Plug!
WANTED...
Musicians, Vocalists, Emcee's & Beatboxers
for a new Monday night at
The Magnet
45 Hardman Street
9pm - 2am
£2-
Ingredients: Jazz, Funk, Ska, Reggae, Hip Hop, R&B, Disco & Latin Breaks
'GUMBO'
"LIVE" FREESTYLE JAMS
Question? When you're out and hear a groove that makes ya head nod and ya start getting ideas / inspiration from the track, wouldn't you like to freestyle over it alongside various artists / instruments with a professional DJ?
WAYNE SEELY ex nightmares on wax resident DJ
Hostess LARA ROSE vocalist with James Taylor Quartet & The New Mastersounds
If your answer to the above question is "YES" and you know how to play your specific instrument, then email us for details:
magnetliverpool@btopenworld.com
Whether you want to witness or take part, come along and check-it-out because after all, action speaks louder than words and seeing is believing...
[Went to The Magnet for the first time tonight and promised to offer this night a plug, so I've reproduced the text of their flyer verbatum. This place is a real hidden treasure, utterly different to anything else.]
Film Elizabeth Wurtzel holds court over the film version of Prozac Nation:
Some people close to the production have cited another reason for the delay. "As you should have figured out by now, it's a horrible movie," Ms. Wurtzel said. "It's just awful. If they thought it was good, they'd have released it long ago."Straight to DVD over here then ...
Radio With the new Hitchiker's radio series I was wondering about how the tones of the new Book, William Franklyn might match up. Reader Jay Campbell was kind enough to send the link which includes a voice sample. Apart from making you shout 'It's that guy!' you'll be please to hear that he'll be just fine.
In related news, I mention in that previous post that my favourite would be Oliver Postgate. The week's issue of B3TA includes a truly touch letter he wrote declining their offer of an interview. It's at the bottom past all the usual wierd links and madness...
In related news, I mention in that previous post that my favourite would be Oliver Postgate. The week's issue of B3TA includes a truly touch letter he wrote declining their offer of an interview. It's at the bottom past all the usual wierd links and madness...
Film So The Matrix Revolutions may not be any good. Wired really puts the knife in here. I will of course reserve judgement. It does re-iterate the argument for me about the nature of sequels and their relationship to the initial film.
When creating a sequel in a genre such as science fiction, why is it important to include the original characters? Granted it's because the viewer wants to see a continuation of their story -- but very often the original story has been told. All we're getting are re-iterations. Why not, if a coherent world has been set up, with it's own rules and ideas can't we visit someone else who lives there and follow their story instead?
It's money, of course. There is a perception that if different characters appear in a sequel, it's a lesser piece. But looking at Men in Black II that's hardly in issue. There was a film which specifically devalued the original by re-energising the Tommy Lee Jones character. One of the themes of the first film was renewal and the possibility that you don't have to keep the hand you're dealt. In the second film, that was all swept under the carpet by the perceived need to get Jones in black. Why couldn't Will Smith have a new partner? Why weren't to new and equally compelling actors hired for a new adventure? It's almost as thought the actor is the fanchise. Which sounds very dull indeed and no way to go about making movies...
When creating a sequel in a genre such as science fiction, why is it important to include the original characters? Granted it's because the viewer wants to see a continuation of their story -- but very often the original story has been told. All we're getting are re-iterations. Why not, if a coherent world has been set up, with it's own rules and ideas can't we visit someone else who lives there and follow their story instead?
It's money, of course. There is a perception that if different characters appear in a sequel, it's a lesser piece. But looking at Men in Black II that's hardly in issue. There was a film which specifically devalued the original by re-energising the Tommy Lee Jones character. One of the themes of the first film was renewal and the possibility that you don't have to keep the hand you're dealt. In the second film, that was all swept under the carpet by the perceived need to get Jones in black. Why couldn't Will Smith have a new partner? Why weren't to new and equally compelling actors hired for a new adventure? It's almost as thought the actor is the fanchise. Which sounds very dull indeed and no way to go about making movies...
TV "I like that you've read my review of As, If at the IMDb, and I thought it would be easier to post this information here so that I just need to supply a link whenever anyone emails me like you have. The theme tune to the TV series As,If is 'Would you go to bed with me?' from the band Touch and Go. It's on the soundtrack albums for As,If and the Ben Affleck / Sandra Bullock film Forces of Nature. You can find ringtones and lyrics at this Google search."
Radio Stunned to see that a third radio series of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy is going into production and everyone is back for it. It'll be a dramatisation of Life, The Universe and Everything. A fourth series covering everything else will follow. It's being produced by Dirk Maggs who's worked with Douglas before and has rejected one my scripts in the past. Not that I blame him. It was pretty awful. It's going to be odd not hearing Peter Jones as The Book, but his seat is being filled by William Franklyn. I was hoping for Oliver Postgate if anyone was going to do it. Oh well.
TV The new issue of Off The Telly has been published and features an interview with Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale and a great piece about the George Smiley sequence.
TV The on the ball tv tattle have scooped everyone with this link to a post at the BBC America website in which the writer Steven Moffat reveals that Richard Coyle won't be re-appearing as Jeff in the fourth series of Coupling. He was a strong character but for some reason it doesn't feel as much of a loss as say, someone leaving friends.
[As a side note, it good to see Steven falling for the same issues I sometimes have writing a piece in Word then posting directly to the internet with all the ' being turned into ? The trick is to copy/paste it into notepad then into wherever.]
[As a side note, it good to see Steven falling for the same issues I sometimes have writing a piece in Word then posting directly to the internet with all the ' being turned into ? The trick is to copy/paste it into notepad then into wherever.]
Art One of the more embarrassing moments of my teenage years was the time I decided to substitute my initials. So for a while I would sign things SDK rather than my given SIB. These new initials stood for S(tuart) D(ebbie) K(ylie) (the second being as in Gibson the third of the Minogue). I'd print this on anything from exercise books to pencil cases. I'm telling you this because I was heartened to discover in the Rossetti retrospective at The Walker that the world renowned Pre-Raphaelite painter did much the same. He was an admirer of Dante Aligheri's poetry (he illustrated the poet's words over and over) and to honour his inspiration chose to swap his given name Gabriel Charles Dante around henceforth becoming Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and this was the name which appeared on his drawings and paintings. And presumably sketch books and the bags he'd keep his brushes in.
The exhibition is scattered with these interesting little points. It's strength is that unlike other, larger retrospectives, rather than overpowering the viewer with hundreds of facts about the artist's life, it chooses to allow the pictures to tell the story, the information on hand giving context. There isn't much for example about the artist's early life - I have no idea what his parent's names are or for that matter if he had any pets. The story begins instead as he joins The Brotherhood with his early drawings, elaborate doodles really tossing about ideas of the kind of work he is going to indulge in later. If you choose to visit I'd urge you not to dash straight into the main room for the canvases. It's really worth taking the time to follow the map provided and work your way through these drawings and watercolours which appear at the start.
Again to compare with similar exhibitions were we see a conflict of styles and ideas in the artist's early years, it's a pleasure to see here that Rossetti somewhat knew he wasn't a realist painter, his talents lay in illustrating stories from literature. The exhibition continues with a series of drawings and watercolours representing the development of a talent. The works illustrate over and over the models and friends he used over the years. His tragic wife Elizabeth Siddal appears poignantly and his other great muse Jane Morris features even more prominently. It's startling at one point to see her appear in a series of photographs, her features as striking as they are in Rossetti's paint and pencil. Of the two ladies, hers is the painter's signature face, appearing over and over, almost like a film star moving from role to role.
There are deceptively fewer canvases than you might expect, but those which are featured are the classics, the ones you'll know from the calendars and the postcards. Loans have been made from Birmingham, Manchester and The Tate and to see them mingled with The Walker's own collection gives a greater appreciation of the man's work than I've seen in some time. They're split into two sections; the Beauties of the 1860s which depict straight portraiture representing classical figures, and my favourites, his Later Work. Although 'Proserpine' herself hasn't made the trip from London, there is a very good watercolour version; pride of place goes to The Walker's own 'Dante's Dream', probably the pinnacle of his craft and a work which can be looked at for hours on end.
This isn't an exhibition which will convert the visitor if they can't stand the Pre-Raphaelites - it's not that kind of show. It's for the rest of us who have bought the postcards and calendars and admired these works in the solitary positions in collections throughout the country. It's a chance to see them to together, to see the craft of the painter develop along with his passion and obsessions and to wonder what it was really like in the heady days of The Brotherhood.
The exhibition is scattered with these interesting little points. It's strength is that unlike other, larger retrospectives, rather than overpowering the viewer with hundreds of facts about the artist's life, it chooses to allow the pictures to tell the story, the information on hand giving context. There isn't much for example about the artist's early life - I have no idea what his parent's names are or for that matter if he had any pets. The story begins instead as he joins The Brotherhood with his early drawings, elaborate doodles really tossing about ideas of the kind of work he is going to indulge in later. If you choose to visit I'd urge you not to dash straight into the main room for the canvases. It's really worth taking the time to follow the map provided and work your way through these drawings and watercolours which appear at the start.
Again to compare with similar exhibitions were we see a conflict of styles and ideas in the artist's early years, it's a pleasure to see here that Rossetti somewhat knew he wasn't a realist painter, his talents lay in illustrating stories from literature. The exhibition continues with a series of drawings and watercolours representing the development of a talent. The works illustrate over and over the models and friends he used over the years. His tragic wife Elizabeth Siddal appears poignantly and his other great muse Jane Morris features even more prominently. It's startling at one point to see her appear in a series of photographs, her features as striking as they are in Rossetti's paint and pencil. Of the two ladies, hers is the painter's signature face, appearing over and over, almost like a film star moving from role to role.
There are deceptively fewer canvases than you might expect, but those which are featured are the classics, the ones you'll know from the calendars and the postcards. Loans have been made from Birmingham, Manchester and The Tate and to see them mingled with The Walker's own collection gives a greater appreciation of the man's work than I've seen in some time. They're split into two sections; the Beauties of the 1860s which depict straight portraiture representing classical figures, and my favourites, his Later Work. Although 'Proserpine' herself hasn't made the trip from London, there is a very good watercolour version; pride of place goes to The Walker's own 'Dante's Dream', probably the pinnacle of his craft and a work which can be looked at for hours on end.
This isn't an exhibition which will convert the visitor if they can't stand the Pre-Raphaelites - it's not that kind of show. It's for the rest of us who have bought the postcards and calendars and admired these works in the solitary positions in collections throughout the country. It's a chance to see them to together, to see the craft of the painter develop along with his passion and obsessions and to wonder what it was really like in the heady days of The Brotherhood.
TV I know that some regular readers were phobic to the charms of Look Around You the series of short parodies of the Granada schools programmes broadcast during the Seventies and Eighties. Although I avoided them at school, before This Morning they were all ITV could offer me during the frequent sicknesses I had as a child. So I only really get the joke by stealth.
But this is another instance of my past following me around. In every episode, the brother of Peter Serafinowicz, one of the co-creators (and the voice of Darth Maul), appears as the sample student wearing a uniform from my old school. The black one with the blue bands. It's a joke that only a certain number of people could get, but it's presence bugs me because Serafinowicz went to rival school St. Francis Xavier (which he mentions on the audio commentary). I'll let you know when I've tried Experiment One.
But this is another instance of my past following me around. In every episode, the brother of Peter Serafinowicz, one of the co-creators (and the voice of Darth Maul), appears as the sample student wearing a uniform from my old school. The black one with the blue bands. It's a joke that only a certain number of people could get, but it's presence bugs me because Serafinowicz went to rival school St. Francis Xavier (which he mentions on the audio commentary). I'll let you know when I've tried Experiment One.
Awards Or rather pointless awards ceremonies. Mtv seem to have hundreds of these a year, honouring the same people each time. Again I ask ... why do they bother?
Starstruck I nearly ate in the same restaurant as ITN’s political correspondent John Sergeant last night. And I got a lesson in how I really should pay more attention sometimes. I was in Liverpool for a birthday drink with Chris and we’d decided to eat out for dinner. We weren’t looking for anything too special, just not fast food. Pre-pub grub. Something you can chug down before you chug down. Finding anywhere like that in the city, 6:30 in the evening is almost impossible. We’d already been in a few places and either they’d finished serving food an hour before or the queue was too massive and the choice too limited for it to be worth it. But we eventually found a place near the Philharmonic Hall. From the outside it looked nice but accessible.
We look at the boards outside. There is a menu and the prices seem quite reasonable. They have Pumpkin Risotto which seems apt. So we hotfoot it up the steps and walk in.
"I'll let you do the talking." Chris says. Thanks Chris.
We're inside. It’s very quiet. Perhaps too quiet.
We stand for a moment. The man behind the bar looks up from his glasses.
“Name?”
“I’m sorry.” I apologise. “Do we need to book?”
“You don’t have a booking?”
“Well, no. We were just passing buy and…”
“Let’s see.”
The barman flicks through what is now obviously the booking list. I wonder if pretending to be Abe Froman, the sausage king of Chicago (from Ferris Bueller's Day Off )might not be out of the question. It begins to dawn on me however what kind of place this is.
"Doesn't matter if you haven't got space." I say.
“I can fit you in.” He says. “But you can only really have the table until the next people arrive. About an hour and a half.”
In ninety minutes we were expecting to be sitting in The Pilgrim pub listening to Hotel California on the jukebox. The kind of food we’re looking for shouldn’t take that long to eat.
“Oh we’ll be done by then.”
”And I’ll have to stick you downstairs on your own.”
Since the place seemed mostly empty anyway I didn’t see this as much of a problem. Someone who in an Ian Fleming novel might be described as a ‘pretty waitress’ appears and leads us downstairs.
We sit at a table. It looks a lot nicer down here than upstairs. Too nice. A chill wind drifts down my back.
“Would you like anything to drink?” She asks.
Chris orders a beer. I ask for some water. Tap water.
She hands us a menu. I start to glance down the list. There aren’t any prices. Until I get to the bottom.
2 courses £19.95
3 coursees £25.95
Yes. I know that isn't too much for really nice food. And it all sounded lovely. But after my birthday splurges this had become the budget for the whole evening. I like food. I like good food. But we’re theoretically going on a pub crawl and the last thing we’re looking for is a la carte. We’re in the wrong place. At the wrong time. Like Tom Paulin at an S Club 8 concert. And we’re about to look very cheap indeed.
“This isn’t …” I try (but fail) to choose my words carefully, “I mean we weren’t expecting to pay … what about the items on the board outside?” The reasonable ones. The Pumpkin Risotto I was looking forward to.
“Well, there’s the specials board...” She says (very patiently).
I look up. This has many nice things on it. Not many prices.
“…and we can negotiate if you just want one course ….”
“I think … we’ll leave it.” I say. “Sorry … erm … well at least we know were you are …” I continue hopefully.
We leave the table. Back up the stairs. Don’t look back.
Outside we look at the menu to try and work out were we went wrong. Two words which didn’t reach an important part of our brain are now perfectly evident on the average prices: “Lunch Menu”
Bugger.
At that moment we look up. John Sergeant is just sitting at a table.
“It’s John Sergeant.” Chris says.
“It is John Sergeant!” I agree.
And we eat at Pizza Hut instead.
We look at the boards outside. There is a menu and the prices seem quite reasonable. They have Pumpkin Risotto which seems apt. So we hotfoot it up the steps and walk in.
"I'll let you do the talking." Chris says. Thanks Chris.
We're inside. It’s very quiet. Perhaps too quiet.
We stand for a moment. The man behind the bar looks up from his glasses.
“Name?”
“I’m sorry.” I apologise. “Do we need to book?”
“You don’t have a booking?”
“Well, no. We were just passing buy and…”
“Let’s see.”
The barman flicks through what is now obviously the booking list. I wonder if pretending to be Abe Froman, the sausage king of Chicago (from Ferris Bueller's Day Off )might not be out of the question. It begins to dawn on me however what kind of place this is.
"Doesn't matter if you haven't got space." I say.
“I can fit you in.” He says. “But you can only really have the table until the next people arrive. About an hour and a half.”
In ninety minutes we were expecting to be sitting in The Pilgrim pub listening to Hotel California on the jukebox. The kind of food we’re looking for shouldn’t take that long to eat.
“Oh we’ll be done by then.”
”And I’ll have to stick you downstairs on your own.”
Since the place seemed mostly empty anyway I didn’t see this as much of a problem. Someone who in an Ian Fleming novel might be described as a ‘pretty waitress’ appears and leads us downstairs.
We sit at a table. It looks a lot nicer down here than upstairs. Too nice. A chill wind drifts down my back.
“Would you like anything to drink?” She asks.
Chris orders a beer. I ask for some water. Tap water.
She hands us a menu. I start to glance down the list. There aren’t any prices. Until I get to the bottom.
2 courses £19.95
3 coursees £25.95
Yes. I know that isn't too much for really nice food. And it all sounded lovely. But after my birthday splurges this had become the budget for the whole evening. I like food. I like good food. But we’re theoretically going on a pub crawl and the last thing we’re looking for is a la carte. We’re in the wrong place. At the wrong time. Like Tom Paulin at an S Club 8 concert. And we’re about to look very cheap indeed.
“This isn’t …” I try (but fail) to choose my words carefully, “I mean we weren’t expecting to pay … what about the items on the board outside?” The reasonable ones. The Pumpkin Risotto I was looking forward to.
“Well, there’s the specials board...” She says (very patiently).
I look up. This has many nice things on it. Not many prices.
“…and we can negotiate if you just want one course ….”
“I think … we’ll leave it.” I say. “Sorry … erm … well at least we know were you are …” I continue hopefully.
We leave the table. Back up the stairs. Don’t look back.
Outside we look at the menu to try and work out were we went wrong. Two words which didn’t reach an important part of our brain are now perfectly evident on the average prices: “Lunch Menu”
Bugger.
At that moment we look up. John Sergeant is just sitting at a table.
“It’s John Sergeant.” Chris says.
“It is John Sergeant!” I agree.
And we eat at Pizza Hut instead.
That Day So I'm 29 and I don't feel any different than I did when I'm 28. People ask if you feel different. Well I feel irritated that you keep asking me the same question -- I didn't have that before. Alright so perhaps I'm a bit more cynical.
Actually it was a fairly normal day. For me. Out of nowhere and without any prompting my parents gave me 'The Very Best of Cat Stevens', which struck me as really quite odd because I've never shown any leanings in that direction. But I like music so I like Cat Stevens and it's really, really good. And Father and Son hasn't been ruined at all by certain awful cover versions.
Went to Cheshire Oaks, bought some shoes, bought a shirt. For some reason the latest style in shirt seems to resemble Marks & Spencer's pyjama tops from the 1970s, so I didn't buy one of those. One of the joys of The Oaks was that it would carry end of line clothing at very cheap prices. Now some designer clothes shops have moved in and the prices only seem a bit cheaper than in the high street. Bought a couple of Christmas presents, although I'm all at sea this year in terms of that.
I did manage to pick up an All Saints single from 1995 before the Appleton sisters joined. It's the original version of the 'Let's Get Started' track from the first album, but rawer and strangely, vocally it's just as strong as the later version. Odd that. Not sure if we need the four versions which are on this single though.
Went for a meal in the evening at some restaurant in the middle of nowhere (well, Prescot Road). Honey roasted steak the taste of which is still hanging about the back of my mouth, which oddly isn't a bad thing. My mother is on first name terms with the waitress. Shocking how helpful that can be.
We've got the yearly circus in the field near our tower block again. It's a massive white tent this time, with coloured light back projected onto the inside. Looks spectacular at night. Went to bed with blue light dancing across my ceiling.
Actually it was a fairly normal day. For me. Out of nowhere and without any prompting my parents gave me 'The Very Best of Cat Stevens', which struck me as really quite odd because I've never shown any leanings in that direction. But I like music so I like Cat Stevens and it's really, really good. And Father and Son hasn't been ruined at all by certain awful cover versions.
Went to Cheshire Oaks, bought some shoes, bought a shirt. For some reason the latest style in shirt seems to resemble Marks & Spencer's pyjama tops from the 1970s, so I didn't buy one of those. One of the joys of The Oaks was that it would carry end of line clothing at very cheap prices. Now some designer clothes shops have moved in and the prices only seem a bit cheaper than in the high street. Bought a couple of Christmas presents, although I'm all at sea this year in terms of that.
I did manage to pick up an All Saints single from 1995 before the Appleton sisters joined. It's the original version of the 'Let's Get Started' track from the first album, but rawer and strangely, vocally it's just as strong as the later version. Odd that. Not sure if we need the four versions which are on this single though.
Went for a meal in the evening at some restaurant in the middle of nowhere (well, Prescot Road). Honey roasted steak the taste of which is still hanging about the back of my mouth, which oddly isn't a bad thing. My mother is on first name terms with the waitress. Shocking how helpful that can be.
We've got the yearly circus in the field near our tower block again. It's a massive white tent this time, with coloured light back projected onto the inside. Looks spectacular at night. Went to bed with blue light dancing across my ceiling.
Menagerie
Garfield as a live action film, featuring a CG cat and Jennifer Love Hewitt. As if that wasn't bad enough, Judge Reinhold will not be playing Jon Arbuckle, the part he was born to play. It's some other guy. [via imdb]
If only the BBC's biography pages were as satirical as this: "Drew is a zero-time Emmy Award winner. In fact, he's never even been nominated. He has, however, shattered both the single-season (912) and career (3,617) records for pieces of Hate Mail Received (HMR) at 9NEWS." [via lost remote]
Turin, the Milton Keynes of 18th century Italy. Although with less car parks.
When reading a novel requires more commitment than some people put into their marriages. The kind of book which requires the reader to see how small the writing is. This one features a play and diagrams, and unlike Glamour magazine it won't fit in your bag.
Please Don't Feed The Pidgeons. For once the typo isn't my fault.
Richard Herring is going to run the London Marathon. Moon. Stick. You make up the catchphrase.
Garfield as a live action film, featuring a CG cat and Jennifer Love Hewitt. As if that wasn't bad enough, Judge Reinhold will not be playing Jon Arbuckle, the part he was born to play. It's some other guy. [via imdb]
If only the BBC's biography pages were as satirical as this: "Drew is a zero-time Emmy Award winner. In fact, he's never even been nominated. He has, however, shattered both the single-season (912) and career (3,617) records for pieces of Hate Mail Received (HMR) at 9NEWS." [via lost remote]
Turin, the Milton Keynes of 18th century Italy. Although with less car parks.
When reading a novel requires more commitment than some people put into their marriages. The kind of book which requires the reader to see how small the writing is. This one features a play and diagrams, and unlike Glamour magazine it won't fit in your bag.
Please Don't Feed The Pidgeons. For once the typo isn't my fault.
Richard Herring is going to run the London Marathon. Moon. Stick. You make up the catchphrase.
ten years since I was a fresher there
Life Yesterday I spent the day in Leeds visiting the three houses I lived in while I was at Leeds Metropolitan University studying Information Studies. It's ten years since I was a fresher there and I wanted to acknowledge something which has had more of an effect on who I am than anything else. I kept thinking about two words on the train yesterday morning. Pilgrimage and tourism. They're both self explanatory, but I think the latter was more relevant. Rather like someone visiting Thomas Hardy country I was visiting Stuart Ian Burns country - visiting landmarks in the same way, a trip into my own life of interest to only one person. Me.
I began university living in halls on Beckett Park. Think Dead Poets Society. Think Georgian red brick building in the middle of the countryside. Think self-enclosed campus where you could spend a whole week and never leave, everything to hand. I was in Macauley Hall, and I probably had much the same experiences as anyone else. Fell for the wrong people, said the wrong words at the wrong time, did all the wrong things. Good times. I knew that the place had stopped being a student hall two years after I left. The university lacked offices, administration and classrooms and they would be cheaper to run anyway. So now it was the Faculty of International Studies.
I was nervous as I walked up the hill towards the campus. Some of this came from a fear of being caught trespassing. There weren't any security gates and theoretically any member of the public could walk in. But I kept having visions of someone asking for I.D. and when none was forthcoming being frog marched off the premises.
But I relaxed slightly as I approached the hall. The building hadn't totally changed. The muddy brick on the walls had been sandblasted at some point and now had a slight artificially modern look. The ad-hoc gravel car park had been replaced with tarmac. I stood outside and glanced up at the window were my room had been. One wall had a bookshelf with folders on. I stepped up to the back entrance, pressed a green button and the doors opened for me. In front was a sign asking all visitors to report to reception. I walked past this and up the stairwell. Concrete had been replaced by royal blue carpet throughout. All of the walls had gone from the dark yellow I remember to a dark sky blue. I entered my floor and was disconcerted to find that there were far less doorways than before. The building had been a hospital originally, and the student rooms created from a partitioning of a ward. The walls that I'd known had been taken out and recreated for the new usage, so my room door no longer existed. No number 26 any longer. But I stood in front anyway and looked at the panoramic picture of Singapore which hung in its place.
I remembered sitting in the doorway of the room reading, with lunch sometimes. I'd once seen a advertisement in which a girl had sat on a windowsill drinking a Coke watching the world go by and it had been my version of that. Sometimes it had meant I was like Rosencrantz (or Guildenstern) trying to comprehend the main action as it passed me by. I remembered the time there had been an electricity blackout one night and the few of us who had been left in the building had sat in the hallway gathered around some candles talking and waiting for the lights to go back on. I remembered the series of signs some of us had for our door which directed visitors to whoever's room we were actually in at the time.
I was a bit of a traveller in the hall. After the initial week when everyone was friends with everyone else, various groups of people drifted together based on mutual interests. I wasn't exclusive. I was still friends with a lot of different people and I loved that. If I'd been less safe with my finances and even less kooky in my choice of beverage (tee total fresher - such a waste) I probably could have been out with different sets of people on lots of different nights. I remember being well liked by some of the people some of the time. I'd help some international students with their English; I'd help others with their relationships. In terms of connecting with people it happened more here than at any time since. Given the chance I can work really well in groups.
I strolled around the rest of the campus taking in the differences and similarities. The student union had changed. It was more - idiosyncratic. Far more rooms and bars and shops and cafes. The little bank which had been so handy while I was there had gone, replaced with counseling rooms serving the mind rather than the pocket. I thought about having lunch in the main cafeteria but didn't want to push my luck so I bought a couple of bottles of water in the shop instead. There were more computers in the main campus library and they seemed faster than the old machines I'd used all those years ago to look at the old Empire Magazine website. Like the union, the same departments and sections were there, they'd just been moved about. The ongoing improvement programme which had begun while I was there was still in place, with incomplete corridors and scaffolding. Some projects are probably never meant to be finished. There is a bus stop outside the library now and a regular service into the city centre. I winced as I remember the number of times I'd walked the long walk up the hill to my room with bags of shopping.
The walk I made to the next house was the same route I would have taken from lectures to my house at the end of the day. It meant I could visit Headingley 'centre'. When I'd gotten off the bus earlier I'd been amazed at how Raj Putts, the Kebab shop I'd visited at 3 in the morning once for a salad pitta was still there. The rest of the town was mix of the old and new. More charity shops. The local Safeway had gone from having uniform shopping isles to a more adhock feel similar to a service station. The KFC was just the same. But then I entered unknown territory as I found a Subway and a Starbucks, and a fabulously relaxed Oxfam bookshop all couches and coffee tables.
Then I got lost. Or rather I forgot were 69 Richmond Avenue was. Somewhere along the line I'd developed the idea that it wasn't directly off the main road, took the wrong turn and ended up walking manically through the back streets looking around furtively for something, anything familiar. Then I remembered that ironically I'd done exactly the same thing the first time. I stopped, asked someone for directions and ten minutes later I was standing front of the second house on the tour.
It hadn't changed at all. An old Victorian terraces house perched precariously on a cliff-steep hill, three floors in crimson red brick. It shouldn't have developed. That would require the landlords to care about properties it rented out to students. But I hadn't been quite so prepared for how close it was. My barn-sized room had been on the bottom floor and there had been a small hole in the corner of one of the bay windows. It was still there. The landlords had done nothing to repair the house and that seemed right somehow.
I didn't get on with my housemates, or rather they didn't like me. Three southern girls who thought they were royalty, one northern girl who aspired to be royalty, and me who couldn't care less. They'd seemed perfectly nice when I'd been to see the house with them. But when I visited the place during the summer to do some work as a cleaner at Headingley Cricket Ground during one of the tests something wasn't right. On the first night, although they were all there and they knew I was coming, when I dropped my bags in my room and went to warm myself in the kitchen, none of them came down to say hello. I shouted up a greeting, but I could just hear them talking. A bit later one of them came down to get some milk. I think she said hello but she didn't say much else.
A friend invited himself over for some of the cricket cleaning coin. When we returned on the last night of work my new housemates were waiting for us (having ignored our presence for the previous four days). This plastic shelving thing in the bathroom had collapsed and evidently they thought we'd done it. They demanded to know why we hadn't cleaned it up and what we were going to do. When I denied anything had happened they just deafened themselves through all of my questions as to why they had been ignoring me until eventually I swore at them. They swore back and so the pattern emerged for the rest of my time in that house.
I was essentially living in a bedsit with four other people. But it didn't ever feel like home. Not in the way my room in halls had. I was like a lodger in my own house, an interloper. A stranger to my own housemates. I'd leave my room and suddenly their uninteresting conversations would stop. I would go into the kitchen and they would leave - and not subtly - once, they literally got up and left. They had the upstairs rooms and like mice I'd hear them creeping about. Whenever I saw them around campus, even if it was a corridor in the library without anyone else about, they would pretend they didn't know me. I wasn't welcome in their lives and they were being pathological about it.
At some point I started to avoid them, just so that I didn't have to deal with the fact that they were avoiding me. I'd wake up at 6:50 in the morning before any of them so that I could go to the bathroom and get my breakfast. Then go back to bed for an hour before I got dressed and went to college. Then I stopped cooking meals at home and started eating out all of the time. Go to a friend's house directly after college, until some days I'd leave the house at 8 in the morning and wouldn't get home until 1 am that night. This way, I think, I might have gone through a three week period without seeing any of my housemates.
Suited me fine and I'm sure they were chuffed; and because of the situation I stopped being a stay home kind of person. I got to know my next door neighbours for a while (a house full of girls, ironically) and spent a lot of time in the weird chemistry of another friend's flat and I mostly had a great year. And at least the bills were always paid on time.
As I leaned on the wall and worked my way through the raspberry muffin I'd bought at Starbucks, looking this house, I began to understand why I'd taken this trip. Even after all these years when I remembered some of things which had happened in that house I think I'd built them up to be more important that they actually were. I looked at the concrete stairs up to the front door and thought about a Friday night early on that year when I hadn't made any friends in the area yet, didn't have anyone to go out with and had just sat there drinking a cup of tea, lonely as sin. But that was just one night.
I hadn't ever walked from this house to the next. I knew roughly how they related geographically so I just plodded in that general direction. By now I was talking to my friend Chris on the phone and I was paying more attention to him than where I was going and whether that was a help I'm not sure but miraculously I stumbled upon the final house.
38 Harold Walk. I looked at this place almost without any emotion. Another terraced house, this time on the end. Dirty red brick. Rust stains on the wall from drainpipes. This was slightly different to the house I'd left seven years ago. One of the downstairs windows has metal bars across it. This had been the most vulnerable place in the house and I was pleased that this landlord had finally taken steps.
It had been entirely different to the previous year. My housemates were perfectly rational human beings and I got on with most of them very well. It helped that there was another man about the house as well as three other girls, so I had somewhere to go when the periods started. We all had our own lives but we also went out together. I cared about them and like them a lot. I bonded particularly with one of the girls who was half-Tai. She was charming and funny and we went places together and she eventually fell for a Frenchman. One of the happiest times was when my housemates took me out for a meal on my twenty-first birthday, being plied with white cider before hand and asking one of my companions if the restauranr was supposed to be spinning around.
But the house was perpetually a tip and the bills were never paid on time. And somewhere along the line the bonds between the housemates which had been so strong towards the start of the year started to drift apart. Ironically, in comparison to my time in the previous house, everyone else started going elsewhere a lot more, sleeping overnight at boyfriends or girlfriends places instead. Somewhere along the line I followed (going out a lot more I mean). But I was still able to talk to them individually even if they couldn't talk to each other. I don't really remember the end of that year. I remember passing on my address to the guy because he had his name on the bills and I wanted him to get in touch with what I owed. I'm sure I must have said goodbye to the rest of them, but I can't see the details.
I wasn't at Harold Walk for very long yesterday. The area seemed rougher than I remembered and I wanted to go quite quickly. I headed up to the cafes of Hyde Park Corner and walked into the city centre. To some extent it all felt anti-climactic. In my head I suppose I thought I'd been recreating the scene in Mike Leigh's Career Girls when they met their old housemate sitting on the step. Had I imagined seeing my Tai friend in the area trying to recreate the one time she'd been happy. Or that I'd feel some kind of closure, the violins playing as I drifted off into the distance?
Neither happened. I went into town and met a friend who I'd worked for in my student job at the time and we went for a meal. We talked about old times and the future. And since she was one of the few people who had been a constant outside of any of the houses, been a real support at times when it had all gone to crap, it seemed right she should be there at the end of this day of nostalgia. She reminded me that my time at University wasn't about the houses or the homes. It was about the people who had been there with me.
[Acknowledgements to Mike Leigh and Vicki who made a similar journey earlier in the year and inspired me to do the same]
I began university living in halls on Beckett Park. Think Dead Poets Society. Think Georgian red brick building in the middle of the countryside. Think self-enclosed campus where you could spend a whole week and never leave, everything to hand. I was in Macauley Hall, and I probably had much the same experiences as anyone else. Fell for the wrong people, said the wrong words at the wrong time, did all the wrong things. Good times. I knew that the place had stopped being a student hall two years after I left. The university lacked offices, administration and classrooms and they would be cheaper to run anyway. So now it was the Faculty of International Studies.
I was nervous as I walked up the hill towards the campus. Some of this came from a fear of being caught trespassing. There weren't any security gates and theoretically any member of the public could walk in. But I kept having visions of someone asking for I.D. and when none was forthcoming being frog marched off the premises.
But I relaxed slightly as I approached the hall. The building hadn't totally changed. The muddy brick on the walls had been sandblasted at some point and now had a slight artificially modern look. The ad-hoc gravel car park had been replaced with tarmac. I stood outside and glanced up at the window were my room had been. One wall had a bookshelf with folders on. I stepped up to the back entrance, pressed a green button and the doors opened for me. In front was a sign asking all visitors to report to reception. I walked past this and up the stairwell. Concrete had been replaced by royal blue carpet throughout. All of the walls had gone from the dark yellow I remember to a dark sky blue. I entered my floor and was disconcerted to find that there were far less doorways than before. The building had been a hospital originally, and the student rooms created from a partitioning of a ward. The walls that I'd known had been taken out and recreated for the new usage, so my room door no longer existed. No number 26 any longer. But I stood in front anyway and looked at the panoramic picture of Singapore which hung in its place.
I remembered sitting in the doorway of the room reading, with lunch sometimes. I'd once seen a advertisement in which a girl had sat on a windowsill drinking a Coke watching the world go by and it had been my version of that. Sometimes it had meant I was like Rosencrantz (or Guildenstern) trying to comprehend the main action as it passed me by. I remembered the time there had been an electricity blackout one night and the few of us who had been left in the building had sat in the hallway gathered around some candles talking and waiting for the lights to go back on. I remembered the series of signs some of us had for our door which directed visitors to whoever's room we were actually in at the time.
I was a bit of a traveller in the hall. After the initial week when everyone was friends with everyone else, various groups of people drifted together based on mutual interests. I wasn't exclusive. I was still friends with a lot of different people and I loved that. If I'd been less safe with my finances and even less kooky in my choice of beverage (tee total fresher - such a waste) I probably could have been out with different sets of people on lots of different nights. I remember being well liked by some of the people some of the time. I'd help some international students with their English; I'd help others with their relationships. In terms of connecting with people it happened more here than at any time since. Given the chance I can work really well in groups.
I strolled around the rest of the campus taking in the differences and similarities. The student union had changed. It was more - idiosyncratic. Far more rooms and bars and shops and cafes. The little bank which had been so handy while I was there had gone, replaced with counseling rooms serving the mind rather than the pocket. I thought about having lunch in the main cafeteria but didn't want to push my luck so I bought a couple of bottles of water in the shop instead. There were more computers in the main campus library and they seemed faster than the old machines I'd used all those years ago to look at the old Empire Magazine website. Like the union, the same departments and sections were there, they'd just been moved about. The ongoing improvement programme which had begun while I was there was still in place, with incomplete corridors and scaffolding. Some projects are probably never meant to be finished. There is a bus stop outside the library now and a regular service into the city centre. I winced as I remember the number of times I'd walked the long walk up the hill to my room with bags of shopping.
The walk I made to the next house was the same route I would have taken from lectures to my house at the end of the day. It meant I could visit Headingley 'centre'. When I'd gotten off the bus earlier I'd been amazed at how Raj Putts, the Kebab shop I'd visited at 3 in the morning once for a salad pitta was still there. The rest of the town was mix of the old and new. More charity shops. The local Safeway had gone from having uniform shopping isles to a more adhock feel similar to a service station. The KFC was just the same. But then I entered unknown territory as I found a Subway and a Starbucks, and a fabulously relaxed Oxfam bookshop all couches and coffee tables.
Then I got lost. Or rather I forgot were 69 Richmond Avenue was. Somewhere along the line I'd developed the idea that it wasn't directly off the main road, took the wrong turn and ended up walking manically through the back streets looking around furtively for something, anything familiar. Then I remembered that ironically I'd done exactly the same thing the first time. I stopped, asked someone for directions and ten minutes later I was standing front of the second house on the tour.
It hadn't changed at all. An old Victorian terraces house perched precariously on a cliff-steep hill, three floors in crimson red brick. It shouldn't have developed. That would require the landlords to care about properties it rented out to students. But I hadn't been quite so prepared for how close it was. My barn-sized room had been on the bottom floor and there had been a small hole in the corner of one of the bay windows. It was still there. The landlords had done nothing to repair the house and that seemed right somehow.
I didn't get on with my housemates, or rather they didn't like me. Three southern girls who thought they were royalty, one northern girl who aspired to be royalty, and me who couldn't care less. They'd seemed perfectly nice when I'd been to see the house with them. But when I visited the place during the summer to do some work as a cleaner at Headingley Cricket Ground during one of the tests something wasn't right. On the first night, although they were all there and they knew I was coming, when I dropped my bags in my room and went to warm myself in the kitchen, none of them came down to say hello. I shouted up a greeting, but I could just hear them talking. A bit later one of them came down to get some milk. I think she said hello but she didn't say much else.
A friend invited himself over for some of the cricket cleaning coin. When we returned on the last night of work my new housemates were waiting for us (having ignored our presence for the previous four days). This plastic shelving thing in the bathroom had collapsed and evidently they thought we'd done it. They demanded to know why we hadn't cleaned it up and what we were going to do. When I denied anything had happened they just deafened themselves through all of my questions as to why they had been ignoring me until eventually I swore at them. They swore back and so the pattern emerged for the rest of my time in that house.
I was essentially living in a bedsit with four other people. But it didn't ever feel like home. Not in the way my room in halls had. I was like a lodger in my own house, an interloper. A stranger to my own housemates. I'd leave my room and suddenly their uninteresting conversations would stop. I would go into the kitchen and they would leave - and not subtly - once, they literally got up and left. They had the upstairs rooms and like mice I'd hear them creeping about. Whenever I saw them around campus, even if it was a corridor in the library without anyone else about, they would pretend they didn't know me. I wasn't welcome in their lives and they were being pathological about it.
At some point I started to avoid them, just so that I didn't have to deal with the fact that they were avoiding me. I'd wake up at 6:50 in the morning before any of them so that I could go to the bathroom and get my breakfast. Then go back to bed for an hour before I got dressed and went to college. Then I stopped cooking meals at home and started eating out all of the time. Go to a friend's house directly after college, until some days I'd leave the house at 8 in the morning and wouldn't get home until 1 am that night. This way, I think, I might have gone through a three week period without seeing any of my housemates.
Suited me fine and I'm sure they were chuffed; and because of the situation I stopped being a stay home kind of person. I got to know my next door neighbours for a while (a house full of girls, ironically) and spent a lot of time in the weird chemistry of another friend's flat and I mostly had a great year. And at least the bills were always paid on time.
As I leaned on the wall and worked my way through the raspberry muffin I'd bought at Starbucks, looking this house, I began to understand why I'd taken this trip. Even after all these years when I remembered some of things which had happened in that house I think I'd built them up to be more important that they actually were. I looked at the concrete stairs up to the front door and thought about a Friday night early on that year when I hadn't made any friends in the area yet, didn't have anyone to go out with and had just sat there drinking a cup of tea, lonely as sin. But that was just one night.
I hadn't ever walked from this house to the next. I knew roughly how they related geographically so I just plodded in that general direction. By now I was talking to my friend Chris on the phone and I was paying more attention to him than where I was going and whether that was a help I'm not sure but miraculously I stumbled upon the final house.
38 Harold Walk. I looked at this place almost without any emotion. Another terraced house, this time on the end. Dirty red brick. Rust stains on the wall from drainpipes. This was slightly different to the house I'd left seven years ago. One of the downstairs windows has metal bars across it. This had been the most vulnerable place in the house and I was pleased that this landlord had finally taken steps.
It had been entirely different to the previous year. My housemates were perfectly rational human beings and I got on with most of them very well. It helped that there was another man about the house as well as three other girls, so I had somewhere to go when the periods started. We all had our own lives but we also went out together. I cared about them and like them a lot. I bonded particularly with one of the girls who was half-Tai. She was charming and funny and we went places together and she eventually fell for a Frenchman. One of the happiest times was when my housemates took me out for a meal on my twenty-first birthday, being plied with white cider before hand and asking one of my companions if the restauranr was supposed to be spinning around.
But the house was perpetually a tip and the bills were never paid on time. And somewhere along the line the bonds between the housemates which had been so strong towards the start of the year started to drift apart. Ironically, in comparison to my time in the previous house, everyone else started going elsewhere a lot more, sleeping overnight at boyfriends or girlfriends places instead. Somewhere along the line I followed (going out a lot more I mean). But I was still able to talk to them individually even if they couldn't talk to each other. I don't really remember the end of that year. I remember passing on my address to the guy because he had his name on the bills and I wanted him to get in touch with what I owed. I'm sure I must have said goodbye to the rest of them, but I can't see the details.
I wasn't at Harold Walk for very long yesterday. The area seemed rougher than I remembered and I wanted to go quite quickly. I headed up to the cafes of Hyde Park Corner and walked into the city centre. To some extent it all felt anti-climactic. In my head I suppose I thought I'd been recreating the scene in Mike Leigh's Career Girls when they met their old housemate sitting on the step. Had I imagined seeing my Tai friend in the area trying to recreate the one time she'd been happy. Or that I'd feel some kind of closure, the violins playing as I drifted off into the distance?
Neither happened. I went into town and met a friend who I'd worked for in my student job at the time and we went for a meal. We talked about old times and the future. And since she was one of the few people who had been a constant outside of any of the houses, been a real support at times when it had all gone to crap, it seemed right she should be there at the end of this day of nostalgia. She reminded me that my time at University wasn't about the houses or the homes. It was about the people who had been there with me.
[Acknowledgements to Mike Leigh and Vicki who made a similar journey earlier in the year and inspired me to do the same]
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