Posts Tagged ‘headingley’

Finnish Christmas Carols are held in Leeds every year, on the last Saturday in November. Lutheranism is the main brand of Christianity in Finland so appropriately, it is held in St. Luke’s Lutheran church in Headingley. The same venue as the Finnish [language] Saturday school takes place.

This is the first year that we took Venla (obviously). Did she enjoy it? Who knows, because she slept through the entire thing.

Despite the fact that she was sleeping for most of it, she did dance along to the children’s song. I was not going to let her miss that, unconscious or not.

There is always a bring-and-share supper after the service. We brought cake. This year it featured a lot of people looking at our baby and saying things like “that is a nice baby”. Or, commonly, “that is a very calm baby you have there.” Because, like all babies, she is remarkably calm when other people are around, saving all the crying up for when she gets home.

Unfortunately, I was from singing along for the same reason as last year: my Finnish is not good enough, nor is my knowledge of English carols.

Last week, we headed up to Headingley for the Finnish Christmas Carols concert.

It was held at the Lutheran Church in Headingley, and there were around twenty people there, mostly Finns. Mixed in with the hymn, which had an organ for the first time this year (in previous years, they have just sung, without music), they had a short play as well, about how you should be dishonest in order to achieve personal gain (not quite why you would include a play with such a message, but there you go).

I’m not sure about the idea of getting a nation of people famous for being rather introverted to sing, but Elina seemed to enjoy it, so job done I guess.

After, everyone headed into the church house in which there was some Finnish food laid on. There were also feedback forms, in which I suggested it would be great if the church could get wifi installed.

Recently, I visited Headingley Cafe Scientifique for the first time for a talk entitled “Intelligence of Genetics.”

I had never attended the Headingley Cafe before but it seems very well attended. It was standing room only by the time the event kicked off and there were plenty of seating available – so they probably had 50+ people there.

The venue was the New Headingley Club which looked very fancy on the website but turned out to be significantly less fancy in the flesh. I got plenty of change from my round at the bar though, so will approve of that!

The event itself was somewhat disappointing. I came away from the talk not really feeling that I had learnt anything – other than that we have a one in three chance of getting Alzheimer’s disease and this massively varies depending on our genetics. There were lots of stats, but a lot of these weren’t really in much context – am I supposed to be impressed by that number? I don’t know what an average sample size for your area of science.

Still, it was good to finally make it down to the Headingley Cafe.

Last week, we headed over to Trio for a bit of a work social. Despite making it clear that partners were invited, but not welcome, it somehow quickly turned into a bit of a couples-fest and as a possible first for Buzz, actually ended up with an equal gender balance.

The drinks were good. Their Rekorderlig was a bit of a rip-off, they had a “special offer” of bottles for £2.50, but it wasn’t the kind of bottle you would expect if you got a bottle of Kopparberg, it was a small beer style bottle.

Far more importantly, however, we were there for the two for one cocktails.

These started well, they had a menu but the first bartender we got was willing to mix up anything and I was soon sipping on an apricot martini. The second bartender we got was far more disappointing, however, despite working at a cocktail bar, he had never even heard of a sloppy joe, let alone being willing to mix one. Service was at least reasonably speedy, however.

The restaurant was far more of a disappointment. Despite charging almost £20 for a fillet steak, it couldn’t even compete with the likes of Brooklyn Bar or The Restaurant, let alone Blackhouse or Cattle Grid, all of which are cheaper, despite being in the city centre!

All in all, a good place to go for cocktails, but I can’t recommend eating there.

For so long we talked about Pub Week. The critics said we couldn’t do it. They told us we were crazy; that it was impossible. But thanks to the vision and dreams of two Dynamic Young Go-Getters, we made the dream a reality.

Pub Lunch Friday was struggling a bit when myself and Jason arrived at Buzz, but a bit of elbow grease and we had it firmly up and running again. Soon we introduced Box Mondays as well, given the food at The Box is excellent and with it being half priced on Mondays means it’s actually reasonably priced too. So all it took was a sly trip to the pub on a certain Wednesday when we realised we could probably just eliminate non-pub lunches altogether.

After an enjoyable start with Box Mondays, we decided to return to the pub the next day of Taps Tuesdays. On Wednesday where else would we go but West End House for West End House Wednesdays (in a West End House in a dead end world – Kirkstall, east end boys…) and finished off the week with Arcadia Thursdays (who had run out of pretty much everything on their menu – poor show) and Pub Lunch Fridays at The Skyrack as usual.

Good times.

I would also like to thank my fellow Buzz social committee chair Jason for making it a reality.

Sunday afternoon we headed down to Shaky Jakes in Headingley for some sundaes to celebrate Viv’s birthday. They literally have every chocolate bar you can think of available to make into a milkshake or sundae and if there is something they don’t have you can even take your own chocolate down and have them use that!

Today was Lachlan’s birthday so the obvious solution was for everyone to sleighly leave the office, don fancy dress hats and accessories and then go back in singing “happy birthday.” I say obvious, it was certainly successful. This was followed by us heading over to The Box for a few drinks or two at 4:30. 5 hours later and we were all still there.

Given it was Nathan’s first day, we came very closing to telling him that every Thursday was Fancy Dress Thursday but as amusing as that would have been, we decided it was just a little too unfair in the end. Aren’t we nice people 😉 .

The secret is, it never looks good.

After doing some good for the community we decided to head to The Original Oak to do some good for ourselves – by taking advantage of grill night. While you were never going to get an amazing mixed grill for £6 including a drink it was never the less more than enough to fill me and indeed very good food given the price.