Christmas Lights in Bristol

 Early morning in Clifton

 Lunchtime on Wine Street

Three in the afternoon on Narrow Quay

Bristol, there've been times I've tried to leave you ...

... but somehow I forget to unhook the elastic strap from the back of my belt ...

... and I'm left doing a sort of horizontal bungee jump over and over again. 

I'm getting tired now ...

... and it's no real hardship to abandon resistance ...

... not on days like these.

Cranes on Princes Wharf

The Wills Memorial Building and Cathedral from M Shed

Looking south to Totterdown

Arnolfini on Narrow Quay

St Augustine's Reach

Over to Cabot Tower on Brandon Hill

Cathedral Steps

The Triangle

A Visit to M Shed

I visited M Shed today with my cousins, Joy who lives in Thornbury and Sandra who flew over the week before last from New Jersey on a blizzard-defying visit prompted by the launch of my book, Dart.  Neither had been to this comparatively new museum before, so it was quite high up their List of Places to Visit.

I like the upstairs part of the museum better than the ground floor, as it contains more about the lives of people living in this city.  I have to say that as a novelist engaged in research, I need more detail than any museum could hope to include amongst their displays, but as a poet, there are plenty of telling details at M Shed that spark the imagination. For instance, I'd forgotten that we used to call the bits of surplus cooked batter which we often had scrumps; a story about Paper Sal, a newspaper vendor in the late 1800s and early 1900s, reminded me.  Here she is.  

Next we moved on to the exhibitions.  There was one about the chocolate-making industry in Bristol, which made me feel very nostalgic (we used to get Frys misshapes very cheaply when I was a child, from someone my father knew) and one entitled Revealing Stories, about the experiences of lesbian, gay, bi and trans people living in Bristol.  This second exhibition is long overdue and was by far the most interesting of the day's displays.  It was good to see my friend Dru Marland's story included, as well as mention of two of my colleagues who are involved in Deafab, and two of my favourite local poets, U A Fanthorpe and her partner, Dr Rosie Bailey.  There were also three pencil portraits by Malcolm Ashman of Bath Artists' Studio which made my heart jump a bit, not least because I met him on several occasions last year, when he drew a portrait of me as part of the Faces {Bath} collaboration with Bath Poetry Cafe.  

In the M Shed shop I was pleased to see a poem on sale there by local poet, Miles Chambers. 

And there was a moment of delight when we scanned a school photograph from the 1940s and my cousins picked out their mother, my Auntie Mavis, who died of breast cancer in 1979 when she was 48 and they were 19 and 17 years old, and who is much missed more than thirty years later.  It was so good to see that she is still part of our city's story.    

A Riot of Biblical Proportions

It was our annual family murmuration yesterday, a time to catch up on news from various far-flung outposts in a non-funereal context.  And there was some good gossip on offer, like my cousin Hayley delivering her own grandchild because the midwife insisted the baby (a little girl called Millie, 8lbs 6oz, since you ask) wouldn't be born till morning.  But there was something more unusual from my cousin Pam, who'd been helping her mother sort through papers following my Uncle Meric's death. 

My photos are rather hurried - my cousin was en route to Bristol's newest museum, the M Shed, where the pages will now be housed - but the pages (from 2 Kings Chapter 11, it would seem) are inscribed with the following in copperplate handwriting:

This was part of a bible which was plundered from the dwelling houses in Queen Square, Bristol, on the ever memorable Sunday the 30th day of October when the dreadful Riot and burning of that place was perpetrated by an infuriate and lawless mob.  

Which poses all sorts of questions.  How did my great-grandmother (for it was she who gave it to my uncle) come by such a thing?  What on earth was a rioter doing looting a bible?  Was the bible the then equivalent of a flat-screen TV as far as entertainment was concerned?   And perhaps most pressingly of all, where's the d from the end of infuriate?