Author: drnicko

Awarded an MBE for services to arts-based businesses, I am passionate about generating inspiring, socially engaging, creative practice within educational contexts both nationally and internationally.

Tips for Travellers: The Greenhouse, Llantarnam, Wales.

Missing: the Menu.

We came out for a family meal a couple of days after Christmas and whilst we were met with a friendly staff welcome, the menu was noticeable by a series of absences: most of the local beers were missing, the mash had gone AWOL and the taste of the chicken dishes had been obliterated by some over-zealous over-heating.

The fun game for the evening was second guessing what HAD stayed on the menu and I was reminded of the old Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch where the hapless customer found himself in a futile search for a variety of cheeses only to be met by an ever increasing array of excuses about why the aforesaid cheese was not available. So a fun filled evening was had by all, although not in the way the owners may have intended.

Tips for Travellers: The Furness Railway, Barrow in Furness, Cumbria.

Revisting Old Haunted Haunts.

The Furness Railway is perhaps one of the most evocative, curious and welcoming pubs in Barrow. Seemingly open at all times to all customers, I’ve never heard them say no to any customer, whatever the time of day or nature of the request.

The food is cheap and cheerful; the beers cheap and surprisingly good and the staff welcome unfazed by some of the more feral members of the community who might inadvertently tip their beer over your head.

It might be a part of some large anonymous chain, but the Furness Railway is a unique experience at all times of day to all types of customer. It’s a ‘must-go-to’ haunt in one of England’s most haunted towns.

Don’t leave Space to the Professionals!

At last, Space, the final frontier between the knowing (the nudge nudge wink wink of the ironic inverted commas) and the unknowing has finally been breached.

In his work on MoonGolfing, Tim Wright sums up the next era of the space race: or rather the space trudge given many of us aren’t fit enough to race anywhere, never mind into space: Don’t leave Space to the Professionals!

The next era of the space trudge will be its democratisation; the time when any old Joe will be to take one small step for man, and an even smaller step for mankind.

By writing the professionals out of the picture, Tim Wright has joined a long line of illustrious contemporary thinkers whose premise is that any profession is too important to be left to the professionals: this includes teaching, artists, historians, and now thankfully, space invaders. Want your kids to have a decent education? Write the teachers out of it. Want to make art? Don’t employ an artist. Want to write history? Just make it up as you go along.

The end of professionalism in the space industry can only be a good thing in the end as it will mean governments will have to engage communities in deciding what kind of rocket they want on their doorstep. An Atlas 125 madam? Complete with twin powered nuclear explosive devices discreetly hidden under the bonnet? That’ll do nicely.

The private sector will no doubt be able to put a man into space for a fraction of the cost that those fat cats in the public sector earn. Whether they can bring that man back to Earth in one piece is another matter altogether and is but a trivial issue in the bigger vision of the democratisation of space.

No, there’s no doubt about it: leaving space to the professionals has resulted in the human race diverting millions upon millions of unnecessary dollars, rubles and rupees in activities which are as scientifically illuminating as landing a washing machine on a comet some trumpty doodle zillion mega aeon year lights away and then watching it bounce big into space, stuck on its spin rinse cycle.

The sooner the likes of you and me can make our mark on the overwhelming nothingness that is the universe, the better.

How the train driver reassures us in times of surrealist confusion. Number 9 in the series: Knowledge, traffic and arts based research.

“Is this Liverpool?”
“No, this is Wigan: but it’s the Liverpool train.”

That cleared that up then; the passenger clearly mistaking a train at a platform for a nearby northern city is corrected by the train guard who later we found out has at least two extra jobs of ticket seller and driver. All is seemingly not as it seems in the world of the train company employee these days, it seems.

But the knowledge of the train driver-ticket seller-guard-drinks dispenser is paradoxically reassuringly settled and his pedantry in making sure we understand the phenomenological difference between a city and a train is one of the few things in life we can be grateful for, epistemologically speaking.

Just imagine if we couldn’t differentiate between a city and a train. How would we survive? What we do on a Friday night after work? Sit in railway sidings and wonder why life was passing us by? How would get from A to B on a bank holiday? We couldn’t just wander the streets of A and wonder why there was no sign of B.

Every now and then in life, we need wise people who can put us straight when it comes to trying to understand what we are surrounded by. The influence of the surrealists unfortunately left many of us completely bamboozled when it comes to understanding whether things are as they seem.

René Magritte’s Treachery of the Images has to bear a lot of responsibility for this bamboozlement.

He painted a pipe and then underneath it painted the text, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”, French for “This is not a pipe.” When it most definitely is a pipe. Anyone can see it is a pipe. He may as well have drawn a cityscape and written ‘Ceci est un train’, French for ‘This is a Train‘ for all the confusion he subsequently wreaked on future generations of art students.

What the train driver (ticket seller-guard-drinks dispenser-on board entertainer-chief bottle washer) ensures is that whilst life seems chaotic, complex and down right treacherous, in actual fact it is exactly as you see it: a train is a train is a train; a city is a city is a city and no amount of visual shenanigans by Belgian surrealists is going to tell us otherwise.

Unless of course you try reading the train timetable which is obviously written by a gang of Dadaistas on acid, given the incomprehensible nonsense those walls of information misrepresent.

The job for the Arts Based Researcher here? To ensure that the train driver’s knowledge is communicated clearly and unambiguously with no wriggle room for misunderstanding or cheeky irreverence. That may be difficult for some colleagues but a short spell on a Virgin Pendolino on a Friday afternoon stuck in the middle of nowhere should be enough to convince them of the power of the propositional knowledge that If I say ‘this is a train‘ then I mean exactly that: it is a train and not an aeroplane, cow or city masquerading as a train.

Dave Kinnear, Raconteur, Co-member of Everton Park and Bootle Sports Centre Squash Teams

A raconteur, according to my online dictionary, is someone who tells anecdotes in a skilful and amusing way.

Dave Kinnear was not a raconteur in the usual meaning of the word.

True, he would tell stories at great length – and who knows how many weird and wonderful stories he’s related over the years – and true he had a kind of storytelling skill – if converting a straightforward story into a complex mix of diversion, cul-de-sac and red herring is a skill, and true he would be amusing – albeit in a baffling kind of ‘Help, I’ve lost the plot, Dave!’ kind of way.

But more than all this, Dave was an urban myth, a legend in his own story life time – and the legends he is part of, are legendary.

Once, there was this fella who reckoned that he had been part of all his families stories – even though he hadn’t been born when they’d taken part. ‘I know these things!’ he’d say, mystically.

Once, there was this fella who persuaded his ill brother to let him drink his medicine – to stop this brother getting into trouble.

Once, there was this fella who had such a deft little wrist shot on the squash court – that his opponents would find themselves on court red faced, high tempered and fuming at the innocence of that squash shot which always had them running the wrong way, or left them flat footed or left them just looking plain silly.

We – his squash mates from Everton and Bootle – met Dave over 10 years ago at Everton Park squash courts – quite how, we can’t quite remember although Dave would have known…

We got playing together on Wednesday nights and before too long we had been signed up to the Thursday night league, complete with so called training on Sundays – again, quite why and how is fuzzy – but Dave would have remembered.

And before we knew it there we all were, driving around Merseyside over many cold winter Thursday nights to play at clubs we had difficulty finding in the squash league schedule – Burscough, Birkdale, Xaverien – pronounced for some reason that Dave would have explained – as SFX.

Dave, with his storytelling, anecdotes and explanations provided the social glue for our team.

Once, there was this fella who told stories in such complicated and detailed fashion, that his audience frequently turned to stone, complete with puzzled expressions across their stony brows.

But what his audience didn’t know was that Dave knew stories of before he was born, and consequently had so many stories to get out to his family and friends – and had so much to say – and so little time to say it – that he couldn’t be wasting time with the craft of telling his legends – so just got on with it, talking to everyone, conversing with everyone, remembering everyone and everything – and becoming a master raconteur to us all.

Dave, you’re a bit of an urban myth in our eyes – thanks for holding us together.

Nick Owen
Bootle EP Squash team
6 March 2006

What if Robin Williams met Anna Craft? What does losing 2 big C Creatives in a week tell us about us?

We’ve lost a couple of giants in the last week, both of whom speak of and for creativity albeit in very different ways: Anna Craft with her little ‘c’ creativity and Robin William’s big black dog of Creativity.

There can’t be many people out there who’ve not encountered Williams in his various disguises but probably a whole lot more who have never come across Anna’s work on creativity and learning. Whilst Williams’ creativity was bombastic, totalising and indisputable, Craft’s was more nuanced, subtle and ambiguous: with Williams you felt a target on the wrong side of the monologue but with Craft you did at least have a sense that you were in dialogue with her, previous generations and yourself.

Between them, they encapsulate the spectrum of difficulty of what it is to define, discuss or demonstrate that most infuriating of phenomena: the ‘c’ word. Is it all about individual genius which borders on insanity and can only be understood by defaulting to understandings of mental health, childhood trauma or drug fuelled psychosis? Or is it about more subtle ways of engaging with and imagining a world of possibilities? Or both?

Let’s do an Anna and ask ourselves, ‘What If they met on their own respective stairways to heaven? What might they have said to each other as they made their way through purgatory? And what insights might they generate as they waited to find out their future destiny? And where would that leave the rest of us?

Would Robin admit to a life long secret desire to be a nursery school teacher? And Anna to a thwarted ambition to entertain millions through her latent desire to be a rock guitar hero?  We’ll never know for certain of course: but one thing they could both agree upon is that without them gracing the earth for their short days, we would all be a lot poorer in understanding what it is to be human.

But if you do have an inside track on their conversation as they made it up into the stars, it would be great to hear about it!

 

 

Poetry on the Hoof: It Ain’t Over ’till It’s Over.

It ain’t over till it’s over,
It ain’t done till it’s done,
The fat lady ain’t singing yet,
She’s sat inside her tent.

It ain’t over till it’s over
It ain’t done till it’s done,
The carnival ain’t started,
The clown’s not yet farted.

It ain’t over till it’s over,
It ain’t done till it’s done,
This corpse ain’t stopped twitching yet,
Put the funeral back on hold!

So save your tears, save your whoops,
Stop living in the future,
Stop living in the past,
It’s the here and now that matters
And tomorrow’s a world away.
There’s nothing to take for granted,
Nothing to assume,
You can plan and scheme all you like
But.

It ain’t over till it’s over,
It ain’t done till it’s done,
The fat lady ain’t singing yet:
She’s still sat inside her tent.

Celebrate Easter and join Aspire’s virtual Hunt the Easter Elephant competition!

Yes, you heard it here first folks: instead of laboriously schlepping around the garden or your local park to hunt for pass-their-sell-by-date Easter Eggs, you can hunt for Easter goodies from the comfort of your own armchair, bathroom or bus queue – or wherever you read the Aspire Trust website from!

During Easter Sunday, we’ll be hiding 12 Easter Elephants through the many pages of the website (www.aspire-trust.org) – and if you can find all 12, just email info@aspire-trust.org with your name and email address and you could win a prize!

Everyone who identifies the location of all 12 Easter Elephants (ie the name of the webpages) will be put forward to a prize raffle which will be drawn at 12.00hrs GMT on Easter Monday: the winner will win 2 free tickets worth £50.00 to the opening keynote speeches at our All Our Futures conference on Monday 16 June (more details here).

So, if it’s pouring down on Easter Sunday and you’re worried how to break it to the kids that you won’t be spending any time soon foraging amongst the shrubbery for their Easter Eggs: then just log in here, look for the 12 Easter Elephants with your kids and family– and enjoy our site at the same time!

An Open Letter to Ed Balls: everyone has a theory about something.

Dear Ed,

(I hope you don’t mind me calling you Ed: we’ve never met, but I have a theory that you wouldn’t mind, you being the affable kind of bloke that you are. I’m sure we’d have a few pints in my local, The Fly and the Loaf in Liverpool, and I’m sure we’d leave on good terms, having disagreed to disagree on many countless matters including what the best German lager in town is. My argument would be that it would be Veltins, but my theory is that you would probably disagree. No matter: that’s not why I’m writing to you right now.)

In your call today for there to be “more to education than theoretical learning”, you’ve joined a long line of distinguished politicians and educators who have deep philosophical reservations about the concept of theory and its relation to practice. My theory about you and your colleagues is that ‘theory’ is an alien concept which has no place in your so called ‘real world’ of pragmatic learning which promotes and drills skills, skills and yet more skills into learners. In this ‘real world’ learning is ‘delivered’; ‘academic’ is an insult and the person who suggested that teaching and learning is not a simple causal relationship should have been shot at birth, or whenever it was some lefty trendy academic theoretician invented him or her.

The trouble is, Ed, is that we all love a good theory. This includes you with your theory that there is more to education than theoretical learning. Of course there’s more to education than any one form of intellectual engagement (there’s another dirty word for you, Ed – intellectual): there’s practical engagement, there’s emotional engagement, there’s social engagement, there’s sensual engagement: there’s lots of forms of engagement but my theory is that your forensic like focus on the word ‘theoretical’ is to try and assuage the leading educational commentators of the Daily Mail (who they?) and its acolytes (who they ditto?) that you are following their theory free zones like all good pragmatic, cautious and entirely uninspiring commentators before them.

Perhaps Ed, if you had offered the theory that learning is more than any one fashionable fixation and will always perplex us in its difficulty and complexity, you might have persuaded a lot more of us that you were the politician to lead us out a neo-Govian future. But my theory (cough – spot the Monty Python reference) is that you didn’t because you can’t and so we won’t.

More’s the pity.

Best wishes and mine’s a pint,

Nick