0-5: Themed Weekend with Ian and Tracey

Top: Ian
Bottom: Simon

Crosby Beach, Saturday 28th June, mid-evening.
Photographs by Tracey McGarrigan

0-5: A Themed Weekend with Ian & Tracey

If you follow this blog or sundaywithme.blogspot.com, you may remember an Artist named Ian Abbot. After two Sundays with Me, Ian Abbot has raised the bar once again and invited me to spend three days in the company of himself and his partner Tracey, at their new(ish) home in Southport. Ian and tracey stipulated that I could choose any them to structure how we spend our time together. Since my first five years were spent in Southport, I chose the theme "0-5". I could try to guess how Ian and tracey might interpret this sparse directive but there is no point. In my experience, Ian is a very surprising man and I am sure that anything suppositions I might form between now and Saturday morning will be utterly confounded. I imagine that I will have some choices to make, but I think the idea is to give myself over to the theme.

When I mentioned this themed weekend to Mother Bowes, she dug out a load of old scrapbooks made "by Simon and Sandy" in my early childhood, one of which was pertinent to our move from Lancashire to Derbyshire in the Summer of 1985.

Emailing Ian and Tracey earlier this week I wrote:

After a conversation with my parents, our 0-5 of my un-remembrances or half-remembrances are:

0-1: Swan's Fish & Chips, on the road behind Bold St (Lord St?)

1-2: Birkdale School, Farnborough Road

2-3: The park where they have the birds in cages - on Cambridge Rd, end of Lord St.

3-4: The site of the old Matti & Tisso, Lord St (coming up from Liverpool Rd, before Scarisbrick)

4-5: Ainsdale united Reform Church, where I was Christened:

Bonus Ball: Wayfarer's Gallery.

Feel free to investigate and take me to any or all of these places."

I am very much looking forward to my weekend. I will be documenting it here and at sundaywithme.blogspot.com.

Forthcoming: Sunday with Ian Abbott

Good News!

Ian Abbott, with whom I spent a fantastic Sunday traveling through Devon on 22.10.06, is coming up for a second Sunday on 30.3.08. He will arrive on the Saturday evening "give or take 30 mins of 6pm" and we will be having fish pie for tea before going for a couple of pints of ale. On the Sunday morning we will walk up Kinder Scout and be brightened by the exercise. If you follow this blog you might remember that Kinder Scout is where Mariella Greil and I walked in preparation for our lecture last November, in entirely abysmal weather.