Love Saves The Day becomes An Outlet

The bad news about Love Saves The Day going bust (yes, for real this time) has a silver lining: an excellent new cafe has moved into its old digs in the Carver's Warehouse, the strange, ubermodern cube on Dale Street by Piccadilly basin.

An Outlet has left some things the same (shelves lined with posh groceries, a globetrotting soup and sarnie menu) and changed many others. The interior has been given a coat of black chalkboard paint and there was a short story about someone eating clams taking up most of one wall the day I went. There are also international newspapers, interesting books to peruse, and storyboard pads and pens should genius strike mid-pain au raisin.

It has a friendly buzz like the canteen of a busy creative firm, which is probably because it is effectively the canteen of creative firm Four23, which had just relocated upstairs when LSTD crashed and clubbed together with another tenant, engineering firm Martin Stockley Associates, to prevent the site from falling into the hands of StarbucksCaffeNeroCosta. Hard to imagine that lot being interested, though. The site is far too quiet, off in the cinematic no-man's-land between the Northern Quarter, Ancoats and Piccadilly. And thanks to their free wifi, it's my new favorite place to blog on the hoof.

Observer Woman: Bite Me

The Observer Woman monthly has been known to make me so angry that I waste perfectly good Sundays being a seething mass of bitter rage, devoting hours to brooding and muttering that were intended for lingering over your third cup of tea and lazily contemplating making another bacon sandwich. So I've stopped reading it. I've strictly limited myself to sneering at the cover (all right, and muttering just a little bit.)

That's why I'm delighted to see that two fine Mancunians have picked up my slack in the righteous ranting department, except they're doing it online and in a much more organized and coherent way. Observer Woman Makes Me Spit is a noble blog that defines its mission thusly:


It arrives once a month. It’s often painful, always annoying. Liable to invoke irrational mood swings and violent bursts of temper. It’s messy, embarrassing and is often known as ‘the curse.’ Yes. It’s the Observer Woman Magazine. Could it be less relevant? Could it be more offensive? 51% of humanity reduced to simpering, bitchy whores of the fashion industry. Nothing to trouble our little minds but hunky men, flashy lip gloss and Gucci gussets. We hate it. We hate it so much we went to all this trouble to set up this blog. And we have real jobs. It took a good 30 minutes out of our drinking time. Spill your bile here. We will.

And I will too. If I ever let myself read it again.