Posts Tagged ‘leeds’

One topic that often comes up in discussions is regarding how big Leeds is. So I thought I would clarify the situation, by pointing out that we are in fact the second biggest city in the UK.

Leeds now has a population of 810,200. That isn’t the West Yorkshire Urban Area which includes all the surrounding towns, of which the population is 1,499,465. So we’re not talking about Greater Leeds if you will, just Leeds.

Compare this to Glasgow, which has a population of 629,501, or Manchester, which has a population of 394,269. Of course, Greater Manchester has over two million people, but as we’ve already discussed, we’re not including surrounding towns.

Only one city can out-match us for population – and that is Birmingham, with a population of 970,892.

What of that London place you say? Why the City of London is only a square mile, and has a population of 11,700.

Having decided it had been far too long since we last had a house warming, there was really only one thing we could do to fix this – move. So this is our new place. Actually, it isn’t, but ours is almost identical to this one, but with nicer carpets and air conditioning.

If you’re wondering why the photos are rubbish quality, it’s because they were compressed into GIF accidentally and then re-compressed to JPEG. I could redo them, but I have more important things to do.

Having been invited for a surprise dinner party by Chris & Cara, we headed over to The Greenhouse – a large apartment development located in Beeston.

If your not familiar with Leeds, you might have heard of Beeston anyway – after all, it’s where the 7-7 bombers came from. It’s also where the football team Leeds United are based, and their accompanying Leeds United Service Crew, often described as the most notorious football hooligans in English history. That explains the two metre high security fence that runs around the perimeter of the complex then.

The idea behind the development is that it is supposed to be eco friendly – which is basically an excuse not to provide any of the tenants with a dishwasher or even a microwave, or anything useful like that.

But enough of bashing where they live. The food itself was outstanding. Individual Beef Wellington’s are always going to work because however much pastry you wrap something up in, you’re still basically serving us steak and there is simply no bad way to do that. Add chocolate cake to the end of that and you have a winning combination. Thumbs up all round.

We recently moved the Chris Worfolk Foundation office to a different business centre in Leeds city centre. Given that we are in serviced offices, you would imagine that this would be a simple process. After all, all those adverts talk about getting a new office overnight so what could be simpler?

Of course, it actually isn’t that simple.

Firstly, when we tried to cancel our existing contract with Forsyth, we were told we couldn’t, as we had to give at least two months written notice and it was too close to the deadline to do this – that means that we had to sign a new agreement with them, otherwise we would go onto what was referred to as their rack rate, which had never been mentioned before, but was apparently very, very expensive.

Instead, they proposed that we simply re-sign a three month agreement, at an additional cost of £22 per month because rent is higher for short term contracts. Interesting, I say rent, but it isn’t actually rent as part of the agreement is that you’re not actually a tenant, you’re a “service user” so allow them to get round a lot of the laws set up to protect tenants.

They also insisted on a higher deposit, which meant we had to make an additional deposit payment of £69.60.

They also charge a “minimum flat fee” of £60 per workstation (we have two in the office) for redecorating the office into it’s original state, even though as part of the agreement, you have to return it to them in the originate state, or they charge you extra for this.

So, when you add up the maths, it comes out like this:

• Extra three months enforced office rent: £914.40
• Extra business service fees incurred for those months: £215.94
• Extra business rates incurred for those months: £57
• Standard repair bills for a pristine office: £120

That makes a total cost of £1,307.34. Of course, this wasn’t a huge surprise to us, as it’s all detailed in the agreement that we signed when we took on the office. What is more of a surprise is just how much it all adds up when you actually do the figures.

On top of that, when we got the office the door lock wasn’t working properly. I spoke to the centre manager and sent numerous emails over the course of the year to get it fixed and every time I was promised it would be, but it never was.

As a result of the problem, the door handle ended up breaking and still nothing was done about it. Yet once we had moved out, we were then given an extra bill for £120 to fix the door we had apparently broken (this is on top of the repair bills, which don’t actually repair anything).

That makes a total cost of £1,427.34. A bill the charity certainly did not need!

Our office car park is located down a side road in Headingley. This makes it difficult to pull out to head into town on an evening as the amount of cars going away from town down Otley Road quickly pile up at the traffic lights.

This shouldn’t be a problem, if people were considerate enough not to stop right across the junction and instead leave a space for those of us that are turning right into the far lane, but often people don’t – sometimes people just block the junction, usually people in Audis (the new car of choice for your garden-variety wanker).

So, on the first of November I wrote to Leeds City Council highways department, asking them to paint a keep clear sign on the road so that people to remind people that occasionally, just occasionally, other people like to use the road as well.

They prompted responded to me saying they would need to investigate and said they would respond by 22 November. They didn’t quite make this, but after a chaser email they responded to me on the 19 December, stating they agreed it was a problem and that they would arrange for a keep clear sign to be placed on the road!

I’m very pleased with the outcome. It might not be world peace, but it just goes to show you that you can bring about change for the better, with a relatively small amount of effort.

Last month, myself and Elina headed down to the Crowne Plaza hotel for a meeting of Leeds City Toastmasters.

Toastmasters is an international organisation that organises local public speaking clubs, where people go to increase their speaking, presentation and leadership skills. It looked pretty interesting so I decided it was worth checking out, just to see what it was about.

The meeting itself was very enjoyable. People presented a number of talks to which they were given up a topic and then asked to talk on it for two minutes, without any preparation. Everything was very regimented – the agenda contains exact times of when everything should happen and there was even someone assigned to make sure we kept to those times.

It was also quite inspiring to see people who had speech impediments or were clearly very anxious about public speaking, getting up and giving fantastic talks. It’s very intimidating to be honest, especially knowing that my talks are literally riddled with “erms” and other bad habits. Never the less, it looks like a great organisation and I am planning to attend on a regular basis, starting next month.

Earlier this month, I was invited to a wedding reception over in York. Due to the medication I’m on, I can’t drink, so I figured the most convenient thing to do was drive over. I didn’t want to arrive dead on 7:30 in case nobody else turned up at that time, so I decided to set off at 7:15, allowing 45 minutes to drive there, get parked and find the venue, thereby arriving a fashionable 30 minutes after the start time.

So I set off at 7:15 and got as far as the roundabout by the big Tesco when I ran into road works which had closed off the A64 entirely, so I followed a badly sign posted diversion route which took me up to Weatherby Road.

They seemed to disappear at this point so I kept driving as far as village which I believe was called Cottingham, at which point my sat nav finally provided me a route which was something other than make a U-turn and head back to the A64.

This involved joining the A1, and heading back down the motorway towards Leeds until I got back to the A1/A64 junction. By now I was massively behind schedule but I thought hey ho, at least I’m now on a dual carriageway all the way to York.

So I carried on down the A64, and suddenly saw a bunch of cars with their hazard lights on ahead of me. Next thing I know both lanes have come to a standstill and I can see some flashing emergency lights up ahead of me.

Apparently someone had been run over.

After being sat there for a while with an increasing feeling that I was going to be trapped on the A64 all night, the traffic eventually started to move again as a police officer started directing cars to take it in turns to make a U-turn and drive the wrong way down an on-ramp to the A64 which lead us into a village that was either near, or was, Weatherby.

By this point I had been on the road for almost two hours and didn’t really know what roads there were into York without the A64, so I just gave it up as a bad job and gave up. That meant that not only had I missed my friend’s wedding reception, but I was also now forced to buy dinner from McDonald’s because I had missed out on the buffet. Is there some kind of compensation fund I can claim that back from?

Recently, I headed down to Leeds Salon for their debate on “The Big Society: A Clean-up for the Charity Sector?” The event was well attended and had a diverse range of people there. Though as the event was part of Leeds Summat, I’m not sure whether that was partly responsible.

The speeches were good, though as someone who only dips in and out of politics a lot of the time, some of the content went over my head. The discussions afterward were very interesting as well. I’m looking forward to attending their next event.

Huzzah, the German Market has once again arrived on Millennium Square. So, A-Soc headed down there for a good bit of German sausage.

Earlier this month, Sir Jimmy Savile sadly passed away.

The reactions of the Leeds community showed just how much of an impact that he had. Having re-watched the Louis Theroux documentary, Jimmy estimated he has raised over £40,000 for charity. Now I like to think I’ve raised quite a bit in my time and yet, I’m fairly sure that you compared it as a percentage, it would be 0%.

It is no wonder, however. There doesn’t seem to be a person I can find who has a bad word about him. Indeed, the more people you ask the poor you seem to get a heartwarming story. Whether it was when he took time out to take a photo with Casual Dave or sign an autograph for my mum. Or the time he went to visit my dad while he was in the hospital or the time he gave my grandfather a lift.

Unfortunately, I was unable to go down and pay my respects as they moved the public viewing back from 9:00 to 9:45 and I had to be at work by then. Still, I’m never the less starting or getting involved with the following campaigns:

• A Statue for Sir Jimmy. If Don Revie is getting a statue (http://donreviestatue.com/), who was someone who I’m sure what a great guy, but I had to ask my dad about, I think it’s the least we can do for Jimmy.
• A Song for Jimmy. Jimmy is the new Princess Diana (the King of Hearts, if you will), I think it would be a fitting tribute for Elton John to write a song about him.
• The Jimmy Savile Arena. We’re building a brand new arena in Leeds, so why not name it after him? Why not indeed?