Well, here goes a second attempt at a blogpost. Yesterday I wrote a quite long entry about what I’d got upto this weekend, however I lost what I wrote, as well as several hours more trying to recover it. The upshot of the error was that I wrote it via my iPhone using an outdated app, I accidentally saved the entry to local drafts, which in effect doesn’t actually exist, thus deleting what I’d just written. So here, still angry at my loss, is an attempted abridged version of what I originally wrote:

Most weekends I find myself working in a low paid McJob which I idly maintain while I continue to study for an MA at university. However this weekend was different. I had originally wanted to have time off a few weekends ago to visit some breweries in Chester, having recently become a member of CAMRA, but it just so happend that the day that trip was due to take place my employer had a no-holiday bar in place due to a promotional launch. So, as a replacement for this I decided I was to attend a local beer festival I had recently seen advertised.

The Beer festival was taking place at a small pub in Wolverhampton called The Combermere Arms, however this did not turn out to be a normal straight-forward beer festival, the kind of which I’ve attended numerous times now. No, this one coincided with an arts festival that was also taking place, and this overlap did not just take place temporally but also physically, with the pub being used as one of various venues displaying and hosting local artists. It should be said that we didn’t just stumble on the art event accidentally, I had been following its process online for sometime, but the clashing dates and the use of the Combermere Arms as a venue was only brought to my attention a few weeks previous.

As we entered the pub, which was converted into such an establishment from dwellings in 1860, we were instantly charmed; it was both cosy and quaint and possessed all the typical signs of alehouse quiddity that one would expect. The pub had exhibits from artists scattered throughout its three rooms as well as in the gents whereby the locally famed ‘Tree in the Toilet” was decorated. The main event taking place at the pub when we entered, besides the beer festival, was a folk band in damp but well attended beer garden. Not long after taking some seats the band tried to get patrons to take part in a folk dance, a splattering of people duly obliged. It was very charming to see and hear, and combind with the setting of a pub with genuine age, with scattered signs of oldness, it made the occasion feel phantasmagoric. This led us to question wether we’d stepped into some sort of LARPing situation, of course we hadn’t but it was the quickest shorthand we could use to share to each other the shared surreal-like feeling we were all feeling. It was a great experience and I would love to go back the pub again, but without the folk band making the pub seem like a portal to another world I feel that I could potentially be somewhat underwhelmed on my next visit.

After this we went round to a few of the other exhibits being displayed in various building and it was genuinely great to see. It was very nice to know, despite the City of Wolverhampton crumbling further into a wasteland, that there’s a thriving subculture of artists of all kinds based in the area, in fact it could be argued that living in such an area, which in many ways isn’t really that bad, could in fact be helping them in their aim of creating good art. Having viewed many of the works I have been really inspired to finish off the long awaited zine I’ve been working on with a good friend, as well as to get on with numerous other creative ideas I have planned and noted but just keep finding the time to put off, which is of course infinitely easier to do than actually make something. It was a great day out and I do look forward to hopefully attending other such events in the future and I’m very pleased, perhaps more importantly, that I now possess a greater passionate impetus to get on and actually make the various things that I wish to make.

(the video included below isn’t great because I was mostly trying to record the sound briefly, not intending to blog it)