Mandi was working today and I had intended to crack on with some work, including bringing the blog up to date and recording The Sunday Alternative. I woke up with a banging headache so went back to bed until noon before taking Jack out and making breakfast. Having previously made a long list of jobs to do today, I didn’t complete them due to my late start although there was a satisfactory amount of crossing out by the time I had decided to knock off for the day. It was mainly a day of catching up, nothing I can call proper work apart from the podcast, although all work related. In between this I also managed to do some laundry, washing up and cleaning the kitchen sides (especially as my fried eggs and bacon for breakfast had caused the most spectacular mess of the hob) and edited my blogs before uploading them a few at a time.

Despite today being a working day for me I still managed a little Twitter silliness based on today being International Robin Hood Day. There has been a lot of hype about this on social media, although typically for Nottingham it has been greeted with a certain level of apathy. The trouble with Nottingham is the fact that not enough people who live here care about the place and its history. I have met this issue head on with such campaigns as The Old General (nobody round the Hyson Green area has lived here long enough for it to be important to them) and Mushy Pea-Gate, something that affected everybody in the city. Robin Hood is a fictional affectation based on myth and legend but Nottingham has never pushed the character far enough, I agree that he should be used as a tourist pulling figurehead for Nottingham (as should Ayup the Duck but that’s another story) but it needs doing properly. First of all it needs to be admitted that Robin Hood wasn’t real and that there’s nothing wrong with using a fictional character. The best tourist attraction I can think of using to a better advantage is the film locations aspect, something that we hardly acknowledge. Why aren’t we operating an open topped bus tour around the settings for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Dark Knight Rises, Control, Once Upon A Time in the Midlands and a great deal more? There hasn’t been a single Robin Hood film ever made anywhere near here so the whole thing is a little insignificant.

I think my main source of amusement was the ambitious use of the word ‘international’. The Robin Hood legend has international appeal and it does bring overseas visitors to Nottingham to see the statue outside our ‘castle’ and to see the visitor centre in Sherwood Forest. However, if Robin Hood had been an American character then they would shout it from the rooftops and have an enormous theme park dedicated to him. So I took the ‘international’ and then I took the piss. By pretending to retweet messages from world leaders I was pulling what I thought was the perfect satire, especially when I put words in Barack Obama’s mouth about having a mushy pea stall on the White House lawn to honour Nottingham on this day. By the time I tweeted on behalf of Russell Crowe, including an apology for the dodgy accent used for his portrayal, I had grown bored of the fact that nobody was playing along and returned to my work.

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