Examiner Community Awards 2011: Poet Simon Armitage wins Huddersfield Daily Examiner’s Lifetime Achievement Award
SIMON Armitage knows the Huddersfield that he likes best and says he saw it when he picked up a top award last night.
“The Huddersfield that I like best is a large town with a big heart and an open mind,” he said.
“What I have seen here tonight has proved that more than I had thought.”
Internationally-known poet Simon, who was at the awards with his wife, Sue and their 11-year-old daughter Emmeline, said he was humbled by the achievements of others who had received awards throughout the evening.
He began by thanking the Examiner for its support over the years.
He said: “If you were going to choose a way of making your way in this world and a place to start from, you might not choose poetry and you might not choose Huddersfield.
“Occasionally it’s been a long and bumpy road – one I’m still travelling – but I’ve always felt like my home town has been solidly behind me and I’m both grateful and proud.
“I once stood in the middle of New York city watching my name go round the electronic zipper sign in Times Square and I felt pretty thrilled, but not quite as thrilled as I felt when I saw my name in the Examiner for the first time – as a poet, that is, not in the cricket round-up: Marsden second X1, S Armitage, bowled Pie-chucker, 0.’’
He added: “When I told my mum about tonight, she asked me if it was a lifetime’s achievement award, and part of me wanted to say ‘no’, because in many ways I feel as if I’ve only just started, and part of me wanted to say ‘yes’, because that would mean I could now put my feet up and eat cream cakes for the rest of my life.’’
And he talked about an upbringing steeped in the arts in Marsden.
“I’ve never really left Huddersfield. True, it can be a hard town to love, sometimes. It doesn’t offer you life on a plate or an easy ride, it’s a place where you have to put something in to get something back and notions of privilege and entitlement count for little here.
“But that work ethic is the most valuable lesson I’ve ever learned from wielding a price-gun in Lodges supermarket to operating a lathe at Brook Motors, to reading poems in front of an unforgiving crowd at the Albert, and it’s a lesson that Huddersfield taught me.
“More recently I’ve come to value what this area means to me. I’m comfortable among my own tribe, and even though I don’t think of myself as representing Huddersfield, I’m undoubtedly a product of these acres, and part of its long tradition of people standing up and doing their thing.
“My wife, Sue, moved two hundred miles so we could be together, and I moved from the Colne Valley to the Holme Valley, about four miles, but mine was the greater wrench. “One day we were going to the Nook for a drink and she asked me what Holmfirth might be like as a possible place to live, and I said: “I don’t know, because I’m not from these parts.” “The fact that she was made so welcome here is something else I admire about this place and perhaps the greatest reason for remaining.“It reminds me to say that staying local should never be about looking at the world through a closed window, but about making a home then throwing the doors open and inviting the world in.’’
