It's that time of year again - believe it or not....

As November ends, Frome town traditionally gears itself up for the festive season ahead with a Festival of Lights... usually a parade of lanterns through the streets cheered on by crowds enjoying a party atmosphere (though one year for a change we had Jenson Button scorching up and down the main street in a McClaren)  - Mel Day and Aliss Vaas run free workshops, sponsored by the town council, to ensure a plethora of stars, moons, angels and bells waving in the night air for the grand switch-on of twinkly lights on Christmas tree, with carols and bands and.. oh, you probably remember it well. Which is good, as this year's festivities will be rich mainly in memories as the lanterns this year will be only window decorations apart from this magnificent swan, created by Mel and Aliss for the courtyard of the Black Swan where Black Swan Arts is currently preparing for a re-opening the café and festive craft shops next week to sell 'small & affordable' art - donations welcome!

Frome On-Air Book Group with Sheila Hedges and Karen Stewart continues to broadcast monthly on Frome FM, and invited me to join Tina Gaisford-Waller, legendary manager of Hunting Raven Books, in offering ideas for christmas gifts. During these non-meeting times this is a zoom session recorded & edited by Helen Ottoway with smooth professionalism (& a promise to edit out my faffy bits). Tina offered her suggestions from her car as the bookshop is currently awash with deliveries, and I also talked a bit about how The Price of Bread emerged from the first lockdown after gestating for 25 years - you can hear all this on Friday 4th December on 96.6FM.

These are difficult days for a local/Arts blog to remain apolitical. With no live theatre or live music, or live groups of any kind even in a cinema auditorium, my off-line entertainment is mostly walking through trees. There's plenty of stimulus online, of course, but after seven months you probably know your own interests there. And with that self-deprecating & somewhat grumpy intro, here's a few things you may or may not know about already, as Frome town is currently as besieged as Macbeth when Burnham Wood began shuffling its deadly way to Dunsinane. Easthill Field is the latest green space to be noted by developers, to the dismay of many who value this species-rich habitat - this is an ancient lime tree, one of the last remaining from the avenue that once led up to Easthill House. The land is earmarked for social housing but protesters insist they are not just NIMBYs as the location, tucked behind a cemetery at a busy junction outside the town centre, isn't suitable for this, and with influential support & careful research they have secured a delay on the decision. Do join the Friends of Easthill Field if you want to follow their progress or feel you can help.

Meanwhile nearer the centre of town, a community-minded group of neighbours decided to get together to transform the scrubble at the end of their gardens back into an allotment, and formed the Broadway Allotments and Community Garden Association. With much hard work already, this abandoned area is slowly returning to its previous function but it hasn't evaded the eye of developers. Frome Town Council is backing the allotment group and has presented a case to Mendip, so let's hope this last small green lung remains in our town's ever more dense housing estates. 

The largest looming threat in Frome's struggle with The Developers, as this amorphous & invasive enemy is commonly termed, is the one hanging over the southern fields, where 1700 new houses are planned to infill from the Mount to the by-pass.  Just, houses - no amenities or services: no medical facilities, Secondary schools, transport links, or parks.  Stop Selwood Garden Community is the protest organisation opposing this euphemistically termed project - and yes, I do realise housing is needed but this project is a cynical money-spinner: no social housing, no chance for Frome's young people stay in their own community continuing the tradition of local companies. To put it in another context, UK Government data this September showed there are 600,000 empty houses across the country, double their annual national building target in fact. Property is a good investment for the monied: rent continues to arrive and repairs are tax-deductible. And once the last of Selwood Forest is eroded, we've lost more than we can ever regain.  

Here endeth the diatribe, but please consider joining one or all of these protest groups.

Moving from nature's effortless artistry to crafted arts: mega-creative Frome poet Liv Torc is taking her sensationally successful Haiflu concept into the off-line world and now wants haikus about life currently in the form of a visible public installation. My first effort is a lamentation for lost seasonal celebrations. Do have a go, and add #haiflu2020 to your art (I forgot) to as Liv has plans for them!

I'll leave you with an image of Frome centre on Saturday night, its tree defiantly glittering with blue and golden starry lights. 

Among a plethora of pantomimes, The French Detective and the Blue Dog by Hattie Naylor is the delightfully-different seasonal production at The Egg in Bath, where the ovoid stage is transformed into a quaint street in pre-invasion Belgium. Enter the famous Parisian Inspector Charcuterie (brilliantly played with Jacques Cluseau hang-dog expression and ‘Allo ‘Allo accent by Chris Bianchi), off on holiday with his assistant mini-sleuth Minette, child genius and self-styled niece. The musical is full of jolly songs like "Let's solve the murder NOW!" but they don't get beyond the opening number before the first victim hits the stage, followed by most of the rest of this village where everyone is a secret circus performer. “There is no greater tragedy than not being able to do the thing you love, that’s why we’re all so hopeless at our jobs” says Fe-fe le Knife profoundly. Deeper than the clowning and comedy, the story touches movingly on human needs: Minette’s solo “I’ll be on my own again”, as her idiotic pseudo-uncle falls besottedly for Madame Spaniel and abandons his little charge, is real lump-in-the-throat time. 12-year old Flossie Ure, who took this key role on the performance I saw, was sensational in both her singing and her stage presence.
Billed as a family show for 6-and-upwards, younger children are unlikely to appreciate the Franglais Midsomer-Murders parodies but vibrant acting, superb script, and fabulous production values carry the show triumphantly through two hours with even the littlies (mostly) gripped. Rapid costume changes and clever props helped a marvellous trio (John Biddle, Paul Mundell, and Jessica Pidsley) create a medley of Belgian misfits and the nail-biting finale is sensational – it would be a spoiler to reveal how dazzling is the circus trick that ends the show.
The programme calls this a ‘world premiere’ which suggests it may travel – it certainly deserves to, but don’t chance it – go along to Bath before January 8th and be ready for much mirth and the odd sniffle.

So here we are, another Christmas. I hope you're having a good one as I write this, and have recycled all the bottles & gift wrappings and made-up all the rows by the time you read this. The year we called 2011 and messed up so thoroughly is nearly finished - time for a new one, box-fresh and shiny. Try and keep it clean this time...

"Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day. That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that. That was the pudding. In half a minute Mrs Cratchit entered - flushed, but smiling proudly - with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quarter of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top."
Dickens virtually invented the christmas idyll as we know it, and with three more sleeps to go what could be lovelier than to listen to the mellow rotund tones of Pip Utton splendidly retelling the classic story of Scrooge's sentimental epiphany? A packed audience at the Merlin enjoyed mulled wine and mass contentment as Pip, costumed like the author himself, regaled us with Dicken's famous ghost story from a red vellum volume set in glittering candlelight.

So now with snow thick all around - Coldplay couldn't have got it more wrong could they?- the end of year countdown has begun:
X-factor and Strictly finals: tick.
Lord Sugar's apprentice picked: tick.
Anti-Cowell kick-back in the charts: tick. (You have to admire the Cage contender for audacity - and value for money at twice the length of Trashmen's wordy bird.)
Flyaway holiday airport chaos: tick.
Yes, we must be nearly there. Still waiting for war is over - a long wait, with turncoat liberal MPs voting now to keep the troops in Afghanistan.
So, merry Christmas and a happy new year. Let's make it a good one, without any fear.
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