E & A in the UK: Tuesday

Traffic isn’t too bad on the way down to Manchester. We get caught up a bit in rush hour traffic around Leeds, and then again on the M60 around Manchester, but before we know it we’re pulling into the airport and frantically gesturing at signs pointing us to the short-stay parking lot. It’s weirdly empty.

We go into Terminal 2 and sit in front of the big arrivals exit. The only people in the terminal are bleary-eyed workers in high-vis. The board has only a single arrival for hours, an A330 from Orlando with my sister and my brother-in-law on it.

We both get a sandwich.

Erika and Austin emerge and we greet them with hugs and delight, and then head back to the car. There’s an abortive attempt to fit the suitcases in the boot with Ghyll, but they sort of fall on top of him as soon as we start moving, trapping him between the back of the bench seat and the jumper cables. He whines. We leave the multistory and pay £12 for the pleasure of a 40 minutes’ stay. I now understand why the car park is so empty.

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Manchester is sunny and bright and a little windy. Judging by the smell on the breeze, the entire population of the city is high. I guess 11am on a Tuesday is a good time for that kind of thing. We get a coffee and a donut at Tim Hortons and stand around in the shadow of some tall building while a group of kids count passersby for a school project. An old lady shuffles past and makes smalltalk with Sam about Ghyll.

We move on to Afflecks. We’ve been before, Sam and I, and have hearty memories of papier-mâché art in the hallways and hole-in-the-wall cassette tape shops. We take turns trying on those tiny glasses that Venjent wears. We scroll through a shop selling irreverent t-shirts, reading things like “The worst day of fishing beats the best day of withdrawing from heroin in jail” or “I AM FISH MAN” or with pictures of David Mitchell as Mark Corrigan from Peep Show.

It feels like all of these t-shirts are just memes in real life. I look for a “i herd u liek mudkipz” one but come up empty.

Ghyll makes a friend on the second floor, a shopkeeper from one of the adjacent stalls with a little spaniel that keeps rolling over on its back in an extremely cute way. The owner is effusive about Ghyll, who has sort of looked a bit bemused the whole time, only occasionally poking his head under a stool or a low table looking for snacks someone might have inadvertently dropped years ago.

After Affleck’s we head to Bab for lunch. It’s ostensibly a kebab place but has that kind of 2010s urban millennial vibe. Red Stripe and Neck Oil on tap kind of place. The food is very good; the man brings Ghyll a couple of treats and then Ghyll spends the rest of lunch sort of standing around in the background looking forlorn and hungry for grilled lamb.

The drive home is uneventful, but by the time we're on the A19 I've started to point out local landmarks, sharing touchstones with visitors in a way that I've (secretly) rehearsed dozens of times. First Leake Church, then the industrial vistas of Teesside, the first sign for Wingate. “This is Station Town; this is the traffic-calming measure; this is the butcher’s; this is my GP practice; this is our estate; that house at the top of the hill with the solar panels is us.”

Erika and Austin make wonderful houseguests: they make themselves right at home, come loaded with a plastic bag full of tiny bottles of Bombay Sapphire, and immediately ask to head back out to pick up a case of beer. Now That’s What I Call Priorities.

We grab a couple cases of Budweiser and then pop to the chip shop for a couple of cod’n’chips. They’re sort of lukewarm by the time we get home but it doesn’t take long for them to disappear.

Then, exhausted, we turn in for bed.