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.
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
74 Colston St
Bristol
Bs1 5bb
Shop or Donate
through the friendly boar
We left the school-yard early, before the evening flights. Pickle cried some nonsense about swarms attacking the church but had finally buckled to pressure and followed us out toward the wood. Bucket and me had our Kill bags tight around our backs. A hammer and knife each, some slingshots, duck-tape for our mouths and enough Godfrey Solution to smear over our hands and faces once the killing was done. Pickle followed behind with his Safe bag: some toy-town plasters, a siren, a compass, two flares and a short knife. He’d packed everything and anything that would be of no use at all if the swarm actually did, and we had heard they did, sometimes, attack. We talked of one day when we got big, we would bring guns, but we had no guns now.
Dad had gone to the hospital again to visit mum. He’d be all masked up and smiling stupidly, holding her hair back whilst smothering her face with Godfrey Solution and wiping away the mucus, that swam with tiny feathered barbs, falling from her distorted mouth. You couldn't even call it a mouth, really. It was a hard gape, a permanent overbite of hardening skin, a claw-like brittling gob. It was, or would be, a beak eventually … if she lasted that long, and she probably wouldn't. Almost everyone's mum had changed by now, becoming feathered things that cawed and clawed in the dark corners of almost every house in the village. They were dying and yet somehow becoming, evolving, into something new, something other.
Bucket had heard that a flock of luminous crows had been seen above the wood past the quarry so we followed the stream out past Pickles house till we saw the woods rising, a sickly yellowing green on the horizon. Along the stream bodies lay like waste. Awkward bodies made bird-like, feathered and mostly dead. We had seen so many by now that we didn't even care who they used to be. Dad said we were his ‘brave little soldiers, for marching out to battle.’ But Bucket said dad was stupid, and that we were not ‘little soldiers’, we were the only thing keeping this stupid village alive. And he was right too, we were ok, all the kids were ok! None of us were getting the sickness and nobody seemed to be asking why? Maybe they thought that to question it would be to challenge and somehow skewer this anomaly and so it went un-said and we, us kids, got sent out to fight and kill the birds day after day and come back each evening to watch the village, and our parents, slowing changing and dying, just the same.
Pickle cried nonsense every time the hammer came down like it was his hand or something, like Bucket was smashing his fingers into the tree stump and not just some small noxious bird like we’d done a thousand times before. Small smashed plumes of feathers got caught in our throats, shattered bits of beak, tiny hollowed bones, each beautiful in its own way piled up in the gutters next to people we used to know, now dead in spectacular colours and twisted wings. We thought that the birds were easy to catch and kill because the illness seemed to affect them as much as us. Whilst alive, they flew weakly, pathetically pushing at the air, their wings almost weeping in the wind. Whatever was happening, God’s aviary had gone awry, gone on a killing spree, the air aglow, luminous, iridescent, flocks of rabid sickness was spreading its wing.
In the hospital, at mums side, dad could find nothing to say that would help her, or him, understand what was happening, so when I went I’d just make up stupid stories so that the silence in the room might be less. I’d tell mum that the birds were gathering at the edge of the village, as if to migrate to some other place, I said that some of the people that were missing had turned up in other villages, lost and scared but alive. I told her that on the big hill you could see the bonfires of birds from other villages rising neon in the sky. Mum said nothing, her eyes sat wide yet unlit, and in them I saw a shadow of starlings twisting back and fourth.
The Godfrey gauze lay over her face, thick, gelatinous and grey like a shroud, protecting her from me and my lies and the dying world outside the hospital window.
Approaching the edge of the wood, the sound of poisonous wing cracked against the air, shivering the blackened branched trees. I crouched low and crept closer to Bucket, quietly reaching my hand back to pull out one of the tools from my Kill bag which dragged along the ground. Looking down, the dandelions lilted weirdly, the daises seemed drawn to the floor in awkward spastic bends and the grass appeared greying and wounded, the opposite of its natural green bliss. A daffodil blinked at me, a black-petal’d iris appeared bright and knowing. It saw me, it felt me near. The woods were speaking in riddles. The air cracked, winged and electrically alive to terror.
Mum got sick in October, so dad said we should ‘Say Goodbye and We All love You So Much and We Will See You Again Soon’ but I never got the courage to say it and neither did dad and mum hasn't died yet so we just kept visiting and waiting and watching her change and hoping that maybe at some point all of this would stop. I don’t think dad gets it, he just thinks somethings ‘off’ but will be made right soon.
He says. ‘So, why is it only the birds that get sick? Why not the dogs and cats? And why do the women get sick first? Are they weaker, more stupid, are they chosen? And why don't you and your stupid friends get sick? Are you girls too? He gets angry, but doesn't know where to direct his hurt...at the birds? They were sick too...at the air! But he’s right, the women did get sick first, there was barely a women in the village left and their changing was so much faster and worse than the sick men, whilst all the kids seemed ok, boys and girls, we were just scared.
After the Godfrey Event, after the spillage, after the birds began to take to the air illuminated by neon pathogens, spluttering like damp fireworks from a bin. Dad still thought time and hope and love and prayer and a good fucking gun would make everything O.K. But he just didn't get it, we’d seen the birds close up, and before we even smashed them we saw something in their eyes, something that terrified them more than we did.
The swarm came at us fast, appearing everywhere at the same moment, from the sky and beyond that, from within the trees, and at the same time screeching up from the grass, from beneath the very earth, their eyes horribly illuminated, alert and piercing me in a strange and knowing way. Bucket reached up and caught the first, snatched it quick and twisted its neck until it clawed softly and died. Pickle stared straight at me, hopelessly, as a fist of beaks caught the side of his head and ripped the scream from his face before it even left his throat. The next attack came just as fast from the side, Bucket fired his slingshot but was lost in the wild ravaging sound.
A black flame of starlings came at my face, so swift and fierce and true, so true and somehow beautiful now that I could see myself in their eyes. The birds were not what they appeared, there was something more, the air was not what it was or should have been, it was only what held the birds, but was also held itself in the grip of fear. The birds were only the vessels of a much darker, and much more darkening thing which was to come, something that had to come. I knew this and accepted, and with some dark joy I beheld and felt overcome. I held my face to the sky, the tools in my hands fell away and became petals which became part of the grey grass beneath me which itself became part of the dark sky which seemed to enclose everything and was more, more than anything.
I accepted the black starlings at my face. I tasted them as they drew blood; my blood song sang between myself and the birds which were only vessels of what? I did not know. A dozen sharp beaks broke unto my face and behind every beak a set of eyes, which were my mothers eyes, stared straight into my changeling soul. I accepted my mothers sharp piercing as I accepted the beauty of my own death as being a rebirth into pain and into knowledge and into the feathered womb of my resurrection.