Autumn continues amazingly colourful, and Saturday was another luscious day with sky still bright blue as the moon showed frail and luminous over Bristol docks just before the dazzling sun set. I'd been at the Pierian Centre for Cortijo Romero's Taster Day, offering a smidgeon of what we'll be doing in the jasmine days of next summer. A delightful and responsive group of 10 tasters joined the word-mezze, and en route home I stopped off at BOV studio for my own sampling: monologues from this year's Bristol Ferment. I wanted especially to hear Adam Peck's monologue My Bristol Vista, as I'd so much enjoyed his script for Bonnie & Clyde. This turned out to be a charming, if slightly lack-lustre, mapping of the city from his personal perspective. Mostly as factual as a visa application, with a smidgeon of emotional history, it was enlivened by slivers of dialogue from both his hometown (Leeds) and new home here. A second monologue on the same local theme, M32 Is Also A Galaxy by Timothy X Atack, was much stronger: tense, filmic, and funny, enhanced by second-person, present-tense writing. My only reservation was the abrupt That's-all-for-now-folks ending but perhaps that's because I could have listened to much more from this writer-performer.

From the Independent I learn that Ken Loach greeted news of the departure of top TV executives with a rousing "Good riddance" and recommended further pruning from the ranks. Urging those still struggling to survive in the media to 'stay hopeful, stay angry', he included this appeal: "I would like to ask those colleagues who have knelt before the Queen at some time in their lives, really, what are you doing? The woman you're kneeling before represents most of what is wrong with this country: inherited wealth, inherited privilege, the apex of the class system. Let's have a bit of dignity. Don't crawl before that woman, please."
It's 33 years since Ken Loach refused to accept an OBE. How great to know age does not wither his infinite integrity.

Next posting will be from Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco, where the weather forecast is sunny and warm.
I plan to write, walk, and write. For three weeks. Sounds like bliss....
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