Hazel & I spent Saturday on an 'Artist's Date'. We've been doing these irregularly ever since we started writing together, sometimes in flamboyant venues like Paris, Barcelona, and last christmas Manhatten, though more often in downtown Frome. This time it was in rural Worcestershire where Haz now lives.

A great day, divided between working on new 'Live & Lippy' material, and walking on the Malvern Hills, where we discovered a wayside shrine where passing poets were invited in Blake's words to
"see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour."
We wrote 7 pieces, walked 3 hours, & rewarded ourselves with fish&chips.

Bristol Harbour Festival expected 200,000 visitors and most of them seemed to be swarming round the docks on Sunday. Streets were in full fairground mode, the river chokka with tour boats, and Cascade Steps throbbing with poetry performances. Rosemary Dun defied an overcast sky with odes to summer passions and the rain held off, till later.

And once more on the theme of writers in their own words... did you know Willm Shakspere never penned his name the way history has selected? I'm engrossed in the Bill Bryson biography, which finds the man himself missing for most of his life but paints a fascinating picture of his theatrical world. This was a time when, despite plagues and casual violence, theatres were crowded nightly with plays seen as so relevant to current politics that performers risked erratic penalties like having their noses lopped off. Ah happy days...
I finished this book knowing a great deal less about our greatest playwright and poet than when I started, but it's a compelling read. And here's Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, one of many conspiracy-theorist candidates to the challenge Will the real Will Shakespeare please stand up - despite being 'sexually dissolute and widely disliked' and prone to murdering his servants, he was the favourite of a researcher named Looney.


Off now to Languedoc for a couple of weeks. Have a good August, y'all!
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You'd think, wouldn't you, that May would be the ideal time to plan a group walk on the Quantocks and Exmoor in the footsteps of Coleridge from Nether Stowey to Porlock... except that incessant rain had flooded most of Somerset, with callouts to the emergency services coming at 3 per second. We forded several roads on our route-planning tour, and found the wooded footpaths marked on the OS map as alongside streams had readjusted the preposition and were now within them. Relief to return to the Castle of Comfort, ironically so named when the 1600s miners' cider house; a coffee-house by the time Coleridge and Wordsworth met there, and now a rather posh guest house. Our room had sherry and a library, where we discovered the Diary of William Holland, vicar of Over Stowey, and gems like this:
"October 23rd 1799. Went with my wife to Stowey and bought a gown of Mr Frank Poole who smiled and bowed graciously. Saw that Democratic hoyden Mrs Coleridge who looked so like a frisky girl, or something worse, that I was not surprised a Democratic Libertine should choose her for a wife." Coleridge would have been 27, married to Sarah Flicker and recently moved from Devon to Bristol, where he lectured at Unitarian chapels and wrote anti-war poems. The Lyrical Ballads had just been published. Kubla Khan and opium addiction came later.

Bath Fringe has so much exciting looking stuff I wish I could get to see more of it. Like all festivals, there's a buzz from just walking around the town on a warm night with audiences spilling out from every kind of event from classic to chaotic. My Friday choice was "A Bath with Bladud" presented by Touch & Go. No script, no repeats, promised the flyer. "An alchemy of movement and sound and more" promised Michael at the start. "It may not be the story you know" he added, usefully. There were places where this tale of the leper King with a fascination for flight seemed not to be a story even the performers knew, as ancient Greece slewed into a place of flamenco and cornetto accents, and Bladud's descent to the Underworld appeared to take him into a bar in Aberdeen. Bizarre impro explorations only added to the audience's enjoyment, and sense of privilege at sharing something ephemeral and courageous, with the themes - aspirations, choices, flight, fatherhood - powerfully shown.