Manchester is so exciting, and even better than that, my smart trousers seem to have stretched in the wash and have become baggy.
We woke up at my parents’ house, in the garden outside actually, and spent the entire morning ambling about, drinking coffee and doing nothing very much. We were supposed to make an early start and go Christmas shopping, but we didn’t.
We didn’t do anything at all.
This happens when we think that we will have a couple of days off. Everything somehow crashes to a stop.
In the end it was lunchtime before we set off for Manchester, and even then we spent ages driving round in circles looking for somewhere to park.
We have not been here for ages, and discovered rather to our surprise, that the car park where we usually park is now a block of flats.
In the end we found somewhere else, still right in the middle of the town, and disgorged ourselves to do the Christmas shopping.
We didn’t do it then either. Instead we found somewhere doing Indian street food, and sat down and drank White Russian cocktails, and ate spicy lamb in naan bread, which was wonderful.
After that we were too drunk to do Christmas shopping, and so just wandered about and gazed at things, happily.
This is really rubbish, we will have to do better tomorrow, either that or just give everybody cash for Christmas.
All the same, it is absolutely magnificent. The streets are brilliantly lit and there are people everywhere, striding purposefully past us and living important lives.
LATER NOTE: It has suddenly become twenty past two in the morning, and in the intervening period I have become rather more intoxicated than is good for me.
The world is still wagging past outside with admirable, and rather noisy, enthusiasm, and we are curled up in our warm dry camper van, listening to it all. It is also snowing.
We went to see the film, which was an exciting production about a misfortunate racing driver who had accidentally been sent to prison for no fault of his own, obviously, because he was a Good Guy. We knew this even though he did not rescue any little girls from burning houses, although he had the look about him of somebody who definitely would if the opportunity arose.
In fact we enjoyed it immensely. Much to our surprise there were quite a few of our friends in it, including one who as far as we had known had no pretensions to a theatrical career at all, and whose last employment efforts had included something involving double glazing. There were lots of properly familiar faces in the film, by which I mean people with whom I have drunk too much and behaved badly rather than the sort of people in films who make you say: wasn’t he the chap who played the detective in that series, go on, what was his name? on the tip of my tongue…
This was ace, and they were all jolly good, especially the one in the cafe who only had to order a full English breakfast but did it with such panache and style that I shall have to get some copies of his autograph because they are bound to turn out to be worth something one day.
It is called All Crazy Random, so when it comes out on Amazon you can watch it as well.
Afterwards we sat until one in the morning and drank too much and chatted.
After that, still later, we staggered through the snow and had a Special Fried Rice in a Chinese restaurant, even though it was the middle of the night, how splendid to be in a city.
Still later, Mark took the dogs for a quick empty in the car park.
It is almost three o’clock, and I am going to have to go to sleep. Mark is snoring beside me.
It has been the most splendid of days and I will try and tell you more tomorrow. Probably then I will be in possession of all of my senses.
I do hope so…
