A cornucopia of a week: drama, bands, ramblings, art - & my new book now on sale!

This week's bulletin once again begins with a performance in Frome's Merlin amphitheatre: HMS Pinafore, Gilbert & Sullivan's comic opera of class pretensions, as interpreted and presented by another of the illustrious casts of Illyria Outdoor Theatre.  (There's also a childrens' show or two from this stable going round this summer, so hopefully this wonderful company will survive the dramatic hiatus caused by plague.)

There's a certain poignant irony in some of the parodic songs - in spite of all temptations, to belong to other nations, he remains an Englishman, for example - but a great set, tight direction, and the talented cast all combine to create an entertaining evening: "Pantomime for grownups!" as one delighted audience member summed up.

This week has been particularly rich in musical entertainment.  Nesta Yurt Camping, unknown to me until quite recently although it's only a 20 minute walk down the lanes from my house, for various reasons last week became almost a second home. The food here is amazing - vegan menu with delicacies like banana-blossom 'fish' and chips - there's a friendly, casual but well-equipped, tent site and visitors from town are welcomed at the undercover evening entertainment. On Wednesday the band stage featured Rosco Shakes, a fantastic funky local trio comprising Dom on guitar, Ned on drums & vocals, and Tim on crazy honky-tonking piano.

Music too in Frome's Victoria Park, where a sunny Saturday saw families & friends sprawled on rugs or - for the more organised - settled on garden chairs to listen to live music from the bandstand all afternoon.  Frome's fabulously funky quintet The Valley, joined by Colin on cajon, led off and other excellent local musicians followed, including brilliant bluesy duo Roger & Annie Davenport. Great sounds, brilliant atmosphere, reminding us all what summers can be like here...

This August hasn't been the kind of summer we longed for during the winter months, but there has been some sunshine and abatement in the downpours and blustering winds. Tuesday's respite gave me a chance to visit Rodden Nature Reserve - one of Frome's best kept secrets, largely because it's closed during the long breeding season for the many rare birds who find this a safe haven. Paths of desire are kept clear between wetland areas, and the entire wildlife park is brimming with autumnal flowers, bushes, reeds and trees - and dense with insect life plus tiny mammals & frogs. 

Art & Lit corner now: Frome Art Society opened its annual exhibition in the Round Tower of Black Swan Arts on Friday: an eclectic display with much to enjoy - though it isn't always easy to avoid window reflections on the glass of the paintings - and a chance for all visitors to vote for their favourite piece. This evocative view of the  river is by Kristen Vincent. 

And my personal big news is the arrival of copies for sale of my new book: Déjà  Lu is a collection of 37 short stories, most of which have been previously published in journals & anthologies or broadcast on BBC4, and now for the first time readable together in all their strange diversity. Suzy Howlett, author, thespian, and reviewer, has summed up delightfully: "This collection, stylishly presented with cover artwork by David Moss, is a delight in the same way that a selection box of hand-made chocolates is: you can select and taste the soft-centres, the nutty, the rich and dark, the hard-boiled, the sweet, the fruity and the plain gorgeous. They are all delicious!"  My first delivery is already all sold or committed, but please contact me if you'd like a copy from the second box, due next week! Thanks Patrick Dunn for the - genuinely spontaneous - picture! 

 Ending this week's bulletin with an image from the fields around Frome, where autumn is already arriving...

Chocolate, words, melodies and memories

Birthday celebrations last week for the Chocolate Festival, ten years old and ready for grown-up shoes - chocolate ones, of course, created by Chocolate Arthouse, along with selection boxes of artistry that tastes as good as it looks...
and most of the goodies in this extravaganza of exotic taste sensation are ethical and even healthy - raw chocolate featured strongly, with individual makers keen to show their processes. Solkiki's stall drew a big crowd avid to hear how ethical trading and purity of produce has won them masses of awards, and the emphasis overall was on high quality and hand-made.  Huge credit to Frome's Jo Harrington for inventing and organising this party-atmosphere market - and luckily the weather was fine for queues of literally hundreds of tasters & festive-gift buyers snaking across Cheese & Grain car park all day.

Music now, and several excellent gigs: On Wednesday we enjoyed an evening with The Valley, billed on the Grain Bar's Roots Sessions menu as 'string-driven drive-thru Americana, nifty blue-grass wiz, jazzy arrangements, good ol'country, and a dash of blue-eyed Trojanish/melodian early reggae stuff.' I'm suspecting Steve Loudoun's hand in this thoughtful diagnosis, which sounds a fine summary - and Nikki's singing of the band's version of The Way It Goes is heart-melting.

Friday at the Cornerhouse gave us the We Don't Scare Tribe plus one, as customer Philip White noticed as he quaffed his pint that the guys were missing their bassist so dashed home to return with various instruments, and join the jamming. Result: a really great night, with much dancing.

Frome's Hoodoos topped an impressive bill at Rye Bakery on Saturday, with superb wordsmiths Liv Torc & Chris Redmond on awesome form too - a fantastic 'Inspire' event curated by Daniel Dobbie: three superb performances inevitably creating a fantastic event.


In a sad but important footnote to this post, this was the week of Jill Miller's funeral, after she finally submitted to the cancer that she wrote about so much, in prose and in drama for her Little Gift theatre company production of Time Bomb (shown up and down the country as a learning piece for the medical profession) which also inspired her to found the charity Positive Action on Cancer, now renamed WHY but still active. I first met Jill through the Labour Party party when Tony Benn came to Frome in 1999, discovered she had written the 1980s feminist best-seller Happy As A Dead Cat, and was privileged to be her friend from then onward. We wrote much together, and always planned to do more, so I'm ending with this image from my birthday last July. Jill was the kind of amazing person who is everyone's best friend: this is her being mine.

Summer has come and passed...

A last look back at summer now, in an immaculately trimmed Home Counties garden, a long time ago : Alan Ayckbourn's first play Relatively Speaking has been revived at Salisbury Playhouse by Wiltshire Creative in a superb in-the-round production. It’s 1965, era of Dollyrocker dresses and The Temptations, London notoriously burgeoning with a new emerging cultural energy while the Home Counties strive to maintain middle class morals and values. When Relatively Speaking opened in London two years later, the evolving scene was reaching its peak in the ‘summer of love’ and this comedy was perfectly pitched, winning rave reviews and establishing Alan Ayckbourn’s reputation at a humorous dramatist.
Historic pieces are always interesting to see in revival, and this is a phenomenally good one: the set alone raised applause, especially when the bed morphed into a lily pond complete with fountain. Converting the main house to an in-the-round venue is masterly, allowing James Button's effective evocation, with Chris Davey's lighting, of both the London flat and the affluent Buckinghamshire garden. The cast are splendid: Hubert Burton as the naive younger man in love with Ginny (Louise Calf),  Tim McMullan as the man he asks for her hand in a misunderstanding only the audience is following, and Caroline Harker as Sheila, bemused but endlessly hospitable as her garden fills with people talking at cross purposes.
Directed by Jo Newman and showing till 28th September - worthing going for an evening of laughter especially if you feel this would be a good time to slip back fifty years a more optimistic past.

Frome Writers Collective recommenced the monthly get-together evening at the Three Swans with an event I sadly missed - my fingers are beginning to type that phrase on auto, sigh - which from reports was much enjoyed: the readings, by their authors, of the stories created by the Writers In Residence at Frome Festival, back in July. 
In case composing a tale 'in residence' sounds a leisurely sort of activity, these brave scribes are 'residing' for couple of hours in public, in a shop or cafe, responding to an unknown prompt delivered in sealed envelope at the start of their enterprise, and their efforts are seized on completion of the specified time... it's writing, Jim, but not as we know it.  Lots of enjoyment though, and all the results admired, with Sarah Deacon's piece chosen as winner of the Alan Somerville award, duly presented on Monday by his wife Jo. Here's Sarah back in June, busy spinning the web of words that won the judges' hearts.

Also on the theme of Frome's writers, Nikki Lloyd was selected as a reader at September's Novel Nights in Bath at Burdall's Yard. This prestigious event follows an effective formula: the first half is a 'writers' showcase' introduced by organiser Grace Palmer and, after a short networking break, Colette Hill introduces a talk, this one by The Bath Novel Awards - immenstely interesting to all fiction writers. Sadly I was already committed, but I look forward to hearing about this from my writing group. I don't know who took the picture of Nikki for their flyer (not me, though I wish it had been!)

Two new exhibitions opened at Black Swan Arts on Friday. The Long Gallery features work by Fiona Hingston: The English Woman's Flora consists of 3D floral sprigs made from wire, masking tape, and graphite, all based on the illustrations in the Observer Book of Wild Flowers. Each one takes an hour and a half to create, so the 200 exhibits here represent 300 hours of work.
The Round Tower also has a new exhibition, showing the work of the Black Swan Guild in response to the theme BODY:art. This varied and very impressive collection from ten guild members also includes pieces by 3 guest artists and represents a fascinating variety of amazing work, from a vivid study for a cobra tattoo to Dan Morley's delicate drawings of his partner's tiny earring. Kate Cochrane's series of scary images of the Skeleton Woman fascinated me too - a really interesting variety of interpretations on the theme - on till 6 October.

Frome hasn't yet settled into its autumnal rhythm of regular events music-wise, but on Thursday The Valley with Nicola Mascall and Steve Loudoun brought their funky country style with an edge of reggae rhythms to an appreciative audience at the Cornerhouse.

Nunney Acoustic Cafe returned after its summer break for an afternoon of varied musical acts. Frome duo Harding McCabe took the main guest spot with an all-original set including some experimental approaches and themes ranging from flâneuring in London to the voyages of Odysseus.  Strong support acts included Shane Fry with Charles Daniel, Paul Kirtley, and two talented youngsters: Ezra Herring on keyboard and Ben Remington on electric guitar,.

Frome Festival 2015 officially off ~ to a spanking start

Silk Mill always has a lively presence, this year leading off with an exhibition of paintings by Romi Behrens and a sizzling opening night party. Here's gallery owner Kate Moore with 'master plaster caster' & raconteur extraordinaire Peter Hone (& Basil the dog). Romi's oeuvre is here hailed as 'a magnificent and star-strewn reality' though the artist herself disclaims echoes of the masters to whom she's likened ~ understandably since Picasso believed paintings should 'bristle with razorblades'.
On to Wheatsheaf New Venue for Polaris Experience: projected visuals and live voice by Gene Serene, unforgettable singing 'hold me, touch me' to the swirling cosmos.  Add a mind-shifting AV created by Andrew Shackleton and a dance set from Johnny Normal and that's an extraordinary evening.

Several arty open nights on Friday: Frome Open Studios this year features 67 local artists at 21 venues. Welshmill Artists are at The Hub with paintings of townscapes & landscapes, and music from Tim Manning's hammered dulcimer, while  Black Swan Arts has  exhibitions in both Round Tower and Gallery. Mell Day's postcards from an ordinary childhood are displayed together with the extraordinary and very touching Home In Frome memory quilt,  created from collage patches & poems. Music provided by John Law and Nick Sorensen.

Then ~ segueing neatly via beds & memories ~  back to Silk Mill to weave through the thronged yard of the pop-up cantena for Frome Drama Club's performance of Mrs Shakespeare, a tale inspired by that famous codicil by the bard bequeathing Anne Hathaway his second-best bed.  In a monologue enlivened by romps we learn how Mr Shakespeare gets lucky in his marriage, despite his passion for Henry Wriothesley, when he discovers young Anne absolutely adores his erotic fantasies. She thrills to role-playing the crazy girl in the river, the sleep-walking Scottish queen (whose name she can never remember), the shrewish wench who needs a spanking, and adores being Queen of the Fairies ravished by a donkey...  Tina Waller's young Anne is a glitter-bomb of sexiness, and Stephen Scammell's Will leaps to the challenge in these entertaining sections. Although the script betrays too much of its radio origins, for lively effrontery alone FDC deserves the praise this show is receiving. The bed is amazing too, and mandolin playing & roundels to greet the audience are a charming touch.

The Valley are about to start their second half by the time I finally arrive at the Cornerhouse. "It's going to be a good week," Griff says, "I've booked myself into rehab for Wednesday - you've got to think ahead."