Month: Sep 2026

390: wandering in Wales

This week has involved quite a lot of mooching about the place and having a thoroughly nice time. I had a couple of days of time off in lieu to take, and was in Wales anyway so why not?

On Wednesday I took myself off to Museum Wales to see the Ffasiwn exhibition – the result of an absolute dream of a co-creation project between Alexander McQueen, Bleak Fabulous and young people from across the South Wales valleys. The young people had access to an amazing range of creative support and pieces from the McQueen archive, and the outcome is a gorgeous set of photographs recording the project alongside zines, magazines and journals. The interview film with the participants really foregrounds their voices and the impact the project has had on them. Honestly though – we talk about building long term relationships with our community groups and work towards it, but projects with this level of commitment from all partners and participants are few and far between. Beautiful.

While I was in Cardiff I visited the arcades as well, all seven of them. I was pleased to see that the taxidermy bear was still at the tobacco shop, but sad that Claire Grove Buttons no longer exists. The website for the ‘City of Arcades’ talks about them being the home of independent businesses and there were some, but also lots of redevelopment and empty shop fronts. They haven’t been taken over by a plague of vape shops and barbers though, so there is still hope.

On Friday we went to St Fagan’s Museum of Welsh History , which I’m pretty sure I last visited sometime in the 1980s or possibly even the 1970s. We took two dogs with us and my friend sat outside with them while I popped in and out of the buildings and read signs and talked to random people. He’d visited quite recently so – having taken me there as a surprise as he knew I’d like it – was quite happy to let me potter around, I even got to see the galleries, and we bought a loaf of bread straight from the oven from the bakery. I liked the sheep, was puzzled by the wicker man although he made more sense when the signs explaining his presence had been put out, and enjoyed the terrace with the houses through time. Fires were burning in the older properties and the visitor assistants were without exception friendly and knowledgeable.

What struck me at both of these Amgueddfa Cymru venues was the lack of visible access support – possibly as this is something I think about a lot in the day job. Signage was confusing and in one case was the worst example of toilet signage I’ve ever seen.

Not helpful.

Saturday was Abergavenny Food Festival, which we hit early to avoid the crowds – the plan was to do a first pass of the vendors and then a second sweep to actually buy things. We were glad we’d gone with a plan as wristband collection was utter chaos – everyone’s tickets had to be scanned individually and only one person had the scanner app on their phone. Thanks to Aber’s location in a bowl of hills the mobile signal is erratic, and the town WiFi wasn’t much better. We waited about 15 mins to be scanned and there were only two groups ahead of us. Children entered free but had to be issued wristbands for parents to put phone numbers on… when the scanning person discovered they’d been left in the office she – rather than sending one of the other volunteers standing around – took the scanning phone and went herself which caused even more delays. There were about 100 people queuing to be scanned when we left at 11. There were two other ticket points but neither were on the main drag next to the key venue.

There was a good variety of stalls, both inside and outside the Market Hall, and our haul included some Two Farmers crisps in Herefordshire Sauce flavour, a leg of lamb for a roast, some proper French garlic sold by some nice onion sellers from Roscoff, gorgeous cider vinegar and some Caws Teifi vintage cheddar which was so strong it gave me a migraine, but so tasty it was almost worth it. I resisted the enormous variety of Welsh cakes but tried a sage and orange fudge.

We sat in on a talk briefly – but honestly, how is it possible for two people to talk about coffee so earnestly and pretentiously for a whole hour? There was a free cooking school for kids at the Castle, object handling and face painting as well as a cookery book tent with lots of speakers. I don’t think I’d have wanted to go for the whole weekend but a couple of hours was great.

Things making me happy this week

  • Celebrity Masterchef. I love Grace Dent.
  • No Central Line commutes as I’ve been working remotely in between mooching
  • sleeping in the same bed for a week
  • Street clocks in Cardiff
  • McVities Mint Club flavour Chocolate Digestives
  • Mindful crochet

Back to work on Tuesday… ah well.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading

King Foretold/Light Burned. – Jayci Lee

More – Gillian Anderson

Curious Events Lately Occurring in this Neighbourhood – Tom Cox

389: this week I am mostly…

…struggling quite badly with the brain frog, which has meant that I’ve spent a lot of time in meetings apologising for the fact that I’ve totally forgotten what I was saying, usually mid-sentence. When you’re facilitating the meeting this can get quite embarrassing, but at least I was able to look at the agenda.

When I first embraced menopause and the blessed HRT patches my brain frog went into hibernation for a while, and all was right with the world. Well, I could finish whole sentences and that was nearly as good. But then it came back, along with all sorts of weird aches and pains and other fun symptoms – some of which go with menopause and others which don’t.

What they do go with, it turns out, is something called Sjogren’s Disease, and the investigations into my aches and pains led to my being diagnosed with this in May. For those of you tracking the Year From Hell (TM) May was after the break up but before the fracture, in my personal timeline.

Sjogren’s is the second most common autoimmune rheumatic disease, I’m told, but remains under recognised and under treated. It affects about 0.6% of adults in the UK, average age of 50, and 90% of us are women. I suspect there’s so much crossover in the symptoms list that sufferers assume – like me – that they’re just on the menopause merry go round and just up the HRT.

It took about two years from first seeing my GP to actual diagnosis, and the offer of treatment so far has been a steroid injection and medication which has the unfortunate side effect of irreversible blindness. I’ve declined that one, funnily enough, as some of my symptoms are still quite mild and I’m going to see how I get on and hope that they develop something else. Day to day things are usually OK as long as I’m sleeping ok – wherever that is, these days – but this week has been somewhat sleepless so the fatigue has kicked in, coupled with the steroid injection wearing off. This week I have no commutes as I’m working remotely so hopefully i can get some decent downtime.

It’s been a year, I tell you. And there’s still three months to go…

Things making me happy this week

  • The Seat at the Table festival on Saturday organised by the Community Partnerships Producers and refugees and migrants living in Islington. So much joy!
  • Twin cuddles from A&B on Friday
  • Thing 2 making almond danishes
  • The prospect of no Central Line for the week.
  • Making fluffy owl babies for story time

That’s it from me…same time next week when hopefully I’ll be less grumpy and less tired.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading

Nine-tailed/King Foretold – Jayci Lee

388: families welcome, whatever size and shape

On Saturday I filled in for one of my team who is off on holiday and supported our monthly LGBTQIA+ monthly family drop in session, this month led by the wonderful Rachael House. Rachael is a multidisciplinary fine artist featured in our Queer as Comics exhibition, who joined us today to lead a drop-in speech bubbles workshop which gzve our visitors the opportunity to find their voices and share what was important to them.

This is the third of these LGBTQIA+ family sessions and our audience is growing – we had almost 30 people today, of all ages, and it was so good to see most of the parents make their own art pieces as well as the children. We had political statements, ethical, joyful, playful and more. People were able to use pens, drawing inks and brushes to create their works and they ended up bold and colourful. My friend Miriam also brought her family – the nuclear unit plus some of the family of choice. Daughter H has just started GCSE art and was able to meet a working illustrator who looked at her work and was interested. One thing I’ve noticed about all the illustrators we work with is that they’re generous people who make time for aspiring artists – Murugiah has been the same.

Since we started the family programming back in June we’ve had more than 600 people engaging with it, and with different materials and media, and it’s so good to see the Creative Studio alive with people being creative and enjoying themselves. Saturday was my third session of the week and they’ve all been completely different.

On Monday I ran a Rainbow Pavement drop-in activity outside – we have a lot of concrete and brick on the site and I decided to bring a bit of colour to the space to end the summer with. Around 40 people came and created artwork – Jimmy, a four year old, came and declared ‘I SPELLED MY NAME RIGHT!’ very proudly. He had, and he and his mum had a great time chalking noughts and crosses games to play too. We used chunky pavement chalks which work for all ages (including grandads with arthritic fingers) and the chalk washes away in a good rainstorm. I had some lovely chats with people – including one man who’d come all the way from Argentina because he loves Quentin Blake.

My absolute favourite session every week, though, is the Little Owls storytellling session which happens every Wednesday afternoon – we have a story and then do a simple craft activity. This week’s story was Quentin Blake’s own Angelica Sprocket’s Pockets. I was expecting it to be a bit quieter as the schools have started back but there was a queue! For me!

I’d popped out of the studio after setting up to go and tout for custom as usual – dressed in the replica coat I’d made a couple of years ago for our schools story session, and there they all were! I also ran into the team from the London Museum while dressed in the coat, but luckily a lot of them are quite used to me by now and didn’t bat an eyelid at the hot pink pocketed costume. We read the story and then created printed pockets on coloured paper, and objects to go in the pockets. This follows We’re Going on a Bear Hunt when we made story maps, The Tiger Who Came To Tea with paper plate tiger faces, Dear Zoo with the ‘wrong’ pets, My Cat Likes to Hide in Boxes (blue fans like the cat from Japan), Whatever Next? and the cardboard rockets and this week we’re doing Owl Babies and making little owls.

The coat of many pockets! From the archive….

I also started transcribing the luggage tag evaluation – what did you like about your visit and what could we do better – and the comments about the range of materials, the free flow creative activities and the wonderful welcoming staff made me very happy as well. Next weekend we have a community festival which has been co-produced with refugees and migrants living in the borough and I can’t wait – it’s called A Seat at the Table and it’s going to be amazing.

Things making me happy this week

That’s it for me for the week!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Fingersmith – Sarah Waters

Nine-tailed – Jayci Lee