Alex!! felt so slow in the head today that I forgot to ask if you were still up to Nottingham? If so, then I think I am going for it, stay the night in that hotel you mentioned and head back on the saturday….do you want to come along? and yes I can be your escort………….Hx
So hotel and escort booked I headed north on Friday. Hayley was driving using her newly borrowed satnav. I loved it, or her, a slightly condescending lady of indeterminate age (the sat nav, not Hayley) who kept us almost entertained for the whole journey. She beeped repeatedly if we went too fast and was extremely calm when we appeared to leave the road entirely. I'd sworn blind that I had stayed at the Nottingham Ibis before but I clearly hadn't, it wasn't where I remembered and it looked completely different. Still once we had staggered down the inexplicably swaying corridors and I had prised our twin beds the regulation six inches apart the room seemed very nice indeed.
We found the gallery easily and spent the first few minutes eavesdropping conversations about untimely evictions and vol au vents while manoeuvring ourselves in front of the fan. There was drink; lager, cava and wine, much drink, too much drink. The show itself was friendly, it had similarities to the Studio Voltaire show but was not as cool, more humour, variety, colour and frivolity. There was a bizarre sequinned toy tigerskin rug which would have sneaked into a school craft fayre and a rather magnificent injured giant rabbit slumped on the floor. My favourite things were Bruce Ingram's two fabulous mythological assemblages made out of paint trays and magazine cutouts.
After a while we introduced ourselves (well Hayley did) chatted, got directions to a show at the Fame Factory, drank more drink and took Hayley's drawings off the wall before beating a hasty retreat into the night.
Later we finished off a bottle of wine while watching a serial killer film. We never found the Fame Factory, probably because Hayley insisted on calling it the foam factory.
I'm not going to write about the next day, as I'd prefer to forget all about it.
