The kind of place you might take your mother to

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I realised as I drove the hired van to Kendal this morning, to collect my exhibition, why I had been feeling so strange yesterday.  I’m sure that it was because of anticipation about today.  When I took the T.S. Eliot exhibition over there at the beginning of the month the experience was not very pleasant.  The weather was foul, apart from anything else, and I didn’t get the assistance I needed in hanging the show.  There were all kinds of problems, and I got back home feeling completely wiped out. Somehow, subconsciously, I had got into the frame of mind of expecting something similar.  As it turned out, I could not have been more wrong.

The weather was glorious, and the drive through the Yorkshire Dales was punctuated by a dramatic incident.  A sparrow hawk dropped onto some piece of small prey within a few yards of the front of the vehicle.  The people at Holy Trinity Church in Kendal were waiting for me on arrival, and the dismantling process went very smoothly indeed.  I have not had the opportunity yet to look in the comments book, to assess response to my work, but I was amused by the remark of the elderly lady staffing the reception table there.  She seemed a little put out by the fact that some people had come apparently in order to see my work, and hadn’t seemed particularly interested in the church!  Perhaps this is gratifying, but a building going back to the thirteenth century is surely worth some attention?   It seems that the vicar has been prompted by the rearrangement of the pews, to accommodate my display, to think about longer term reordering to make space for other similar events.  The churchwarden, I believe, will not be very receptive to that idea.  He is still complaining about the way in which the place had been “mucked about” in the 1850s!

The help I was given enabled me to get away at about 2.00 …. in contrast to me departure shortly before 5.00 when I put the show up.  The task of unloading when I got home was also made a great deal lighter by the fact that our neighbour and her son turned out to help unload the van. How very kind!  In short, I’ve spent the day feeling supported and appreciated, which is wonderful.

Having cleared and returned the vehicle my wife and I were  very hungry, but disinclined to spend time cooking, so we drove into Bradford for a curry.  This is something we used to do regularly when we were both employed at the University, but we’ve got out of the habit. We ended up going to a place close to the University, where my colleagues treated me to my retirement dinner.  It is a little bit more classy than the average Bradford curry house.  I was reminded of a review of the place that appeared in the guide to the curry houses of the city, produced many years ago by the Students’ Union.  It said that Omar Khan’s “has table cloths.  It’s the kind of place you might take your mother to.”  Years later I’m still puzzling over the precise semantic freight of those phrases.

 

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