Simone Reddington

Last week I met up for a well over-due catch up with my friends from uni. As we are all now grown up and live in various places across the North West, we decided to meet in Manchester as it was in the middle and accessible by a direct train for all of us.

Due to the bad weather and the reliability of Northern trains in todays climate, it was nearly 8 o’clock before we finally all arrived in Manchester city centre. Luckily, we already had booked a table at Manhatta, an American restaurant in the Deansgate area. It was New York themed, with a very glamorous interior but had a very limited menu. I ordered the Asian duck salad, which was very tasty. I loved the contrast of the taste of the duck and vegetables with sweet watermelon and pomegranate seeds in the salad.

We then headed to the Flight Club, a darts bar where we had a booking for a hour-long session. When walking through the city centre we walked past the Manchester Christmas, which are always very popular during the festive season. We stopped to admire the gorgeous Christmas tree in Spinningfields with adorable Nutcracker dolls. As someone who refuses to feel Christmassy until the 1st of December, I must admit to start feeling a little bit festive.

I have never played darts before so I had no idea what to expect when my friend suggested the Flight Club. Growing up, I often used to watch it on the TV when I was at my grandparents and I would normally associate the sport with working men’s pubs, rather than venues in a city centre. It was very fancy, with an old-fashioned but chic circus themed decor. The dart boards were all electronic, with sensors to measure the scores, which comes in very handy if you were playing as a novice to the game, like I was! We had so much fun playing different darts games such as Killer, and I discovered that I wasn’t bad at throwing either. I can imagine that they will get really busy in the run-up to Christmas with all the office parties. I would highly recommend it to anyone whose looking for something a bit different when making plans to go out on an evening with friends.

We would have like to have stayed out a bit longer, but we didn’t want to rely on getting the last train in case it got cancelled so we made our own separate journeys to headed back home. We did all have a gorgeous night, and it was so nice to venture to a different city for a lovely evening.