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.

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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.

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. 

 

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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. 

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Castlefield in the Sun

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

 

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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!

 

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.

Bank Holiday Incoming

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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.

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.

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