Getting to the art of the matter

See that little pile of treats above? These were just some of my purchases from an artists’ open studio event in Nottingham yesterday.

And these were some more… I’ll show you what I did with them in a minute.

Yesterday morning we headed to St Jude’s Church in Mapperley where a group of artists were showing and selling the fruits of their labours. I’m sorry, I can’t call them creatives because creative is meant to be an adjective not a noun in my humble opinion – although I know a lot of people  use the term.

So I visited a church and inside I found a lot of creative people that I call artists – cos that really is a noun.

The event was organised as part of Nottingham Open Studios and the artists were a talented bunch. There was a jewellery maker with gorgeous silver rings, earrings and necklaces and some amazing woolen wear on another stall (but it was a bit warm for wool); there was a lovely lady who makes rugs from recycled clothing and they were funky designs and colours.

I loved this stall – I bought some cards and some new notebooks (I have scores of notebooks, I will never get through them all but I love new notebooks). She also made clocks using old book covers. She calls herself The Forgotten Library and blogs on wordpress.

We had a lovely chat about an old font book she had, which I wanted but it wasn’t for sale.

This is Lis from Lily Mosaics. I really, really want to make a mosaic sign for the front of the house with our door number on it (mainly cos the old one is unbelievably old and tatty) and Lis runs mosaic courses for beginners – yay. In the meantime I bought two little mosaic kits with everything I need to make a tiny gecko to join a large beautiful gecko that I bought  in Flying Horse Walk a while ago and a mosaic robin that will go in my new home office. Can’t wait to get started on those.

This lovely lady is Sasha Niamat who paints beautiful watercolours and is holding the fabulous scruffy robin that I bought from her. My first piece of original artwork. I’m very proud.

We had a chat about her work and she even invited me to visit her studio some time and see how she works. She gave me a robin card as well.

So you may be sensing a bit of a robin theme going on here. Three reasons: I like robins; they remind me of my dad who died a few years ago; and also my daughters have called Phill Robin since they first discovered he came from Nottingham.

This is Jen McEwan who makes the most stunning stained glass creations. From Jen I purchased yep, you’ve guessed it, a robin which will hang in my office window (when we’ve created my office space – not quite a work in progress yet!) and some strung pieces of coloured glass which I used to make this when I got home.

It makes such a gentle, pretty noise and glistens in the sunlight. I’ve hung them on a twig and strung with rope made by Phill ages ago on a trip to the Peak District.

Jen also leads workshops and I’ve love to have a go at making some stained glass.

I also picked up plenty of these…

I am a complete leaflet freak. My car, handbag, footstool, bookshelves, kitchen are full of them but I learn stuff and find interesting thing to do. Who knew there were vineyards 20 minutes outside Nottingham? Well I do now. And I picked up a brochure for Sherwood Art Week and there’s LOADS of stuff going on from art and craft fairs, exhibitions in shops, walking tours to look at Sherwood’s mosaics (I didn’t know it had any), music and food. It’s at the end of next month. I can’t wait.

I met some talented and fascinating people yesterday and bought some beautiful things for our home and garden as well as some things for me to have a go at as well.

A little bit of inspiration from these artists for me to start getting a little more creative again.

Poetry and crime

I like poetry – in fact I have been known to write poetry (probably really badly but what the hell) – however I really don’t know very much about it so an evening at Five Leaves Bookshop with poets Stuart Henson and John Harvey seemed a good opportunity to learn more.

The evening, a few weeks ago, was a pre-launch event for Nottingham’s poetry festival – the majority of which I was unfortunately unable to attend due to work and other commitments. The evening was free, I just emailed and reserved a seat, it was packed to the rafters and I learnt stuff. So a good night was had by me, and I think by all.

Stuart Henson was the first poet. He read several of his works, old and new and as he read, something occurred to me for the first time – poetry is meant to be heard, not read. During a poetry reading, the poet puts the intonation where he intended, pauses for a split second, or for a longer time, where necessary. A poem needs to be performed.

Some of the audience had their eyes closed and, I have to be honest, I had as much fun observing people listening to the poetry as I did listening to the poetry but that’s because I take an almost unhealthy pleasure in people watching. People are fascinating.

But I also found the poetry fascinating. I enjoyed Mr Henson’s poems very much – I even purchased a volume of it.

John Harvey was on my list of Nottingham authors to read. He’s very prolific and (according to Wikipedia) has written more than 100 books as well as scripts for stage, television and radio. On this particular evening he was launching a new book of poetry, Aslant, which features fabulous photographs taken by his daughter Molly Ernestine Boiling, who was also in attendance.

In fact she also read her father’s poetry.

I liked the language of the poems. They were accessible, not written to confuse or confound. I wasn’t searching for a meaning, feeling I was trying to gain access to a club of which I wasn’t a member. I got the imagery, clever words that put pictures in my head. I enjoyed the listening.

I bought a book of Mr Harvey’s poetry too – and a poetry anthology. I’ve read many of them. John Harvey’s I like very much, some of the ones in the poetry anthology I am not so keen on. I genuinely think that I shouldn’t have to struggle to find the meaning of words. I mean I’m educated, literate, I have a good vocabulary, if someone wants to communicate something to me, I’d appreciate it if they did it clearly and not hide behind obscure meanings. I suppose I just find it a bit pretentious. And surely choosing to read someone’s poetry is meant to be enjoyable not a chore (unless you are studying for an exam and I’m not).

I gave up on the anthology but I fully intend to read more of John Harvey’s poetry.

Before that, however, I thought I’d read one of his novels. His most famous creation, I believe, is a Detective Inspector called Charlie Resnick, based in Nottingham. It seemed a good place to start. Waterstones in the city centre stocked a fair few, I chose this one. I don’t know whether I should have started with the debut appearance of this jazz-loving detective, but I liked the look of this one and the novels all looked as though they were stand alone.

It’s funny but I’m not sure I’ve ever read a novel with as much geographical detail about a place I know pretty well and I loved the Nottingham details. This novel was written in the mid-1990s so more than 20 years ago and it was really interesting picking up some of the social history too.

Phill and I were on the bus into town the other day and I asked him whether there used to be a police station at Canning Circus. He pointed out the building at the top of Derby Road that used to house the old police station and asked me why I’d asked.

I’d asked because we’d just passed the Sir John Borlase Warren pub and in Living Proof, the CID officers pop in there for a drink after work.

As the mystery unfolded, I could follow the action around the city knowing the locations or wondering what shop had replaced one mentioned in the text. It added another dimension to what was a really good read any way. I do like a nice crime novel.

I now have another goodness knows how many books added to my ‘must read soon’ list. Every time I cross one off, another 20 or 30 get added.

I am so glad I went to that poetry evening. The evening itself was great fun, I have added to the list of reading matter and I have a new source of information about my adopted city.

As an aside, a couple of months ago I had a whistlestop tour around Beeston with Matt Turpin, project and communications manager for Nottingham City of Literature and self-proclaimed Lord Beestonia. He showed me a cafe where they have poetry slams. I now feel the urge to go along and hear some more poetry. Maybe one day I’ll even be brave enough to perform some of my own.

 

The Big Bang theory

(Otherwise entitled the worst practical joke in history)

I love this part of the Nottingham Canal. It’s a place of peace and tranquility in the middle of the city. Narrowboats mooch on by, chugging along at just a few miles an hour, fishermen sit quietly on the bank waiting for the next bite and there are walkers and cyclists along the towpath enjoying their exercise. In the evenings it livens up a bit with drinkers and diners filling the bars and restaurants along it.

But it hasn’t always been like this. Before the coming of the railways, this was a hive of industry. Huge warehouses were filled with goods to be transported up and down the country, boatmen thronged the banks loading and unloading their wares. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, this was the transport equivalent of the M25 – a crowded, bustling place where goods were dispatched from a to b.

It was also the scene of the first great British canal explosion. Nottingham has a lot of firsts and I think this is one of the more unusual.

The Nottingham Canal stretches 14.75 miles. An act of parliament granted permission for its construction in 1792. It was completed 10 years later.

By 1818, when our story takes place, this part of the canal was one of the most important transport hubs in the country.

On Monday September 28 1818, Captain Hezekiah Riley, working for the Nottingham Boat Company,  moored a boat under the warehouse of the Nottingham Canal Company. It was laden with a varied cargo that included stone, cotton, molasses and 21 barrels of gunpowder destined for the mines in Derbyshire. Each barrel contained 1001lbs of gunpowder.

Riley disappeared off into the warehouse while crewmen Benjamin Wheatley and Joseph Musson were left to start unloading. On the dock, the top of one of the gunpowder barrels had broken, spilling gunpowder on to the floor… and Joseph Musson had what he thought was a bright idea.

Along the dock a little was a boat with a fire going. Musson went along and took a piece of burning coal between two sticks and carried it back along the dock. He dropped it and picked it up in his hands, juggling it to stop his fingers burning. And then he dropped it on to the spilled gunpowder, thinking he would make a little flash.

All 21 barrels ignited – more than 21,000lbs of gunpowder – BOOM! The resulting explosion lifted the entire warehouse several feet in the air before it ‘burst asunder into innumerable fragments’ according to the witness testimony of a man in The Meadows. It blew the unfortunate Joseph Musson 126 yards across the canal where his body was found (in several locations apparently) in The Meadows. It also killed nine other people, including a young boy who had been quietly fishing by the canal, and a horse.

Buildings collapsed, roofs blew off, hundreds of windows shattered and heavy pieces of furniture fell over as if the city was suffering an earthquake. It “spread the most extensive devastation throughout the neighbourhood” and was described as “a most dreadful calamity”.

“The explosion was followed by a cloud of smoke that completely darkened the atmosphere.”

The bodies of the dead, many of whom had been blown a considerable distance in the blast, were taken to The Navigation where the inquests were held.

The damage caused to the warehouses was estimated at £30,000 but the insurance company refused to pay so Nottingham Canal Company sued boat operator Nottingham Boat Company and won damages of £1,000. Unfortunately, the boat company didn’t have that sort of cash and the Canal Co received just £500.

The people of Nottingham began a fund to help the relatives of those who had died – a 19th century crowdfunding project.

At 3pm on September 28 last year – 200 years to the minute after the explosion – this plaque was unveiled by Nottingham Civic Society to commemorate the first great British canal explosion. It was this plaque that prompted me to find out more.

And when I was researching the history of the disaster, I came across this on a site called Songs of the Inland Waterways.

It’s a folk song by Buz Collins entitled William Parker and it’s about the explosion.

The final lines say:

It was ten men that were killed that day and many others hurt
And it’s still I’ll haunt that warehouse where my body was torn and burnt
And it’s still I’ll haunt that warehouse for my spirits shall never be free
So remember the great explosion at the Nottingham Boat Company

It’s also really rather nice. I like folk music.

 

 

Out on a school night? What a drag!

“Ooh, ooh, ooh,” exclaimed my friend Paul at Cucamara, pointing his finger madly at me as he does when he gets excited, “Drag Queen Bingo, Tuesday.”

“Yes, yes, no, bugger, Tuesday? I’m meant to be in London.”

I’ve been very excited about the prospect of Drag Queen Bingo since Paul first mentioned it. I mean, what’s not to like? It’s drag queens calling bingo. Ok, to be honest I can take or leave the bingo bit. I’d only played once in a beachfront arcade in Skegness, really don’t see the big deal about it. But drag queens, well they just add a completely different dimension and I wanted to go.

But I did have a meeting in London. A little bit of research over the weekend (and a begging text to my boss) determined I could catch the 6.30am train to St Pancras, get to my meeting near Tower Bridge and, as long as I could be on the 4.35pm train home, I could get to Rough Trade in Hockley on time.

Look at me making plans to go out on a school night. For years Monday to Thursday has been eat, sleep, work, repeat. But this was drag queen bingo for goodness sake.

So 5.40am bus, 6.30am train, in to St Pancras by 8.20am and at the office by 9am. Meetings, meetings, schmeetings, tube at 3.45pm, train from St Pancras at 4.35pm, back in Nottingham by 6.20pm up to Hockley to meet Phill, quick drink at The Broadway Cinema where me met Paul and friends and then, still clutching my work laptop, we headed to Rough Trade.

I have no idea what The Friend Zone is but it was packed with lovely friendly people. People of all ages (I was by  no means the youngest or the oldest). There were men, women, gay, straight, trans, people who were unsure whether they were any or all of the above and people who didn’t care what they were anyway. A fine crowd.

It was already very busy so we bagged ourselves a table (a wallpaper pasting table in fact that sort of collapsed half way through the evening) and plonked ourselves down on beer barrels with cushions on top. The bar was reasonably priced and everyone was obviously looking forward to having a good time.

Bingo cost £5 for three games – bargain – and they even provided the pens.

Our hosts were Marilyn Sane and Nana Arthole and they were hilarious. As usually happens, they singled Phill out pretty quickly and picked on him for most of the evening. This happens often, I think he appears on some invisible radar giving out vibes that say ‘pick on me, I don’t care, I can take it’.

That and the fact he loves the attention 🙂

Marilyn and Nana are fantastic hostesses. They bounce off each other (no, not literally) and the verbal sparring was hilarious and risque. They dubbed our side of the room Refugee Corner because it was just off the main area. “The lifeboats are coming but Theresa says you can’t stay,” quipped Marilyn. “They say Brexit means Brexit but it doesn’t does it? Brexit doesn’t mean anything because it’s just a made up f***ing word.”

As well as taking the mickey out of Phill, which Marilyn in particular seemed to enjoy, they were quite happy to indulge in a bit of self-ridicule too. “When I was born,” said Nana, “my dad screamed at my mum ‘You promised me a boy. What’s that?’.”

“I got the award for trendiest boy at school,” said Marilyn. “Basically that just means faggot.”

And I might be a bingo novice but I swear these aren’t the traditional bingo calls:

Your make-up is NOT fine, 89

Daddy told me it was glue, 52

It burns when I pee, number 3

Marilyn you uncultured swine, 39

Nana smells like wee, 53

“Oooh there were some cheers for number 79 then, who’s into granny porn?”

We didn’t win, it didn’t matter. What mattered was we had a riot and it was well worth hauling myself to and from London in time to get back for this. Would I go again? Oh god yes, haven’t had such fun for ages.

I like to think we’re friends now (actually that’s just wishful thinking 🙂 ). That’s Marilyn on the left and Nana on the right and, just for clarity, the short, round, middle-aged one in the centre, looking very unglamorous in gorgeous company, is me.

I have no idea how often Drag Queen Bingo takes place, but if you get a chance to go then do it, you’ll have a great time.

 

 

Who said heroes have to be clean?

‘Heroes with Grimy Faces’ – Winston Churchill coined the term and he was referring to the firefighters and the Civil Defence Workers who helped protect home soil during the Second World War.

I discovered Nottingham’s memorial to these unsung heroes in the churchyard of St Mary’s when I was looking for the grave of George Africanus and, as I usually do, I made a point of reading every name. These tributes are erected because the people on them deserve some recognition, the very least I can do is read ALL their names.

When I’ve read the names on War Memorials in towns and villages across the country often I have come across two, three, sometimes more of the same surname and been struck by the sadness that some lost multiple family members in the fighting. I look for patterns and I look for anomalies because that’s where I find stories… and I love stories.

On the St Mary’s memorial I was interested to see there were two women included in the lists of names.

On August 28 1940 Ruth Willis lost her life and is immortalised at the top of this panel.

And on May 9 the following year Dorothy Coulson also died. Her name can be found midway down this panel on the memorial.

There are many men on the memorial too but the reason I am concentrating on the women is that I didn’t expect to see them there and so I wanted to discover more about them.

I am ashamed to admit that I had no idea about the bombings Nottingham suffered during the Second World War and I shall certainly be doing some more research into that at a later date. Forgive me, I’m a southerner. When I think of the Blitz, I think of it as being mainly in London, although some places like Coventry Cathedral also spring to mind. But I have little to no knowledge of what happened during the Second World War in Nottingham and I’ve added it to me ever-growing list of things to find out.

Trying to discover more about Ruth Willis and Dorothy Coulson, I came across this website which has information about all those featured on this memorial.

Ruth Willis was on duty with the Air Raid Precautions Service First Aid Party in Laxton when six bombs dropped just before 10.30pm on August 28 1940. She was standing near her front door when the first bomb fell in her front and was killed by shrapnel. Two other members of the first aid party were injured. The village school, farm buildings and several houses were damaged in the bombing.

Dorothy Coulson was a Firewatcher. On May 9 1941 fires were blazing in the factories and other buildings on Newark Street and Manvers Street following heavy bombing. Dorothy was in an underground shelter in Dakeyne Street when it was penetrated by one of the bombs. She was just one of 21 people who died as a result of that explosion.

The memorial also includes the names of firefighters who have died in the line of duty since the end of the Second World War. Thankfully the number of names is few, the final two being Philip Hunsley and James Quickenden.

Leading firefighter Philip Hunsley was 54 and was meant to retire but he’d stayed on for six months to train new recruits. He collapsed and died following a training session on March 3 1998.

Firefighter James Quickenden was based at East Midlands Airport and was also a Retained Firefighter at CarltonFire Station. He was undergoing a training session at East Midlands Airport when he collapsed and died on March 22 1999.

Princess Anne unveiled the memorial to these Heroes with Grimy Faces in 2013. That’s not actually that long ago and I’m surprised it took until then to commemorate these heroes.

Go to St Mary’s churchyard in the Lace Market if you get the time. Read the names. It’s the very least they deserve.

 

Out of Africa… the story of a Nottingham legend

Some time in 1766, a boat arrived in the UK carrying cargo from Sierra Leone. Among that cargo was a gift for Benjamin Molineux of Wolverhampton. That gift was a small black boy, aged about three years old. He was given to the Molineuxs as a slave, as was fashionable at that time.

The Molineuxs had the small boy christened. They named him George John Scipio Africanus – not, as one website told me when I was researching this, after ‘the Roman Generals’ (note the plural there) but after Publio Cornelius Scipio Africanus (236-183BC), the Roman general who beat Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202BC and who is considered to be one of the greatest military commanders and strategists of all time.

Now young George proved to be quite the strategist too, rising from his terrifying early years of capture, transportation and slavery to become a business and property owner in Nottingham, a ‘Freeholder’, a member of a group created to enforce civil order and the city’s first black entrepreneur.

I first came across his name on a blue plaque in Victoria Street. I’m a bit of blue plaque freak; I can spot them from half a mile and will climb over things to see what they say. This one piqued my interest because a) I’d never heard of him and b) I thought his name was interesting. When I discovered he was black and was formerly a slave, I became fascinated. How had this man thrown off the shackles to become a businessman in Georgian Britain? Had he married and had children? He obviously climbed the social ladder, did he have to combat racism along the way? So many questions.

So I determined to find out more about him, not realising quite how irritating my internet searching would prove (seriously, does no one check their facts any more?).

So back to George – sadly the name his family in Sierra Leone gave him is lost in the mists of time. Although he was enslaved to the Molineux family, he was relatively fortunate in that the family taught him to read and write and apprenticed him to a trade as a brass founder.

And times they were a-changing, In 1772 – the young George would have been about nine years old – it became illegal in England to own a slave, although it wasn’t until 1807 that the slave trade in Britain was finally abolished completely.

Some years later, and precisely when has been impossible to pin down, George is no longer in servitude and arrives in Nottingham. A variety of different sources state with their own certainty that he is anything from 18 to 24 years old at the time. In fact timetoast.com tells me the date of his arrival in the city is March 3 1784. Sadly it then says in brackets underneath ‘exact dates are not known’. Well that’s a pretty precise guess when you actually have no clue, timetoast!

What is known, and can be proved by documentary evidence, is that on August 3 1788, George married a Nottingham woman named Ester (or Esther) Shaw. They are married at St Peter’s Church where George is a parishoner, Ester having been recorded as being a parishoner of St Mary’s in Lace Market. She is a milliner, he a labourer and brass founder.

St Mary’s Church, Lace Market, Nottingham, where Ester was baptized and where George and Ester are buried

Interestingly, an article on the Wolverhampton Express and Star website from a few years ago about a play written about the Molineuxs and George, say he was apprenticed as a hairdresser. I can find nothing else that verifies that at all.

The couple had seven children but were marred by tragedy and only Hannah, their sixth child, survived until adulthood. While I did find somewhere that listed their children, their year of birth and their ages at death, it didn’t say how they died – I sense a visit to the Nottinghamshire archives coming on.

George and Ester also set up a business. The Africanus Register of Servants was, as the blue plaque pronounces, a pre-cursor to an employment agency, matching servants looking for work with employers. When Ester died in 1853, an obituary said she had helped run the business for around 60 years, which dates its formation to the early 1790s perhaps?

Documentary evidence is also available to show where the couple lived. A deed of sale for several properties in Chandlers Lane, Nottingham – close to where Victoria Street now runs – is dated October 24 1829. George Africanus paid £380 to purchase business premises and homes that he then let out from one Abraham Landy. You can even view a site map from the sale, outlining the property George purchased. It says there was an alleyway of seven feet wide between his property and the Blucher Public House. I Googled Blucher – apparently it’s a high shoe with laces over the tongue. Blucher Yard was behind George’s property.

Now many of the websites I looked at said George, who had now become a ‘Freeholder’ was now entitled to vote, something only one in seven men at the time were able to do at the time.

But there’s a problem with that too. The secret ballot for elections wasn’t introduced until 1872 and there is a polling book from the 1826 election shows George Africanus voting for the abolitionist John Smith Wright.  Even the Reform Act of 1832 only gave the vote to men in town’s who owned property with an annual value of £10. So if George voted in 1826, he must have already have been a property owner three years prior to having bought the property in Chandlers Lane.

So George was a business owner, a family man, a property owner, but he was also an upstanding member of the community. In 1811 The Luddites got a bit cross about knitting machines replacing manual workers and there were riots. These began in Nottingham. Some of George’s neighbours and acquaintances owned knitting machines. The city’s response was to form a Watch and Ward, a sort of Georgian Neighbourhood Watch, to keep civil order. George features on an 1816 list of members.

George Africanus died in May 1834. His gravestone says he was 70, the internet says he was 71. In his will he left everything to Ester and his only surviving child Hannah. But there’s still a story there. Hannah had married a man called Samuel Cropper, a clock and watchmaker. From his will, it’s clear George did not have high opinions of his son-in-law. While his will left everything to Ester and Hannah, it was on condition that Hannah never cohabited with her husband again.

Years after George’s death, though, census records show Ester, Hannah and Samuel living at the same address.

 

George’s incredible achievements faded from memory for a while until he was featured in Nottingham Castle’s Black Presence exhibition in 1993. In 2003 a plaque was erected to him on the railings of St Mary’s Church and his grave was rediscovered in the noughties thanks to an historian who in 1911 had mapped the whole churchyard. A rededication service of the grave took place in March 2007.

In August 2015 a Nottingham tram was named George Africanus in his honour.

Sadly there doesn’t appear to be any preserved words from George himself. It would have been fascinating to read letters, diaries or anything else in his own words.

He was a black African slave, became a free man, he set up a business, married a white woman and had children, purchased property and was a landlord, was among the elite voting classes, became a member of an organisation designed to keep civil order and left the fruits of his labours to women… in the first half of the 1800s.

Why has no one made a film about this man?

Votes for women

Do I think of myself as a feminist? I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot recently. After the gender pay thing hit the headlines, everyone went into overdrive about gender inequality in a way I hadn’t really noticed since the late 70s and early 80s. At work a new women’s group was formed. I genuinely couldn’t decide whether or not it was something I was interested in becoming part of or not.

So I started thinking about what I did and didn’t believe about gender and came to the conclusion that I wasn’t interested because I’ve had a pretty charmed life and I’ve never really experienced any gender bias. My parents brought me up to believe that I could do anything I wanted to as long as I put my mind to it and they taught me to do lots of things. I can, for example, knit, I can sew – not just in straight lines but I can make clothing – I can cook, I clean the filter of a washing machine, I can strip down and rebuild a car engine, I can do the decorating, wire a plug. Yes, ok, if a light bulb blows, Phill changes it but that has nothing to do with him being male and me being female and everything to do with him being 6ft 2 and me being 5ft 2.

I have never been blocked from doing anything at work. I honestly don’t feel I have ever been passed over for a job because of my gender. Ok at a recent company meeting of my contemporaries from around the country there were only three women in a room of around 20 people. Is that because women were not given the opportunity to take up these jobs? Honestly, I don’t know.

And then I remembered how angry I was in my late teens when I went into a snooker club and wasn’t allowed to get served at the bar because I was a woman and how I once nearly got fired when an editor asked me to tell a junior reporter to wear tights because he didn’t like her legs and I told him exactly what I thought of him and his idea. Or how me and a number of other female reporters had to campaign to be allowed to wear trousers to work (that was circa 1988).

My mother would tell you that one of my earliest phrases as a child was ‘I can do it by my own self’. I really don’t like it when people tell me I unable or incapable of doing things.

The reason for all that preamble is that I went to have a look at the current exhibition at the Nottingham Contemporary yesterday not knowing what it was in advance and came across Still I Rise: Feminism, Gender, Resistance. And I’m glad I did because it finishes on Sunday (January 27).

I love Nottingham Contemporary. I love the variety of exhibitions it stages but I always enjoy the multimedia aspect of most of the exhibitions there. Still I rise included audio, video, photography, the amazing banners above, literature and magazines from campaigners and agitators, art, architecture, the list goes on.

I was fascinated by this photograph.

This was among the photographs of the Suffragettes (oh how angry I would be if I didn’t have the right to vote). This is an image of the Indian members of the Suffrage movement taken in June 1911. Not enough is made about the contribution of Indian women to the UK Suffrage movement and yet, while women in Britain got equal voting rights in 1928, Indian women had to wait until India was granted its independence in 1947 to get full voting rights – that’s 36 years after this photo was taken.

There were also many images of women from the Paris Commune. All the images were taken of women who were either executed or deported.

Statement cushions littering the floor in one of the galleries.

I love these. Some of the protest posters on display. There was also a great book of posters from the Red Women’s Workshop to flick through, along with a lot of literature from LGBTQ+, race and environmental activists including books and underground magazines. I could have sat there reading them for hours.

There were a fair few vaginas on the walls: either depictions of or anatomical explanations of, what to do with one, what not to do with one, what can go into one, what can come out of one. There was little to surprise me in that section.

What did get to me were the photographs of the mothers, sisters, daughters, wives of ‘The Disappeared’ campaigning for information about their lost loved ones in South America. There were just so many of them. The photographs were sad, angry, poignant and determined all at the same time.

I am still unsure whether or not I would class myself as a feminist per se. I believe no one should be discriminated against by reason of their gender, sexuality, race, religion, disability. I want to live in a world that is non-judgmental, fair for all and where everyone has the same opportunities. And would I fight against an injustice that prevented that? Yes I would.

I would protest with those women searching for information about their lost family members, just as I would have marched with the Suffragettes. But if men were denied the vote, I would also protest against that too. I don’t want women to take over the world, but it’s been a man’s world for a long time – actually, it’s been an affluent, educated, straight man’s world for a long time.

I think, on balance, I would describe myself as a humanist, rather than a feminist.

 

Sometimes you wanna go…

I’ve been lax, distracted, busy… oh I can trundle out all the excuses. What it boils down to is that, once again I let work overrun the rest of my life and I have promised myself that this year I am not going to allow that to happen. It’s one of those annual promises that I make to myself and see how long it takes me to break it.

Like new year’s resolutions, which I make almost religiously… and then fail at. So I thought I’d take a different perspective on them this year. Here they are.

What can I say? I have a chaotic mind!

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I’m back, I’m still getting to know my new city and I have every intention of telling you all about what I’m discovering on a far more regular basis than in recent months.

I’m going to start with Hurts Yard. Do you know it? It’s easy to pass right by and not even realise it’s there. There are two entrances to Hurts Yard, which, from what I can gather, doesn’t seem to take an apostrophe (- maybe it didn’t once belong to Mr Hurt?). There’s an archway on Upper Parliament Street, on the right if you’re standing at Tollhouse and looking up, and there’s another from Angel Row, on the left if you’re looking towards Market Square. You could miss them if it wasn’t for two dirty great A-boards announcing the location of two of my favourite drinking holes- 400 Rabbits and Cucamara.

I’m going to talk about Cucamara.

When I lived in deepest, darkest Hampshire, I rarely drank alcohol, mainly because I was always driving rather than because I don’t like it. With the excellent public transport system in Nottingham, I have rediscovered recreational drinking – to be honest, I’ve become a bit of a lush! Well, only on a Friday because I don’t have to drive anywhere on a Saturday. And Cucamara does some very lovely cocktails 🙂

More importantly, well for me as a relative stranger to the city, it was the first place I started to make some new friends.

Now, ostensibly Cucamara is student central. Late at night, it’s packed with young people, the pace is fast and furious, it’s loud, effervescent and fun. It’s fair to say I am not their key demographic. But we head there early. Friday is meant to be my day off. Phill works until 4pm, so I meet him in town and we head out for a drink. By 5pm when Cucamara opens, sometimes we are queuing at the door.

Mein host extraordinaire (yes I know I’m mixing languages) Paul Cotton is good, really good. You can see him sizing up the customers, noticing the details, finding some common ground on which to spark up a conversation. With us it was Phill’s Tesco uniform. Paul had shopped at his store and recognised him. He has also previously worked in retail. It’s a start, an opener, a way to make a  customer feel at home… and it worked, we went back again and again and again.

Initially we became known as The Tesco Couple. I was ok with that because I knew that, despite the fact we weren’t Cucamara’s core customer base, we would always find a friendly welcome there. That’s Paul and Megan. Sometimes Phill would bring olives from work and Megan and I would share them at the bar. Sadly Megan no longer works there and I have no one to share my olives with.

Now, early on a Friday evening, we find the very charming Tommy behind the bar who always has a smile for everyone. And we while away a very lovely hour or so sipping cocktails and putting the world to rights.

I think we’ve worked our way through the cocktail menu about six times now, we’ve sampled the shots and bombs, tried out several new concoctions and discussed the possibility of a Hurts Yard event – cos there are other places up that narrow little alleyway that could all benefit from people knowing they are there.

You know the theme tune to Cheers? Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name. Well they know my name now and I like that. I like that there’s always a warm welcome, I like that they make customers feel important and, to be honest, the cocktails and Sambuca or Tequila or whatever – although very tasty and reasonably priced – have become pretty incidental. I can go anywhere for a drink, I can’t go anywhere and get the same reception I do here.

As an aside, Paul has challenged me to find out more about the history of Hurts Yard and, to date, I have failed miserably.

It’s a quirky little twitchel, home not only to Cucamara and 400 Rabits (more on that another time) but also to Rob’s Record Mart where Rob has been selling vinyl since Phill was a boy (ancient times lol), the Deviant Angel Emporium, a tattoo parlour and the Barrel Drop real ale establishment among others.

It’s got a mixture of architecture and two very narrow entrances either end.

If anyone knows anything, I’d be very grateful to find out more. I really can’t have Paul thinking my research skills are that crap.