Sunday, October 26, 2008

Teddies

This in-between time has me feeling a little like an émigré to Hull, when in fact I've done an eighteen year stretch. Nevertheless, as a old-newcomer, it's good to know someone with an ear to the ground. Enter Han, with whom I went to the third of the Seeds and Bridges 2008 contemporary music series.

We saw Nalle, who were just wonderful, and came off like fifteen year-old, multi-instrumentalist wiccans going hell for leather in the school music room.



P.S. And if, like me, you fear the Newsome effect, stick with it, I promise Hannah Tuulikki's voice is less babytalk and more word-chewing.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

In the back of a chevy...




This is my Granddad, sporting a tee shirt commemorating 1985 Sonic Youth and Lydia Lunch collab Death Valley 69. My Nana (just out of shot) discreetly disapproves of this choice of shirt, too prim to admit why.


Ron has had it filed alongside Get Your Kicks on Route 66, as part of a stack of souvenir tee shirts from tourist jaunts to the States. In fact, it was collected by my Uncle Phil during his days as a security guard in the Smoke. My Granddad has been wearing it, nonplussed, since 1985.

News from Nowhere

By-the-by we left Norwich. Sad, of course, but muted by tussles with spiders, black mould, the silverfish that fed on our books' bindings and - worse, more wriggly and grotesque - lettings agencies.


I'm now in Hull, taking a fortnights holiday in being eighteen years old. Last night, I went to the Adelphi (which is, strangely, alongside the English Department of the University of East Anglia, one of the places I feel most at home) to see Han's band The Rocky Nest. With the sudden departure of a guitarist and a drummer, they were reluctantly forced to perform as a trio acoustic-style.


Han is channelling Francoise Hardy a little at the moment, I think.



Thursday, October 16, 2008

Norwich's Greatest Hits

Here's an entry from the Top Ten: the Plantation Garden, tucked down a driveway off Earlham Road near the Roman Catholic Cathedral.



Although a beautiful and lovely place in its own right, it made it into my Countdown as the location of fondly-remembered late night/early morning pastoral-style hi-jinks a couple of years ago.


I have it pegged as the Most Dewy Place on Earth. And as admission is by Honesty Box, payment is optional but the right thing to do.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Infilling / Something Good


We're winding down our last days in Norwich. With a week and a half to go, my Boo is holed up in the Graduate Resource Centre putting his PhD to bed whilst I potter around, feeling about as a "chill" as I ever have, making wrinkle-nose gross faces at our flat's mould infestation, tinkering with my new swank camera, taking day trips, mentally compiling Norwich's Greatest Hits, toying with a PhD proposal.