GO CAREFUL

Hull: The City That Would Not Die, from RIBA Journal

IT WASN'T A DREAM, IT WAS A PLACE

I'm listening to Salman Rushdie on The Wizard of Oz on Radio Four as I pack for my return to Budapest tomorrow. Disarmingly, it has just segued into some very pertinent - if a little histronic - discussion on homing, leaving and elsewhere.

You can listen here.

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.

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.