Celebrating Halloween with Nicola Adams
I’ve become very friendly with Olympic Gold Medal winning Boxer Nicola Adams of late after having met her at my bar,Fibre just after she won her medal. When she first came in lots of people were taking her picture and someone introduced me. We got chatting and hit it off well, have become friends and go out together regularly ever since.
I’m really jealous of her Nando’s black card which she got after the first thing she said in an interview on winning her medal was that she couldn’t wait to get a Nando’s. It’s great publicity for them, something you just couldn’t buy. I do have to point out that I’ve never had a Nando’s from her yet though!
A few weeks ago she text me to say she was going with Prime Minister David Cameron to Rio and was teaching kids how to box in the favelas over there. I gave her tips about Rio as I’ve been going for 10 years to the Rio Carnival and she’s got one of my books of Carnival In Rio pictures. Winning gold has made her a worldwide celebrity so she was recognized over there too.
We’ve been hanging out together quite a lot, she comes into Fibre and my club, Mission. We text each other a lot too. She’s working on writing a book at the moment, I hope she won’t be able to resist writing about our funniest night out in Leeds.
Her celebrity status makes it a bit of a nightmare being out with her though. Everyone wants to get a picture with her but she’s so polite and smiles all the time, but to me it’s annoying as everyone tells her the same thing, how proud they are and congratulates her, but of course you don’t want to turn down all that adulation.
It was her 30th Birthday last weekend so she celebrated it at Bar Fibre. She was then due to go to Birmingham on Saturday night but had such a good time the night before, she wanted to make a weekend of it and came back that night too.
It was one of our Halloween parties and I’d already had my face painted so she didn’t recognize me at first. I convinced her to have her face painted too so she could have a peaceful night out.
Posh the make up artist at Club Mission made us look identical. No one recognized her until she smiled as it’s so distinctive.
We borrowed wigs from drag queens in The Viaduct showbar as her hair is also braided and distinctive. She loved it as no one recognized her, she felt it was like being normal and anonymous again and she’d missed it.
We had such a good laugh and no one at the bar even recognized me even though I’m one of the owners. I had to pay rather than getting our drinks free. Nicola kept saying “we’re putting it on Terry George’s tab”. The bar staff weren’t having any of it though. I told her to stop causing trouble!
Going back into Fibre they made us queue up and stamped our hands to go in which I thought was hilarious. Then we moved on to Mission after hours but they tried to turn us away by saying they were closed.
Nicola told them “Terry put us on the guest list” but he still refused so I offered to ring Terry. Pretending to dial I said “Hi Terry, there’s a really fat guy on the door not letting us in. Very fat? yeah that’s him I don’t know his name he looks really grumpy and said he was Irish (but I knew he was from Leeds).” I was laughing to myself, “he’s going a bit bald on top too”. “ He said to just let us in.” By now he was getting really angry then Nicola said “ he said big boned , he never used the word fat”. The doorman said “ there’s no way you’re coming in now” . “ I was talking about someone else” I lied.
Suddenly another incident blew up down the road so he turned round to see what was going on. Like sneaky school kids we ran into the Club behind him and he didn’t know who to run after, us or deal with the other incident.
Nicola just walked behind the bar to pour herself a drink and pretended to work the till. None of the staff challenged her.
She said shed never had such a fantastic night, we didn’t leave until 4:30 am. I text her the next day to say I better get the wig back and apparently she’d woken up wearing it!