The Midland Hotel - (Monday 14 July)

Dressed like two disowned twins in black bomber jackets, LRF t-shirts, jeans and trainers Tarzan and Jane hit the road this morning for more ‘Apprentice’ style cold calling to finish off the twenty six stopovers for the Bananathon.

Rather than build up the suspense of which were the good places we visited, which were the not so good, I’ll start by telling you that I’m not going to tell you as there will be more of that later in the week.

Instead I thought I’d try and relay what was at the time a very funny episode this afternoon.
After a couple of truly amazing ‘cold calls’ (more of them later in the week!) we headed off towards the majestic Midland Hotel.

Situated on Peter Street in the city centre, the Midland was built by Charles Trubshaw in 1898-1903 for the Midland Railway Company. It is situated next to the G-Mex Centre, Bridgewater Hall and Manchester Central Library. Its distinctive style is made of red brick and brown terracotta, with the exterior clad in several varieties of polished granite and Burmantofts (a type of terracotta). The building is grade II listed.

The hotel was regularly used by American cotton traders whilst they were on business selling their raw cotton to Manchester's cotton cloth manufacturers; the businessmen collectively referred to themselves as the Old Colony Club. One of the hotel's restaurants has been renamed The Colony in recognition of this fact.

....and did you know that the The Midland Hotel was also allegedly coveted by Hitler as a possible Nazi headquarters in Britain.

It has recently been upgraded extensively to become yet again the place to stay when in ‘town’ and was full of totty (urban slang for beautiful Asian air hostesses) – anyway less of the travel agency blurb and on with the story…

We had planned to meet Claire Woods from The Midland Hotel in reception to tell her about the Bananathon and ask if she could help us in anyway.

The really helpful concierge tracked Claire down and we had a very productive meeting and discussed what we could do for each other (have you ever seen a Banana carry cases to waiting taxis after running 24 miles… you may well do on September 13th…). We said our goodbyes and then headed off to our next port of call which would be a Casino – we had planned to put all the money raised so far on black 27 but decided against it at the last minute – on the way there I noticed that we no longer looked like twins as Tarzan no longer had a jacket – Aggh ! it contained the car keys.

A quick check of Tarzans ‘man bag’ told us that it must be at the hotel still. I ran back to the hotel, mainly because I’m quicker than Tarzan at the moment and he was chatting to passers-by in the street by now.

I found our helpful concierge once again and explained that Tarzan had left his coat on a chair in the foyer – little did I realise that concierges these days, despite looking like they are still out of Upstairs Downstairs have gone all high tec. Within seconds he had radioed through to security, scrolled back the CCTV footage to reveal that.. yes, you’ve guessed Tarzan had his jacket on still when he left the foyer – I apologised for my friends stupidity found him again and this time we looked properly in his bag to find one missing jacket !!

Well its been an exhausting day with Tarzan and Jane out running in the beautiful Derbyshire hills just after 8:00am this morning so I will bid you good night and tomorrow will start to reveal a treasure trove of surprises.

Jane

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