the Irish coast in 1854, were clearly in vain.

Even the Guardian’s fabled home in its original form, The Academy, had its 26 years in the sun as a hotbed of free-thinking dissenters, among them Joseph Priestley.

Nearly forgot Bewsey Old Hall, Walton Hall and hosting one of the few remaining walking days in the north west.

The contributions of Pete Postlethwaite, Sue Johnston, Tim Firth and Pete McCarthy to the wider milieu can’t be discounted (Kerry Katona, Rebekah Brooks, the late George Formby and various boy band stars we’ll pass over).

But of course that’s the sheer magic of ‘data journalism’. Unlike its rapidly fading older cousins, it doesn’t rely on such staples as research, local knowledge, or talking to folk.

Simply find some willing interns to trawl Google for a few weeks, whack a few tables and graphics up online and sprinkle liberally with marketing drivel and you’ve authored an index.

Then a town which once entertained the Romans can receive an ill-deserved kicking as part of the 24-hour disposable news cycle.

Boys and girls, I’ve fulminated at length over the past two-and-a-bit years about WBC’s frankly baffling approach to our cultural history, recent or otherwise. If there’s a grain of truth here, it’s that we don’t shout from the rooftops about the historical cavalcade in our midst.

You don’t need me to rant at length once again about the original Boteler School’s demise. And yet more hate mail from the Lewis Carroll Birthplace Trust I can rather do without.

But as the emerging redevelopment of Omega South and the Bank Street overhaul have ably demonstrated, sometimes it’s better for a town’s lifeblood to have a promising future, as well as a storied past.