Prospective Tuesdays

A few treats this week.

If you haven't seen Matt Damon SF movie The Martian yet, Manchester Social Nights are watching it tonight. £6 is cheaper than most cinema tickets these days.

If you fancy learning the Latin step of Bachata, keep this Thursday free. The Manchester International Party People have reserved the whole of Element 19 club for lessons. And speaking of “free”, so is the event.

Friday: join me and Manchester Social Group at The Milton Club for Soul Purpose, where Radio 1 DJ Trevor Nelson will be playing. I've been to a couple of Soul Purpose nights before and they were superb. You'll need a ticket. We'll be starting in Deansgate's Slug and Lettuce pub, which has recently been refurbished. In fact, Friday is the venue's reopening party. Come take a look!

On Saturday Manchester's Christmas Markets officially reopen. It's always a good shout if you want trinkets, pork burgers with stuffing and Gluwein. Find them at these places and probably any other small section of side street the city council has managed to cordon off. They will be RAMMED, so be prepared to use your elbows and shoulders.

Tweet me if you've got more!

Why you should get drunk with your debit card

A few Long Island Ice Teas in Sakana kick-started a Saturday night on Peter St. Small and classy, the Japanese restaurant's bar makes a good starting place. We moved on to the recently opened Albert's Schloss, under Albert Hall and in the unit that once housed Brannigans. The décor of the club has been scraped back to the bare brickwork and the disco balls and lights give it a blend of 70s dance club and German-styled beer hall. Unique and with size and presence, (and Arabian-style performance dancers) it's a great starting place. The only problems I had were the 20-minute queues at the bar and the smelly cross dresser. Seriously, what the hell. Anyway. Oh yeah, and there's a bookable seated area that isn't properly cordoned off, and we strayed into it at one point in the night resulting in evil looks and a few stern words from the customers. The security should have been tighter.

Playing that night were The Turbans.

We then moved next door to Club Liv, the local celeb haunt. Great club. I didn't recognise any famous types but my mate pointed out footballer Tom Cleverley, who I'm assuming was the recipient of the giant wooden crucifix that the bar staff were carrying flat across the club. The frame's design held 10 bottles of Dom Perignon in circular holes cut into the wood paneling, each bottle adorned with a club sparkler.

I was not big-balling to that extent, being on a BSO's wage, so I was buying £5 shots of Wild Turkey instead. This isn't too bad a price, considering I payed £4 for a shooter and £12 for a shot of obscure whisky in Sakana a while back.

Re the title of this blog post: most clubs now allow you to pay on card. This means that you don't have to walk around with a huge wad of cash in your trousers / purse (you may need some on the door, I don't know. It depends on the establishment). It also means that you'll get home with a series of receipts detailing exactly where you've been and how much money you've spent. Just don't throw them away and you'll piece together every part of your night. Having said that, even if you do your bank statements will hold testament. If all you do is draw out cash, that's the only record you have. Everybody's memory gets a bit hazy after a few scoops, but if you've got memory difficulties like I have it's much easier to just log onto internet banking the next day and see where your money went. It also stops you from spending your taxi money (unless you're using Uber, which is contactless payment anyway). The only reason you'd need cash is perhaps for the entry fee, or food after leaving the club. Or if, say, you drunkenly spill someone else's drink and you want to give them the money for another.

It's perhaps not so good if you're the type who needs a limit on how much they spend.

LIV's Facebook pics from the night are here. 

The Facebook Snapchat video of the night is here.

I went with someone I met in the Party People group, showing the Meetup site works and allows you to meet the right people for you.

Is Sheffield Always this Scary, or Just on Halloween?

You know I love you, Sheffield people. But seriously, how cheesy? And what's with the vast number of couples?

Anyway, I had a top impromptu Halloween night out last weekend in the Yorkshire town. For my first night out there, this is what I went dressed as.

We went to a few bars, went on to Popworld (very cheesy) and ended in Dempseys (very gay) til about 5am. (It was the only place open.)

 

This guy was loving playing the chained-up zombie from 28 Days Later, flailing himself about in the middle of the street. Kudos.

Sheffield: a funny, fun night out. Not to be taken seriously. It's not Spinningfields. There's no house or RnB. But in all fairness I didn't see it kick off, and you're hardly going to be charged £12 for a scotch you've never heard of.

 

 

Down and Out in Paris and London

I picked up this George Orwell classic in Fopp in Manchester. It's a fascinating account of people in the early 1900s, struggling to get by on waiter's wages and slipping into utter poverty and destitution. You think you're poor? You are not poor.

It's surprisingly entertaining and not as depressing as you'd expect. The narrator tramps his way through the two cities, battling the cold, hunger, tiredness and the vicious attitudes of short-term employers. It's a fairly directionless story, really, (aside from a distinct downward spiral), but is suitably short and very interesting.

A Sad Time for Urban Cookie Collective Fans

Urban Cookie Collective and fellow Mancunian Diane Charlemagne lost a battle with cancer last Thursday. She was 51.

Ms Charlemagne was probably best known for The Key The Secret, which peaked at number 2 in the charts in 1993.

I was in first year in secondary school when the song came out, and it always reminds me of school discos- in particular my first one in secondary school, where someone- presumably a teacher- dressed up as a snowman and began busting moves on stage to said song. The outfit looked like some kind of dress, and all the kids in the front row were drying to reach up onto the stage to lift it up. Weird.

I personally preferred Feels Like Heaven, an underplayed 90s classic.

I remember hearing it on what was Kiss 102 in around 1994, back when dance music wasn't as popular as it is now. Urban Cookie collective were still very well-loved among teens despite this.

Ms Charlemagne will be missed.

Prospective Mondays

Now you've wiped off the fake blood and makeup from Saturday night and put the Patrick Bateman / Netflix and chill / nurse / mutilated cheerleader outfit away, what can you look forward to this week? What's happening that's a little less dead / slutty / ridiculous looking?

National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, is under way. If you fancy writing a 50,000 word novel, now is the best time: So are thousands of other people. The site will give you all the support you need. I'm working on redrafting a screenplay this month, which is a fair bit shorter, but needs plenty of redrafting. I'd start now though, if I were you!

If you fancy getting a close-up look at some of the puppets from TV show The Clangers and Sci-Fi comedy Mars Attacks!, then get yourself down to The Waterside Arts Centre in Sale. Puppet Masters runs until 27^th February. Great for the young'uns, especially the millions of Bob the Builder fans out there.

Tonight, Young Professionals in Manchester are off into town to watch Tim Burton classic horror comedy Beetlejuice.

Guillem Balage, author of the new Christiano Ronaldo biography, is signing copies in Waterstones Deansgate midday Thursday.

I'll be in celebrity hotspot Club LIV this Saturday. Great music, stunning clientele. Worth a look.

Anymore for any more?

November is NaNoWriMo.

The month of November in the States is National Novel Writing Month. As the site describes, “On November 1, participants begin working towards the goal of writing a 50,000-word novel by 11:59 PM on November 30.”

I've noticed this event mentioned on Twitter over the years, but I've never given it a shot. Writing a novel isn't something that I've particularly wanted to do: I've wanted to write short non fiction, short fiction and screenplays. When I think of ideas for stories that I've had over the years, most of them have been short stories, poems or short screenplays. In my teen days I came up with a few ideas for feature-length scripts. Some were dreadful. Some weren't too bad.

1. An insomniac bank manager's gifted, straight-arrow assistant exploits her employer's weaknesses to rob the establishment.
2. A con man rips off a logal gangster and has to fend for himself, and as the turf war escalates we see how, through each of the characters, the seven deadly sins are alive and well in contemporary society.

The rest were abysmal. As I got older, some of the ideas I had were sharper and more defined, and I eventually got around to writing them. One short script was published on a fiction website some years ago.

There's a story I devised in 2004 about a graduate who, after becoming increasingly disillusioned with the British job market, finds himself inducted into a world of terrorism, illegal immigration and shady backroom politics. I called it Once Upon a Time in Great Britain. I finished it some time in 2006, but kept tweaking it for years after. I printed a copy of the script some time in 2010, and then my Macintosh G4 died a slow agonising death and a lot of my files- that manuscript included- vanished.

I've still got the printed version, though- it's clunky and is hampered by “writer voice”- all the characters sound like angsty, 20-something me. It's also 17,000 words and 45 pages long, only half the length the ideal screenplay should be. Added to this, although it's short, it's also over-complex. When I took the synopsis to feedback group Writers Connect they described how they struggled to keep up with the plot, and noticed the few female characters are underdeveloped with minimal screen time.

I made notes on this, and somewhere in my cupboard is a printed synopsis covered in scribbles. I need to dig it out, rewrite the synopsis, retype the original screenplay and then work on rewriting it based on the advice I've received. And that is what I'll do, all before 1^st December.

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