Norwich - three times as cultural as Liverpool!
Surprisingly little trumpeting seems to have been done about the news from listings website LocalLife that when it comes to arts and entertainment, Norwich knocks the new European Capital of Culture into a cocked hat. They calculated that we have approximately ten cultural outlets per ten thousand of the population and Liverpool has approximately three. (And that's without counting all the pubs the Lee Vasey Band has ever played in.)
This probably wouldn't have come as a surprise to anybody who was in Chapelfield Gardens last Saturday. Klang's Entourage was there to support the protest against the seemingly arbitrary funding cuts from the Arts Council which threaten the future of our own wonderful and practically unique Puppet Theatre and also Eastern Angles, who travel around the region working miracles with minimal props and maximum inventiveness. I took Kevin the glove puppet dragon, an engaging little chap who sports a blonde quiff and diamond earstuds in homage to his cricketing namesake (yes, I know Pietersen doesn't have the quiff any more but if you shave plush it doesn't grow back) and was I glad of him as a handwarmer, as we got pretty bored and chilled hanging around while speaker after speaker chuntered away quite unnecessarily from the bandstand. Still, it was a great opportunity to catch up with people from the Maddermarket and Crude Apache and Big Sky and the Playhouse and there was the wonderful stately Nelson puppet towering over us all and a dinosaur who had a brief squirmish with Klang and a cluster of caballeros or were they pistoleros in huge black sombreros, like a low-flying thunderstorm, and children in carnival costumes and a Whiffler and lots of balloons and the inevitable earnest person trying to sell the 'Socialist Worker' and in fact if this had been July rather than January it would have been a really nice place to hang out.
Smiles and waves as we followed the Samba Band down to the Walk and up past the Forum to City Hall steps, good bit of consciousness-raising, though I am always amused and amazed at the bovine ability of some people to totally ignore anything in the slightest bit unusual, not so much as an eye flicker. We were a bit tired and cold so sloped off to doff dragons and huddle round soup, cake and hot chocolate in the Greenhouse, where a mysterious force drew several upstairs to the booksale and I came down a v. happy bunny with a beautiful Folio Society edition of 'Mistress Masham's Repose' for the princely sum of four quid.
Anyway, whether or not the protest succeeds in changing things (and sadly, in my experience this rarely happens) it reinforced the fact that this city contains a very high percentage of the kind of people who are actively involved in doing the stuff that makes life worth living, and will continue to do so long after the bunting has been taken down in that Other Place!