the official launch party

Life Perfect moments. Last night I attended the official launch party for Liverpool’s latest culture blog/website The Double Negative hosted at Camp and Furnace, the arts and events venue off Jamaica Street in the centre of the Baltic Triangle in the building which used to be the AFoundation and before that a factory. It made the local papers recently for its indoor caravan park. After a first tentative half hour in which I attempted to look happy with a Cherry Coke for company, the DN’s Laura was the perfect host and introduced to me to some people and the next hour or so passed quickly and happily.

I’ve previously worked in the space in 2006 during the Liverpool Biennial and I was forever being told by my co-workers how beautiful it was after hours in the very late shifts as the main industrial factory floor space became illuminated by the night through the transparent ceiling, a cosy atmosphere created by spot lights here and there. I never was given a later shift but I now know what they meant. In the middle of our conversation, dusk happened and suddenly this massive room became intimate, the long congregation of tables somehow shortening. Or at least that’s how it felt.

But the perfect moment came later, just before I was about to leave. I was with a friend by a stage which had been erected, a band, Trouble With Books playing a mix of acoustic and I suppose grindcore electronica, sometimes in the same song. Disco flashed across the crowd and the smell of charcoal wafted in from the yard nearby were smokers gather. As the guitarist delicately picked away, just briefly I simply stopped and looked around, at the way the light played against the walls, against faces, against smiles of people genuinely enjoying themselves and the warmth of the fire wafting over me like a hug.  I couldn’t stop smiling.