Bury Market

Nikki has a project in mind. In anticipation of the new lounge being a colder room than the old, and in an effort to keep the gas bills down in the face of rising fuel prices, she's going to crochet me a blanket to keep my old bones warm when I'm crashed out in front of the telly. The wool is available for an unbelievable price from Bury market, so we all headed off there first thing this morning to see what else is there.

Wow. I've lived in and around Manchester for 30 years and I've never been there, but it's big. A quarter of a million visitors a week and it's easy to see why. An initially confusing array of buildings and assemblies of open-air stalls - Market Hall; Market Place; Market Plaza to name but three - soon takes on a kind of weird logical structure as you wander about familiarising yourself with the place.

We stopped in a café for a breakfast toastie and a coffee (or banana milk shake in the case of the girls) before almost tripping over the right wool stall in our first five minutes. With the business of the day transacted straight away we were free to wander up and down the aisles in search of other bargains. We had an idea we may be able to find something for the new lounge, but in the end nothing was quite right. To be honest, faced with so much choice, I tend to go into a kind of sensory overload, and can't concetrate on any one thing because I'm always distracted by several other things all at once.

I did find a replacement pair of slippers though, which means my old slippers can now take the place of my painting slippers, and my painting slippers can be relegated further down the pecking order of household footwear (which might even mean them fetching up in the bin).

Two hours of dodging the pouring rain (pouring sometimes from the sky, and other times from the edges and corners of various awnings and canopies) was enough for us, and we headed home around 11am. A fascinating place though, which we'll certainly return to when the weather is more conducive to a leisurely amble.