Yesterday was a full one. I had to go to Manchester to look at the Radisson Edwardian Hotel which is built on the site of the old Free Trade Hall. If you're a Dylan fan you will know the relavence of the venue - it was the scene of the infamous "Judas" concert in 1966. The venue has now been virtually demolished (only the front facade remains) and replaced with a posh Hotel. I was disappointed to see that they didn't have a Dylan suite amongst the conference rooms!!

My Dylan pages

I had lunch in Wetherspoons in Piccadilly - Manchester has changed a lot since I lived there 20 years ago. It's really nice now but there is still a lot of building work going on.

I came back on one of Virgin's tilting trains - we were sitting waiting to leave when the train manager came on the tannoy. Apparently the driver had told her that he had to "reboot" the train. However after the reboot it still didn't work (must run on microsoft software - haha). We then had to go and get on another train so I was late getting back.

I listened to lots of music today on my Archos - a lot of Dyaln stuff - Street Legal, still one of my favourite of his albums, Desire and Blood on the Tracks. Curiously though, given where I'd been, not the "Albert Hall" bootleg which is on there.

I can't stop listening to the Willie Mason album "Where the Human's Eat" which I bought in Sunderland at the weekend. It was one of those moments, that hasn't happened for years, where you go into a record shop and they are playing something which you know instantly that you have to buy. I listened to it twice today.

Beth was sick all day - could have been the same bug that Rhianna had last week.

By the time I'd got home and we had got organised it was nearly 10pm when we set off to go to Tesco. We did our shopping and got to the check outs at about ten to eleven. There were only 2 open and the queues were long. At 11pm all of the checkouts did their daily update and we then had to wait another 10 minutes for them to come back on line. By the time I got through it was too late for me to buy the bottle of beer I had in my basket. That was bad enough but then I tried to use a clubcard voucher and the checkout girl told me I hadn't spent enough on Fruit and veg which we had. The checkout girl then threw a wobbly and walked off leaving the head of security to sort it out. The Duty Manager was called but she was useless and "could only apologise". She said she'd get the checkout manager to phone me but I bet he doesn't. It was nearly 11:30 before we got out of there.

So by the time we'd put the shopping away and had something to eat it was the early hours before we went ot bed. Just before I went to bed my Belkin wireless network suddenly started dropping out again. I thought that updating the operating system (XP) with all of the latest updates had sorted it. It runs ok for hours and then suddenly despite the fact that the signal strength is strong the network suddenly becomes unavailable and the only way to get it back is to reboot. If anyone has any ideas - answers on a postcard