When K first suggested moving out to the countryside at weekends, my initial reaction was a cautious one. Having spent most of my childhood and adolescence marooned in rural North Nottinghamshire and longing for escape, I knew all too well the pitfalls of village life.

The village I grew up in was not typical of its surroundings. In an area dominated by collieries to the north and agriculture to the south, and nestling in the shadows of the local slag-heap, it represented a tight, plucky little enclave of Conservatism in a diehard Labour heartland. North Nottinghamshire may not have boasted of much in the way of a “county” set, but our village did its best to uphold the values of church-going, fete-holding, tweed-jacketed and navy-blue-pleated respectability. For several years during the 1970s, a sign on the village green proudly declared our status as the “best kept” village in our part of the county.

By the middle of the 1980s, the ground had started to shift. With the coal industry clearly in decline, and Arthur Scargill’s striking miners newly defeated by the Thatcher government, the chill winds of recession were blowing over us. Nevertheless, Thatcherism was not without its winners, and such winners as there were seemed to be headed in our direction. As the aging tweed-and-pleats set continued to merrily tootle along, with increasing irrelevance, so the “new money” moved in.

Returning to the UK after a year in West Berlin, I could instantly feel the sea-change. New dogmas had taken root, social divisions had widened – and amongst the emergent ranks of the newly successful, attitudes had hardened.

As a freshly politicised would-be radical myself, eager to position myself on the other side of the fence, the village provided ample fodder for my withering scorn. It’s like a downmarket Dallas, I would sneer to my student housemates in Nottingham, blithely unaware of my own crashing snobbery. But not without reason, for the place felt stuffed full with slippery philanderers and tinpot tycoons, gin-soaked lushes and tear-streaked tragedy queens – high on conspicuous consumption and surface gloss, barely concealing the ruthlessness and desperation which bristled beneath. Brittle, incestuous, claustrophobic and philistine: this was my perspective on village life, and I assumed it held equally true of all villages everywhere. No wonder that I baulked, however momentarily, at thoughts of returning.

There again, my perspective was inevitably skewed by the shifting fortunes of my own family, and my father in particular. Of which more tomorrow...

Jump to Part 2.

Labels: telegraph

– While you were in the shower, I thought I’d save some time for later on – so I’ve packed your socks and pants for the weekend.

– Thank you. But did you pack my weekend socks?

– I don’t understand…

– Let me have a look. No, these are all wrong. You did this last week as well. Those are my boring weekday socks. Haven’t you ever noticed? I wear my multi-coloured stripey Paul Smith socks at weekends.

– Sorry, I’ll change them…

– Hang on, hang on – I still need a boring pair for Monday mornings. So that’s two pairs of stripey socks – plus one spare – and one pair of boring socks. Can you remember that in future, please?

– OK. What about pants? Do you have weekend pants?

– Of course. They’re the dark blue Turkish (*) ones, with the yellow lettering on the bum. They’re roomier than the others, so I can get nice and comfy and relaxed in them.

– So, you want your snazzy socks and your jazzy leisure pants?

– You got it. At the weekend, the Real Me comes alive. Goodbye, dull workaday drabness! Hello, SNAZZ!

(*) A friend of K’s parents owns an underwear factory in Turkey, so there are free samples to be blagged. God, we’re well connected.

Update: So, who did say what? The answer's in the comments...

(An edited version of this review originally appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post.)

One of the first hurdles that any ambitious new act must face is the three-quarters empty room. Last night at The Social, this young Cardiff three-piece faced a largely deserted main floor, with a couple of dozen more punters scattered bashfully towards the back of the room. How a band chooses to respond to such a dispiriting turn-out is crucial, and a significant test of their future potential.

In the case of the support act, Das Wanderlust, the answer lay in treating the gig like a cheery warm-up session in front of a bunch of mates. Clearly under-rehearsed, and suffering from the lack of a sound-check due to traffic problems on the Nuthall Road, they jokily confessed to all of this and more, with an appealing self-deprecation that helped to gloss over their deficiencies.

The Victorian English Gentlemens Club took the opposite approach. Fixing us with unnervingly blank, wide-eyed stares, they doggedly trashed away as if this small midweek gig was their most important showcase to date.

The band specialises in jerky art-school indie-rock, mixing British new wave influences (Wire, early XTC) with the stylistic feel of US acts such as The Pixies and The Breeders. Hell, they even have a song called “Cannonball”.

Their twenty-eight minute set eclipsed even their self-titled debut album for brevity. Sadly, the forthcoming single “Impossible Sightings Over Shelton” is destined to win them few new fans. Better by far was the early B-side “My Son Spells Backwards”, which deserves an urgent re-promotion.

Now, I am fully aware that all the Hip Kids have been using Skype for, like, years. Not being so much of a Hip Kid myself, I have only just got round to installing it. Goodness, it really seems quite easy to use! What a relief!

Trouble is, I don't actually have any Hip Kid friends who use Skype themselves. Nobody. Not one. So I'm stuck making test calls to the nice automated lady. I think she might be getting a little sick of me.

If you're a Hip Kid and you'd like to be my Skype buddy, then please e-mail me. (I'd tell you my Skype User ID here and now, but I sense this might be Asking For It, in some as yet unknown way. Best to tread cautiously.)

1. No "proper" blog post today. Every well of inspiration needs the odd refill.

2. And definitely no fifth consecutive mention of Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirror. Even the most severely thrashed of equestrian corpses must fall apart some time.

3. In lieu of the above, here's something I prepared earlier: a feature-length review of the third Hidden Cameras album, AWOO. (Synopsis: still way above average, but in danger of running out of ideas. Plus I miss all the rude gay sex stuff.)

4. Still not satisfied? OK, here's something which I knocked up last night: a gig review of The Victorian English Gentlemens Club (their lack of apostrophisation, not mine) for t'local paper. (There were times last night, perched on my own at the back of The Social, when I wondered whether there weren't better ways of spending an evening. On the other hand, I'm committed to getting as good as I can get at doing this sort of stuff, and even a dull night can still make decent copy.)

So. Deal? Or no deal?

It's not often that I am moved to write letters of complaint. A crap holiday cottage in Scotland and aggressively rude service in a Nottingham bar spring to mind, but that's about it. Until today that is, when an article on the BBC news site sufficiently inflamed my ire.

Under the heading "Sky Mirror unveiled in Manhattan", some anonymous hand at the BBC saw fit to say the following about Anish Kapoor's sculpture:Now, as I explained at some length yesterday (in the post directly below this one), the New York mirror is nought but a cheap knock-off of our own fine (and extremely expensive) original, still standing proud and tall outside Nottingham Playhouse. So what got my goat about the BBC article was the implication that the New York mirror was somehow the Sky Mirror. It's not. It's a Sky Mirror. There is a big difference.

So busy was I, working myself up into a froth of righteous outrage over this attempt to air-brush the Nottingham mirror out of history, that I clean forgot to get equally outraged over the second inaccurate assertion. I mean, honestly. We might be provincial, but we're not totally thick. Spontaneous combustion of innocent passers-by was never one of our fears.

True, there was an issue surrounding pigeons - but the "danger zone", as laboriously calculated and triangulated by the astronomical experts, was way above the heads of even our tallest citizens. A simple protective screen, mounted on the roof of the theatre, was all it took for danger to be averted.

Off went my e-mail. Less than a couple of hours later, I checked the BBC article again. Lo and behold! The text had been altered to read as follows:Much more like it, I purred to myself, in satisfaction with an act of public service successfully executed.

However, the outrages were not yet over. I've been wondering why Anish Kapoor chose to replicate his Nottingham sculpture, six years after the fact - and in this article from the New York Times (hidden behind a registration wall, so good luck), maybe I've found my answer:Well, Mister La-Di-Dah Famous Artist, I'm only sorry that we weren't good enough for you. Off you jolly well trot, then. I'm sure they'll all love you in New York - but never forget the Little People who helped put you where you are today, eh?

We didn't pay for a mere prototype, you know. We thought we were getting something unique for our £900,000. Ah well, that's show business.

I'm not sure whether my home city can take many more of these indignities.

I never expected to mention Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirror in three consecutive posts - but then, I have only just discovered that a third version of the sculpture was unveiled today, this time on Fifth Avenue in New York.

For once in our lives, we humble Nottingham folk are way, way ahead of you NYC hipsters. We've had a Sky Mirror in Nottingham since April 2001 - and what's more, ours was the original, so yah boo sucks.

I have to say that this sudden mushrooming of mirrors has caught me off-guard, as I had always had the original version down as something of a misfire. For starters, the project ended up running many months overdue, and coming in some way over its original estimated budget. As I recall, there had been various problems with the manufacturing of the sculpture, as tiny but significant imperfections demanded correction in a variety of far-flung locations. ("It's gone to Finland for extra polishing" was one of the excuses that sticks in my mind.)

When the Mirror finally arrived, a few days ahead of its official unveiling, I remember my initial awe being tempered by a certain measure of disappointment. As as a great admirer of Kapoor's work, this was a bitter pill to swallow - but the work lacked the dramatic presence of some of his other major pieces, and I particularly disliked the slight but inescapable distortions in the reflections on either side of the dish. I had expected these reflections to be perfectly smooth, not broken up by the faint concentric circles that could be made out on the surface. Furthermore, I didn't feel that the images produced in the reflections were of any great note: an inverted church spire on the concave side, and an empty paved area on the convex side. Was this really Nottingham's answer to Antony Gormley's Angel Of The North: an iconic must-see, that would bring tourism to the region? Well, hardly.


My suspicions were amplified when Kapoor failed to show at the opening ceremony, his place being taken by that well-known patron of the arts, the ex-boxer and panto regular Frank Bruno. Nevertheless, Bruno worked the crowd effectively on the afternoon itself. He had only accepted the gig on condition that no big speech was to be expected of him; rather, he would "mingle" with the invited dignatories, whose ranks were somehow swollen to include K and myself.

Thus it was that K came to feel a tap on his shoulder from behind. Pausing in mid-sentence, he looked behind, and some distance upwards, to see Bruno smiling back down at him.

"I just wanted to say, that's a great suit you're wearing. Makes you look very regal, hur hur hur!"

Well, one takes one's compliments where one finds them.

Apart from the cost involved - £900,000 of public money, prompting all sorts of local outrage ("What's that in school books and hospital beds?") - the Mirror was also touched by controversy of a different kind. As the project's own consultant astronomer himself warned:The press duly had a field day, with all sorts of nightmare visions of dead, roasted pigeons tumbling from the sky and landing on the heads of the public.

Alas for the doom-mongers, no pigeon to date has been so much as singed. Indeed, the whole story was brilliantly squashed on the opening day itself, as the chairman of the Nottingham Playhouse Trust solemnly conducted his own "experiment" in front of the assembled press. Brandishing a long wooden pole, with a bird cage mounted on the end of it and a toy canary perched inside, he held it up in front of the mirror. As the canary failed to topple, so the Sky Mirror was pronounced officially safe.

I'm keen to know what New Yorkers will make of their own version of the Mirror. If the initial photos (here, here and here) are anything to go by, then it looks as if their reflections will be rather more dramatic than the ones which I see almost every weekday, on the way to buy my lunchtime sandwiches. And of course, the New York sky is just that little bit higher than our Nottingham sky, what with all those tall buildings and all - so the impact of seeing it reflected back at ground level will be all the more dramatic. (Here in Nottingham, we barely have to tilt our heads to cop a load of cumulo-nimbus, any time we want.)

We'll soon be regaining our unique status, though. The New York mirror is only on view until October 26th, and the Chatsworth House mini-mirror (of which more below, two posts down) will disappear a day later. But is this to be the start of a whole spate of intinerant mirrors, springing up in prominent locations all around the place, and fatally diluting our brand in the process?

Ach, who cares. You lot can keep your second generation, after-the-fact knock-offs. Here in Nottingham, we prefer to originate, not imitate.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've noticed a subtle but significant re-alignment of my hour-by-hour visitor stats. As midnight approaches, there's a pronounced upwards blip, as regular readers swing by to see whether I've met my self-imposed daily deadline. On some days, such as this one, it can be a close, nail-biting call. Especially when, after spending the entire evening slaving away over a feature-length album review for Stylus, I find myself quite, quite drained. Ah me, must they drag my words from the core of my very soul? What more do they want from me: blood? Blogging can be a harsh, pitiless mistress.

Nothing else of significance has happened today, it has to be said. The usual agonising start-of-week wrench away from the comforts of the cottage. (Why do Monday mornings in the Derbyshire Peak District have to be consistently f**king picturesque? Someone up there is mocking me.) A morning spent in fraught near-panic over a new and seemingly impenetrable work assignment, whose mysteries were kindly and patiently unlocked for me over the course of the afternoon. A lunchtime spent in the usual spot: basking in the windy sun-trap of the Playhouse courtyard, beneath Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirror, alternately giggling and wincing over a hard copy of the last couple of months' postings on the ever-magnificent Forksplit. (I like to save them up, and then indulge myself with a marathon splurge.)

After a whole month of four day weekends, this return to a five day working week still feels like a monstrous invasion of my freedom, and Friday still feels like an age away. Whatever shall I find to write about between now and then? Funny how these things always end up taking care of themselves.

Right then. Load the dishwasher, finish my beer (just the one tonight), and then bed, sweet bed. Some days, it can be a real struggle to force myself upstairs, as I have inherited the family penchant for the late evening Second Wind. But not tonight. Tonight, I can hardly wait.



(Photos taken yesterday afternoon at Chatsworth House, courtesy of dearest Dymbellina. I told you those dahlias were dazzling.)

HIT: Our second visit to The Bull's Head at Ashford in the Water confirmed it as our new favourite country pub with food. I don't want to say "gastropub", as that's not really what it aims to be - despite having been named one of the country's ten best towards the end of last year. (By persons unknown, but a list's a list for all that.) Rather, it's an unassumingly traditional place, with no fancy decor, a straightforward chalkboard menu, no advance table reservations, quick service, and a fairly rapid turnover of tables: you arrive, you eat, you leave, but there's no unseemly pressure to vacate your places, either. The welcome is an uncommonly warm one, the low-key buzz of the place puts everyone at their ease, and the food is flipping fantastic.

Last night, all four of us chose a minted pea mousse for starters: served warm, on a bed of watercress and rocket, with a spicy tomato sauce. There was nothing remotely showy-offy about it, and yet the clever combination of simple ingredients added up to something stimulating and new, yet wonderfully reassuring at the same time. My baked plaice came in a thick, creamy sauce, and was... hell, I can't bloody well remember what it looked like, I was too busy enjoying it. Sheesh. The four of us (myself, K, Dymbel and Dymbellina) then shared two puddings: a something (with chocolate), and a something else (with pastry). They were both completely scrummy, and the fact that I can remember nothing else about them (apart from the pastry), should not be read as any sort of indictment. Whoever said that all memories should be catalogued for future reference, anyway?

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MISS: Although, before their departure, Dymbel and Dymbellina expressed their wish to publicly disassociate themselves from my slaggings, I have to say that our lunchtime visit to the newly opened "Design Museum" (plus attendant café) at the David Mellor kitchenware shop and factory in Hathersage singularly failed to delight me.

For "museum", read a single wall of display cabinets, plus a letter box, a rubbish bin, a few chairs, some bollards, traffic lights and a Pelican crossing. Mellor designed them all, you see. My word, but the geographic and functional re-contextualisation of the Pelican crossing... well, it made it look like a Pelican crossing, basically. Still, it was nice if you like looking at old knives and forks.

And many do, don't get me wrong. It was just that I was hungry, and cranky, and in no mood for delayed gratification.

The attached caff looked stunning, granted: a beautiful row of tables and chairs against a long glass exterior wall, its panels opened to the warm afternoon sunshine, with divinely turned wooden benches spanning its length both inside and out. But, oh, the service. An age to take the order, and at least 35 minutes to bring it to the table - and we only wanted salads. It's not even as if they were swamped with other food orders; we barely saw another table served while we waited. Then, the coffees: a cafetiere so weak at to be undrinkable, and a nasty, bitter espresso which perfectly matched my mood.

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HIT: The gardens at Chatsworth house are currently playing host to an exhibition of modern and contemporary sculpture (yes Virginia, there is a difference), with works provided by the Sotheby's auction house. All pieces are for sale - but God knows who's going to be able to afford them, as this is serious stuff. Dali, Miro, Moore. Gormley, Hirst, Kapoor. Names, names, names, sweedie.

The positioning of the pieces around the extensive gardens is bold, ingenious, and frequently quite magical. A Gormley stick figure perches on the roof of the house itself; in the landscaped rock garden, a scaled down version of his "Angel Of The North" looks down on passers-by from either side. A custard yellow Keith Haring figure sits on the main lawn, with Robert Indiana's bright red "LOVE" letters halfway up the water cascade behind it, and Damien Hirst's intricately gruesome "Saint Bartholemew, Exquisite Pain" off to the left. Down by the canal pond and the Emperor fountain, there's another miniature: this time, it's Anish Kapoor's "Sky Mirror", looking even more effective than it does outside Nottingham Playhouse. At the pond's end, Dale Chihuly's "Sunset Boat" radiates bright yellows, oranges and reds: the colours of the bizarre glass objects which fill its hull.

It's not all hits: Joan Miro's slapdash assemblage "Femme Et Oiseau" causes me to coin the phrase "objets plonkées", and the space-age optimism of Juan Dubuffet's "Arbre Biplan" looks as tired and shabby as its cultural contemporary, Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris. However the vast majority of pieces complement their settings so well, that you find yourself longing for them to remain there permanently.

(Oh, and the dahlia garden by the entrance to the maze is quite, quite dazzling, my dears; almost as good as the lupins of a couple of months ago.)

The exhibition runs until October 27th, and I commend it earnestly to the group.

Update (1): I agree with most of Richard Dorment's review of the exhibition for the Telegraph (don't miss the slideshow), with two major exceptions. Firstly, the Dali sculpture is not on the same axis as the Hirst; they're at opposite ends of the garden, and the Dali is hidden up a narrow walkway. Secondly, I couldn't disagree more with Dorment's suggestion that Manzù's seated cardinal should be swapped with Condo's Miles Davis - the current location of both pieces suits them quite wonderfully.

Update (2): Justin has more photos: the LOVE, the Miles Davis and the Salvador Dali.