Power is a State of Mind: May 2026

Sunday, 31 May 2026

Kodo

Hmm. Perhaps I wasn’t 100% honest with last week’s post on Castlefield: there was, in fact, a bristling of drama. But to describe it properly, I’ve got to go way back to early 2020.

It’s March. Our idiot then-PM Boris Johnson shuns the COBRA meetings and locks the country down late, writes ‘bollocks’ across the COVID medical info and allows Cheltenham Festival to go ahead. COVID rips through the community and, as the months go on, 200,000 people die, including a load of my work clients (in the public sector tied to healthcare) and my mate’s dad.

Early 2021: Pfizer announce a new, fully approved, fully tested and fully safe vaccine. It’ rolled out, and immediately COVID cases start to plummet. We’re heading back to normality. Sadly, a good number of my friends reveal themselves to be anti-vaxxers, and to believe a load of horseshit conspiracies. I try to talk some sense into them, but one thing anyone knows about me: I have no power of persuasion. The only thing I can do is block them and move on.

Summer 2024: I’ve blocked loads of people. I’ve moved on from entire groups. The few friends I still have are busy with kids and careers. I bite the bullet and shell out to be a Meetup organiser. I set up Manchester Nightlife, a group for nights out in the city with a plan to see some DJs, try some cocktail bars and be the first to visit the new places. As the weeks go on, the group grows as more people join.

May 2026. I now have 900 members, with more joining all the time. Last week’s Castlefield meetup takes place. I haven’t checked every member that joins, and unbeknown to me, one of the new members, AA, is someone I’d had to block on Facebook – not even that long ago – for spamming my profile with some crank far right website with batshit COVID conspiracies. I didn’t even notice he’d signed up to the event until he rocked up at Barca. He went to the bar. I mentioned this to one of the other group members, and then AA himself brought it up. I explained I just can’t have anti-vaxxers in my social media.

And that was that. No big argument. We were civil. Then he seemed to leave early.

Fast forward a week. Last night a few of us met in Roxy Ballroom near the Printworks for this week’s meetup. a new guy mentions that he’d been reading the reviews on the site, and someone had properly gone off at me. The Meetup website hadn’t notified me about this, so it’s news to me. I take a look, and it’s AA.

‘Gossiping host allowed members to be rude and disrespectful towards me. I had a polite demeanour throughtout. Made to feel unwelcome. Very poor.’ (sic)

Jesus fucking Christ. Like I've not known him for years. Whatever. The question remains: why would you go to a meetup ran by a guy who you gave some shit to online, and who then blocked you? Did you not think that they would have something to say?

Whatever. We moved on from Roxy’s to Kodo, a new hidden bar with a Japanese theme.

All I had to do was find the venue and show them the pic from the website to get in, and then find the actual bar. It’d be good to go back once an upcoming wedding is out of the way and I’m not avoiding alcohol. Good little joint if you can track it down.

Aside from all that, Magali Gorre liked my pic of us on Facebook. I am out of cereal, so my weight should start to drop soon, and I did a rare Parkrun with the family, getting 36:04. Watergrove in Rochdale is a tough, hilly course. And that’s the week.

Saturday, 30 May 2026

Paprika Roasted Sweetcorn

From Rukmini Iyer’s The Roasting Tin: Paprika Roasted Sweetcorn with Spring Onions, Feta and Lime.

Took 53 mins, was supposed to be 35. Fair. My pack of sweetcorn cobs had 6 in, 1 more than the recipe, so they all went in. All came out simple, tasty, healthy. No complaints.

Monday, 25 May 2026

Discover Hidden Bar Kodo on Saturday

Well. That IDRA meetup didn’t take off, for whatever reason. Too niche, perhaps. Anyway, I ended up staying in last night. Hence, I accidentally woke up at 5am, when I’d like to have been coming home.

Also, actor William Forsythe liked my Insta comment about another actor Mike Starr.

I’m off work until Friday. I have a ton to do. Saturday night: Join Manchester Nightlife Meetup as we head to hidden bar Kodo Their location requires a bit of legwork to find, but I’ve figured it out. There’s a door. There’s a code to get in. (I’ve found all of this for you.) Think moody red lights, Japanese décor… and that’s all that’s available online. All you have to do is meet me and the group in Roxy Ballroom, Withy Grove, first. 9pm, Saturday.

Sunday, 24 May 2026

Castlefield in the Sun

Bank Holiday week is going well. With some annual leave thrown in I’m not back until the 29th.

Went out to Castlefield last night with Manchester Nightlife. Good group of people. The area is popular when the sun comes out thanks to a few different bars having outdoor areas next to each other, on the banks of a canal. Have a cocktail and a pint, and watch the Canada Geese strut by. My plan was to meet in Dukes 92, but sadly the entirety of Manchester seemingly had the same idea and the queue was horrendous. Weirdly, Barca next door was spacious with a few customers and lots of free benches, and minimal bar queues. Toilets needed checking though. Good group of people again. No drama. Moved on to Blues Kitchen, Alchemist, Lawn Club. Great afternoon. Also, look who I met: Magali Gorre off Real Housewives of Cheshire!

Saturday, 23 May 2026

Bloody Social Worker

I work in a field of healthcare – you can Google to find more – and I’ve moved around between several offices over the past 18 years. At one of the offices I’d worked in, the staff told me that a former social worker who’d been part of the team had left to write a book, an autobiography called ‘Bloody Social Worker.’ I bought it for a Secret Santa event that we were having, but due to some confusion I ended up keeping the book.

I read it recently. As someone who’s on the paperwork side of things, I don’t get to deal with the social work patients face to face, but I do deal with them over the phone. It’s always fascinating to hear of the more hands-on side of the field. Author Richard Wills details how he made a solid crack at what is basically an impossible job: supporting the town’s most vulnerable people under the Community Mental Health Team.

What seems to be the over-arching theme of the book is the stress that comes with dealing with mentally ill patients for decade: the toll it takes on the mind and the body when you’re supporting people who are frequently delusional, usually in some discomfort, and occasionally violent. This stress, it can’t be denied, is only exacerbated by the drip-drip effect of 14 years of Tory cuts, meaning fewer staff, and hence a bigger workload. Unfortunately, Labour haven’t particularly alleviated that situation since they took over. Social Workers are, on average, lasting 6 years in their jobs, according to Skills for Care. Less funding means fewer positions, which means as workers leave the profession, they aren’t necessarily replaced, meaning in turn that the workload is distributed across the rest of the team. Increased stress for the workers, longer waiting times for the clients.

It’s a clusterfuck.

The upshot of this: social work requires getting your clients to ‘let their guard down’ to describe in enough detail, what the problems are that they’re facing. The clients are less likely to discuss their problems, which are frequently highly personal, if the rapport between the client and the worker hasn’t been developed because they don’t get enough contact time.

You get the picture. It’s this disappointment, affecting all the clients, that – according to this book – led one service user to mail his dirty underwear to then-PM David Cameron in protest.

A fascinating, funny and depressing book. It just needed a tad of editing here and there, including one typo I spotted. But it’s great that Wills has taken the time to illustrate the pressures that these public services are under and the value to society that CMHT teams across the country bring, and the improvements they could make, with the right funding.

Monday, 18 May 2026

Bank Holiday Incoming

Stay tuned for a psychology book review on the blog.

Saturday Afternoon: join Manchester Nightlife in Castlefield for some hopefully outdoor drinks in the sun. Dukes 92 from 3pm. The sun should just about be coming out, as are 6 people at the time of writing. It’s the perfect time of year for that area.

Sunday Afternoon: Manchester Nightlife are out again, this time to new club venue IDRA on store St. Veteran house music DJ John Digweed, from the Kiss 102 days if you’re in your 40s and 50s, shares the set with headliner Sasha. Second release tickets are £37. They will increase! I haven’t bought yet. At the time of writing I’m still waiting for attendees.

There isn’t a great deal else happening on Meetup this weekend, particularly not on the bank holiday Sunday. I’ve noticed this a lot on Meetup, that when it comes to those Mondays off, nobody seems to want to do anything on the Sunday night. Either I put something up (I ran a Northern Quarter bar crawl on a bank holiday Sunday a few months ago) or nobody does.

Saturday, 16 May 2026

Does Coriander get you High?

Dan Nestor’s Get High Now book features a section on natural remedies. One such example is the Mediterranean coriander plant, a staple in many Mexican and Indian recipes. A tasty herb, Coriandrum sativum can be bought fresh or dried, or even alive in the pot.

Nestor claims it can also get you high.

He describes it as an ‘Iranian folk remedy,’ and lists symptoms as including ‘wild hallucinations, laughter and eventually pitbull-like lurching.’

I got a whole pot from Tesco and transferred it to a baggie, then looked for an ideal evening to try it out. Thursday 9th April looked like the right time. I was planning to join the GetSocial group to do Point Blank, as I understand it a laser-based shooting range on Deansgate, but between the time the event was announced and the actual date, Point Blank themselves went insolvent. All 3 venues across the UK closed. In light of this, GetSocial recalibrated and put on a regular bar drink meetup in Be At One next door. My car was in for a service, so it seemed like an ideal time to use public transport and see whether coriander has the effect that Nestor claims it does.

I got the bus in, arriving at 6 on an empty stomach. Be at One graciously had a 2-4-1 cocktail deal, so I got 2 Cuban Zombies (full of rum and burning half passionfruit) and started sipping. I went to the bathroom with a glass of water from the bar and shovelled down a whole pot’s worth of coriander leaf. Gross. I stayed and chatted to people, waiting for the effect to kick in, but the only difference I felt was from the sudden influx of alcohol. I dished out a few blog cards and tried to rope a few people into my own meetups, but generally it was a routine affair. I certainly didn’t get the high that Nestor had promised me. I had work the next day and obviously a bus to catch, but even so, I was way too drunk by 8pm and walked out.

So yeah, none of the aforementioned symptoms – maybe a chicken-like meandering back up to Piccadilly Gardens, but certainly no lurching.

Wednesday, 13 May 2026

Journal Club: Living With Disturbance

Contents of tonight’s Journal Club: haikus, free writing and lemon pesto tots. Organiser Fi runs through the ground rules:

CONFIDENTIALITY

SPEAK FROM I, NOT WE

STEP FORWARD, MOVE BACK

EVERYTHING IS AN INVITATION

BE KIND TO YOURSELF

It’s Wednesday 6th May, I’m in Hinterland Manchester at their monthly writing group. The theme tonight is ‘Living with Disturbance.’ First, though, a warm-up exercise.

RIGHT NOW, I AM FEELING…

...Good, ignoring the rubbish parts of life and remembering everything I have to look forward to. Granted, no day is perfect, and today is like any other. But essentially, I’m feeling gratitude for family, a steady job and freedom to come here.

Next, we talk about the meaning of disturbance, throwing out key words and phrases for the board.

CHANGE

CHAOS

INTERRUPTING

PEACE

JUGGLING

DISCOMFORT

Next, a prompt:

MY RESPONSE TO THE IDEA OF LIVING WITH DISTURBANCE IS

Everyone has to deal with a little disturbance in their lives, otherwise we’d have nothing to strive for. I was watching a video of Robert Greene about a prince in some faraway land, hundreds of years ago, who had everything handed to him on a plate. Guess what? He was massively miserable. The staff around him couldn’t figure out what was the cause of such upset. It was because he had nothing to strive for. Nothing to motivate him. That’s why they’ Royalty like Prince William, have jobs flying helicopters etc. That’s why Harry (formerly Prince) was in the Army. We need a bit of disturbance to get us through the day. It’s when this disturbance becomes unmanageable that you need to ask for professional help. Don’t sweep stuff like that under the carpet.

Gong.

Next up: a haiku, a short-form Japanese poem, arranged in a 5-7-5 syllable format. The title: ‘Disturbance is the Dance of Life.’ Here’s mine:

What are you doing,

If not striving for release

From your own mind jail?

We had a chance to read out what we’d written, and people seemed to like this one.

The next haiku challenge involves a series of suggested words to be included:

WEATHER

EDGE

WEIGHT

HUM

SHIFT

BREATH

SPACE

EASE

I came up with 2:

We weather the storm

An admin task becomes

A demi-plie.

Without the crushing

Existentialist longings

I’m a potted plant.

Great session. I cannot find that ‘bored prince’ story anywhere, but I know it was Robert Greene who recounted it. Journal club is more than likely back the first Wednesday next month. Check Eventbrite for upcoming events.

Sunday, 10 May 2026

Diecast

Great meetup last night with Manchester Nightlife. Large group of 10, pretty sure all of them showed up too. Diecast offered up good cocktails, food, (I had the chicken shawarma, great but not cheap, but then where is?) ping pong, live music one end, a DJ in the other (house music in the end where there was no food or seats, so didn’t hear much of that) and all ended early enough to get the bus back too.

That was my last alcohol for 2 months. Need to get fit for a wedding.

Saturday, 9 May 2026

Wedding Fit

There’s a wedding coming up. Don’t worry, not mine.

I’ve got a new suit that fits me as I am, with a little give, in fact, but the wedding isn’t until late June. Hence, there is a 2-month period in which I could attack one of the ‘Before 44’ challenges I gave myself last August.

In particular, I’d like to get back into my older suit trousers, most of which are 30” waist. If I do this before the wedding, the suit I have will doubtlessly be too big, but with enough time I could easily fill it back out.

Furthermore, I’d really like to beat my bench press record, which has been stuck at 103kg since 2013. Other records are overhand chin-ups (23), underhand chin-ups (20) and dips (170). I’ve got a sprint machine record of 23.6kmph, and a local, hilly, 5.4km running route that I have done in 36:23. Let’s see if I can smash through all of these. I currently weigh 86.7kg. I know I need to be 72.2kg to fit into my other suits.

There’s a way this can be done. I’m drinking tonight and eating food with the Meetup group. After that, no more alcohol. No junk food. Fight the cravings (hence psychology). Lots of gym classes and body weight exercises. Recipes. A welcome break from the constant plundering of my liver at the hands of overpriced cocktails and cut-price Aldi liqueurs.

Here we go...

Monday, 4 May 2026

Come get food in Diecast

It’s bank holiday Monday. I was in bed by 10 last night. What the hell, man. I forgot we all had an extended weekend and hence didn’t put up a meetup. Neither did any organiser of any other group, that I can see. So I stayed in with a plan to read a book, but then fell asleep anyway.

So much restaurant food this upcoming week. My poor wallet (and waistline). I’m out with work tomorrow. Wednesday night: Journal Club returns to Hinterland for writing exercises, prose, poetry and introspection. Also great vegan food. There’s a Meetup with Manc Mates. 7pm. I have a pharma experiment review to go up Saturday. Weekends after bank holidays tend to be quiet, but… that means shorter queues and waiting times for food, yes?! I was talking to a few Manchester Nightlife group members recently and we’re set on Diecast for next weekend for food, drinks and music. 7pm. Good range of different food, great cocktails, with a live band in one room and a house music DJ in the other. Great stuff in the home of a disused metal factory.

I’m likely to start a new fitness project soon to counter the endless alcohol from the last month.

Saturday, 2 May 2026

Law 47: Do not Go Past the Mark You Aimed for; in Victory, Learn When to Stop

Saturday, 11th April ‘26: the British heavyweight boxer, 37-year-old Tyson Fury came out of retirement a *inhales* fifth time to fight *checks notes* Arslanbek Makhmudov, a 36-year-old Canadian-based Russian. The British former champ Fury clinched the win with a unanimous decision, and then called out fellow Brit Anthony Joshua.

Joshua himself is now 36, so both fighters are on the cusp of the 38-Year-Old Rule. This, according to esteemed voice of authority on boxing Sharpbetting (?) is the age generally regarded to be the most appropriate age for retirement. Physical and mental health, brain injuries, neurological injuries and even death are all things that a fighter risks more as he progresses through his 30s. The general consensus is, don’t risk it.

What might author Robert Greene say about such things? He wrote The 48 Laws of Power, a book that’s been found hugely valuable to many, including rappers and sports stars, but is highly regarded in the business world too.

Law 47 is ‘Do not go past the mark you aimed for: in victory, learn when to stop.’

Tyson Fury has a net worth of an estimated £120 million. Anthony Joshua: £150 million. Granted, there are many people richer than them put together. There are 156 billionaires in the UK today, owning a million pounds a THOUSAND times over, each. But still, they’re presumably sat behind a desk, or on a yacht, for most of their day. They aren’t doing a sport when they’re trying to deflect repeated blows to the skull.

Both of these boxers have held titles. Both have had long-enough careers. Should they be fighting? I doubt Robert Greene would think so.

“The moment of victory is often the moment of greatest peril,” Greene explains. “In the heat of victory, arrogance and overconfidence can push you past the goal you had aimed for, and by going too far, you make more enemies than you defeat. Do not allow success to go to your head. There is no substitute for strategy and careful planning. Set a goal, and when you reach it, stop.”

I expect Greene has no particular knowledge of boxing, beyond interviewing Freddie Roach, Manny Pacquiao’s coach, and being interviewed himself by MMA magazine Bloody Elbow. But he does understand conflict. The guy’s got a BA in Classical Studies. He’s well-versed in world history which, if you remember school, is punctuated with wars and with royalty meeting all sorts of awful demises. Among Greene’s bibliography is The 33 Strategies of War, so I expect he’s got a good theoretical grasp of fighting, if nothing more.

I’m sure Greene would agree with me that the time for Fury and Joshua to fight has now passed. There’s younger blood coming through. Both aforementioned boxers both had their fair share of victories, and have reached enough goals. The enemies they make from now on won’t be other boxers – it will be their own health.

Friday, 1 May 2026

Excess Month Review

It’s May today, hence this absurd Excess project comes to a close. What have I done since Sunday night?

A while back, I got a couple of Chivas Regal blending kits as presents, containing 5 single malt blends in each: Smoky, Citrus, Creamy, Fruity and Floral, plus a bottle of standard Chivas Regal blend. These are made for blending, but I sipped through them individually to try each. They also came with a beaker, stirrer and an empty bottle for the blend. With the next kit I might try blending to experiment. I also polished off the last third of a bottle of Jura Journey, a great single malt. Not in one night, I might add.

Rewatched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, about a journalist reporting on a motorbike race while slamming a suitcase full of drugs into his body. Rewatched The Crow, seeing as I met David Patrick Kelly the other day. Rewatched 8 Mile for a similar reason, although substitute the actor for Mekhi Phifer. Rewatched David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, about a TV executive becoming obsessed with a Malaysian snuff TV broadcast that eventually gives him insane hallucinations. It was a DVD transfer from a recording I made off the BBC probably just before the turn of the century, when Mark Cousins was presenting Moviedrome, a series of cult films. Brilliantly weird film, great lead actor in James Woods, shame he’s turned into a MAGA nutter in recent years. Rewatched Terminator 2: Judgement Day, this time with the Blu-Ray commentary and in-screen accompanying storyboard. Fascinating. Not seen it in years, certainly not since meeting the cast in July ‘24. Rewatched Scanners, about an underground society of mind readers whose telekinetic abilities cause their victims’ heads to explode. Crazy shit again from David Cronenberg. I recently watched his early works which feature similar mind reading themes, in particular Stereo.

Went out for an Indian in Mossley.

There’s more to be uploaded, including a small psychopharmacological experiment. I read one of the books I pulled out, review to be uploaded soon.

But how was this month’s actual excess experiment? How did it go? Honestly, the steady flow of alcohol didn’t do my mental health any good. Shock. It was difficult to get out and see the city and do things out there, as gathering people together is insanely hard unless it’s a Saturday night. Even then, with conventions and televised boxing matches, it can be hard to find the time myself. But generally, nobody has money, people’s interests are different, people travel, so a lot of what I did was to stay home, hammer through that alcohol and watch those films. Looking back at the original plans, I’m not sure I’ve seen many opportunities to do things other than the horror convention. There are 4 blog posts on that in the last month. Everything else has been hand weights, movies, the odd night out and hard spirits. I enjoyed most of it. 3 more months to achieve the rest.

It’s only now that I realise, after doing this for a month, that this Excess project wasn’t even part of the plans I had for this year. Wow. I’d just assumed it was because I had no room in my drinks cupboard.

Well… I have now.