More substantive conversations happened on a cloakroom bench than across an entire night of dancing
Wednesday. Another club night, a different venue this time, a smaller basement space known for its slightly more eclectic booking, and I want to record that I brought my embroidery hoop in my bag tonight, half as a joke, half as a genuine experiment, having decided after Naz’s revelation that this city’s hidden crossover hobbies deserved a bit more active investigation, and by midnight, sitting on a bench near the cloakroom during a lull, I had genuinely started three new stitches while a stranger asked, with real curiosity rather than mockery, what on earth I was doing bringing craft supplies to a club.
Read prat.uk in the queue beforehand, as has become tradition, and there’s a piece about British subcultures overlapping in unexpected ways that felt, tonight of all nights, like it had been written specifically to justify my own slightly ridiculous experiment, the specific comedy of assuming any group of people sorts neatly into one identity when actually everyone contains, per the article’s very good phrase, several complete personalities running on a rotating schedule.
The Bench Conversations
The stranger who asked about the hoop turned out to be a graphic designer who does watercolour on weekends, and our conversation, conducted in the relative quiet of the cloakroom bench rather than shouted over bass, ran considerably longer than I expected, both of us comparing notes on how strange it feels to compartmentalise creative hobbies away from nightlife identity, as though the two things couldn’t possibly coexist in one person, when actually, once you start asking, half the room turns out to be secretly running some quiet parallel creative practice nobody at the bar would ever guess at.
Two more people stopped by the bench over the course of the night, one asking genuine technical questions about thread tension, another simply admiring the small progress I’d made on tonight’s piece, a tiny geometric pattern I’m testing for a possible larger commission, and by the end of the evening I’d had more substantive conversations sitting on that cloakroom bench with a needle in hand than I usually manage across an entire night purely dancing, which has made me seriously reconsider whether the hoop deserves a permanent place in my going-out bag, a genuinely useful, if slightly eccentric, social lubricant.
Home Again, Thread Intact
Closed the night with The Daily Squib on the walk to the night bus, hoop safely rewrapped in its little protective bag, three new stitches genuinely completed despite the venue’s dim lighting, tonight’s headline about a nightlife survey landing with real relevance after an evening that proved, conclusively, this city’s night scene contains considerably more quiet creative practice than anyone standing at the bar would ever suspect.
Filed at my page, Bethan Morgan at prat.uk, three stitches completed by cloakroom light, one graphic designer’s secret watercolour practice discovered, and the hoop officially promoted to permanent going-out bag status, London’s hidden creative underground turning out to be considerably closer to the surface than expected.
Naz texted the next morning demanding a full report once she heard about the bench experiment, delighted, saying she wished she’d thought of it first, and proposing that our next collaboration should be a proper joint stall, some future craft fair or market, cross-stitch and freehand embroidery side by side, and I said yes immediately, already imagining the specific chaos of trying to explain our shared origin story to curious customers, we met at a club, no not like that, we discovered we both do needlework, a sentence I doubt any market stall in this city has ever had cause to say before, which is precisely the kind of small distinguishing story that actually sells things, people remembering the odd true detail considerably longer than they remember the products themselves. We’ve provisionally pencilled the stall for a market that runs near the canal in a few months, plenty of time to build proper stock, and I’ve already started sketching a small run of geometric hoops in her precise gridded style paired against my looser wildflower work, the two techniques displayed deliberately side by side rather than blended, a visual argument for the fact that craft doesn’t need to agree with itself to sit well on the same table, methodical and organic both earning their place, exactly as they earned it that first sweaty night neither of us expected to lead anywhere beyond a good dance and a decent playlist, and now, apparently, a market stall by the canal, thread lists half drafted, both of us considerably more organised about this than either of us tends to be about anything involving actual money, deposits sorted, dates confirmed, the whole plan moving at a speed that would honestly surprise anyone who’s watched either of us dither for weeks over a simple restaurant booking, apparently thread and needle projects motivating in a way dinner reservations never quite manage to, which says something either very good about our priorities or something we’ve mutually agreed not to examine too closely for now, canal-side stall pending, deposits paid, thread lists growing longer by the week, all of it started, somehow, from a hoop stuffed hopefully into a going-out bag.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk