Silly girl

A minor exchange between myself and an American girl regarding Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the death sentence a Boston court handed down to him on Friday. I screenshotted these on different days, hence the profile picture change. The @handle, as you'll notice, is the same.

Scene at Spinningfields

Spinningfields' first Indian Restaurant opened last month. Scene, on the Left Bank of the newly developed corner of Manchester, occupies the unit previously home to Strada Italian restaurant. I dropped in with meetup group Manchester Social Nights. 

They're a good group with regular attendees so you get to know the people rather than dealing with a steady turnover of members. The venues for meetups are good choices, as was Wednesday night's.

The opulent and well-placed venue sports oak and deep red tones, creating a private ambience, and the arched doorways within the building carry a traditional Indian feel. We were led through the high-ceilinged entrance through to the large dining room and to our own table with attached apex roof, giving us a certain element of privacy.

We were served appetisers of plain and spicy poppadoms, the latter of which contained black flecks of spice and nearly blew my head off. Impressive.

One of our group was a young Indian man with impressive knowledge of his native food, so although the menu was clear enough we had a little extra advice on what might be to our taste.

I started with a tasty and suitably small king prawn appetiser, and moved on to their signature dish, the chicken makhani. Deliciously mild, this is a great choice for those- like me- whose taste buds aren't at vindaloo-level endurance just yet.

The business still has a few growing pains- when I went on Wednesday they were still waiting for their supplier to send till roll, so the bill was hand-written. There were a few errors on it which we straightened out, but presumably when the tills are properly up and running these mistakes won't occur to affect customers.

The group leader also somehow managed to get us 25% off the bill, a perk to joining the meetup group. Get involved!

Check out the Manchester Evening News' writeup for more info. Their photography picks out the intricate metalwork and woodwork of the décor.

Cooking on Gas

I've written a lot about working out and about cooking recipes. The former I do quite a lot, the latter not enough. It's well-known that you don't get the results you want at the gym and in your physique unless you eat the right food to begin with. But what is the right food?

I've been following recipes from the Hairy Dieters Cookbook for a few years now. The meals are packed with meat and vegetables- protein and vitamins. These recipes are perfect for if you're trying to lose weight (which I now am) and also if you're building muscle (which I always have been).

I've been cooking them few and far between, though. And I've been relying on chicken stir-fry, chicken fajitas and omelettes for too long. It's time to vary things up and include a bit more veg. Hence, for a month I'll hammer the Hairy Dieters book, trying out the breakfasts stews and pies. I'll also try the recipes that came with my soup-maker, and I'll write them all up here. Throughout this I'll get to the gym as much as possible and see what PBs I can beat. Let's see if I can get my weight under 70Kg again.

Cooking a meal, from writing a shopping list of ingredients through to sitting down and eating it, is a process that contains its fair share of steps. For most people those steps are quite straightforward, but for those of us with disabilities that may take a little more effort than people realise. Writing a shopping list may be a necessity (it is for me) but through trial and error you learn to not just write down the ingredients you need but also to check you have the right equipment- for example a meat recipe might require string, or a soup recipe might require a ladle. You learn through time, whether learning disabled or not, to watch out for minor problems along the way. But these problems can be overcome through practice- hence this project.

In a month, I hope to be a lot sharper and a more competent chef.

Meetup- Don't Stay In

Further hammering of the Meetup social media site has allowed me to make more friends, eat good food, visit cool bars and restaurants and spend more time in the fantastic city of Manchester. A good number of groups have sprung up over the last few months, so recently I've checked out a few of them.

On Bank Holiday Monday I went to meet the people from Manchester Social Nights, a group for over-30s. The event is listed here. Dockyard is a bar at the river's edge on the opposite side of Spinningfields to Deansgate. Great relaxed atmosphere, modern yet traditional and pubby. The burger I had went down a treat, although the table I sat at was strangely uneven. We then stopped off at the recently-refurbished and still-fantastic Alchemist. 

Manchester Social Nights is a good group. The organiser also introduced me to a few other meet-up groups that I'll mention after I've visited them.

Next up in my calendar: Manchester Social Scene. I went to meet them on Friday for drinks in the Northern Quarter. It rained a lot on Friday night (hey, it's Manchester) but a good number of us made the effort. We checked out Bluu

and Bar 21, formally TV 21.

Interesting night. Got told I looked like Jack Shepard from Lost.

Fuck it, I agree.

Also, a girl branded me “a bit of a knob” because I turned her down. She wasn't one of the group. Honestly not my kind of place and I think I've been there enough times now, but I'd meet with the group again.

And then Saturday: I woke up strangely early (insomnia can hit at both ends of the candle) and I fell back asleep in the afternoon. I needed to get up in time for the evening as I was running a Lads' Night through the 20s and Early 30's group. But I didn't hear my alarm and I missed the beginning of the meetup, along with phone calls and texts from the rest of the group. Thankfully the group organiser had turned up and was commandeering. They'd already met in Bluu, gone on to Trof and Apotheca and were a few drinks in by the time I found them in The Bay Horse, a small but smart pub in the heart of the Northern Quarter.

We moved on from there and all the ideas I had had been kind of exhausted, so we looked for places we'd not tried and landed on Hula, a Tikki bar in Stevenson Square. We queued for 15 minutes and paid the £4 door charge, but tikki bars are what they are- rammed Jamaican-themed shacks with straw on the floor, badly-mixed contemporary and old-school R'n'B, photos plastered to the ceiling and bamboo fixtures. Fine women, though.

Hopefully we'll get another, more popular lads' night scheduled for the likes of Spinningfields or The Milton Club, and I'll sleep properly beforehand and guide the night a little better.

Forthcoming nights out planned with Meetup: A Thai restaurant, a pub night with media creatives, a body-art-themed Asian restaurant and an exclusive party night. These events are in Manchester but the Meetup site is worldwide, and as the site becomes more popular more and more people will be setting up events near you, so get involved.

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...