Why I Love... Where I Live

My love affair with my neighbourhood - Clarendon Park in Leicester - began six years ago, when I first visited the area for a colleague’s birthday celebrations.

I’m not sure if it was her stories of guerrilla gardeners or the excellent tapas at Barceloneta, but the next morning I found myself searching online for rooms to rent and a couple of months later I made the move.

On that first day, hungry from unpacking boxes, I stepped out in search of lunch – and almost immediately bumped into a friendly neighbour who warmly welcomed me to the street.

Fifteen minutes later, the guy chattily wrapping up my doorstop sandwich at Salvador Deli offered to lend me a hand if I needed any help shifting heavy boxes or putting up shelves. I was going to be happy here...

So starts the beginning of an article I've written for Leicester's cultural magazine Great Central! 

You can read the rest of the article HERE - including insights from former and future Weekend Reviewers David, aka One Man and His Loaf. and Ruth from Clarendon Spark (who I have to credit for the photo at the top of this page!)

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Why I Love... Working in Cafes

If you’ve never done it, working from home seems like the dream – and I have to admit there can be real joy in a 20 step commute to ‘the office’, a uniform which can happily incorporate novelty pyjama bottoms, and full control of the radio dial. 

But, as a semi-regular home-worker, I find it’s not always the greatest. We humans are flawed creatures; prone to distractions, loneliness and chocolate-eating.

I’m never one to actively procrastinate; I’ve truthfully never binged on box sets in work hours – I couldn’t live with the guilt or build-up of emails. But other things shift my focus from report writing and Excel spreadsheets – mainly, despairing over my messy house.

It’s true there’s no risk of distraction from work colleagues at home, and this can be a massive bonus when I need to be completely absorbed in something without any interruptions. But equally being alone for too long is rubbish. On these days, I’m so desperate for company I’ll make up reasons to call my boss and am a little too keen to make conversation with anyone/thing I come into contact with (the postman, fellow shoppers in the Co-op, Siri.)

Of course there’s an alternative, and one that seems to fix many of my issues with home working. It does require me to lose the PJs, but for some reason my productivity levels soar when I move my portable office (i.e. laptop, notepad and phone) to a cafe.

We’re lucky in Leicester to have loads of great independent coffee spots with friendly staff and fast wifi. Just before Christmas I profiled a few of these places for Great Central magazine - which you can read HERE

But, there is a small disclaimer - yes, I might have paid for a flat white, but this does not entitle me to be kept warm, connected and fully charged for a whole day. So I stand by the following:

1. As a general rule, one coffee equals 60 to 90 minutes of work time. If you’re also having breakfast/lunch, you can just about push this to two hours.
2. Be open to sharing your space, especially if the place is rammed. You might even make a new friend/creative collaborator.
3. Don't take long phone calls if they are clearly going to be overheard and therefore annoying to everyone else. See also - use headphones when playing audio

Are you a cafe worker? Would love to hear your tips for non-office working!

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Brunch Club: Delilah's

A couple of months ago we featured the manifesto of John Helps, who planned to start up a new quarterly magazine called Great Central, previewing arts and culture events in and around Leicester. 

Well, we're pleased to say the first issue of the paper magazine is officially out today - if you're local to Leicester you should be able to pick it up in venues, eateries and bars across the city - and the website has gone live.

And we're even more chuffed to say we've written a column - which you can read below, with some added photos. Can you guess the subject of our contribution...?

It will probably come as no surprise that we, The Weekend Collective, love brunch. It is, after all, a cultural activity which has no place in Monday to Friday life. So in honour of the most leisurely of meals, we've founded our own Brunch Club - to make a real monthly effort to appreciate good food and good friends.

For our last date, our venue was the newly opened Delilah Fine Foods, an import from across the border in Nottingham. Our company was a couple of adventure loving friends, who we've connected with through blogging - Janet Blogs at Someone, Somewhere and Laura is the face behind Make, Do and Mend. Laura is a Nottingham dweller, so a visit to Delilah's seemed particularly appropriate.  

Set in a lovingly restored building in the heart of St Martins, Delilah's boasts an array of delightful deli items. The menu format is simple and effective - a selection of sandwiches, salads, and tapas showcasing the very best of Delilah's impeccably sourced produce. 

So with such a wide range of foodie finery on offer and four hungry mouths to feed, what did we opt for? The same sandwich. All of us. But what a sandwich it was! Grilled halloumi on a bed of roasted vegetables with homemade harissa yoghurt. Delicious. (To be honest, there was one small difference in our orders -  three of us opted for sourdough bread while Janet bravely branched out with ciabatta - a real rebel).

We ate outside, grasping at the few glimmers of sunshine our terrible English Summer had to offer. And what do blogger talk about when out to lunch? Blogging, obviously. But we're also all fans of good books, creative pursuits and vintage shopping - so there was plenty of swapping stories and ideas of places to visit, things to do and stuff to read.

One of the joys of blogging is the community it builds - friendships can be forged without even meeting a person "in real life". We have made connections all over the world with people we've never met, but we're very lucky Laura and Janet just happen to live nearby.

Brunch was, needless to say, followed by an obligatory rummage through the nearby charity shops, and more chatter. An excellent way to spend a Sunday.

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Making it happen: Great Central

If you've ever read this blog, you'll know how much we love bigging up our home city of Leicester and indulging in the cultural happenings it offers up. So we were very intrigued when we heard word of a new magazine with a similar mindset. John Helps is the man with the plan, and has been kind enough to jot down his thoughts on the matter for us...

Leicester is wicked. It took me a very long time to come to this conclusion – passing variously through stages of absolute hatred, resignation and overwhelming disappointment at various points over the last decade – but we’ve reconciled our differences and it’s finally feeling like home.

I think it helps that the stars have aligned to make this one of the greatest periods in living memory for Leicester – between Richard III and the football there isn’t much to complain about in terms of national profile and local enthusiasm.

It wasn’t always this way - we all remember – and if we’re not careful we’re in danger of slipping back in to a post-premiership-champions malaise.

I came to a bit of a realisation pretty early on in my time here. Sitting around complaining that nothing happens in your city is pointless.

Nothing happens unless somebody makes it happen, and if you want what YOU want for your city, then that person almost always has to be you – if not directly then by persuading others to get involved. Apathy is the absolute killer.

The Robot Needs Home Collective has become the banner under which my friends and I try to create awesome things. That’s basically the remit. We started White Noise Festival, then Handmade Festival. We persuaded The Cathedral, The Guildhall, and a handful of churches, galleries and other weird and wonderful spaces to let us put on some of our most memorable shows of the last ten years. We’ve managed to get Leicester bands and festivals on to the national stage, and we’ll keep doing that for as long as people keep listening.

Thankfully there are a tonne of others with exactly that attitude in the city at the moment. I don’t remember a better time for happenings of all shapes and sizes – there are gigs, festivals, comedy, art and performance and more restaurants and coffee shops than there has been for ages and it feels like there’s a real buzz in the air…

But Leicester still has the power to disappoint. For every sold out show, there will be an empty room. For every bustling coffee shop, there is an empty restaurant. It’s always been hard to tell people about what’s going on, primarily because there just isn’t the infrastructure to do it.

As good a job as the fine people at Leicester Mercury and BBC Leicester do, it feels like an uphill battle. These aren’t the target markets for most of us, and although we came painfully close to convincing the city council to provide better provision for us to spread the word it was snatched away at the final hurdle - ironically seemingly forgotten once Richard III and premiership success reared their heads.

So, in the spirit of “being the change we want to see in the city”, a swift Facebook post and a couple of emails to people who I thought would be good at this sort of thing and we have an “alternative” newspaper on the verge of being birthed in to the world.

She’s called Great Central and she’ll be out quarterly (to start with) focusing on arts, culture and entertainment. Previewing rather than reviewing and bringing peoples hard work in to the public consciousness. It’s a long battle, but I’ve already been astonished by the amount of positive feedback and support we’ve had, and it just keeps growing.

It really feels like this is something the city needs and has been crying out for. Hopefully with a little time we can be a small part of the solution to that problem. 

Follow and support the progress of Great Central on the website. Slideshow images of cultural happenings in Leicester kindly provided by  photographer David Wilson Clarke.