New editor has parish’s mag down to a fine art

Nov 25 2009 by David Whetstone, The Journal

When Jamie Warde-Aldam took over the parish magazine, few people can have imagined what they were going to get. David Whetstone meets an editor with a mission to entertain.

He casts his mind back to a parochial church council meeting when the previous editor announced he didn’t want to do the job any more.

“We have very convivial meetings and I’d probably had a couple of glasses of wine, so I very rashly agreed to do it.

“A couple of months later, my wife said, ‘What are you going to do about the parish magazine?’ Then I got into a panic. I have an appalling memory.

“I pretty much put the first one together myself, although quite a lot of people contributed to it. The story is that I just wrote to lots of people asking them to do things. That got published and it got an amazing response.”

Since then, a growing list of respected writers, artists, photographers and poets have contributed to The Hotspur.

They include Bill Feaver, who wrote the book which inspired the play The Pitmen Painters, the illustrator Georgina McBain and artists Simon Cutts, Leo Fitzmaurice, Catherine Bertola and Cornelia Hesse-Honegger.

The latter is also a scientist and paints anatomically-correct paintings of mutant bugs found near nuclear installations.

Bill Feaver wrote an appreciative essay about Newcastle’s Lit & Phil, which was accompanied by a fantastic photo taken by the city-based photographer Dan Prince.

Every issue of the magazine has a theme chosen by Jamie – marriage, food and drink, gardens, forgotten books, to name but four. Each is a capsule of elegance and wit.

The dogs issue includes a glossary of barking as a foreign language, listing woef (Afrikaans), bup, bup (Catalan), boj (Esperanto), guau guau (Spanish), baf-baf (Ukrainian) and wau wau (Vietnamese).

Another issue lists – tongue in cheek, no doubt – the Eskimos’ 100 words for snow.

Jamie says that, after university, he went into advertising: “I still do it when people ask me, and I still love doing it.

“The job description is copywriter but the secret of a good advertisement is connecting words and pictures. You have to think visually.”

Jamie says he had always been aware of contemporary art but didn’t really start to look at it properly until 1996, when the North East hosted the Year of Visual Arts.

He says: “I suddenly found myself standing in front of things that really put me on the spot and forced me to think and, actually, that feeling – well, I became rather addicted