Weekend Reflections: the Cornerhouse grid

The Cornerhouse arts cinema and galleries are reflected today in November sunshine, as the Palace clock attempts a Salvador Dali melting clocks impression... Linking with Weekend Reflections.

Office working vs Home working and solutions with TSG

The UK has become a service sector economy and Manchester is no different. It was ranked as Europe's top city for business competitiveness and rated fourth in the world in 2010, Although there is much home working these days, many workers still rely on a daily commute to city centre offices. 

There are pros and cons. I think the best solution is a split between working from home and working from the office, enabling you to get all the work done without distractions but also to be able to keep in touch with colleagues and meetings. What's your preference for working?

Businesses are dependent of course on reliable technology and TSG offer a friendly local service for hardware and software solution. They are one of the UK’s leading IT support companies, trusted by thousands of businesses across a wide variety of industries. They  offer a full range of IT services to small and medium sized businesses and can also help larger organisations through a specialist division TSG Enterprise Solutions.

Rural Thursdays: Nature's traffic lights

Green for go and green for grow.

               Amber = get ready to change colour, autumn's here.

                              Red = Stop, end of the line for this leaf.

                                        Linked to the Rural Thursday blog.

ABC Wednesday: "Q" for quirkiness @TheOastHouseMcr

When the Oast House was built a year ago I considered it to be a very quixotic project. A replica of a south-east England building designed for drying hops, in Spinningfields?- the 21st century capitalist quarter of Manchester and full of the suited and booted? It seemed incongruous to me. 

I had deliberately avoided it until last week but once inside I was won over by its quirkiness and charm. Certainly Spinningfields needed some architecture that was different to the glass and steel square office blocks that dominate the heart of it. The design with wooden beams, shabby chic furnishings and rustic doors with metal latches somehow all works. The staff are lovely too, bright and cheery and well intentioned, in  fetching pink and white checked tops. Their enthusiasm shines beyond the meagre wages they are probably earning, like so many of the waiting and serving staff in the catering trade.

I enjoyed the atmosphere but my only gripe is with the food. There is nothing for vegans on the menu and not enough choice for those who would like to eat vegetarian. It is all heavily meat-centric and although the barbecued skewers are well presented on little stands, I would expect there to be veggie options for this too. 

I went for a Waldorf salad, which was so disappointing. The bed of salad leaves comprised about 95% of the dish. Far too much salad, and only a handful of grapes, a few pieces of celery and a couple of bits of broken walnut. The dressing was ok but too sweet for me. There may have been apple too but I cannot recall it. 

A Waldorf salad is so simple to get right and a healthy dish of beauty, but not at the Oast House on this occasion sadly. At least the Waldorf salad in Fawlty Towers got a few laughs...

I previously posted about the Oast House's exterior in summer: http://mancunianwave.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/oast-house-olympics.html

Linked to ABC Wednesdays , the Sesame Street of the bloggers' world. This week it's the letter "Q".

Barn charm: a barn for barges near a breach in the canal

Here on the Trent and Mersey Canal is a shelter, almost a barn, for narrow boats, or barges. Taken last week near Preston Brook in Cheshire. Linking for the first time today with the Barn Charm blog.

While this is a typically gentile and picturesque vision for canal users, in September a less usual scene was seen, when the 240 year old Trent and Mersey canal burst its banks. The breach caused damage that will cost an estimated £1.5 million (and many months) to repair. A 12 mile stretch of the canal, not far from the above photo has closed as a result. A Repair the breach fund has raised over £12,000 so far but needs every £1 it can get. Breach diary  updates.

Monday Murals: Amy Winehouse

We return to ever reliable Stevenson Square where a diverse range of street art style is  on show. Amy Winehouse looks on somewhat surprised to see her new backing band who seem to be melting into the pavement, Mary Poppins-style...

Taking part in Monday Murals .

Weekend Reflections: Brick, glass and leaf

In Spinningfields, where a solitary tree can hold its own and reflect just as well as as the Mancunian red brick buildings. Taking part in Weekend Reflections .

North Tea Power- an antidote to autumn darkness

A shoot-from-the-hip photo in North Tea Power.

With the clocks turning back last Sunday we are now cruelly plunged into darkness by the end of office hours. As the dark gloom descends by 5 o'clock a way to counteract its effects is over a cafétiere of loose leaf mint tea at North Tea Power on Tib Street.

North Tea Power is one of my favourite café names and its warmth is ideal for an autumn evening. I feel at home surrounded by the laptop typing tea drinkers, artists and their design portfolios and the usual suspects of nicely quirky Northern Quarter dwellers. This ideal post-work pick me up was made even better by a catch up with my friend Miriam (published writer and blogger at Little Bones and more), before she headed back across the North Sea to Germany.

My teenagers don't get the café name so, for non Brits and the under 30s, North Tea Power is a play on words of North Sea Power - which (as well as being similar in name to a great band, British Sea Power) came into the vernacular in the 1970s with the discovery and exploitation of North Sea oil reserves. I hope it will soon be in everyday usage again and applied to harnessing the massive potential of wind power from the North Sea.

My latest Smitten by Britain guest post take us back to a summer's weekend.  A toast to the Gower Coast is at: www.smittenbybritain.com/2012/11/a-toast-to-the-gower-coast/

The carpet crawlers heed their callers... Sofa Carpet Specialists

One of the abiding memories of my youth are endless Saturday mornings in tow behind my parents as they seemingly explored every carpet store in a 50 mile radius of our hone. This interminable search for new carpets was an inevitability which came with the purchase of a new house.

It was actually quite fun. The wonderful smell of new carpets almost overpowering as you entered the warehouse or local shop- a nascent aroma that, on reflection, I have fond memories of. The giant rolls of carpet suspended horizontally on poles from ceiling to floor made for adventurous games for my brother and I, as we left the parents to debate underlay and fibres, patterns and costs, square footage and shag piles. 

Had I retained some of that information instead of playing hide and seek while inhaling the blissful carpet newness, then I may have been better equipped when it came to carpet decision making for my own home, decades later. All I can recall from childhood carpet expeditions is that we had a psychedelic carpet in hall and landing, deep browns and black with swirls of orange and yellow fire emanating from it. Great for playing on. 

So these days, I am completely in the hands of experts, be they local independents or the large out of town superstores that advertise on television. SCS (Sofa Carpet Specialists) are up there with the most familiar brands and have been trading for over 100 years. 

The style these days (I think) is for muted, neutral, plain carpets, with which I concur. You can then accessorise your rooms with splashes of colour from artwork that you choose rather than, as in my childhood, having to choose items that fit in with the technicolour nightmare which stalks every inch of your living room, forever reminding all and sundry of your foolhardy and outrageous choice in the carpet showroom.

Carpets unsurprisingly do not occur in song lyrics very often. A beautiful exception is a track called the Carpet Crawlers but, before carpet advertising executives get too excited, the song has more to do with nature and the creating of a new life than a paean to flooring… Sheer poetry. 

There’s a 2009 jazz cover version Fragile’s Carpet Crawlers or there is this 2012 live performance, preceded by a marriage proposal, Ray Wilson’s Carpet Crawlers . Justice was done with this version back in 1993 by Human Drama which is the most moving of the cover versions I've heard. The original version is probably the best and is from that very same era of the psychedelic carpets of my early years and tears...

CDP Theme Day: At the water's edge

The City Daily Photo Theme Day for November takes the topic of At the water's edge. So, here we are (a few weeks ago, on 3rd October) at the Fernilee reservoir in East Cheshire, which was constructed in 1938. I was amused by the signs in the reservoir which state: "Do not pollute this reservoir- it's your drinking water."