The Real Story Award!

On Wednesday night, I went to the Manchester Blog Awards, an evening celebrating the blogging community in this lovely city. See the winning and nominated blogs here. My flatmate, Natalie Bradbury won the Best Arts and Culture Award for her fantastic work over at The Shrieking Violet.

On the same evening, The Real Story Competition also announced its winners. Over 60 people submitted creative non-fiction pieces to the competition, and 5 winners were chosen to read at the Manchester Blog Awards... and I was one of those five! We didn't win anything other than getting to read our stories out, but that was a pretty big deal anyway.

My story

And I recorded my reading of it, so you can listen to it here

It was a big night for me, and I had a really good time. It was also a chance to catch up with some friends and meet some amazing people that I'd never known about before. New friends!

Last night, I had a little early birthday celebration at the Soup Kitchen. I thought about my birthday last year, and how different my life was then. Even with all the changes and surprises this year and this town have brought into my life, I looked around last night and I had to admit: I have lovely friends, and I am lucky to have landed so softly in this town.

Mark pretends to be drunk, while I pretend to be sweet.

Mark then got worried what my parents would think, and stopped pretending to be drunk.

Gem thinks Joe is cute even when he acts like a doofus.

Joe and Geraint try to take a good picture. Hmm.

Joe fakes attack by gloved maniac.

Dear Despoina. I miss living with you.

Paul. We need PIE.

Andrew. Stop being so serious. It was a party, for goodness sake.

I realise from the pictures I've shown you, it looks like only a few people came out, but that's not true. Lots of lovely people were there, I just didn't get pictures of all of them. Allow this beautiful picture, taken by I don't remember whom, stand for them.