Artless

It's quite a journey, but I had been promising myself a visit to Darlington ever since I discovered the local authority's innovative approach to raising revenue.

I never did find the offending miniature parking bays. Instead, my attention was diverted by a sign for Darlington Arts Centre.

I first visited the imposing building which houses the Arts Centre shortly after it was opened, some 30 years ago, when delivering a lecture to a class of trainee journalists at the nearby technical college. When, all those years ago, I chanced upon the converted building which had begun its life as Darlington College of Education, founded by the British & Foreign School Society, it was a delight.

Of course, this was the late, (but pre-Thatcher) 1970's, and attitudes to art were a little different to those prevailing these days. The arts 'industry' was in its infancy. But I remember a vibrant mix of exhibitions, a buzzing bar and the sound of avant garde music playing everywhere you went.

Little wonder, then, that I fancied recapturing a touch of those days gone by when I saw the sign for the centre. My regular readers will know that I am not much given to nostalgic yearnings. Nevertheless, the road already travelled sometimes appeals much more than the uncertain one ahead, so I decided, on a whim, to revisit the Centre.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I discovered. Darlington Arts Centre's best stab at providing art to the masses seems now to be a corridor outside the gents, where someone (possibly accidentally) had left a few works by local artists hanging - no more than twenty pieces in all.

I'm not a man to give up easily when I've got the scent of culture in my nostrils, even if it's mixed just a little with the smell of bleach. Pausing only to take a (quite decidedly horrible) coffee in the misnamed 'Garden Bar' (now a shabby room, on the first floor, whose only access to the anything like a garden was the glimpse of a boring patch of grass through a dirty window) I made my way back to reception, determined to be directed to whatever works of art the Centre was hiding - however minimalist they were.

Unfortunately, the reception staff - though perfectly friendly - struggled in the task. Had I seen the display in the corridor near the toilets, they asked, hopefully.

'Come back on Monday,' they pleaded: 'We're having a Grand Re-opening then'. A bit of me was tempted, although I wondered for a moment if I had stumbled into some kind of artistic recreation of Monty Python's famous Cheese Shop sketch. Would there be any art available to see, I wondered, hesitantly voicing my query even as I (shamefully) began anticipating their reply. They gamefully studied the programme, but it was no use. They had to admit that nothing was scheduled.

My top tip for anyone who has received an invitation to this 'Grand Re-opening' - which seems to centre around a new reception area, as the rest of the building was looking tired and shabby, is this: save yourself the anguish. Stay at home and flick through that coffee table Taschen book your cousin bought you for Christmas a couple of years back.

And, if the Community Arts Co-ordinator at Darlington Arts Centre is reading this, I only hope you enjoyed your lunch. Had it ended earlier than 2pm, when I was there, you might have had a piece of my barbed tongue to contend with.

(Incidentally, readers should not confuse the establishment with this place which, though tagged with the same moniker, seems at least to be living up to what an arts centre should aspire to), even if it is a few thousand miles away from the North East Centre for the Misnomers.

Fortunately, just around the corner, I discovered the quite lovely Gallerina art gallery. It's website may be 'under development', but I can assure you that the gallery itself is well and truly finished - and there you'll find an eclectic mix of intelligent painting and sculpture while discovering some local talent that hasn't been relegated to a corridor outside a gentleman's lavatory.

They had a few items by an artist who perfectly captured the camaraderie of the old mining communities in south west Durham - Alistair Brookes. Huge, white canvasses, with shadowy black figures of miners on their way to work: the dignity of labour acutely caught in vinyl. And not a whiff of bleach to be had anywhere.

Don't Look Back

"Pa," young Jasper said to me this morning, "perhaps your readers would enjoy reading about how you got interested in journalism?" I thought I detected just a hint of sarcasm in his voice, but it's so difficult to tell with the younger generation these days. Well, it's an idea, anyway.

When I try to recall the spark that led me into a life-time of working in a newsroom, I'm drawn inevitably to that Christmas Day in 1953, when an excited young chap opened up his presents to find, amongst them, a John Bull Printing Set.

In the days before blogs and computers, this was possibly the only way a youngster could get to see his name in print. For the benefit of anyone who never saw the John Bull in all it's glory, it provided an array of tiny rubber letters (none of which, strangely, came with accents - unless there was a special edition of French letters that I never discovered), and you were expected to slide these into a special holder.

Once you had assembled your words, using a tiny pair of tweezers, you were ready to impress them on an ink pad, and then away you went. Of course, producing anything more than a few lines was the labour of Hercules - but it was a start. This was desk top publishing at its most primitive. But the heady smell of the ink, the wondrous smudgy feel of the paper when it had received its imprint was like a drug to a child with little opportunity before him other than, perhaps, working down a local mine.

I am sure it was that Christmas Day, in the kitchen of that tiny, terraced house, that my fire was first lit. The rest, as they say, is history.

Nostalgic Yearnings: Not For Me!

I've never much been one for raking over the past. As Bob Dylan once said (quite frequently, in fact) Don't Look Back. It's a philosophy that has served me well in my dealings with life to date.

But when I had a call at Blunt Mansions yesterday, I couldn't help but reflect that sometimes there is a proper place for nostalgia. "Bill," they said, "I've searched the internet in vain for any of your old articles for Beyond the Boundary. Couldn't you throw a few on your blog, for old-times sake?"

It's a couple of decades since I penned those articles. The political landscape has changed almost as much as the girth of Mrs Blunt. And if my time at the knee of Wally Green taught me anything, it is that 'old news doesn't sell'.

So I'm not entirely convinced my blog readers will really want to pore over articles culled from what was, I must admit, the best football fanzine of its generation. But, I suppose there's only one way to find out.

Here's one from what I consider was my finest hour - when the magazine took a stand on the issue of censorship. I was proud to lend my distinctive voice to that campaign.