Frome Writers' Circle soiréed this month at Elaine's house, where despite the charming viands, as Daisy Ashford would say, dark themes predominated: two murders and a (very moving) wartime atrocity. To lift the mood Mike had brought his poems of wicked passion. Sighs does matter, he assures us. Ahhh.....

Telly time again: Grand Designs returned to Il Collegio this week, to show artists David Westby and Leonie Whitton in their Paglia paradise. I used to run writing courses at their first Il Collegio, in Tuscany, so it was brilliant to see how successful David and Leo have been in building this gorgeous new place themselves - and that means literally, brick by brick, with minimal budget or hands-on help. As Kevin Mcloud says. “Human beings do not chance upon Paradise. They make it.”

Back to Bath Lit Fest on Friday for a 'Writers of the World' event: 'Words in the Snow'- 15 short pieces by 3 spanish writers, read first in English and then in their original language. Yes folks that is 30 readings in all, in an hour, and though each piece was short their authors seemed aware of a race against time that allowed minimal contextual comment. Apparently they are stories told in Northern Spain around the fire "to fight against the long dark boring of the winter days" (lovely phrase) though little sense of an oral tradition emerged from these shaggy-dog, sci-fi, fables which seemed born from the rubble of more urban times. But it's always good, as my companion commented, to get out of our parochial bubble and connect to a European context.

From Spanish snow to Glastonbury rain... (that was Dave and Ben's opening song):
Subfuscous illumination at St James Vaults on Friday night but a crackling Oh What A Performance event, led by Dave Angus and with brilliant Byron Vincent as main man. There's really no-one quite like Byron. With his Dennis-the-Menace jumper and Please-Sir-Can-I-Have-Some-More? air of anxious innocence, he opens his set with a request to the audience to 'take a moment to lower your intellectual expectations' - but not below Nietzsche or you'd miss some of the poet's absurd, painful, and exquisite perceptions of an urban alcopops generation -
"beautiful but indistinct
like a Monet viewed up close."

Best of the rest... quite a lot, actually, including musical talent, but cos I do love to laugh I'm picking Rod Marks for the ridiculous rambling introduction to his Easter Bunny poem.

Great to hear 'spoken word' stuff on the radio - PolarBear on Colin Murray's show on Monday night. PolarBear was on the Apples&Snakes 'Exposed' tour in 2006 when I was one of the guest poets.
And if you missed my story on the radio on Friday and are thinking 'Dang it! I wish I had a chance to listen again!' then Afternoon Reading is the site to visit. (Thanks so much to those of you who've texted & emailed me such generous comments!)
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PEN was founded in 1921 (by John Galsworthy) to support persecuted and imprisoned writers across the world, and still vigorously does so, now in more than a hundred countries worldwide. On Friday night, choreographed by Victoria Glendinning, a group of ten more fortunate authors and poets gathered at Bruton's Hobhouse Theatre to read some of the words of these writers, several now assassinated or suicides in exile. They write, among other things, of a swallow's twittering, a spider spinning its web in the door of the cell, and it is in these luminous glimpses we see most clearly the indomitable spirit of human soul... the generous hospitality of our organiser afterwards was so overwhelming in contrast to the starkness of these experiences I hurried home to join PEN forthwith. Voices of Conscience indeed.

"It's a great pleasure to launch the Bath Literature Festival" says BBC Producer Sara Davies to a packed Guildhall audience as the radio4 afternoon stories for next week are recorded before our eyes. Certainly a great pleasure for me, as Alison Reid reads my story 'Mrs Somerville's Garden'. I'm there with Alison Clink - we've both had stories in the festival before, and take it turns to act as each other's groupie. Gill Edwards, another Frome writer, is in the line-up too, with a quirky list of tips on how to survive that dreaded School Reunion (top tip: don't steal more glam car to impress old boyfriend...) Stories will be broadcast next week at 3.30, Gill's on Monday 25th, mine on Friday 29th - come on, you know how to listen on line later if you miss out!

"The Romantics: James Fenton on Samuel Taylor Coleridge" next day was a quintessential Bath event, and slightly sombre despite the glittering lights of 6-tier crystal chandeliers. The gist of the talk appeared to be that Coleridge could be a rather difficult character, what with the opium addiction and the clinical depression and those suicide threats hidden in the rich loam of his landscape poems. James Fenton picks his words slowly, like plum tomatoes fingered from a trailing vine. Sometimes he finds one that's a bit squidgy. "Did I say Dorothy was the inspiration for Wordsworth's writing? I meant his wife Mary, of course." Cue muted chuckles.

And now for something completely different. "Probably the most charming film you'll see all year" says some website I found while googling Juno. There isn't a duff review anywhere, and nor should there be. Cracking script, brilliant cast, who to pick out? Well Juno, definitely, and her dad too, maybe because these two shared such brilliant dialogue:
“Hey there big puffy version of June-bug, what you been up to?”
“Just out dealing with things way beyond my maturity level.”
I was empathising with her way before that though, from “I don’t really know what kind of girl I am” to “I guess normalcy isn’t our style”. But she does find out how to love 'a part-time lover and a full-time friend'.
"A surprise hit and simply one of the most delightful films of recent times" enthuses the reviewer. If you want convincing, try the trailer.
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For a writer, television can be distraction or it can be research. I want both, as Pooh said when Rabbit offered him honey or condensed milk with his bread. (Pooh was polite enough to add 'Don't bother about the bread' which is how I feel about media news coverage.) Currently I'm following Lark Rise to Candleford, BBC's soft-as-putty Sunday night costume drama, which this week took inspiration from its title, being filmed in the dim ruby luminosity of candlelit night parlours when not in dewy soft-focus through leafy glades. The storyline was especially puttyish: a little girl abandoned alone. Exquisite as a porcelain doll she was, and touched the hearts of all around including, rather belatedly some might feel, that of her mother. "Put her in your bed, Laura" said Dorcas as little Polly reached round 3 of pass-the-parcel from cottage to castle. Nobody mentioned nits, though.

And the very wonderful Ashes to Ashes, as well as celebrating the Return of Gene Hunt (regular readers may recall my ode on this subject & will envisage the throaty appreciation inherent in these words), also features a left-by-her-mother little girl. Candles too, though these are cake candles so their function here is merely poignant. Will DI Alex Drake psychologically-profile her way out of the 1980s in time for her daughter's birthday...? Frankly my dear I don't give a damn, I just love the characters, the humour, the music, the narrative pace and most of all the terse laconic dialogue. Unmissable for any writer. Taster here.

The Words@FromeFestival team met on the night of the lunar eclipse (sadly cloud-covered before the dragon began to bite at 2am) to dot the I and cross the T of 'Literary' in the summer festival. Still time to enter the story contest!

Friday is the start of the London Word Festival which the posh papers are already lauding in terms like 'gritty' and 'illicit joys'... "Rap-inspired verse" whispers the header in the Times, adding quickly that "if that thought turns you purple with rage, you are probably not quite the target audience." Tee hee. Much as I like purple as a colour, I'm more of a mint green with envy I can't get there, so if you can, do!

This week's non sequitur: Strictly Come Duck Dancing on Ice - the frozen lake at Stourhead.

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness,
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

Perfect for Valentine week.... yes, except Thou might have been a sense of internal divinity rather than a lover, though possibly both. "In the West we make too big a distinction between physical love and spiritual love" suggests poet Paul Sutherland, talking about Omar Khayyam at the Bath Royal Lit & Sci Institute. We know so little about this Persian philosopher who inspired Edward Fitzgerald to create, as 'translations', those sensusal verses now accepted as the Ruba'iy. Khayyam lived in a place of beauty at a time of danger, and the urgency to seize life pulses through his words, whether that life is sufi inner spirit or epicurean erotic passion. Fitzgerald translated only about a fifth of the 500 verses in existance, and only a tenth of these are estimated to be by Khayyam himself. "Maybe we don't need to give a name to the writer, or any of the writers,' Paul suggests at the end of his sensitive and intriguing discourse, "maybe we should just treasure these as fragments that somehow survived a thousand years."




The Merlin artists' salon this year was held in the Bath Arms on the edge of the Longleat estate - very useful when debate reaches need-to-walk-in-the-sunshine intensity. The bedrooms have intimate names like Bird-in-the-Hand (where I nestled) and Axis-of-Medievil (ok I made that one up). Artistic discussion ranged from Is The Play Dead? (conclusion: at Death's door, might yet be pulled through...) to Why We Do It: why we embark on what dance choreographer Mark Bruce so lucently calls 'the long journey of making something that's about your life, and producing something which is special, and potent, and touches people'.



And back to the theatre on Saturday, to see the current Rejects Revenge production.
"To be honest, Here Be Monsters, created in difficult circumstances, is not a classic Rejects show" writes Lyn Barber in the Guardian. awarding the play two stars. One for the acting and set probably, but the second must surely be in consolation for those difficult circumstances, it can't be for the script. Is The Play Dead? well it will be if stage wit descends to injokey jibes about arts funding.

What women want... or rather, what's wanted of them: The Herbal Bed, at Salisbury Playhouse this month, is a play I wanted to see because it's based on actual historical records. William Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna is accused of adultery and, to save her husband’s medical practice and her lover’s reputation as well as her own good name, fights the claim through the ecclesiastical court. A word-conjurer like her father, Susanna magicks the verdict she requires from the stubbornly sceptical Vicar General, and persuades her reluctant co-conspirator their embrace in the night garden has an imperative that should not be held to account in the prosaic light of day. Peter Whelan’s play raises timeless questions of love, loyalty, and integrity which are still relevant to our very different sense of social morality.
After this immersion into women's social status in Elizabethan days it was fascinating at the opening night of The Taming of the Shrew to see the Tobacco Company's interpretation of that contentious issue. A hugely successful high-energy production which grabbed attention unflaggingly for nearly 3 hours. I'd never seen an uncut version before so had always missed the point of the 'play-within-a-play' structure. Above all this complex plot is about duplicity, with much swapping of coats and assuming false personas, as well as that (in)famous storyline of the role of woman in society and in marriage. 'Altogether disgusting' Shaw called Kate's final speech of submission, and Michael Billington dismissed the whole play as 'totally offensive'. I see the Shrew as a wonderful play about social role-playing. "Love wrought these miracles" says Lucentio ingenuously, when the dissembling of these false fathers, teachers, servants, and masters reaches its climax in preposterous confrontation - and for this Kate and Petruchio it seems true, as they play their conflict games for sexual frisson once the destructiveness of anger has been shown and understood.

Tenuous link time: Luxurious twilight Bath spa date with my friend Diana, free-lance journalist and now broadcaster. "A writer has to be fearless" is one of her mantras. Lured by sun and their generosity, I extend my sleepover to include lunch by the river near Pulteney Bridge with Diana and her partner David, also a writer. And here's Burrington Coombe on sunny Friday: See the teeny weeny cars in the bottom left corner? That's how high we'd climbed...



Wicked Passions, our Valentine 'Poetry Frome' event on Sunday, was held at the Media Arts Centre so performances could be recorded. Wiltshire poet John Richardson leading, first, a full workshop of passionate poets and, later, an evening of wicked readings. A wonderful day and evening of erotica - and that includes the supper too, courtesy of the creative imagination of Nicki Deli from 'Sagebury Cheese'. More pictures on Facebook!

Russell Brand markets himself as the Marmite of the media world. Love or loathe him, he wants only your dilated gaze - which I suppose makes him not really like Marmite at all as those squat pots are inanimatedly indifferent to our taste. Perversely, I used to consider him ok but not unmissable, somewhere between Moylesy and Scott Mills in the mid-list attention bracket, until my son, rightly intuiting incipient allure, gave me a copy of 'My Booky Wook'. Stylistically it's a chaotic blend of self-help casestudy, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Heat magazine, and must be compulsive reading for anyone who a) ever looked back at their life with mortification b) enjoys bizarre phraseology or c) likes to laugh. So that's 3 page-turning reasons for me. "I don't wanna get all Holden Caulfield about it," says our 'congenitally self-obsessed and solipsistic' hero looking back on the 'psychotropic fog' of his life, "but I do see the passage into adulthood as a betrayal of the innocent values of childhood. Even the most savage monsters that history or red-top tabloids can parade were once just soppy tots, and before that snug li'l foetuses - and I've never met a foetus that I didn't like yet."

Which segues seamlessly into writer/actor Pip Utton's double bill at the Merlin Theatre on Friday: "Adolf" and "Bacon". I much preferred the second. Frances Bacon may have been a bit on the depraved side but sadistic buggery between consenting adults is less horrible than genocide. And I liked the jazz and the TS Eliot quotes, and camp quips such as “champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends”, and the underlying sense of scraping for some kind of artistic truth like smearing paint from a canvas to uncover the reality: that flesh is meat. "Art should shock," the dead painter declares, in between reminiscing of life, love and lust: "The job of an artist is always to deepen the mystery."

And this is release week for another monster, Sweeney Todd with lovely panda-eyed Helena Bonam Carter being a very naughty girl as she convinces revenge-riddled Johnny Depp to butcher his clients, starting with the plump ones: "the trouble with Poet is how do you know it’s deceased? Try the Priest."
I know the characters have other names - the demon barber has 2 - but huddling in the Westway cinema for this gothic-lit Jacobean tragedy, we're all here for the real-life talents scrolling down the screen - especially Tim Burton.

While bad weather hits the headlines nationwide, Spring continues to creep cunningly into the southwest. Here's the lanes near my house, and the canal at Bradford on Avon.
Frome Writers' Circle decamped to Bradford for a meeting at Jo's cottage, with quirky love stories and tales of independent living. Some great opening lines, like "Is it possible to sue God?" and "Stella had flue, not the sedate kind..." Starters were this month's theme, so finishes will be the focus for next time.

Coming soon to Frome, another one-man show: Luke Wright, "Poet and Man". It's brilliant - I saw it in Edinburgh - and at the Merlin March 29th. Luke mails to say he's been plagarised by a guy called Gav, which is especially annoying as the ripper doesn't get the rhythms of the poems he's ripping off. The full & very funny story is on his new blog.
News of this and other upcoming local events will be on Poetry Frome. Big virtual bouquet to Harry and Helen of Knibb.net who've created this new site to promote and archive all our writerly activities. One to bookmark.

Monday was officially the most depressing day of the year, apparently, since we're over the excesses of December and still a week till payday. Unfazed, the Words@FromeFestival planning group had a really good meeting. January is always the crucial one: brochure copy nearly due, so grandiose plans have to be sharply tailored to dates, times, and venues. We've got a great programme this year, we think, with a huge range of writerly interests catered for and a mix of big names like Matthew (Life on Mars) Graham offering a workshop, to fringe fun like soapbox poets spouting every hour in Cheap Street. And the usual everything-in-between. What I love so much about Frome festival is that the 'literary' bit really does support writers with chances to learn and to share, so is much more participatory than many well-established fests crammed with talks that are really only glorified book-signings. Or am I just being overly partisan? Let's think...... mmm...No.

Lust is a strange compulsion, especially for places. For some people it's an I-must-go-down-to-the-sea-again yearning but for me it's Bristol docks. I've no idea why, perhaps I was a footbridge in a previous incarnation, or a swan, but I love that quayside, especially the walk from the marina to the Arnolfini, especially when - after a week of baleful rain and flood warnings - the water glitters under blue sky and sunshine. And here's Stourhead, where Greek gods lurk around the lake and lots of burgeoning things are happening on the trees and shubs. Persephone must be packing her case already.

In celebration of Burns Night, 'Oh what a performance' featured several poems with a scots connection on Friday, though some (like the Scots chiropodist's ode to feet, 'the perfect stocking filler') were a tad tenuous. The gallery room at St James Vaults was overflowing with Bath bards, and the constantly recurring theme - apart from phalluses, obviously - was climate change.
David Johnson as guest poet led the charge, managing to make doom entertaining as well as, well, doomladen.
Most popular 'from the floor' was Lee Coombe's medicine monologue, with warnings escalating from dizziness to visions of angels and existential angst. (Alan Summers, of With Words, comments: "marvellous poet/comic story raconteur, a cross between Michael Caine, Jack Dee, and Hannibal Lecter, only better looking and funnier.” )

Happy Birthday Serendipity! Someone mentioned the origin of this wonderful word for happy accidental discovery, and I find it's 254 years old tomorrow... coined by Horace Walpole on 28th of January 1754 in a letter to a friend about 'a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip' in which their highnesses discover things they were not in quest of. I'd love to say I discovered this by serindipitous accident, but actually I wikipediaed it.

And finally....
One of the pleasures of living alone is not having to shop for food, hence my serendipitous indulgence in the vibrant cafe life of Frome.
On Black Monday, as the papers are calling it though for fiscal reasons unconnected with my erratic eating habits, I survived on Alison's sandwich and some crisps at our evening meeting, so next day was out early & hungry for Jon's veggie breakfast at the Garden Cafe, served with a freshly brewed newspaper. Which is where I saw this great quote from Jane Birkin. Asked what she sees as the greatest threat to the arts, this wonderful sexagenarian said simply: "I can't see one - art is so important. If you shut down all the theatres, people would act in the street."
Here's to all of us actors in the street theatre of our lives.

"Physical Energy", sculpted by GF Watts as 'a symbol of that restless impulse to seek the still unachieved'. The moon glowed behind and the sun dazzled ahead, and Hyde Park felt more like October than January.
I was in town to see 'Marianne Dreams' at the Almeida, a transformational story in the mould of 'The Secret Garden'- a little girl fulfilling every little girl's dream: to become a healing angel and thus truly deserve love. For Marianne it's literally a dream. She meets her version of Mary's Colin in the night-time journeys of her imagination but, as she says, "What you do in your dreams is just as important as what you do in real life." Vibrant dance and charming acting, a delightful production leaving much to ponder. Like the restless energy of the sculpture, a metaphor of creativity for the writer too. "My head's empty" whines Marianne, staring at her pencil. "Well that's a good place to start" her mother tells her crisply, "anything may appear."

Thrilled to see at WH Smiths the speedy success of two recent books by writer friends: Debby's novel The Trouble with Marriage is planted firmly on the centre of the best-seller shelves, having charted at the half-way position of 52, while in the Business & Management section, Annie Lionnet's Brilliant Life Coach is at number 11!

And finally for this week...
If you've every wondered how many 5 year olds you could take in a fight, here's a handy website to work out your stats. I could manage 8, apparently. If I'd had experience of being chased by a swarm of pissed-off bees, or been prepared to use my adversaries as weapons, I'd have scored more. I also found out my body is only 24% effective as a human shield, though the value of my corpse is $4665. Presumably not after being shredded in a fracas, though. Great fun for all you writers needing other procrastination while waiting for your next turn on Facebook scrabble.

Poetry audiences don't drink enough, apparently, so Monday was the last of the Bath Can Openers "Poetry & a Pint" nights at the Raven pub (Quoth The Raven "Nevermore!" quipped Brian) before removing to The Rummer from next month. Linda Saunders and Sue Boyle were guests, sharing poems about journeys & time with each other and with us. "Time is to nature endless, and as nothing"... Linda wove these words from geologist James Hutton into a thoughtful piece on the ephemerality and endlessness of life itself. Her poems have been called luminous and tender, which they are, but both these poets' words leave a profound reflective aftertaste too.
And with time and journeying, and the new moon - Moon of Wands - I'm using the wafer-thin connection of Omar Khayyam for this image of my new stained-glass front door panal, created by talented Frome artist Tamasine Pritchard:
"The Bird of Time has but a little way to fly — and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing."
These are my swallows. I can see them from my study.

Poet Rose Flint led the first Self-Help Writers Group workshop of 2008 around a theme of resolutions. A full group, and some lovely pieces written and shared. Here's some trivia of mine, from the exercises:

Let us praise New Year resolutions, their pusillanimous tyranny,
and let’s praise their abandonment half way through January.
Let’s eat more cake, and talk about it too. Let’s praise
the boringness of diets, and that long debate about detoxing,
how much we don’t need this big glass of Pinot Grigiot
- would be just as happy without it! - oh go on then, I’m not driving.
Let’s admit that this new year will be just like the last: a wrangle
with discipline which your more articulate decadence will win.
Let’s praise the clichés and faux logic we’ll find to let us off the hook:
“Be gentle on yourself – it is winter time, after all.” “Men like love handles.”
Ah, the love handles of our lives, the soft slack self-indulgence
that under-bellies every good intention. Let’s praise bad intentions.
Take courage, take heart. A toast to whatever is hidden in the dark.

'The Trouble with Marriage' has caused a local furore. So 'Exwife' author Debby Holt tells us in her witty speech at the launch of this her third book at Waterstones on Thursday. Her husband is receiving compassionate calls requiring him to respond that he doesn’t think he has separated but will look into it... As there are too many of us to sit for a reading, Debby beguiles us instead with a passionate talk about love songs: specifically those of Eric Clapton, who had ‘something in common with Shakespeare, Hardy, and Shelley, in that they were wonderful at writing about the first throes of love but no good at all at writing about what happens when those first few weeks of passion are over - about how you keep a relationship going. That's the really interesting thing. Any questions?'
Yes. 'Will your book be in the self-help section?' Possibly not, but it's sure to be in the best-seller lists.

Richard II is my favourite Shakespeare play, possibly my favourite play, so what better way to start 2008 than at the RSC's stunningly fabulous production in The Courtyard Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon... (that's a rhetorical question so no punctuational query required.) It's the first of the history cycle, 8 plays tracing struggles that smouldered on through Shakespeare's time, with themes still hot today: new imperatives versus the old ways, charisma versus status, and the limits of loyalty. So many moments of the staging reached inspiration - that swirling dust on dethroned Richard which became the brutal setting of the new king's bloody ascension, the gorgeous costumes blending in tableau yet each subtly distinctive...
Jonathan Slinger was sensational as the flawed monarch, finding outrageous comedic moments in his tantrums even at the most tragic moments while never losing a single breath of the poignancy. At the end of the three hours my eyes were raw from silent crying, it was that good.

And now it's Epiphany, and the new year is well and truly launched. 2008 is the year of the rat, a time of renewal and fresh starts. We've got another month to hatch them, as the Chinese reckon from February 8th, but no harm in getting a few resolutions ready. Here's a great one that landed on my mobile today:

This is a toast to all us beautiful ladies for 2008!
For the men who are fortunate enough to have us,
the losers who had us and lost us,
and the very lucky bastards who are yet to meet us!

I don't usually go for Up-the-wimmin rallying cries but this I did like. Happy new year one & all. May our writing inspire us and delight us throughout 2008, and maybe even enrich us too.
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