Monday: I went into BBC Radio Norfolk to be interviewed live during their afternoon show. This was brilliant timing as it was the very day before Part Two of my hill-building performance at Cromer Museum. It was good for the museum because they got several mentions, but also I was able to cite the Howe website address and hopefully a few listeners will be motivated to take a look and see what the project is all about.
Tuesday: the day at Cromer Museum was exhilarating and very, very hard on the knees. Well, not just knees – legs in general. It must be easily the longest I’ve ever spent in non-stop performance. In fact, despite my initial resolve to get out and have a break at lunchtime, in practice I never left the courtyard from 10.15am until past 5 o’clock. Luckily it was a glorious day, which was just as well with all that paper involved.
It soon became evident that it would take all the hours available to get anything looking like a hill, despite the fact I had a head start from my three hours at The Late Shift last month. I had already realised that each row of names would take successively longer to organise and paste, but it had still been difficult to predict what would be possible in perhaps twice as much time. Also, I couldn’t tell how much the time would be broken up by conversations with viewers. As it happened, a reporter from the local paper came to talk to me during the morning, and told me that there would be a photographer coming over at 2pm. It was at that point that I realised it would not be possible to allow myself a lunchbreak …
It was only towards the end of the afternoon, when the pain really set in, that the whole thing started to feel like a chore that I couldn’t wait to finish. Until that point, it felt creative and fun, and I had some lovely conversations with visitors to the museum who on the whole seemed interested and approving of what I was doing. I had a few flyers with me but only gave a couple of them out. Nonetheless it felt very worthwhile and I couldn’t have been luckier with the location (not to mention the weather). Because it was so sunny, the museum staff said that attendance was down on what they would expect during Easter week – but you can hardly blame people for heading for the beach, just a few hundred metres from the museum.
That’s what we did ourselves afterwards – well, we didn’t get onto the beach itself as the tide had come in by that time, but we did treat ourselves to fish and chips on the pier. Sublime.
