Last weekends sickness continued through the week. It hit Simon on Monday so we were looking after each other.  I decided not to give in to my Roman Catholic guilt and I stayed off until I was sure I was well enough to go back, unlike my boss who boasted to me that he came in even though he had been feeling bad.  All this achieved was him needing longer to recover and coughing his germs over everyone else in the office. 

After the stress of the last few weeks at work followed by our bout of sickness, I treated Simon and me to a valentine's weekend in Manchester.  We stayed in the Jarvis at Piccadilly which was a nice enough hotel although the lifts refused to take us to the floor we wanted.  Simon took me to a really good Chinese buffet restaurant, unfortunately we couldn't make too much use of the all you could eat offer as we had to rush off to the exchange theatre.  This was a beautiful old hall, with lots of marble pillars.  This hall area contained a smaller futuristic round building with seating all around and a circular stage in the centre.  Our cheap seats mean we were very high up looking down. It meant there were some parts of the play we couldn't see properly, but it did allow us a good vantage point for bitching about the rest of the audience. 

The play was a 1940's Noel coward romp called the vortex starring Will Young, whose character went from happy go lucky fop to angry young man. However his bare footed skip off the stage after the final bow summed up how angry he actually got.

A brief freshen up at the hotel and we were off on a Canal street pub crawl, Simon keen to show me the bars he used to know so well.  They included The Thompson arms, the New Union, The Rembrandt, Via Fossa, Trobica, AXN, queer, and the one underneath it, velvet, Churchill's, Company bar and napoleons.  Funnily enough we were feeling a little worse for wear after this so it was back to the hotel via a pizza, which for some reason was loaded with pepperoni and tuna.

In my drunken stupor I didn't manage to take out my contact lenses until the morning, and I must have messed up when I eventually did, as I had an unbelievably painful eye for the rest of the day.  Thankfully Simon nipped out and got me some eye drops.  After checking out from the hotel we took a tram to the GMex area and took a leisurely stroll along the canal side.  Simon took a few photos, which was handy as I couldn't see much thanks to my dodgy eye.  He got very nostalgic as we past a metal wall documenting the history of the Hacienda.  We left the canal side at Canal Street for a spot of lunch at via fossa.  We then went for a whistle spot tour of the Art Gallery before heading to the cinema at the filmworks to see 'Hot Fuzz', the new Simon pegg comedy on a big digital screen. Unfortunately the crystal clear large screen was enough to set off my dodgy eye during the more action packed scenes. 

Then it was back home where we collapsed on the sofa for the evening.