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Oliver Cross: Woodhouse Festival of Culture and visual deafness
Woodhouse resident and YEP columnist Oliver Cross talks Woodhouse Festival of Culture and visual deafness.
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Culture's growing
Lynne's plan to organise a literature festival in Woodhouse, has expanded.
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It will now be called the Woodhouse Festival of Culture or, if Lynne can fix the sponsorship, the Nazam's Curry House Woodhouse Festival of Culture – Hot Food for Cool People!
Which is just one example of the high-class kudos that supporting the festival would bring and if local businesses want to descend into an undignified sponsorship bidding war, they should do so before July 2010, when the festival will be held.
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Lynne, however, says the festival is to celebrate local talent and a sense of place and has nothing (darn it) to do with getting free dinners.
These local festivals – there's a big one going on in West Leeds at the moment – are gathering steam, as we used to say in the 19th century, and constitute, I think, a Movement in the earnest, uplifting Victorian sense of the word, like teetotalism.
Which is probably a bad example because parts of the festival will no doubt take place in Woodhouse pubs and clubs, but Lynne and her fellow organisers (who don't include me) also want to include churches and schools and anywhere people gather.
And talking about schools, I saw a steel band, the Silver Steel Sparrows, at the City of Leeds School fete in Woodhouse at the weekend and was struck by how cultural it was; not jangly, crowd-pleasing sunshine stuff but thoughtful, elegantly-played music which made you think how clever children can be, though they don't often get credit for it.
I also saw this week a little girl standing on a pavement in Woodhouse and singing/screeching Swing Low Sweet Chariot to nobody in particular at such a volume that people were putting hands over ears and crossing the street, as if she was an air-raid siren going off.
This is the sort of talent the Woodhouse Festival of Culture needs to harness.
I can't believe eveything I think I've read
I'm suffering from a little recognised (except by anybody aged over 50) condition called visual deafness.
This means that you misread words in exactly the same way as hard-of-hearing people mishear them, so that when I saw a headline in a travel supplement reading 'A luxury villa for 5 a day – Bring it on!'
I got very excited because I thought it said 'A luxury villa for 5 a day – Bridlington!' and I'm rather fond of Bridlington, well at that price anyway.
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Weather for Leeds
Saturday 19 May 2012
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