We are here.
I am not going to write much. Mark is in the shower, and we are exhausted, stuffed to bursting with dinner, and also a bit tipsy.
We are staying in a new hotel, and very splendid it is as well.
I tried to book with the Midland, but they seem to have had some staff changes. The manager that we knew has gone, so has the area manager, and I got an email from somebody called Front Desk who told me that it would cost me £493 per night if I wanted to stay there.
We were planning on two nights, so I didn’t. I emailed Front back and declined.
We have gone elsewhere.
We are in an absolutely unbelievably fabulous hotel called Kimpton Clocktower. It has got a clock in a tower, you see. Apart from that it looks rather like the bank in Harry Potter. There is an enormous sculptured horse in the vast reception, and several very splendid glass-roofed dining rooms. Also they welcomed our arrival with a free glass of wine, actually as much wine as we could drink if we wanted, although it turned out to only be one glass because of us being late. There was popcorn as well, which felt rather like being at the cinema, but we were starving by then, so we ate it anyway.
Once we were suitably full of wine we staggered up the stairs to our room, where somebody thoughtful had delivered our excessive luggage, because I didn’t pack until the last minute, and so just brought everything in case of differing sorts of weather. We showered and changed and dashed away.
We were going to a jazz club called Matt and Phred’s.
I like jazz.
Readers, it was ace. The only thing that made it not New Orleans was the cigarette smoke that was not wreathed all over the place. It was a dark sort of hole with lots of too-close tables and a slight whiff of disreputability.
We were still starving despite the popcorn, so we ordered everything, although without optimism, because it was the sort of place with vegan options at the top of the menu, and no dead things anywhere except in the Cajun chicken.
We ordered cocktails and olives and hummus and Greek pizza and garlic bread, and it filled the table.
To our astonishment it was so very good that we kept eating for long after we weren’t hungry any more. I mean really, really good. I could have carried on eating until the legs of my chair snapped underneath me.
Then the jazz started.
It was magnificent. It would loud and dreamy and wonderfully jazzy. People from the audience got up and joined in, and there were trumpets and saxophone and a tuba and drummers and some utterly brilliant pianists. I loved every minute. The band was made up entirely of bald blokes who had drunk too much beer for their trousers quite to contain it, and yet they produced amazing, glorious sounds.
We clapped until our hands hurt.
In between the music we speculated about the other people in the bar. The couple in front of us were an elderly sort of chap and a very young lady in a surprisingly minimalist skirt. There was a bored girl on another table who had been dragged there by somebody from work, and who ignored the band and stared at her phone the whole time. There was a couple of ladies, one of whom was cross about something and folded her arms and scowled despite her companion’s cheerful pats and smiles.
We listened and looked and drank cocktails and ate until our waistlines had inflated enough to become jazz musicians ourselves. Then at almost midnight we strolled slowly and contentedly back across Manchester to the hotel, because of it being a balmy, warm evening, and also because of not wanting to be the sort of people whose bad legs oblige them to get taxis to go just around the corner. We had got a taxi there, because of being late, and the taxi driver did the thing of trying not to charge us, because we were taxi drivers, and we gave him a tenner anyway, because we are taxi drivers, and we all went away satisfied.
It has been wonderful .
It is still wonderful.
Mark has finished in the shower.
I am going to sleep it all off.
