Nick Hopwood has a collection of beer glasses that he’s gathered from around the world. He doesn’t simply steal them from bars though. Each one has a story of how Nick acquired it – by bribe, by offer of marriage, sometimes by hook, but never by crook. In this video he talks about the back stories to three glasses from Ghana, Uzbekistan and Russia. Here’s a video of Nick, talking about his collection of Object of the Week.
Nick adds: ‘Not taking glasses without permission adds something important. It means many glasses I would like to have never make it into the collection. This means the collection is as a result of relationships, conversations, moments and success and failure.’
The video is not captioned, but the text is reproduced here:
“Hi, I’m Nick and I’m really grateful to be able to contribute to this extraordinary museum. I want to share with you three objects from my collection of beer glasses. This is the one that started it all off. Star Beer is from Ghana and I lived there for a while and Star was one of my favourite beers. Now these glasses are not very common. They’ve very hard to even find and then when you find them, getting them is even harder. I spent a glorious two weeks towards the end of my time there, with a brilliant person called Noah, and we went to extraordinary lengths – we went to lots of bars just trying to find these glasses and then when we found one that had them we had to persuade them to give it to us. In the end my friend Noah offered to propose to marry one of the people working in the bar, although I think she probably saw it more as a threat and gave in and gave us the glass.
This one is from a Czech pub in Samarkand in Uzbekistan. I ended up in Uzbekistan because I made someone trying to make a reverse charge call to Tashkent from a high street in Oxford one night and I was a bit drunk, and anyway … We ended up becoming friends and I went to visit him in Uzbekistan and he was very persuasive – a bit like Noah although he didn’t have to threaten marriage – and we did end up with a Samarqand beer glass. Samarkand is an incredible place and I am very fond of the memories I have from there.
This is one of many I like because it has a non-Roman script on it. I love different alphabets. I’ve got ones from Armenia, Georgia, Ethiopia. This one is from Russia. We were in a bar and three times I went up and tried to ask them if I could take the glass and three times they misunderstood and just filled it with beer, which was no great disaster. Eventually, when we emptied the glass for the fourth time, and they understood what we wanted they said ‘nyet, nyet possible’. I put some rubles on the bar. ‘Nyet, nyet possible.’ Doubled the amount (sic) of rubles. ‘Da, is possible.’ So that was interesting.
What I like about these objects is their provenance, both where they come from but also the stories behind how I came to acquire them. I don’t like stealing them – that takes away some of the joy of having them. But these different pathways of them coming into my collection is part of the joy of the objects. I hope you enjoyed it. See you soon.”