After the reading, performance or whatever you want to call it I walk alone to The Living Room. Tonight its the VIP relaunch of a “newly refurbished” Living Room on Deansgate and friend who is DJ at the party has invited me. The Paparazzi are outside. One of them clicks as we shake hands. The others shirk with indifference. The place is packed with botox and plastic and I decide not to go in. I'm tired. I need food and it doesn't look like fun – it never did. I haven't eaten since breakfast. The Living Room displays a twisted irony by using black door staff.

The Living Room is basically aspirational for the unimaginative and an exercise in mediocrity over the average. It's where Hollyoaks is considered docu-drama and Katy Price a feminist. The longest words the inhabitants use are the names of cocktails. It is the kind of place where an organiser would ask a DJ legend to read out the results of the raffle. As my friend and I talk outside Johnny Jay walks past and hangs out too, to shoot the breeze. The musical knowledge and the knowledge of Manchester between them is phenomenal so I bask in the conversation.

An half hour of night disappears as fatally vain insouciant footballers and their injected wives slide past us and twitch at the flashing cameras like junkies at the dealers corner. My friend eventually goes into the club to get down to work on the decks, Johnny Jay continues walking with a bag full of Demo's and I slope back to the Midland to deconstruct my evenings work and to eat one of the best Cheeseburgers of all time. I love this city. I love it. I love the bits I don't like. I love the bits I do. Manchester. Done.