Lets’s begin at the beginning…

….but I’ll make it as brief as I can, this is supposed to be a diary after all so we need to get up to speed, up to the present day, but a little back story shouldn’t hurt, while avoiding being one of those blokes at the end of the bar talking about when you could buy your own body weight in sweets and still have change from a groat, back when there were long summers, and the streets were full of white dog shit.

It didn’t begin with me, it began first with Nottingham, and perhaps with Great Aunt Daisy…there’s no room to tell you all about her days in the children’s home, the long nights in the ‘haunted cellar’ as punishment for some nothing misdemeanour, and her revenge, by slapping the evil Matron in the face with the boiling gristle stew. Another time perhaps, should you ever want to know, because she escaped eventually, and like so many local girls from what was then a proper steaming slum, found work in Nottingham’s Lace Market.

In the absence of an education, a family and any love, here was something to add an inch to your only pair of boots…she may not have spoke proper me little duck, ayup our kid and where’s yer Mam, but she was now part of one of the many proud manufacturing moments of British history. She made something beautiful, so admired it travelled the world, with salesman who would take to ships and carry it to the nethermost regions, up the Fjords and the Umpopo, to be made into the best table cloths – and were you to be married in Australia, you could want for nothing finer than some Nottingham Lace in your dress. We made so much we imported female labour from across Europe into our special gene pool, should you ever wonder why Nottingham girls have a gentle dusting of the exotic…ok, I know, after fifteen WKD blues and a chip and gravy chaser, there are a few who are a bit tasty with a violent stiletto in the pub bogs, but they’re gorgeous none the less, and outnumber the men seven to one, so they say.

And while Great Aunt D darned my socks, I sat at her kitchen table knitting dish cloths, or in the parlour sewing patches on my flares, back in the Seventies, when it was ok to look a twat…it was then perhaps that something was sniffed, a thread, a little fluff…hold on that sounds wrong, that’s what we used to call farts, anyway, you know what I mean, the textile was inhaled and taken in, its fibres there to spread.

So I became a little proud too; Glasgow had her ships, Sheffield had her steel…Birmingham dazzled us with the Metro the Maestro and the Princess, and we saved the Midlands with our clothing manufacture. There was a day, maybe twenty five years ago when if you called me, as some of you kindly do, and said ‘I don’t know if anyone has said this to you before, but I’m thinking of starting my own clothing brand’ I could say ‘Come to Nottingham’. I could meet you at the train station, waft you along Canal Street past the October Factory, left at Sam Ward’s garage and up that Malin Hill, jog up Long Stairs, stop at the top for a fag, it’s bastard steep, and say ‘Pick a door, pick any door’, and we could have wandered in to the gentle crescendo of machinery, there to make whatever ridiculous fripperies we fancied.

That day alas is past, gone, up in smoke with Forest’s European Cups, lost in the mists rolling in from the Trent.

Why?

I blame the Accountants obviously. I’d like to blame the Estate Agents, the Traffic Wardens and Derby County supporters, but it wasn’t their fault…it was the calculator boys (and the Politicians, but we expect nothing much from them because Billy Connolly was right, anyone wanting to be a Politician should be disqualified, on the grounds that they want to be a Politician)…no, it was those who said we can make it cheaper elsewhere. The price out of the factory door in Ho Lee Fook is so much less than anything from The Arkwright Building. Let’s just look at two numbers and consider nothing else, not the currency fluctuations, not the quality, not the losses due to imperfect goods, nor the time it takes to get it here from Ping Pong Harbour, and the loss of sales while we wait three months for our hot new product to arrive, now at best luke warm…we care nothing for ingenuity, speed of response, the death of community and social collapse, the end of local pubs and that sandwich shop, where the bacon was crispy, and plastered in sauce…bollocks to Britain, for I have here a cheaper figure, oh do you Mr Grey Plastic Slip Ons, do you really? We’re going to be a call centre aren’t we, focus on our nichey technological products, be a financial global powerhouse…tell them that in what’s left of the pubs in Radford, and start running…it didn’t work, there was no plan B, and they still don’t care.

So one Friday, and it was a Friday, all the Mike Baldwins walked into their factories, camel overcoat draped over shiny suit and said, ‘I’m sorry girls, it’s all over, we just don’t have the work’…and Maureen and Daisy, Doris and May, all had an extra sugary tea, a deep pull on a Number Six, a damn good cry in the lavvy, and bang, or was it fizzle, went the British Textile Industry.

No one said much, because they were women…and while Red Robbo ranted in a car park and the Miners threw bricks from a bridge, the girls walked quietly out, and got a job at Asda. They’re still there in the main, beeping stuff over glass with skilled hands, calling you love, and helping you with your packing, polyester clad Queens, with a name badge.

There, it’s off my lint filled chest. I’m genuinely sorry, and if you stayed this far bless you, for out of this rubble we will build, and when you ask me ‘Can I start my own clothing brand?’ I will say ‘Yes’…