Richard Baum

Tonight I am taking the evening off canvassing to attend a work function, which ironically is at Bury Town Hall. A few years ago the thought of spending a worknight anywhere but slumped in front of the TV or out with my friends would have had me harrumphing my way through the evening in a gale of indignant unhappiness. Now of course the Town Hall is like my second home, so I don’t mind at all. And there’s probably the chance to recoup some time owing in lieu. So that’s a double bonus.

Despite my frequent delusions of grandeur, colleagues in the party assure me that my absence tonight won’t have the campaign grinding to a temporary halt. So the leafleting and canvassing will continue this evening, and you may get the opportunity to meet Mary D’Albert, the Lib Dem Focus Team candidate for St Mary’s ward in the May 1st election.

Today I have started thinking about my birthday, which looms like a an ominous shadow in an otherwise blue sky. I would gladly mark the occasion with nothing more than a private wailing ceremony, shaking my fists skywards from the top of an isolated hill and loudly demanding my youth back off a clearly vengeful God. Unfortunately, both Tamsin and social convention dictate that I have do something more “sociable,” and thus I have been pondering restaurant opportunities, with the idea being that I invite a couple of my closest friends, leave the ones on the fringes to their Saturday nights in peace, and grab a quick bite before heading home to old age and death.

These days I’m glad that my birthday can pass without being force-fed garish-coloured alcopops in a hideous neon-universe of bars and clubs until I succumb to an alcoholic coma. But even though I am more willing than I once was, there’s still this nagging doubt I have in my mind that, as well as being a celebration of the desperately unwanted passage of time, none of my mates really want to spend their money on celebrating the fact that many years ago I popped into the world on an arbitrary date that coincides with today.

So I try to make the event a bit more special than normal by finding the most ridiculous restaurants in Manchester to go to. So that people can get so flummoxed by the menu that they ignore me, and I can kid myself that they’re all out to experience something bizarre and cultural, rather than stare grimly at me whilst I unwrap cards and they simmer with resentment at missing Dr Who.

I am torn between the Lebanese one in the Northern Quarter, and the new Russian one on Sackville Street. I must say I’m hedging towards Russian. Not just because it’s bigger and thus less likely to chuckle knowingly when I try to reserve a table, but also because it isn’t in the “Northern Quarter,” a name and an area so laughably pretentious that it makes me want to vomit my spleen out onto the ripped jeans of every hair-gelled whining label serf I pass there.

If anyone’s been to either, let me have the recommendations please. I reckon I’ll book on Wednesday…

Have a nice day.

Rick