Manchester is a good place to experience an England somehow more authentic than London, to hear wonderful accents, to bring to vivid life the look and feel of the industrial revolution, to watch football, to eat your way through a solid mile of curry houses, and to throw an axe.
Dinkum. You can, if you so wish, make your way of an evening to "Whistle Punks" in the Great Northern Warehouse on Deansgate for a spot of "urban axe throwing". It's a bit like darts, but more violent and physically taxing. Phil "The Power" Taylor might struggle to get his follow-through past his boep.
What Manchester is not is a good place to lose a cricket match, much less the last match in a lost series.When that happens, Manchester is a grim, cold, wet place filled with crass people who pay good money to hurl axes at wooden targets. Uncivilised or what.
South Africa knew that Manchester all too well on August 7 last year, when England won the Old Trafford test by 177 runs in four days to seal a 3-1 series win.
The darkness of the day, for South Africans, contrasted starkly with a cake that made its way into the pressbox in the aftermath of the match. It was sent by an admirer of Test Match Special commentator Henry Blofeld, whose 45-year career as an on-air caricature of a particular type of Englishman was drawing to a close.
Every colour in Blofeld's cravat collection was represented in the cake's several layers, which were crowned with a sugary sculpture of a pigeon - a favourite subject, along with which bus went up which hill, of Blofeld's magnificently mouthy meandering in lieu of giving the score.
Bloody cake. Bloody Blofeld. Bloody Old Trafford and its newly renamed "James Anderson End". Bloody poms. What do they know of nonsense who only nonsense know?Faf du Plessis was a picture of weariness that day as he explained to the press, politely and articulately what had gone wrong.
English cricket reporters have a habit of latching onto the minutest detail of the bigger drama and parsing it to within a millimetre of its relevance. They will ask the same question in myriad ways and expect a different answer each time. And there are a lot of English cricket reporters, all keen to ask the same question as their competitors and in many ever so slightly differing ways.
How Du Plessis got through it without punching someone beggared belief. Clearly batting for close on eight hours on debut in Adelaide's deathly heat is a gift that keeps on giving.
South Africa's captain fielded questions again last week, two days before the start of the Wanderers test. But this time he stood in jeans and T-shirt, drink in hand, on the outdoor deck of a larney Joburg hotel as the city's evening lights twinkled in the distance...