The big question which will make it a little easier for you, how much time are you realistically going to spend in crawl speed traffic? For me it was a no brainer to go Auto as my daily commute involves over an hour of sitting in stop start traffic a day.
Automatic's are more difficult to find, however the MPG bit mentioned above is becoming less and less of an issue, even my 10 year old car, the realistic MPG for the manual is 36MPG vs the Auto's 34MPG on a 1.6L 4cyl.
Auto's are more expensive to repair, there is no disputing that, however they are no less reliable than manuals now. The reliability issues recently stem more from dry clutch DSG semi auto's, where the expected life on a gearbox is less than 45,000 miles, as even 2nd hand cars with those sell for in excess of £10k with reasonable year for year mileage, I somehow doubt you'd be looking at those initially (think more expensive VW group cars).
As far as forgetting how to drive a manual, once you've learnt how to do it, it's not something you really forget, as its committed to muscle memory.