A Memorable Night Before Christmas

It was a few nights before Christmas and I was in Manchester. It was late.

I stepped out of the taxi into the cold night air and headed to where the driver had told me the hotel reception was located. I walked into the reception and my spectacles immediately steamed over. The room was very warm and humid. It was clearly a bar. I removed my spectacles and tried to clean them with my scarf, to no avail, they simply steamed over again so I walked carefully to the bar, sans lunettes, in a blur to enquire about my reservation.

As the barman was attending to me my specs cleared, I replaced them, and it was only then that I noticed; the bar staff were all male. nothing unusual in that, but their uniform of leather trousers with chains and also their moustaches made me realise they were all gay. I slowly turned around to scan the rest of the bar to see that the place was occupied solely by men, mostly dressed like the barmen. Not only was I in a bar; it was a gay bar.

This was my introduction to Canal Street in Manchester. I had never previously heard of this road. At the last minute I had been invited to attend a conference and my PA had looked at the list of hotels recommended by the conference and booked me one in Canal Street in Manchester. To this day, I never worked out if this was her idea of a joke.

But this unusual night did not start there. As my train approached Manchester Piccadilly station I checked Google Maps to note that Canal Street was only a few hundred yards away from the station. Easy to find, I thought, so I turned off my phone and decided to follow my nose. Unfortunately.

My nose took me in the wrong direction. I turned right out of Piccadilly and then first right, diametrically in the wrong direction into the back streets behind the station. I had only taken a few steps before I was asked if I ‘wanted business.’ I was in the red light district.

For some reason, I thought that turning around and walking back would be the wrong thing to do; it would also let anyone watching me realise I was lost, and that is never a good signal to send out in a strange city late at night in the pitch dark. So, I applied my time-honoured technique of finding my way back to whence I came (which works provided there are no dead-ends) of taking the first left, then left again until I would be back to square one.

Many offers of ‘business’ later, I duly emerged from the red light district, hailed a cab and asked the driver to ‘take me to Canal Street.’ The look he gave me was one of ‘aye aye, what we got here?’ which I assumed was because of where he had picked me up.

Later, I realised with that, and the subsequent request to go to Canal Street, he probably thought that I wanted the best of both worlds and was celebrating Christmas early.

The barman led me out of the bar and across the road to where the hotel rooms were situated, and showed me my room. I was glad to be alone, but when I went to lock the door it did not have a proper lock. It simply had one of those flimsy sliding catches, the type often found in the spare loo in a house, or in the garden shed. These can be broken simply by pushing on them.

Scanning the room, it was apparent that this was not, how shall I put it, a residential hotel. The bed was barely clad, the shower was a tiny pod, and the room was in an appalling condition. Clearly, this room was designed for frequent occupancy and had been battered, possibly several times a day.

It was not easy sleeping with one eye open.

Next morning, it was back over to the bar to check out and have breakfast. From the programmes they were scanning, there were quite a few other attendees of the conference there and a few of us took a taxi together to the venue.

That was one of the quietest taxi journeys I have ever taken.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.

This piece first appeared in Country Squire Magazine, and is reproduced by kind permission.

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