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.

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…

Until about a month ago there was a 130-year-old cast-iron bridge across the canal at the junction of Sackville Street and Canal Street, in the gay village. Now it has been removed and replaced by a concrete replica.

I took these photographs on Sunday, but I held off posting about this until I had checked the facts. But yes it’s true. It has all gone and what you see now, in the pictures shown here, is moulded concrete that will be painted.

The really pathetic thing is that they have screwed the original makers plate onto the concrete.

The existing bridge didn’t meet traffic regulations. Heaven forbid that they might stop enormous buses hurtling along this street and route them another way, so the original bridge could have been preserved. Far easier to destroy another part of Manchester’s heritage…

People may think ‘it’s only a bridge’. The trouble is, bits here and there disappear and, before you know it, an area has lost everything that made it ‘special’ in the first place.

I know Manchester has to be a working city. But we’re told that, in the future, Britain will have to rely on its cultural heritage to compete with emerging nations such as China and India. The trouble is, we’re throwing our cultural heritage down the drain through neglect and unsympathetic development.

In Manchester, the planners seem to have no overall picture in their heads. Everything is turning into an ugly ‘mish-mash’.

In recent years there has been a tremendous amount of building going on in Manchester. It’s all around, all the time, and as I walk into the city centre for lunch with Peter several times each week we get to see the new buildings appear step-by-step.

Yesterday we saw this curious structure in Spring Gardens, near the Post Office. We couldn’t quite visualise how it may end up. Peter thought it looked like something from the backlot of a Hollywood studio.

Building techniques seem to change all the time too. The latest thing seems to be huge white polystyrene sheets that are sandwiched inside walls. Many buldings seem to grow from the inside out these days.