Archive for January, 2025

Message from our President – January 2025

Posted on: January 15th, 2025 by mlpEditor

Welcome to the first newsletter of 2025.

I wish you all a Happy New Year; I hope you are happy, healthy and successful over the next 12 months and beyond.

The Manchester Lit & Phil team is back and refreshed from the break. This month’s focus is on Autumn programme planning and finalising the rest of the 2024/25 season. We are examining how to develop the program. Susan Hilton and Ian Cameron have taken joint leadership of the Program Planning Group. Together, they are investigating what we can change to further develop the program’s appeal.

Looking at the attendance numbers, Manchester-themed events are very popular, as are popular science topics, historical events and the ever-oversubscribed Philosophy Forum.

We have two exciting terms ahead and tickets are selling well. Please look at the upcoming events and book early.

As we drive awareness of our events, we see the popular events selling out quickly. This is a nice problem, but we need help – especially from our members – to ensure as many people as possible who want to attend are offered a place.

When an event sells out, we always talk to the venue to see if we can increase the available seating. We also send out nudges to cancel tickets in case an attendee’s plans have changed since booking their ticket, and we manage the waiting lists too. We aim to accommodate as many attendees as possible to our most popular events, so it is very disappointing when the room is only 80% full on the day. We have reviewed the numbers from last year and the previous term and our no-show rate amongst members is more than 25%.

We all know that life can throw up last minute challenges, meaning we need to change our plans unexpectedly. Cancelling your ticket in advance, if you are no longer able to attend, will really help us maximise the success of our events.

To help Manchester Lit & Phil, we ask all our members to manage their bookings.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to cancelling tickets –

If you have an Eventbrite account:

  1. Log in to your Eventbrite account using the email address that you booked the tickets with
  2. Click ‘Tickets’ in the top right corner of the screen
  3. Click the event that you would like to cancel for
  4. Click the ‘Cancel Order’ button and confirm your cancellation
  5. Your booking will then be cancelled and Eventbrite will inform us by email

If you don’t have an Eventbrite account:

  1. Open the Eventbrite confirmation email for the event
  2. Find the event title and click on it
  3. Click View Your Order in the top left corner
  4. Find the order details and select Cancel Order
  5. Follow the instructions to complete the cancellation

 

Thanks in advance for your help with this.

Please send us feedback on events or ideas for future events and themes.  Also, remember, bring a friend, talk about us, and interact with our social media posts; all these small things are making a difference.

Thank you for your continuing support and let’s make this a great year for Manchester Lit & Phil.

Peter Wright, President

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oliver James Lomax at The Portico

Posted on: January 8th, 2025 by mlpEditor

With generosity of mind and spirit, Oliver James Lomax’ latest anthology of poems – The Dandelion Clocks – veritably springs from the page. Held in the much-adored Portico Library – where parts of Lomax’ work is currently being exhibited – Lomax read extracts from his latest collection, showcasing his lyrical agility and observational wit.

Throughout the event, that took place in November 2024, Lomax offered insights into his creative process, sharing anecdotes on the inception of particular poems – their time, their place, their insistence. Tender is the night of a political poet; pithy in their precision, his arguments are formed in the revelation of self, of community, of hope, of humour.

On the misty November evening, as the Christmas crowds passed us by, I felt very lucky to be amongst an audience of attentive listeners. As though entwined, a cadence of hilarity and heartbreak rose and fell across his readings – note ‘Free Range’ of God Missed The Last Bus And Walked Home or ‘Dementia Ward’ of Cloud Seeding Over Bolton. To my delight, the former still has me laughing.

Often reposeful, his poems express a carefulness, an intent. A verse may introduce one point of view to then end with another, bringing his reader to a moment of introspect and quiet. As in the case of Buying Back Your Gay Dad’s Shirt from A Sue Ryder, humour leads and then hands the baton over to delicate prose:

‘…But please, pay it no mind, because when I was dying, you were there, to clothe and feed every martyred word and window dress my feigned oblivion, without condition…’

As we enter this New Year and the January blues settle in, The Dandelion Clocks is the perfect book to lift our spirits.

 

By Charlotte Lanigan

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