When I left you last, we were in the midst of the most intense snow experience of my life — chest high drifts, complete white-outs, blizzards... It started off being kind of cool, but VERY QUICKLY got old. Our neighbour Caroline also has a border collie called Nancy. With her young son off school due to the snow, and with a border collie and little boy having very different levels of ability to trudge through deep snow (i.e. 'could keep going forever' vs 'tired within a few feet'), I helped out by bringing Nancy along on our walks. (In payback, it should be said, for the many times Caroline has helped me out, particularly when me and Alex were laid low with the tummy bads back in January). Nancy is great. She's a strong independant woman who knows what she wants, and I think Charlie actually quite likes her, despite being indifferent to or scared of almost every other dog.
There’s this Muscovy Duck (I have since learnt this is what it's called and it's not in fact a variety of goose as I wrote here) that lives along the canal towpath and is always hanging out in exactly the same spot. I wonder if it's very elderly, but I guess there's no way of knowing. We walked along there when the canal was all frozen over and the towpath still thick with snow, and I know it’s hard to read emotion in birds but I think it was pretty bloody miserable.
As the snow continued to not thaw, interesting patterns of dirt started to form in it, after the initial pristine couple of days.
(As an aside, like many people, I am reconsidering my relationship with Facebook in the wake of recent revelations. It's simultaneously something I should probably have done a long time ago, but also something which still is a huge struggle to cut off completely. As part of trying to break ties, I have gone back to the good old days of uploading pictures to Flickr instead of Facebook. I will miss the interactions and comments that Facebook inevitably encourages, but actually Flickr has a way nicer UI, upload pages, and is just generally better all round for viewing and enjoying photos. If you're interested in seeing a little of how ridiculous the snow was in Hebden Bridge, there's an album here)
I kind of enjoyed pushing myself to try new visual ways of representing the snow with paints and colours though. This based on this picture
After a week things gradually started to thaw. But so slowly. Walking still hard and exhausting, and Charlie needs no less exercise on snow days as he does on rain days or sun days or any other day.
Waiting, both for snow to thaw and spring to come, but also for much anticipated soon-to-come holiday. (Still life of Alex's room drawn while watching some trash on Netflix)
This is really badly drawn but made both Alex and Justin crease up laughing, so it works somehow I guess. (The boy really does love bananas)
Raging / plotting / running.
Just when I thought the snow had stopped IT STARTED SNOWING AGAIN, I mean come on. But some holiday plotting and some running despite cold are distractions.
I spent a lovely few hours at my friend Nic’s shop in Heptonstall, ‘The Workshop’. For her formal opening weekend (despite the shop actually having been open since Christmas) she invited various of the local artists whose work she stocks to come and hang out at the shop, show off their work and/or run mini workshops. I was there at the same time as lovely Emma and Marie-Claire from the Todmorden Food Assembly. I bought along two years worth of these visual diaries for people visiting to skim through, and did some drawings while I sat there. People were very sweet about them which made me happy.
Also pre-holiday admin day, because I am a terrible stressy traveller who needs everything to be JUST SO.
Holiday travel begins. Generally throughout my adult life I have tried to avoid flying for environmental reasons and because I just generally don’t like flying. (Although I am going to break that later this year in a big way). Conscious that a holiday in Amsterdam could easily be got to in a few short hours with a flight from Manchester airport, I nonetheless chose instead to get the train down to London, and then the following day get the Eurostar/Thalys on across Europe. It is a lot of extra time, and depressingly some extra money, but is overall a far nicer experience, and clearer conscience for me too. Strange in-between day though, of getting down to London but no further. Still very lovely to see George and Wes fleetingly stopping at their place en-route.
Then, onwards. I do love Eurostar. Fast and clean and suddenly you're on the other side of the channel where everything is different and exciting. (And there's a great vegan doner kebab shop in Brussels Midi, although this is apparently about the only good vegan thing in Brussels AS DISCUSSED LATER)
Got to Amsterdam and had a lovely stopover with friend Scott and his kids (and also friends) Rowan and Sabine. Fleeting but wonderful, they've been kind enough to host me and Alex for holidays before and I love the Netherlands so much it's always a joy to return.
Scott lives just outside Amsterdam, so on the following day I travelled into the centre to meet Alfred. On tour around Europe (as Daedelus, playing a new weird and wonderful modular DJ set) in support of Baths, he had a couple of days stopover in Amsterdam while Will and Morgan of Baths (and tour manager George) played an extra last minute addition show all the way over in Tblisi.
We had a lovely day of delicious food, vintage clothes shops and a fairly intense modular synthesiser shop staffed by a gruff Dutch man with very extensive knowledge of bleeps and bloops. (I now know a lot more about modular synthesisers than I did before and yet they are still almost entirely opaque and mysterious magic boxes to me)
As a bonus, I also got to catch up with me and Alex's other NL friend Lara, who works in a coffee shop at the central station. As she's potentially moving to New Zealand later this year, this fleeting moment may be the last time we see each other (for a very long time/ever?), which is a strange feeling, but I'm super excited for her new life plans.
The following day, further adventures, including a ridiculous errand to nearby Haarlem to buy a kilogram of a very specific tea for Alex, to source the best chips in the Netherlands, then back to central Amsterdam for a joyous afternoon of Rijksmuseum nerdery and loads more delicious food. (Including just so much vegan stroopwaffel which is entirely unobtainable in this country)
Will, Morgan and George joined us in Amsterdam the following day full of great stories from Tbilisi (And some very weird sweets), before their show at Bitterzoet that night. I am still very bad at drawing realistic likenesses, but I TRY. I have seen Alfred perform more times than I care to admit, but the new modular set he's playing is very cool, and I'm intrigued to see where he takes it next. I'd never seen Baths before, but his album 'Romaplasm' from this last hear has been huge for me, and it was such a joy to hear it performed so incredibly live. TBH you've probably missed your chance now, but if you can get to see Baths live, please do. Will and Morgan put on a formiddable show.
The following day we all had some last moments in Amsterdam for fancy yoghurt, more nice coffee shops and general canal admiring. Their next show was in Brussels, and given my predilection for Eurostar, I was having to pass through Brussels to get home anyway. Alfred, Will, Morgan and George were squeezed into a car full of keyboards and synthesisers with no space for me, but this is GOOD because I am so ridiculously travel sick and like the worst passenger, so I very happily got a train over to Brussels to meet them there.
They were held up a little in traffic, and I suffered a little from train delays, so none of us got there until quite late afternoon...
Alfred warned me that vegan options at the venue were likely to be limited, and I was like 'Oh, I'll find something as I walk from the hotel to the venue', but there was NOTHING not even a single solitary chip shop, just fuckloads of pancakes and pastries. Having only managed to find a weird fruit and nut breadstick and pretzel for lunch when passing through Rotterdam, with phone battery running low, and increasingly cold weather closing in, it's fair to say, my (already kind of limited, tbh) affection towards Brussels diminished with every step.
The venue was the incredible Botanique, a stunning glasshouse situated in the middle of some beautiful botanic gardens. Alfred suggested I explore the gardens rather than watch them soundcheck but they were just full of creepy Belgian dudes and it was starting to rain, so that option seemed unappealing.
Luckily, once in, it turned out there was a (seemingly, hopefully) vegan pasta dish which I wolfed down, as well as some cheeky stolen snacks from Baths rider. Honestly, in all my years of being vegan now, this is was the most vulnerable I've felt in terms of genuinely perhaps not getting any food at all. (Others have since corroborated that Brussels kind of sucks in this respect, although with a bit more forward planning, time and research, I could probably have found something reasonable).
But anyway, grumbles and moans aside, Botanique is a spectacular venue, and the 'Orangerie' room they played included some of my favourite venue features: tiered standing area, sprung dancefloor, and A++ lighting/lighting technician. The sound was much better than the previous night too and I had a joyous time seeing them both again.
After the show, Will from Baths was playing a DJ set at midnight at a bar in central Brussels. Both me and Alfred were tired BUT I was actually uncharacteristially in the mood for a weird party and a weird party was exactly what I got. Ask me about it sometime.
The day after the show in Brussels was time to part ways, with Will, Morgan and George heading on to Paris, Alfred to Den Bosch back in the Netherlands for a
week’s residency with the most incredible machines, and me back to London…
In perhaps somewhat ridiculous scheduling given how tired I was from a few days of travel and music and heady partying the night before, I couldn't turn down the opportunity to take on my friend Naomi's spare ticket to see much acclaimed musical Hamilton at the Victoria Palace Theatre. I hate musicals but I love hip hop and historic costumery, and the latter two won out here. It's an incredible thing and I feel very priviledged to have witnessed, you should absolutely go if you get the chance (And this coming from someone who hates musicals. If you love musicals this might be like the best thing ever).
I stayed at my friend David's place in London, then the next day got the train back to Manchester. Still, not quite home, stayed at incredibly hospitable Kim and Sylvia's, enabling me to catch one of my most anticipated shows this year, Milo and Open Mike Eagle at the Deaf Institute. It was all I had hoped for and more, and the best possible end to my ridiculous week of adventures.
(SO MUCH LOVE to Wes, George, Scott, Rowan, Sabine, Lara, Alfred, Will, Morgan, George, David, Naomi, Kim, Sylvia and everyone else I met/saw over the course of the week who welcomed me, showed me kindness, took care of me, fed me, shared with me and just generally helped me have a wonderful time. I couldn't have asked for more happiness, honestly.)
(There's an album of pictures from this trip here, if you want to see a better representation than my crude drawings convey)
But oh my goodness I got the train back from Manchester on Monday morning after the gig at about 7am to commence work at 9, and arrived back in Hebden Bridge to STILL SNOWING and just… This valley. IT TESTS ME SOMETIMES
And you know, back to the mundane day-to-day reality of most of my visual diaries — this isn’t very well drawn but here are some very specific chores that I very specifically loathe.
I’ve been growing out my fringe since about last July and it is SO CLOSE. SO CLOSE. But not quite. (Also there’s a Charlie hair stuck to this one which I couldn’t be bothered photoshopping out, because my life now is just Charlie hairs on everything I own and everything I love and everything I eat and I feel like I should share this with you. Particularly bad at the moment as he’s shedding his winter coat and it is incompressible to me how my sweet boy can shed such an impossibly vast amount of hair at such speed)
So I turned 30 on the 26th. I’ve basically been treating the entire month as one big celebration, but maybe quietly. (Or maybe not, some might say). Anyway, this felt like the beginning of ACTUAL birthday doings — Wes, George, Nat and Lauren, up from London for a thing, took me out for a bangin’ vegan junk food lunch at V Revs where we ordered ALL THE THINGS. Also bought some treats, saw some art, and when I got home, David had arrived!
The next day, me, David and Justin did a big walk from Todmorden up to Gaddings Dam (The UK’s highest beach) and Stoodley Pike. Still over excited by our new house acquisition of a selfie stick, we all got a bit carried away with scenic selfies.
Before David headed back down to that London, we had delicious vegan full English breakfasts at 'The Humblest of Pleasures' (ugh that name tho) in Hebden. Then later that day Alex finally followed their dreams and created 'The Yorkshire Burrito', an unholy combination of vegan black pudding, yorkshire pudding and gravy all wrapped in a tortilla. I was NOT DOWN but despite my reservations they were bloody brilliant and I basically skipped dinner and ate three of these instead. Expect this horrendous/brilliant recipe in the next cook-zine, zine-fans...
And then THE DAY ARRIVES, but tbh it kind of sucked… I am trying to do WAY too much this year in terms of taking annual leave, which means I can’t afford to throw away any days off on minor frivolities like birthdays, I need to save them for major frivolities like pursuing unlikely international friendships, seeing music, and terrifying big holidays — more of that next month...
So I was working my usual 9.00 – 1.30 fixed hours (although did permit myself the afternoon off from freelance commitments), and then I’d wanted to take Alex on a birthday date into Manchester for more tasty food, but there was a train strike which basically rendered that impossible. Trains were (infrequently) running to Halifax, which is hardly the most inspiring of locations, but I decided that I still wanted to go SOMEWHERE so we went to Halifax where I got a tray of chips and curry (prob in my top 5 favourite meals and the chip shop in Hebden cook their chips in lard which is a perpetual source of low-key rage to me) and spent way too much money on treats in big Saisnburys. Trains were infrequent enough that Alex persuaded me to get a bus back instead, but this valley is BROKEN at the moment, with everyone who lives here and regularly drives despairing at the combination of roadworks and just sheer geography that means any car journey along the valley at the moment takes about 10 times longer than it should. With the result that the 15 minute train journey from Halifax to Hebden took about an hour and fifteen minutes on the bus which is, let’s be honest, not how you want to spend your 30th birthday.
To add insult to injury the Chinese takeaway is closed on Mondays which means I couldn’t even get fancy dinner. YOU ARE TESTING ME STILL, HEBDEN
(But I got loads of really lovely messages and tbh that was the most wonderful thing about the day, it meant a huge amount to hear from so many friends near and far, THANK YOU)
TBH clearing up prolific quantities of dog vomit isn’t how I’d have chosen to spend the first day of my thirties, but life comes at you fast. It's quite substantially less gross than child vomit and I take great consolation in that.
So there's this thing called the Pace Egg. It happens in Heptonstall (and other places, I'm told). It's a short, simple play about St. George involving sword fights aplenty, a not insignificant amount of racism (no blackface although that is a low bar), borderline unsettlingly specific audience participation, and a huge amount of alcohol consumption built into the plot. The play is performed five or six times over the course of the day in different locations around the village, with each performance becoming progressingly more shambolic/rowdy as the cast (and audience, some of whom spend the whole day watching all of the iterations) become drunker. It is a strange and bizarre local spectacle, at times hilarious, but not without its problematic elements... This place, man. This place.
Also, on the same day, THIRTY PARTY! The Egg Factory, Hebden Bridge's finest* (*also only) co-working space is one of my favourite places and filled with some of my favourite people, who very kindly offered to host me a party. Friends from far and near came out, not even all drawn here, and I suffered from that terible social anxiety of looking round the room lots and hoping everyone was having a good time... But did also manage to have a good time myself, and eat lots of delicious food and have lots of wonderful catch ups. Special shout outs to Elly and Jak, James, and Naomi, who all travelled a long way to join in.
The next day we cooked a big breakfast for everyone still around (me, Alex, Justin, Elly, Jak, James and Andy), and also had an unusually good Indian takeaway for dinner. But most importantly I MET A WOMAN WALKING A SKUNK, what the actual fuck. This place. (Maybe it's alright after all)
(It is still snowing though. It's April. It's still snowing. I weep)
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