Manchester; Friday, 09 November, 2012

I’d been at a conference in Manchester for the previous couple of days, so it was a very short walk after the conference ended from the hotel it was being held in to the slightly better hotel that I’d booked into for my holiday.

Given it was only 3pm, and I wasn’t actually on leave yet after checking in I fired up the laptop and did a couple of hours work, clearing through most of the emails that had come in whilst at the conference, and then on the dot of 5pm I logged out of the work email and shut down the computer.

As the weather had eased down a little bit to light drizzle rather than the heavy rain of a couple of hours previously I wandered out into town to have a look around.

I wandered in the direction of the Town hall and arrived there as they were in the process of switching on the city’s Christmas lights. Clearly the event had been going for some time, so I was a long way from seeing anything, though I did see the lights around me fire up.

There was a short fireworks display and after taking in that I had a long wander through the city centre, firstly taking in the area around the former central station and then eventually finding myself by the Cathedral on the other side of the city centre.

Having walked quite a long way I decided to be lazy and caught the tram back towards the hotel, stopping off to grab a bite to eat.