I’m sure many people in Manchester were shocked by Mr Manchester’s death by a heart attack. That’s been reported on all over the place.

Interestingly, while he appeared to have quite a gruff persona he went out of his way to help a lone American see Manchester as it should be seen, and to explain some of it’s history. That American visitor blogs about Tony’s help in Manchester. In particular how he took him to see Manchester town hall.

If you checkout Google Zeitgeist you’ll notice that in the UK Manchester Airport parking comes in at the number 10 most searched phrase in June.

That’s either good, because so many people are using Manchester airport and are looking for a convenient parking place. Or bad because the same bunch of people are making multiple searches to find the cheapest parking spaces.

Manchester airport car parking ranges in price, for example from under ?5 per day for parking where you’re collected by shuttle bus to get to the airport to just under ?10 per day if you’re using the short stay car park for Terminal 2 if you pre-book. Terminals 1 and 3 offer different prices.

So you can understand when people look elsewhere for parking. And of course there are a multitude of web sites that have sprung up to act as an intermediary between parkee and park keeper. For example this parking portal gives a range of locations to check prices against.

Or you can just do what my brother did – ask your brother to park it on his drive for 2 weeks. Which is great because I get to use it!

What I’m not meant to…?

Who was it who said Manchester would never have congestion charging because we don’t need it?

Certainly since we appear to have been caught hopping by the spin doctors we’ve been suckered into agreeing to it or else we can’t have the Metrolink Big Bang that puts tramlines and stations where people can actually use them.

As an aside I wonder what would happen if Londoners were told that they couldn’t have had the Thames Barrier , or only part of it, or the Water ring around the capital would only go part way round?

And adding fuel to the spin fire we appear to an example where the pro lobby (apparently led by our own council and its quangos) has “manufactured” 4 cases studies about how “real” people would be affected by the charge.

The truly interesting point about all this is that there appears to have been a vast amount of PR stuff generated. Apparently including a Yellow Bus and the aforesaid case studies and I didn’t see a single bit of it.

As I live on one of the main routes into Manchester and where I suspect the outer ring will be I would have been very interested in anything about the congestion charge.

And you know what? I would have been doubly interested by a report from a body that didn’t have a vested interest in getting into Manchester, or keeping it out.

Oh and by the way. Do we know whether the London Congestion Charge actually makes money or breaks even? Because if it proves difficult to collect money or chase defaulters guess who’s going to pay?

Yes, your good old friendly Manchester rate payer.

Waterstones in Deansgate, Manchester, has launched a bid to persuade J.k. Rowling to allow famous schoolboy wizard Harry Potter to stay alive.

Certainly Harry has been a fantastic franchise for all involved, film makers, author, publisher and product manufacturers.

Personally I’d like to see Harry move into the adult world and work with Muggles, rather like in The Men in Black to prevent Muggle abuse by magic users!

If you want to save Harry Waterstones have kindly created the Save Harry Potter website where you can do exactly that.

So go on, you know you want to. Get clicking to the Save Harry Potter website and add your vote now. I suspect they’ll need every vote they can muster.

I’ve read Rob Benwell’s book on Blogging To The Bank 2.0 so I’m going to use some of his techniques to get more  traffic to this blog.

I’m not using Google Adsense at the moment and probably wont.

On my other blog (Power Packed Business Growth) I’ve reviewed the book, so if you’re curious head over there and check out my Blogging to the bank review.

In the meantime I’m still loading WordPress plug-ins to give this blog the ability to allow people to leave comments and then be notified if anyone has made further comments.

Other plug-ins will follow. I’m also going to do a three column template. If you were particularly alert on Tuesday you’ll have noticed I did briefly have a 3 column blog. Then it reverted because the heading had disappeared. That template will return soon!

I’m also going to be providing Amazon links to Manchester-born books or authors. if you know any really good ones let me know.

I was just returning from a church fete where Kay had a stall where she sold armloads of teddy bears and assorted games, puzzles and miscellaneous toys.

I’d been driving through a Manchester suburb when a set of unidentified objects in the sky caught my eye.

When I stopped I saw exactly what they were…

Have you seen them?

Maybe you have a similar photo you could share with us?