Manchester

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So I´ll try and catch up on everything a bit from now, I´m going to upload photos for the blogs once I get a chance too.

The day after seeing Love Never Dies we got up nice and early and headed up to Manchester on the bus. Now, Manchester is both a special and strange place to me. I decided to live there while on my working holiday visa in 2004-2005. I´ve never really understood why I chose it but ended up living there for 10 months and kind of had a love hate relationship with the place.

Getting off the bus was pretty funny and a bit of a ´welcome to manchester´moment for Dan. There was a massive blow up at the bus station between the staff and one customer, then we bumped into a 50yo couple playing tonsil hockey followed by a spaced out hippy dancing around in circles blocking two lanes of traffic, so that was within 3 minutes! After an hour we´d also come across some of the abandoned warehouses from the English North´s industrial age, and a guy post-punch-up with blood gushing out of his eye. Dan automatically went into nurse mode but the guy was on a war path and the blood from his eye was probably the least of his worries. Pretty funny introduction for Dan, and instantly bought the memories flowing back for me.

We met up with Delaney in the mid afternoon, Delaney is a friend from Wollongong whom I used to play music with, a mad tottenham fan, staying with his family in leeds. It was great that we managed to meet up in Manchester after missing each other in london by a couple of weeks.

So we headed down to a local pub in preparation for the match we were watching that night between Manchester City (the only team from manchester, despite what you may have heard) and Tottenham Hotspurs (this match was basically a play off for fourth spot in the league and a coveted champions league place - a big deal, potentially worth 50 million pounds). Delaney and I had a good chat about the lead up to the match and the goings on in the league, and dan did well to pretend to be interested.

We headed off to the match and it was great to be back amongst the blues singing some songs and getting psyched up for the match. Delaney was also sat in the City section so had to be on his best behaviour not to reaveal his true allegiance. This is English Football, clubs are fierce rivals, supporters are segregated, it kind of enhances the theater of it all, GOOD FUN!

Spurs won 1-0 which was a bummer but I was stoked to be back in the city watching a game. If we had to lose to someone while I was back there I´d have wanted it to be a mates team so all good times in the end.

The next day we checked out the old suburb that I used to live in. It´s a quaint little place between manchester and stockport with high hedges, big parks, and smoking chimneys. A peaceful place to walk around and explore compared to the absurdity of the city centre!

We had some time to kill before the bus back to london and managed to take in Iron Man 2. A good flick, not as good as the first.

The driver on the trip back to london had a death wish tailgating trucks by like 30cm on the motorway so we were relieved to make it back to matty´s in Hammersmith in one piece.

A nice little side trip, full of fun, football and a dabble of craziness thrown in for good measure.

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