Michael Hughes

Transcription of talk and Poetry reading for Bristol Hydrotherapy Pool Wall

It starts where the recording starts, some of the beginning is lost

...getting imagery and compressing it so that over the next 50 years it'll gradually leak out into peoples' consciousness and you're going into see it in one go and most of you don't matter - what really matters to us is the physiotherapists who are going to be living amongst it and working with it and it seems to be a good chance to give them some sort of insight into the way our minds might have worked - might have worked - well it's rather odd talking about something that you haven't seen yet but in a sense that's where Roger and I started -

we heard that Lesley Greene - where is she - was going around with little bags of money for anyone that can do a bit of art you see so we invited her down to our den and she told us about the hospital - how that was going to be developed and Roger and I thought we could do something there and we came out in the - I remember in the darkness in - under that light of Bower Ashton and - on the grass and we thought well what can we do to decorate a hydrotherapy unit and - cos we knew nothing about hydrotherapy or whatever else did we? - and so on - and Roger said well it has to be dolphins because whenever there's water there's dolphins - everybody that does art knows that so we thought have to do dolphins and -

I'd better explain why I'm going to tell you this story now - when you start to have ideas you have an idea that you don't use and another one that you don't use and another one that you don't use but each of these ideas doesn't disappear - it's like putting stuff into a cake - this is for the women amongst you - and so that when you eat the cake you say can I taste a bit of lemon or is it a bit of whatever else - what I'm saying is that the stories you put in there they retain some of their flavour even though they've disappeared as stories and I thought it might be useful to tell you some of those underlying stories on which we finally built the narrative so-