Our unlikely musical odyssey appears to be continuing in Krakow. While we choose to save our own voices until obliged to sing for our supper again we have already become welcome at the Viva Los Alamo show bar, tucked away above a courtyard down a side street (in case you ever wish to visit). This is in no small part due to Bateman’s heroic actions of last night. Again we encountered a pair of fiancés, this time the male having been all-too-clearly permitted to indulge in his natural excesses. For the entire evening he’d sat slumped forward before the stage on which a pocket-sized Polish diva effortlessly belted out ballads. I fear Bateman is growing weary of impersonations as a rule (my Michael Crawgreaves and Jimmy Savgreaves are more than a touch dated) but as we prepared to leave, this chap’s impression of Victoria Falls was undeniably top-notch. As I hid behind a pillar, and without a thought for his crocodile-skin loafers, Bateman was quickly mucking in, helping the barstaff to prevent an unprecedented flooding of the venue. No ulterior motive as far as I can tell, he must have been simply off his head on booze juice. In any case, our reward tonight is the company of pan-European barman Jan at our table – an expert on almost anything you can imagine, a fact made tolerable by his penchant for buying an almost unimaginable amount of drinks. In an after-hours backstreet bar near a cat-strewn piazza (you’ll never find it) Jan secretes his most pertinent of recent over-hearings. Through the fug of an all-day bender I decipher the following: Manchester / ex-Russian secret police / cotton market manipulation / proposed assassination of Ancoats philanthropist. I would love to say that two hours later, encased in the cast-iron head, Bateman and I are contemplating this intriguing tosh, but in fact we are performing a joint-impersonation of the continent’s smallest ‘stag party.’ And then we are flying out of the head and I am finally meeting this strange, hard land head-on. Blackness.