The week when freedom arrived and nobody noticed

Starting, unusually, with a weather report: over 30°C all week until the dramatic storm in the early hours of Saturday morning. As I was born in a German air-raid over London, this seemed a very appropriate start for my birthday, although sadly other celebrations were either rained-off or plagued-off.  But the long hot days were perfect for walking along the river path, and the glorious evenings lovely for a sunset trip to Marston Park.

Friday's trip was a jaunt to Hauser & Wirth, where Green councillor and environmental activist Theo Simon was giving a short talk in the cloisters to chime with the impressive exhibition of works by Spanish pacifist & artist Eduardo Chillida. Theo's personal eco-activism started in '92, inspired by Swampy and the Twyford Down M3 protest: his tales of past action were entertaining but he reminded us that the situation now requires urgent mass direct action.  Theo's also the  songwriter/singer leader of Seize the Day and brought his djembe so his talk was top n tailed with a song. And then to the galleries and the magnificent garden! 

Returning again to the topic of my birthday, celebrations while small were perfectly spaced:  a trip to the cocktail bar with Eleanor Talbot, whose weekly online programme Variations on a Theme is always smorgasbord of tasty talk & tracks, and a garden get-together with two close friends. Sadly my family's visit had to be cancelled - a scenario that many in similar situations will recognise. 

An upbeat note to end this week: Frome's popular new Mayor Andy Wrintmore, featured weekly in the Frome Times, was interviewed by Kerrang under the banner “They kicked party politics out of town”: Spending the day with the punk rock mayor of Frome.

It's a good read, and a particular pleasure for Andy who for years avidly followed Kerrang - "The world's greatest metal / punk / hardcore / rock music publication." Andy's Giant Pod has a new edition too, and his latest Mayoral column in Frome Times (p.25) reflects powerfully on the serious loss to the town centre of the Co-op - and of course Andy is interviewed as a musician in Frome Unzipped - from Prehistory to Post-Punk (pages 186-188) which has it's own page here, with regular updates.

When 'normal life' is exciting... with fingers crossed...

Frome last week was abuzz about the return of the Saturday Market, a proper outdoor do with stalls selling everything from carved curios and tantalising jewellery to garden glories and amazing edibles - here's Liam's Cake Stall offering scandalously delicious vegan specialities.  Stoic local buskers Paul Kirtley and David Goodman were on the bridge to enhance the market yard browsing experience, too.

Across the town in Merchants Barton, the ongoing debate on the Saxonvale development moved  forward with a weekend-long presentation to the public of the preferred project, described as "an exemplary development on the banks of the River Frome, meticulously designed taking the historic grain of Frome as its starting point and delivering a characterful, vibrant, residential-led mixed-use community, with flexible commercial uses, high-quality public realm, and homes for all ages." It really does look what Frome needs, and local enthusiasm is high (especially for the lido.)

Also in Merchants Barton, the car parking space has been embellished by a project to raise awareness of Mental Health Awareness Week and to further highlight the need for creative development of the Saxonvale site.  Photographer Tim Gander shot pictures, which have been paired with poems and comments from users and staff at Mind in Somerset. Tim's aim is to highlight "what happens when a former industrial site is left to deteriorate. Fly-tipping, vandalism and natural decay take their toll" and his project has much to commend it, but it is worth remembering that the abandonment wasn't all negative: birds and wild flowers flourished among the trees and the old buildings were a prime site for the ingenuity of young street artists as Frome's graffiti Hall of Fame... here's a sample:

This week's zoom drama is Transition Tales from The Travelling Talesman, promoted by  the Art House Southampton with the tagline 'When gender fluid gods saved creation...' Not only in Greek mythology but in cultures across the world, deities changed gender as well as species, and his transformation tales ranged from the same-form duality of Hermaphroditus to flowers (Hyacinthus, remade in blood and tears), stars (Ursa major & minor) and in the unfortunate case of Actaeon, a stag promptly torn apart by his own hounds. Zeus had a particular penchant for metamorphosis, apparently, seducing his many lovers in multiple forms such as as a parrot, a pig, and a shower of water. Although this talk clocked in at 2 hours 20 minutes, the chronicles never flagged and the zoom audience was enthusiastic and articulate: the chat line was really interesting, posing questions like How does root sex work for fungus? (the answer is mitochondria) and comments on the gender of quabbatic numbers. Performances like this, with an option for audience participation, are as valuable for community health as Open Mic poetry online sessions, and hopefully will all outlive the pandemic and continue to zoom.

My week ended excitingly with a train journey to Gloucester, taking advantage of new freedom to meet my publisher and iron out various issues relating to my upcoming short story collection: not only a useful visit but a delightful one, as we had time to walk around the docks - which are beautiful - and the older parts of this odd, somewhat bedraggled, city. 

Relics of medieval buildings, religious and secular, are everywhere, though mostly overwhelmed by modern build, but there seems to be a will to reclaim civic history more effectively. There are quite a few boards explaining the history & context of some features - there's a storytelling bench designed by the master mason at the Cathedral in 1999 - but there's not much street art around the city. This alleyway, however, has been turned into a Van Gogh art gallery, with posters of the artist's final works all along the hoarding,  in a designated 'covid friendly outdoor exhibition.'  There are some interesting curios too, like the team of clock bellringers above the old woodwork & jewellery shop, the new gargoyles on the cathedral, and even the unpretentious centre of the old town where road signs to Eastgate, Southgate, Westgate, and Northgate once referred to the old main roads London, Devon, Wales, and the North - as shown in this 1805 map:

This was a week when summer came in starts and stops, rather like everyone's social plans, and a busy one for me: the deadline date for my quarterly round-up of drama in the southwest for Plays International (amazingly, and encouragingly, there was much to report even though not a single production was live), a restarted writing group, new fiction project underway, and sense of renewed freedom.  I'll end with a view of a sunny walk along the river path from Frome to Great Elm. 

Non-contact Shakespeare, virtual sleuthing, and various walks

As the English Puritans discovered in 1642, you can close playhouses by law but you can't keep theatre down. We've seen the emergence of zoomed & streamed performances and now there's a filmed version of Romeo and Juliet available on a laptop near you. It's set in a the near future in a depleted world with all its traditional rivalries plus unused theatres intact - a kind of Mad Max II where the disaffiliated youngsters lounge about in red plush velvet auditoriums. Shakespeare's play is about passion and intimacy, giving producer Nick Evans a major problem in these pandemic times: the chosen solution is computer-generated imagery with cast members all filmed individually against green screens. Considering this is an early foray into a new form, it seems churlish to complain that the result lacks dramatic impact, but it does. The overall story-telling is laborious, with too much intrusive music and speeches slow and heavy as if lingering for translation. My main problem was my usual gripe about filmed productions being too selective - i.e. not showing the whole scene the way the playwright envisaged but going instead for a close-up of whoever is speaking.  This inevitable consequence of separate filming is a major problem since the plot hinges on intense sexual encounters and a deadly dual, plus a community in rowdy discord with two rival gangs running wild in the streets. This contextural tension was a major casualty in this production, and the Prince's solemn hope that these deaths would inspire societal control was barely audible under the finale music. Technical problems aside, this is well acted in the circumstances but insensitively directed and with unimpressive scenery & costumes (who wears a bra for their night of passion?)  Juliet (Emily Redpath) is lovely, but Romeo (Sam Tutty) while charming has a disconcerting resemblance to Joe Lycett.  Anyway I don’t want to put you off, have a go if you fancy it, for the fx at least - it's on till the end of the month.  

And now for something completely different: another zoomed dramatic gem from that clever young Sharp Teeth team with Bristol Old Vic this week as Murder on Ice challenged its audience to find the killer on a stricken Antarctic expedition where the leader has been found mysteriously murdered. 

Technically, this spoof show is superb in terms of organisation & timing, and the five-strong team of young actors are all quirkily brilliant. The concept is demanding for anyone who prefers the anonymity of a silent darkened auditorium since, apart from the characters' passionate protestations of innocence (& hints of others' culpability), much of the dialogue of the drama is up to the viewers to create via their impromptu interrogations until the big reveal at the end...  It's great fun, with all the essential essence of theatre. Hopefully this unexpected bonus of performance-in-lockdown will continue in some way after the buildings have reopened, maybe moderating the sacrosanctity of silence in the auditorium since the more interactive days of Shakespeare, when interjections from the pit provoked much of the wit. (I've posted this 2013 article before but it's still relevant.)

With the continuing rain, my walking has tended to be confined to the lanes around Frome: this field is surrounded by posters pleading for a halt to the massive commercial project that will convert it from an idyllic view to massive housing estate, probably annually battling with the consequences of building on a floodplain - you can read more about the project & the protest here.  Inappropriate invasions of our fragile ecological environment are still shadowing Frome's life:  Easthill Field has now been officially designated a priority habitat requiring conservation action, and Frome Town Council are supporting their application for this land to be designated an asset of community value. Plans to build here are now halted but to ensure its future safety there's a petition to Mendip District Council you can sign here. And Save River Frome Pathway has successfully delayed a controversial planning application and temporarily at least saved this important final stretch into the town. Huge respect to all the committed Fromies who dedicate so much time and energy to protecting the town from loss of its treasures and inappropriate development.   

Here's a picture of local river walk threatened only by its own popularity and the rain: Vallis Vale. My Sunday afternoon walk took nearly three hours, and cleaning my boots took nearly as long, but the luminous green landscape of sculpted moss made it all worthwhile.

Regular readers will have noticed there's very little reference to televised shows in this chronicle, since presumably you all have your own favourite channels & programmes, but I can't let  It's a Sin leave our screens without note - if you're not sure why Russell T Davies' series about the 'gay plague' of the 1980's is an important contribution to a mostly-secret aspect of our own lifetimes, this article is a reminder.  

And on the subject of demonising,  a salutary tale from Northern Ireland: Human rights activist Mark Ashton, who died in 1987 of Aids, is scheduled for a memorial in his hometown of Portrush but the project has met Unionist Party protests that Mark - a catholic - was an IRA supporter. Considering he went to London to cofound a movement to support striking Welsh miners (featured in the film Pride) this seems a dubious claim but it suggests that the Brexit border issue has breathed life into old hostilities once again. See The Price of Bread, my novel set in Belfast in the 70s, for how it happened last time, and what followed last time. 

Romance, murder, and local history

Renaissance Reimaginings is the enticing title of the new exhibition of paintings by Leslie Glenn Damhus at the Hubnub Gallery: they are simply gorgeous, evoking archane medieval myths with a slight twitch of the lips, and they have enticing titles like 'Madonna with an albino wallaby' - definitely not one to be missed.

Hubnub's Rye Bakery also hosted this month's Town Council 'business breakfast' session which I decided to join despite the fact it started at 7am. My pre-dawn sortie rewarded me with tortilla and some tips on twittering. I'd taken my laptop in case advice arrived as a series of tweets but actually it was mostly via old-school flip-chart, with a useful power-point summary from Sarah & Hannah of DNA Worldwide.

February so far has positively throbbed with live music, but I've only found time for only the skimmiest of skim-throughs with a couple of brief pop-ins, though there's been several excellent jazz sessions at the Cornerhouse, Emma's soul at the Archangel, Invisible Eyes punk at the Griffin, 2+2=3 boogie night at From Perú to You, Celtic jamming and Grain Bar blues... here's just one image of Nasty Habits at The Sun to represent all this massive local talent, free in Frome.

I couldn't miss Bookends of Time at Frome Library, three fascinating talks about this area: the Selwood Forest story from always-engrossing  World Tree expert Julian Hight, plus a tale from pre-Roman days when this area was part of the Kingdom of Dumnonia (Flesh and Bones by Annette Burkett) and Carolyn Griffiths' Woad to This, the story of the local wool trade from glory days of dyeing to the dying days of closures. Woad was grown just outside the town and its indelible indigo hue used as the basis for every other colour - recipe books from the 1700s still exist and you can see photos online at Bath Central Library where they are held. This cloak showing various tones of the unblended dye was created by the knitting group at ~ appropriately ~ the Blue House.  

Moving now to Salisbury Playhouse where Murder, Margaret and Me pitches Agatha Christie, a writer who slaughtered her characters as casually as she sipped tea at Claridges, against Margaret Rutherford, an actress who obsessively made all her characters comical. Between these two flits the imaginary character of Jane Marple, claimed by both her creator and her performer, and nicer than both of them. Philip Meeks's play was originally a solo show, quite a challenge to convert a monologue to a three-person two-act drama when nothing actually happens apart from talking, much of it direct-to-audience exposition, and a little soft-toy playfulness. You'd need ideally a varied tonal range of voices, difficult when all three (Kate Brown, Sarah Parks and Tina Gray) are ladies of a certain age and similar cultural class. Maybe it’s one of those Samuel Johnson things.  Director Damian Cruden adds some clever touches, like the anonymous technicians who gradually build a set around the inaction, and the unwrapping and rewrapping of the hard furniture of these bleak lives. Costumes by Dawn Allsopp reflected personalities, idiosyncratic for the sparring duo, sweetly old-ladyish for Miss Marple who is perhaps the most satisfying character: she is frankly invented. Neither the real writer nor actress come across as women anyone would want to spend much time with, the one obsessed with prying and the other with puddings.  On till 24 February.

I'll end with a glimpse of Vallis Vale, where the river merges with Mells stream, where I walked as a break from interviewing and transcribing for my engrossing current project. Still one of the most beautiful places I know.