Matt Tuckey is a writer from Oldham, England. He covers celebrities, night life, Manchester, fitness, creative writing, social media, psychology and events. Some of this may, in some way, help others. Or maybe it'll just entertain you for a while.
Christmas:
you're done and dusted! Let's take a look at the week ahead,
including new year celebrations.
Sales
in Manchester and the Intu Trafford Centre have been in full swing
since 6am on Boxing day, including these sad bastards queuing up in
the rain. I was in a state of drunken REM at the time. Some good deals listed
in the article though.
For
new year itself, most people have their plans set. If you're at a
loose end, Meetup might just save you.
If
you're in the Prestwich end, Vicki's Social Nights have a buffet
going down. Get on that!
If
you want a Northern Quarter New Year, then Have an Absolutely Shite
NYE with Manchester Social Scene. Their name, not mine. Cheesy music in The Abel Heywood pub and heading on to The Ruby Lounge. Certainly not my thing; 77
people seem to think it'll be a good one though!
If
you're into soul and motown, join Manchester Social Group. They're
heading to the Irish World Heritage Centre for a night of golden
oldies.
Saturday:
Garage group The Artful Dodger perform at
Static nightclub on Lloyd St. Remember
Rewind and Moving Too Fast? Great tunes, great times. If you fancy
joining me the meetup event is
here.
There are still club tickets.
Mad
Friday: the last Friday before Christmas is notorious for huge
numbers of revelers, large amounts of alcohol consumed and usually a
spot of violence. My Christmas leave certainly started with the first
two.
I
joined folks from Manchester Social Group for
my night out. Started with a few drinks in Albert's Schloss. Immense queues to both get
in and get served. The bar reached capacity early on in the evening.
There was a bloke in there who looked like the guy off Eraserhead. It
turned out he was a big-time David Lynch fan and his outrageous hairstyle
was a conscious nod to the movie.
We
moved on to local celeb hangout LIV for
Bamboo, their Friday event. It took a
while to pick up but before long it was stuffed. I've got a video of
a toy train stuffed with Moet and sparklers being brought to a
mystery big spender. Youtube isn't working for some reason, so here's
the vid on Facebook.
Couldn't
resist a pic with lovely promo dancer Sam.
A
great night. Other venues perhaps weren't as enjoyable. I took a
stroll after leaving. The Mad Friday scenes were more traditional:
ambulances racing across the city, paramedics tending to a bloody and
bandaged man on John Dalton St, a police van outside RnB club
Suede.
Saturday:
another Manchester Social Group night
out, this time starting in The Lawn Club and moving on to nearby
Suburbia. Both great venues although
the latter's music was a little cheesy for me.
It's
well worth getting involved in the Meetup group if you want to see
some more of the city and meet new people.
My
target audience is a little narrow with this post, but hey, a lot of
my hits come from Facebook and from people who are local to me, i.e.
Oldham. Manchester is 8 miles away from the centre of Oldham, so on a
Saturday night with the wrong taxi firm you could be paying over £30
to get home. No need.
I've
asked around and I've found a winner. Cartax Radio Cars, based in Lees, east
of Oldham and hence a little further out from the city, will pick you
up from the Northern Quarter and take you home to Oldham for a very
reasonable £20. Compare this to Uber and you'll be paying an extra
£10 if the Saturday night surcharge is applied.
Unless
anyone has any better suggestions?
Also,
what about other towns around Manchester? What are your
recommendations for taxi firms to take you back to, say, Stockport?
Or Bolton?
I
met up with Writers Connect
for the first time in AAAAAGES on Sunday. The feedback group meets in
Nexus Art Cafe on Dale St, and it's a
really handy meetup for advice on fiction and poetry. We start the
meeting with a writing exercise to warm the creative engines and get
into the swing of writing. Last week we tried a new exercise.
We
each started with a blank sheet of paper and a theme. Our theme was
“football”. The person who suggested this idea (not me,
obviously) was the only actual football fan at the table. Oh well. We
each wrote for one minute exactly, then regardless of where we were
up to we stopped writing on the dot. We then passed the sheet to the
next person. We had a few moments to read what was already written,
and then we had a fresh minute to continue the story where the
previous person left off. This continued until we had contributed to
each story.
Note:
it helps if you use A4 paper and not a spiral-bound notebook, as with
the latter different contributors use different sheets of paper and
sides of paper. With A4 you're unlikely to get to the bottom of the
page.
After
writing we tried to read out the whole story, but other people's
handwriting (usually mine) was hard to read for some of the group. We
suspected in hindsight it would be easier to pass the sheets around
in the same order in which we wrote on them as we read them out, so
we would only read out what we ourselves had written.
Here's
my finished story. I've emboldened alternate parts so you can see
where the next writer took over the narrative:
Richard
hates football. But once every four years, his bitter hatred of men
kicking each other in the shin and crying about it subsided. At every
World Cup, Richard joined in the charade, that England moment when
Paul Gascoigne cried at the World Cup in the 90s changed football
forever. The English women that hated football fell in love with
football just because a Geordie man cried. The footballers never cry
now. Maybe if they don't get enough money in their new contract or
modelling deal that would push them to tears but not
the actual game.
Richard
never cried at football, just watched his friends sob. Didn't see the
drama.
Football's
an industry, it's actually got boring
Even
though crowds and takings are soaring
Ditch
Sky TV and your season pass
Live
your life with a little more class
Richard
used to sit there, next to his two friends, and close his eyes, and
try to think of something more interesting, like cheese, or rivers, or
sausages, or tadpoles, or in fact anything that
And there the timer ran out and the
page had made its way back to the first person to write on it. So. A
little haphazard, asking four non-football fans to write about
football.
There are five other stories like this
that we produced during the exercise. I'll try and source them!
I'm tempted to try this again using
sheets of A4 and a random topic that doesn't require much knowledge,
like, I dunno, fruit. Or something. Carpets. Whatever.
Author
Dave Haslam is signing copies of his new book Life After Dark, a
history of the British nightclub
scene.
If you're a writer I'd love for you to guest-blog this. Hit me up.
Wednesday
If
you're a Wordpress user, meet fellow bloggers using the platform at
Manchester Wordpress User Group's monthly meetup.
It's their Christmas party, so leave the car at home! Join them at
Madlab on Edge St in the Northern Quarter.
Thursday
If
you're a film fan, you'll be more than aware of the new Star Wars
film being touted as the big hit this Christmas. I'm looking forward
to it, admittedly. I've found an impressive deal on the Manchester Evening News' site. If you're not in work on a Thursday, or can book
it off, and fancy watching the film and chowing down on some Almost
Famous burger, then make a move quickly: this offer's gonna be
snapped up. Midnight screening, anyone?
Friday
Anyone
fancy some ales and cocktails?
Font bar is the perfect place, just off
Oxford Rd next to the train station, and Young Professionals in
Manchester may be the ideal group. You won't know unless you try, of
course...
Saturday
You're
probably more than aware that there's a new Star Wars film coming
out. If you fancy watching it and meeting new people at the same
time, (obviously before and after the film) check out Manchester Film Fans. They're meeting in the afternoon.
If
you're out a little later, join me and Manchester Social Group for
some drinks in Spinningfields.
We're starting in The Alchemist for
some inventive cocktails, after which we'll probably head into The Avenue for more posh drinks.
Sunday
A
book signing at Nexus Art Cafe with
Karen Little. More events happening at Nexus as the month progresses.
I
don't just want to reproduce content online- if I can find events
happening that are not listed elsewhere, I'll put them here. If you
see anything you think I should include, particularly if it's not
online yet, tweet me the text or a
pic please!
Las
Vegas with Trevor McDonald begins on ITV tonight. If it's anything
like Mafia with Trevor McDonald, which aired some months ago, it'll
be superb. Sir Trevor McDonald's investigations into these shady
worlds are always tremendous viewing.
Tuesday:
I have found something that may help if you're affected by PTSD (Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder). Impact PTSD and DPD Support Group
provides assistance for depression, emotional trauma and PTSD and
survivors of abuse. It's held at Norden Old Library on Edenfield Rd
in Rochdale.
If
you fancy a few power ballads on a Friday night, you're not alone.
Join 60 other like-minded folk at Manchester Social Scene's Christmas Special
at The O2 Ritz. They're starting in
nearby Gorilla. It must be a good
group if it's that popular.
What
is a Christmas Ceili? It's a social event with Scottish or Irish folk
music and singing, traditional dancing, and storytelling.
Particularly, a Yuletide-themed one. Friday sees one such event
happen in Fallowfield with Manchester Social Scene in aid of locally
based, Ugandan-focused charities.
Live music is provide by
Albireo.
Get
your Santa / Mrs Santa outfits at the ready: There will be a stampede
of Santas- a flurry of Father Christmases- in Manchester on Saturday
for the Charity Santa Claus City Centre Bar Crawl. Raising
money for MS, the crawl starts at the rowing club at Salford quays,
then goes into Manchester via Metrolink. It looks hilarious. Somebody
please guest-blog this for me!
If you're a UFC fan
you'll already know that the long-anticipated Aldo V McGregor
featherweight match is FINALLY going ahead after a painful delay
(Aldo's broken rib). This is happening Saturday night at 3am. I need
to find a good Manchester venue for boxing and UFC. Suggestions?
I won't be able to
watch it though as I'm at feedback group Writers Connect the
next day and I need to be fresh for it. If you fancy some creative
writing exercises and giving / receiving feedback on stories and
poems, check us out in Nexus from
1pm. If advice on writing is something you're after I strongly
recommend giving these meetings a shot.
I
got there about 2 hours early and there was already a queue. It was a
very quick sign-and-photo session, but in the 10 seconds or so I had,
he seemed like a decent bloke. The situation was not as tense as it appears between me, him and his bodyguard!
Yesterday
was the final day of NaNoWriMo, or
National Novel Writing Month. As mentioned
I have been dabbling with a screenplay that I wrote in 2005. I did
this instead of writing a novel from scratch. I still believe the
script has potential, but in order for it to be the best it can be I
need feedback. In fact, I quickly found that I couldn't move forward
with the project without advice. My plan was to revise the synopsis
(which I did), then show it to feedback group Writers Connect. The meeting
I managed to get to was cancelled, though, so I'm still waiting for a
chance to show it to other people. After this, I'll use the feedback
to adjust the synopsis and the manuscript itself, then bring in said
manuscript in thousand-word chunks to see what the group make of it.
I
may have another go at website Scribophile,
a fiction critique website. I've just had a look after being away
from the site for a couple of years. There is a screenplay subheading
but there's no work currently waiting to be reviewed here, so if I
entered my synopsis or screenplay segments they may not get that much
attention. Anyone know of any good screenplay review websites? One
site I was planning to use seems to have shut down its feedback
section: Trigger Street Productions no
longer have their “Labs” section for advice. I never even got
around to using it.
Are
there any other screenplay resources I should check out?
