Busy stretch ended (I refuse to sweat the small stuff, like nearly all the christmas shopping). I suppose a trip to my parents didn't count as busy, except that I knew I should really have been preparing for the Volume fair at the amazing new Birmingham Library. Instead I had a lovely couple of days enjoying somewhere else's christmas market (Bath instead of Manchester),
admiring the ceiling in Bath Abbey (unusually for a church building, it was much warmer in there than outside, which was very welcome)
and generally soaking up glowing autumn colour - the greyer the day, the more glowing the colours (no photos, always driving, and I've made the very wise decision, I think, not to combine driving with photography).
Then a mad day (though not half as mad as it needed to be) of sticking and wrapping and preparing before making it down to Birmingham with Gemma. As is becoming almost traditional for fairs in new places, we drove in a few exciting wrong directions before hitting on the right one, but we still got there with time to spare. Birmingham's new library was brilliant. I already liked the centre of Birmingham anyway, the little I've seen of it - everything seems to be clustered in a way that makes it absolutely crystal clear that yes, there can be no getting away from it, this is the centre - and the library is a flashily tasteful addition on the outside, with great facilities and amazing juxtapositions of shapes and colours on the inside.
Then a mad day (though not half as mad as it needed to be) of sticking and wrapping and preparing before making it down to Birmingham with Gemma. As is becoming almost traditional for fairs in new places, we drove in a few exciting wrong directions before hitting on the right one, but we still got there with time to spare. Birmingham's new library was brilliant. I already liked the centre of Birmingham anyway, the little I've seen of it - everything seems to be clustered in a way that makes it absolutely crystal clear that yes, there can be no getting away from it, this is the centre - and the library is a flashily tasteful addition on the outside, with great facilities and amazing juxtapositions of shapes and colours on the inside.
Driving across the embarrassingly tiny section of the centre to get to where we were staying (admittedly we were trying to do this during the rush hour) involved another interesting detour (all in all we saw a lot more of the A38 than we ever intended) and a few irritated drivers, but we managed. And the fair? Well, it could have been busier - it sometimes lacked buzz - but I've decided that bringing new people together with the niche corner of the world that is book arts, is an arcane skill requiring decades of practice (whatever, it seems irritatingly difficult), and of course the event was nevertheless full of lovely people and amazing work, and the staff couldn't have been more welcoming and helpful than they were. All in all it was a brilliant couple of days.
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