THE public speaking that flows out of guiding is a mixed joy.

On the one hand you usually stay warm and dry.

On the other if you forget what you're talking about or why, you can't suddenly lead the audience on to another guiding location while you gather your thoughts. (This is a classic guiding ruse that also comes in handy when you have an over-eager guest who's interrupting the flow of the tour. It's a simple distraction technique. Always works.)

Certainly when people are sat eyeballing you from a couple of metres away in some hotel function room or conference chamber it sounds unconvincing if you say: "Right, let's all stand and have a walk down to the lobby and back while I recall that very important point I needed to make and which the organisers paid me handsomely to remember."

There is only one thing that happens should you lose your thread during public speaking. You feel the cold grip of shame - or maybe SHAME - on your neck.

That's probably why public speaking tends to command higher fees than guiding. The opportunity for things going horribly wrong is so much higher.

Still I love doing it. 

You have a limited duration in which to 'perform' and if you get it right people love you. This is largely because there's a genetic fear in normal humans about having to sit through endless minutes of dull public speakers bleating on and on.

I emphasise normal humans. 

There is one guide I know who is such a committee man that he drove away everybody but himself after the third meeting of any organisation. He had a bewildering desire to hear his own voice picking through the bones of every point of order as though it were the Treaty of Versailles. I think during one of his endless forensic examinations of correct kerb heights in the city  - or some such - I actually gnawed away my little finger. And my thumb. And the table. 

Another issue was his voice which was downbeat in the extreme as though he were informing us of a death in the family. Sometimes people don't fit their jobs.

In the picture above I'm doing a public speaking gig. 

Or rather I'm compering an event at Victoria Baths, Henry Price's 1906 gem of a public building in Chorlton-on-Medlock. The event marked ten years since the BBC's Restoration programme granted £3.4m to Victoria Baths. 

This involved Manchester Central MP Lucy Powell unveiling a stained glass window - Aqua - but there were also performances and tributes from numerous others. I introduced these good people and topped and tailed with quotes, observations and drollery. 

There was also a synchronised swimming team Aquabatix. Before announcing these fine ladies I was asked if I could mention they'd swum for Disney, David Walliams and ex-President Gorbachev of Russia, the man who oversaw the dismantling of Communism. 

"Wow," I joshed during the event, "what a trio. Gorbachev, Mickey Mouse and comedian David Walliams all together, round the pool. Would have loved to have seen that." 

"Er, they swam for them at different times, not all together," somebody told me afterwards in a whisper as though passing on a secret. You don't always take everyone with you on your compering journey.

Victoria Baths, by the way, is a symphony of Arts and Crafts tiles, and stained glass. It's gorgeous. Worth a visit, with the delight, not the devil, in the detail. The pictures below show off its joys.

Back to the speechifying. 

This was a happy event, a celebration of the work of the Friends of Victoria Baths and the efforts of all the volunteers and other agencies in preserving this exceptional building after its formal closure 20 years ago.  As Henry Owen John of English Heritage said, "Victoria Baths was the most remarkable example of a municipal swimming baths of the period." 

It's easier speaking and compering a celebration, no-one's looking for you to fail, and usually nobody's paid their own money to get in - money always sharpens the focus.

Still there was one disconcerting element.

 The invited guests were separated from me by the full length of a swimming pool, and also in elevation, as they were all sat on the exhibition balcony. So no eyeballing then.

But I thought, as I took the microphone and marched out in front of the audience, if things do go horribly wrong I could at least throw myself into the water. 

Distraction techniques are mighty fine things. And full immersion in a suit would certainly work.

THREE tours to close the week off.

The first was for the excellently appointed Great John Street Hotel. A former city centre school now turned into an elegant hotel for the Manchester-based Eclectic Hotels.

Three women on the tour, two of them writers. The tour was a general Manchester familiarisation walk taking in St John's Gardens, Spinningfields, John Rylands Library, The Royal Exchange, Haunted Underworld for one story, Exchange Square, King Street, Albert Square and back. 

"With all the squares in Manchester the city feels European, Northern European I mean, especially in Albert Square. Antwerp perhaps?" said one lady.

She was right. One of the impulses behind the Town Hall in the 1860s was to reflect Manchester's status as a great trading city. In a way it was saying, 'In the old days there was the Hanseatic League in Northern Europe, but now there's industrial Britain with Manchester at it's heart, so move over.'

Pride comes before a fall they say but you have to admire the bombast of the building. Remember at the time, Manchester, through the Royal Exchange, controlled around 80% of all the world's finished cotton trade. 

When we returned to the Great John Street Hotel we noticed there was a bumper crowd of Coronation Street autograph hunters. In amongst them were several press photographers. The latter were armed with long lenses, no doubt trying to 'pap' actor Micheal Le Vell before his trial. For a journalist group it somehow seemed appropriate. 

In the evening on Friday I took an office group from insurance group Caunce O'Hara on the ghost tour. They proved to be good screamers and the terror was helped by one chap who stood away from the rest of the group in the dark and kept making me jump too by suddenly appearing out of the gloom. On the Saturday tour there were more screams and a very jolly family group discovering the delights of underground Manchester.

I reckon that last tour, was tour 142 of the year.

A MONTH or so ago I took a Swiss film crew from Zurich around the city. Charming pair of gentleman, very interested in the city and also happily keen to use time efficiently and sensibly.

Some TV crews have made a religion of being awkward. They can't decide on the correct shot or take forty seven thousand versions just in case. They are often too afraid, too fastidious or too impractical.

A decade ago I stood on heavily bus populated Portland Street in the city centre with a French film crew when the female producer said to me: "Jonathan, but there are so many buses. Can you phone the Town Hall and ask them to close the road for an hour while we film? I want to do an interview here and the noise is impossible."

The fact that she was from a small French channel, that thousands of people might be inconvenienced, that the city hadn't been paid a fee, that the whole notion was utterly absurd, didn't occur to her. The buses were being too loud. This was an extreme case but there can be a certain arrogance about film crews. 

The TUI Suisse boys were the opposite of this. There was one strange incident.

“Is this right?” asked Roland the presenter. 

“Is what right?” I asked.

“These red trousers and the blue shirt,” said Roland continuing with, “I was told by my colleagues that Manchester boys like to wear red trousers and blue shirts. Everybody in Switzerland thinks this is what Manchester boys do.”

I didn't know what to say except, "You look great in them, but I wouldn't say as a general rule, Manchester lads wear red trousers."


During the course of the day we did see one student-looking lad wearing red trousers.

"There, you see," said Roland.

"I think he's Swiss," I said.