Here's another of those hurried poor quality photos that characterise this blog, and one that reveals a curious connection. I took this yesterday in Bradford Central Library. It shows the not-quite-everyday occurence of a lady demonstrating crochet to Emiel the goth. The cakes and the candle are woollen.
With my colleague Linda Constable I've been developing a variation of the Living Library concept, one which is locally-sensitive and non-confrontational, and helps to build relationships. It's unlikely that someone who is interested in talking about knitting would find a place within the established European tradition of Living Library - it's emphatically about confronting prejudices, but perhaps not that kind of prejudice - but our project encourages local libraries to take their own approaches and recruit their own catalogue of local people.
That's how we came to have Emiel (who's also featured in a promotional clip here on BBC Look North) sitting with a knitter on a sofa while both were waiting to be borrowed for a conversation, and getting absorbed in the arcane mysteries of The Woolly.
He and his two fellow-goths got the bug and one rushed off to buy some crochet hooks. Leaving me fascinated at the part played in this apparently trivial connection by (i) the organisation of the series of events, which set up numerous conversations that otherwise would not have happened, and (ii) the focussed occupation of the hands in conversation.
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