A Turning Point

Hurrah! It’s the Winter Solstice! This is always my favourite day of the year and to celebrate, I plan to light a small fire on my balcony and then dance around it wearing nothing more than a strategically-placed feather and a bone through my nose. Oh, Happy Day! The nights will now get shorter; the dawn’s rosy fingers will begin to tickle me awake earlier and earlier. Summer is on its way.

I went to the Nottingham Creative Network’s Christmas bash last night which was held in an extraordinarily stark room inside the university. The room was painted completely white and there were no works of art adorning the walls. In one corner stood an eight-foot high Christmas tree entirely bare of any decoration – no baubles, no tinsel, no twinkling lights, no chocolate money, even no fairy! Nothing but the natural greenness of the pine needles. Quite an original idea and very attractive it was too.

The party was fun. A couple of people made Pecha Kucha presentations – the first, a talented (but mad) Polish photographer who told us that her best birthday present ever was a saxophone that she couldn’t play; the second, a jolly (but very talented) painter who revealed an unlikely fascination for Kylie Minogue. Very entertaining. Pecha Kucha is a presentation format where you get to describe yourself and your life to an audience using PowerPoint slides. The trick is that you may only use twenty slides, and that each slide must only be displayed for a maximum of twenty seconds. Therefore, your life is illustrated to a fascinated gathering within a total of six minutes and forty seconds. Another rule of the format is that as the presenter, you are forbidden from taking yourself too seriously. Sounds exactly like my sort of thing and I shall definitely be having a go next time. It’s a marvellous way to show off and at the same time, poke fun at yourself (before someone else does). The snag for me is this: Has my life been interesting enough to fill out even a meagre six minutes and forty seconds?

Who cares? I shall at least have a photograph of me dancing around my balcony fire to show them all. That’ll make ‘em laugh.