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Tips for Travellers: The Seacote Hotel, St Bees.

The Hotel that DIY Enthusiasts have been crying out for.

Cumbria affords the tourist a multitude of seldom seen pleasures. Whether it’s landscapes and seascapes, birds and butterflies, or trains and wind turbines it’s impossible for the visitor not go ‘wow’ at least three times a day.

These feats of genetic and human engineering bring a particular type of visitor to the county’s shores: the enthusiast. It’s impossible to spend a day out and about without tripping over a sweaty couple in the sand dunes who are stalking the lesser spotted horny rimmed owl, or overhearing earnest young women discussing the consequences of the recent disruption on the line between Rowrah and Cleator Moor due to a misplaced 40566 travelling in the wrong direction.

Enthusiasts from all over the world travel to delight upon the treasures of Cumbria and need a hotel which reflects their enthusiasms and the Seacote Hotel in St Bees near Whitehaven is such a hotel.

The Seacote caters for a particular type of enthusiast: the DIY Enthusiast. They have left no stone unturned, no unmade bed made up and no fixture permanently fitted to ensure that the DIY enthusiast who finds themselves on holiday, perhaps pining for a wobbly wardrobe to stabilise or a dripping tap to stop, has plenty to delight themselves with. Simultaneously allowing the DIY enthusiast to both rest from and fiddle with some unfinished DIY, the Seacote provides the perfect work life balance for those of us whose idea of heaven resembles spending the weekends wandering the aisles of B and Q in search of that holy grail, the missing whatsit which will fix the thingamy to the doodah.

The hotel’s policy of enthusiast encouragement is evident in every nook and cranny of the hotel and the management team have been enthusiastically thoughtful in catering for the range of every DIY obsession.

If you want an iron and ironing board, you go and collect it yourself from reception. If you want a functioning iron that doesn’t leak all over your suit, you fix it yourself and hope you’ve remembered the correct colour coding for the wires in the plug before you switch it back on.

Crockery is left uncleared away in the bar, encouraging you to tidy up after someone else; bath fittings are left incomplete, encouraging you to pick up a nearby screwdriver to tighten up those loose screws on the bathroom mirror; exit signs on the doors are left half attached, allowing you to finish off the attachment with aplomb, confident that you have added to future visitors’ enjoyment of the Seacote experience; the TVs are placed so awkwardly on the walls, you’re encouraged to pick up a hammer and relocate the TV yourself in the nearest waste paper basket.

So if you’re a DIY enthusiast, the Seacote Hotel is just for you. Just watch you don’t trip over the twitchers wrestling their way along the seashore on your way in.

When you land somewhere new, you have no history.

Or so you think.

You hear the words but can’t understand the sentences. The maps are intriguing but meaningless. The streets have names but no personality. There’s no hypertext in the environment: which means no links, no back story, no memories to reminisce about.

Or so you think.

When you’re new, you understand the importance of roots. You understand root systems in a way you didn’t until you’re plucked – or you pluck yourself – out of. Unrooted and ignorant, you understand, when you’re new, the significance of old.

Or so you think.

After a short time, you establish habits, you converse, you invent names for flowers in your back yard, and before you know it you have fledgling roots. Uncertain, tentative and unassuming but roots nevertheless. After a short time, you sit in a bar and you say to yourself: ‘I remember when…’ You meet someone and say ‘how was it when…?’ And at that moment you realise you now have history. You have previous.

Or so you think.

You realise that you had previous in this new place well before you physically arrived here. The new was part of your old but you didn’t hear it. The new was a shadow in your old, silent, sometimes shyly whispering, almost embarrassed to make itself known to you but also knowing one day that it would knock on your front door and say: ‘Hello. I’m your new. Remember me?’

And then you realise that your history is not the stuff of memories, but the incidental and accidental. The stuff of meaninglessness. You see the value of recognising the words but not understanding the sentences.

Guest Blog for Creative Nottingham: Getting under their skin: portraits of Hockley, St Anns and Sneinton by Mik Godley.

Like many other immigrants over the decades, my first move into Nottingham was to move into Sneinton. It’s a compact neighbourhood and it wasn’t long before I was exploring the Polish delicatessens, the Asian supermarkets and the perpetually open corner shop which sold “everything you could ever want at any time”: apart from the very thing you wanted at midnight on a Monday.

My early weeks in Sneinton reminded me of earlier times in Harehills in Leeds, Toxteth in Liverpool and numerous boroughs across London: thriving, lively communities which whilst they were culturally and economically far apart from the centre of their host city were perhaps better placed to describe how the host community claims to tolerate diversity and endeavours to encourage community cohesion.

So, I was intrigued this week to visit the “Portrait of Hockley, St Anns and Sneinton” exhibition at City Arts in Hockley, presented by the Nottingham based artist Mik Godley: a painter, lecturer who works out of Primary Studios in Lenton.

The exhibition aims to show the vibrancy and diversity of the three neighbourhoods and is made up of work that was originally created for Nottingham Light Night 2015. Mik visited groups, communities and landmarks in those communities and produced over 50 images of local people and landscapes. You can see details about it on the BBC East Midlands programme here.

Mik uses the iPad application ‘Brushes’ for this exhibition which, if you’ve never seen it at work before, is an intriguing experience. You use the app much like an artist would paint: you use the touch screen as your canvas and your fingers to choose colours, brush sizes and textures to suit your purpose. The app captures every brush stroke you make in real time and allows you to play it back: with the effect that rather than looking at a static portrait, you see a portrait being composed and constructed as you watch.

You can see an example of how it works here.

The exhibition is consequently both a video and photographic experience as Mik has printed off several of the portraits to accompany the screens which show the portraits in motion.

I wondered whether his vision would compare with mine, or if there might be some significant differences in how we experienced the community and its people. I found myself asking was whether the technology added anything to the interpretation or whether it got in the way. Mik had stated previously that he “.. really enjoyed meeting all the different sitters. It gave me a fascinating insight into their varied and interesting lives. I hope that the exhibition captures this.”

So I wanted to see if the exhibition captured the interesting lives he saw in front of his i-Pad. You can see how it played out in the gallery here:

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The answers to these questions became quite complex as time wore on. Initially, I just concentrated on the still images which were presented around the gallery and I found myself doubting whether these portraits told me anything new about the neighbourhood I had recently moved to. I didn’t feel that I had learnt anything new about the streets I walk down daily or the people whose shops I visit or share the bus to work with. But I found myself wondering whether this mattered. Does art have to give you new insights all the time or is it enough to have people’s daily experiences affirmed by the work of the artist? Perhaps it’s enough that the subjects of the paintings felt honoured to be painted by the artist and for their images to be exhibited in a public gallery?

But as I shifted from looking at the portraits to watching their play back, I realized that the video experience enabled me to look at the portraits in a more engaged manner. The change of lines, tones and contrasts as the faces developed were like micro-films of the people who were sitting for Mik. You could imagine stories of journeys travelled, family discord, weddings, of resistance, of drudgery, of wealth and poverty, of darkness and lightness of being: a whole range of stories were opened up by the ability to see the portrait under construction rather than being presented as a fait accompli. I realized that the still image is all too often an image which does exactly that – it stills its subject, fixes it and doesn’t allow for their growth and development.

I also wondered how much control the artist has over that technology buried deep in the heart of the I-pad. The algorithms do their job very well but it seems to me that all too often they allow for clichés to accrue. They dictate how the images are viewed in a tightly predefined and regulated ways: the presence of that maddening Ken Burns zoom effect which finished every portrait playback is a classic case in point.

The challenge for Mik and artists who use this technology is to not only get under the skins of their human subjects, but to get under the skin of their technologies too and make sure it becomes more of a servant to them, rather than their master.

Portrait of Hockley, St Anns and Sneinton will be exhibited in City Arts’ window from the 1st to the 17th of April.

You can download the Brushes app from all good app retailers but you won’t find it in the corner shop that claims to sell you everything at all hours. Especially on Mondays at Midnight.

Further details of City Arts here.

And more details of the Creative Nottingham Website are here.

Sloppy Postmodernism: a British dining revolutionary crisis?

There’s nothing worse than sloppy post modernism in the restaurant trade.

In the good old modernist days, the days before eating in a restaurant was a fashion choice and when there was no such thing as British ‘aute Cuisine, we all bought into the fancy food that was prepared invisibly behind closed doors by chefs who sported a hat that looked like it just had risen in a very hot oven, and then whisked to your table in a flurry of activity accompanied by French adjectives and sounds of encouragement and amazement.

“Zut Alors!” the cry would go up from your guests when presented with the latest concoction of filigree pastry, icing sugar and chicken gizzards which was promptly set fire to. You would eat your meal in silence, not knowing, not needing to pretend to know anything about the vintage, the provenance of the ingredients or very much else about anything at all. You were happy to sit there in silence, happy in your modernist knowledge of your ignorance that you knew nothing and that was the way it should be.

Then came along post modernism and the world changed for the worse. Suddenly we all had to know how the food was cooked; we had to have deep intimate views of kitchens and waste chutes; we had to know where our gizzards were coming from and where they were headed after passing our lips and navigating our tortured guts: tortured mostly by the knowledge that we knew nothing and were now embarrassed by that absence.

And along with post modern catering came the obscene phenomenon of food on receptacles that had nothing to do with plates, knives, forks, condiments or anything else resembling food‘s traditional modernistic mores and fancies. No longer could we eat at tables but we had to dine on bookshelves; no longer was it enough to use knives and forks but we had to resort to curling tongs and long white sticks used for measuring tennis net heights. And to crown it all, as demonstrated by the Wewantplates movement, we had to stop using plates to eat off. We now use shovels. We devour paperback books. We imagine plates where plates once never were. We ruin our fancy clothes as a result and the only people happy in this dining revolution are the dry cleaners.

And to cap it all, we now have the unhappy but probably inevitable phenomenon of Sloppy Postmodernism: postmodernism that is so unable to take anything seriously, it can’t even take itself seriously enough to play the game any longer. In the dining world this means just one thing. Potato Wedges on Ping Pong Bats. The lack of commitment, the absence of attention to detail, the dearth of sheer pimping chutzpah is just galling.

At least it might be a sign we might be heading back to modernism and the good old new days of rude French waiters serving us some stuff we don’t understand, can’t pronounce and retch violently every time we take a mouthful.

The Bog Standard Advisor: The Town Hall, Barrow in Furness

It’s said that Barrow Upon Furness is built the wrong way round; the front of things are at the back and the back of things are on the front. This is as true of Barrow Town Hall as it of much of its wider urban landscape: so a visitor who has been caught short and is looking for some quick relief will have a problem if they think they are going to find the toilets quickly through the front door. Because the front door – the one through which would naturally walk – is actually the back door, and what you want to be doing if you’re really desperate, is use the back passage.

Barrow in Furness is also disparaged for being on the end of the railway line; at the outer edge of English civilisation and having the highest concentration of neurotics in the whole of the UK. Whilst all of this is unfair and none of it true, what is true is that the toilets in Barrow Town Hall are hard to find: but once you’ve found them, they are quite a delightful experience.

The first thing the rushed visitor finds when coming in the back passage is a PRIVATE sign: which hardly encourages you to go any further. But the hardy, desperate visitor ignores these signs and heads up the stairs and eventually sees the signs they are wanting to see and heads off in that direction with one sole intent in mind.

Once in the cloakroom (and the good burgers of Barrow have called it a cloakroom as opposed to resorting to a cruder nomenclature), the visitor can be delighted by the architecture and the efficiency of the water systems.

Relief is quick and efficient and on the way out, one gains a bit more understanding about Britain’s industrial past at the same time by being able to study and marvel at the history of UK submarine construction for which the town is rightly famous.

The Bog Standard Advisor: St George’s Hall, Liverpool.

An OfSTED inspector once confided in me: if you really want to know a school, go and visit its toilets. And she was not wrong: for all the froth and razzmatazz that a school could muster when government inspectors came to visit,there would be many times they would forget to look after the basics of their children’s needs. Teaching and learning strategies? Tick. Attendance records? Tick tick. Behaviour modification programmes? Oh yes, tick tick tick tick tick. But the school toilets?

In many a shiny school I visited, the toilets were still left in a disgraceful state. Cubicle doors kicked in, toilet paper hanging off the light bulbs and the stench of urine never far away and always beckoning you to look for the next urination hot spot.

Things were made worse by some bizarre school policies which instructed children not to go to the toilet at all between the hours of 9.30 and 10.17 precisely: or only on a Tuesday: or only if accompanied by a gazelle. No wonder the poor dear’s little bladders went into convulsion the moment they joined big school.

So since then I have been alert to the promise of shiny schools and the reality of their crap houses. And the same thing applies to many civic monuments up and down the country and around the globe: the magnificence of the Taj Mahal, the promise of liberation at The Statue of Liberty or the spiritual communing at The Vatican promise so much but deliver so little in the way of public amenities. It’s like they all want to celebrate the nobility of human endeavour without acknowledging that every King, President or Pope also needs a crap once in a while.

Happily, this is not the case with St George’s Hall in Liverpool. That it is a major public monument of historical significance is indisputable; that it offers a thousand and one ways for the occasional visitor to engage with the City’s past is without question: but the real icing on the cake are the gents toilets which are modestly upholstered and a welcoming relief to the bombast in the Big Hall along the corridor.

Decorated with some fetching light blue, grey and cream coloured tiles which make the urinals feel like a glorified beach hut as opposed to the nearest pharmacist’s clinic, the space enables you to go about your business with a spring in your step and song in your heart.

Liverpool may well have won the European City of Culture Award in 2008 and spent millions upon millions of pounds upon its local artists such as Royal De Luxe and their splendid puppets, but what will linger longer in the memory at a fraction of the price are the toilet facilities of St George’s Hall, for those of you who have got caught short at Lime Street Station and can’t pay? won’t pay! the 30p the station will charge you.

The Bog Standard Advisor: Nottingham Town Hall.

Nottingham Town Hall is a highly salubrious venue when it comes to visiting the city’s glorious past and the many artefacts that reflect its long industrial history. It sits in the pride of place of Market Square and naturally attracts a lot of street vendors, mobile tea and coffee units and neighbouring restaurants.

What is less known about Nottingham Town Hall is that it is home to some very comfortable gentlemen’s toilets.

You can sit down in comfort, wash your hands at ease knowing full well that there is clean hand towel nearby and there are even baby changing facilities in the same room as the urinals.

Some might baulk at the idea of this kind of adjacency but there’s no getting away from it: if you’re half inclined to be taken short whilst you’re in the middle of Market Square in Nottingham, heading over to the Town Hall will provide you with quick, reliable and comfortable relief in a way that the local McDonalds Fast Food outlet will never be able to.

The Bog Standard Advisor: what’s it all about?

There are endless restaurant reviews across the world, reviewing every edible thing from eggs to echidna and back again. One thing they all have in common is that they review and comment on the facilities which involve putting food and drink of various quantities and qualities into the human being.

What they frequently omit to mention are the facilities which involve disposing of the waste products that emerge once those food and drinkstuffs have been processed by aforesaid human being: namely, the toilet. Or WC. Or Crapper. Or John. Or Bog. Or whatever you want to call it in your home town or metropolitan lair.

This bog-blog is going to address those deficiencies by irregularly reviewing toilets (WCs, crappers, johns etc.) that one has had the pleasure or displeasure to visit. It will, without fear or favour, name the guilty and praise the innocents when it comes to advising the world’s public about which toilets (WCs, crappers, johns etc.) to use and which to avoid like the plague, just in case you stand a chance of catching nasty from the water system.

Watch this space… but don’t stand too close, just in case.

I am Peter? And I am? your workshop leader? For today?

Ok Peter, I get the message quickly that you are about to run this session today but what really perplexes me is your constant inability to talk in a straight line. You’ve developed that really annoying tendency Peter which turns a statement into a question by placing an upward intonation at the end of every sentence.

And worse still Peter, that high rising terminal is creeping into every part of your syntax so that after just a few minutes of your session, I’m left wondering whether you think I’ve never heard the name Peter before, whether you actually exist, whether you think I’ve ever heard of such a thing as a workshop leader and whether you’re suggesting you’re going to inflict your rising questions on me not just for today but possibly for tomorrow as well and heaven forbid for the foreseeable future.

It doesn’t instil confidence in me Peter that you know what you are doing and it doesn’t predispose me to liking you or engaging with the content you’re trying to impart. In fact Peter it makes me want to leave the room and go find someone else who knows his or her own name, knows what they’re doing and knows today’s date.

Just imagine Peter if you met a surgeon who introduced themselves like this: “I’m Doctor Smith? And I’m going to remove your appendix? later today?” What would you rate your chances Peter of getting on and off the operating table in the right number of pieces?

Or you’re on a plane about to take off and the pilot says, ‘Good morning ladies and gentlemen? We’re about to take off?” He may as well add, “if that’s all right by you?”.

See Peter, it just doesn’t instil confidence Peter in you as a human being or as a workshop leader. So please Peter, just cut out the questions and start speaking in straight lines again.

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