Round Are Way

I got back from Manchester yesterday, after an epic four-hour long interview, which, it has to be said, I feel went rather well.

Given my general opinion of London, NOT helped yesterday by being pulled over by the London Transport Police (see below), I must confess I didn't have high hopes for Manchester.
Having travelled round Europe for nigh on three months almost exclusively by train in 1999, I began to believe that there's a lot you can tell about a place from it's train station. Coming off the slightly grimy platform at Manchester Picadilly I was most impressed by the rest of the station. Tall, vaulting shiny metal girders and polished marble, all clean, all...new. Leaving the station the pavements were broad, café tables adorned the walkways and people were chilling out with cappuccinos and pastries...I turned round and checked the title of the station again. Manchester Picadilly, right. Not Paris. No. Only British stations are called stupid things like that.

Manchester? I liked the place.

On the way back from Manchester, my train arrived in London Euston about ten minutes early, so I thought I'd take advantage of the extra time to stop off en route to meeting Alice and buy her some flowers. I thought time might be a bit tight, so I ran (massive bulky bag over my shoulder, looking a bit sweaty, with the olfactory legacy of a four-hour interview wafting gleefully in my wake) up to the barrier, where my ticket refused to work. I was instantly made a beeline for by two gentleman employees of the London Transport Police, who asked me if I minded stepping this way please, and then spent fifteen minutes asking me to go through my bag, asking me where I was from, where I had been, who I was meeting, why I had been running and where did you live again? As if asking the questions again later would lead them to discover I was in fact an international criminal mastermind. They then disappeared with my passport (luckily in my bag) for another 15 minutes, leaving me in a small starkly-decorated interrogatio-sorry-interview room, staring at a poster with 'Have YOU checked your bags?' written on it in garish, eye-jangling script.
Indeed, I had.
Rather nervously.

They returned, explained that it was just routine, and apologised for holding me up.
I was a little taken aback by this, as you can imagine...

I bought the flowers anyway, but I was late meeting Allie.