Steve Zissou? In Lancaster?

No, he wasn't, but the Friends of the Maritime Museum were treated to a great slideshow by Gordon Fletcher yesterday, with him chatting (uber-passionately) about his sightings in dives around the Bay and west coast of Scotland.

It was only a 40 minute talk but packed with fascinating facts, for example did you know the barnacle has the largest (relative to body size) penis of all creatures? It was a risky starting fact, but loosened up the (mainly male) audience.

© Gordon Fletcher

I loved his extreme close-ups of fish eyes, in which you could see galaxies of light and colour. The photos of brittle stars were just as divine, their filaments combing against the fat cushion starfish: an otherworldly version of Laurel and Hardy. But perhaps favourites were at the end when he showed a sequence of photos of the water surface as he was resurfacing.

The sea is a lens, he explained. Multiple lenses, really, created by wavelets on the surface that either focus or dissipate light under the water, and the objects near the surface, so cliffs and clouds viewed from metres below the surface became post-impressionistic forms, ice-creatures, mythological landscapes that have disappeared from our lives.

Transcendental. And it surrounds our island...

Anticipation v Anxiety

And so it was Spotlight on Friday, where I had been asked to take a ten minute slot. I like the monthly event - a friendly audience, a wild mix of work/performers and it's local.

It's very much a known event. I've performed all sorts of work there - solo, with my old collaborative trio 3dV, as Hymas & Lewis, straight, big, old and new. So it took me by surprise to feel so nervous. I'm not sure why since I always feel nervous before getting onto a stage. I thought at first it was when I had memorised work, for the obvious fear of forgetting stuff. But latterly it seems to be for whatever I do.

In part Friday's nerves were down, I'm sure, to my decision to read new work. I find it very useful (if challenging)for the editing process to take work to an audience. There is a new 'collective' ear brought to each poem.

I wonder if a part of me (the bloody clever clever subconcious me) recognises the value in having this anxiety (the flip side of excitement, after all): to prevent complacency, sharpen my ears, insure a connection with the audience - not to take for granted the position of telling people my work - and to hold each poem carefully as it deserves as it's being told. Basically, it seems, there is no getting away from the fact nerves serve the energy of my performance. It's a shame the experience is akin to swallowing staples.

I gave, what I considered to be, a quiet rendition, fairly stationary, so I could best hear the new work. People listened. I listened. I changed some poems mid-recitation. I stepped off the stage ultimately happy with the experiment, relieved, looking forward to the next one.

Listed

With readying the boat for hibernation, I've been scouting around Glasson Dock, on foot and in books, and recently found this great aeriel photo of the place, pre 1960s, when the graving dock was still in use. (Found in a great picture book compiled by Nigel Daziel and Sue Ashworth)

What I find most fasinating about this picture, however, is the custom house just visible on the far right hand side of the frame. An inauspicious building especially in comparison with its relative in Lancaster that is adorned with porticoes, columns and double-sided steps.

I think what's particularly interesting is while Lancaster's custom house was built on the cusp of the shipbuilding heyday of the city, and so reflects all that hope and ambition, it is still regarded as a important historic monument, and accordingly it houses the maritime musuem. Glasson's custom house was built as the industry was declining, Glasson Dock, itself, was a last ditch attempt to cling onto shipbuilding/ship repair. So the custom house is appropriately more conservative, cautious, perhaps. And sadly is now inaccessible, encased as it is (preserved by being listed, I suspect) by warehousing built with a neat square indentation that edges round two walls of the house.

What was once the gateway to a place, the house that made the money to keep the port running, is lost to hawthorns, corrugated iron and breeze blocks ...

This place of order, accounting, lists and registration has crumbled away into something I am now repiecing with new lists and new accounting to make sense of what it was, what it is, a rebuilding, an honouring in language that has no financial value whatsoever! And right now, that feels positive...