Over the weekend I braved Storm Desmond to catch up with friends and family in Manchester and Leeds, which meant that I immediately stopped doing blogmas in favour of visiting 9 million Christmas markets and eating my body weight in cheese. But I did take some pictures of said markets. So here they are.

Welcome to Manchester.

I think it would be fair to say that Manchester does markets a bit more enthusiastically than Edinburgh. We saw Martin out of Corrie flogging cheese (and were informed this is not interesting or unusual as he’s been doing it for years), accidentally bought an off-colour joke book (which we later shredded), and failed to locate any peanut butter fudge. We did meet this raven though.

Quoth the raven, ‘gies a kiss, it’s Christmas’

And this Santa-ish guy made out of beads.

Santa, I guess

We had a few drinks, and a few laughs.

Cherry beer

We stood and watched this massive Christmas ornament on top of a bar spin round for a bit.

  And we gave these guys a wide berth.

Sinister Santa

We spent an entire day at said markets, and now I feel like I’ve been celebrating Christmas for about a year. Now I’m off for a lie-down.