My friend Nick Pinkerton -weird coincidence this, with the names and everything- who’s a friend of Nick Pemberton and a descendant of the founder of the fabled American detective agency -just came in out of the rain with a bag of hands. No he is not a mafia man. It was drawings of hands. Representations of real hands. It‘s something the two Nicks and some of their friends have been doing for a while now -three years almost. They learned it from a poet and drummer called Dave Stickman Higgins who did a workshop with them at Tullie House a couple of years ago. They ask people to draw round their hand and then inside the image of the hand write down their name, and the date and place they were born. Then they ask whoever has done the drawing to write down five things they believe, five things that are important to them and one memory. In the sunshine on the grass at St Cuthberts, in the Poetry Café in January and then again this July, up at the Brampton Road Campus of the University on National Poetry Day, in the Poetry Cafe at the end of the Lowther Arcade, in Foxes café… Now, specially for BITE, we‘ve got Tony Rutherford to make some of them into two books. And she’s done that. One collects the drawings from Foxes Café in July this year. The other is from the Poetry Café in the Lowther Arcade from the same time.
And both books have me -well my hat- impressed in the binding, one on the inside, one on the outside. Hold them till they catch the light just right and -even though I don’t exist, right as rain, bold as brass and plain as day, there’s my hat and me. You can feel it with your fingertips, as real as you and your shoe are, as real as Diane from Carlisle who was born in 1966 and for whom friends, family, love and sex are all important, Camilla from Bogota, Colombia who was born in 1971 and believes that it’s more important to give to people than to receive, that the world is round, that we judge ourselves too much, that we spend years learning how to be happy, and that we are not progressing, or Ben who was born in Sandton, South Africa, and one day, in mid July in Carlisle, remembered how, one Christmas back home in South Africa, when he was seven, he had dressed up as Batman.
So maybe that’s where people live anyway. In each others’ memories. So maybe even though I’m not there, maybe I am. Or maybe it’s the other way round. Or maybe it’s… who cares? The books are beautiful. So, whoever you are, wherever you’re from, come and have a look at them. And come and start another one. Draw round your hand on BITE day and then write down what’s important to you.
Tony is also doing a papermaking workshop at The Methodist Hall.
COMMENT ADDED EARLY LAST NIGHT BY MYSTERY GUEST: I know you and you know me… (no walruses though) but a bird told me, and its right, that the paper making will be going on from 12:30- 2:30 at the methodist hall…. Harley if you come we could make some paper so you could be more than pixels but some ink as well….
12:30 – 2:30
oh and if you still inspired you can do some hand building with edge ceramics from 2:30 to 4:30 and not even have to go out in rain after making your paper….
