CREATIVE COFFEE LEICESTER, 27 MARCH 2013

The fortnightly meeting of Creative Coffee Leicester at Phoenix takes place this morning.

After having speakers for the last two meetings, we have a couple of table experts this morning, with whom attendees can book a free 15 minute consultation:

• Tom Simpson, Accountant with Torr Waterfield Accountants and Business Advisors. Torr Waterfield have a number of clients in creative industries.
• Russ Pacey, Business Coach for LCB Depot and Phoenix Square. Russ works on the Enterprise Hub Scheme to help startups but also supports SME businesses.

CREATIVE COFFEE: LEICESTER EVENTS GUIDE

At Phoenix Square Film and Digital Media Centre for the fortnightly meeting of Creative Coffee. That’s two separate words and no "Club" from now on - or, to give it its full name now, Creative Coffee Leicester. We have a speaker this morning: Rav Kaur (with backup from Sean Clark) for Cuttlefish Media, on the Leicester Events Guide. Their website is currently in beta testing. You can follow Leicester Events Guide on Facebook. We follow the regular session with another brief meeting of the committee. There are some good ideas put forward for advancing Creative Coffee Leicester; I look forward to helping put them into action.

CULTURAL QUARTER SET FOR SECOND INDIAN SUMMER

This article appears in today's Leicester Mercury:

Cultural Quarter set for second Indian Summer

The sights, sounds and tastes of India will be spicing up Leicester's Cultural Quarter this weekend.

The second annual Indian Summer will be transforming Orton Square into a Mumbai bazaar.

Last year, the two-day festival took place in Phoenix Square, but the event has expanded, with organisers showcasing cookery classes, films and dance performances across seven venues.

Organiser Bipin Anand said: "It is going to be really colourful, exciting, vibrant and fun, with loads going on.

"If anyone has been to a Mumbai bazaar they will know it is all about the hustle and bustle, with so many sounds and smells. We are hoping to recreate that.

"This year is a big expansion, with loads of events, and while we are having short moments of panic and nerves, we are soon reminded of how brilliant and exciting it is going to be."

Run by Leicester social enterprise Inspirate, the event is expected to attract thousands of visitors.

The Exchange bar, in Rutland Street, is hosting sitar players, henna artists and Indian music workshops.

"We saw what they did last year and thought it was fantastic, so we're really pleased to get involved," said manager Anna Webb.

Indian films will be shown at Phoenix Square, while Curve will host a Carrom competition, giving visitors the chance to compete at an Indian game.

The theatre will also showcase classical Indian dance clothes, worn by performers.

At the LCB Depot, in Rutland Street, speedy cooks will be challenged to take part in a competition to see who can cook the fastest chapati.

Retro Indian music videos will be projected in Manhattan 34 bar, also in Rutland Street, and there will be food on offer at Chutney Ivy, in Halford Street.

Meanwhile, the Ramada Encore hotel, in Charles Street, is hosting talks on topics including the Ugandan migration and sex before marriage.

Bipin said: "It is a great chance for a big mishmash of people – all ages and Indian and non-Indian people – to come along and sample the culture.

"It is a mix of traditional and modern aspects, which I think helps keep the culture alive."

Events are taking place across the venues from noon on both days, until 11pm on Saturday, and 9pm on Sunday.

For more information about the programme, visit: www.indiansummer.org.uk

CREATIVECOFFEE CLUB: REBORN!

It’s the other Wednesday, so I’m at Phoenix Square Film and Digital Media Centre for the fortnightly meeting of CreativeCoffee Club. That’s two meetings in a row I’ve made – a feat I haven’t achieved since I don’t know when.

In a subtle innovation this morning, we have a couple of “table experts”, whom attendees can meet one-to-one for a quarter of an hour of free advice.

As you’ll see form the picture above, faithful reader, I still find it hard to get a photo inside Phoenix Square that makes it look like there's a decent number of people here. Is it because I’m taking pics on my iPhone? We must have 20-odd attending CreativeCoffee Club this morning – I’ve tried to squeeze in as many of them as I could.

The regular session is followed at noon by the first meeting of a new committee formed to take stock of the past and present of CreativeCoffee Club and to chart its possible future. The meeting is convened by Cheryl Gill, Enterprise Support Officer at LCB Depot and Phoenix Square. Cheryl took charge of CreativeCoffee Club in April and will hold the reins till March next year. Emma Moore, Jed Spittle and I were on the short-lived committee that met only once eight months ago and which (despite our best intentions) managed to lead CreativeCoffee Club down a bit of a dead end. Steve Bowes, Russ Pacey and Ben Ravilious are also in this new committee today.

I’ve been having a bit of trouble with my hearing over the past few weeks. Every so often, my right ear switches off, which leads to some unusual effects (and to me looking a bit rude sometimes, I imagine). In this meeting, I hear Ben saying that he’s acting as “Neville’s Advocate” quite a lot.

We oldies provide a little bit of historical context, especially for those relatively new to CreativeCoffee Club. When CreativeCoffee Club relocated to Phoenix Square from its first home in the Graduate Bar at De Montfort University, it continued its pattern of meeting on alternate Wednesday mornings. One of the other Wednesday mornings would be occupied by a monthly public meeting of Amplified Leicester (same time, same venue, if a different room). Those sessions of Amplified Leicester featured innovative speakers (some of them from other parts of the country, a few from other parts of the world), more formal presentations, more structured participation. Amplified Leicester was the filling in the sandwich then, with a slice of CreativeCoffee Club on either side. That allowed reasonable differentiation between the two kinds of meetings and allowed each to develop its own character – even though, more often than not, it was the same crowd attending both (and one Wednesday morning out of four free). If someone didn’t take to the more relaxed nature of CreativeCoffee Club, they could come to Amplified Leicester – and vice versa. In the last phase of Amplified Leicester these public meetings moved to Wednesday evenings. Once Amplified Leicester came to an end in summer 2011, we were left with two slices of bread but no filling – nice bread, but all the same … Two floppy slices of bread, flapping around in search of a decent filling isn’t the most attractive prospect.

In terms of charting the future, we begin by discussing ways to refresh the brand. An immediate decision is made regarding the name. From now on, it’s going to be Creative Coffee Leicester (CC Leic for short, which matches up nicely with the Twitter feed: @CCLeic). I never got “CreativeCoffee Club”. I couldn’t understand why those first two words were run together like that, with the initial C in “Coffee” set upper case. I could see no logic or sense in it, no benefit or good effect arising from it – and no one I asked about it could explain it to me. I couldn’t find one person, involved in the network or outside it, who could understand it themselves or explain it to me. Why not run all three words together and make all three initial Cs upper case? Being different for its own sake is just annoying. It’s juvenile. A punch in the face is memorable, but I wouldn’t want another one. I don’t need or want funny spelling to make something memorable. The experience should be memorable for the right reasons to those who have had it and desirable to those who haven’t had it yet.

Well, that’s been one of my biggest moans for years and now it’s been dealt with. Mind you, I find people saying “Creative Coffee” annoying in the same way as when you hear people saying “Thomas the Tank”. What’s that? Just leave it, you say?  Hmmm …

Actually, that won’t matter now, as we’ve also agreed to drop the word Club from the title. We don’t want to make it sound cliquish or exclusive, that you have to apply for membership, or that some people are in and some are out.

A straw poll was conducted at the meeting on 4 April, asking attendees to answer the following questions (among others):

• Should we should from fortnightly meetings to monthly meetings?
• Should we introduce ourselves at the beginning of each session?
• Should we wear badges / labels?
• Should we have speakers?

We say yes to occasional speakers. We can encourage potential speakers by offering this as a networking opportunity which will be to their for the benefit as much as it is to their listeners. More “table experts” too – although there’s no reason why they shouldn’t always be brought in from outside the regular attendees.

At the start of a meeting, we could have a kind of “Open Mic”, giving newbies an opportunity to introduce themselves and for Committee Members to announce “Parish Notes”.

There’s a new website under construction, which is obviously the topic of much of our conversation today. We discuss its content and its style. The site could feature profiles of those who use Creative Coffee frequently and regularly (as used to be on Amplified Leicester’s ning). Each person’s profile could show their response to a small set of questions (e.g.):

• “Why do I come to Creative Coffee?”
• “What do I get out of Creative Coffee?”
• “What do I bring to Creative Coffee?”
• “Who do I hope to meet at Creative Coffee?”

There's more discussed than I've recorded here. Cheryl takes fuller and more professional notes of the meeting, which she’ll circulate soon. We’ll be meeting again immediately after the next Creative Coffee session on Wednesday 13 June.

AH, BUT THERE'S *THAT* MUCH MORE JELLY!

This morning, at the regular fortnightly meeting of CreativeCoffee Club at Phoenix Square Film and Digital Media Centre, I get to bend the ear of Richard Smith, Phoenix’s Catering Manager, about a matter that has weighed heavily on my mind for several months now: jelly babies.

Back when Phoenix Square opened, it sourced its chewy sweets (such as jelly babies, liquorice allsorts and wine gums) from Taveners, who don't use any animal derivatives in their products. Taveners use pectin as their gelling agent, rather than gelatine. This is welcome for people from a variety of faith communities and traditions: Hindus would want to avoid beef gelatine; Jews and Muslims, pork gelatine; Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs would want to avoid either of these. It’s also good news for Harry and me, as vegetarians. Add vegans into that mix and that means quite a lot of people would choose foods with pectin in them.

Some folk might check out the ingredients of a packet of sweets as an afterthought and only discover that they've eaten something containing animal products (perhaps one that goes against their religious dietary regime) after the event. They might only check out the ingredients after they’ve been enjoying something for a long time. I know that I only thought to do this after years of committing to not eating meat or products containing anything derived from animals. And I love my jelly babies and liquorice allsorts (though I'm not that fussed about wine gums – sorry Alastair). Just as many, if not more, probably wouldn’t think to do that at all. I don't know how many people would be aware they're breaking any of their religious, moral or ethical rules by sharing a bag of jelly babies. It’s a bit of a test if you find out halfway through eating them, as I know from my own experience!

It wasn’t long before the Taveners bags disappeared at Phoenix Square to be replaced by the same sweets sourced from Bassets. Now, most people would see Bassetts as the real deal when it comes to these traditional sweets (or "retro" sweets as they're often called these days) and just about every other brand as being second-best (at best). To some extent this is because of Bertie Bassett, the character made out of liquorice allsorts, who has been a popular and successful marketing tool for many years. When I was younger, Bassets had a TV advert that featured Bertie swaggering down the street, followed by a gang of kids, singing "Good old Bertie Bassett, He's Britain's greatest asset!" I also remember coveting a badge that supported another Bassetts ad campaign, “One too many and you might turn Bertie”

Arguably the best advert for jelly babies, though, was Tom Baker’s Doctor, who would pull a bag out of his frock coat at inappropriate moments of peril, or when encountering a member of a new alien species. The fourth Doctor wasn’t carting Bassetts jelly babies around the galaxy in the Tardis (unless he was decanting them from their branded packaging into a battered paper bag – although that would be in keeping with the BBC’s anti-commercial policy in those days) but it can’t have done any harm to Bassetts sales and reputation, as the market leader.

Mind you, someone on the production team at Doctor Who may not have wholly bought into the product placement ethic at the BBC. Witness the Kandyman, from the Sylvester MCoy (seventh Doctor) 1988 story, The Happiness Patrol. The Kandyman was an evil robotic sort of Bertie Bassett, who comes to a sticky end (did you see what I did there?)

It's easy enough to find Halal approved sweets and vegetarian sweets, just as it is to find sweets which are nut-free or sugar-free. Nut-free would be a more pressing priority of course, as fewer (if any) people are likely to go into anaphylactic shock if they ingest gelatine. As someone with a strong interest in equality and diversity, I’d like that kind of choice for everyone, wherever such sweets are sold. But of course, in the end, this is a commercial decision by the retailer and I (as well as everyone else with a view) should respect that.

Oddly enough, when it comes to jelly beans, at the lowest end of the market (Tesco’s jelly beans, part of their own brand sweets, three bags for £1) and the high end of the market (Jelly Belly Beans – delicious but dear, though they are my favourite sweets) are made with pectin.

Any food containing pork gelatine, other derivatives from pigs or similarly prohibited ingredients would be Haram ("forbidden") to Muslims. There’s a intermediate state in Islamic jurisprudence, which is neither Halal nor Haram: Mushbooh means "doubtful" or suspected". Muslims are advised to avoid anything that falls into this category. Other religious communities have analogous forms of guidance.

After I've cornered Richard and bent his ear for several minutes, he tells me he agrees with me, that arrangements for sourcing these sweets was rather hit and miss at the beginning – and that they have not been stocking any sweets of this sort at all for a year or more now. I hadn't really noticed that, since I'd given up buying them once they'd switched to Bassetts. They weren’t selling well enough to keep stocking them apparently. But Richard says he’s willing to give them another try in the not-too-distant future. I’d better buy some then!

If anyone asks what I’ve achieved in five years in this post, I can pint to the restoration of vegetarian-friendly chewy sweets at Phoenix Square … sometime in the future. On a serious note though, this is just one more reason why members of the faith and cultural communities don't feel welcome in the kind of public spaces that many of the rest of us inhabit. They don't feel at ease with the food and drink on offer. I know I'm making a generalisation here - and I know that there are some groups who won't go anywhere at all where alcohol is sold (which you can't really do anything about in somewhere like Phoenix Square). What I'm harping on about here is a small concession, but can mean a lot to those who care enough to take note of such things.

And, by the way, there's no actual wine in wine gums, so there's no need to go down that road, faithful reader.

CREATIVECOFFEE CLUB, 21 MARCH 2012

At Phoenix Square Film and Digital Media Centre this morning for CreativeCoffee Club. Between one thing and another, I haven’t been for some time: since 25 January to be precise. That’s three in a row … I don’t think I’ve missed that many consecutively before in what's been almost five years of attending CreativeCoffee Club.

This is a good day to come back and make a fresh start as it's Naw-Rúz - Bahá'í New Year - today.

Not so many here today as the last time I came. There are a dozen or so, but that includes a couple of new faces, as is always the case. The cafe bar is busy in is own right, with several small knots of people working on laptops in twos and threes. There are also (what I assume are) auditions or rehearsals for something called Under the Influence with How Bizarre Productions - a student performing arts company based at De Montfort University. A large group of young people are gathereD there; after a while they're ushered into one of the screening rooms.

There have been a few changes to CreativeCoffee Club since I was last here. Since funding and support from De Montfort University ended last year, CreativeCoffee Club has been stop-start. No one has really taken it on and run it with the same kind of devoted attention. From now on it will be overseen by Leicester Creative Business (LCB) Depot. From April 2012, a new dedicated website will be launched for CreativeCoffee Club (Thanks to Cheryl Gill, Enterprise Support Officer, LCB Depot & Phoenix Square Workspaces for providing more info.)

On the way to CreativeCoffee Club this morning, I bump into someone who was a mainstay of the event for a while. While chatting, I hear for the first time about Business Biscotti, which meets in another city centre venue, same day same time. My first reaction is to make a joke about the two groups getting together, since it sounds like they're made for each other (biscotti, coffee - get it?). On further online investigation though, it looks like there would a reversal of the natural order and they'd swallow up CreativeCoffee Club! There are Business Biscotti groups in Cambridge, Dundee, Liverpool, Slough, South West London, Wentworth, Weybridge, Windsor - and Leicester, of course.

CREATIVECOFFEE CLUB

At Phoenix Square Film and Digital Media Centre this morning for CreativeCoffee Club. Another good turnout, with just as many, maybe more, as at the last session a fortnight ago (at least two dozen people today - including, for the first time, a babe in arms). A very positive feeling about the session today, a palpable buzz in the air - and that's not just thanks to the caffeine!

Patrick Welsh (Marketing Manager at Phoenix Square) and I have an interesting discussion about "ownership" of CreativeCoffee Club. What's the relationship between CreativeCoffee Club and Phoenix Square? Is this a loose, informal group of people who met for a while at DMU Graduate Bar, currently meet at Phoenix Square and at some time in the future might meet somewhere else? Is CreativeCoffee Club an integral part of Phoenix Square's programme? Who runs it? Who makes it work? What can be done to make it work better?

We don't reach any conclusion about this, but it's an interesting question to ask, with obvious implications for promotion and publicity, retaining the existing membership (if it can be said to have such a thing) and bring in new people. Take, for instance, blogging. At the moment, that's only done here, by me, attached to the Council of Faiths website. So it reflects my interest and involvement - and that of the organisation for which I work. But there's more to Creative Coffee Club than just what I see in it and what I get out of it. Should it have a blog of its own? If so, who would do that? Can it be done collectively?

One veteran of CreativeCoffee Club (and of the late, lamented - by me, at least - Amplified Leicester) tells me that this shouldn't be thought of as a networking event any more; that we might as well be meeting in the pub. My response to that is that if we were meeting down the pub at 10 o'clock on a Wednesday morning, then it would say something very different about us as a group! My feelings are that CreativeCoffee Club is that it's loose, relaxed and low-key (which, for some people, can mean it's frustratingly baggy, shapeless and unmanageable) and that it doesn't work to try and mould it into some other shape followed by other groups and meetings of which we might have experience or knowledge. There are other networking events happening in and around Leicester - and some of us take part in those too. If CreativeCoffee Club is a square peg, it can't be battered into a round hole.

Since I keep telling anyone who's interested (and plenty who're not) that I'm the longest-serving member of CreativeCoffee Club (having been here since the second-ever meeting at DMU in the autumn of 2007) I think I'm entitled to take the long view. Some folk questioned why I was coming to CreativeCoffee Club at all (including some of my employers), but from my point of view it's paid off, in spades. I don't have a product to promote, or a service of the kind that others have here. It's been a process of building credibility, trust, even friendship - that others attending see my open hand, understand my agenda (and don't think there's a hidden one). In the context of attending and supporting CreativeCoffee Club at Phoenix Square, that paid off for me (and for Leicester Council of Faiths) with the Faiths Film Festival during Inter Faith Week 2011. Getting that put on was the perfect example of pushing at an open door. Phoenix Square even went the extra mile by having one of our banners on display for a whole month leading up to that event and for the week of the festival itself.

I have an interesting chat about social media with one chap, here for the first time today, which reflects on the nature and purpose of CreativeCoffee Club itself. Twitter, for example, could be said to be dynamic, non-hierarchical, to evade standard ideas about management and ownership. Get the picture, faithful reader?

Listed below are some of today's attendees. These are live links; click on them to go straight through to the relevant website or Twitter account.

• Bipin Anand touchRainbow Productions @touchRainbow
• Kim Campion The Alternative @AlternativeKim
• Craig Clarke @Beatroot
• Doug Cubin GIS Coordinated Ltd @gisco
• Ian Davies Leicester People's Photographic Gallery @IanDai
• Shell Edwards Make-Up Artistry @_makeupartistry
• Emma Fay Emma Fay Make-up & Concept Artist @EmmaFayMua
• Cheryl Gill LCB Depot @lcbdepot
• Dave Johnson Silverleaf Studio @Silver_DJ78
• Toby Jones The Awesome Consultancy @awesomeforhire 
• Olga Kras OK-CreArt @OlgaKrasCreart
• Cheryl Leadbetter Povric @PovricByCherylL
• Trevor Locke Artsin Productions @ARTSIN
• Ben Ravilious Ultimateweb Ltd @benrav
• Farhana Shaikh The Asian Writer @farhanashaikh
• David Sinclair Sinvision @sinvision
• Edd Smith Purple Claw @purple_claw 
• Jed Spittle Manic Music Productions @manicmusic 
• Mohan Subra Subra Designs

CREATIVECOFFEE CLUB

At Phoenix Square Film and Digital Media Centre this morning for the first CreativeCoffee Club of 2012. More than two dozen people are here today: twice as many as came to the last meeting in 2011.

Patrick Welsh (who was appointed Marketing Manager at Phoenix Square late last year) has taken charge in a vigorous (though not obtrusive) manner. By that, I mean he's offering free cake from the cafe bar. That wasn't put about beforehand, so it doesn't explain why we've got more here today. However, a few people tell me that they read my blog entry for the last meeting (Wed 14 December 2011) and that encouraged them to come (or, in more than one case) to come back.

Listed below are some of today's attendees. These are live links; click on them to go straight through to the relevant website or Twitter account.

• Bipin Anand touchRainbow Productions @touchRainbow
• Ian Davies Leicester People's Photographic Gallery @IanDai
• Farid El-Jazouli Valve Sound @valve_sound
• Anjala Farmah Strategic Secret @StrategicAngel
• Emma Fay Emma Fay Make-up & Concept Artist @EmmaFayMua
• Julia Hamer LCB Depot
• Matt Hart Hart & Harvey Photography 
• Cheryl Leadbetter Povric @PovricByCherylL
• Ross McMinn & Christine Cox Workspace 1 @Workspace1
• Nick Osborne Nick Osborne Photography @OsbornePhotos
• Michael Perridge Graphic Accelerator 
• Mark Seemann Synety @synety
• Farhana Shaikh The Asian Writer @farhanashaikh
• Edd Smith Purple Claw @purple_claw 
• Jed Spittle Manic Music Productions @manicmusic 
• Michael Tedstone Manike Music @manikemusic 
• Garry White garrywhite.co.uk @garrywhite_
• Dean Williams The Art Wizard @theartwizard 
• Rosemary Winsor The House of Winsor @houseofwinsor

LEARNING ABOUT BENE ISRAEL

This evening I attend an informal talk by Leon Charikar, President of the Leicester Progressive Jewish Congregation, on the Jewish communities of Mumbai: the Bene Israel.

According to folklore there has been a Jewish Community in the rural Mararashtra for over 2000 years.

• Where did they come from?
• By what means did they arrive in the west of India?
• How did they survive and maintain their identity?
• Did they keep kosher, did they observe the festivals?
• How did they dress and what work did they do?
• How did they live and work alongside other religions and cultures around them?
• What is their relationship to other Jews who came to other parts of India at different times?
• What part did they play in the history and development of India?
• How has their community fared in the modern world?

Leon's presentation considers these questions, sifts legend and myth from history and fact, and describes his own family connections to the Bene Israel. Before this evening, I knew little more than that this community existed; I learned a little bit when researching my presentation, "How Diverse is Leicester?" for An Indian Summer at Phoenix Square in June last year (see my blog entry for that occasion). I find the whole thing fascinating. The photo above is of the interior of a synagogue in Mumbai.

CREATIVECOFFEE CLUB

At Phoenix Square Film and Digital Media Centre this morning for the fortnightly meeting of CreativeCoffee Club. There are a dozen or so around the tables this morning; that’s good compared to the last two scheduled meetings.

This morning we meet Patrick Welsh, recently appointed Marketing Manager at Phoenix Square. He introduces himself to us collectively, seeks our opinions on what made CreativeCoffee Club work, why it appears not to be working now, and what might be done to revivify it (that's what's going on in the photo above). After doing this for a quarter of an hour or so, Patrick spends the rest of the morning going round the table and speaking with each of us individually.

It could be said that the CreativeCoffee Club experience on offer for the past few months has been the decaff version. Whatever it was that gave it its zing is missing now. Rebecca Harvey, who was in overall charge of things now that CreativeCoffee Club has been taken over wholly by Phoenix Square, was staring to do a nice job, but barely had the chance to get her teeth into it before moving on to pastures new. Of the half-dozen or so people who came forward several months ago to make up the new management group which would work alongside Rebecca, only Jed Spittle and I appear to remain. So, short of begging Jayne Childs to come back, what can be done to inject some life back into CreativeCoffee Club?

With Patrick taking a hand-on role now, CreativeCoffee Club will probably be the subject of a new marketing push, with various media and methods being explored for the first time (can we have CreativeCoffee Club mugs? Wouldn't that be a nice marketing tool? How come no one has thought of that one before?) 

Below is a list of today's attendees. These are live links, so click on them to go straight through to the relevant website or Twitter account.

• Lee Allen Lee Allen Art @leeallenarts 
• Matthew Clark arxproject @arx_project 
• George Horne Proof @George_Horne 
• Dave Johnson Silver Leaf Studio @Silver_DJ78 
• Richard Kennedy October House Imaging 
• Ruth Page Digital Narratives @ruthtweetpage 
• Edd Smith Purple Claw @purple_claw 
• Jed Spittle Manic Music Productions @manicmusic 
• Mohan Subramaniam Subra Designs 
• Maryann & Michael Tedstone Manike Music @manikemusic 
• Rosemary Winsor The House of Winsor @houseofwinsor

TIME TO GO HOME

Our banner has been on display in the foyer at Phoenix Square Film and Digital Media Centre for exactly a month now, lending support to their Faiths Film Festival during Inter Faith Week. It's been in a prominent position at the Reception, clearly visible to anyone and everyone entering the venue and buying tickets. Now that it's all over, it's time to pack it away and take it home.

I'm really grateful to the staff at Phoenix Square for having the banner displayed so prominently all this time. It was a genuinely unexpected bonus. I'm particularly grateful to Programme Manager Andy Jones, who suggested that we have it there for this extended period.

INTER FAITH WEEK 2011, DAY 5: HIGHCROSS EXHIBITION

Fifth day five of our week-long exhibition in Highcross to celebrate Inter Faith Week, showcasing the eight communities represented on Leicester Council of Faiths.

Yesterday was a relatively quiet day compared to this one: it's very media-intensive today, in three distinctly different ways. Around 0945, Bharat Patel arrives with a crew of two, to film some material for Pukaar News. He does some straight-to-camera stuff inside the display area, interviews Fayyaz Suleman, our Vice Chair, for 20 minutes or so, then records a few minutes with me. After they're finished filming at Highcross, they head off for the City Council buildings on New Walk, to film an interview with our Chair, Cllr Manjula Sood.

Early this afternoon, Rebecca Bryers, Production Assistant on John Florance's Sunday morning show on BBC Radio Leicester, arrives on the scene to record an interview with Jo Tallack, General Manager at Highcross and with me - first about our presence there during Inter Faith Week, then about the Multi-Faith Prayer Room. I took the above photo when the three of us were inside the prayer room. It's just about ready to go into use, but today the piped music was still playing in there. Rebecca's interview with Jo will have Dionne Warwick's "All the Love in the World" all over it when it's broadcast this coming Sunday.

Around 1600, we have our long awaited "speedfaithing" event that we seem to have waited the best part of a year for. However, a number of factors conspire to make it something of an anticlimax. I was hoping we'd have at least half a dozen people of different backgrounds of religion or belief here but there's only three of us (Noel Singh, Martin Stern and myself). Several of those whom I hoped would be joining in are out at Gateway College doing the Religion and Belief Roadshow organised by St Philip's Centre and there's no chance of them making it back here in time. There's a similarly small number of young reporters (Holly, Christina and Vickie in the photo above) and I'm not sure all of them took part in the "pre" event at Phoenix Square during Leicester Speaks. We make the most of it though - and the girls certainly seem to get something positive out of it - but I wouldn't call it our greatest moment.

Here are some of comments entered in the reflective log by volunteers on the exhibition today:

“Spirituality or shopping? Seems this morning consumerism and the offer of sales is winning!”

“Lots of people glanced at the displays and wider literature. A few read with greater attention and one picked up lots of leaflets to help with her educational consultancy work. So the stall is doing its work in many ways including giving us volunteers the opportunity of meeting across the faith boundaries.”

“I found that it was an interesting experience being able to find out myself about other faiths and being able to talk to other volunteers. I realised it is hard to grab the attention of passers-by to invite them into the space to talk about interfaith week but didn’t want to feel as if I was pestering them. A few people took occasional glances as they walked past, but only a couple stopped. I feel the space would benefit from a more interactive environment which would encourage people to enter the space and not feel afraid of talking to people with the aid of hands-on experience / interactivity rather than just leaflets and banners. The Highcross although deemed an ideal location to gather large quantities of people, at the time of year in particular you find that people are rushing around the shops and don’t have time to stop.”

“I enjoyed volunteering at the Interfaith stand. I learnt more about religion and found it very interesting. Although quite a few people looked at the stand from afar, there wasn’t actually many people who wanted to come up and talk. However I did speak to a couple of people who were quite excited when I told them about the film festival. Although the stand in Highcross meant more people knew about interfaith week, I think it would be a good idea to hold an interfaith festival in one of the parks which would attract lots of attention.”

“It has undoubtedly been a wonderful experience visiting and volunteering at the interfaith stand."

INTER FAITH WEEK, DAY 3: CELEBRATING DIVERSITY OF RELIGIONS

From today's Leicester Mercury:

Celebrating diversity of religions

A week-long series of events celebrating the diversity of religious faiths is under way.

Inter Faith Week 2011 runs until Saturday. Staged by the city's council of faiths, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary, it features exhibitions, talks and films.

Manjula Sood, chairman of the council, said: "Leicester has a diverse range of faiths and this is a wonderful opportunity for people to find out more about this fascinating subject.

"Learning more about the beliefs of others is a key part of increasing understanding between people of all faiths, which in turn benefits relationships in communities across the city."

An exhibition is taking place throughout the week at Highcross shopping centre. There is a film festival at Phoenix Square.Leicester People's Photographic Gallery, in Belvoir Street, is featuring an exhibition of images showcasing holy places and sacred sites.

For more information on events, call 0116 254 6868.

INTER FAITH WEEK 2011, DAY 2: FAITHS FILM FESTIVAL

Here are the programme notes I put together for A Serious Man, showing this evening at Phoenix Square as part of the Faiths Film Festival, celebrating Inter Faith Week and helping mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of Leicester Council of Faiths. At least they're drawn from more than one source, which is an improvement on the notes I "put together" for Little Buddha last night.

A SERIOUS MAN (2009) 

Directors Ethan Coen, Joel Coen 

Writers Joel Coen, Ethan Coe

106 min 

Cast Michael Stuhlbarg, Rixchard Kind, Sari Lenick

Plot summary (from Internet Movie Database)

Bloomington, Minnesota, 1967: Jewish physics lecturer Larry Gopnik is a serious and a very put-upon man. His daughter is stealing from him to save up for a nose job,his pot-head son, who gets stoned at his own bar-mitzvah, only wants him round to fix the T.V. aerial and his useless brother Arthur is an unwelcome house guest. But both Arthur and Larry get turfed out into a motel when Larry's wife Judy, who wants a divorce, moves her lover, Sy, into the house and even after Sy's death in a car crash they are still there. With lawyers' bills mounting for his divorce, Arthur's criminal court appearances and a land feud with a neighbour Larry is tempted to take the bribe offered by a student to give him an illegal exam pass mark. And the rabbis he visits for advice only dole out platitudes. Still God moves in mysterious - and not always pleasant - ways, as Larry and his family will find out.

A Serious Man: Coens change tack with masterly fable of a crumbling life (Andrew Pulver, The Guardian, 28 October 2009) 

The Coen brothers may just have made their masterpiece with this, their 14th feature and yet another hairpin-bend change of direction, which has been their trademark for their entire career. 

Two films back they were prowling the Texas badlands in a gruesome tale of blood and revenge in No Country for Old Men; then they turned to weightless farce in the entertaining Burn After Reading.Here they are heading to the suburbia of 1960s midwestern America for an elaborate, slippery, fable that feels, strange as it may sound, like a novel that Saul Bellow or Bernard Malamud never quite got around to writing. 

A Serious Man starts off odd, and gets odder. The first five minutes is entirely in Yiddish, a Coenised version of a shtetl folk-horror tale featuring a bearded old man who may or may not be a dybbuk (wandering spirit). Suffice to say, the Coens don't muck about when it comes to the use of stabbing weapons. 

Then we flip forward from the old country to the new world, to where our protagonist, Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg) is your archetypal harassed and neurotic Jewish-American college professor.His apparently unimpeachable lifestyle is crumbling rapidly: one of his students is trying to bribe his way through exams, his application for tenure is being undermined by ­ anonymous threatening letters, his deadbeat brother is sleeping on the sofa and attracting the attention of the police, and – this is the killer – his wife is planning to leave him for another man, one of those swinging middle-aged types who embraced the permissive culture with desperate fervency.To offset this Gopnik goes looking for answers from his religion, but unlike Judah Rosenthal in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, he does not come up against the blank wall of a  Godless universe; what he encounters are perplexing rabbis telling him baffling parables that just leave him feeling more and more confused. 

It's this refusal to neatly resolve their narrative that gives A Serious Man its distinctive flavour; it has the same open-ended spirit of The Graduate, an authentic classic of late 60s Jewish-American culture. (A Serious Man could easily have been conceived as a sequel to that film, with Gopnik as a grown-up Benjamin Braddock.) 

The Coens, though, don't quite do deeply felt alienation like anyone else. Despite the opaque story line, their film is a glittering, perfectly honed artifice; but what pushes it into the Coen premier league is the sense that, as with Fargo, there's something very personal going on here. 

It's not autobiographical exactly, but the Minnesota setting is the Coens' own childhood universe, and they revved up for their barmitzvahs at pretty much the same time as Gopnik's son, Danny. The Coens, so normally elusive, have let the mask slip a bit. It's  paid wonderful dividends.

A Serious Man is being shown as part of Phoenix Square’s short season of films with themes or subject matter of religion or belief as part of Inter Faith Week 2011 (being held throughout England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Sunday 20 – Saturday 26 November). Our Faiths Film Festival is being promoted in association with Leicester Council of Faiths, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary during this period.

George M Ballentyne, Equality & Diversity Officer, Leicester Council of Faiths

Number of paying customers for A Serious Man this evening: 28