Glancing downwards, hair dripping wetness from walk through town and gales and rain, I spy a date that says today is the first day of February and I realise it’s two weeks since my eerie Ochs / Gallo dream and three since I last managed to write anything of length anywhere at all. Three weeks of scratches in various notebooks; rabid snippets of lines from books and endless to-do lists, the contents of most of which remain to-do. Three weeks of a head full of thoughts of many things, but mainly focused around processes and film and classrooms and learning, and oh, stuff most sensible people would find very dull indeed. Such is life. Thankfully those thoughts put to a back-burner for a while after yesterday’s Making Creative Connections 2 conference in Bristol. This my first visit to Bristol in far too many years, so many in fact that the last time I was there I was looking at drawings and models of the bridge across from the Arnolfini to the Watershed. So yesterday I walked across the bridge just for the hell of it, and back again, to get into the warmth of the Watershed café and a welcome coffee. Can’t believe how much development has taken place, and how little warmth there is in that development. Britain, it seems to me, does this kind of development very badly, mainly I think because there is an insistence on cramming in bars and clubs, and as we all know the British aren’t really very good at drinking without resorting to violence and, not to put too fine a point on it, shitting in their nests. So it all looks a bit shoddy and shady already, which is really sad. Of course maybe I just think this because I’m just getting old and need to retire to a cottage in the country. It’s entirely possible.
posted by duke harringay at 8:41 PM