Life after Spain

It’s not easy taking over a course at short notice, and difficult too for participants who chose a specific facilitator, so big appreciation to the stoic souls who arrived at Cortijo Romero last week to seek their inner poet with me instead  ~ and did so with warmth & humour as well as honesty, integrity and sometimes a bite of raw sorrow. It was a delight to hear and a privilege to discuss these multi-textured, lucent, colourful pieces, whether free-flow or shaped into form, netted from experience or fly-fished from wild imagination. Cortijo Romero in June is exquisite and abundant: the gardens blossom-filled & tranquil, the cool dining room filled always with bowls bulging with local fruit ~ oranges, cherries, apricots, plums… On our day off I took the river walk to town, arriving after a long hot upward trail at a garden bar I remembered fondly. I stood at the gate, calling through “Are you open?"  "Not yet" said the barman courteously, "come in," and he gestured below shading orange trees and brought me a beer.  Spain, I love you.

Another consequence of my short-notice travel was anti-social flying hours, which meant I was at Malaga airport 12 hours early, which turned out to be a brilliant way to spend a final day in Spain: exploring old-town Malaga, revisiting the Picasso Museum, and remembering all over again why I love this perverse & puzzling painter. “You have to wake people up,” he said, “to force them to understand they're living in a very strange world that’s not what they think it is.” 

Picasso loved Malaga but he didn’t spend much time here: this collection, while beautifully curated & presented, doesn't reflect his best work. But there is one exquisite piece: a tiny, half-painted drawing of a young man watching his lover sleep. I can’t decide which is the most moving: the superb single-line drawing, sensuous fleshlike painting, the transcendental way both merge, or the inspiration of form, allegedly unfinished yet quintessentially perfect. I guess it’s all of these, and more.

Back home in Frome now and the week ahead is brimming over: Nevertheless Productions' Frome Festival production of Midsummer Dusk sold out completely on both nights and Rosie has enterprisingly organised an extra date on the final Saturday ~ get booking now if you were one of those missing out and clamouring! Rehearsals are in the cemetery, which in the summer solstice glow is more beautiful than ever. Principal gardener Gerald Shakespeare has trimmed branches and strimmed around the gravestones but there's still a sense of fecundity and wildness all around. The cast are so good they gave me goosebumps, I can't wait to see them in costume and fully off book...
In the meantime, Muffin Man (One & Two) is on at the Cornerhouse on Thursday and Saturday. This is a reprise of last year's 'Bard of Frome' comedy winner plus a sequel to the cliff-hanging ending, and with bonus tracks of song & comic standup from talented duo Ross Scott and Fleur Hanby Holmes.  A Festival Fringe event, we're calling it.

And on Wednesday I'm booked to do poems at Jo Butt's Speakeasy event in Bath, always a lot of fun and with a lively open mic so I'm hoping my theme of older women behaving badly will fit well... 

Happenings in Frome, including some 'Wow!'s.

The appeal of writing a blog for me is that, unlike articles, there's no need to target a market, keep to word-count, or even stay on theme.  Mine aims to commend and recommend events in and around Frome, but this doesn't preclude random musings on other stuff. Jottings about stage shows ~ tidied later for my bimonthly theatre magazine column ~ jostle with local entertainment and chat about trips and TV.  For a writer this form is fantastic, an opportunity to process experience to share with no constraint except awareness (thanks Blogger overview graph) that people do read them. So with appropriate humility, here's the latest patchwork of Things That Happened since last posting:

Local drama this week as TicTacToe returned to The Cornerhouse with their second Play in a Day which, in contrast to last autumn's surreal farce, dealt with serious issues. Inspiration came, sort of, from Frankenstein and Iain Heggie's black comedy about dementia Wiping My Mother's Arse, except the amnesiac (Mike Walker) isn't alzheimic but in denial about something revealed only in the final moment, and the monster may not really be a monster at all... And it's moving rather than black or comic, developing slowly to show the relationship struggle between the old man and his son-in-law (Ross Scott) as told in flashbacks to volunteer Archie (Calum Grant). Fleur Hanby Holmes is superb as the girl, evoking the crux of a horribly plausible dilemma with minimal words. Wow. An amazing achievement in just one day.

Speaking of time, that's what Greg Morter was doing, with some visual and human aids, at the Scout Hut last week. Greg has written a book about The Universe Story in Science and Myth and leads walks paced to scale, from the origin of the universe (not a big bang, more of a flaring forth, he says) to the present day. Annabelle and I went on one of these two day events; we reached the birth of our galaxy during the second day and man appeared in the last two centimeters. Greg had reduced his scale for this fascinating talk to one millimetre = one million years, but as I'm irredeemably earthcentric the bit I really like is when our world blasts into the story and starts to teem with life... Here's our earliest mammalian ancestor, helpfully posing with a paperclip to show how teeny he was. What is really great about Greg's talks, apart from his enthusiasm in sharing his scientific knowledge as a story, is the way he makes it possible to be positive about humanity despite our aggression, greed, and destructiveness. Those qualities, he says, were in the struggle for survival throughout the history of the universe ~  what we also have is a unique ability to care, not just for ourselves and our kin but for others unmet and for the planet itself. We have the ability to remember and to anticipate, which enhances our empathy and our effectiveness. And we can, with our new knowledge, replace 'human-scale chauvinism' with the understanding that we're living in an evolving situation and we too are elements from that fireball, 'We are the universe telling itself its own story.'  Wow.

And of course this being Frome there's been music... and a rendition of Happy Birthday for lovely Griff who runs the Roots Sessions at the Grain Bar each Wednesday, last week with Amelia Orgill and her band. Great vocals from guest Steve Loudoun and pedal steel from Gus Yorke.

February is also the month when our summer festival starts seriously brewing, with brochure entries due in at the end of next week. Nevertheless Productions is moving into new territory with a site-specific, outdoor, production in the Dissenters Cemetery... Midsummer Dusk will be performed, at dusk, by our newly formed company the Star Players. I forgot to take a photo of this amazingly talented trio when we met this morning so here's a picture of the venue... wow. Can you even wait????