My sister was in Manchester on business and offered to treat me to a late birthday lunch on her. We went to the The Ox — a pub on Liverpool Road that I’d heard good things about.

We weren’t disappointed. We had soup and then a big sandwich each. Mine was chicken breast, bacon and onions. The staff are friendly and the atmosphere is nice.

My little nephews had sent me a birthday video message. So I recorded one for them.

My sister was impressed with Manchester and thought it very clean compared to London. Interesting to get the first impressions of someone who hasn’t visited for a long time.

One of the nicest birthdays I’ve had in a while…

I woke up to find an email with a small video attached: my two little nephews, aged three and six, singing ‘Happy Birthday Uncle’. Very sweet.

Then, lunch with Peter and two of his friends at our favourite curry place. After which we visited two pubs. I don’t drink much so I was feeling distinctly merry after two pints of cider.

Then I went to meet ‘L’ & ‘T’. We saw each other from opposite sides of Deansgate. Their three-year-old daughter was waving and jumping up and down, holding my birthday card. We went to a Turkish restaurant where she sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me. I’m not a very sentimental person, but it nearly brought to a tear to my eye. Twice in one day! My Ghanian friend ‘K’ arrived too.

Then we did a bit of shopping and I got home about 9pm.

When I saw the children singing, I had a flashback to when I was about six years old and at school. Unexpectedly, the teacher lifted me up so I was standing on the table and the whole class sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me.

Updated on 14 April 2006

In the world of online video, things change almost weekly. Just when it seems I’ve found the ideal format for the videos on my site, along comes something better and it’s ‘all change’ again.

Then there are the developments with the hosting and listing of videos: iTunes, blip.tv and YouTube, RSS feeds… More people are getting ever-faster broadband and inexpensive portable video players are just months away… It’s all pretty exciting.

I’m switching to Quicktime (.mov) for the videos that are embedded on the page. I never thought I’d use Quicktime, but I like the way it works now. There will also be options to download either Quicktime (.mov) or Windows Media (.wmv).

Windows users may like to check out the free Quicktime Alternative player which will save you having to install the official bloatware. Though you’ll have Quicktime already if you’re installed iTunes.

Up until now, putting up two versions of each video meant that I was rapidly running out of space on the server. But now I’ll be hosting some of the files at blip.tv.

You probably won’t even notice, but you may like to check out blip.tv as I think it is the best video sharing service around at the moment.

In terms of sheer hypocrisy no other British newspaper can match The Sun. Take Tuesday’s issue…

On the bottom half of the front page: relatives of the victims of the ‘Moors Murderers’ condemn Granada Television for merely filming an episode of Coronation Street on Saddleworth Moor.

On the top half of The Sun’s front page: ‘Free today! Carry On Screaming DVD’. Which is especially appalling when you consider that Brady and Hindley recorded one of their victims as they abused her.

Presumably it is OK for Rupert Murdoch to use the murders along with a comedy DVD to sell his rag of a ‘newspaper’?

As far as the Coronation Street issue is concerned… I have sympathy with the relatives, but I don’t think you can ban all filming at a certain location because of something that happened forty years ago. Any drama that is based in Manchester, and which needs a desolate location, is going to turn to the moors.

Actually I’ve always wondered if the 1959 film Hell Is A City gave Brady ideas in the first place. There is a scene in that where a woman who works in a bookmakers is abducted by the robbers, murdered in the car and her body thrown out on the moors.

Very few films were made in Manchester, so Hell Is A City would have been a big event. It had its premiere at the Apollo Theatre, Ardwick, in April 1960. Brady and Hindley began killing and burying the bodies on Saddleworth Moor just over three years later…