Ferro's stag do

Went to Albufeira Portugal. Stayed at Paraiso De Albufeira. 

We got a ridiculously good deal on this. Take a look at the pictures on their site and you can imagine what thirty blokes from Oldham looked like, already drunk from skulling Captain Morgan on the coach, rolling into a joint like this. Nice place with an opulent reception area, although once you're in your room finding reception again can be hard. The lifts all seem to drop you off at the back of the building where the golf course is. (Golf is a big thing in Albufeira, or so it seems from the contents of the baggage carousel at Faro Airport.) The hotel's minimal signposting was a problem.

We decided to spend a day in Speedos, just for a laugh. I'd hung on to the ones I bought for 1 Euro in Magaluf in 2010, so I was pleased to bring them out of retirement. Fetching, yeah?!

 

(Not our stag)

Here's Kati.  

 

She's a native but her boyfriend is a scouser. She hated her job and her manager, and was in the process of ripping off the bar. I asked her for a Southern Comfort and Coke and she filled the collins glass half-full of SoCo. She charged me about 5 Euros.

Not long after that somebody challenged me to do handstand press-ups, which I can actually do sober. Suffice to say, I could not drunk and I had a cut on the top of my head for the rest of the holiday.

Every bar in Albufeira sells Cutty Sark blended scotch. The only other place I've seen this on sale is in the gift shop at the actual Cutty Sark exhibition in Greenwich. I drank my fair share over the course of the weekend.

We decided to do an eighties theme for one of the night-time sessions. I went as RoboCop.

 

 

We also had a Lion-o from Thundercats (great face-paint effort), a black guy who went as a golly, Another black guy who had the perfect frame to play Mr. T, two tennis players including a John McEnroe, a Jamaican bob-sleigher from Cool Runnings (which is a film that came out in 1993, but whatever), a tracksuited scouser with a curly wig a'la Harry Enfield and Chums (a TV series that also began in the 90s, but again whatever), an MC Hammer, an Ultimate Warrior, a Jimmy Saville, an unspecified pilot from Top Gun and a Flash Gordon, among others. The bride-to-be's dad had found an impressive Freddy Mercury outfit, and ironically one of the bars we landed in was dedicated to Queen. Only hits from the 80s group played via concert DVDs over the screens and sound systems, and countless photos and posters lined the walls of the small bar. A good laugh but there's only so much Queen I can take.

A great weekend. The pictures tell more of a story than I could. If you're looking for a cheap destination for a stag do / mates' holiday, Albufiera is worth a look.

Join me on this lads' night

Social group 20s and Early 30s in Manchester is a great opportunity to meet new people in the city. It's an absurdly popular Meetup group with over 1500 members listed. The last meeting in March was brilliant. Good people, our own cordoned-off bar and and a comfortable environment made this a worthwhile early-doors night out.

The second of two girls' nights will go ahead on Friday 8^th, so if you fit that demographic why not get involved?

And to balance things out a little, the group's first Lads' Night will take place Saturday 9^th May. I'll be on it. If you're male, in your 20s or 30s and you want to meet new people and go to some decent Northern Quarter bars, now's your chance. We'll probably be checking out the likes of Bluu, Cane and Grain, Apotheca, Cord, The Fitzgerald and El Capo. But who knows. The bars are smart and so is their dress codes, so please make an effort. Sign up to the site if you haven't already, and RSVP.

NaPoWriMo ends

National Poetry Writing Month is done and dusted for another month. I've been busy, so didn't get as much done as I'd hoped.

I've uploaded a couple of edgy poems I wrote years ago, I've followed a couple of the site's prompts, I took a musical sketch scene to a writer's group for feedback and I've worked on a rap write-up of the Eminem vehicle, 8 Mile. Stay tuned for these- they'll be up when they're finished.

I think one way of making a blog stand out could be to put all information into rhyme in order to keep it different from the rest of the blogosphere. You'd also get pretty good at rhyming if you kept at it. Rhyming couplets also encourages the use of interesting imagery, and could put new angles on subjects that many bloggers are covering. There are no rap verses about the Royal Baby online, for example. None in English, anyway.

I have more writing in the pipeline, so I may just do that...

Portuguese Hay(na)ku)

Day 27 of NaPoWriMo asks for a Hay(na)ku, a variant of the haiku. As the site describes, A hay(na)ku consists of a three-line stanza, where the first line has one word, the second line has two words, and the third line has three words. Here's mine. I'll go into more detail in a later post. Stay tuned.

Albufeira.

Alcohol flows

nearly lost nose

Erasing Eraserhead

For Day 20 of NaPoWriMo, The site organisers suggest we attempt an erasure poem. To do this, we take an existing piece of text- possibly another poem, although it could be any piece of writing- and delete certain words to alter the meaning.

The year before last I used the lyrics to an Erasure tune and erased some of the words to create a strange poem. This year, I used the plot to the David Lynch film, Eraserhead. 

 

I found this synopsis on Wikipedia. It's a surreal movie to begin with- as are all Lynch movies- so I only had to cut a few conjunctions and pronouns, then format.

Man in the Planet moving levers floating in the sky.

A spermatozoon-like creature emerges

from Spencer's mouth, floating into the void.

an industrial cityscape, Spencer walks home filled with

piles of dirt and dead vegetation.

carve a chicken

the bird moves and writhes on the plate and gushes blood.

mother,

tries to kiss him.

X has had his child

X, however, is not sure if what she bore is a child.

caring for the child—a swaddled bundle

with an inhuman, snakelike face,

resembling the spermatozoon

infant refuses all food, crying incessantly, intolerably.

sound drives X hysterical, she leaves Spencer and the child.

Spencer attempts to care for the child, it struggles to breathe,

has developed painful sores.

Spencer experiencing visions, again seeing the Man in the Planet,

the Lady in the Radiator sings to him as

she stomps upon miniature replicas of Spencer's child.

a sexual encounter with the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall,

Spencer has another vision,

seeing him get decapitated,

a stump underneath resembles the child's face.

Spencer's head sinks into a pool of blood, falls from the sky,

landing on a street below.

A boy finds it, bringing it to a pencil factory to be turned into erasers.

Spencer

seek out the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall,

she has begun taking other men home.

Crushed, Spencer returns to his room,

child crying.

a pair of scissors: for the first time removes the child's swaddling.

the child has no skin; the bandages held its internal organs together,

they spill apart. The child gasps in pain,

Spencer cuts its organs with the scissors.

The wounds gush a thick liquid, covering the child.

power in the room overloads, lights flicker;

child grows to huge proportions.

the lights burn out completely,

the child's head replaced by the planet.

Spencer, in his normal form, billowing cloud of eraser shavings.

side of planet bursts apart, inside,

Man in the Planet struggles with levers, now emitting sparks.

Spencer embraced warmly by the Lady in the Radiator,

both white light and white noise crescendo

screen turns black and silent.

Anti-Tesco Reduced Isle Challenge Review

I've just realised I should have written this post two weeks ago- on 7^th March I uploaded this post describing how I wanted to keep away from the reduced isle in Tesco in a bid to eat better and stop being a cheapskate.

Well, I certainly cut down from buying from that particular shelf. I've made a point of eating fresher food, and more veg, and it seems to be doing me well. I've crashed back into it when I've seen a deal here and there- like tonic water or something- but I've not bought any reduced pizzas or microwave meals. And I feel better for it.

Then the project deadline passed and I completely forgot to write it up. Let's see how it affected me in the gym. What improvements were made during that month-long period?

I'm lifting 15 plates on cable crunch, and doing as many reps as possible. I've put on 10 more reps on when performing this with a metal handle, and 10 more reps with the rope handle. That's it. Not an amazing improvement, it may seem, but I'm spending more time doing boxing and gym classes, and working out at home, rather than using the actual resistance machines in the gym. My weight has gone back down to around 73kg, which isn't great but is 4kg less than what I ballooned up to. I'm sleeping a little better, which is forever a problem overall, and I'm feeling more energetic.

I've made further improvements since the 7^th April, both in the gym and other areas of life, but that's for another post...

Diamond Robbery Fail

I made it back to feedback group Writers Connect for the first time in nearly a year. For a warm-up exercise, we wanted to write in second person. We used the recent Hatton Garden robbery as a prompt. We didn't research the details- we just set the timer going and wrote, hence my deviance from accuracy and slightly abrupt ending.

Once you feel the engine cut out you pick up the drill, smashing it through the brickwork, the movement vibrating your bones and drowning out the hammering of your pulse. You make six quick holes, then John slams the sledgehammer through the wall. The alarm sounds. Three minutes. You crawl through the dust and rubble and onto the carpet, John running ahead of you to the cabinets. Another swing smashes the glass and you throw the sack to him. You scoop up the diamonds and dump them into the sack, and it reminds you of your stint in the post room. Similar, yet not so.

Michael shouts from the truck. “Two minutes.”

The sack is now full and the shelves are empty, and you make a point of fighting your urges to scramble back to the vehicle's waiting side door. You walk professionally, hands feeling cold, stifling panic, placing the sack onto the floor of the truck, sparse treasure, worth more than the warehouse truck's usual stock even when full to the brim.

You climb in and John yanks on the shutters, plunging you into darkness once again, and you scramble, arms out in front, to the wall at the back of the driver's cabinet.

The engine coughs to life and you feel the lurch of movement, and with your back to the wall you slump into your hoard.

Where's your glove?