Jeremy Hooker is now Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Glamorgan but he used to live in Frome, and came back on Thursday for a conversation with still-local author Lindsay Clarke at Rook Lane Chapel. The event was entitled In the Household of Words and the words were mostly Jeremy’s own: a well-judged selection from poems spanning 60 years ~ lucent, sensual, and deeply interrogative, exploring the nature of nature itself:
From debris
of collapsing stars,
from gas and dust
where nothing is wasted
a stream of images
The conversation was a meeting of like-minded friends, reflecting on the role of a nature poet in a contemporary world. Lindsay quotes Brian Swimme: The universe is not a place, it’s an emerging event, and adds “The poet has a crucial role to play in this evolution ~ poets are a keystone species.” Their role, now as always, is simply and lucidly to remind us we are the earth and all that is on it. Since the 'Cosmic Walk' with Annabelle I've been more than ever aware of profound underlying connections, and that every destruction on earth is a depletion of ourselves. Whatever else we believe, we need to believe this or, like Tinkerbell, humanity will simply flicker out and die.

Dolphin Crossing at the Brewery is a tale from an earlier and more innocent time, an era when boys were brave lads and men were chaps who went off to fight for King and Country and every story ended with lashings of ginger beer. Blue Brook Productions took a brave step, in these post-Comic-Strip days, in adapting this Blyton-esque tale of daring-do by Jill Paton Walsh about two plucky boys joining the Dunkirk rescue team in their motorboat and coming home to a jolly good spread made by Mummy. It's a simple tale, both in narrative and moral values, but complicated to stage, and the two actors had to lug props around a lot to make both land- and sea- scapes. Characterisation was limited to their respective posh & gor-blimey accents, and 'memoir' links were provided by the sonorous & slightly parodic-sounding recorded voice of Tim Pigott Smith. Ironically, the Dunkirk miracle has since been proven to be an early example of media spin: The story of the small boats was soon enshrined in British popular consciousness, an example of a people coming to the rescue of their army. It was a very British story - the gallant loser escaping from disaster at the very last moment - and one that the public liked to be told. The audience seemed to like it, but for me it's not enough to tell the old lies with such high zest. Patriotic death ~ in any war ~ is not, and never was, sweet and fitting.

Holburne Museum gardens are worth a visit on a sunny Sunday afternoon anyway, and a site-specific happening evoking voices from the past was an added attraction. Ghosts in the Garden is the innovative idea of splash&ripple and features a 'special listening device' housed in a very smart casket and a great deal of painstaking research into Georgian history. Apparently these tranquil lawns were once as busy as Alton Towers, crammed with edifices from tea-rooms to castles and even a maze, and with entertainers from comedians to high-wire artistes. It's the story of some of these colourful characters that our magic box allows us to overhear, through time-slip techical sorcery, and we have a chance to alter the outcome by our responses as their disembodied voices gradually reveal their plots. For me there was too much plot and not enough sense of the actual lives of these people, but I like the idea of overhearing fragments from another reality and I wish I'd known from the start that the story was based on real characters. We were there on an early trial day but the tweaked version will be on August 5th so you can go along and hear for yourself.