I'm disconcerted to find myself in agreement with Salman Rushdie on the Slumdog subject - although he is considerably more irascible about this 'banal fluff.. slum tourism', commenting in the Guardian: 'To watch your home town's story being told in this comically absurd, tawdry fashion is, finally, to grow annoyed.'
Back in Bristol, Polly Teale from Shared Experience, was at Bristol Old Vic to reveal 'how to weave a more physical approach into the building of character' to sixteen keen would-be playwrights. Hurtling around with chairs and intensive text analysis combined to confirm: objectives and obstacles are the essence of drama. "A good scene can be quite spare, a lot of it will come from the playing of it."

Bath Literature Festival boasts 'debate discovery passion and inspiration' and like all good festivals there's far too much to do. I went to hear Debby Holt, Sarah Duncan, and Robyn Sisman discuss the place - & status - of romance, an entertaining debate which proved a point made by Robyn: the novels may be light but that doesn't mean they're easy to write, despite the literary prejudice against romantic comedy. As Sarah said: women's issues are no less valuable than man-genres like Goth the Impaler. But can the complexities of a relationship be conveyed in a novel designed to entertain? asks chair Caroline Kington. Debby says an emphatic 'Yes - you can make a point more effectively in a funny way." I agree, and I wish I could remember who said Humour tells the truth, but faster.
Writer and publisher Diana Cambridge has a neat take on relationships too: they're our way of warding off death, she suggests, by making life dangerous and dynamic. We met for long nibbly lunch at Cafe Rouge, and later I was back in the Guildhall ready to be dazzled by the heavyweight talents of literary award-winners Helen Dunmore, Jane Gardam, and Rose Tremain. The brochure blurb predicted converse on writing about love and yearning, youth and old age, loneliness, sex and exile. Irresistible. In the event they discussed form, research, and something defined, somewhat pompously, as 'the writerly frame of mind'. Perhaps it's a problem of format. Mathematically, a trio of writers talking should be three times as interesting a solo subject in the chair, but actually this triple division of topic feels superficial even in a heavy-going event like this. Paradoxically the chick-lit authors in the morning event achieved interactive discussion more successfully to create a sense of reciprocal interest. Or maybe it was the chandeliers in the great hall upstaging all below.

And finally... a word & image miscellany from here, there, and beyond:

"It's fun and it's difficult but that's the combination that, sometimes, gets you through" - Larry from U2 on making music. True of writing & life too.

"It's the best rush I've ever had and I'm utterly, hopelessly, addicted to it" - T.C.Boyle on writing. He's allegedly done 'vandalism, alcohol, drugs, maniacal driving, and the writings of Kerouac' so he should know.

LET DE MAN SPEAK, LET DE MAN BE HERD - Islamic hiphop site.
(Heartfelt echo is from a shopfront in Frome.)

"Can written language ever capture and recreate spoken language, or is it a place where the book is a lesser place than the tongue and the ear?"
Ian McMillan's piece in The Reader is about writing in dialect, but i think it's a good question for every writer.


'In all Fairhurst's work there is a powerful human presence through actions, intervention, emotion and humour.'
Arnolfini guide to the Angus Fairhurst exhibition, on till the end of the month.


One of the first things you learn as a writer is that you write what you can, not what you want. - Gabriel Garcia Marquez, quoted by Debby.




Crysse finds her niche in the temple of Diana at Stourhead.

Emerging blinking into the sunlight from the nightlights of Bristol's theatreland, I find Bedminster shops are full of.... theatre. Trading Local is a Show of Strength initiative, using 19 shops to stage 5-minute monologues based on their own location and trade - each one repeated 3 times, so by scampering up & down North Street an ardent audient could catch them all. I didn't manage that, but the ones I saw were great: among them Bernard the table lamenting his lot at the antique shop (Oliver Millingham gave great voice to Matthew Oven's tale from beneath candlewick drapings) Tracy Wall's recreation of the Poet Butcher, a real-life character who sold doggerel along with faggots in the 19th Century, and Caleb Parkin's Units of Memory at Compuwave which took a poignant look at "life broken down into its componant parts." And I loved the reluctant tattoee musing on her graphic options, noting the sign on the door: "No Children, No Drunks - I should think that just about rules out anyone who wants to come in." Satiric comedy may seem easy; evoking warmth rather than a patronised stereotype isn't, but writer Joe Hobbs & performer Kim Hick succeeded.



And as Slumdog Millionnaire scoops the ultimate award on Oscar night, my question is this: how can brutality & sentimentalism emerge as 'the feel-good movie of the decade'? Fabulous soundtrack I agree, with brilliant camera work, and great montage ending, but the storyline was thin as the characterisation and the fairytale is embedded in realism as bloody as the rags on the eyesockets of the blinded beggar boy.
It's complex, I know. I wouldn't begrudge director Danny Boyle his Tigger-bouncing moment of glory or Simon Beaufoy his credit for the screenplay, but you have to search to find the name of the original writer: Vikas Swarup. And over in India there are riots over the 'humiliating' term in the title.
But is it the dog or the slum that's the problem? A perspective from an Indian journalist in NYTimes insists that Its depiction as a slum does little justice to the reality of Dharavi... (which is) safer than most American cities. The crowd is efficiently absorbed by the thousands of tiny streets branching off bustling commercial arteries. Also, you won’t be chased by beggars or see hopeless people loitering — Dharavi is probably the most active and lively part of an incredibly industrious city. People have learned to respond in creative ways to the indifference of the state — including having set up a highly functional recycling industry that serves the whole city.
Promoting prejudice, creating misinformation - even fear of reigniting the violence against Muslims of 1992 so graphically depicted in the film.... so although the title itself is merely a slur from the bad-cop who turned good-cop, objections are not as simple as one online comment seems to think: "Tough Shit. They don’t have any money to see it anyway."

Censorship is also the theme of Chimes of Freedom, a Spoken Word event at the Merlin on March 19th featuring poems and prose by writers across the world who lacked - and lack - the luxury we see as our right: 'Freedom of Speech.' It's on behalf of PEN, and former president Victoria Glendinning is joining the lineup of local writers who'll be reading. If you're in the area, come along.

A five-star revue from Venue for On the Edge: "What characterises all four plays is efficient writing, crisp direction, and therapeutic humour... Remedy for winter blues available now at the Alma Tavern." And the audience feedback is great too. (It's all on the Stepping Out website, click on the left-hand boxes.) Makes me come over all Kate Winslet. Other purr-making comments from Bristol online listings ".. each story involving wonderfully unique storylines, all delivered with unwavering energy, this is an intriguing and satisfying way to contemplate serious issues, provoking laughter throughout a week of almost nightly sell-out performances."
And a huge thanks to my friends - more than 30 of you - who swelled the audience, and the even-more who sent good wishes when there were no tickets left.

Moving south, and back in time... Road Hill House was the scene of the most sensational murder case of the 19th Century, and arguably responsible for the development of crime fiction as the genre we know today, with a wily sleuth uncovering secrets & lies from tiny clues and psychological tells. The building was renamed Langham House, and local spelling has changed to Rode, but it's the village I used as setting for my first novel Frozen Summer, so I found Kate Summerscale's account of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher particularly fascinating. "The dizzying expansion of the press in the1850s prompted worries that readers might be corrupted by the sex and violence in newspaper articles" she explains: "The new journalists shared much with the detectives; they were seen alternately as crusaders for the truth and sleazy voyeurs.” Freud recognised that therapy was psychic detection: "No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”

Still a few months before the 2009 Frome Festival brochure is out, but 2008's Short Story winners and details of this year's competition are now on the Festival website. Watch, as they say, this space.
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Bristol Evening Post has done us proud with their Crackerjack review of On The Edge. "...barrowloads of deft writing, some absolutely lovely comic acting and a hit of thought-provoking conundrums. Chock-full of bright ideas, a tight group of actors and a slick series of sets manage to punch far above their weight... The voracious appetite among Bristolians for good new playwrights continues to be well fed."
My favourite bit is being nominated for a medal for describing baklava as “a hamster drowned in honey”. Thanks, Sophie Lomax - and your notion of a 15-minute play as "theatrical espresso" deserves a mention in despatches too.

Reading Matters on BBC4 set out to prove that words can literally electrify us, and reading about an act creates the same brain response as doing it. Science writer Rita Carter led us through this mental maze in a blue pashmino and Tory hairdo looking like she was off for a bridge night rather than an MEG scan. Our brain, she explains, was never designed for reading or writing. It remoulds itself, like a lego truck remade into a tractor, combining the oral linguistic function with the ability to distinguish between prey & predator in order to create a new ability: distinguishing between symbols & interpreting them as language. Hence empathy. It was all very convincing. Use it or lose it, said Rita, because your brain is still on the move.

And speaking of empathy, I've been meaning to say something about Being Human (TV, BBC3) because it has more interesting stories about half-lives than smiting, rending, and shooting them to bits. Humanity, not demonising, is what the world needs now... and it's better scripted and funnier than Demons too. I'm getting very fond of the characters: Annie the ghost with self-esteem issues, George the rueful werewolf and gorgeous Mitchell the vegetarian vampire. ( Mitchell's prequel is a neat story in its own right.)
Annie's a spectre after my own heart: last week, determining to find out why she's remained trapped in a shared house in Bristol since her demise, she announced "I don't know how, but I'm pretty sure it will involve some highlighter pens and a large pad of paper." George's new thing is dating: "We need some ground rules about guests," he tells Mitchell: "- like, don't kill them."
And there's lots of love and sex and death too, what else do you need for a Sunday night sit-com?
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The snow brought Frome not so much to a standstill as a slide. The main road was briefly closed, with cars abandoned at odd angles or, more ominously, slipping backwards down the hill with horn on full alert. Police advice not to travel seemed a good call, so reluctantly I missed the final rehearsals of the On the Edge plays - but the thaw came just in time for Sunday night's Love Cafe in Bath.

Enterprising organisers Sue Boyle and Caleb Parkin had created a scripted evening which survived the weather warnings with compliant readers standing in for absentee poets. "I think we've got the aggressive butterfly" said Sue, doing the roll call, "do we have the melancholy waitress?" We did, and all the humour and pathos you'd expect from the night's theme. 'Je m'aime' was an email sonnet collaboration between Caleb and me, performed by Arabella Butler and Paul Hurley with Caleb on cello - all I contributed on the night was some Jane Birkinesque passionate gasping. Great fun - check it out on Youtube here.


Still on things lyrical, the next Frome Poetry Cafe is on March 4th, with a theme of celebration. Just because it's been a long winter.


From stage to page: Diana Athill’s memoir Somewhere Towards The End, recipient of the Costa award for biography. The Daily Mail published an extract focusing on her sex life, apparently with much the same view as Samuel Johnson had of women expressing opinions: "like a dog's walking on his hind legs: It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all."
“The woman who worked her way through the Kama Sutra in her sixties – and at 91 refuses to worry about death - reveals how to grow old disgracefully” marvelled the Mail header, adding as further headline tasters The delights of late-flowering lust and Wear what you damn well like.
The DM has never been bothered by tedious constraints like consistency and was soon back on ageist form with an acid comment on 75-year old Joan Collins posing in Hello: "Hardly conventional for a pensioner."
Guardian columnist Michele Hanson responded tersely: "And what is a conventional pensioner meant to wear? Maroon, or navy, or beige... tracksuit bottoms with elasticated waists, a sure sign that your sex life is no more.. but then none of that matters, when one is a "pensioner". As Michele's rant points out, a pensioner can be anyone from around 60 to over 100. "That's people with up to 40 years between them, all lumped together... No one would expect a five-year-old and a 45-year-old to wear the same frock."
All true. But I wish I was enjoying the old lady's memoir more. It seems sad that a woman who was once a courageously unconventional thinker now muses on misapplied lipstick and Max Factor facecream. It's unpretentious and honest, and the affectionate side of her bohemianism is a delight, but was it really the most interesting memoir the Costa board received? Or is this an example of what Marlene Dietrich called the Deathbed award: doled out indulgently and with a fine sprinkling of cynicism.
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The annual Salon for affiliated artists of the Merlin theatre coincided with the heaviest snow seen in the southwest for 18 years, a fact of special significance as our venue was the Bath Arms, a charmingly eccentric hostelry on the Longleat estate... delightful for rambling in the forest but disconcerting when the track to the main road glazed into a skating rink.
We talked, among other associated artistic things, of the influence of social networking filters on modes of learning. By coincidence or zeitgeist, I'd been listening last week to Rupert Sheldrake on the radio propounding something similar with reference to the whole of nature. Not that crystals or creatures have social networking sites, but that they evolve, as we do, through collective memory. 'The laws of nature didn't spring into being fully formed at the moment of the Big Bang, like a kind of cosmic Napoleonic code,' he says: 'Through morphic resonance, the patterns of activity in self-organizing systems are influenced by similar patterns in the past, giving each species a collective memory.' So they're not actually laws, just habits. Sheldrake's classic A New Science of life was tagged by one reviewer "the best candidate for burning there has been for many years" when first published, which brings me neatly on to censorship and Jaqueline Wilson.
Yes, amazingly, the Children's Laureate and Queen-Mum of young fiction faced removal from the shelves of Asda until her publishers agreed to change the word 'twat' to 'twit' in her new book My Sister Jodie. Over 150,000 copies were already sold, apparently, before 3 complaints came to light. Who are these prits, winkers, and siddoes, one wonders.

Back On the Edge, rehearsals are increasingly fascinating. On Wednesday we were in the tiny Upstairs Theatre at the Lansdown, snow whirling outside, and I quizzed Ollie about how to become a character - or in his case two characters in the same scene, which needs different-coloured highlighters for a start. He learns his lines as a monologue because, he says sensibly, he wouldn't know what other people are going to say. His process is to decide what the character wants, what's stopping him, and what would happen if he can't get it. When he's got these intentions, he works line by line to decide emotional action. Thrilling to watch the drama emerging from its script chrysalis - Venue magazine has previewed our production and tagged it as their Choice in the listing, but there's more snow forecast for the first night...
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Chris Loveless, founder/director of Fallen Angel Theatre Company, says black comedy is his favourite kind of drama. Which is great, because he's directing my play Thursday Coma and I've so enjoyed watching him and the actors work on "making the invisible visible" - including the humour lurking, I hope, in the darkness. "What's the intention in that line?" he asks, as we sit round the table deconstructing my script over tea and Oliver Millingham's chocolate brownies, until I'm really not sure any more and my words start to look like soldier ants.
Challenging, and immensely exciting.

Oh What A Performance! was the typically quirky title Dave Angus chose for his monthly poetry event in St James Vaults in Bath. Dave, who so sadly died last month, was a droll performer as well as - in his own words - a militant atheist, so it was appropriate that the poetic community celebrated him with song, sonnet, and story in a memorial OWAP night last Friday. Organised by Richard Selby and attended by about a hundred people, the atmosphere was more upbeat than mournful, with many like Bard of Bath Master Duncan paying tribute to Dave's encouragement. Mary Palmer summed up: "Dave was really good at wrapping up a serious message in a lot of humour." Personally, I'll always remember him explaining the psychedelic connection between The Owl and the Pussycat and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds at last year's Frome festival. Sailing, flying... all our stories are journeys.
Humour is truth, and as Peter Ustinov said, "Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious."
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Cotswolds Conference Centre almost seems too comfortable for a Creative Writing course: warm rooms, free newspapers and constant coffee - don't real writers need an icy garret? or at least a draft and no choice of puddings. Apparently not; despite the indulgent surroundings of Farncombe Estate, my weekend group was brilliant, gelling easily and producing an inspiring range of styles and stories.
I drove home on a high, at least until the road disappeared in a sleet-storm that drowned out the radio and obliterated the landscape. It was as if all the local rivers, partially frozen, had reared up like pythons before shaking themselves back down to earth. Poor naked wretches that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and raggedness, defend you? a mentalist monarch with realm-rage might well have wondered.


Rehearsals for my plays in the On the Edge programme at the Alma Tavern Theatre begin this week and director Pameli Benham invited me to come along for the thrill & privilege of witnessing my words brought alive by professionals. The actors, Meg Whelan and Kirsty Cox, are both fabulous, morphing into their roles before my eyes and turning Pameli's diningroom into a Greek island terrace even with no sunshine spot or potted geraniums. My response to this empathetic interpretation was an intense desire to rewrite the entire play - or rather, to edit ruthlessly. I started extracting lines like they were prickly pear splinters. Exposition - Out! Repetition - Out! Gratuitous - obvious - cliché - out, out, out !!! Best fun I've had with my boots on all winter.
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Idiot Colony, at the Ustinov last week, was devised by Redcape Theatre from the shockingly true stories of women institutionalised during the 1940s for having children by American GIs. The 1913 Mental Deficiency Act was in operation till the 1950s had a 'moral deficiency' clause and could be activated without a psychiatrist - it only needed the prejudice and hostility of two GPs and a relative. The three women performers evoked their characters stories succinctly and the 'business' was impressive but what touched me most was the words. Clever and self-confident performances but less stage skill and more speech would have made it even more emotionally memorable.

Nikki Bennett's party at the Bath Royal Sci & Lit Institute sounded a little bit daunting, with twenty-five performers lined up. It was actually a delightful evening, smoothly run with a generous bar and fabulous buffet and everyone keeping to their prescribed 3 minutes. A really lovely night.

And on this inauguration day when America was told "the world has changed and we must change with it", if you've ever wondered who writes Obama's speeches, the name (according to the Independent) is Jon Favreau and he's 27. Obama disgorges his thoughts and Favreau crafts them into prose, and the pair then work in tandem. With disgorged thoughts like "Our patchwork heritage is a strength and not a weakness" and "We have chosen hope over fear", I guess the the soundbites write themselves.

And finally... Bath Poetry Cafe is putting on a Love Fest for February, with feisty Caleb Parkin and foxy Sue Boyle in charge. If you say it's a love poem, then it IS a love poem, says Sue, and wants "as many cafe poets and audience as possible to get a chance to read" in this UNUSUALLY CONVIVIAL, ENGAGING AND ORIGINAL EVENT. Tickets, from bathpoetrycafe@googlemail.com, are going fast.
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"As you get older you realise that everyone is odd, in different ways" says Debby Holt at the lively launch of her new book Love Affairs for Grownups. This is a story about two odd people who - like the rest of us, according to the author - do not get wiser as they get older. "They're constantly stymied by things that happened in the past which they don't talk about." Debby ended with a short reading, just enough to show the novel is funny and fascinating, and invited questions. "Do you think your heroines are getting tougher?" asked one gentleman. "They're drinking less" Debby agreed.

The January meeting of Words@ Frome Festival always has a sense of vague urgency. The festival - voted by Time Out the best in the UK last year - isn't till July but brochure copy has to be ready next month... New events, regular favourites, and the return of the popular 'Authors and Publishers' day at the library.

Recording Miss Daisy:
Quantock Close, our team effort local radio soap, is progressing and Mike is working on other writerly programmes. Here's me reading my adaptation of Daisy Ashford's classic The Young Visiters as a 5-part 'Book at Bedtime'. All recordings should start with salmon and wine, in my opinion.

And only a week now before rehearsals for my plays at the Alma Tavern Theatre begin, only three-and-a-bit weeks before the opening night!
Bookings 0117 9467899 or online here.

Silly story of the week: American author JF Lewis is in trouble with his local church because his humorous debut novel Staked features a vampire. If it had featured a tortured man with blood dripping from his head and side as he died in agony, maybe that would have been ok.
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Exciting news: my plays, showing at the Alma Tavern Theatre next month, have been cast: Oliver Millingham, whose work I've seen at the Tobacco Factory, Jo Lancastle, and Meg Whelan. It all seems so much closer now. They're part of the 'Writing in the Margins' programme of short plays: my two are Thursday Coma (when it's your mother's funeral and your estranged brother is arriving so you can't see your therapist, a quick coma seems a good solution) and Your Time Starts Now (co-listening? just like conversation, isn't it? what could be simpler...)
Richard (Clockers) Price says every character you create is yourself: "How do I create a young black urban drug dealer? He’s me. Everybody’s the author, it’s all fiction." That was on Front Row this week. Anne Enright said something similar in The Guardian: "Writing fiction is a habit of flipping the world or tilting it... the way children make things up all the time. We are just picking up a fish finger and flying it across the dinner table: "Vrrrrrrrrrrrr vrrrrrrrrr vrrrrrrrrrroooooooom".

And on the subject of flying fish fingers, I'm loving Demons, a brilliant new vampire series with a wicked script. Gene Hunt turns Ghostbuster to aid novice warrior Luke in battling unbeings and entities. "We don’t care to name them" he growls in a softly unidentifiable transatlantic accent, " We just smite 'em."
Luke is shocked at the interruption to his revision and unfamiliar with the opposition.
"Is that an entity?"
"No Luke, that is a rat."
They meet Gareth from the Office wearing a beak, and set about smiting him. "Very well smit, if I may say so" concedes the unbeing before combusting. Absolutely excellent.


Still on a vampiric theme, Van Helsing, a few years old now but shown this week on ITV2, is overlong but highly entertaining. Anna Valerious, aka Kate Beckingsale in a costume blending grechen with catwoman, must kill Dracula to save her family from purgatory and Transylvanians from being swooped on by a plague of winged vampires. Igor and Frankenstein are involved too, and Van Helsing has a sidekick friar called Carl, like the Lone Ranger and Tonto. There’s an awful lot of whooshing about and things flung dizzily around before exploding but the best scenes are frankly spoofy: the undead giving a whole new meaning to hissy fits, and Carl like Bond’s Q showing Van Helsing his state-of-the-art equipment (a cross bow). David Wenham as the friar had most of the offbeat lines: "Why does it smell like wet dog in here?" he mused after a particularly gruesome werewolf battle. As Richard Price says, “If you put the way people really talk on the page, it would be interminable... you take all that stuff and compress it into a shapeliness, and it’s fake but it does have the appearance of, wow, this is how people really speak."

Frome library writers' group met this week for an excellent workshop led by Val Fellows on the timely topic of New Beginnings, reminding us that every next moment fits that category. New beginnings means starting from now. It doesn’t have to be box-fresh, this start. It only has to be illuminated by mindfulness of mortality, knowing that in this moment we are alive.

Footling footnote of the week: According to stats, the average Briton spends two-and-a-quarter hours every day feeling anxious. I wish I knew how they cope with the other 21 and three quarters. I grade my anxieties from 1 to 12, which happens also to be the scale used by Philip Glenister's smiting character for the nastiness of entities and unbeings.
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It’s the first day of January and my FB friends....
- Are eating chocolate cake
In a house full of dogs and hangovers
Wishing everyone glucklich dingdong

- Are wearing a woolly hat tis cold today
Reading Plato in bed
Saying happy new year, ya mofos!

- Are baking bread
Having watched a massive firework display
Wishing everyone a brilliant sparkly starry creative and loving new year

- Are yoga-ing by the red sea
Saying thanks for a fun night
And hoping all your dreams come true

- Are wondering why it doesn’t snow in Hong Kong
Yelling Happy New Year from Glastonbury Tor
And wishing everyone all we wish ourselves
(adding confusingly
May you all break eggs with sticks.)


So we made it to the end of the year. And now, slipping between melting ice-caps and teetering past abandoned outlets of retail giants, another precious little New Year tiptoes in. Time for a detox, a reprogramme at the gym, and a new To-Do writing list... my focus is on scripts, with Frome writers' soap Quantock Court scheduled to go out on local radio soon, and my 2 short plays on in Bristol next month.

And if you ever doubted the power of drama to change the world, muse on this titbit from the Blackadder documentary: more than half the regimental goats in the British army are now called Baldrick.