Home to Mum

I've bought an e-ticket to Manchester, flying on Thursday. Home to Mum. It was a book-three-days-ahead cut price deal. Thanks to the sky high oil prices, it's not the cheapest I've had. But Manchester's an expensive airport to fly in and out of and the nearest alternative option was to Liverpool - the depressing back door to Britain. Sorry Liverpool, you might be Europe's cultural city for 2008 but you've still got a long way to go. That anyone as creative as The Beatles came from there is amazing. They must have been making music to cheer themselves up...

Manchester is also not the prettiest of places but these days the centre does buzz. It's improved in leaps and bounds since the IRA bombed it in 1996 - luckily with no fatalities. Every window in the centre of town was blown out in that blast. I saw it six months later and it still looked like Beirut. Since then the centre's been rebuilt with spacious plazas and proud glass-fronted stores. The old Guardian newspaper building is now a trendy arcade with bookstore and eating places and the site where the cooperative movement was founded is an urban museum.

For the actors among you, the old Corn Exchange is now - as before the blast - home to the Royal Exchange Theatre Company. They perform theatre-in-the-round on a stage set in the centre of a steel and glass construction that resembles a space capsule. During the interval, the audience trickles out of the capsule into the vast darkness of the encompassing Exchange hall, crowding round the various bars for drinks.