Do you remember when you were a teenager and your mum and dad (or any variation thereof, in my case mum and stepdad) let you have a party? The social terror that came along with inviting the whole school year, wondering whether the cool kids would come? Worrying about getting the place set up, getting the food right, all that stuff? Thinking “God, mum and dad will be upstairs, how embarrassing!” … All that?
Yeah, that’s what it’s like at Homebaked this week. We had a sort of similar feeling in the fortnight before the Biennial started, getting the place gorgeous for the Anfield Home Tour and such, but this is very different.
You see, as a collective, we decided that we need to engage locally, in a more accessible, mainstream way. We love having Biennial’s people and The Guardian’s journalists pop in, but we feel we’re not meeting our neighbours enough. We’re not Embedded as a project. Jeanne says housing is the battlefield of our time, which very much makes us – as locals – the UN interpreters, stuck in camp bastion with the soldiers, having sort of stepped away from our culture a little bit.
So instead of going out on patrol in blue helmets (stretching the metaphor a bit there, as the Biennial’s colour-way is very much of the red persuasion, and blue would make us Evertonians anyway), we needed a way to get people on side. My friends in the army use sweets, I believe, and carefully chosen snippets of local language to ingratiate themselves. To show that they’re fighting FOR the locals, not against them.
We chose cake. Naturally. So we’re having a Bake Off, a housewarming party where our neighbours are invited to come along with something they’ve made, to share. So we’re preparing for a massive party. The Biennial Experts meeting will be upstairs in one of the lovely, tumbledown rooms in the Baker’s Flat, talking about the Philosophy of Urban Planning, or something along those lines, and downstairs we’ll be biting our fingernails worrying that the party will go all wrong.
The whole school – Liverpool Wider Metropolitan Area – have been invited, so oh my God what if EVERYBODY comes, and we have big kids gatecrashing? The cool kids who are coming – BBC1’s flagship light entertainment programme, The One Show – will probably think we’re losers! They’ll tell everyone! (Our segment on that week’s food show will be a disaster, in other words). Someone will get drunk and be sick in the sideboard! (Nut allergies?) WHAT IF NOBODY LIKES US?
I suppose it’s only natural to be a bit nervy about it. I mean we’re trying to get people to like us, ultimately. What this is, when you get right down to it, is an attempt to get all the people round here who have so far kept their heads down and hurried past, like Oakfield Road is Sniper Alley, to instead come in and say “YES! WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER! WE’RE ON YOUR SIDE!” … We know most people are, but they’re not going to put themselves in the firing line for nothing.