Warming up the old blog

In a repeat of last year, I intend to reactivate the blog while it is Edinburgh festivals time. Anything and everything I go to will be written up and judgement made on the enjoyment or offensiveness factor. Sometimes things are simply not fun without the frisson of a good feeling of righteous offence.

Just to get in the mood, I've included a report on a recent day out in Liverpool where I played tourist on one of the infrequent summer days.

The highlights were a visit to the International Museum of Slavery and the Tate Liverpool. 

John Lennon peace monument, by artist Lauren Voiers

I spent a long time in the International Slavery Museum learning things I should have known already. Liverpool's history is that of prospering because of the slave trade over hundreds of years. I'd not realised how early on Europeans had been enslaving people from West Africa, although I knew about the fight for abolition.

I could not manage to see round the whole museum because it was so horrifying in laying bare the conditions slavers transported people in. I realise that is a bit wimpish, but I do intend to go back sometime and see the rest. More uplifting were displays honouring the many slave uprisings across the Caribbean and America. Often these were instigated or led by women such as Carlotta in Cuba (1843), Solitude in Guadalupe (1802) and Rebecca in Curacao (1795). Of course, the woman we are most aware of is Harriet Tubman.

Slavery is still with us as was outlined in the campaign section of the museum where the display showed the plight of child domestic workers who've been trafficked to work in slave-like conditions in many parts of the world.

However, I'd particularly wanted to see '42', an exhibition by Lee Karen Stow, who photographed women in Sierra Leone. 42 is the average life expectancy of women there and one in 8 dies because of childbirth and complications.  It seems to me quite extraordinary that women in Scotland take it almost for granted they will live through childbirth, while for many women elsewhere in the world, pregnancy is a death sentence.

There is no need to have this rate of maternal mortality anywhere on earth. Those with the power to do something about it, should do it and stop financing wars and other toxic activities. We should all be blazing mad at this female carnage.

Emotionally zonked by the International Slavery Museum, I had lunch before visiting the Tate Liverpool. I wanted to see the gallery curated by Carol Ann Duffy and this did not disappoint. I spent ages there looking at her choice of exhibits from the whole Tate collection.

Gillian Wearing, Signs that Say at Tate Liverpool.

Duffy has written a sonnet specially for the exhibition

Poem

I couldn't see Guinness and not envisage a nun;

a gun, a finger and thumb;

midges, blether, scribble, scrum.

A crescent moon, boomerang, smirk, bone;

or full, a shield a stalker,

or stone. I couldn't see woods

for the names of the trees - sycamore,

yew, birch, beech -

or bees

without imagining music scored

on the air - nor pass a nun

without calling to mind a pint of one

stout, untouched, seen on a bar

at the Angelus.