Stairwell of Doom

We have our own front door these days. When you open it you are greeted by these stairs.

Please admire the dirt-coloured carpet.

The stairs are steep, and for whatever reason, the steps themselves are small, forcing you to descend at an angle. Maybe folks had itty bitty feet in the 1880s.  Fortunately, there is a handrail for clinging on to.

The stairwell was intimidating when we first moved in. The bedrooms are upstairs, while the bathroom is on the ground floor where it no doubt began life as a haunted, unheated outhouse. These days it is a fully tiled part of the flat with all the mod cons, including a particularly useless heated towel rack I wish I could turn off some way besides removing the fuse.

So there you are, your first night in your new place, trying to get used to the new sounds and smells and debilitating feng shui and what have you. Then you have to get up to go for a pee, which involves getting down the stairs without taking a tumble and snapping your neck and you start thinking how, really, chamber pots make an awful lot of sense when you think about it...

I am used to the stairs now. They are less scary, although it will always be a challenge to take a cup of tea up, and if I am using legs fatigued from running, the trip down makes me consider completing the journey by shuffling on my butt.

There is a loft at the top of the stairs, and in theory, if we could reach it, it would be a good place to store camping gear and suchlike. But this is York, so you just know it's packed with slumbering night-gaunts waiting for some fool to free them to raven and slay. And for once that fool ain't gonna be me.

The Spoken Word

I went to an open mic called The Spoken Word last night at the Exhibition Hotel, just outside Bootham Bar, very close to some big church the locals call the "Minster".

I hadn't been to this pub before. It seems a popular place (location location location!) and they serve food til late. Unfortunately there was only one bartender on and he was a foetus at that (if you're out of Golden Pippin, turn the clip around, you fool). The open mic was in the conservatory in the back.

The crowd was almost entirely white, middle-aged and middle class, but it's not like people can help being these things. I was one of four people with North American accents. Everyone seemed to know each other and they were welcoming to a new face. The atmosphere was that of a salon in someone's glass-walled parlour.

I seem to be meeting a lot of retirees. Not that this is a bad thing, but I think I would like to meet some people my own age, if only for the shared pop culture references. How do you meet people in their thirties, anyway? Or in their forties, for that matter? Are they all busy hatching children and only make friends with other parents?

Participants can read pretty much anything that takes their fancy; it doesn't have to be one's own work. There is a sort-of theme (this month's was "goodbye summer, hello fall colour"), but it's only a suggestion. There was a lot of poetry and a few short stories, but there was also a reading from a musty old book of observational essays about trains by Hamilton Ellis. I live with a train geek, and try as I might, I just don't feel the pants-peeing excitement at the sight of a Deltic like some of these people do. But it added to the variety of the night.

The Spoken Word wasn't the late, lamented Freed Up of Manchester's greenroom (R.I.P.), but it was very good in its own way. The quality of the original writing was high, although naturally some of it grabbed me more than others. Mostly I was impressed by the voices themselves: these people are skilled orators.

It was a friendly crowd and I was encouraged to participate. "I write, but I don't speak," I explained feebly. That's ok! you can read someone else's work, or someone else can read your work! they said. I get a lot out of attending performances (beats watching tv, or it would if I had one), but I really don't have any interest in performing myself, so I will have to give it some thought. 

For some reason, several plates of lovely greasy pub food arrived at the interval (a couple of pizzas, chips, cheesy chips (woo!), sausages). As the night was free, this was all the more surprising. A gift from the creative writing gods? Alas, I wasn't hungry so I didn't have any. There's always next month.