Return to Crime Town

I was pretty nervous last night when I went to watch Richard Herring in Manchester. Yes, just 4 days later after being robbed, I returned to the scene of the crime.  Technically it was a different part of the city and so wasn’t actually the scene of the crime, but I’m more than happy to tar the whole place with the same brush.  Would my poor little Saxo survive its latest incursion into Manc territory?

The journey didn’t bode well.  There was a traffic snarl up on the M62 approaching the M60.  I counted at least 8 cars broken down on the hard shoulder over a 3-4 mile stretch. It was clearly too many cars to be a coincidence, but there were no signs of an accident. It was perplexing.  The only possible explanation I could think of is that an alien spacecraft chose to fry the engines on particularly hostile vehicles.  It seems an odd theory, but it’s difficult to predict what these aliens get up to.

This had me running late and slightly stressed at the thought of turning up at the gig late.  Matters weren’t helped by the city planners, who decided to put traffic lights every 20 yards that turned red every time I approached. I was going to be cutting it fine, but I still should have made it.

That’s until my new sat nav app on my phone (bought to replace my stolen Tom Tom) decided it was a good idea to start playing tricks on me.  I’d suggest that a ‘prank directions’ feature isn’t really that useful on a sat nav. I spent a good 10 minutes on Manchester’s back streets looking suspiciously like a kerb crawler.  Expect a full review of the sat nav app soon.

Thankfully it eventually started to give the correct directions (after a long, unnecessary detour) and I found the car park.  I was now 10 minutes late.  I hurried to the pay and display machine to find the car park attendant in mid-repair.  A very slow, drawn out repair, that seemed to involve opening the front, pulling out some tickets, closing the front and repeating.  I was disproportionately stressed by this stage.  After 4-5 hours (actually minutes) the guy told me that I didn’t have to pay and he’d note my registration plate so that he didn’t give me a ticket.

You’d think that free parking would be considered a win.  And free parking would be a win.  I just wasn’t convinced that he’d remember the right car and fully expected to find a fine when I returned.  It added an element of intrigue to the evening.  Amazingly, there was no parking ticket when I got back to my car.  I consider this to be a minor miracle.  Perhaps this was the universe’s\Manchester’s reward to me for such shoddy treatment on my previous visit.  I had travelled to Manchester, my car had survived and I avoided the ridiculous parking fees.  This was a result in anybody’s book.

I drove home feeling foot loose and fancy free.  Maybe the world wasn’t such a bad place.  I continued to feel this way right until I smashed into an upturned cone on the motorway and broke a piece off the front of my car.  It’s safe to say that I’m an idiot.