The third week...
and we'd become such lotus eaters it might have been impossible to leave Paxos without the lure of the seaplane which whisked us off to Corfu at sunrise.
By sunset we're on Salamina island, after travelling by plane, car, and finally ferry across Thermopolae Straits, where the tiny Athenian fleet saved the City States from Persian invasion in 490BC. We're searching for the legendary cave of Euripedes, unknown even to the Rough Guide, for the setting of Steve's next play - which we heard last week has been shortlisted for production by Theatre West, so that adds zest to the quest.

Salamina isn't that big but the population's more than 10 times that of Paxos, and it's totally untouristified. So there's no concessions to non-greek linguists, not even the road signs, and our explorations need much ingenuity, many pidgin pleasantries, and Steve's knowledge of Russian (their alphabet is similar, apparently) before we reach Euripedes Kanteen, a friendly little bar on a hillside above the tiny bay of Peristeria. A steep clamber led us to discover... excavations of an ancient marble tomb, and a giant wild tortoise.


Time to move on to Delphi, where this often under-appreciated Greek dramatist would have seen his plays in performance at the amphitheatre beside oracle.

As befits a Greek odyssey, we had varied adventures before reaching Athens airport again, so I'm just going to post a few extra images from a place I still feel I'm wandering...

- morning view from our rooms in Krisso, near Delphi

- Orchomenos ancient amphitheatre

- a figure from a family votive offering to Apollo, 2nd Century BC (yes folks, that is 2,200 years ago....!!)



- American visionary Eva Sikelianus, who revived the tradition of amphitheatre drama in Greece in 1927

- that tortoise

The second week here... and we decided not to start thinking about our final week in Greece until our stay in Paxos was nearly over, until we suddenly realised this drizzled- honey time of late patio breakfasts, strolls above cerulean seas, and easy evenings with new friends, is actually scudding past with scary speed, and our flower-filled days and firefly nights will soon be over. So we're going to extend our stay on the island for five more days…
I’m confident now I know the island paths, and stride off with the map, up past olive grove hill and donkey Hote (we feed her apples) to Ozias with the little bar that’s never open – which is open - and after a while Steve says
“Look! The sea!”
And I say “Yes! Isn’t it beautifu!”
“But it’s on our right!”
“Oh! It should be on our left!”
“Well it isn’t!”
And we’re lost for 4 hours on the hilltops of Paxos, above rock falls and mysterious cerulean sea inlets, until we finally arrive back at the bar that’s never open and it’s closed, so we go home for a Mythos on the patio.



As I've been rhapsodising about these cerulean waters, I should be honest and admit there’s the usual Greek scribble of wires across every vista, with villas plonked like trout-pout lips on the coastal face at every turn. The beaches here despite the beauty of the bone-white stones, are the dirtiest I’ve ever seen - the Germans didn’t need to waste ammunition when they invaded, they could have dropped the skiploads of plastic bottles that litter the island today and despoiled it just as thoroughly.
One of my poems about the frustrating and beautiful enigma of Greece ends:
"Greek islands are like that.
Tainted enigmas, sainted sluts,
Smells of jasmine and lust."

But my guess is, as Paxiots are nothing if not sensible to tourism, those beaches will be cleaned up by the time the season begins officially next week.
As Dionysis told us tonight at Anesis (“laid back”) bar: they are no more than 60% ready yet. Why, there’s still one day to go before the season starts!
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Kalo Paska! Greek Easter is as far behind our as their summer is ahead. On Paxos island the paths through dappled olive groves are already swathed with golden carrot flowers and broom, wild gladioli and garlic, mint, oregano, and thyme. The asphodels are beginning to seed and the aphrodysiac blue hyacinths nearly over, but the pretty purple parasitic mock-orchid broomsrape is profuse, and real orchids are emerging. Jana, our friend and my reason for being here, is path-Minerva of the island. She recognises each trail literally stone by stone, since she's cleared most of them herself, and knows the history of each ancient cistern, mill, basilica, and village. The cisterns - sterna, locals call them, are amazing: there's no running water on Paxos (the main reason it's escaped mass tourism) and since the first inhabitants rafted across from Corfu, finding water has needed ingenuity and hard work. Wells were chiselled from the non-porous rock, and settlements developed around this essential supply plus the need to hide from pirates. Hence the profusion of ancient connective routes.
I've come to see, and write about, the reclamation of these old paths zigzagging across this tiny island. Almost every turn gives another glimpse of the sea, indescribably blue. Our villa pack describes this crystal water as aquamarine silk but there's turquoise brilliance too. "It's like headlights under the sea" says Christos.
We've spent the last 6 days blissfully wandering these wild flower paths, stopping by white pebbled bays, and after dark watching the strobe dance of the fireflies in warm night air below our villa on the southernmost tip of the bay.
On 'Big Sunday' we went with Jana and Colin to share a greek family meal of pascal lamb and eggs dyed blood red.
Monday was even bigger: a procession from Ipapandi Church in the oldest hillside village, with bell ringing, fire crackers, and chanting - and flowers, blood-red and pure white, strewn on the path of the icon all the way to the sea front at Lakka. Kristo aneste - Christ is risen, the followers greet each other.

But they also say here Poseiden fell in love with the nymph Amphitriti, and with his trident sliced off the most beautiful end of Corfu to make a paradise hideaway...
"This division between past, present, and future doesn't mean anything, and has only the value of an illusion, tenacious as it may be." - Einstein, apparently.

Sue Townsend said every time she sat down to do some serious writing she'd decide she really ought to defrost the fridge. I resisted that particular distraction for 8 years, but my kitchen's now getting a total makeover - by my friend Rog, hands-on designer extraordinaire - so what with essential scouring attacks on appliances & cupboards, and other local activities including a workshop at Longleat Centerparcs, there's very little writerly goss to report this week. Though I did find an entertaining site for surreal similes, for anyone prefers procrastinations that don't involve melting ice. Among 33276 options: Love is like a bumble bee. How true.

There will now be a month's intermission.
I'm off to Paxos, where the temperature is already over 20°C, to write about walking the footpaths of this exquisite island. I've been dreaming for weeks about sunlight on Greek waters... This image is from my hosts, Paxos Magic - other mouthwatering glimpses at their site too.

What will I miss most about the English spring I'm leaving, apart from friends and family? "Streetcar Named Desire at the Merlin" - my garden unfurling - and Gavin & Stacey, obviously. Oh to be one of Uncle Bryn's 17 Facebook friends...
Writers James Cordon & Ruth Jones seem unerringly to find the stairway from suburbia to surreal heaven, with awe-inspiring moments like Nessa reminiscing over her torrid affair with John Prescott: "many’s the time Dave Blunkett came over with his bitch". And if you're wondering, not even the writers know what happened on the fishing trip... James Cordon says his favourite comedies “have a touch of humanity, a touch of heart and soul”. Mine too.

Speak later.
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It's a long drive to Taunton Brewhouse Theatre from Frome, so Alison and I were hoping Funeral Games, billed as a "black comedy double act" would be more playful than grave. It was both, and brilliant. The physicality is awesome, the humour irresistible, and the deeper layers of damaged intimacy deeply moving.
Unpacked have a simple set: 2 filing cabinets used as prop stores, coffins, bunk beds, fight arenas, remembered landscapes, magicians boxes, even murder weapons.
Darren East is Henry, an undertaker, sole carer & lonely heir of a tyrannical father. Gilbert Taylor is Keith, a malevolent Artful Dodger of a baby brother, come home to relive the terrors and challenges of their childhood. Random extra roles are taken by the audience - we were in the front row so Alison was the horse. I was the one who betrayed Henry to Keith with a nod. I felt like Judas.

The final Words@FromeFestival meeting for 2008 was really more of a group pat on the back. We think we have a great programme. From soapbox poets and shop-front writers to a master-class with the creator of Life on Mars, there's something for every writer with a pulse. The brochure will be out mid-May - get on the mailing list now!

I'd love to tell you in a few words what "Seven Go Mad in Thebes" was about but I'd be about as successful as Stephen Hawkins explaining the origins of life. It's a witty spoof on Blyton and Greek mythology, it's a half-familiar history lesson of lamentable aggression that time-travels right up to Iraq, it's a passionate critique of the marginalisation of madness, and it's a outrageous farce. How do the Secret Seven come in to this story of conflict between the Kings of Thebes and Sparta, echoed in the rivalry of Tiresius and Cassandra? Why, through the magic pool, of course, to save the day by revealing the god Dionysus (or "some guy with a shrub on his head and a drink problem" as scoffed by King Lacedaemon, himself merely a guy with a stetson on his head and a Bush complex) was luring all the women to the hills for commercial gain not cultural freedom. Appalled by his conniving, everyone sings 'Summer Loving' and the show ends with a feel-good high and a flurry of cross-dressing.
Stepping Out is the leading UK mental health theatre group and they've been winning awards and delighting audiences for a few years now. Last night for this performance is Saturday, go if you can - check out the audience feedback for 54 reasons why!
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Questions, questions...

You would think, wouldn't you, now that April's here it would be safe to invoke the theme of Spring for a Poetry Cafe event? Indeed if climate change had a shred of compassion for my nerves, as Mrs Bennett might have said, this April would sizzle with summer warmth as it did last year. Instead we've had hail, sleet, and snow. Despite which, 18 poets seized the night, creating an amazing collaboration of warm words, deep thoughts, and delightful humour. Rosemary Dun, the spangly - or possibly spanking - host of Bristol's Big Mouth Cabaret, was our witty guest (do Soulmates profiles really request 'No Performance Poets' apply? Apparently so...) and seasonal themes ranged through cuckoos and the first glimpse of builders to Persephone and Sheelagh-na-gig. A great night, showing how with poetry anything goes: if you can think it and feel it, tell it. Many thanks to all who did.

What makes a short story memorable? Sally Flint and Ginny Bailey, editors of Riptide, drove up from Exeter on Monday to talk to the Library Writers Group about their selection criteria for this sassy new journal of 'short stories with an undercurrent'. Their 18 enthusiastic listeners scribbled down helpful tips like “Start a story as close to the end as you can” and "Know what shoes your character wears, and what's under the bed. You won’t use it, but know it." After hearing smatterings from stories in issues 1 & 2, copies were grabbed faster than tickets for Glastonbury.
Sally & Ginny are currently considering submissions for Riptide 3 - check their website. And on a similar theme, a new project Yellow Room Magazine seeks stories of up to 2500 words. Hey, why not send to both?

Is this the end of the line for the semicolon? asks The Guardian whimsically (G2 supplement, last Friday). There's a semantic storm whirling in France, apparently. "People don't like it, writers are afraid of it, journalists rarely use it" laments Sylvie Prioul, author of 'La Ponctuation ou l'art d'accommoder les textes'. Unsurprising with so Proustian a title that its author deplores this trend - I'm more curious about those 3 separate categories of non-user; as a journalist, a writer, and a person too, should I be triply averse? Prioul blames the English for an increasing succinctness of self-expression, thus pushing the poor point-virgule into redundancy. The Guardian editor has trawled famous authors for views 'For' and 'Against'. My fave is Irvine Welsh: "People actually get worked up about that kind of thing? I don't fucking believe it. They should get a fucking life." He's been put with 'Undecided'.

Luke Wright fears his baby face will never age and he will always look like a child, although eventually a rotting child. Maturing gracelessly is a theme that gives him plenty of material, as he takes us through the chapters of his life from school-days taunts of 'Big Gay Face' to 'I bet that you look good on the sofa', now that married life means a night on the tiles involves grouting rather than dirty dance floors and dreams of naughty-Arctic-Monkey-ness.
Around 60 people came to see Luke's brilliant 'Poet and Man' show at the Merlin, not a bad turnout for a boy bard on a wet & windy March night in a small town. Most stayed for the Q&A in the foyer, and quite a few came to the pub with Luke and support act DockersMC after that. From then on, the night's performance contained haze, as Northern Broadsides might say...

Sunday night was more of a cakes-and-tea event - excellent cakes too, well done Ramscombe Kitchen Foods, caterers to the Mission Theatre where I was guesting at Bath Poetry Cafe. Sue Boyle organises this monthly event with a wonderfully convivial atmosphere and wide range of varied voices, from Helen Moore's passionate commitment to ecological awareness to Duncan Tweedale's evocative word-paintings inspired by romantic mystic Caspar David Friedrich. And I especially liked the understated elegance and warm humanity of Emily Wills, whose second anthology is due out soon. These sorts of events, as one reader said, are so important, "not just for what we hear, but for what goes on under the surface." Thanks, Alan, for the image.


Ashes to Ashes ended this week, though disciples of the Gene Genie have a fourth coming to look forward to. How was it for you? For me, several scripts disappointed, and the mother-Drake storyline stretched fantasy into frankly tedious, but hey, it's still an excuse for a picture of that 'overweight, over-the-hill, nicotine-stained, borderline alcoholic homophobe with a superiority complex and an unhealthy obsession with male bonding'. Bolly-knickers never got a line as good as that one but Thursday nights will be the poorer now.
Meetings, meetings... Writers groups are just the best, aren't they. I've been to 2 this week. On Monday Rosie Finnegan hosted the Frome Writers Circle and shared her brilliant work-in-progress script, and on Tuesday the Fromesbury Group reconvened at Emily's for another extraordinary evening of sharing and listening... It's a challenge, a privilege, and a fate, says Emily of family life. And maybe the writer's life too.

And finally....Luke Wright has a wickedly scathing link on foreign travel, pointing out that "if you grew up in Warminster you're unlikely to find your soul somewhere in Goa". While I don't leave home to 'find myself', whoever that perverse elusive person may be, for me such journeys are a necessary irrigation. I'm a passionate advocate of my (now) home town Frome, but I need to know that each year will bring pilgrimages to distant places, that I'll see the sun rise and set over unfamiliar horizons and hear voices in other languages. Next trip for me, coming up soon now, is the Greek island of Paxos, to report on a project to reclaim ancient footpaths. Dionysus, god of wild vegetation, satyrs, and nymphs, will, I hope, be pleased.
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"Tonight's performance contains haze and nudity" promised posters in the Theatre Royal Winchester but technical difficulties prevented Northern Broadsides from getting hazy in this radical production of Romeo and Juliet with Staffordshire accents and contemporary street fashion. I went with Emily, as her nephew Liam is one of the multi-talented cast who sang, played, duelled, and clog-danced their way through this hate-fest so often mistaken for a love story. The real story is the conflict: family rows, city feuds, power-struggles at every level of the action. Director Barrie Rutter brought out the energy of these angry confrontations brilliantly - even Friar Laurence, often played as a doddering do-gooder, had his Ian Paisley moments. Less developed - perhaps inevitably - was the love-affair, best at showing the youth of Juliet and emo tendancies of her Mika-lookalike Romeo, rather than the poetry, tenderness, and eroticism of their encounters.
An electrifying production overall, though, surviving the collapse of the lighting system effortlessly. It's on tour now: check Northern Broadsides for venues.
We met up with Liam for lunch and a walk around the city's lovely old cathedral area. There's a Jane Austen house, and Keats apparently wrote his Ode to Autumn here, & perhaps that passionate letter to Fanny Brawne: "love is my religion - I could die for that. I could die for you. I cannot breath without you."
Romeo couldn't have put it better.

Mediaeval Verona to modern Zimbabwe, and back at the theatre, this time the Ustinov in Bath. ‘Breakfast with Mugabe’ was based on “tittle tattle”, the playwright tells us in his programme notes. This turns out to be an article headlined "Paranoid Mugabe dines with a ghost" by a journalist notoriously antagonistic to southern African liberation movements. Fraser Grace from this created a story of three brutal unscrupulous 'blacks' and a rather nice 'white' who tries to help them, and in reponse one murders his wife, one takes his land and the third beats him up. What’s the authorial message here? That Ian Smith was right? This play won the John Whiting Award for best new play 3 years ago but I couldn’t join in the applause.
Reviews I googled were bafflingly uncritical of this thinly structured piece of drama, apart from Victoria Brittain discussing the original production: "Zimbabwe in 2001 resonates with Britain in 2006. What's in Blair’s head? We know we don't have a clue. But when it comes to the same conversation about Mugabe, the old African stereotypes come up and we say that he's mad. Political theatre is now more fashionable than ever. Robert Mugabe, routinely demonised by the British media as a larger than life African tyrant - Idi Amin with brains - was an obvious dramatic target."

Time for a picture of dancing daffodils, I think, now the Equinox has ushered in summer and the season of Lindt chocolate bunnies is over. This is Longleat, where Steve & I walked in sleet and sunshine on Saturday.
And as spring is the theme for the next Frome poetry cafe, I'll end this post with a fistful of quotes:

Poetry can communicate before it is understood ~ TS Eliot

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world ~ Shelley

Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance ~ John Keats

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement ~ Christopher Fry

Poetry is life distilled ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits ~ Carl Sandburg

Poetry is just the evidence of life ~ Leonard Cohen

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese ~ G.K. Chesterton

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The wind was so wild on the way back from the Isle of Wight tonight the FastCat was nearly cancelled. Wonderfully hospitable though our venue was - it's run by Yannis Andricopoulos, also Oberon to the magic island of Skyros - I do feel the 10 participants on my course deserved better weather while finding their Writers' Voice. The Grange is only a spit from the lovely sandy coastline at Shankhill, but the rain spitted back throughout most of our weekend stay, though this didn't diminish the exuberance of a talented and delightfully goodhumoured group. You know something's gelled when the entire course reconvenes after a demanding day's work at the village inn (helpfully named The Village Inn) for late-night supper together.
The retro charm of the Isle of Wight featured in several pieces of writing: 50s? 70s? We couldn't quite decide...

Pastel shades on the seafront have the dainty dilapidated charm of Miss Marple's theme tune, but the live music at the pub was Eagles era. What will I take with me? Full grey skies, golden gorse, pewter seas. Generosity, warmth, laughter. Passion, integrity, constant coffee.

According to Ted Hughes, Ovid was interested in passion too, I'm told by the programme notes of 'Tales from Ovid: Metamorphosis', as presented by the A/S Level drama students at Frome College. It's a vibrant and unequivocal production, all the more impressive as the students apparently shared the direction as well as, literally, the characters they portrayed. This is passion in extremis, mutating through violence into something surreal... I'm trying to make a link here with the tempestuous sorrow Lorca talks about, in order to morph into a final comment on the concept of duende, which I had never heard of until this week. Duende is the kind of inexplicable sadness at the heart of many songs - not with the poignancy of tristesse, but with a force that 'jets up like blood'. I read about it in the Back page of the Guardian (which I bought for the Philip Larkin booklet): "a terrible question that has no answer...Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically with it. Tom Waits can summon it.'
...Sounds like a Writers' Voice to me.

Niamh led this month's Library Writers' Group with some canny thoughts on 'Don't get it right get it written' - how to deal with deadlines and discipline and what Zoe calls the 'inner wallpaper' of self-judgement. Learn to love editing, Niamh advises, and don't be deterred by lack of experience. "Make it a strength to come to your subject as an interested ingenue - we have enough experts."

To say that Cube's modernised version of Hamlet has been controversial round here is a like saying The Satanic Verses raised a few eyebrows. I really enjoyed it. It's true the actor taking the title role was tiresomely twitchy, and Gertrude and Horatio seemed to have wandered in from Abigail's Party, but this is a stunning interpretation of a play so full of quotations as to be almost impossible to make fresh and vivid. From the opening (Streets) track onwards, the music added energy, and the set - a silver wall variously claustrophobic, Big-Brother-intrusive, and screen for memories & nightmares - was brilliant. I loved the unexpected, sometimes outrageous, liberties taken with the script: letters as mobile texts, tequila shots and happy-slapping, that famous soliloquy sharded into dialogue. A terrific way to remind us the essential elements of Hamlet are timeless: dysfunctional families, violent passions, love, loss, and loneliness.

Serious bit this week - and I've chosen this picture because the well-known author of 'Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis' is stroppy about website exposure, even though googling Wendy Cope gives 145,000 references. But I'm going to talk about her anyway.
What do you do if you want a smart quote, maybe a few lines of verse perhaps already half-remembered? You look on the web, right? Wendy Cope thinks: wrong. “It isn’t ok – you have to fork out for the book” she asserts, in an article on copyright which is reprinted – obviously by repayment to the author – in the current issue of ALCS news. It’s a Grumpy Old Woman rant, and I don’t know how seriously Ms Cope intends it to be taken since she admits it even annoys her that her words will still be making money after she’s too dead to spend it, but it does raise serious questions about this new world of wider access to literature. And I disagree with her at just about every level.
For one thing, I don’t agree there’s a direct & discouraging correlation between downloading and book-buying. I’d suggest that those who find and enjoy poems on the web are more, not less, likely to buy poetry collections - just as musicians recognise that initial interest from downloading & copying encourages word-of-mouth promotion and hence CD sales. "If poetry was only available to book owners we wouldn’t have our rich popular culture", Emily points out as we discuss these issues over coffee. And as it’s this accessibility to light verse that makes her the ‘good money' she so desires, what is her problem? It’s like an artist, having sold a painting to one buyer, griping that others will enjoy sight of it too. These enriching glimpses create the buyers of the future, in every area of the arts.
Another bee in Ms Cope’s bonnet – her cliché not mine – is literary festivals presenting readings of other people’s work without clearing permissions. I’ll stand up here and admit it: I am Spartacus. Arts festivals – ours anyway – work on budgets that make shoestrings look tough as towlines, and no-one makes big money out of poetry events. Clearing permissions is incredibly time-consuming and can be prohibitively costly. Last year I organised an event called Desert Island Reads at which writer Steve Voake read from a little-known collection of stories by American writer Frank Huyler. Neither Steve nor any other contributor was paid, but five of the audience went away and bought that book. And we were within our legal rights in introducing this author to a new audience, as the law is luckily not always an ass: ‘Fair comment’ specifically allows such use of material still in copyright as long as there’s no libellous intent.
So I have no sympathy with Ms Cope’s stance. There’s a lot of us out here working hard to make a world where her verse, and the poetry of others, will be more widely known and appreciated. We use real events and we use the web too. The internet has impacted our world – she’s a beneficiary, not a victim.

And finally... On 29th March, Luke "The best young performance poet around" Wright comes to Frome's Merlin Theatre. Book soon (01373 465949), bring friends - I promise you this is a knock-your-socks-off show. Appraisal above from The Observer - here's a few more reviewers' verdicts: "A rip-roaring raconteur..." "This man is a genius." "...electrifying." "Britain's brightest young bard ... hugely engaging performer, without a trace of pretension" "..genuinely funny and charming.. quick wit and blinding talent... a born performer."
Perhaps best not wear any socks...