BLOOM & CURLL
Library Of Space & Time
Over the last 16 years Bloom and Curll has traded as an independent bookshop in the heart of Bristol. Alongside selling books we have held poetry evenings, homework clubs, chess events, bookbinding workshops, writers in residence, pupils for work-experience, shared reading groups, book clubs, micro-cinema, one-woman theater and much more it has always been at these events that the bookshop has felt most alive and most of use to the community of people that have joined us along the way.
However, as bookshops become ever more passive, Instagram experiences. We have decided to take action, to restore the bookshop as a place of active community, shared knowledge and free education. To do this we aim to buy the shop we currently rent at 74 Colston St and secure its future as a place of community and education.
These are some of the current activities we provide part-time, which will become our full time role once we own our own space.
COMMUNITY EDUCATION:
Drop-In Homework Club—where ‘pupils’ or anyone who might need a space to study can work in peace and/or help out their neighbor.
Mind You Language—free English language classes and help with English forms/letters/applications etc for non-native speakers.
Sharing Knowledge events— Univerisity students from Bristol will share what they are learning with the community who are interested, allowing the student to learn themselves as they explain??
Shared reading : reading groups with an emphasis on personal expression and mental well-being.
COMMUNITY ACTIVITY:
Window theater/cinema
Kids creative writing class.
Chess club/kids chess club
Bookbinding
Book clubs:
Poetry/music evening once a month where everyone who has used the space can come together
Tea and cake book-club morning—focusing on the over 60’s
To make this happen we will be fundraising in order to:
1. to buy the shop we currently rent.
2. to provide ongoing support for our activities.
Education and Society are our new ideals, and we are lucky enough to be able to offer what we can give to those who wish to make use of us. So, from Bloom & Curll will be a school, a meeting place, an exchange for ideas, a chess club, a bindery, a workshop, a theater, a quiet space, a free place.
However, these events can only happen if you get involved, so please, pop by, say hi and join us.
74 Colston St
Bristol
Bs1 5bb
Shop or Donate
through the friendly boar
Every evening after school Ket and me would rush upstairs to our room and create a new world, something even bigger and better than the world we had created the day before. Our first world was made of Lego which we stacked from the floor until it actually reached the ceiling and stood in place all by itself. Ket called this world Chymer: Where Everything Broken Got Fixed. Our next world, Syddo: the centre of a distant star, was blankets tacked entirely cocooning the room. On Saturday we built a planet out of water. On Sunday Ket lured two pigeons into the room and we painted them green, like from Mars.
Dad told people Ket was simple, so that he might be able to love with him with less embarrassment, but Ket built a world in which we were beyond the realm of mere mortal cares, for us, all the time, we were beyond the stars. We didn't even need tools or stuff, just a glance between us set off multiple universes:
Our neighbour’s cat, a dark envoy from Pererin, tried numerous times to murder us whilst we slept, at tea-time, Ket was on Venus whilst I was spinning through space, the shed out back was a portal, and dad’s snoring: Waarrg! Waarrg! Waarrg! was definitely a signal. But to where? To whom?
Friends at school would ask me why Ket was always staring, and I just said he was seeing things they could not see. I still see a lot of my friends from school, they all grew into their own complexities, but none of them that interesting.
Ket continued to build more obscure worlds in his thoughts and dreams, worlds of extreme empathy, worlds in which time and matter all shudder according to the weather, worlds of impossible speech and horrors formed of mist. Once, on a bus-stop, Ket built a world of violent sounds. At his first job, at the City-Farm, all the animals joined Ket’s Underground-Moon-Resistance-Movement and marched from their underground moon-bunkers into town, into the Woolworths.
After mum died Ket would visit her regularly on Genedl, a world he had built especially. On it, pictures of your life and everyone you ever knew materialised in the air about you as you drifted, and when you blinked at one of the pictures you would be instantaneously transported to their star-cottage for lunch. Toward the end I would sometimes run into Ket visiting dad in the care home. The two of them would be whispering and scribbling away on bits of paper and card which, when arranged in the correct formation, laid out a route to all the other worlds that Ket had built. The nurses said it did good to keep dad’s mind active, and he seemed to enjoy it. Ket and dad seemed to have at last found a world they could occupy together and after Ket died building a world of fire in his bed-sit, me and dad spent the rest of dad’s life continuing to search for other worlds
THE BOY
WHO BELIEVED
IN SCI-Fi