Gusto Knutsford- Eating Out

I had not seen my best friend properly for a while, so I decided to book a table at our favourite restaurant, Gusto in Knutsford, an Italian chain that have a lot of restaurants in the North West and also a couple dotted around Great Britain. I have been to Gusto a few times and I have never been disappointed, however, there were a few grumbles about my last trip.

When we got there, it was quite busy, but nothing on what it is usually like, probably because it was a Sunday and a few days before NYE. We sat down at the bar, I got my usual starting drink, a Watermelon Iced Tea (a twist on the classic Long Island Iced Tea) whilst Abbie got a coke (she was driving). The presentation of the cocktails are always great and they are the perfect way to kick the night off.

 We arrived at around 7:20pm and our table was booked for 7:30pm. However, we had finished our drinks during our 20-30 minute wait for a table. We also noticed that people walking in after us were being seated first. They may have had tables booked earlier than ours, who knows, but it was slightly annoying. 

When we sat down, we got served straight away. I ordered the Focaccia and a glass of Prosecco and Abbie ordered her usual, the Garlic Dough Petals and a water. They came quite quickly, however, again, I did notice people who had been seated after us getting their food first. This may also have been because they ordered simpler food, I don't know, but it seemed odd as this didn't usually happen.

After eating our starters, our plates were cleared, and we waited for our main course. The table next to us, who were seated after us, again got their meals first even though there were more of them than there were at our table. Oh well. We both ordered the Gusto Burger cooked medium. When the burger came, it was not medium which was a shame. It was as if our order was forgotten about as it was well done, no pink in sight. However, it tasted great and it was hot, unlike the man's pizza at the table next to ours, again, none of my business. (At this point I had forgotten to take pictures, apologies.)

Our plates were taken and we were then given the dessert menu. I ordered another cocktail (a Passion Fruit Mojito, another twist on a classic), however they were out of passion fruit to garnish the drink. I told the waitress that it was okay but she insisted that they would make me something special to make up for it. I wasn't going to complain at that. She came back with my drink that had passion fruit syrup in but was garnished with strawberries. It was the best drink I had ever had from Gusto. The bar staff really knew how to compliment the flavour of the passion fruit and it was lovely.

Our desserts came quite quickly. I had ordered the Mascarpone and Nutella Calzone with pistachio Ice Cream and Abbie order two scoops of Pistachio Ice Cream and a scoop of Vanilla. Mine came warm as it should with none if the ice cream melted, so it has been plated up and bought to us immediately which I really liked. As per usual, the dessert was delicious.

We paid the bill (always reasonably priced and perfect for students like Abbie and myself), left a tip and drove home. Looking back, the atmosphere was lovely that night. The waiting staff do come over and check that the meal is okay, however, they do not hover like I have experienced in other places. I was slightly disappointed with the food as I know the standards are higher than what we got on our visit, however, it is not enough to stop me visiting Gusto again in the future.

December Bucket List- A Look Back

At the end of November, I wrote up a bucket list of the things I wanted to accomplish by the end of December. Here's how it went.

1. Try A Gin And Tonic

This did happen, quite early on actually. It was at work's Christmas party and we had free drinks tokens so I thought 'why not'. The findings- it's amazing!

2. Make Macaroons

I am really disappointed with myself because this just didn't happen. The kitchen has been constantly taken over by Christmas preparation and I've not had the time either. Hopefully I'll find the time and space in the next few weeks.

3. Have An Amazing Christmas Day

It wasn't spectacular by any means but it was an enjoyable day. Amazing food, good company and we had a laugh as a family. Everyone loved their presents and it was lovely just to have some time to relax as a family.

4. Write Up Some Festive Blog Posts

I have to admit, this month I seem to just have moaned a lot about topical things. This needs to stop, I need to be more friendly in January. I didn't spread the Christmas spirit and for that, I am sorry.

5. Try My Hand At Making Tree Decorations

Again, didn't happen. Out tree was bought a week before Christmas because this is Blue's (my dog's) first Christmas with us. We didn't know how he was going to react to the tree so my parents kept putting it off. We eventually got a disappointing plastic tree that could barely hold the decorations we already had, no room for any extras this year.

6. Learn To Crochet

There's a pattern occurring here. I didn't even buy the things I need to learn to crochet. Again, this was a time issue. However, in the new year I will buy the equipment and learn to crochet after work to unwind.

7. Watch All The Christmas Films

I watched Elf more times than I can remember. But then again, it is my favourite. I also watched The Nightmare Before Christmas, which is both a Halloween and Christmas film, just to settle the argument. I think that was it. There were a lot of Disney films also watched.

8. Finish Reading 28 & A Half Wishes

It got so boring so I gave up on it. It's not often that I just give up on books but this was awful and predictable and yes I sang it's praises in the actual bucket list but things change.

9. Get To At Least One Blogger Event

There was one event I was really interested in that was based in Manchester and I think it was hosted by a jewellery shop or something similar. However, that night I had promised my mum that I would go to the Christmas markets with her in my hometown and that clashed with the event. I was gutted but I got some nice things from the market and also ended up seeing my best friend and my cousin, it was a win win situation.

10. Make New Blogger Friends

Well, I have made new blogger acquaintances and I have talked to a few bloggers on Twitter and a group on Facebook that I'm a part of. I'm starting to dive head first into the world of blogging and I'm getting involved in the community slowly but surely and I can't wait to see what January brings. 

Christmas #1- One X Factor Victory Too Many?

I think we all saw it coming, no matter how much we didn't want it, The X Factor have (yet again) scooped the Christmas number 1 spot, and it's actually gone quite unnoticed.

The thing is, since The X Factor came along, churning out squeaky clean pop songs into the British charts at Christmastime, the Christmas number 1 single doesn't seem to matter as much anymore. Yes, the first few years that Cowell decided he would personally choose the number 1, the anticipation as still there. And in 2009, when rather a lot of us decided to boycott the charts and Killing In The Name by Rage Against The Machine was number 1.

The year was 2004, the man was Steve Brookstein. The first winner of the X Factor anywhere in the world, and it was guaranteed the show would become a phenomenon after the winner's single reached that all important Christmas number 1 spot. The years kept coming, and so did the X Factor winners. After 11 years and now 7 top spot singles, it's getting so boring, and I presume I'm not the only one who feels like this.

In the years before the X Factor (I know, it's hard to believe there was a time when it wasn't here), actual festive songs were topping the charts during the holidays. It wasn't happening every year, but since the 1950s, Christmas songs were claiming that important spot every few years. Ironically, the last Christmas song to hit number 1 was Band Aid 20, in 2004. That was 10 years ago, and alright, we've had other acts like the Military Wives and Justice Collection who were both spreading the word and raising money for a good cause, lovely. Women singing to their husbands who were at war and reminding them that they love them. It was cute.

So Simon, if you;re reading, pack it in. We want to be able to celebrate family and festivities during this time of year and not fund your expensive habits. Either put off the winner's single until after Christmas or just air the show at another time of the year. Give us a well deserved break.

Picture Sourse: http://images.nymag.com/daily/entertainment/20090630_simonmoney_250x375.jpg

Share Some Love This Christmas

Okay so Christmas is coming up very rapidly and apart from having all my presents bought and nearly all of them wrapped, I;m completely unprepared, we don't even have our decorations up at home yet! I usually write a Christmas list to help my friends and family who wish to buy me gifts because they normally tell me I am difficult to buy for (apart from my best friend who always knows what to buy for me). So, here goes:

• 'Wreck This Journal' by Keri Smith, have a peek here
• 'Finish This Book' also by Keri Smith, have another peek here
• A record player that also looks like a briefcase (the dotty one from Urban Outfitters)
• More modern vinyl, preferably: Collide With The Sky, The 1975 & Save Rock & Roll
• A really cool piece of unique artwork to hang in my bedroom
• More candles (I like all smells)
• Cushions for my bed, the quirkier the better

So I hope this gives you all an idea of what I might be looking to get this Christmas. I realise this post makes me look really materialistic, but really, I love Christmas because I get to spend time with my family and make new memories, most of my favourite childhood memories come from the festive period. I also love to give to charity during this time and last year I helped my college send 40 (or so) shoeboxes over to Romania for orphans and children living in severe poverty. Apparently they loved the fact that nearly every box has soap, a toothbrush and toothpaste in, some of them didn't even know how to use them which broke my heart.

I suppose the point of this post is, share some love this Christmas. Giving a little bit of money, or even your time, to a local charity or to someone far away will help them enjoy Christmas as much as you will this year. It upsets me that people spend Christmas lonely, or ill, or in poverty when there are people out there with spare time and spare money who could give them something to make their holiday season a little brighter. Spend some time with a lonely older person, help the homeless find somewhere to spend the colder nights and hopefully get back on their feet, or just give your spare change to the charity collectors that are dotted around at this time of year. Do something to make this world a little better.

The Best Books I Ever Read

I keep it quite quiet that I'm a major bookworm. If I'm honest, books mean a lot to me, my mum read to me when I was little, I learnt a lot of important life lessons through books and I have turned to books and escaping to fictional worlds when times get tough to live my life though someone else's eyes and sometimes even see that other peoples' lives are not as bad as mine. There a few a few of my favourites, although it's very hard to choose!

1. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee

This is and I believe always will be my favourite book. I read it during my GCSEs and started to hate it when I had to read into every little detail in depth, but after rereading it a little while later, I fell back in love with it. The story is told through the eyes of a young girl called Scout and is based on her adventures with her older brother Jem and their net door neighbour Dill. Her dad, Atticus Finch, is a well respected lawyer and is working on a very important case where a black man had reportedly raped a young, white girl in the Deep South during the early 1930s when racism was at its height.

The story sees Scout looking up to her father and following his court case without really knowing what's going on whilst finding out more about the secrets of their town Maycomb and the people within it including a family in severe poverty and a man who got locked up for apparently killing people in the town. With a lot of twists and turns, I'd definitely recommend this read for anyone who wants a good plot that they can sink their teeth into.

2. Paper Towns - John Green

There are no words to describe my emotional attachment to this book. John Green quickly became my favourite author after I started reading A Fault In Out Stars (before the hype- may I add) and I think he is the best person ever (I mean have you ever seen Mental Floss?!). This book is about a guy and a girl who quickly form a very tight bond, and after she goes missing, he wants to find her, badly. It explores the themes of emotional attachment and obsession beautifully and being a person who gets attached to objects and people quite quickly, I believe John portrays this amazingly.

The characters are 100% loveable and are really easy to identify with. The movie is set to come out next year, I don;t fully agree with the casting and I believe there are many other people who could play the female lead better than Cara Delevigne (most people would actually) and I know a lot of Paper Towns fans agree with me. If you enjoyed TFIOS, you will love this even more, to me, it's John Green's most underrated book, which quite frankly shouldn't be the case.

3. The Gruffalo- Julia Donaldson

Okay, so it's a kids' book. I literally don't care. The Gruffalo is a cute little story about a mouse who avoids his predators by telling them about a giant grizzly monster called the Gruffalo. Little does he know that the Gruffalo is real and scares his predators into not eating him. It's charming, it's adorable and it has a sequel- The Gruffalo's Child. I don't care how old you are; if you haven't read this before go and do it. Right now. It won't take you long.

4. Hush Hush- Becca Fitzpatrick

This one is a little bit cheese and there's a whole saga but this is the only really good book in it. Now that that's out of the way, I read this book about 5 times back to back when I was in high school, just after the Twilight craze kicked off (a saga I never actually finished). It's about a guy who is a fallen angel and a girl who falls in love with him and then finds out he is hiding a huge secret.

I suppose this book is a bit of a guilty pleasure. I'm supposed to have outgrown it but I still do have a soft spot for Patch and Nora. It's a typical teen romance story with the supernatural edge. Like Twilight but better written, with a better plot and more relateable characters. Okay, so it's not much like Twilight.

5. Unknown

This is really bad of me but there is a book that I adore and I lent it to my nan and I can't for the life of me remember what it is called (so if anyone knows, can you let me know please!). It's about a young girl who has grown up in a cult in America and one day gets forced to marry her 70 year old uncle at the age of around 15. She seeks refuge in books (a lot like me but I;m not in a cult or being forced to get married) and gets illegal books from a mobile library to see what life is like outside of her cult. It is a gorgeous book and a quick read but with so much detail, I hoped for a sequel but it never happened.

If you, like me, love books and want to share, I'd love you to! Comment on this post and who knows, we might even have a new blogger book club, that would be awesome! Let me know if there are any good reads that I should delve into because I've just left a very predictable, boring one behind.

Those Crazy Women

I'm not the biggest fan of Taylor Swift or her music, but when I heard a little bit of an uproar in the feminist community, I decided to check out her video for her new song 'Blank Space'. After being branded as 'crazy' by a few guys in the past, I completely understood where the feminists were coming from.

If you haven't seen the video, it features a relationship between Taylor and a very attractive man which has major ups and downs which lead to them shouting at each other, Taylor Swift destroying a beautiful car (I almost wept) and at one point I think she was stood on a horse? Yeah, it was a bit weird.

Now I don't know if she was trying to show men that their girlfriends aren't that crazy and they shouldn't be branding women as crazy because this is how they behave, or if she was saying that this is how women wish they could behave and, in fact, are nuts. Either way, the video portrays women in an awful light and actually makes me think, why have I been branded 'crazy' in the past.

Most of the time, the guys who have called me crazy weren't even my boyfriends? There was one guy who couldn't decide between me and my best friend. He told me to kill myself (that's another story) and still to this day calls me psychotic to my best friend (it happened literally 2 days ago).

If this is anything to go by, are people just calling women crazy to cover their own tracks? Let me know your thoughts because I'm still a bit confused. Email me at emily.ware96@gmail.com and I'll compile all the answers in one post.

Thanks guys!

The Myths Of Britain Banished

Okay, so I've noticed, now that my blog is a whole month old, that I get my fair share of readers from across the globe, hello to all of you! From talking to people from around the world on platforms like Twitter, I have noticed there are a lot of misconceptions about my wonderful homeland. I'm going to bust some of these myths and let you know what the real Britain is like.

Firstly, I hear a lot of girls say they want a British boyfriend. Here is what I suspect they are thinking of:

And here is what rather a few of the guys in Britain are actually like:

So to all you girls out there dreaming of your perfect British man, yes there are a lot of beautiful charming gentlemen (I am fortunate to have met  quite a few myself), but just remember what us British girls also have to put up with whilst trying to find our own. Myth number one: busted.

Another common misconception is that we all talk like the queen, when in fact, all the little towns and cities have their own accents and regional words. For example, living in Cheshire, I would call a round piece of bread a bun or a roll, but move elsewhere in the country, you may find the same round piece of bread being called a cob, a bap, or a barm cake. Yes, this is a little bit weird for such a small country, but we do all speak a little bit differently, it's not just Scottish, English, Welsh and Irish accents, there's a whole variety of sounds that come out from our mouths. This map should help you understand more:

Myth 2: banished.

Probably the worst misconception is that we all drink tea all the time and it's all we ever drink as we all love it so much that we bathe in it. As a matter of fact: I hate tea, and I also know a lot of other people who agree with me, and are British. It's brown and earthy and disgusting. I'd much rather have a lovely cup of coffee than a tiny sip of tea, thank you. Yes, I suppose we do consume a lot of tea as a country, but then again, so do a lot of other countries around the world. Another issue with tea: no we do not have afternoon tea all the time; when we do have afternoon tea it is a special occasion and we dress up and go to fancy hotels or restaurants and have posh little sandwiches and cakes. No, I have never been to afternoon tea, because surprise surprise, I don't drink it. Although we do have champagne afternoon tea now, I may have to try that instead.

Myth 3: bamboozled.

Here's a few more I have come across that I will quickly go through:

• We don't all have bad teeth- we actually get free braces on the NHS
• The Queen doesn't have more power over us than the Government
• Not all of our health care is free
• It doesn't always rain in Britain
• Our breakfasts aren't always huge- some people don't eat breakfast at all
• Great Britain, United Kingdom and England are not all the same
• We DO NOT like to queue, I, in fact, hate to queue (unless it's for a concert)

Now please, go forth and spread your newly found knowledge about British culture, and no more stereotyping us, thanks.

Picture Sources:

//i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01208/10th-tennant_1208537i.jpg

http://www.imjoe.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/chav-scum.jpg

http://front.dadaviz.com/media/viz_images/english-dialects-on-the-british-isles-3256618.png

My December Bucket List

I have recently been inspired by the blog posts I've been writing in work in the run up to the festive season. One suggested writing a bucket list of everything you want to do during the holidays and I thought: why not have a crack at it myself? So here it is!

1. Try a gin & tonic
2. Make macaroons (I'll share the results with all of you!)
3. Have an amazing Christmas day
4. Write up some festive blog posts
5. Try my hand at making tree decorations
6. Learn to crochet
7. Watch all the Christmas films! (Okay, just the good ones)
8. Finish reading Twenty Eight And A Half Wishes (it was a free book on iTunes, but it turns out it's actually pretty great, it's quite gritty, even though it sounds like a girly book)
9. Get to at least one blogger event (now I'm in a group that advertises them on Facebook!)
10. Make new blogger friends

I'll keep you all updated on Twitter and I'll write posts about the bigger points on there like the blogger events and learning to crochet (I've wanted to for so long!). 

What will be on your Christmas bucket list? Let me know.