It's National Curry Week- so what are you ordering to celebrate?
Here in Leeds, we have plenty of delectable curry options to choose from, whether you're opting to run up to Trinity Kitchen for Rola Wala's street food or sitting down at Tharavadu for a taste of one of Leeds' most loved (and celebrity frequented) restaurants.
Meal-box delivery company, HelloFresh, surveyed Brits to find out which city prefers the hottest curry- and Leeds has shown its true love of spice.
Ranking a respectable seventh place, Leeds was third highest in the north for spicy curries, narrowly losing out to Liverpool and Sheffield.
The top thirteen cities to handle spice was ranked as followed:
Norwich
Birmingham
Sheffield
Edinburgh
Belfast
Liverpool
Leeds
Southampton
Nottingham
Manchester
Cardiff
Bristol
Newcastle
Taking the crown for spicy curry conesseuirs, Norwich were given the top spot for their love of Phall, a curry that is considered the hottest available in the world and hits up to 350,000 Scoville units.
By comparison, the Vindaloo sits at around 100,000 Scoville units, which 1-in-20 in Birmingham voted as their favourite curry, landing them a silver medal in the survey.
Down the other end of the scale, the most popular curry in Newcastle was a korma, leaving the survey with no choice but to assume Geordies that don’t seem to be able to handle the heat. This was followed closely by Bristol who preferred mild curry Pasanda over any other city.
To find out our top picks of places to grab a curry in Leeds check out our Instagram page here.
Channel 4 is back looking for more adult virgins to take part in the potential next series of its hit reality show Virgin Island.
If you’re unfamiliar with Virgin Island, it’s unlike anything ever seen on TV before.
First hitting screens back in 2024 and having run for two successful seasons now, Virgin Island follows the journey of a group of adult virgins who are whisked off to a Mediterranean island retreat to learn life-changing skills in the art of intimacy.
Working with leading international therapists, the aim is to help the young people overcome their fears and insecurities when it comes to intimacy and sex.
Channel 4 said it chose to commission the show after a recent study into intimacy found out that one in eight British 26-year-olds is, apparently, still a virgin.
A casting call for the new series on the Channel 4 website reads: “Are you a virgin and do you need help and guidance with your fears and insecurities around intimacy and sex? Double Act Productions is casting adults for a potential second series of Virgin Island.”
You just need to be over 21 years of age to take part in the show.
Fancy it then? Or know someone who may be up for the ride? Applications for the potential next series of Virgin Island are now open, and there’s still plenty of time left to put your name down.
You can find out more and register your interest here.
Fossilised 320-million-year-old fish found in Leeds’ Roundhay Park
Clementine Hall
A prehistoric fish fossil has been unearthed at Roundhay Park in Leeds.
The fascinating prehistoric skull bone of a coelacanth fish was discovered by a geologist at Roundhay Park earlier this year.
It is thought the creature was frozen in time aeons ago, during an era when the park was submerged under a vast tropical lagoon.
The remarkable discovery has now been kindly donated to Leeds Museums and Galleries and added to the natural sciences collection at Leeds Discovery Centre.
Image: Leeds City Council
The Leeds fossil was found by Ru Smith of the Yorkshire Geological Society during a reconnaissance walk he was carrying out ahead of a planned field excursion in the north Leeds park.
Describing the moment he made the discovery, Ru said: “There’s a layer of rock in the park which dates from around 320 million years ago, from a time before the breakup of the continents, when what is now the park would have been situated close the Equator and under the warm waters of a tropical lagoon. West Central Africa would be a good place to find similar environments in the present.
“There’s a bed of freshwater mussels called Carbonicola at one level in the rock, and opening a piece of shale from this bed in my hands I saw something unusual – a distinctive skull bone of a large fish. I knew straight away this was something different and very rare."
The bone was verified byexperts as belonging to a coelacanth older than those found elsewhere in Yorkshire, making it the oldest fossil coelacanth discovered in the region.
Ru added: “Coelacanths are pretty amazing fish and it’s just very cool to think that at one time, you could have been standing in Leeds and watching them swim around above a bed of mussels in Roundhay Park.
“That’s really the wonder of geology, looking at the rock and time travelling in the imagination to what was a very different world.”
Sophie Smith -
3rd October 2022 
