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Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 2h

Amid a sea of closed and closing shops in Birmingham city centre, don’t forget to look up at the old Marks & Spencer. Above the garish ground-floor boarding, what a handsome beast it is.

Art Deco building with fluted columns, green marble insets, and elegantly scrolled window frames and balconies.

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Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 2h

Anyway, this is only part one, so if you have a pox-ridden child you wanted to rub against me until you can attach them with static like a balloon please wait six weeks.

Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 2h

Shingles vax this morning, only slightly hampered by my being unable to remember the word ‘Shingles’. What! I bet you *can* be vaccinated against Sciatica…

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Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 3d

Proper pea-souper this morning. Spent several minutes looking for the specs I’m already wearing before realising it’s the world that’s blurry, not me.

Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 3d

Casey Bailey’s poem is based on his experience of visiting heritage houses and seeing paintings of obviously enslaved people explained away as servants.

Trompe-L’Oeil
The Black boy with the metal collar
is a ‘page boy’ chained like the horse
he holds. A black beauty, a beast
braced by the man he serves.
Out of frame there is champagne
pissing from the heavens -
intoxicating. The statue lions
have been roaring into the vacuum,
animated in protestation,
and here, in this corridor
between actuality and invention -
the Black boy
in the collar is
a page boy.

Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 3d

More #BLitFest with a really excellent panel on artistic responses to the colonial and slave history of English country houses, and the often vicious response to any challenge to the scones-and-tea-towels approach to the past.

Writers on stage under a slide that reads: Colonial Countryside with Corinne Fowler, Malachi McIntosh, Casey Bailey and Miranda Kaufmann.

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Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 3d

Live #BLitFest action! There’s a queue.

A man sits behind a desk in the foyer of Birmingham Library. He has a typewriter, a sign the reads ‘Free Poetry!’ And a queue of teenage girls.

Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 4d

Sorry to hear that, it shouldn't be a lottery.

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Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 4d

And that’s beclometasone which is exactly what I have.

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Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 4d

Some asthmatics (like me) can get it free if they have the steroid inhaler, as steroid medication is still a qualifying treatment and, as others have mentioned, you're unlikely to be quizzed about it.

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Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 4d

I bought lemon, pistachio and traditional (which is the one where someone garrottes you with a piano wire and takes the cannoli).

Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 4d

Very much blame the influence of @blushingunseen.bsky.social for this morning’s shopping decisions. I only went to the market for too much bread and a mountain of cheese.

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Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 4d

Outstanding book. Starts as a social comedy. Towards the end I was reading more and more slowly because I was scared of where it was ending.

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Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 5d

*I’m going to call it #BLitFest but do try not to confuse it with the Coventry Literary Festival.

Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 5d

First event of the Birmingham Literary Festival* tonight, a good-humoured conversation with the authors of a modern retelling of Carmilla (horny lesbian vampires) and a story of how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein (lusting after annoying men).

Book: Love, Sex and Frankenstein, by Caroline Lea.

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Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 5d

I’ll shoot Unity myself, no need to wait for war to break out.

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Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 5d

Interval of The Party Girls about the Mitfords at Birmingham Rep. Quite liking Jessica in Washington, as it’s an unfamiliar part of the story. But my dear, the screeching. When the sisters are all together it’s like six Mrs Thatchers being poked with a stick.

Jessica Mitford and Benjamin Truehaft in Washington 1942 with flag pins in a map, rearranging the office so that bigots sit with the people they hate. Photo by Mark Senior.

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Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 6d

My trek through the James Bond audio books reaches You Only Live Twice. Which game will be the grand showdown with the villain in this one? Will it be Roulette, Chemin-de-fer, Baccarat?

It's rock, paper, scissors. Not to suggest that Fleming was running out of steam by this point, or anything.

Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 7d

Points silently at the economy I helped steer through financial crisis and pandemic, armed only with an English degree.

Badenoch: Curb students taking ‘rip-off’ degrees such as English. The performing arts, sociology and anthropology are amongst my the subjects the Conservatives would like to cut.

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Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 8d

Autumn art history classes have started up again with Fra Angelico, and I'm a big fan of Saint Catherine of Alexandria's exact expression of 'woman having a thing explained to her by a man'. Just out of frame, the book she wrote about the thing he's explaining.

Detail of Fra Angelico's Saints Catherine of Alexandria and John the Baptist, 1422-23. She is blanking him, with a glazed expression of suppressed fury. He hasn't noticed.

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Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 8d

Outstanding, from the Guardian's review of Richard Holmes' new biography of Tennyson.

From his teens he was imposing, even glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt and handsome. Even before he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could dominate a room.

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Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 9d

The landlord, Mr Sly, was subsequently famous for leading Lancaster’s celebrations of the Prince of Wales’ marriage by roasting two whole oxen and leading ‘a grotesque torchlight procession’ through the town.

Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 9d

The Two Idle Apprentices, based on their travels, tells the ghost story of a bride who was slowly poisoned there. Visitors are taken to see the room where it happened and bride cake is served after dinner as the custom of the house.

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Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 9d

Just back from Lancaster with more ‘on the road’ adventures of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens. The King’s Arms (rebuilt and now sadly closed) was where they stayed in 1857. Intriguingly, a wall plaque reads: ‘Let us eat bride cake’.

Victorian line drawing of the staircase in The King’s Arms. Wood panelled and carved in a Jacobean Revival style.

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Knitted Clanger @knittedclanger.bsky.social · 12d

Loved Mortimer searching for diamonds in the airing cupboard and filling Arabel's dad's pocket with spaghetti so that when he put his hand in his pocket he said, "Worms" and fainted dead away.

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