Manchester is the rainy city. We know this for a fact, just as we know that Scottish people have red hair and Cockneys are cheeky. Nemanja Vidic, Manchester United’s Serbian defender, is alleged to have told a Russian football magazine (before claiming he was misquoted): “In England, they say that Manchester is the city of rain. Its main attraction is considered to be the timetable at the railway station, where trains leave for other, less rainy cities.”

Cue much criticism of his disloyalty, although it is fair to say Mancunians themselves sometimes share the damp and gloomy image of their city, all misery and Morrissey. “The rain falls hard on a humdrum town/This town has dragged you down,” wrote The Smiths’ songster. Mancunians do not get a tan, it is said, they just go rusty. Adrian Mitchell (not a Mancunian) wrote a poem about Manchester’s “thousand puddles . . . poised on slanting paving stones” that “lurk in the murk of the north-western evening”.