Posts Tagged ‘leeds’

Duck of the Day is clearly a terrible name for this series. Firstly, most of the animals featured in it are in fact not ducks, but other types of birds. Secondly, the same duck appears twice. But it does have alliteration, which makes the whole thing more memorable (even if you only remember it for how semantically incorrect it is).

They’re more difficult to do, in narrowboats.

Photos from the bedroom tax protest that took place in Leeds.

Last month saw White Rose Speakers hold our 2013 international speech and evaluation contest. Actually, we held a speech showcase rather than a contest as I was ineligible to compete due to already having won at Leeds City, so we elected Erik is our club representative to take our club to the area contest.

Meanwhile the evaluation contest was more hotly contested, and I was worried that running out of time hurt my evaluation, but it seems everyone suffered from a little of that and I ended up taking first place. I’m looking forward to learning from these lessons and moving on to the area contest.

Recently, a new lunch place specialising in jacket potatoes opened across the road from our office, named Jackpots.

I tried it out last week, though I wasn’t overly impressed. The potato was nice and the toppings were OK, but I think a few key problems let them down. First of all, you can’t build your own potato. They have a few toppings you can select a combination of, otherwise you have to go for a “set menu” style. In an age of Subway and Barburrito, it would be much better if they could just lay them all out and you could pick any combination.

Secondly, I don’t think the containers they give them out in. They’re like the noodle boxes you get from Wokon. They do fold out to form a flat surface, but they don’t do this very well and that is equally annoying as it has no edges. Give me an old fashioned takeaway box any day.

We live in an age where scumbags often try to rip you off. Paying with basically any method costs you extra money with RyanAir, even though they’ve been told they have to change it by the authorities. So it takes something special to cause outrage these days.

But Leeds Arena and their ticket partner Eventim have somehow managed it. I’ve just booked to go see Nickelback and tickets are at a fairly average £37.00 each.

But then there is a booking fee of £6.30 – per ticket! Presumably, this is to cover the cost of processing the payment, though I notice they don’t even take my American Express.

Then comes delivery – this is £7.50! Of course, I can opt to collect the tickets from the venue itself, in this case, I would have to shell out £2.50! Just to collect the tickets myself! And there is no print them at home option.

That means for £74.00 worth of tickets, I’m paying £20.10 in service charges – making up 21% of the entire cost.

Of course, you can argue that Eventim is just a company and therefore driven to make money, and having a natural monopoly they can just rip people off (we’re just doing our jobs – like the Nazi soldiers who worked in the death camps). But surely at a certain point, the authorities have to step in and say “look, you’re just lying about your ticket prices”, just like they did with the airlines.

Last Thursday, the Trinity Leeds shopping centre opened. On Friday, it snowed. This presented quite a few problems for the new shopping centre, whose website claims it is the largest in the UK, even though we know that’s not the case (as if it wasn’t obvious to anyone who was walked around Meadowhall, that in itself is only the 8th biggest).

Snow settles on the roof
The large glass roof that covers the centre over will no doubt be magical in ideal conditions, but with a lot of it being fairly flat, the snow just settles on top of it. As a consequence, it almost felt a little gloomy over the weekend because all you could see when you looked up was a thick layer of snow.

It’s very cold
The centre isn’t actually enclosed, it just has a roof over it. The result is that when it is cold, it is cold inside as well because there is nothing to keep the heat in. This would be fine, but at least one of the restaurants has most of their seating outside, which is then rendered useless by our wintery conditions.

It snows inside the centre
Another rather unfortunate consequence of not having a sealed roof is that when it snows outside, it snows inside as well. Walking though the centre on Saturday felt like just being outside as as much snow seemed to be falling inside as it was outside.

With Michelle back in town, we headed down to 51% Bourbon for some drinks.

Last week, we headed down to the new steak house located on the Headrow, Miller & Carter.

Despite having just opened, it was actually relatively quiet. We are able to walk up without a reservation, and I would say only about 30% of the tables were occupied – though there were enough people in there to give it some atmosphere.

Was it the best steak I’ve had in Leeds? No. But George claimed that his was. My personal opinion was that it can’t match the top tier of Blackhouse and Gaucho, but it was still an excellent steak, and certainly not somewhere I would be adverse to going back to.

Turns out, I’m the new Vice President of Education for White Rose Speakers.

White Rose is a Toastmasters group, that meets on the 2nd and 4th Wednesday of each month, at the Jury’s Inn Hotel in the city centre. If you’re interested in improving your communication and leadership skills – why not come down to our Open Meeting on Wednesday 27th February? Or indeed any of our meetings, as guests are always welcome!