Friday night was far from my normal Friday night. Normal would be ferrying kids around, watching telly and maybe having a drink or two. No, this Friday was far from normal….but in a great way. I’m not sure when going out stopped happening, maybe as the family grew. But the draw of going out drinking all weekend definitely vanished from my world. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big drinker and I love my bed, so staying out late was always a push for me haha.
A couple of weeks ago, we met up with Helen R and her family at The Biscuit Factory, a really cool art gallery full of really quirky things for young and old alike. Anyway, afterwards in the coffee shop having the most yummy ice-cream, Helen R discovered The Late Shows 10 booklet. It’s like a pub crawl, but instead of getting filled with drink, you get filled with culture, museums, churches, art galleries….all kinds of wonderful venues open till late and ready to fill your mind with new and undiscovered things. So, we were sold. Marking off in the booklet what things we’d really like to go see and setting a route. Something to look forward to and a much needed girls’ night out.
Now you need to understand that right from the off, we were going to embrace this fully, try everything…….even if we made a fool of ourselves…..which is far easier than you think. So our first venue was Circus Central, high wire, juggling, trapeze……And the hoop thingy. We were encouraged to try them all, and we did……with varying levels of success. High wire walking (which was only actually 2ft off the ground) was ridiculously hard, fighting the instincts to put your hands down when you feel like you’re about to fall, but we tried and we laughed. In a room at the back was the trapeze, a huge pole and the hoop thingy. There was a 10yr old just walking up the pole like it was the easiest thing in the world and a guy just hanging from the trapeze……this was my kind of cool. So when a space became available on the hoop thingy, I just knew we had to have a go……so I thrust Helen R forward haha. Other people made it look so easy. Helen R was proof that it is not so, we laughed so hard. Next was my turn. Now I managed to get on, but not in a dainty way, but I was up and I loved it. Clearly our efforts frightened our friends off as they did not even try!!
Next we discovered a really great bar….Ernest, really great atmosphere, good music, quite a broad age range and the food looked amazing. This is definitely somewhere we will be going back to. Just down the street is Cobalt – face painting, lights and reflection, this place had the most chilled atmosphere. From there we ventured across to St Dominics Church where we enjoyed music, dance and churchly fashion….although we missed out on the food which is always disappointing.
Getting to the end of the night we wandered down towards 36 Lime Street. All night, in all the other venues, we’d heard people talking about Pitch Black Piano so thought we’d give it ago. Getting there at 10.45pm and seeing a queue was not good, but as the people before us were leaving they all passed saying “its worth waiting for”. This had better be good!! And it was. A small room with an eclectic range of seats and a small piano, a local musician playing 2 of his own tracks. Just a piano in the complete darkness…..well apart from our glow stick which did make us giggle. Having to totally focus and having one of our senses taken away was really good. Like listening from a different place almost.
Time for a last drink in The Cluny, time to sit a reflect of what we’d seen and done and how much we’d laughed, and that we should do it more. Oh and that we were the only ones with our face painted Bowie esq!!!
