This piece was written by Stephen Hough for the telegraph.co.uk online blogs. Stephen is a concert pianist by night, but his daytime interests include theology, art, hats, puddings ... and writing about them.

I was honoured and delighted a few years ago to be made International Chair of Piano Studies at my alma mater, the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. It means that I have the opportunity to visit there from time to time to give some lessons and classes, and to re-live some of my student memories – one of the most important of which is lunch at the 8th Day Cooperative, a vegetarian cafe of superlative quality just along the street from the college building. Manchester has always had one of the largest student populations in Europe, and walking around the streets here is guaranteed to make anyone over the age of 30 feel decrepit – but how some things have changed! When I used to come here for lunch in the late-70s “… and on the eighth day“, as it was called, was attached to a radical bookshop whose shelves were packed with Communist books and magazines translated and published in places like Russia and China. I bought the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao one day whilst digesting a nut-roast bake, and I often leafed through the grainy pages of a Trotskyist broadsheet with nervously moist fingers. I loved the danger of extremist politics as a teenager and those same fingers, I have to admit, sometimes left marks on the corners of a Spearhead magazine too – for sale at a different vendor of course.

If you, or anyone you know has memories and/or photographs of 8th Day from yesteryear (complimentary only of course!), we'd love to hear from you: brenda@eighth-day.co.uk