Manchester the morning after

It’s just after 8am.
Piccadilly Gardens is closed to the public.
The fences around the square are mobbed by Mancunians taking pictures with mobile phones.
Inside the wire our showpiece square is looking like a landfill site
Around the gardens the rubbish has been swept up into piles of filth.
Broken glass cracks under foot. The pavements are sticky with spilled booze – like a nightclub floor on a heavy night.
Market Street is carpeted with disguarded copies of the free Manchester Evening News.
Cans, plastic bottles, and fast food wrappers everywhere.
Exchange Square was open but deep in rubbish.
The grass banks behind Urbis were covered in rubbish at 8am – but pristine and green by 9.15am.
Men in Glasgow Rangers shirts are buying booze for the journey home.
Considering up to 200,000 drunken football fans were in town, Manchester is in pretty good nick.
The papers show pictures of a smashed up car.
I saw no broken windows and little damage to anything.
In the 1970s or 1980s that many football fans would have smashed up the city just because they could, never mind the fact that the big screen had failed or their team had lost.
So we are much more civilised than we are used to be.
The economy of Manchester is based almost entirely on bars and the service industries.
A city that is fuelled by booze can’t complain when a few visitors drink too much and behave like drunk people do.
We reap what we sew.
When I walked down Canal Street this morning part of it was freshly cleaned, and the rest was as dirty as everywhere else in the city.
So the flower of Scotland’s protestant fundamentalists had been partying hard with Manchester’s flamboyant gay community.
That’s what I call multi-culturalism.