nice

It’s nice, that.

This is such a good phrase, which in 2007 became the title of a great website. But nice is a tricky word, one we were told under no circumstances to use in school English essays. It can be just too banal and weak, and all too often it can damn with faint praise.

Sometimes, though, nice is just what you need. When extremes, depths, drama, fear and loathing are definitely what you don’t want. When the news is utterly exhausting and depressing, nice will do nicely. And the past couple of weeks have been sprinkled with niceness.

I went with a friend to see the Ladybird Books exhibition in Peterborough (in a grand 1820s house which became Peterborough Infirmary and there’s a fainting fit-inducing Victorian operating theatre at the top of the building). It was actually nicer than nice, beautifully presented laid-out, and a joy to find some of my favourites such as The Nurse and Things to Make, and to recall learning to read at home with my Mum teaching me from the Peter and Jane books. The suburban niceness of much of the Ladybird output may look dated now, but my goodness those books did a huge amount of good work.

[North Luffenham, Rutland by John Piper]

A couple of day later, I went to Leicester to see the latest exhibition in the Art School Project which meant going back along on the same train route across the wide, flat Fens then this time beyond Peterborough and into Rutland (‘La Terre des Ruts’ as a university friend once called it as we crossed the border) and Leicestershire. These counties contain some of my favourite landscapes which are the epitome of “undulating”. It is all unspectacular, undramatic but lovely, gentle, very green in May, and dotted with old buildings in pale local stone.

It is particularly enjoyable seen from a railway carriage, and the train also stops is also a series of delightful stations with old canopies, wrought iron, and lot of gloss paint: March, Stamford, Oakham, Melton Mowbray. Which reminds me, I very much like the BBC series The Architecture the Railways Built. Tim Dunn is the presenter (he’s also on the TfL podcast Mind the Gap) and is knowledgeable, enthusiastic, genuinely excited by columns and signal boxes and waiting rooms, and nicely boyish in his self-confessed railway nerdiness.

The Art School exhibition is in the Leicester Gallery, part of De Montfort University and a stone’s throw from the original, extremely grand Leicester School of Art. This is the second one I’ve seen, and I admire John Beck and Matthew Cornford’s dedication to the project which is unfolding and developing at a gradual pace and is very simple in its presentation of all the art schools - as they are now - in a region, whether or not they still exist as such, or even whether or not the building is still standing.

[detail of 2021 photo by Matthew Cornford of what was Walsall School of Art]

This very pared back ‘show, don’t tell’ approach is wonderfully open to interpretaion and it’s therefore all the more shocking when you realise that virtually none are still functioning as art schools. It’s good to see that there’s a lot of adaptive reuse, but what we lose when we close provincial art schools is out of all proportion to the saving of the buildings.

I had a good look round Leicester, too. The city that was so reviled by my Mum who, apart from two years at teacher training college in Ormskirk, never moved more than two or three miles from where she was born and then lived in the same house for nearly sixty years, following one godforsaken year in Leicester which was the stuff of misery, as she told it But I find there is a lot to like about Leicester which is mixed, modest and middling with many nice bits. Old red-brick and terracotta factory and warehouse buildings which once produced and stored leather, corsets, hosiery, and Goddard’s silver polish are still hives of activity, there are plenty of artists’ and makers’ studios.

[lovely lettering, interesting spacing, nice spelling of borough/burrough]

There’s some excellent lettering and stained glass in Leicester Cathedral, and the elegant Georgian New Walk where Arts & Crafts designer Ernest Gimson lived as a child is still pedestrians only, after more than 200 years. I can do without all the Richard III hoo-hah though.

There’s been some good reading and watching too. I reread A Month in the Country after reading the biography of JL Carr by Byron Rogers (an odd book about an intense and unusual man, often relying on the word “bizarre” and far too many long quotes from sources). It is a deceptively nice short novel, though, the kind of thing that gives melancholic depth to the word.

And we saw The Marching Band (En Fanfare) which is a fine, old-fashioned type of all-inclusive film (cf The Full Monty, Brassed Off) which combines a good story with comedy, tragedy, marvellous music, and the need for tissues.

[photo by Robert Whitaker, 1964l

I bought a copy of a lovely little Teatles zine, produced by Huw who has collected zillions of images of the Beatles drinking tea or in the vicinity of tea cups and has gathered together contributors who write on a jumble of themes.

[ZW Cropped Shirt made with one and a bit vintage hand-embroidered tablecloths]

One day, I’m going to make a proper compilation of Beatles songs in the “Nice” category to play when I’m sewing on the machine and need songs that are not too fast, too wild or too spaced-out.

I’ve mentioned before now my love for the Merchant & Mills Factory Dress, and this week I made one using the gathered skirt hack which required Nice Beatles tunes (‘I’ve Just See a Face’, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, ‘I Will’) when dealing with the gathers and the stripes (fabric from Higgs & Higgs).

Nice is nice enough.

Happy Sunday!

PS the only problem with ‘nice’ is that if you say it too often, it starts to sound like John Thomson in The Fast Show Jazz Club sketches