Caribbean comes to town

This weekend sees the Nottingham Carnival burst into brash, loud, singing, dancing, multi-coloured, multi-ethnic life; the culmination of many hours of work by adults and children across the city throughout the year.

Rising above the local, petty politics that usually accompany this event (perhaps any event that involves bringing disparate people and communities together?), the carnival is a life-affirming celebration of the power of people to work hard for something they believe in and something they enjoy.

With its origins in Christian tradition, and with echoes of ancient Roman festivals thrown in, carnivals around the world are flamboyant, bustling events which offer an opportunity for communities to demonstrate their creativity, humour, sense of purpose and their shared humanity.

The Nottingham event is no exception. Based on Caribbean traditions, it attracts groups from across the city who make costumes, build floats and turn up at the Forest Recreation Ground for two days of music, eating, dancing and chilling (hopefully, this year, in the sun).

The carnival is always an event worth visiting and, if this weekend’s weather forecast is accurate, you should be in for a mouthwatering slice of Caribbean summer.

Out of Africa

I had an interesting contact over the weekend via Condron (a US site that gathers and publishes blogs in a similar way to Alphainventions).

Naomi, a blogger from South Africa, left a comment on my About page, making an interesting comparison between Nottingham’s reputation for gun and knife crime and a similar one that Johannesburg has. I think we both agree that our respective cities’ places in the international list of dangerous places to go are probably unjustified.

Apart from the fact that it was nice to be able to connect with someone so far away via the wonders of the internet and to discover Naomi’s blog (which has some stunning photographs of African wildlife taken by her husband), it seems that my brief description of Nottingham has inspired her to consider a visit to the city.

If anyone from Experience Nottingham or Notice Nottingham (or the Nottingham is a Really Nice Place, Why Don’t You Come Here department of the City Council) is reading this, please contact me for an address to send my commission cheque to.

Jackson’s ‘political’ songs are largely ignored

No apologies today for this post having nothing at all to do with Nottingham. Much has been said and written about the passing of Michael Jackson but it seems that the emphasis of a lot of the reporting and the tribute programmes on TV so far has been on the medium – his singing and dancing – rather than the message… and yet he wrote some powerful songs about peace, justice, freedom and the environment and I hope he will be remembered for these as well as for Thriller, Bad and similar songs.

Many scoff at these examples of Jackson’s compassion and sincerity as being naieve and egotistical (remember Jarvis Cocker’s ‘protest’ at the Brits in 1996?) but when you have the influence of Michael Jackson and the audiences he can command, writing and performing songs such as these can change the way people see the world and could, perhaps, even change the way some of us behave.

There will always be detractors who point to MJ spending millions whilst writing songs about poverty and war, but he also gave millions of dollars to charity… and no-one is perfect.

So this is my own tribute to the man and to three songs that I think stand with any in the ‘protest’ genre as well as being right up there with the best of the brilliant catalogue of other songs he has left us.

City’s game for some computer fun

I’m not a fan of computer games. Probably something to do with my age or my poor hand-eye co-ordination. But I can still recognise their importance in today’s digital culture and so I’m surprised that Nottingham does not make more of its status as GameCity.

What?… I hear you cry. That’s precisely my point. As annoying as these flashing, bleeping, addictive, hyper-activity-inducing, spawn of the digital devil are, millions of people around the world play them and Nottingham has fashioned itself as Game City to celebrate all that is good in recreational electronic innovation… but who knows about it?

GameCity is a concept more than a place; an event more than an ongoing activity. The official blurb on the website says that: “GameCity is a lot of things, but most of all it’s an ongoing project to find out what a video game festival could be.”

It goes on: “A very small team of dedicated, charismatic and attractive people. GameCity is a project of Nottingham Trent University, based within the newly established Centre for Contemporary Play. You might have heard of another one of our projects, the National Videogame Archive.” (I hadn’t, until now).

Predictably perhaps, for a website dedicated to computer games and presumably put together by tecchies, it’s a bit vague on what the project actually does but it looks as though there is going to be a launch on 1st July where “…bars and pubs of fair Nottingham city will be hosting competitions, encouraging excellence and generally being very playable”.

Then comes what appears to be the high point of the year with a gaming festival (the fourth in the series of successful events going under the banner ‘GameCity’ apparently) in Nottingham from 27th to 31st October. Surely a must for anyone under 30?

And if that doesn’t get your mouse or your joystick twitching, GameCity appears to be supported by Greater Nottingham Partnership and Nottingham City Council as well as the university, so how can it fail?

See you there. I’ll be the one in the corner with a pint, moaning about the noise.

Mixed messages from Place Survey

Once again it’s the Evening Post that offers a source for this post and so I have to begin by saying that I’m grateful to them for reassuring city residents that 70% of us are satisfied with the city and that almost a third of us think the City Council provides good value for money.

Important data... or another load of useless tosh from the Government?

The source of these revelations is the Place Survey, carried out in 2008 by local authorities at the behest of the Government’s Department for Communities and Local Government. Questionnaires were sent out across the city and county asking people for their views on 18 ‘national indicators’ covering issues like public services, local decision making, respect & consideration and community safety.

It’s obviously good for the city and those who live in it, to know that things are going well and that the people in charge of public services are doing a good job. And, as City Council Leader Jon Collins pointed out: “This new survey does not measure residents’ satisfaction with council services alone but importantly also asks about services provided by all the public services within a local area.” So this seems to be good news for everyone and we should certainly take the positives from it and celebrate them.

But, before Jane Todd and Jon Collins cause each other physical damage from all that back slapping, perhaps we should look at the one statistic that the Evening Post managed to miss. The response rate in the city to the place survey was 34%. Or, to put it another way,  two-thirds of people who received the questionnaire couldn’t be bothered to send it back… or thought it would make no difference to anything if they did. Which is interesting, because one of the questions was about whether people thought they could influence decisions in their local area, and 32% said they felt that they could (that’s a third of the third who responded…) but maybe many more thought they couldn’t and that’s why they didn’t return their questionnaires.

The Data Quality section of the Place Survey Report says: “… Nonetheless, where response rates are low (less than 30%)…. some caution may be necessary when using the results to set performance targets (for example as part of local area agreements). Just scraping in at 4% above this minimum response rate should, perhaps, give the City Council cause for concern.

And, if there’s a Government ‘health warning’ of this sort on how the the results from such a low response should be used, you could be forgiven for asking: “What’s the point?”.