Mostly music, and some crazy golf, as summer arrives

A mega-musical week, with Frome Busks filling the town centre with young talent, so we'll start there, as eight acts from the College, some soloists and some groups, rotated from 11 till 2 around eight locations. Ages ranged but the sound was superb in each case. Here's Hushwind, a very accomplished duo,  Becca who sang with verve and confidence, and classical music student Ollie, fantastic on guitar. The organisation was impressive too, with routes & changeover times all planned and equipment and power needs all covered. An impressive display of young talent, and a very enjoyable day.

        

Still with local young talent, Monday's  SOUNDCHECK   session on Visual Radio Arts featured Afraid of the Dark,  the band who caused a sensation at the last Nunney Acoustic Cafe. All four members are studying music at Bath College, and as well as playing some of their stunning original songs - lyrics by Gwen Sutterby, pictured - they talked in interview about what each brings to their collaboration. This brilliant session will remain on the VRA site here, (screenshot includes some listeners' comments) 

Rosco Shakes brought their hi-energy jazzy blues to town again on Wednesday as these five performers lit up the night in Bar Lotte. Pictured here are Dom (guitar) Ned (vocals & drums) and Tim (keys & wild leg-dancing) but Josh (base) and Steve (sax) enhanced the band's terrific sound too.

A movie recommendation now: Phantom of the Open, showing at Frome's Westway this week, a delightful true story from the 1970s.  The lure for me was that Mark Rylance plays the central role of Maurice Flitcroft, the Eddy-the-Eagle of the golfing world - appearing in different disguises as he is repeatedly banned from competing in the British Open Golf Championship. Mark is impressive, evoking humble tenacity and care for his family as well as delusion bordering on idiocy. Loyal wife Jean (Sally Hawkins) and his dancing twin sons (Jonah and Christian Lees) are excellent too. 

 Curiously, despite finding similarities to Paddington Bear, none of the reviewers have pointed out that the format is exactly the same as for The Duke, recently reviewed on this blog. Eccentric quirky Northerner takes on the Establishment - golf, this time, not art - to snatch a trophy, with support from his son/s and after struggle that's poignant and funny in equal measures, all ends well and the movie ends with snapshots of the real individual to affirm the truth of the tale... check out the link here - then go see the movie! 

An away-day trip also this week: to Tewkesbury, which - as the town's website reports - is 'an historic riverside town in Gloucestershire with an abbey, medieval streets and a high street full of independent shops', which (apart from the abbey) makes this Cotswold town sound rather like Frome. In fact it has far more shops and is generally less poky than Frome, but the vibe is the same: relaxed and friendly, with quirky pubs and a jazz tea-room.  Here's the splendid interior of the abbey: the stained glass windows are impressive too.

And as the wind drops and days fill with sunshine, a chance once again for long walks around Frome as the banks beside the river paths fill with blue and golden wild flowers. ... and speaking of blue & gold, here's my Mother's Day necklace from son number one - how well he knows me! (smiley-face)

Wishing all readers peace and sunshine as summer time officially arrives.

A dramatic week: absurdity, tragedy, & some poetry...

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Who said February was a dull month? This week has been crammed with performance and creativity. Let's start with live theatre:The Late-ivity. Yes, it is the nativity story from the bible, Jim, but not as we know it.  Living Spit, unabashed that January is trudging onward, has brought their version of the arrival on earth of the Son of God to Bristol’s Wardrobe Theatre at the end of its short revival tour - revived from December’s performances when it was called The Nativity, that is.

The Wardrobe has fantastic audience atmosphere, especially for comedy, and Howard Coggins & Stu McCloughlin are absolutely on top form here - I speak as one who has followed them for over a decade of fantasies and histories, always steeped in absurdity. Here, Howard’s bored God picks a random woman (Howard) to impregnate, so Stu dashes around as an exasperated Gabriel, and both of them morph into shepherds and kings, skimming hilariously through the familiar tale to their own undoubted highlight: Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, recreated by audience participation as scores of dolls were chucked at us to dismember and hurtle back. The stage by the end looked like party leftovers from a cannibal feast. Sadly next week is the end of the run for this show: if you can’t get tickets, keep your fingers crossed for The Later-ivity - this one could run & run.

The recent remake of West Side Story, which has been popular with both reviewers and the public, has been showing at the Westway, Frome's charming little independent cinema: the combination of Spielberg and Sondheim, plus wild passion and hot nights, is clearly unmissable in a chill January, and the Westway has added attractions like icecreams on offer from a tray during the intermission, and a foyer bar. Adding to these small delights, this movie has been very well reviewed by both critics and audiences - and rightly so. This version is, as you'd expect, careful to get ethnicity correct, and also to establish a credible social context for the aggressions of the deprived teens.  Choreography & agility in the dances is as brilliant as you'd expect, and that clever, funny, song Gee Officer Krupke works particularly well as a private ensemble number rather than an unlikely challenge to real authority. It's great, altogether.

Still with drama: a chat in The River House with Frome's writer/performer Hannah Kumari whose one-person show ENG-ER-LAND will be touring the UK from February. As well as celebrating her own passion for football, Hannah says it's an exploration of her own mixed race identity, and what it means to be English. "I wanted to write a play that was fun and uplifting, whilst also confronting big issues," Hannah says. The play is coming to Frome in March, with a showing at the Football Club as well as the Merlin theatre.

This was a rich week for poetry too: Words at the Black Swan ekphrastic poetry group met on Monday to respond to the extraordinary Slow Time exhibition in the Long Gallery which opened last weekend. This fascinating project proved really stimulating to all ten workshop participants- do take a look at the website in the link, there are some extraordinary and beautiful responses to these pinhole landscapes extending Cartier Bresson's concept of a 'decisive moment' into an infinity of time. One of the group, Mike Grenville, also made a film you can view here.

Then Thursday evening Rainbow Fish Speakeasysession on Zoom led by by Frome's wonder-girl Liv Torc included some wonderful words, mostly crafted from heart-felt personal experience, with brilliant guest Rebecca Tantony also movingly personal in her poems: there's a sample of her work here. 

And after a couple missed Wednesdays, here's your musical blast from wonderful Bar Lotte! Saxophonist Iain Bellamy was with Nick Pini on bass, guest guitarist Denny Ilett, and drums this time from Marc Whitlock. I know nothing about jazz, but I do know that these sessions are fabulous.

And your final footnote this week is a recommendation for all those who for various reasons don't get up to the talks at the National Gallery in London: this is another of their short free-to-view exhibition promo films, this time Albrecht Dürer. It's a fascinating revelation of Dürer's huge impact on artists ever since.

A hefty week for theatre, so buckle up!

September in the Rain isn't just a recent memory or a sentimental song, it's also a play written by John Godber in 1983, allegedly about his family but also about every Yorkshire couple who sat in deckchairs on the beach at Blackpool complaining about the weather, each other, and everyone else - in fact the dramatic structure is a series of cliches strung nostalgically together... but the current production at Salisbury Playhouse skillfully finds the humour, and underlines the nostalgic charm. Jack and Liz are a couple who have never heard words like dysfunctional or counselling, so they rub along annoyingly and forgivingly and somehow manage to enjoy their annual holiday despite travel friction, awful lodgings, frequent rows, and constant rain. 

It's the excellence of the acting from Ian Kelsey and Nicola Sloane - subtly showing irrational mood swings but always, somehow, endearing - and it's the sharp direction from Gareth Machin, plus skilled lighting effects (Johanna Town) that make this such an excellent production: swift-moving enough to be entertaining though with no dramatic surprises, it leaves a slight aftertaste of sandy ice-cream as you remind yourself how life was gentler then, and can never be so innocent again. This production has been already mentioned in this blog, as I met the excellent cast last month, and am glad to report that Ian recovered from his script-related narcolepsy, and Nicola's delightful giggle survived the ardors of rehearsal. 

As theatres move cautiously, with streamed overlap, into old-style performances, some have decided that online productions may well provide a future, appealing as they do to a limitless geographic area. Going the Distance is a co-production from the Lawrence Batley Theatre, Oxford Playhouse, The Dukes & The Watermill Theatre - a new comedy by Henry Filloux-Bennett and Yasmeen Khan, directed by Felicity Montagu, with a stellar cast which includes Sara Crowe, Shobna Gulati, Sarah Hadland, and Matthew Kelly with Stephen Fry. The storyline is totally on-theme: a small theatre, struggling to survive, puts on a last-ditch production choosing, somewhat over-ambitiously, The Wizard of Oz.  Naturally, egos and personal agendas intrude, and Oscar Wilde's Miss Prism's precept for fiction - that the good end happily - is only partially observed. Satire is from the start somewhat over-larded, but it does give perceptive insight into the difficulties facing live theatre at this time. Shakespeare, of course, overcame plague to continue successfully producing, but he didn't have netflix to compete with, so please watch with sympathy. Available until 17 October. 

Now for probably the most impassioned and skilful show online right now: Bristol Old Vic is promoting Can I live?, conceived and performed by Fehinti Balogun to share his journey into the world of environmental activism - its inspiration, its effect on his family and friends, and how his life was radically changed by understanding the current prospects, and real history, of our planet.   This is not only compelling and moving in the way our cultural history and the environmental prospects of our planet are always disturbing,  it's also brilliantly presented using spoken word, hip-hop, animation, graphs & graphics, and concluding with options  for positive involvement. Created by Complicité and available until 10 October for whatever you choose to donate, this one is really worth an hour of your life. 

Bristol Old Vic also had another idea to connect with a wider audience through online options: All The Threads You Left Behind is the first of a series of Sudden Connections - short pieces by five south-west artists, free to view.  This one is created by Anna Rathbone mourning the suicide of a friend.  Previously a 1:1 performance installation, this digital version commissioned by Bristol Old Vic Ferment allows the viewer to choose the pace & style of the narration - my choice was to read as well as listen to the text, and to contribute to the 'threads' memories too.

Back on the live stage, John Cooper Clarke arrived at Frome's Cheese & Grain on Thursday with his current tour I Wanna Be Yours - the title of one of his most iconic poems (you can remind yourself of it here) and also of his new book.  John's ability to entertain a crowd seems unflagging as he blends jokes & observations with book extracts and performances of his popular classics: he wrote Beasley Street, he claims, "18 years before that bitch Margaret Thatcher got in, and I worry I might have given her a few ideas!"  It has an update now, which John also shared: Beasley Boulevard.  And despite joking that marriage was useful only because 'without it we'd have to fight with complete strangers', he concluded with this poignant tribute: I've fallen in love with my wife.

And now for something completely different. What if in 1594 Will Shakespeare's players, made tetchy by the plague outside and the mounting bodycount in their new drama, had insisted on abandoning the Aristotelian rules of tragedy to create a merry ending for Hamlet.  Thus, Hamlet Act 6 A Comedy, performed by Shakespeare Live at the Merlin Theatre, introduces Friar Lawrence from Romeo & Juliet, now reskilled after his disaster with the star-crossed lovers, to devise a resurrection for all the slain, plus new liaisons for everyone.  Laurence Parnell as both bard and friar provides a series of unlikely revivals: none of the poisons or sword-wounds were terminal, Ophelia didn't drown she tripped, and even the skull of Yorrick gets a rewrite. Clearly the team had great fun with this extended adaptation of a short script by Dennis Harkness, directed by Alison Paine.

In case you've got this far and are wondering if everything this week involved seated observation, the answer is no, there was also some walking about: The new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth  by Thomas J Price entitled Thoughts Unseen features bronze heads, some small and some enormous, and several incredibly large bodies. They are really impressive - enigmatic but accessible: the artist says his aim is to question historic narratives & power structures in society, using presentation and scale to explore our assumptions. His monumental figures inevitably trigger thoughts of the current debate around monuments in public places, too.  It's superbly crafted, thought-provoking without being overly cryptic, and well worth a visit - a return visit too. This exhibition, and the Eduardo Chillida one too, will be in the galleries until January 3. And the gardens there, of course, are lovely even in autumn and winter.

Saturday should have been music night at The Sun in Frome but sadly the popular Raggedy Men had to cancel - though this did give me the chance to catchup on Have I Got News For You, and Richard Osman's House of Games Night, two TV-trivia gems postponed by Friday's reopening of The Crown, my local hostelry, now completely revamped for gloozing (glam boozing.)  But the week did end with live music - lots of it, as popular Nunney Acoustic Cafe reopened with fizz (literally) after its 18 month lull. Eight acts took the stage, ranging from folk to funk, solo debut to celtic band - all superb: here's the featured guest band from Swindon Splat the Rat and Frome's new quartet combo Unit 4.  Dancing between tables and Keren's opulent cakes were both popular accompaniments to the onstage entertainment. 

 

Finally in a busy week: regular readers will know that, although my passion is theatre, occasionally a movie will lure me to Frome's smashing little Westway Cinema - all seats four quid, and ice-creams on a tray at the intermission like in the old days. No Time to Die, Daniel Craig's final outing as James Bond, was the occasion this week. As I'm not really competent to review this medium, here's  the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw to explain why he gave the show 5 stars: "It is of course a festival of absurdity and complication, a headspinning world of giant plot mechanisms moving like a Ptolemaic universe of menace. It is startling, exotically self-aware, funny and confident, and most of all it is big." Here's a link to a short homage to the actor who kept the  Bond franchise alive.

Times a'changing: a random mix as doors reopen.

Anyone who's read my novel The Price of Bread set in Belfast at the start of the 1970s, or remembers 'the Troubles' escalating onto UK's mainland, may wonder how such ferocious anger and historic grievance finally abated.  John Hume, primarily, is the answer. Coming from the Bogside, Derry's large Catholic area (which had suffered much during his growing years as the port and the city were deliberately run down to force trade to more Protestant Belfast) he worked consistently for a solution to the age-old divisions in the Northern Irish community. He founded the Social Democrat Labour Party with a commitment to non-violence in 1970, negotiated privately with Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams throughout the next decade, and finally engineered the signing of  Good Friday agreement in 1998, earning him that year's Nobel Peace Prize. He died this week and is rightly mourned as Ireland's Martin Luther King. You can read more about his work here, and his own words here (thanks David Thompson for this).

Meanwhile in the real world, the return to gigging for Frome bands creeps cautiously on. This image is from a great session in the garden of The George at Nunney, led by talented performer, and master of effective non-planning, Paul Kirtley.  Great classic folk/rock songs, great playing & great sound, with conscientious space-awareness from the pub - a very enjoyable evening made even better for me as I walked the 2 miles from Frome through fields of corn as the sun set... sharing that image, too.  

Also in the music category: the excellent indoor self-recordings continue on local musicians' facebook pages - Open Micsolate has a wide variety of individual contributions - and Al OKane has a new single out:  Butterfly Mind is available on Spotify here. 

Poetry hasn't gone live yet but discussion is in progress, with the Merlin's ECOS amphitheatre a possible venue for our postponed Poetry Cafe open mic evenings.  And the Fromesbury Group writers, founded more than 20 years ago and still meeting monthly, celebrated the new permissions with a reunion in Victoria park on a sultry night last week. Our fourth member was granted leave of absence as she's in Majorca. My personal writing success story this week is in the category of bizarre, with acceptance of my submission to quirky 42 Stories Anthology in response to their call-out for stories written in 42 words with a 42-word biography and a 42 letter title. The collection is due publication when they get enough off-the-wall entries to fulfil their 42-centric requirements - online here, if you fancy entering! And The Price of Bread is now featured in my website, courtesy of designer David Goodman. 

As the world cautiously opens up,  Frome's Westway cinema does so too so in a spirit of mingled curiosity & support, I went along - appropriately cautiously - & shared the afternoon showing  of Back to the Future with an audience of four others, finding the venue superbly well-organised with all standard precautions and the air-con circulation turned off, and such a pleasure to time-travel back to those innocent days when the future didn't need a mask to mingle...

So for now, the Blog Goes On. Moving to a different provider would lose access to archived posts, but the new layout is frustratingly limited and learning how to compromise is taking a g e s . . .  

Meanwhile in the real world, Frome like the rest of the country has its own struggles in these extraordinary times, as evidenced by town councillor Andy Wrintmore in an excellent piece in the Frome Nub, and two areas of town are under threat of invasive development. Rambling the meadows, riverside, and woodlands around Frome in this continued sunshine has an edge of poignancy: all are 

full of thriving wild life and sublimely beautiful, yet several are under threat. This is the water-meadow that Friends of the River Frome is working to protect, now recovered from a previous assault but with its future still uncertain, and there was an unexpected attack on scores of trees in the heart of town this week in the name of 'strengthening' the railway support. A support group - Willow Vale Trees - formed immediately to protest this ill-timed and excessive damage in a conservation area, but when wealth and profit always win over the health of the environment, and with projected dismantling of the need for planning permissions, it's a worrying time.  

Emma & Einstein, plus words and art, and both in windows.

Jane Austen films, while popular with fans of heaving bodices and grand vistas, are often disdained by serious Janites as reducing these wonderful social sagas to Mills & Boon romances. Frome's Westway is now showing the new version of Emma directed by Autumn de Wilde, and it's delightful. Purists might complain that our heroine and her ultimate partner (Johnny Flynn) find their feelings earlier than the author intended, and that he is younger, fierier, & better looking than Jane Austen's Knightly, but these changes - like others such as contracting the Jane/Frank romance in favour of a stronger role for Harriet (Mia Goth) - all worked well to create an entertaining movie which looked luscious throughout. I loved Bill Nighy as Emma’s father, Miranda Hart as the irritating neighbour, Amber Anderson as Jane Fairfax, and obviously the costumes and cinematography. It’s true there was none of the political and economic critique of that era which Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility achieved, but the troops of servants, from housemaids to stablemen, constantly jumping to anticipate their masters’ needs, established a strong sense of the infantile dependancy of this ostensibly ‘ruling class’. Here's Emma with her hypochondriac father, and Mr Knightly looking sultry. (Still showing this week.)

Moving on to art now, and on a town-size scale - right across the town in fact, as Window Wanderland 2020 began its weekend visit to the houses, shops, cafes and pubs of Frome: here's the team responsible, at the Black Swan launch with Emma Warren, and just one of the literally hundreds of beautifully illuminated displays - in shops, schools, pubs, cafes, and - most impressively - private dwellings where hours of careful creative toil must have gone into designing and crafting each creation. Fictional & fantasy characters from books and movies featured often, with lots of animals and birds, some with messages. There were scores of  'favourites' for me but this one (probably on Somerset Road but the miles of walking have blurred!) sums up the moving nature of the event - shared passions, charmingly presented. Congratulations Lisa for importing this brilliant event into Frome and Jo for creating the map so we could find them. There's a short video here, made by BBC Somerset, if you missed it all!

Art on a small scale continues, always: Boann Lambert's touching work inspired by her grandmother's shoes is at the WHY Gallery, with Abigail Reed's wild life images. Abigail works mainly in monochrome too and is known for massive bears and other animals, but also creates moths - this one, she says, is largely imagined, but it looks very lepidopteran.

Pip Utton, Frome's favourite one-man showman, took his latest persona Albert Einstein to Edinburgh last summer where it was favourably reviewed as an interesting and genial evocation of that great, though not always good, scientific genius. The geniality was welcome after the addition to Saturday's billed performance at the Merlin of a run-through of Papal behaviour as preparatory work for Pip's next show. Popes proved a a tough warm-up act, though Einstein was well-received. Looking like a scatty Professor Branestawn with white fright-wig, Pip's ability to interact compelling with a full-house audience is impressive: he shifts effortlessly from roguish humour to rueful confidences, and his simplifications of those famous mathematical equations are as impressive as his twinkling eyed charm and underlying sincerity. Imagination is more important than knowledge, he insists throughout: 'If you stop being curious, you start to die.' 

More words now, from local historian David Lassman, who launched his latest investigation into the fascinating past of our town, Frome At War 1939-45 with a short talk at Hunting Raven on Friday night. Frome lost only two residents and a tiny bit of Nunney Road to bombers -and that was accidental - so the main practical impact was the arrival of child evacuees, many of whom still retain a fond connection with the town. Another social consequence came from housing American troops as one of the government-designated 'alternative' towns: this meant black GIs could not socialise on the same night as their white colleagues, to avoid fights, though sadly it didn't prevent five racial murders in the town. All this and more, including conscientious objectors & a secret visit by Eisenhower, is revealed in David's book...

This was the last week for submissions to the Frome Festival brochure, involving me in a flurry of finalising details for the Poetry Cafe,  Nevertheless pub theatre night, and a book-based history walk with David Lassman.  Other submissions are in the pot too, including a response to BBC Radio Wiltshire's quest for 'Ten Tiny Plays' set in Wiltshire. A session on writing drama for radio at Warminster Library led by playwright Jamila Gavin was provided free to support writers submitting to this, and it was a privilege to join the Warminster Writers Group for this excellent workshop. We were all too busy writing for a photo, so let's move on now to music.

Reg Meuross, troubadour par excellence, returned to the Grain Bar Roots Session on Wednesday with songs of his travels both real and imagined. Reg is a superb raconteur and while his lyrics are droll and his tunes are charming too, the banter is undeniably a big part of our audience delight. A hugely enjoyable evening - maybe a live recording would be the way to go for sales...


Fabulous Pete Gage with his mega-talented guitar/bass/drum trio band at The Cornerhouse on Friday were, as  always, a total delight.  Among other scorching classics, they do the best version of St James Infirmary Blues you'll ever hear, with stunning solos from Paul Hartshorn, Richie Blake and Eddie John.  Extra seating enabled closer audience but didn't stop the dancing!

. This Sunday as first of the month had brought, along with birdsong and a sudden abundance of wild flowers along our verges, the Independent Market which fills the streets of Frome with stalls of tantalising goods.  Blue skies and sunshine ensured a great atmosphere, and great acts on the busking stage enhanced the benign mood.  They Don't Scare Easy Tribe, a variable line-up led by Paul Kirtley, were followed by duo MountainSpeaksFire: haunting cello from Helen Robertson combined with subtly passionate voice of Vin Callan make this duo unforgettable.

And another regular favourite of mine, Frome's awesome Back Wood Redeemers put on a brilliant show at the Three Horseshoes in Bradford on Avon on Sunday. It was even worth missing the rest of this first sunny afternoon of spring for these guys who, to quote no less a music critic than Charles Nevin, not only "bring forth to you songs of dark country, twisted blues and religious fervour" but "just as importantly, they’re also top fun." He's not wrong.

Myths, legends, and modern heroes -

An effective antidote to the national news arrived last week at Bristol Old Vic's Weston Studio which swarmed with vibrant and talented youngsters recreating heroic Greek mythology when the BOV Young Company - with extra fizz from the Wardrobe Ensemble - took on the story of Hercules in a ping pong parlour. Here all of humanity is the helpless plaything of wilful gods, as psychotic Zeus and vengeful Hera struggle for power over the young men of Thebes, and Hercules' physical power can't help him cope with his suppressed emotions. It's a morality tale for modern times, and it's funny, fast-moving and inventive as well as raising serious questions about the need for more articulation of the pressures on young men in our society. Rehearsal pictures rarely show anything of the quality of the final production but that's all I've got - at least you can see the age range of this terrific group of talented young people. Superbly directed by Helena Middleton, though sadly it was only on for three nights.

Three years on and Frome's David Bowie night continues, moving this time to the Cornerhouse for our celebration-memorial: brilliant deejaying from The Fat White Duke wearing the iconic red lightning-strike, and a big screen to show images of interviews and concerts throughout: a fabulous evening of singalong and dance ended with - of course - Heroes.

Another great music night at the Wednesday Roots Session, which featured Reg Meuross. Reg is a mesmerising singer/songwriter and also a charismatic raconteur who held the crowded Grain Bar rapt with songs about the Hull triple trawler disaster of 1968 and its consequences, and personal and fantastic tales from his US tours - like how Billy the Kid actually survived to age 95, with songs about seeing Phil Ochs & Elvis eating lunch in Morrison's Cafe in Texas, and Dylan Thomas meeting Hank Williams in a bar before Leaving Alabama... Another change of mood then, with And Jesus Wept, a lament for the 306 young soldiers suffering shell-shock in the war and subsequently shot for desertion, and concludes a superb evening of thought-provoking entertainment with the anthemic England Green and England Grey.


The Artisan on Friday hosted another of Paul Kirtley's Bare to the Bones charity gigs featuring mainly rock classics, played by a lively ensemble - with me making a brief appearance as the 'cerebral' spot. Thanks Steve!


Still on the subject of fundraising entertainment, after a recent break-in at The River House cafe and theft of their charity collection-pots, staff responded by working for an entire day in without speaking to anyone, serving customers in the guise and costume of mime artists, to raise donations replacing the stolen cash. Thumbs up, indeed!

Frome's community spirit became a bit of a theme this week, with requests to talk about Frome Unzipped on Monday to group of trainee tour guides at the Town Hall, and then on Saturday morning the privilege of joining an annual walk in memory of campaigning journalist Crispin Aubrey, organised by his daughter Meg for the legacy fund in his name. Around 40 people gathered for the start of the tour at the HUBnub where co-owner Io Fox told us about its amazing restoration, then onto Catherine Hill to hear the quirky history of Reg Ling & the Valentine Lamp, next to the cobbles of Poldark's Passage - sorry, Gentle Street, then via a look at the Silk Mill to the bridge for my short spiel about the origins of the town, and where Sarah Scholefield (pictured, with Meg) spoke of Willow Vale and her novel Redferne Lane.  By then the weather, previously uncertain, had made a definite decision on rain, so we scurried up Cheap Street to huddle into Hunting Raven Books where an encouraging number of those who hadn't told me that they'd bought my book already now did so.

Still on the subject of books, Bath Flash Fiction Awards on Saturday provided a great evening of entertainment and an amazing variety of winning tales, read by their writers, as organiser Jude Higgins launched both Flash Fiction Festival 2 and Bath Flash Fiction 3 in a party atmosphere at St James Vaults - I didn't get a group picture so this is from their website (credit Christopher Fieldon). Both these lively collections are published by Ad Hoc Fiction.


And now a rare movie-spot to conclude this post: having recently been lured by Steve Coogan's name in the cast list to watch Holmes and Watson, which turned out to be the official Christmas turkey, I was cautious about a visit to Frome's lovely little independent Westway cinema for Stan and Ollie, but it deserves every accolade reviewers and audiences have given it. Tender, beautifully written and superbly acted, this feel-good-then-bereft-then-better movie has to be the best friendship movie since Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Full houses all three showings on Sunday, so book when you're passing for whenever you can!