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Crewe station wasn’t quite as I remembered. For one thing it wasn’t as big, but then nothing you remember from childhood ever is. It also didn’t have a big arched roof, though - it has three or four peaks. It was foggy when I arrived and the whole place had a real Brief Encounter feel.

I arrived in Manchester at the wrong station (Piccadilly rather than Oxford Road) and walked across town to the Palace Hotel to meet with Sal, Dan and Dad, and Anne, who Sal and I have known all our lives. She is a friend of dad’s, and so was once known as ‘Auntie’ Anne. Now we are older she is simply Anne.

We caught a cab to Cafe Istanbul, an excellent Turkish restaurant, for fried goats cheese and vegetarian mousakka that came in such big portions none of us could leave a clean plate.

Dad had been in Manchester most of the day already and had an argument with a wonky paving slab. The slab had won and he was limping but nonetheless we walked back to the hotel through the cold. I was glad we did. It helped to clear my wobbly head.

We didn’t sleep particularly late. I never can when I’m sharing a room with dad, as he has a built in alarm that gets him out of bed far earlier than most of us. So, we had breakfasted by ten and were out wandering the city by eleven. As all good shopping trips should do, it started with coffee and chats in a sunny window, which did well to make us forget about the cold outside.

The local paper aside, I didn’t buy anything, but by the time we got back to the hotel seven hours later I was exhausted, and we all flopped down in a dark corner of the bar while our legs recovered.

I was very impressed with Manchester. It has some fantastic buildings, great shopping and really friendly people. The pubs were cheap, too. I bought a round for four of us, including crisps and it came to

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2002 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.