We have had the most gorgeous, brilliant, fantastic holiday day.
It started, as all days on your holidays jolly well should, with scrambled eggs and sausages and mushrooms and lovely orange juice that tasted just like oranges, somehow much more than the one we get at home, which also tastes like oranges but just more cheaply and hence somehow less satisfyingly.
The thing was that we were so full and tired after that that we sloped off back to our lovely bedroom and hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the door and slept until lunchtime.
This made me feel fantastic, what we lost in time adventuring round Manchester was more than made up for by sleeping being a much better idea for your budget than shopping, and also by feeling entirely refreshed and pleased with ourselves.
After that we trotted off happily along Deansgate to Kendals to meet the Windermere Diaries Appreciation Society at Tom’s Champagne Bar for afternoon tea. It had rained an awful lot, and it was very splashy and grey, and it was ace to tumble in through the heavy doors of Kendals into the gleaming white and gold of the fragrance department, where Mark bought me some lovely Chanel soap because he loves me.
It all made for a very happy afternoon indeed. Of course we had champagne, which came with strawberries in it and which made me giggly. My parents are entertaining company anyway, so it was a cheerful meeting. We told them all about our adventures and heard about theirs, and felt thoroughly pleased to be related to one another and having such a lovely afternoon.
After lunch we wandered around the store, which is enormous and dignified, like a sort of smaller Northern Harrods. I tried on some boots which we thought might be a decent sort of compromise because of being long enough to appeal to Mark but without the agonising high heels, which he thought he could probably mange to overlook. When we looked at the price it turned out that they were in the sale and reduced from a hundred and twenty pounds to thirty five, so of course we bought them, and thought that if we didn’t tell anybody I could walk about pretending to have really upmarket feet and nobody would ever know that we were secretly just optimistic peasants.
We went to a cobbler’s shop and bought a myriad of ace shoe cleaning things, for every imaginable colour of shoes, and then joined my parents again, because none of us quite wanted to cut our afternoon short, in the Midland to drink coffee and admire one another’s purchases. This turned out to be not at all the usual tranquil haven we were expecting, but was mildly tiresome because the entire hotel seemed to be full of people with cameras and boxes of cables and lights, and it turned out that they were filming something for the television.
I had not heard of it and now can’t remember if they said it was called Cold Feet or Cold Play but it was definitely Cold Something, and they were absolutely all over the place, in the lobby and in the lifts and it turned out that they were using the bedroom opposite ours as well. Mark took a picture of the lift after they had gone, so if you see Cold Something on the television at some future date you can remember and think that you saw those very same lifts on these pages first.
After a while we said our goodbyes to my parents and our friends Diane and Mike turned up. They have been friends ever since we were foolish youths, and being with them is like putting on slippers, obviously not the sort that the dog has been chewing with horrible sticky dog dribble and unexpected holes, but like the sort that are warm and flat and comfortable for your feet after a day in boots with heels that your husband likes.
I don’t want to chirp on about the wonderfulness of the evening, because it must be dull just reading about ace times, drama and tragedy are much more thrilling, as we know from the exciting play last night: but actually it was the loveliest night.
We talked and talked and drank nice things and ate enough dinner for a dozen of us. We went out to a bright buffet restaurant that did Turkish sort of food, and it was all so lovely that we kept on eating long after we were full. The waiters were young and friendly and the wine was good, and the puddings were ace, and we ate ourselves into a state of mild discomfort
We stayed in there for ages, because we couldn’t bear to leave just in case the food settled a bit and we discovered that we had room for more, but in the end we had got to, and our friends took us to an unimaginably small pub. You could not just sit anywhere, it was so small the girl at the bar had got to decide where they could fit you in. We were given a table next to the hearth of a bright little fire with a gorgeous oak mantelpiece and tiled chimney breast, where some men in their seventies and eighties were sitting peacefully drinking beer and talking to one another.
The place was so small that there was no possibility of being standoffish or middle class even if we had wanted to, which we didn’t at all: and we were welcomed as warmly as if we had been neighbours.
We did not at all feel like the visiting strangers that we were. It was like going into a village pub with people you have known for ever.
It was the oddest and loveliest thing, within minutes we were all telling stories together, talking over one another and laughing and listening, and they had got so much to say we were enthralled. One of them had been a footballer for Manchester United in his youth, and told lots of stories about people whose names I did not know, except Bobby Charlton, but Mike likes football, and was completely captivated.
We were enchanted by it all. It was a joy, the best sort of possible night, lovely times with family, and then with friends, and then, at the end, even with strangers. One of them showed me pictures on his phone of paintings he had done, and they were stunningly good, I would happily have bought one, sunrise and snow and an old man walking alone with his dog.
The night ended, all too soon, with hot chocolate in the now quiet lounge at the Midland, and we retreated upstairs sighing with the wonderful pleasures of friendly company.
Life is brilliant.
See you tomorrow.
