Bulletin 4 from Half Moon Bay...
We've had a couple of mornings of sea fog. It's like a pot of paint-water has been spilled across the vivid coastline colours, thick white tendrils unfurling dramatically into the cornflower blue sky. Undeterred surfers loom faintly like a ghost army of silkies. Now we're back to the familiar cloudlessness, with temperatures in the high 30s. Sitting with a café freddo in a Mezzaluna afternoon under this improbably blue sky, I'm thinking about making a poem about El Granada in April & start to make a list:
Long surfing waves surging endlessly for miles,
Wind sweeping peachy sands impeccably smooth,
Ice plants, creamy & plum pink, smothering the dunes,
Cedars twisting into sculptures, eucalyptus rustling.
Sandpipers paddling, cormorants grooming,
Garboesque seals lounging on outcrop rocks,
Crabs scuttling, lizards... being small and lizardy.
Ginger barking me into playing ball on the lawn,
Kaitlyn puzzling over the objective correlative,
Sowing onions with Anja, Mo's songs, Mahi-mahi taco at the Flying Fish Grill...
The poetry is the list,
The being here is bliss.


California seems very far away from home (5253 miles, to a crow with stamina) but Dee Allen's poem - see link in last post - is grimly close to the G20 violence. Time difference means I'm just about to set off on another sunny walk while it's midnight in the UK and I have Rob da Bank on as I finish my laptop work stint for the day. He plays a Dop track I can't find on Youtube but it's this Bukowski poem: The Genius of the Crowd.
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To encourage my aim of walking every coastal path in striking distance, Mo took me to his building project above the cliffs at Moss Beach and loosed me there like a homing pigeon, except without wings and -more significantly- a sense of direction. He pointed me south and said 'Remember the tide's coming in' and I set off, scuttling like a Purple Shore-crab across the boulders along the rim of the ocean. I know the type of crab because my route took me through the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, 'one of the most diverse regions in California' according to the pictureboard. Volcanic action has shaped the rocks into huge hoops which are a haven for all kinds of wild life: while I was focusing on some comatose seals about thirty pelicans came flapping slowly past.
"Seals don't hate us, honey, they just want to be left alone" a woman was consoling her child.
Keeping the Pacific on my right and the skyline hills on my left for about 3 hours brings me back to the harbour where I can watch the windsurfers riding the long waves with a gigantic fig icecream. Me, not the surfers. They need their hands free.


The Haight is the hippy area of San Francisco, a bit like Glastonbury but harder-edgy and with more sunshine. Mo and I had a mooch around the coffee bars and a browse in Amoeba music shop and then headed for Diamond Dave's open mic night.
Diamond Dave boasts the longest running poetry cafe in San Francisco. "On that street some call Haight and some call Love, I turned 30 in that golden summer of '67" he tells us, and introduces us to the eclectic audience: "We have a representative of the British and Irish working class, coming together to prove that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, isn't that beautiful?" Guest of the night was a self-styled beat in Ugg boots nostalgic for the murk of his drug days, but better stuff came from the floor readers, a few similarly self-indulgent but some sharp and topical. Highlight was Dee Allen whose poem Face Down moved the agenda from rainbow-tinted nostalgia to powerful political protest at the recent killing of Oscar Grant by two Bay Area Rapid Transit police officers.



And I'm now again lost for words. Here's a few more images:

Vegetable connoisseurs may be fascinated to know this region boasts the title 'artichoke capital of the world'. Duartes restaurant, at nearby Pescadero, has made a sturdy reputation by supplying an enterprising range of artichoke-based dishes to hungry or curious visitors. I was both, as we'd been walking the cliffs to watch basking seals and soaring cormorants, and the artichoke ratatouille was delicious. Deep twilight as we drove home, a rim of mystical pink separating silvering sea from darkening sky.

After ten days' nomadic exploration, I've become a connoisseur of cafe coffee. Discounting Starbucks, obviously, I've sampled Peet's (the gold standard, according to "zealous customers known as Peetniks"), Sam's (plentiful & free with breakfast), Raman's, New Leaf, and I can tell you with confidence that Mezzaluna down by the harbour wins by a Half Moon Mile. For one thing, it's served in a real cup, and actually served too, so you don't feel like a mere middleman on the disposable beaker's journey to the bin. And they make the best Americano in the Bay. I reported my findings to Mo and he said "Well they would, they're Italian."
Other discoveries:
- Blackbirds here sport scarlet epaulettes.
- PAM means jack of clubs. 'Tis in the Scrabble dictionary, so 'tmust be so.
- Huge full moon, Rain Moon, blazing like a magic lantern above the chicken shack outside my window.

Two open-mic events - my favourite was Cameron's English Pub - and a visit to the theatre.



The Coastal Repertory Theatre is a pleasant purpose-built venue - it’s where I saw Godot last year (in fact Mo was recognised and hailed for his ‘phenominal’ Pozzo) - with a very long stage. For their production of Sam Shepard’s True West the director’s decision to use the length worked against the sense of intrusion and family claustrophobia in this story of a screenwriter challenged by the arrival of his drifter brother. This play has been hailed as a masterpiece, simultaneously "clear, funny, naturalistic, opaque, terrifying, surrealistic", as a metaphor for "the two sides of the American present: one sophisticated, cultured, ambitious, and successful; the other alienated and outcast, raw, wild, violent... each is the double of the other, emphasizing that despite the American belief in starting anew, the past is never over but continues to intrude into the present." (Or as the review in the local paper put it: "Bottom line: As tough as things are, we can still laugh. And, after all, there’s always someone worse off.")
It's a strong theme, however you interpret it, and whether or not it's significant that the dramatist's intelligent screenplay is trounced by the more commercial pitch of his degenerate sibling, but for me the real drama is in the interaction of the brothers and the play didn’t need appearances from either the producer or the mother. Sam Shepard himself says it's not intended as "symbolic or metaphorical or any of that stuff. I just wanted to give a taste of what it feels like to be two-sided. It's a real thing, double nature. I think we're split in a much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal."

Still on the subject of theatre: "I want to be genuinely shocked. I want plays that shine a light into the darkest recesses of the human soul, that lead the audience on a journey that leaves us breathless and invigorated even if we've been terrified and deeply shaken by what we've seen. And while I'm not asking our current playwrights to be as great as Shakespeare or Euripides, I am asking them to remember that those are the heroes of the tradition in which they work."
Louise Kennedy reviews for Boston, but I found her rant at the current state of theatre in THE WEEK over my breakfast coffee, picked out as a Best Column. Playwrights, she says, shouldn't attempt to compete with the 'heightened version of reality' of films and television. "In moving away from the essence of drama - that is, the subtle and expert use of language and carefully developed action to illuminate human life - toward thrill-seeking and adrenaline jolts, playwrights give up their own most precious gifts.
And the audience? Jaded by the unnatural shocks of electronic entertainment, we remain unmoved by its awkward imitators, and hungry for the real, visceral, cathartic thrills that true theater can provide."


On Saturday I varied my coastal path route by walking along the beach, which for most of its two-and-a-half miles was disconcertingly deserted for a holiday weekend apart from clusters of birds, possibly having a Hitchcock conference. I started thinking about all the warning signs: HAZARDOUS WAVE CONDITIONS EXIST EVEN ON CALM DAYS - WAVES CAN SWEEP PEOPLE INTO THE OCEAN before eventually reaching civilisation in the form of windsurfers, a scramble-up-able cliff, and a cafe.
And now it's Easter Sunday, the chocolate bunnies are risen, and I am unbelievably nearly halfway through my stay in paradise... must find a wicked apple before I go.

April in California... I loved it here in Autumn so I'm back for a month to write and to walk. The writing's up to me; for walk routes, my friend & host Mo has drawn me a sketch map of El Granada and its environs. We're about 400 yards from the Pacific here, with a coastal path all around Half Moon Bay. The snag is Highway 1, which also hugs the coastline, lies between me and the sea.
Mo's map shows two options: I can take the back roads to the harbour, where traffic lights allow the (nippy) pedestrian a chance to dash across the 6 lanes of ceaseless traffic, or I can creep through the (nearly dry) drain under the road at El Granada.
And then I have the freedom to walk for miles with barely a sound but birdsong and the rolling breakers. And the wind - this wind would skin a goat, Mo warned me before I came, but the sun is strong and the sky so immensely high, so densely blue. I see only a few other people on these paths, but they greet me like they've been recruited by some Californian 'Let's make visitors feel cherished!' campaign, offering smiles, handshakes, even names.

After a week of retreatful days & early nights I went along with Mo to a music evening - a gentle event but pleasant. I can't play guitar or sing so I offered a couple of me pomes.

An idyllic weekend staying with college-days friends, chewing the fat and the Mothers Day chox and doing a lot of walking. We went to Grantchester, famously the haunt of Rupert Brooke, where the orchard is now a hugely popular cafe so there is indeed honey still for tea. You can also pick up a free booklets about the 'Grantchester Group' which apparently comprised Forster, Russell, Keynes, Virginia Woolf and Wittgenstein as well as the soldier poet. Alongside photos & poems there are intriguing quotes, like Keynes on camping: don't make one nearly so ill as one would suppose, Woolf on Forster: I always feel him shrinking sensitively from me, and Russell on Wittgenstein: he would never have noticed such small matters as bursting shells when he was thinking about logic. There's a little museum too, with pictures of Brooke's grave and statue on Skyros which made me nostalgic for the those Greek skies. Here's the yet unacademic stream, along the river walk to Cambridge.

"We don't care if it's by a man or a woman or a dog, all we care about is the story" is what women's magazine editors say, according to Alison Clink's encouraging talk at the Bath Writers Workshop where she and I were both guests on Wednesday. We were warmly welcomed by hosts Kevan Manwaring and David Lassman, and found the writers of Bath a friendly and participative audience. No canine members, I'm glad to say.

A retrospective footnote this week: positive feedback on Chimes of Freedom in the local paper (read the review here soon) and from our illustrious lead reader, who enjoyed the ‘radical’ edge in Frome - and thanks, Sharon, for the positive vibe on your blog!

It's appropriate maybe I discover 70s cult classic Harold and Maude this week. Elderly Maude has a sound philosophy of life - "Everyone has a right to make an arse out of themselves" - and a catchy theme song if you want to sing out, sing out and when young Harold gives her 'the nicest gift anyone has given me in a long time' she throws it into the San Francisco Bay saying blithely "That way, I'll always know where it is."
Which brings me nicely to my own departure, in 2 days time, for a month in California. Not that I plan to sling anything in the bay - in fact I'm not really sure what I plan to do. Watch, as they say, this space.
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A varied week.

On Wednesday Caleb & I recreated our collaborative sonnet Je M'aime at the film studio for the Frome Festival Cabaret, once Howard has edited in the cello sequence and added his own animational flair.

(Loo, lippy, and narcissistic poses are integral to the poem; paper bag was Caleb's idea.)







And on Thursday a complete contrast in mood:
Because the poet is the only person
who never forgets
the meaning of freedom
(Yandamiro Restano, from a Cuban prison, 1993)
Chimes of Freedom at the Merlin, based on readings from persecuted writers around the world, in support of Pen.
Ten local writers and artists reading poems, letters, and speeches from Euripedes to Pinter, all passionately insisting on the right to free speech.
Booker judge Victoria Glendinning, who is among her other literary roles the vice-president of English Pen, introduced the evening and read a moving anti-war speech from dissident Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. Stories of imprisonment, torture, exile - Come and see the blood in the streets, Pablo Neruda challenged the world after the murder of Lorca. Powerful stuff and inevitably dark - but with a dazzling lift after the break from musical performances by six of the Amnesty Youth Group, as stunningly talented as they were self-assured.

And finally: Andrew Motion speaks out at the end of his 10-year tenure as Poet Laureate to berate journalists who 'turn poetry into a kind of Aunt Sally by making it look ridiculous and out of touch'. Poetry is, he says, 'a fundamental requirement of the human spirit, as natural and necessary as breathing.'
Words worth writing, and perhaps even worth waiting ten years for.
And who's next for the poison chalice? Wendy Cope says the post is ridiculous and should be axed, but Roger McGough demurs: "It's a rather nice tradition to have, and anything that gets poetry mentioned is fine by me - it can put a lot of pressure on a poet, but if you can't handle it, don't take it on." So, Luke Wright, Poet Laureate... Why not?

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There’s an out-of-season indolence along the sea front at Shanklin, souvenir shops still shut, entry to the lovely Chine area locked and the cliff-top lift closed till official holiday time begins. None of this detracts from the Isle of Wight's timewarp charm, which starts with the London tube-train waiting at the ferry point to transport the visitor on a rattling journey of nostalgia. As Yannis our host at The Grange says: 'Here you are a time-traveller. You walk down the street and you walk into the 1950s.'
My last Find Your Voice weekend here was a year ago - the 2008 Grangewriters had their reunion while I was back on the island - and though the group was great the weather was not. This time both were fab. Best bits: golden gorse and daffodils, red squirrels playing tag in the pines, spring notes of birdsong, and above all supportive friendly company and wonderful writing, brave, quirky, inventive & funny. For a sample - and a lush seascape image - see Jay's blog where the 'recipe for Shanklin' says it all.

Regular readers - don't laugh, there are some - of this blog may recall my comments on the revival of William Saroyan's play The Time of Your Life last December. I talked about an 'unsatisfying ending' but I wasn't nearly so disparaging as one reviewer of the original London production, 63 years ago this month. "The high spot of the evening was the incursion of an anonymous drunk. For this no marks can be allowed to the author" his summary concluded, adding dryly: "Certainly a play to be seen; one could hardly read it."
It's a voice I remember well. Regular readers of this blog will have to delve the archives a bit to realise why this review struck such a chord with me, as it was back in August last year I wrote "My father was a drama critic and he had a typewriter that must have been twinned with a lemon grater..." Yes, my regular and irregular friends, the H.G.M. at the end of this and several other pieces in Theatre World magazine in March 1946 was himself. My father, younger than I ever knew him but clearly no less acidic.
I owe this emotional reunion to the lost world of my London childhood to a pile of just-post-war issues of this once-premier theatrical magazine, dug out of my dramaturgic friend's attic. "I thought you might like to see these" he said, and indeed I did. Theatre World was heavy on black-and-white photos featuring kohl eyepencil and intense expression, and featured photo-stories of the major productions rather as The Sun uses graphic illustrations on their problem page.
HG continued to review in his own distinctive, often lugubrious, style until the late 70s, and was particularly proud of his appraisal of The Mousetrap: "I give it a week." His review of the 1946 Stratford-upon-Avon Festival concludes: "There were many children in the audience and from them the loudest applause followed the murder of Macduff's son and his mother's screams as she is strangled. Such are these times."
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Black comedy hour again... Blavatsky's Tower (at the Alma Tavern Theatre till March 21st) shows Sartre got it wrong: Hell is not other people, Hell is an agoraphobic family incarcerated in the top flat of a tower block with a crazy father who is the architect of this cultural monument to dysfunctionality. Gaudi built his cathedral high so the angels could reach it easily but angels aren't so easily lured here. Even the doctor who staggers up fifteen flights with an armchair can't save a trio who have normalised incest and incineration of their father's corpse in the roof garden. "We used his copy of Paradise Lost to start the blaze." And the comedy comes in... where exactly? Oddly enough, quite a lot, in Moira Buffini's script and in the actors' interpretations of this Chekhovian family dynamic, where the 'crushed' world below the high-rise is their own unattainable Moscow. Oliver Millingham as the patricidal son is especially moving.
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Mardi Gras night at Frome Poetry Cafe: a dash of razz-ma-tazz, a score of performers, and a Garden Cafe-ful of enthusiastic audience. The theme of celebration enjoyed wide interpretations, from Stephen Ledbury's ode to Shepton Mallet carnival to John Payne's charming Quantocks bestiary, from Bev's Salvadorian story to Lucy Howlett's fish-eye view of fairground life. James Stokoe brought us Euridice and Rose Flint evoked Venus: "If love isn't around a Mardi Gras, I don't know where she'll be." A fantastic range of delightful reads and performances.

Actor Cameron Stewart found his grandfather a hard act to follow, so instead he's chosen to take that act around the country as a one-man show called 'My Grandfather's Great War'. The grandfather is Captain Alexander Stewart who fought in the three major assaults of the first world war with extraordinary heroism and survived to tell the tale in a handwritten diary forming the basis for this performance, which reached the Ustinov in Bath last week. The diaries have much of the grim humour of Blackadder Goes Forth, including their own genuine General Melchett who agrees one particular mission is deathly lunacy but adds that it's the Brigadier's order, so "do your best, eh?". An amazing record of a man of exemplary moral qualities, but for me the most powerfully affecting words were the grandson's own as he ends his proud and passionate tribute: "I'm confused. All war is abomination. What the devil did you think you were doing, running around in the mud slaughtering each other?"

Change of pace again on Saturday, with the launch of the Concertina Books weekend event at Widcombe Studios in Bath. Ruralist writer Peter Please is making a stand against the mass production of books, creating instead something 'quirky and individual' which combines old and new technologies. He has the support of John Moat, co-founder of the Arvon foundation, and several luminously talented writers and artists who contributed words and images to the project. There were readings too, some gentle, some charismatic; the whole evening a reminder that prim Bath can do bohemian, delightfully, too.

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