Eventually I ended up in Chinatown, which announces itself to the world with a big colourful arch and then almost immediately loses heart. There was a scattering of restaurants among big office buildings, but I can't say I felt as if I had wandered into a little corner of the Orient. The bigger, betterlooking restaurants were packed, so I ended up going to some upstairs place, where the decor was tatty, the food barely OK and the service totally indifferent. When the bill came, I noticed an extra charge beside a notation marked 'S.C.'

 'What's that?' I said to the waitress, who had, I should like to note, been uncommonly surly throughout.

 'Suhvice chawge.'

 I looked at her in surprise. 'Then why, pray, is there also a space here for a tip?'

 She gave a bored, nothingtodowithme shrug.

 'That's terrible,' I said. 'You're just tricking people into tipping twice.'

 She gave a heavy sigh, as if she had been here before. 'You got complaint? You want see manager?'

 The offer was made in a tone that suggested that if I were to see the manager it would be with some of his boys in a back alley. I decided not to press the matter, and instead returned to the streets and had a long, purposeless walk through Manchester's dank and strangely illlit streets I can't remember a darker city. I couldn't say where I went exactly because Manchester's streets always seem curiously indistinguishable to me. I never felt as if I were getting nearer to or farther from anything in particular but just wandering around in a kind of urban limbo.Eventually I ended up beside the great dark bulk of the Arndale Centre (there's that name again). What a monumental mistake that was. I suppose it must be nice, in a place as rainy as Manchester, to be able to shop undercover and if you are going to have these things at all, much better to have them in the city than outside it. But at night it is just twentyfive acres of deadness, a massive impediment to anyone trying to walk through the heart of the city. I could see through the windows that they had tarted it up inside since the last time I had been there and very nice it appeared now, too but outside it was still covered in those awful tiles that make it look like the world's largest gents' lavatory, and indeed as I passed up Cannon Street three young men with closecropped heads and abundantly tattooed arms were using an outside wall for that very purpose. They paid me scant heed, but it suddenly occurred to me that it was getting late and the streets were awfully empty of respectablelooking fellows like me, so I decided to get back to my hotel before some other latenight carousers put me to similar use. I awoke early and hit the drizzly streets determined to form some fixed impression of the city. My problem with Manchester, you see, is that I have no image of it, none at all. Every other great British city has something about it, some central motif, that fixes it in my mind: Newcastle has its bridge, Liverpool has the Liver Buildings and docks, Edinburgh its castle, Glasgow the great sprawl of Kelvingrove Park and the buildings of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, even Birmingham has the Bull Ring (and very welcome it is to it, too). But Manchester to me is a perennial blank an airport with a city attached. Mention Manchester to me and all that swims into my mind is a vague and unfocused impression of Ena Sharpies, L.S. Lowry, Manchester United football club, some plan to introduce trams because they have them in Zurich or some place and they seem to work pretty well there, the Halle Orchestra, the old Manchester Guardian and these rather touching attempts every four years or so to win the bid for the next summer Olympics, usually illustrated with ambitious plans to build a .400million velodrome or a .250million table tennis complex or some other edifice vital to the future of a declining industrial city.

 Apart from Ena Sharpies and L.S. Lowry, I couldn't name a single great Mancunian. It's clear from the abundance of statues outside the town hall that Manchester has produced its share of worthies in its time, though it is equally clear from all the frock coats and mutton chops that it has either stopped producing worthies or stopped producing statues. I had a look around them now and didn't recognize a single name.

 If I haven't got a very clear image of the city, it's not entirely my fault. Manchester doesn't appear to have a very fixed image of itself. 'Shaping Tomorrow's City Today' is the official local motto, but in fact Manchester seems decidedly of two minds about its place in the world. At Castlefield, they were busy creating yesterday's city today, cleaning up the old brick viaducts and warehouses, recobbling the quaysides, putting fresh coats of glossy paint on the old arched footbridges and scattering about a generous assortment of oldfashioned benches, bollards and lampposts. By the time they have finished, you will be able to see exactly what life was like in nineteenthcentury Manchester or at least what it would have been like if they had had winebars and castiron litter bins and directional signs for heritage trails and the GMex Centre. At Salford Quays, on the other hand, they have taken the opposite tack and done everything they can to obliterate the past, creating a kind of miniDallas on the site of the oncebooming docks of the Manchester Ship Canal. It's the most extraordinary place a huddle of glassy modern office buildings and executive flats in the middle of a vast urban nowhere, all of them seemingly quite empty.

 The one thing you have a job to find in Manchester is the one thing you might reasonably expect to see row after row of huddled Coronation Streets. These used to exist in abundance, I'm told, but now you could walk miles without seeing a single brick terrace anywhere. But that doesn't matter because you can always go and see the real Coronation Street on the Granada Studios Tour, which is what I did now along with, it seemed, nearly everyone else in the North of England. For some distance along the road to the studios there are massive wasteground car and coach parks, and even at 9.45 in the morning they were filling up. Coaches from far and wide from Workington, Darlington, Middlesbrough, Doncaster, Wakefield, almost every northern town you could think of were decanting streams of sprightly whitehaired people, while from the car parks issued throngs of families, everyone looking happy and good natured.

 I joined a queue that was a good 150 yards long and three or four people wide and wondered if this wasn't a mistake, but when the turnstiles opened the line advanced pretty smartishly and within minutes I was inside. To my deep and lasting surprise, it wasactually quite wonderful. I had expected it to consist of a stroll up the Coronation Street set and a perfunctory guided tour of the studios, but they have made it into a kind of amusement park and done it exceedingly well. It had one of those Motionmaster Cinemas, where the seats tilt and jerk, so that you actually feel as if you are being hurled through space or thrown off the edge of a mountain, and another cinema where you put on plastic glasses and watched a cherishably naff 3D comedy. There was an entertaining demonstration of sound effects, an adorably gruesome show about special effects makeup and a lively, hugely amusing debate in an ersatz House of Commons, presided over by a troupe of youthful actors. And the thing was, all of these were done not just with considerable polish but with great and genuine wit.

 Even after twenty years here, I remain constantly amazed and impressed by the quality of humour you find in the most unlikely places places where it would simply not exist in other countries. You find it in the patter of stallholders in places like Petticoat Lane and in the routines of street performers the sort of people who juggle flaming clubs or do tricks on unicycles and keep up a steady stream of jokes about themselves and selected members of the audience and in Christmas pantomimes and pub conversations and encounters with strangers in lonely places.