Ever tried to borrow a bed? Rosie and I are on the hunt for the sole but vital prop/set for Four In A Bed, the next Nevertheless production Upstairs at the Lamb in Frome early next month. We found this eminently portable one in the local bed shop but sadly failed to negotiate custody. The quest continues as the plays go into rehearsal - two by me and two by Rosie, each written to feature this as-yet missing item. Watch this space - and lets hope audiences find it filled by March 10th, our opening night.

“In the guise of a smart comedy of manners, The Constant Wife is in fact ablaze with anger about the injustices of the married state,” begin the programme notes for this Salisbury Playhouse revival, so you might think this study of hypocrisy among the upper class is a kind of early stab at feminism but – as Somerset Maugham’s own wretched marriage could confirm - that would be an oversimplification. Written in 1926, set in the London of Bertie Wooster's aunts, this is a wealthy world where a woman who decides that living off her adulterous husband makes her feel like ‘a prostitute who doesn’t deliver’ can turn her hand to interior design and make her own fortune. Although the play is overlong, with too many speeches to represent attitudes rather than create three-dimensional character, this production delivers some notable highlights. In the first act these came mostly from Maggie Steed as Mrs Culver, mother of the pragmatic Constance, who brought Wildean aplomb to her one-liners, but by the third act (bizarrely crammed onto the second though set a year later) the pace began to liven overall. The final scene is a scorcher, with Constance in full revolt against the values of her age (“Men are meant by nature to be wicked and deceive their wives, women are meant to be forgiving” expostulates her mother vainly) and what seemed a brittle revenge plot becoming suddenly moving when Constance speaks of the lure of feeling loved. And it’s here her previously preposterous husband (David Michaels) steals the scene, creating a real sense of personal journey as well as the comedy of his come-uppance. Colin Falconer’s set design, all opulent creams and golds, is sumptuous.

When you're talking about plays, which I seem to do quite a lot these days, you stand on unshifting - albeit subjective - ground. Commenting on a television series is different, because scripts can vary week by week. I positively trilled about the first episode of Demons, and look what a load of old tosh that turned out to be. I'm reveling in How TV Ruined Your Life, but Charlie Booker's hyperbolic spleen is perilously close to rant overload. Nevertheless I'm going to take a deep breath and declare this series of Being Human, after a shaky second episode, is shaping up to be the best yet. This weeks's brilliant episode subtly explored dimensions of 'being human' - copy-cat killers and damaging mothers - which sadden even monsters, while providing some of the funniest lines yet.

And finally: there's a ditzy and delightful exhibition on at Frome's Black Swan gallery till March 20th: well worth a browse on a grey day.

Frank Hardy has a talent to heal. Or does he? Frank sometimes wonders, and Gracie almost dismisses the notion. But loyal promoter Teddy believes in Frank as an artist of healing, and stays with this fighting couple as they travel through a litany of the Celtic villages until one tumultuous night in Donegal which was, it seems, the last night of Frank’s life. We don’t know this for certain, but there’s much we don’t know about this man and his chaotic relationships with himself and those who love him: his woman, and his mystified, adoring, promoter.
Brian Friel's mesmeric and marvellous play Faith Healer, currently playing at the Bristol Old Vic, takes the form of separate speeches from these three key characters who never connect on stage, and whose long monologues each tell a dramatically different version of this story.
It may sound tough, but this production is luminous: a stunning script made unforgettable by brilliant acting especially from Finbar Lynch - totally charismatic as the flawed healer - and Richard Bremmer's loyal Teddy. The theme of faith, held and lost, is strong, but what emerges most forcefully and compassionately is the private and public struggle of the artist, and the quest for identity. Simon Godwin directed with wonderful simplicity and minimalist sets (Mike Britton) and shadowed lighting (Guy Hoare). Faith Healer is showing in the studio while the main house is refurbished, till 5th March - go if you can.

And now for something completely different. How would you direct Under Milk Wood if you believed spoken word inadequate to create imagery, mood, or story? Splice Productions decided to spice it up with slapdash comedy to distract the audience from the tedium of Dylan Thomas's words. How? Distractingly. I don't know about the rest of the tour, but at the Arc in Trowbridge a jovial audience readily took their cue to while away Captain Cat's reverie with noisy interruptions. Two excellent actors wasted their potential to entrance and the writer must have writhed in his grave.
"Think Dylan Thomas meets Round the Horne" the flyer suggests- that should have told me everything. Fern Hill and Fifties' Light Programme farce... not a good combo.

Better luck on Saturday: Miracle Theatre has been touring its winter show since November but there was no sign of flagging energy when Beauty and the Beast from Mars arrived in Frome. It’s the kind of show Miracle does best: a ramshackle contraption of simple ideas absurdly connected, strongly reliant for success on individual personalities and audience collusion. Such is their charm the last ingredient is readily forthcoming, so there was lots of interactive panto-style shouting and even mass singing of the Chin-Up song. The storyline, to use the term loosely, connects two 1960s phenomena: heart-throb male singing stars, and fears of alien invasion. Tom Adams as Bobby Beauty has hoola-hoop hips and a great voice, and the wonderful Ben Dyson is on best baleful form in an auburn wig as Major Bunty, in charge of the attack on Mars. When Beauty is abducted in retaliation by Martian Empress Bestiana (think Blackadder’s Queenie in Quant frock and green scales) the Major – who happens to be his mother - races after him on the Schadenfreude space probe, accompanied by number one fan Nurse Bumper… all ends happily of course, as the white heat of Bobby’s charisma can charm even the beastly empress, and the psycho-magnetically inserted pin number is retrieved in time to save the world. Lots of fun for everyone, nostalgia for oldies and double entendres about suction to delight the kids.

"Sex" announces Muriel, rehearsing randomly for her solo gig at The Bell in Buckland Dinham. The rehearsal was hilarious though I was in Bristol on Thursday so missed her much-acclaimed performance of poetry and wit burlesque-style, but there will be more... Muriel emerged from the Poetry Platter night at the Merlin, so I am of course claiming to be her chrysalis-unzipper, but - of course - Muriel Lavender is her own exclusively marvellous self and will continue to be so.

The reason I was in Bristol was Word of Mouth, BOV's monthly spoken word showcase, compered by Byron Vincent and therefore unmissable. There's only one thing funnier than the eccentricity of Byron Vincent's animated diatribes against social absurdities like X-factor and social network messaging, and that's his delivery. I start giggling as soon as he shambles onstage talking, only controlling my chortles so's not to miss some querulous gem like the atheist preacher who buggered belief and the maniac who married a hobnob with two kids eaten by ghosts, or his extended family alighting on facebook like a swarm of semantically challenged locusts... (any more and I'd be spoilering you...)
Byron's intros make a hard act to follow, but the main show, Tim Clare's Death Drive, lived up to the Edinburgh festival hype. The title links a suicidal impulse ruined by parental intervention ("like dancing, seeing your Dad attempt something you want to do is not cool") with Freud, and a moral emerging somewhere between a psychic horse and the stain on the ceiling from the dead man upstairs: time is longer than hope, and longer than sadness too. Tim Clare has an engaging confidence and a ukelele: his story is a funny, tragic, reflective, mix of interactive banter and breathtakingly lyrical poetry.

As a vigorous and vocal anti-royalist I had no more intention of seeing The King's Speech than watching William's forthcoming nuptials but a recent viewing of A Single Man on DVD changed my mind. Isherwood's tender, intimate, study of lonely grief, I felt, could not transfer to screen and especially not with Colin Darcy Firth playing the main character. How wrong I was, and this is now one of my favourite movies: script succinct, acting impeccable, and visuals, for tonal range alone, stunning. So to give my prejudices another dunking I joined the queues for this massively hyped docudrama.
I'm quite glad I did. Colin Firth apparently ached physically after his scenes as voice-throttled Prince Bertie, and it's not hard to see why - or to see why the O-word clings tight as a tic in all talk of his performance. But the most adamant republican need not fear filmic fawning: this cold, bullying, dysfunctional family is shown as unequivocally inadequate to be the crowning glory of any society with aspirations of humanity. Audiences seeking fairytale rapport between prince and commoner would be disappointed: far more cleverly, what we were shown was that the king's momentous speech about The War was nothing to do with Hitler ("I don't know what he's saying, but he's doing it jolly well" stutters the Bertie enviously) and everything to do with his own personal enemies - his unforgiving childhood and his stifling larynx. I give it a worthy 3 stars.
..

Another week in theatreland: a reading at the Ustinov of Kate Mitchell's new play about the impact of autism on parents (divisive, especially if the therapist is useless) followed by a meeting there of the SWNWN, the group that sounds like a long sneeze whatever way you say it. The need for a broad spectrum of ecology featured, with much talk about it and about, as Omar Khayam might say (the poet not the bomber); and as convener Frances Macadam pointed out, networking is the main point of a scriptwriters' meeting.

Bristol Ferment has simmered down, with the next show-case of local writing not till the summer. I caught another couple of these very varied presentations: the most polished was The Morpeth Carol produced by Sleepdogs,Timothy X Attack’s quirky, funny, moving, fairy story – unseasonal but would be fabulous on radio next Christmas. It’s the tale of a ten-year-old who meets santa which may sound whimsy it’s not, it’s tough talk from the first image of a crashlanded sledge and burning reindeer. This is not a jolly bearded gent, this is a fallen god of the tragic-greek variety. He doesn’t know where he’s landed, but he can empathise with a bullied child, and hotwire a Peugeot too. Nice one, as ten-year old Harry would say. “The universe is a terrible place, that’s a fact", don’t-call-me-Santa tells his new elfin guide as they hurtle from the carcases to deliver the presents, "but it’s not an important fact." Excellent audio effects, and the images created by a great script glowed a long time after.
And later the same night: Guy Dartnell hopes his work in progress Something or Nothing will be more of the former by the end, and having seen an earlier more polished version with lighting, I’m quite sure it will.

Exciting news of the week for me and Rosie Finnegan is that preparations for FOUR IN A BED are now underway! Nothing at all to do with naughty Tracey Emin's slutty artwork (but I'm sure she won't mind me nicking the image, until we get our own), this is a Nevertheless/Bootleg co-production of four short plays, two by Rosie and two by me, each of which feature - yes you got it. A bed. We haven't actually got one yet, but are hoping to borrow a sturdy single bed that will fit in the company's van, since after our launch Upstairs at the Lamb, the show will tour to Salsbury and beyond. If you live anywhere near Frome, put March 10th 11th and 12th in your diary, rustle up a posse of friends, and prepare to be tickled, touched, and generally highly entertained.

Finally... I don't usually buy newspapers, preferring to browse online find a café comp, but over the last few weeks I've been grabbing the wonderful on a near-daily basis. Content is slightly skewed to the twiterati, I grant you, but all the news opinion of the day, succinctly splayed, for twenty pee... I rest my case.

Before Rodgers & Hammerstein straddled the Hollywood musical world, there was another combo: Rodgers and Hart. I learnt that this week from a Salsbury Playhouse Production called With a Song In My Heart, a superbly smooth presentation of thirty songs from different shows, linked by succinct script by David Benedict which gave poignant insight into this creative but difficult partnership. Richard Rodgers was just 16 when he met young Larry Hart and recorded “I acquired in one afternoon a career, a partner, a best friend, and a permanent irritation.” The 'mismatch made in heaven' broke down after three years, but in that time they wrote prolifically and with enormous innovative energy. Salisbury's Salberg Studio, with its slightly clubby feel, made an ideal venue for this project and the audience were all clearly charmed by the songs and their performers: Gillian Bevan taking the feisty roles, Julie-Alanah Brighten the winsome one, Joel Karie the American smoothie, and Glyn Kerslake both singing and playing the piano with amazing verve throughout the entire show. A class act, though I've probably heard enough songs from musicals for 2011 now.

Bristol is in Ferment, theatrically speaking. Ferment is the artist-development strand of Bristol Old Vic, introduced by events organiser Sharon Clark as 'ideas in motion.' Audience response is part of the process, so we're there not to appraise as finished work but to envisage how these scripts could develop to full theatricality. It feels an exciting privilege, like being shown a baby-scan - ooh, there's the head, and it's got little legs....
Only, written and read by Adam Peck, is an autobiographical monologue in confessional style, filled with colourful characters and never far from either poignancy or humour. Adam touches on romantic rejections, parental desertion, mortality, and a grandad who smells of porridge and pee and prunes, all with the same delicate ruthlessness of authentic recollection, especially the moments with his nonexistent brother who is the only person this 'only' can confide in. Fine writing and an endearing performance, which interestingly explored both intimacy with the audience and movement in time. Interesting too that the aspect that worked least well for me - hauling chairs out of the crowded auditorium - was not directorial intrusion but an integral part of the initial concept. Perhaps this would have worked better if the BOV basement hadn't been totally crowded out, but that in itself is big credit to Adam, whose play Bonnie and Clyde put him in the spotlight last year and has now transferred to London.
Another autobiographical piece, Byron Vincent's JellyHead, was top of my must-see list but sadly this brilliantly anarchic performer had to cancel due to illness. Instead I went to see The Peace, a monologue by Natalie McGrath in the voice of Mo Mowlam. Petrol bombs light up the night sky. How does anyone get used to it? It's a long time since I left Northern Ireland and I had mixed feelings at the start but this wasn't ultimately really about politics, more about being a woman in a man's world, struggling ill-health as well as prejudices. The glimpse of Blair - "the ego has landed- and he wants a medal" - was satisfying thoug anachronistic for 1998 Peace Process days, but overall this was a strikingly lyrical script sensitively read by Sophie Stanton.

Thanks to the Big Arts Give,
Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory has expanded this year for the new season which features Richard II and A Comedy of Errors. As director Andrew Hilton said at the media launch, these plays seem to have little in common but their connection is the theme of identity. Richard II is my all-time favourite play since I first saw it at the Old Vic in London as an emo teenager and the rages and lamentations of the rejected king plucked histrionic chords in my heart. I'm hugely looking forward to this new production with John Heffernan as Richard and from the enthusiasm at the Mint Hotel today, so are the rest of the cast.

It's been a dramatic week all round. Niamh led another successful performance workshop this week, with great participant feedback, as Stage Write Café presents Dressing Up Box at the Merlin is growing closer... book your tickets and tapas supper now!

Stay out of Somerset. They don't like writers there. That's the opening of the lead feature in Mslexia this month on SCC's ' institutional philistinism' - as writer Celia Brayford understatedly calls it - in axing the entire arts budget. How does it feel to live in a county nationally shamed for indifference to both culture and community? Not good. The irony is that as well as enormously enriching, creativity isn't even costly - as Celia points out, a toll booth on the road to Worthy Farm collecting a quid from every festival-goer would cover the entire budget. And then there's the onslaught on the Libraries: 24 out of 30 in Somerset to go. I was one of the team outside Sainsbury's this Saturday collecting signatures on the petition against the closures, and public support was heartening so maybe this at least is one battle we can win. If you live in Somerset, and haven't signed the petition yet, please do.

So with the future of books in continued jeopardy, where do you stand on the e-book? Not literally, of course, you'd break your Kindle. But this highly contentious issue isn't going away, as the editorial of the new issue of The Author - journal of Society of Authors, our trade union - acknowledges.
Will the boom in e-books lead to more people reading or simply siphon readers away from the print? is the anxious question. There's one note of encouragement on the letters page, from author Stewart Ross: Following the discussion on e-books at the Society's AGM, I asked children in several schools I visited, would you prefer to have all your books on one electronic reader or as lots of separate paper books? Answer overwhelmingly (with teaching staff alone in their dissent) was in favour of the former. Clearly the next generation do not share our sentimental attachment to crushed trees - or perhaps they don't share our mistrust of technology?

Also mistrusting the democracy of technology is newspaper columnist of the year (1995) Andrew Marr, who has been reflecting on citizen journalism. "A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower nosed young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting." (Not a big fan of writerly solidarity, then, Andrew?) This is the month I officially join the cauliflower-nosed tribe, as I'm continuing my blog but concluding my regular column in Writing Magazine. It was back in 1994 when I submitted, on spec, the first Good Practice piece - deconstructing a short extract of published prose to show why it works then suggesting a related writing exercise. 17 years is long enough for any formula, and now my personal passion has shifted from fiction to stage drama, I'm looking forward to being able to read for relaxation again, without any analytic agenda.

And as this has been a rather wordy posting, let's liven things with an image: Stourhead last Sunday - frost on the grass but a promise of better days ahead.

Happy New Year. It's traditional, I know, but sometimes that's ok.
I'm still looking back on a 'festive break' - ok, let's call it Christmas - packed with good things with family and friends: feasts and fizz, games and quizzes, walks and dancing... and now the sudden thaw has become as familiar as the long freeze, here's hoping we all achieve those wishes sent into the midnight sky in blazing lanterns.

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

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

So as snow crashes all our schedules and intentions until that towering sledgeload of excess and stress we call Christmas skids into the bleakness of New Year Resolutions - here's my pick of the seasonal shows:

Herding Cats at the Ustinov features the traditional office Christmas party debacle as a kind of climax but it's a dark psychological story of loneliness and interdependency despite the jolly Slade jingles. Justine (she went to the fancy-dress party as The Pantychrist, if you're wondering about the costume) is franticly work-obsessed, while her flatmate Michael is agoraphobic and spends his hours working a phone sexline as the fantasy daughter of sadist. Michael can't resist the depravity of Saddo, the most difficult person in his work life, while Justine convinces herself she's in love with the most difficult person in her work life - her boss, who inevitably rejects her. Love and Hate look the same word in the mirror, on the teeshirt Michael gives Justine, and this seems a theme at the heart of this immensely powerful play: troubling, sad, but never drab. Olivia Hallinan and Philip McGinley were totally engaging as the young people, and the simplistic set enhanced their curious isolation. But what I liked best was Lucinda Coxon's script, which boldly created Justine's most significant relationship entirely offstage through reported dialogue as she confides in her sympathetic flatmate. In fact it would have been interesting to see what would happen if the playwright had been similarly brave with Saddo, who didn't really need to be spotlit for his menacing phone calls - a dark stage with Michael curled up whispering those sleezy endearments to 'Daddy' would have been even more effective. But I'd still give it four stars - oh, it's christmas, I'll give it four and a half.

And now one for the kiddies: Peter Pan at the Merlin in Frome, an all-singing all-dancing traditional pantomime with live music and cinematic special effects. We all know the story: Peter doesn't want to be grown-up, and Wendy tries to change his mind by introducing him to grown-up things like marital bickering and demands for improved housing. Of course it's all a dark psychological allegory with irrepressible surges of erotic yearning and loss of innocence really, but that didn't bother the little girls who adored the mermaid and fairy dances and the little boys who thrilled at wicked Captain Hook. My own favourites were Tinkerbell the feisty fairy who turned exquisite cartwheels in her flight harness, and tiny Michael asking Hook if his mother really wanted him to be a pirate... And everyone loved the crocodile.

And now, as the steep streets of Frome rapidly becoming a car-free zone and children groom them for toboggan slopes, here's wishing everyone a peaceful snowy solstice, with plentiful pagan celebrations to come.

Bath Christmas Market... a kindof vast outdoor stocking-filler warehouse, spread all around the abbey like brandy butter around a pudding. It throngs with near-gridlock crowds and has apparently been sprayed with gullibility dust that makes us avid to hand over notes of absurdly large denomination for small sewn, carved, and painted, gewgaws you'd normally pass to a charity shop without a pang. Great fun.
I met up with my writer/editor friend Diana Cambridge in Café Rouge too, for festive planning. And the Fromesbury Group converged at Emily's for our midwinter jolly, with our very own Nigella hostess providing mulled wine and the most decadently delicious mincepies on the planet.

Until this week I'd never heard of the great Russian producer and showman Diaghilev, called by Jean Cocteau 'Cet ogre, ce monstre sacré" and by himself a charlatan with no principles. From the Ballet Russes exhibition at the V&A, I learned that he was a catalyst and trend-maker before and between the wars - and a user and abuser of all who worked for him, including the ballet dancer Nijinsky, whose mental illness and death were allegedly caused by Diaghilev's treatment of him when their affair ended. But whatever his private life, his artistic influence on the early decades of the last century was extraordinary: Picasso, Matisse, and every great composer of the century. Diaghilev bragged he had no interest in achieving the possible, it was only the impossible that interested him, and his ground-breaking work shocked society, notably with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring which caused a riot at its premiere. Diaghilev founded his Ballet Russe when Imperialist Russia was high status in the cultural world, but he ended his life a stateless exile from Bolshevik Russia, still touring. A dazzling exhibition, informative, richly decorative, and totally absorbing.
And then on to the Finborough for a Victorian melodrama - Trilby, a sensation when first produced just before the turn of the century. This is the story of a svengali-character far worse than Diaghilev: the actual Svengali, the preditor-hypnotist who represented the anti-semetic fearfulness of the English. Like Shylock, like Dorian Gray's Lord Henry, he's a decadent dream-maker: he transforms a pretty girl into a popular singing sensation but at a terrible price... actually that's beginning to sound more like Simon Cowell than Shylock. A stonking cast, especially Rebecca Brewer's beautiful and endearing Trilby, did full justice to this revival, revealing resonances of brutality and mental cruelty that are as timeless as love itself.

Finally...Facebook has become my morning window to the world. It's an intriguing fleeting magazine of media news (how politicians voted on student fees, how police & BBC interviewers deal with a protester in a wheelchair), what my friends are celebrating, lamenting and laughing at, event invitations, esoteric videos and literary recommendations. Which is how I came across the New Yorker roundup of best poetry collections, including Don Paterson's Rain. described as showing "what heartbreakingly small difference beauty can make in the world. This is fascinating work, a poet having a brutal argument with his art in his art."
A good aim I think for a dramatist too.

Freezing fog is both beautiful and unpleasant, a combination I think shared only by the word 'syphilis' which sounds like a flower fairy while actually meaning a disgusting degenerative disease causing dementia and death. That's about ten-out-of-ten in unpleasantness, whereas freezing fog is probably only a one-to-three, depending on whether you're walking through it or trapped on the motorway in it.

A poetic week, with a double dose on Wednesday. In Bath, lunchtime readings From Around The World at the BRLSI uni-verse, compèred - for the final time after her heroic 3 year stint - by Nikki Bennett. International in a very English way, the main theme was snow and the overall mood sombre. Rose Flint's celebration of winter lifted us finally:
This is ascension time -- sing!
Let the light hold you through the ice.

And in the evening, Frome's Garden Cafe hosted the annual festive season Poetry Cafe/Merlin tie-in event, with pantomime tickets for best poem on the theme of winter flights of fancy, as picked by Nikki Bennett, going to Margie McCallum and Carola Cooper. Fourteen performers gave us some wonderful fantasies, from a witty skit on aged Boy Band reminiscences by Muriel Lavender to Phillis Higgins' touching tribute to her personal superhero Peter-Panman. And for me the most surprising flight of fancy was Wendy Miller-Williams presenting me with a gift of gorgeous glasswear, from all the team, as a farewell present for my festival involvement. Completely & utterly unexpected, and I'm deeply appreciative.


Over in Bristol, Word of Mouth promised "a night of extraordinary urban voices" with 'achingly funny' Byron Vincent introducing 'mellifluous' Shagufta K Iqbal, 'charismatic, entertaining but thought-provoking' Ben Mellor, and Kate Tempest - 'without a doubt one of the best performance poets in the country.' Who could live up to hype like that? Well, each of these did, and then some. One of the best nights of poetry I've seen anywhere in the country, achingly funny and thought-provoking too. I couldn't put it better myself so I won't even try. Byron says there'll be another Word of Mouth event at the Bristol Old Vic basement in January - can't wait.

Bath's Oh What A Performance night - yes folks, that does make 4 poetry events attended in 3 days, the kind of excess that in Ireland prompts the question "catholic or careless?" - was actually more of a music night, with the rather wonderful Golden Eggs creating richly textured arrangements of familiar carols with cello, keyboard, guitar, percussion & trumpet that were quirky enough to charm even the most jaundiced listener with an allergic reaction to the seasonal C-word. Which is usually me. They were joined by Brian Madigan, better known in his solo persona as A Band Named Brian who promised and delivered a genuine 'folkclub first': four minutes of total silence as he recreated Cage against the Machine, the anti-X-Factor chart contender. Highlight of the evening for me though was his stunning performance, with Beth Porter, of the Pogues christmas classic Fairy Tales of New York - an absolute Live Lounge cover winner.

And finally... I can't let the week go by without homage to Corrie's 50th birthday celebrations, which went with a bang as the street exploded from the cobbles up, topped by a tumbling tram, cleverly contriving the climax of all its lingering loose-end storylines: the secret-lover baby, the secret-lover bride, the secret-lover body-burier stalker, the secret child at the pub, the secret chocolates at the Kabin... all the stuff of an ordinary suburban Soap Street in fact. Corrie is unsurpassable for its huge swings from melodrama to farce - even in the hour-long live episode with several residents bundled off to the morgue, mad Mary managed like the porter in Macbeth to interject surreal comedic notes - but it packs a profound emotional punch: there's a scene between Sally and Kevin in the darkness of their kitchen when she quietly reveals the terrible truth that Molly mouthed before she died, which is as good as any television drama I've seen and very much better than most.
..

Possibly I set a local, if not global, record for tissue consumption over the weekend at Farncombe Estate in the frozen Cotswolds. Despite my gleaming Rudolf-nose and struggling energy, my loyal and lively creative writers provided all the pzazz necessary for a terrific course. As a group mutually supportive, as individuals all genuinely interesting wordsmiths, here's the self-styled Glorious Residue - and what's not to love about a group that claims that title? We worked from 9.30 Saturday morning till 9.30 that night, and I left them in the bar still discussing each others' work and sharing readings with the singers...


Always good to see writer friends doing well - Christine Coleman spotted her new novel Paper Lanterns in a Waterstones window display with that 21st Century accolade of success: a 3 for 2 sticker - and in the happy company of literary leviathan Colm Tóibín, hardy-perennial Nick Hornby and queen mum of lit-chicks Maeve Binchy... or you could get 3 copies of Paper Lanterns and give two of your friends a great read.


December's Frome Poetry Cafe traditionally has a panto link, and as this year's christmas show at the Merlin is Peter Pan - my all-time favourite - the theme on Wednesday 8th is Winter Flights of Fancy. 'Tis the season for audience votes but we've bucked the trend and Nikki Bennett is coming from Bath to decide who gets the prize of 4 panto tickets for the most apt poem of the night. No Tory ex-Home Office ministers welcome, whether flying on wires or sailing on ice.