Fashion

Back in May, not long after I had started my archive traineeship, I arranged to visit the Gallery of Costume at Platt Fields. I couldn't have predicted in my wildest dreams that by September I would be staying across the road from Platt Hall, at Appleby Lodge.

Whilst I was there I helped unpack this amazing dress, Widow 2009, by Susie MacMurray, now a permanent part of their collection.I also got to see Gladstone's collection of hats, including his summer panamas. There is also an intriguing hat from Anglezarke, near Chorley - early 17th c., felted, faded, almost puritan in style.Every store room was full of treasures. Rails of beautiful dresses, dating from the mid 19thc to the 1970s, prison uniforms, fashion magazines, old photos, new Dior acquisitions for the current exhibition. It was like a dream. It was a glimpse into the expanding world I had entered with this new job, weaving together past experience and present interests.

New year, new blog

While I have been working in Manchester I have found myself wanting to write about stuff that doesn't quite fit into place in my Historic Gig Guide or Life and Death in the Peak District blogs. Life and Death was started when I was very wrapped up in concerns for my elderly parents and my youngest son, then still a teenager. Time has moved on, my father died on New Year's Day 2010, my mother has rallied and regained a sense of adventure, with an I pad and trips away. My youngest has turned twenty, found a job he enjoys, and looks after the house and cat while I play at being a Mancunian again. Historic Gig Guide started as a way of recalling and sharing memories of my youthful gig going. I have been using it to share the present for a while. I have also discovered the Manchester District Music Archive as a way to share the past So it seems time for a new blog for a new year. A new decade for me too,with a significant birthday coming up at the end of January. And hopefully a new job in the spring when my present archive trainee post finishes at the end of March. Why The Nico Ditch? Well, it represents finding something that's always been there right in front of you,if you only realised.I discovered its existence very recently,bizarrely through reading an article about World War One hospitals in Manchester. If you look up the Nico Ditch you will see it's a geographical link,an Anglo Saxon earthwork running through the part of Manchester where I am living. For me it links my fascination with Anglo Saxon language and culture, Platt Fields and the amazing Gallery of Costume, Appleby Lodge where I am living in faded art deco splendour, and the enigmatic Nico and her links with Manchester. Psychogeography, history and folklore, fashion and music. It might be a boundary marker, it could be a fortification and protection. Whatever its purpose, it's got to be a liminal place, and liminal places are where anything can happen. So here I am, at the end of a remarkable year, full of surprises, unexpected connections and links with my own past, ready to step over the threshold into 2014.