Awards and wentletraps
Mar. 25th, 2007 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustYou go for months without an awards ceremony, and then two come along together.
Yesterday's was the City of Durham Trust's Architectural Commendation of the Year, which went to the Science Learning Centre in Pity Me. A modern building, designed - if I've got this right - to provide refresher courses for science teachers, and to pique the interest of schoolcildren who might also visit from time to time, it could not have been more different from last year's winner (the restored church in Brancepeth). I liked many of the details - a sculptural array of globes hanging in the airy central rotunda, a fluid floor whose patterns shifted as you trod on it - not to mention the determination to demonstrate as many ecological features as possible (although budget restrictions meant that this spread had been achieved at the expense of depth. Ah well). Being old enough to remember the 1970s, I was a bit disconcerted by the colour scheme of fluorescent green and orange, but the designers explained that they had done their best with the green that had been allocated to the North East as its section of the national spectrum of Science Learning Centres.
Today we went to New Writing North's Writing Awards, held this year in Hexham as part of the Hexham Book Festival. We attend the ceremony because we maintain the web site about the award in memory of Andrea Badenoch, one of those presented today. Awards are made to new writers just breaking into publication (Northern Promise awards) and also to more established writers (Time to Write awards) to allow them to prioritise their writing over all the other ways they earn a living: and the award winners read from the work which has earned them their award. The star turn this year was Andy Croft, who read from a work in progress, a comic novel in verse, loosely based on the story of Hamlet - not only in verse, but in sonnets, and not only in sonnets, but in Pushkin sonnets, with the ababccddeffegg rhyme scheme alternating masculine and feminine rhymes, including what Andy broke off to assure us was the first ever Pushkin sonet written in texting.
As if this weren't enough, we went early to Hexham to attend a poetry reading by two Northumberland poets, Pippa Little and Peter Bennet, in an upstairs room at the Queen's Hall, watched over by a magnificent tapestry in which a fascinated audience frames three commedia dell'arte figures. This seemed appropriate. It was Peter Bennet who contributed the word of the day, "wentletrap", which he defined as a spiral staircase or a spiral shell. There is a whole page of them here, some of them are very fine: the Perplexed Wentletrap) for example, or the Precious Wentletrap, who sounds like - and is dressed in the muted shades of - the Puritan heroine of a historical romance.
Yesterday's was the City of Durham Trust's Architectural Commendation of the Year, which went to the Science Learning Centre in Pity Me. A modern building, designed - if I've got this right - to provide refresher courses for science teachers, and to pique the interest of schoolcildren who might also visit from time to time, it could not have been more different from last year's winner (the restored church in Brancepeth). I liked many of the details - a sculptural array of globes hanging in the airy central rotunda, a fluid floor whose patterns shifted as you trod on it - not to mention the determination to demonstrate as many ecological features as possible (although budget restrictions meant that this spread had been achieved at the expense of depth. Ah well). Being old enough to remember the 1970s, I was a bit disconcerted by the colour scheme of fluorescent green and orange, but the designers explained that they had done their best with the green that had been allocated to the North East as its section of the national spectrum of Science Learning Centres.
Today we went to New Writing North's Writing Awards, held this year in Hexham as part of the Hexham Book Festival. We attend the ceremony because we maintain the web site about the award in memory of Andrea Badenoch, one of those presented today. Awards are made to new writers just breaking into publication (Northern Promise awards) and also to more established writers (Time to Write awards) to allow them to prioritise their writing over all the other ways they earn a living: and the award winners read from the work which has earned them their award. The star turn this year was Andy Croft, who read from a work in progress, a comic novel in verse, loosely based on the story of Hamlet - not only in verse, but in sonnets, and not only in sonnets, but in Pushkin sonnets, with the ababccddeffegg rhyme scheme alternating masculine and feminine rhymes, including what Andy broke off to assure us was the first ever Pushkin sonet written in texting.
As if this weren't enough, we went early to Hexham to attend a poetry reading by two Northumberland poets, Pippa Little and Peter Bennet, in an upstairs room at the Queen's Hall, watched over by a magnificent tapestry in which a fascinated audience frames three commedia dell'arte figures. This seemed appropriate. It was Peter Bennet who contributed the word of the day, "wentletrap", which he defined as a spiral staircase or a spiral shell. There is a whole page of them here, some of them are very fine: the Perplexed Wentletrap) for example, or the Precious Wentletrap, who sounds like - and is dressed in the muted shades of - the Puritan heroine of a historical romance.
