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Oliver Cross: Woodhouse Literary festival plan
Woodhouse resident and YEP columnist Oliver Cross mutes the idea of a literary festival for Woodhouse and talks guinea pigs.
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Novel ideas required
Lynne has a plan to organise a literary festival in Woodhouse, Leeds, on the grounds that if Headingley can have one, as they did few months ago, then so should Woodhouse.
I think she took the Headingley Literature Festival as a sort of personal slight. "So you don't think we're cultured enough to have a literary festival round here then? Well, we'll see," she said in her head, adding a "Humph" for good measure.
Actually, I should think Woodhouse and surrounding areas (obviously excluding Headingley and other snobby places which think they're the bee's knees) has very good literary connections because many distinguished writers must have passed through Leeds University – which is in Woodhouse and not Headingley, so, in the words of the West Side Story lyricist Stephen Sondheim when he got stuck finding a rhyme for Manhattan, smoke on your pipe and put that in.
Write to me if you have any ideas for the Woodhouse Literature Festival and I will pass them on to Lynne on the understanding that I take no responsibility for anything whatever and was the first to say it will end in tears.
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Dim view of guinea pigs
In Croatia, where we were a couple of weeks ago, we visited the most grim zoo I've ever seen. To get there we had to climb (well, sort of stroll vertically) a great distance up a path leading to the top of a desolate mountain in Split.
I was keen to see the zoo because my holiday reading was Life of Pi by Yann Martel, a novel which contains a spirited defence of zoos and the art of the zookeeper.
But Split zoo is indefensible. A wolf pacing up and down manically, as if in the corridor of a mental-health wing; a big wild boar trying to wallow in the dry, dusty pebbles which make up zoo grounds; an all-alone monkey literally rattling his own cage… even the ordinary, domestic geese and ducks were completely caged in, as if they wanted to escape, which, as Martel explains, no properly-kept zoo animal does, it being a jungle out there.
Life of Pi also reveals that the only truly safe zoo animal – the one that wouldn't even think of giving you the tiniest of nips – is the guinea pig.
The guinea pig enclosure at Split zoo is carpeted with guinea pigs of many generations capering around and breeding like, well, rabbits, as if they think their zoo a wonderful place. I suspect they are deeply stupid.
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Tuesday 07 February 2012
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