Out of Town

They told me it was a book launch. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t have gone if I’d known that it wasn’t - if that makes sense - but it wasn’t. I’m not really sure what it was. We arrived at what was essentially the loading bay and warehouse area of some random industrial unit in the wilderness of Radford. The man on the gate checked our names against the guest list and in we went.

There were some strange people there – it was the Press Launch of an event called ‘Unleashed’ and was billed as ‘bringing together the best of Nottingham creatives in furniture, fashion, arts, graphics, interiors and architecture for a celebration of Nottingham and a gift of inspiration’. It true, that’s what it said on the invitation (which I hadn’t read fully, which is why I mistakenly thought it was a book launch). The dress code said: 'Anything Goes'. One woman with 4-foot long legs wore nothing but a tiny pair of briefs and a basque; someone else wore a piano. Actually, that last bit isn’t true – but there was a piano there which was built as if it were a giant child’s rocking horse and instead of sitting at it in the conventional way, this man sat in it and made the whole construction rock backwards and forwards, weeble-like, while he played classical tunes. Another guy played some kind of weird electric clarinet while perched on a fork-lift truck.

I met some crazy people – Steve, the baby-faced editor of a glossy magazine called Icon (how could anyone so young hold such an exalted position?); Sam, the architect who appeared to break the mould by presenting himself not as an architect, but as the kind of guy who would wash your car at the supermarket. He would have made a good model actually; it’s a pity he wasn’t the one in the briefs and the basque.

A friend of mine was meant to be filming the event. After several glasses of wine (there was a very generous free bar) we reviewed some of the footage. I can’t recall whether shots of people’s feet were what the organizers had asked for, but it seemed to me that this was what they would get. Very dangerous, free bars.

The reason for these kind of events, and for getting oneself on the guest list, is to network. I swapped contact details with several people but I can’t find any of the scraps of paper or business cards now. I think I must have left them in the taxi.

When we returned to the throbbing, mob-pressed streets of the city, I found the stray cat sitting on my doorstep. Oh dear, why did I ever let him in?