Frankly, a miscellany

Booking is now open for  Frome Festival in July and Annabelle & I have been walking Rodden Meadow at one step to 5 million years in preparation for our Time Walk - the story of the earth in a thousand paces, struggling to unknot  the scientific complexities of the last 6.5 billion years. Solar Physicist Keith Barnham has no such difficulty: in The Burning Answer, "a user's guide to the solar revolution" he explains history, here-&-now and future options in a guaranteed-readable form.

 Here's Keith at his Hunting Raven book signing on Saturday with poet Claire Crowther and Oliver Dowding, organic farmer and enthusiastic purchaser. And while we're on the subject of earth ~ survival of, and best way to live on ~ Flatpack Democracy, the story of Frome council's successful bid for independence, is still creating a stir with a Guardian feature last week.

Moving from prose to poetry, Rosie and I were guests at Words from the Rising Sun, a friendly venue in Bath with an intimate atmosphere. A fun night, thanks Sadie - and Kevin Boylan on the tin can guitar.  And moving on again to drama, Nevertheless Productions was featured on the Frome FM writing spot Write On with David Lassman, on Sunday.

This year is the fourth anniversary of Frome's unique Pub Theatre which, inspired by Rosie's vision of bringing professional productions to the town at an affordable price in an accessible venue, has been thriving at The Cornerhouse ever since. During those four years we've brought in 14 productions, all using professional companies, so it feels good to pause and celebrate before our next project: War Zones, commissioned for Frome Festival and  showing on July 8th and 9th ~ you can book now...  we do sell out you know!
Speaking of drama, I must do a quick plug for Lane's List: invaluable for anyone writing for stage as local playwright David Lane trawls the lucky bag of current dramatic opportunities.
And since this post is already a mishmash of themes and genres, I'll end on a musical note: the marvellous  Fat Stanley at the Olive Tree on Saturday night. Here's wishing you happy writing in the sunshine, and lots of dancing too.

Local knowledge

I'd never read, or even seen, The Godfather but Paccamora on Catherine Hill was an ideal venue to learn more about that complex political world, over an amazing supper created by Loredana Waters for her 'Literary Reading' event on Friday. Jamie Thomas-King, famed for his role in The Tudors (a series "light on dates and heavy on sex, glamour and lovely table settings" according to The Guardian review) read two dramatic scenes as we nibbled authentic Sicilian cuisine in cushioned candlelight. Originally formed to support the poor through solidarity, the Mafia is now synonymous not only with racketeering but with Sicily itself, and Lore was anxious we should know that only 2% of the five million in her homeland have any such links...  which I make 10,000...

Tales of sex and violence take me neatly to Bedminster on Saturday for the Show of Strength theatrical walk Why Don't We Do It In The Road? Writer Sheila Hannon researched the quirky, and often gory, history of these streets to introduce us to authentic characters like Alfred Daw Collard the poet-butcher who penned ditties in his slaughterhouse. Less jolly was the history of The Bull pub which doubled as Magistrates Court and was known locally as The Bull and Butchery. Mrs Gardner, matron of the Victorian jail in North Street, tells of the last public hanging in Bristol when the prison governor fainted as seven men wrestled an 18-year-old servant girl to the scaffold, despite the 3500-signature petition to the Home Office to save her.
After gruesome tales of grave robbers & body snatchers we moved on to more modern times with Lucky Eric, who introduced us to traditional features like a drain cover made by Thomas Crapper, ending the tour with the 1983 Brinks Mat Warehouse Robbery which unexpectedly has a local connection too: stolen gold was smelted down in a North Street house and laundered through the local Barclays, where apparently no suspicions were aroused by the deposit and withdrawal of a few hundred million pounds in a few weeks. All stirring stuff, lucidly animated by actors Kim Hicks & Chris Yapp and much enjoyed by those who braved the gales to follow them.
Another image to end this posting, from the blossom-filled lanes around Frome which make me think of Brendan Kennelly's fabulous (longer) poem Begin:

Every beginning is a promise
born in the light and dying in the dark
determination and exaltation of springtime
flowering the way to work... 
Though we live in a world that dreams of ending, 
that always seems about to give in,
something that will not acknowledge conclusion
insists that we forever begin.

Homeward Bound

In the week I was away, Half Moon Bay turned into a blossom festival: yellow mustard massing high as an elephant’s eye and floral pageantry everywhere. The lanes are loud with birdsong as lizards bask on the cliffs & seals bask on the rocks along the shore. I had just two days for all those 'last time' moments: suppers with Mo & Anja, walks along the beach and over the headland, a final Classique cappuccino with the (fiendish) crosswords in San Francisco Sunday Chronicle, before heading back home.

The sky in London was the colour of tarnished pewter and as my train reached Frome the steady rain turned into a monsoon so I arrived at my house drenched to the skin from gutter spray of passing cars... but then there was a rainbow, so that's all right.
Time now to unpack, and look back: despite having to abort my plan to restart running, overall this was a fantastic trip ~ plenty of walking and also quite a lot of writing.
And now I'm home there's much to look forward to: reconnecting with friends & family, and great local events like Frome Poetry Cafe on Monday May 19th, when the very talented Daisy Behagg will be reading some of her award-winning poems. Garden Cafe, 7.30 ~ do come.

Trekking time

I didn’t expect to spend last week in the Sierra Nevada, hiking through forests spattered with snow and wandering the beaches of Lake Tahoe in 20-degree sunshine... but that’s what happened.
Mo’s friend Gary has a condo up here and a three hour drive brought us into a land of snowcapped mountains and dense forests and this shimmering lake, 22 miles long and 12 miles wide, filled with enough water to spill over the whole of California to a one-foot depth.  It's a "young" lake, glacially carved about ten  million years ago, but long known to the Washoe Indians who came here to fish, hunt, and spiritually commune with these crystal-clear waters. Then in 1844 it was 'discovered' by a senator named John C Frémont and within a decade became a tourist mecca, serviced by railroad and steamboat even before the roads were cut through, and by the 1960s the forests were riddled with condos and burger bars.

But the beauty of the lake is transcendent, and with a shoreline of 72 miles even that urban assault hasn't ruined it all: we walked for miles along fabulous trails through scented forests of incense cedar and Jefferson pines with cones as big as sheep skulls, seeing jays and woodpeckers,  golden-mantled ground squirrels and masses of other wildlife - not actually any bears, though this is bear country. The Steller jays are ubiquitous, and came each morning to the condo balcony demanding breakfast.  The beaches are lovely too ~ we found Tahoe City by far the nicest resort: if you ever go there, head for Dockside 700 for a great meal as you watch at dusk while the lake melts from indigo to silver and the white-crusted mountains flush under the setting sun.

Back on schedule...

Great to be moving around again, after last week's blip, and exploring more of this marvellous coast. The Devil’s Slide, a notorious stretch of highway running tight to the shoreline from Pacifica to Montara, is closed to traffic now, with that heavy flow tunnelling its way through a mile or so of mountain to regain Cabrillo Highway further south. The old road has been reopened for walkers & gives fabulous long views of the coast ~ when Mo and I walked it, we saw whales blowing and breaching as they moved slowly northward on their migration path. Almost as spectacular as the wave-crashed crags below were the rocks above, swirled in intricate patterns from their complex conglomeration.

California is officially in 100% drought so it feels almost bad to enjoy wandering in sunshine on the headland above Pilar Point among wild strawberries and through the dramatic eucalyptus groves above the bays... but there's been enough spasmodic rain to keep me to my self-set writing schedule too.  And here's Mo playing at Classique on Friday morning, after which we went for lunch at a proper diner where boys walk round with pots of coffee topping up your cup and there's hundreds of ways to cook eggs... simple pleasures!

English heroes had a good week for birthdays, with Wednesday shared by St George and Shakespeare, and the launch of a free on-line magazine of all things bardic including a Shakespearean tour of Bristol from playwright Tom Phillips.  And, unbelievably, this is Star-date 27 of my transatlantic trip, four weeks in and only one to go. We're off tomorrow for a trip to Lake Tahoe, where it's currently snowing... Enjoy your bluebells, England! See you soon...

Seals and sudden standstill

San Francisco Bay in sunshine: Alcatraz... seals basking on Pier 39... I thought this would be a pleasant break from writing and new running routine. I was half right. Our day out ended with me collapsed & feverish for 36 hours, cautiously emerging rather wobbly and very wary. My aim in re-starting running after a 24 year break ~ in 1990 I completed the New Forest Marathon in 4 hours 15 minutes ~ was to enter the Frome Half in July as a kind of birthday celebration but that's unlikely now. Mo and Anja, who arrived to stay in England last autumn to find me in a similar state, stoicly resumed care roles. I'm on the up now but no more 7 mile runs in the near future. In between whimpering and dozing I've managed a jigsaw & 2 movies: Mud, a pleasant Tom Sawyer fantasy with Matthew McConaughey and two sweet little boys, all too box-fresh to be credible dwellers of the Arkansas lake islands. The political thriller Page Eight is a much better movie: as one critic says, "I'd happily watch this cast read the phone book, but fortunately the script by David Hare (who also directed) is intelligent, engaging and generally makes good use of this singular cast's talents." Bill Nighy especially is absolutely brilliant, mercurial and mysteriously sexy.

Meanwhile over the pond, Billy Bragg played outside Raves from the Grave last Saturday, which is annual record store day, causing as you can imagine quite a jam in Cheap Street. I see Billy's also promoting Trussell Trust food banks, which despite a fearless campaign from the Mail on Sunday to prove that if you tell a lot of lies to compassionate people, some of them will believe them. I'm pleased to note the outcome was a surge of donations. 

Birds, jazz, and entomophagy

Two weeks into my Californian idyll. There've been outrageously hot days with skies eyeball-scorching blue, and translucent days with sea-mist surging and ebbing indescisive as a wilful child. And though this landscape is now familiar I notice new details every day: craggy avenues of peeling eucalyptus, golden poppies by the highway, pelicans gliding and plummeting into the waves, redtail hawks circling the cedars, hummingbirds in the garden (I'm inordinately proud of this snap, first time I've caught the 50mph beat-blur looking wing-shaped.)
As well as supplementing stints of writing with daily explorations along the coast and foothills, I’ve been plundering my host’s bookshelves, enjoying Sebastian Foulke’s passion for PG Wodehouse and Bill Bryson’s for American history,  though failing with the much-hyped Stoner ~ whoever said it was ‘the perfect novel’ maybe meant it as disparagement of that form. The rhythm of life here tends to quiet evenings but Friday was Cyprus Meadows monthly folk night and we went along to hear guests John Lester  and Paul Tiernan, on tour with personal ballads played jazz style.

And on Sunday we drove inland to San Jose, which has been so upgraded in the last few years that Anja, who used to live here, didn't recognise most of it. It's now spacious and sunlit with fountains and flowers and street sculpture like a city in southern Spain. We were here primarily to see Game On, a new play by young San Franciscan writer Dan Hoyle, and a model for anyone wondering if it's possible to use drama for propeganda.  Dan Hoyle's big message is environmental awareness and the need for Western producers to consider insects as a future food source, but because we're laughing at the baseball gags (well, I was bemused but others were howling) and because we care about the two main characters, there's no sense of a 'worthy' drama, though I did emerge better informed on comparative costs & protein provision of insect farming over beef. Alvin the entrepreneur and Vinnie his temperamental sidekick remain throughout confined in the same room (impressively convincing, more like a show-house than a stage set), as they wait and plan their big pitch ~ a classic situation of dramatic claustrophobia successfully exploited by playwrights from Pinter to Rob Grant & Doug Nailer in their Red Dwarf scripts. Result: rising tension, exploding tempers and a wild food fight with grasshopper rolls and impro baseball bat... also unexpected twists and my personal highlight, the whale-song rap from Glen (Cassidy Brown). San Jose Rep Theatre is a great venue, too.

Letter from America

A week into my 'writing retreat' in Half Moon Bay, where the bay by surfers' beach is empty and a sign on the shore seems to acknowledge the terrible legacy of Fukushima.  No more barefoot walking through the shallows on these beautiful sands for me if radiation contamination along the California coast is now frankly admitted. I could say more, but I do that on facebook, so here I'll just say: the sky is blue, the iceplants are flowering, I'm enjoying long walks and long hours of writing... for me, at least, life here is very good.
I've followed the coast track all down the long scimitar beach, and over the headland to the seal sanctuary at Moss Beach, I've watched the sun set over the ocean from Miramar, I've enjoyed a day clambering the extraordinary rocks at Pescadero ~ these dragonish formations carved by erosion into the sandstone over millions of years have the strangely unonomatopaeic name 'tafoni' ~ and a convivial night of shared readings with El Granada writers' group, and I've spent quite a bit of time on my laptop too. Which is all exactly as I hoped it would be.

So that's it for this post, except for a quick tip for everyone back home:  Luke Wright is bringing his Essex Lion to Merlin Theatre on Thursday April 24th, and it's a definite don't-miss. I've seen the show already, and if I wasn't here, I'd be going again, so if you're in or near Frome that night, you're passing up a treat if you don't go. Tickets only a fiver and there's (bookable) supper available too. Luke always gets brilliant reviews: here's mine, from last October: "... hilariously satiric, angrily political, or unexpectedly compassionate... as well as rapid-fire rhyming, striking imagery, and sublime turns of phrase, Luke's observational comedy is never far from self-deprecating and it's this quality that makes his flamboyant style work so well. Whether he's pretending to strut in Cuban heels, parodying his penchant for posh plumbers or recalling teenage delusions, he reminds us that we all share the same conviction as the Essex lion spotter: how can a thing that makes you feel / be anything but fucking REAL?"

Lebanon to Arcadia

It begins like a bad joke:  an Englishman, an Irishman, and an American are taken hostage in Beirut... so which will stay imprisoned, which die, and which be released? Someone Who'll Watch Over Me by Frank McGuinness is a terrific script, topical when written in 1992 but timeless in its calm, incisive, investigation of the human capacity for love and fear, and exasperation too.
The three roles demand not only convincing accents but absolute emotional authenticity too, so all the more impressive that three young drama students from Strode College held their audience totally gripped with a brilliant touring production which arrived at Frome's Cornerhouse on Thursday night. Ross Scott as the Irish journalist, Lewis Elson as the English teacher, and Sam Rich as the American photographer, took us captive with them them for a breathless hour-and-a-half and brought real dramatic energy to this intense and moving drama.

Tom Stoppard said that nothing he wrote was supposed to be remotely bewildering, which bewildered me a bit when I read the outline of Arcadia ~ though it's often been revived since first performance in 1993, I hadn't seen before.  Two simultaneous timelines exploring the history of iterated mathematical formulae, landscape gardening and Byron.. the new Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory production sounded confusing but it isn't:  each thread is clearly & cleverly intertwined and each intriguing revelation neatly fitted into the story. And it's ~ mostly ~ very, very funny. Brilliant directing from Andrew Hilton, great costumes, simple and effective set (a table) and terrific acting from all the cast, with Matthew Thomas charismatic as the 20th Century academic, Piers Wehner & Hannah Lee totally enticing as the 19th Century tutor and his gifted pupil and Dorothea Myer-Bennett superbly Wildean-witty as Lady Croom. It's on throughout April ~ definitely recommended.

Frome footnote: quirky little gallery-shop OWL had a special event on Friday night to celebrate new work, including an impressive life-size African deity created in felt by Gladys Paulus.  Sande represents women in sisterhood, and is based on the initiation masks of the Mende people of Sierra Leone. She's on her way to America now, where I hope she inspires as much discussion as she did tonight. That's John Law playing jazz on keyboard beyond the brooding goddess. Which reminds me I missed Acoustic Plus at Cheese&Grain again... though I did make Rag Mama Rag at the Olive Tree.
There's so much fantastic music in Frome I can never get to all of it ~ and I'll miss everything and everyone in Frome for the next five weeks. I'm off to California for a writing retreat in El Granada so my next posting will probably show the sandy shore and long waves of Half Moon Bay. Here's a glimpse from last springtime there...

Heathrow update: I can't fly off without bigging-up another Frome success: Flatpack Democracy by Peter Macfadyen describes how a group of local people, exasperated by the dysfunctionality of current local government systems, campaigned for independence and took the whole town with them. Upbeat and easy-read, this story is an inspiring handbook for jaded or enthusiastic townsfolk anywhere, explaining the process and the pitfalls ~ with pictures ~ and emphasising crucial points like Keep it light and Party!

Typically unconventional, the Sunday evening booklaunch (which is why this missed the first edition posting) was a walk through Frome's radical past led by feisty duo Molly and Ruth from Bread Print & Roses. Much fascinating historical data, illuminating quotes from William Cobbett on the destitution that followed the Cloth bonanza (Frome was listed as one of the wealthiest towns in England in the Domesday Book) and a quick roundup of all the dissenting churches that flourished in a town renowned for its non-conforming ethos and support for workers' solidarity. and I didn't know our MP in 1914, John Barlow, was a pacifist throughout the first world war! Another reason to be proud of Frome's past.

15th Century grief & 20th Century grooming

In 1401 a Bohemian clerk called Johannes von Saz lost his wife in childbirth and next day wrote a dialogue with Death as full of vivid grief and rage as you'd expect from such an outpouring. Death and the Ploughman has been translated by Irish writer Michael West into a dramatic diatribe for voices, an argument by turns lyrical and chilling, with unexpected shifts and even dark comedy, and The Mechanical Animal Corporation with Tobacco Factory Theatres has taken this into Bristol's Arnos Vale Cemetery for an extraordinary piece of site-specific promenade theatre.
 'Promenade' always makes me think of strolling with parasols, but here we trooped by torch-light up muddy forest paths between tombs where dim-lit figures could be glimpsed tending their graves and decorated figures mourned on their own headstones, as we followed the ploughman in his contentious pursuit of Death deeper and deeper into her dark realm. Death disdains his protests. "Man lives in this world a stranger in a strange land: from the moment you enter this world you are old enough to leave it." The language is often biblical but the debate about love and suffering is timeless, and Death's speech of scorn at mankind's use of life is, though short of fracking and bankers's bonuses, as fresh as this week's facebook. Director Tom Bailey and his cast have created a gripping & unforgettable theatrical event, with a satisfying final verdict from the strange chorus: "The honour is to the ploughman, but the victory is to Death." It's on till Sunday ~ if it's not sold out dig out your warmest clothes & go.

I haven't seen Pygmalion since the movie of My Fair Lady in 1964 and I'd forgotten how seriously political a statement about the unpalatable nature of class distinction the play is intended to be, so it was interesting to see this unsaccharine production at Theatre Royal Bath. The allusion in the title seems deliberately ironic: Professor Higgins did not fall in love with Eliza as an artwork and make her real, he remained obsessively infatuated with his own skill and made a real girl miserably artificial, which makes a truly satisfying outcome difficult. Shaw had problems with his directors over this from the 1914 opening night on, but director David Grindley finds an ending the writer might have accepted while emphasising the situation comedy and verbal wit throughout. Effectively simple sets and beautifully muted costumes evoke the era superbly and there's a strong cast, with Rula Lenska as Higgin's mother and Jamie Foreman as Eliza's father excellent and Alistair McGowan as the high-functioning sociopath professor outstanding.

This week's Frome-fact: Hot on the heels of the Sunday Times accolade, The Times has published a list of the 30 most glamourous places to live in the UK with Frome at number 7 ~ just ahead of Primrose Hill. Their rational is based on occasional celeb-spotting rather than town life but it's nice to be popular, even with journos who praise house prices and the fact 'commuters from Bristol and Bath live here.'

And I can't post without a farewell to Tony Benn whose funeral is today. His image is featured in the window of the Health Food shop in Cheap Street, with a quote of wonderful simplicity and wisdom.  "If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people."

Renaissance to Resurrection, and a town less ordinary

From A Very British Renaissance I learned it was Thomas Wyatt who made poetry one of England's most dynamic art forms, after visiting Italy while Petrarch was busy pioneering the sonnet as the perfect love poem. Wyatt took the form (eight lines to lament love unattainable, six to find resolution) and added passion: His line It was no dream: I lay broad waking is apparently unique to love poetry at a time when sexual union could only happen in reverie. "He captured the messy quality of life as lived, setting the tone for English poets from Shakespeare to Larkin" says glam guide Dr James Fox, though I'm pretty sure it wasn't a direct line to the Bad Sex Awards from here on. John Keats was scolded by contemporaries for allowing Madelaine to enjoy her swain's 'solution sweet' in The Eve of St Agnes, and as Martin Amis points out in his book England, early novels didn't allow heroines to copulate or even think of it: the exception is Jane Austen's Lizzie Bennet, whose father tactfully takes her aside to check she has the right chemistry with Darcy:"I know your lively talents, Elizabeth. You could be neither happy nor respectable in a loveless marriage." The BBC2 programme is on iPlayer for a while,  if you want to see why Holbein's painting of The Ambassadors tells the quintessential story of the era man discovered the world through art.

Art was the question, if not the answer, on Saturday morning in Frome where a banner outside Rook Lane Arts promising Something wonderful is happening, and it did, for after a burst of hail there was a rainbow in the sky above the banner in town with the same '70s-style message, commissioned as a 'new motto' for Frome (artist Ruth Proctor was apparently unaware the town already has the motto A wonderful place) and flown around towed by a small plane.

This was part of a day of concept art organised by Foreground Instructions for an Ordinary Utopia to "make an ordinary town a little less ordinary"~  not an overly ambitious mission as Frome has once again been named in national media as ~ for 'creative energy' ~ one of UK's best places to live. Like the hippy happenings I remember from 50 years ago, except with 'names' in the art-world bussed-in (literally) from London, this wasn't much known about by those not involved, and facebook discussion has been lively.

There's always excitement around new initiatives, but for some this was tempered by the Marie-Antoinette-ish nature of the opening event: throwing pennies down the streets for the locals to pick up. Artist Peter Liversidge provided a hundred quid's worth of small change to realise this whimsical proposal inspired by a nursery rhyme, though he annoyed locals by misprouncing the name of the town he was making 'a little bit more special' in this manner.
But Frome is a small town with a big heart, as the show-biz cliche goes, and there's interest in anything 'arty', especially the exploratory and contentious. As local painter David Chandler said: "It brings people together, and if it does that, it's doing it's job.'

Meanwhile Black Swan Arts was jampacked as results of the Young Open Art Competition were revealed, with fifteen children & teenagers winning workshops with local artists. So perhaps the ideal is to embrace all and avoid a 'hierarchy of excellence': art observed is inevitably a commodity, but we don't need to put higher value on what is esoteric and fashionable over what is accessible and ordinary.

Over in Bath the 3-week Shakespeare Unplugged Festival ended with Resurrection, a retelling by local writer David Lane of themes in five different plays, performed by the Engage Shakespeare Company.
Coincidentally this experience too began with a coach journey, as the audience was collected from Bath Egg and ferried to Burdell's Yard for a promenade-style performance in awesomely atmospheric settings, each suited the theme and mood of the scene. The concept is intriguing: What if these famous characters had evaded the death delivered by Shakespeare and lived on ~ in King Lear's case for 29 years, psychotic & inarticulate, tended by a now-cynical Cordelia. Ophelia resents her totem status, Titus' daughter has wrenched her father's tongue out to voice her vengeance, and two children, both princes usurped, have processed trauma in very different ways. Programme notes say the aim is to 'haul Shakespeare's themes into the 21st Century': there's much madness and murderous rage though in places the haulage maybe slightly lost in translation to anyone unfamiliar with the plays. That's not of course what matters ~ the monologues are gripping, and the stories vivid and visceral, timeless rather than merely contemporised, shifting through different rhythms so this almost seemed more like a symphony than a play. This exciting and richly theatrical production ends as it begins with a call to find our own tongues: Shakespeare would have appreciated this full-circling wheel.

Writers' journeys

Tonight's Frome Poetry Cafe had the theme of Journeys, so it was ironic perhaps that Daisy Behagg was left stranded at Castle Cary and couldn't join us... but our other lead poet David Johnson was on fantastic form with performance pieces about railway journeys and journeys into history ~ ending with a witty imagined 18th Century slam, with neurotic Romantics on tour / signing their volumes in the foyer. So mega sympathies Daisy ~ who will try again later this year ~ for your trauma, but luckily local eco-poet Helen Moore was on hand to step in, and the 17 open-mic poets took us on many fabulous journeys too. A full house at the Garden Cafe and a wonderfully rich evening.. one of those special nights.
Obliquely on the subject of journeys still: it's 100 years since Dylan Thomas was born, and Graffiti magazine had a little competition for pieces inspired by his poems.  Fern Hill is a favourite of mine since early childhood when my father read it to me, so I took its rhythms and notion of long-ago memories and adapted both to summer holidays on the south coast of Devon... and then came the storms, prompting an ending more disturbing than nostalgic. I'm pleased to say the judge liked it and Dawlish Warren won first prize. It's a fine line between homage and plagiarism, so I hope I haven't transgressed too much - you can judge for yourselves here:

Now as I was golden brown and straddling the rock pools 
Along the laughing beach and singing as the sand was home 
The sky high and dazzling blue,
 Granny held me in her towel 
Wiping icecream from my salty face
 And queen of the mermaids I wriggled away and ran back to the waves 
Heedless of any call beyond their gentle surging swell,
Toe-kicking the coarse wet sand 
All along the brown-sugar rim of the sea. 

And after the thermos-and-sandwich tea, dried and cardiganed,
Princess was I of turreted sand-castles and splendid forts
With scalloped moat and paper flags
Flying their stripes and stars
The whole world in my dominion.
And picnic packed and sandy shoes pulled on to go, we'd see
Slow foaming rivulets creep over our brave constructions
Licking the ramparts into sandslides,
slipping back into dunes as the sunset streamed.

Nothing I knew, in those childish times, that storms would obliterate
All of my memories in one raging night of terrible severance
Rail from rock, rock from land,
Nor that rousing from sleep
I'd see the path to my past wiped away forever
And watch onscreen that timeless landscape ripped away.
Oh as I played along those Devon sands happy and unknowing
Time held us all in ignorant thrall
Believing ourselves as strong as the sea.

Finally journey of this posting: my writer friend Sally Gander, author of the Y/A thriller The Big Deep, invited me to join her on a 'blog tour' and although it sounded like a cross between a discursive relay and a chain letter, I was intrigued enough to agree. The aim is to share personal perspectives on the writing process: each 'guest' blogger answers 4 questions and hands the baton on. So here goes:
What am I working on?

Currently, so many different things I feel like the sheep in Alice in Wonderland knitting with fourteen pairs of needles. I’m writing two plays ~ both in delicate stages of development ~ and revising two others. I’m also working on two monologues, one on spec for an actress friend, plus a short for our Nevertheless Productions event in Frome Festival. The theme is War Zones, which is a challenge for a militant pacifist. I’m also working with performer Annabelle Macfadyen on a script for a ‘Time Walk’ around Rodden Meadow in the festival, telling ‘the story of the earth in a thousand paces.’ Mind-blowing science but a lot of fun. And the blog trundles on:  theatre reviews, local arts, random thoughts on anything related to writing. I’m off to California for a month at the end of March, for uninterrupted focus on all these projects.
How does my work differ from others of its genre? 
 The same way every playwright’s work is different from others':  it’s my voice and not theirs. I write psychological dramas and use dark comedy a lot. I also tend to indulge in meta-theatrical elements ~ ‘smart-arsed’ to those who don't like plays that are self-conscious about being dramatic inventions ~ so I sometimes let characters address the audience direct. Well it worked for Shakespeare...
Why do I write what I do?
To find out what I mean. I think all writers at heart write to discover their own processes of thinking and feeling.
How does my writing process work? 
Scripts for stage are no different from stories on the page, at the start. A character starts talking to you, quietly at first, and then increasingly intrusively. There are challenges in their life, and other characters with their own opinions on these matter, and eventually they all colonise your head and your only choice is to start writing it all down. When it's all collected you carve it back to the bone, marveling how much verbal fat there always is, and work out what it’s all about. Then you hand it over to a production team, who wrestle it into a coma ~ excuse the mixed metaphors but this is a mixed process ~ and then breathe life into your words and make you feel that seeing your story on stage is THE most fantastic privilege for any writer.  Then when the production’s over you go into a bereaved state… until a character sidles up and starts talking to you….
Well, that’s how it is for me, anyway. I don’t have any routines, or any preferred time of day or place. I work directly onto my laptop, at home, in a café, or traveling ~ but always have a notebook beside me to jot down thoughts.

And now over to Cliff Lonsdale, who I met first in Skyros two years ago, when he would lie full length at the edge of the Aegean and write the most amazing pieces. He sent me this thumbnail biog:
Cliff is a writer and development consultant currently living in Myanmar with his wife and two dogs; prior to this he lived in Africa for several years. Cliff spends a large proportion of his life bouncing around in the back of a car on dirt roads; he tends to have quite a lot of time to contemplate life. His utterings, mutterings and general musings on this and many other matters can be found at www.clifflonsdale.com.