Tag: community

268: the Father Ted conundrum

I’ve had a couple of conversations this week at work about focusing so much on the small stuff that the far away stuff is getting away from us. The small stuff (well, a monumental horse, if you can consider that small) is what’s keeping me awake at night these days, and then while I’m worrying about the horse in the wee small hours I remember all the other stuff I have to do that isn’t getting done because of the horse and then rooooouuuunnnnnd we go again. The poor horses in the fields on my walking route are probably wondering why I am cursing them and glaring as I walk past. They haven’t done anything apart from look like horses, obviously, but I’m not being selective with my equine animosity right now.

Part of this is trying to be several people all at once. Thank heavens for the return of my Community Partnerships Producer who is looking rested after a few weeks in Italy with her family, or at least she did until she walked into my personal maelstrom. She works two days a week with us, so in a few weeks we’ll be looking for the other half of her role but right now I am that other half and summer is always an intense period for community work. We’re building our centre with a desire to be a place where the community feels at home, and unlike at Young V&A we don’t have a 150 year history in the borough so we need to set out our stall now, letting people know we’re coming and that we want this to be a place for them. This means popping up at the summer festivals and chatting to people. This is an excellent part of my job, but then I have to find other people to do it with me and for some reason not everyone wants to work weekends. The horse project is also a community thing, but it’s proving a little tricky to recruit participants.

I had a really invigorating meeting with one of the festival organisers from the council on Thursday – one of those amazing conversations where ideas bounce off each other and things come together. It spun on into the next meeting, with a small crossover where I introduced the illustrator to the producer and things blossomed. Thursday, in fact, was all about meetings. The Radical Rest session I listened to while I was working on things that couldn’t wait (Sorry Kate, I know I missed the point!) was, ironically, about burnout in the cultural sector and there have been moments in the last couple of weeks where I’ve been ticking off a lot of the symptoms.

Schools remain within my remit: this week a school approached me about a CPD, which they initially wanted in September but then moved to July. Because all our sessions are tailored to the needs of each school, I have to meet with the school to work out what they want, reach out to the fabulous freelance illustrators who actually deliver the sessions, and do the admin around it. Schools session bookings have been honed over the years – from working closely with the bookings teams at London Museum through many years, taking bookings myself rather than remaining at arm’s length so I understand what needs to happen. There’s still admin around this, of course: sending invoice requests and confirmations, making sure the illustrator is in place and has all the materials they need.

Developing and piloting new sessions is on the radar: a science x history x illustration session which we need to deliver to six schools in the next term. Working with the lead facilitator to identify dates, locating a second facilitator and getting their dates, reaching out to schools who you’d think would like free sessions on local history but who actually take emails, a phone call to make sure they’ve got the email, resending the email as they probably just deleted it the first time, and then checking back up later to organise a conversation where I tell the teachers all the things they’d know if they’d just read the damn email in the first place. Developing the resources that support the session; making sure the materials are ready, doing the schools bookings admin, reporting to the funders, attending the sessions, evaluating the sessions. We’ll be recruiting someone for this soon as well, and they’ll be working on family programmes for when we open.

With my Welcome and Participation Lead head on, I’ve been working on access. Organising the first meeting of the Access Panel – booking rooms; booking BSL interpreters and audio describers; reading, watching and listening to expressions of interest; meeting with the consultant. I’ve never been so interested in toilet door fittings and it’s now perfectly normal behaviour to ask friends to take photos of these if they go anywhere new. Sorry Amanda….you need to know it’s not just me though…

I’m thinking about tech and furniture for the learning spaces, about interactivity for the site as a whole, about outside furniture and play and illustration opportunities, about how people are welcomed, about creative programmes for when we open, about how we make links with teachers and other cultural organisations along the New River to support CPD for our key boroughs when we open, about how I can embed illustration in learning throughout the school system, about how we market our schools offer more locally, about how we how and when we bring on our volunteers, about how we diversify our front of house, who the young people will be for our final project in the autumn term. My head can’t contain all the things so despite my highly organised to-do list I feel like I am juggling five oranges and then someone throws me a chainsaw.

Also in my head I know this is a pinch point and things will even out again….but I’M A BIT STRESSED RIGHT NOW. I’m not very good at admitting when I’m at my wits end when I’m at work as I try to be quite positive – all the while knowing that toxic positivity is a bad thing, but also knowing that the experiences in my last job where any negativity got you burned have left me somewhat scarred. It’s a conundrum indeed.

Things making me happy this week

  • A gorgeous swim with Jill on Saturday morning.
  • A ramble through new footpaths on Sunday last week, via the fields to Epping Upland and back round to Epping – saw my first hares for a while which made me happy.
  • An early morning Tuesday ramble where I shared a field with a huge herd of deer
  • A chaotic afternoon for GT2’s 2nd birthday last Sunday.
  • Two thirds of the sea creatures done: still to go are three crabs, three turtles, one starfish and one jellyfish. These are going to live at the British Library which I am pretty flipping excited about, I can tell you. I feel more neon colours coming on, especially for the jellyfish.
  • Visiting the site for the first time in a couple of months – it’s all coming together!

Right, I’m off for a Sunday walk! Here’s to another bank holiday…

Kirsty

What I’ve been reading:

Demons of Good and Evil – Kim Harrison

Interesting Times – Terry Pratchett (Audible)

The Glass Room – Ann Cleeves

267: stop the week I want to get off

Last week’s paean to four-day weeks (or three, at least) has been overtaken by the experience of this week’s four-day week which didn’t go nearly as well. Not for any specific reason, but…

…on Tuesday I took Lulu to the vets for her annual inspection – this minimises the actual experience of my Beloved and I acting in a pincer movement to wrestle her into the cat carrier, me forcibly lifting her out again as she clings to the sides like the facehugging xenomorph from Alien so she can be weighed and checked over, and watching her slinking back in in an attempt to make herself invisible afterwards. I popped to the library to pick up my holds (another recommendation from a colleague and a couple of Ann Cleeves), came home, set up my table, logged in…..and realised I was supposed to be in the office as we were interviewing in the afternoon. Cue throwing tidy clothes and my face on, racing for the bus and heading for the office. The Central Line was misbehaving with delays on both journeys. On the way home I had to get rescued from South Woodford by my Beloved as there were no trains and luckily he wasn’t far away.

The rest of the week continued to fluster me: never quite working out what day it was, not being able to finish one thing before starting the next. Part of it is the continued joy of menopausal brain fog, part of it is just trying to do too much at once on too many different things (but they all need doing!). Whatever it is, this week wasn’t working for me. I did get to meet some interesting interview candidates – I like interviewing – and had coffee with Amanda on Thursday.

Friday was great, on the other hand. As my communities colleague was off on her holidays I got to sit in on the first session of our new co-creation project. This is the third project of four before we open the Centre next year, and this one is in partnership with Islington Centre for Refugees and Migrants and the artist MURUGIAH. These are a series of projects exploring heritage and what it means to people. MURUGIAH grew up in South Wales (like me!) with Sri Lankan parents (not like me!), and our participants yesterday came from the Ukraine, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Morocco and Turkey. Their co-ordinator is Polish/British so we had a broad set of heritages to draw on. MURUGIAH’s work builds worlds of colour and shape, and always reminds me of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.

We thought about the things that make us ‘us’ – memories, language, family, food, music, the journeys we have made, the things that have happened to us. One of the things that I love about these projects is sitting with the group, working alongside them as they’re drawing their stories. Done, from Turkey, drew her childhood garden and told me about climbing the mulberry tree to pick the fruits from the top as she sat in the branches. She drew baskets of cherries, birds coming the eat the mulberries – she liked the sour ones rather than the sweet – and the bees who’d come to the flowers. There was a green house with a red roof, and she missed the garden when they moved to the city. The Ukrainian pair drew big blowsy poppies and sunflowers, flower headdresses framing blue sky and golden wheatfields, rivers – there are always rivers, they said – and a soldier standing to attention. Herve, from Cameroon, drew flags and a monument; our Congolese participant shared her memories of beach parties where they’d dance and catch tilapia to eat cooked in banana leaf parcels, and the colourful clothes they wear. Our Moroccan lady drew things from her country and their London equivalents – taxis, trains and buses, food, flags and more. It started quietly and as they started to draw the stories came out, and our two hours flew by – I’m not usually in on Fridays but I’d quite like to drop in on these sessions. Regular readers will remember previous experiences working with refugees and asylum seekers have made a massive impact on me (and also that this is why I am doing the Cardiff Half Marathon in October for the Choose Love charity, and any pennies you can spare towards my target are much appreciated! I have £170 to go….).

I also got to catch up briefly with Jhinuk Sarkar, another of our community illustrators who is delivering a co-creation project at Bethany House – this is a supported housing project for women from Islington experiencing homelessness/houselessness for a wide variety of reasons. They’re making bunting and flags and I can’t wait to see them – enough to stretch from Bethany House to the Centre is the ambition!

Other things making me happy this week

  • An Easter Monday swim with Jill and Rachel followed by simnel cake and hot chocolate
  • More Northern Exposure – we’re up to Season 3 now and I can’t find my Season 4 box set anywhere
  • Crocheted jellyfish. Curiously satisfying to make with their curly tentacles! I like the neon green one – the photo doesn’t do it justice!
  • Running into TT2 with GT2 at the station on Wednesday – how is he two already? It’s his party today and Thing 2 has created a gorgeous birthday cake.
  • Seeing the trampoline populated by bouncing kids – next door’s small people like to come and run round our garden and see what my Beloved is up to, as well as say hi to the cats
  • A ten mile ramble through fields on Saturday in a wide loop around Toot Hill, Stanford Rivers and Tawney Common. Not too warm, with a lot of geese around for some reason, a muntjac, a bouncy deer (without benefit of trampoline) and a lot of consulting of my OS map.
  • Being talked into signing up for another half marathon next month – it took Tan all of five minutes to convince me,

That’s all, folks! Have a good week.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

The Makioka Sisters – Tanizaki

The Trouble with the Cursed/Demons of Good and Evil – Kim Harrison

A Letter to the Luminous Deep – Sylvie Cathrall

Talismans, Teacups and Trysts – K Starling

The Last Continent – Terry Pratchett

176: a week of two halves

A somewhat misleading title but does lead nicely into one of my work visits this week, which saw me heading to north London for a visit to the Emirates Stadium. It’s not often a single meeting puts me within a hop and skip of the 10,000 daily steps target but this one did, with a whistle-stop tour taking in the changing rooms, the press conference room, the post-match interview bit (which looks a lot more glam on the telly, I can tell you – in reality it’s a corner under a concrete stairwell), the stands and various corporate spaces, as well as the pitch and the Hub.

Not shown: any football players changing

The Hub was what I was there to see, really: having spent 17 out of my 21 years in museums knocking about Tower Hamlets, I’m now being let loose on Islington as we’re embedding ourselves in the borough while we develop the new Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration at the old New River Head site. Islington isn’t somewhere I know very well, other than sneaky visits to drool over yarn I can’t afford at Loop and hanging out at the Crafts Council occasionally. Islington, in my head, is a literary thing: Douglas Adams and Nick Hornby, Charles and Carrie Pooter in middle-class Victorian Holloway. As it turns out, it is quite literary, but also full of actual people as well. Who knew! So I am on a bit of a mission to talk to a lot of them in the hope that we can work together.

As well as the Hub, I found myself at the Museum of the Order of St John this week, where I was enveloped in an enormous hug by lovely Maggie, an ex-colleague from Museum of Childhood. Coming as a nice surprise to someone instead of a terrible shock is a good thing! If you haven’t been to this little gem of a museum, it’s worth a visit: full of interesting medieval things and housed in a fascinating building, and they have a lovely family programme. Time it right and on the same day you could do The Charterhouse and wander through to St Bartholomew the Great, tucked away behind slabs of modern brick and concrete, and the Postman’s Park.

Between St Bartholomew the Great and Smithfield

Other things tucked away behind modern slabs in the area include Bleeding Heart Yard, where Amanda and I finally managed to go for our belated 50th birthday dinner – we’ve rearranged it twice when work got in the way, but it was worth the wait. We ate at the Bistro, sitting outside on their shaded terrace which was quiet on an early Tuesday evening. We chose the set menu: I had gravadlax of salmon, followed by wild Brixham seabass fillet and crème brulée, while Amanda had roasted beetroot, Chicken Paillard and chocolate delice. We shared fine green beans and pommes frites…and a side of fresh, warm madeleines which were wonderful. The friendly waiter didn’t even bat an eyelid when we asked for a side with our desserts, bless him. The Aperol Spritzes were perfect, too, and we laid off the wine as migraines are no fun at all, and that’s currently the result of even a small glass at the moment. Why prosecco doesn’t have the same effect is anyone’s guess, but I won’t complain.

Other things making me happy this week:

  • A conversation with illustrator/author and fellow South Walian Isabel Benavides who launches her first picture book in August and who is coming to do a family workshop for me at Finsbury Library
  • A 90-page conservation plan for the site which was full of fascinating information.
  • An early morning walk with Thing 3
  • Far too much crochet and my new Banks jumpsuit covered in otters. I sewed it on my Aunty Jo’s old Singer Samba sewing machine, freshly serviced and a dream to use.
Not jumping
Rear view
Covered button with otter
Shy cactus
Chrismouse
Catcus

Things making me sad this week:

The death of Sinead O’Connor, who I loved as a teenager. The Lion and the Cobra is a hugely powerful album. Hopefully, whatever the cause of death turns out to be, she’s found some peace now.

Same time next week!

Kirsty x

Cover image: “The Laurels”, “a nice six-roomed residence, not counting basement” – Drawing of “The Laurels”, the fictional home of the Pooter family. First published in The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith. London, J.W. Arrowsmith 1892.

What I’ve been reading:

Heir of Uncertain Magic – Charlie N. Holmbury. Also started The Will and the Wilds but it was bloody awful so I stopped. Life is too short to read books you’re not enjoying.

Museum of Magic – Beth Revis

Odds and Gods – Tom Holt

Broken Homes/Foxglove Summer/The Furthest Station/The Hanging Tree – Ben Aaronovitch (Audible)

The White Hare – Jane Johnson