Those in the know will know (as they tend to do) that I spent the last few days in Manchester. What follows is a comprehensive review of my time there.

I love Manchester. Oxford pales in comparison. Oxford is not a city. It is a university which happens to have attracted a rather large number of other people to drive the buses. It has a few pitiful wretches for clubs, places which would, in Manchester, have been put out of their misery long ago. It has one, maybe two passable music venues (Brookes and The Zodiac). It has Cornmarket for shops.

Manchester, by comparison, is a gleaming metropolis of cosmopolitan glamour and dodgy haircuts. Even on arrival, you sense the vastness of the place - Manchester City's new stadium glides by on the horizon as you pull into Manchester Piccadilly, which boasts a top notch information system, a little shopping arcade of its own and a central location. Walking out and down to Piccadilly Gardens, there is a buzz about the entire place. The Britannia Hotel, where I stayed, has a reputation for being "shit" (to quote my mate Mike), but did not particularly disappoint - despite the lack of a window, replaced by a wall-sized poster of the Empire State Building, with the twin towers in the background...

Shopping in Manchester is fantastic. You've got the Trafford Centre and the Arndale Centre, of course, which are fairly well known, but then there's all sorts of smaller places knocking around. One example is Affleck's Palace, which looks like an absolute dive - and is - but contains some unusual little shops selling stuff you won't find anywhere else. Affleck's Palace came highly recommended to me by Rhys, who accompanied me to gigs on Thursday and Friday night.

One of my purchases came in useful that very same evening. I had nipped into Burger King at around 7ish, just before I was due to meet Rhys, to grab some food. As I sat in the window looking out onto Piccadilly Gardens, a bloke outside on the pavement stood in front of my field of vision. He drew my attention, looked directly at me, and made a rubbing motion with his hand on his cheek. I checked my own cheek and, lo, there was a bit of sauce there. This seemed like a fairly random thing to happen involving a complete stranger but I gave him a thumbs up, he left, and I carried on eating.

A minute later, he came back, this time with a girl in tow. He acknowledged me as he went by, then they entered Burger King. I thought my time on this earth was up. Clearly I had given some kind of subtle mob signal that I wanted a fight or something, because here was this guy, with a mohican, entering a Burger King specifically due to my being in it. He sat down next to me. I gulped.

"We've come to talk to you because we thought you looked lonely."

I was just about to protest that I was getting up to leave, when the girl next to him chimed in.

"She's gay and she's waiting for a girl called Tom."

Well I never. I looked back, and the bloke was a girl! She was the most convincingly butch lesbian I have ever seen in my entire life (my mother's going to murder me for saying that). With the mohican, and a chest as flat as a squirrel under a juggernaut, she did not appear at all female. I could not believe it. I didn't really know what to say. Not being the most assertive of people even at the best of times, I made my excuses.