So here I am in California, after 10 hours and 4 movies, none with a shot as good as the icecaps of Greenland. Mo collects me from San Francisco airport and we take the coast road past long pale sands where surfing waves are dramatically eroding the cliffs away, down to Half Moon Bay.
Mo and Anja live here in a blueygrey painted timber house, the Pacific on one side and hills & creeks on the other, canyons in the distance and hummingbirds in the back garden. In short, Wow...
Within an hour of arriving we’re all in Café Gibraltar where I’m mesmerised by the way the waiter chants the specials with particular attention to dressings. I pick the tomato salad with pumpernickel, Peruvian pine nuts and open-sesame seeds, drizzled with light squalls. (I may have misrecalled some of those ingredients, but the waiter applauded my choice & didn’t call the whole thing off even though I pronounced tomato the UK way.) Ah, and there was Californian wine too, I seem to recall...
Next day is mostly orientation & walking by the rocks of Pescadero, with an evening performance of Waiting For Godot at the theatre in Half Moon Bay. Mo plays Pozzo. “One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?” It’s an amazing play for many reasons, one of them being that every part seems to have the best lines. The director has decided that this timeless allegory of alienation exactly defines the plight of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, and his set reflects this. It’s interesting, and of course all interpretations have validity, but for me there’s extraordinary power in Beckett’s evocation of the road to anywhere, and that existentialist question what are we waiting for? is compromised rather than enhanced by a realistic answer: for rescue from specific urban tragedy. That aside, a great production, with some powerful performances, notably Estragon and Pozzo.

A quieter day seemed called for after the cast party: more coastal walking along the bluffs and a little downtown mooching -oo-er that’s me on the poster in the bookshop! I'm hoping my airbag burns will be less livid by the time I perform. We're off to Morro Bay for a couple of days first...

"The reasons we write fiction are both simple and complex. Simple in that we are story-telling creatures who must shape our experience and share it with others; complex in that we are all individuals with different motives and desires." Derek Johns is an agent and a novelist too, so he straddles both camps in his article 'Why Write Novels?' in the current issue of the Society of Authors' Journal. Possibly from beneath the brim of that first hat, he concludes: "The European novel was a function of 19th-century middle-class leisure time, just as chamber music was a function of chambers. Will it be superseded? We will always tell ourselves stories, but will those stories necessarily take the form of novels? And is the novel necessarily the highest, most evolved form of story-telling, as we have tended to think?"
Answers on a blog, email, poetry podium, or postcard, please.

Writers-on-radio corner: If you thought Alan Partridge far-fetched, spare four minutes to squirm at this interview with writer Hardeep Singh Kohli recently on local radio. Unbelievable but genuine.

"A misty Autumn day, smelling of empty benches... what will become of those memories of water and swans?" This was Saturday's Finale of 'Palace Intrusions' at Wells, as Artmusic threaded and wove together sunset and singing, candles and cellos - and awesome parkour free-running. A very different musical interlude from Acoustic Plus in Frome on Friday, featuring the 'Mendip Rock' of Cary Grace who's also my multi-talented web-designer.

Monday was a dramatic night: "A Number" at Salisbury Playhouse only lasted an hour but crammed in everything anyone who’s ever been a parent, or a child, might have wondered or worried about. What is the value of a person, when we’ve got 30% the same genes as a lettuce… and does it even matter? Not being unique is hardly a death-penalty offence, is it? Carol Churchill’s play is rightly highly acclaimed, though the staccato faux-naturalistic interrupty dialogue is occasionally jarring, but the acting (Pip Donaghy & Fergus O'Donnell ) was stunning and the overall impact both moving and shocking.
And another dramatic impact that night was suffered by my car, deemed by the guy from the Crash Repair Centre about the worst damaged he's seen. Thank Daewoo for airbags - you only need them once but when you do, you do.

And now I'm off to Half Moon Bay in California to meet up with old friends in a new place - and to bring some southwest-UK stylee performance poetry to deepwest-USA. I'm billed to do a set in Caffe Lucca, Montara, which gets great reviews on Yelp. "Espresso pulled to perfection and foam that is wickedly thick and fluffy" says Jonathan C, giving 5 stars: "The patio overlooks the Pacific, but has a window to keep the chill of the coastal breeze at bay and minimizes the noise pollution on Cabrillo Highway." Fellow reviewer Elizabeth H - is that really her on the surfboard? xtreme! - says it's her new favourite place. Mine too and I haven't even been there yet... Can't wait.
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"Civilisation as we know it is well and truly past its sell-by date, and this is where this book comes in" says Bath writer Esme Ellis at the launch her novel 'This Strange and Precious Thing'. It's love, of course, and more - an exploration, among other things, of the possibility that fantasy is only another name for potential.

Small Wonder (Sept 18th-21st) is billed as one of the UK's most successful independent literary festivals. It certainly must be one of the smallest, being entirely contained in a barn just off the A27 a few miles from Lewes. Alison and I drove down to investigate, arriving at sunset on Friday to be met with cathedral quietness and exceedingly good soup.
The barn belongs to Charleston, where the Bloomsbury set allegedly met, so although the house and garden weren't open we could imagine Virginia and Leonard musing beside the cows, and EM Forster picking his way through the byre in his carpet slippers.
Our inquisitiveness was specifically focused on the Short Story Slam, to see if the idea might be worth nicking for Frome festival next year and luckily for our 8-hour round trip, it is. We'll adapt it, of course. We won't open the event with a narrative poem about the Mau Mau Uprising - always tricky to lift the mood to high joviality after graphic details of bloody atrocities. We won't have the scores writ large on screen, so that the least successful slam readers have to sit staring at their low ranking along with the entire audience like some dreadful dream of schooldays trauma. We won't - oh, we've got lots of ideas, you'll have to wait and see. But thanks & respect to the writers and readers who created a highly entertaining evening, even though I couldn't honestly tick the "totally agree" box on the evaluation form for "Small Wonder is designed with young people in mind."

Our evening ended on a more lively note in Hanover, where Alison's friend Jonathan hosted us & introduced us to his bit of Brighton with "aspirations to bohemianism". Now if he'd given us an evaluation form, we could have ticked Accessible, Stimulating, Exhilarating, and Fun....

And finally... I'd never seen that "classic romantic drama” Brief Encounter so as it was on this Sunday afternoon I thought I Ought To. David Lean's iconic movie is more interesting as a study of a culture thankfully gone forever, where 'heppily merried' meant being hysterically emotionally repressed but with an invisible cook to make dinner. Romance I saw not: the love-struck couple sniggered and bitched like Karen and Jack from gay sitcom Will & Grace until guilt intervened to ruin their heppiness. Made in 1945 but clearly set pre-war (Noel Coward's script was written a decade earlier), there's appeal in the bravado of the voiceover technique, trusting us with the ending right from the start, but narrative viewpoint is sacrificed for an unnecessary scene in Stephen's flat. Brief? that was 86 minutes of rare British sunshine lost forever. But nothing lasts long, neither heppiness nor despair. And aren't we due an Indian summer?
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The Coleridge Way is signposted at judicious intervals with a quill, as fitting reminder of the inspirational nature of these 40ish miles across the Quantock Hills and Exmoor. The cunning marketing is certainly inspirational. It did strike me as a bit odd the poet had regularly paced this looping route to Porlock Information Centre; in fact he probably only did the bit between his house and Wordsworth's, and the rest are just some rather nice places he might have popped by. It's still a great walk, though we were mostly too knackered at the end of each day to write even with Dorothyesque minimalism. ('Walked, I know not where' is one of my favourite entries.)





Well, anyway, we did it. Nine random writers followed the quill through varying weather and terrain, with some natural wastage, until on the fourth day the survivors arrived wreathed in proud smiles and gratuitous waterproofs to collect our certificate.


We'd travelled through Xanadu's sinuous rills in forests ancient as the hills, forded seething chasms; like the earth we'd breathed in short pants and if we didn't drink the milk of Paradise we certainly had some really good nosh at our B&Bs.

Back in time to catch some of the Bristol Poetry Festival at the Arnolfini, where the cafe isn't open due to building work.

I had low hopes, as Emily and I picked the last Saturday in August for a writerly jaunt to Weymouth, of a proper day at the seaside with sun, swimming, and fish'nchips to finish the day.. but we did. We had an absolutely brilliant time.




Frome Library Writing Group met again on Monday: Ten authors in search of a character. Alison, this month's randomly rotating guide, stimulated our efforts with names, trigger lines, and tips like 'Obsession is always good.'




This weekend Hazel & I are off with the Dreamweavers team on the Coleridge trek, 39 miles across the Mendips and Exmoor. We're hoping to find inspiration for poetry of our own from treading in the footsteps of this perverse and talented radical, and find out more about the man too. It was Coleridge who defined literature with stunning simplicity:
"prose = words in their best order;
poetry = the best words in the best order".
His was the primary inspiration behind the Lyrical Ballads yet Wordsworth, perhaps out of jealousy, edited his contributions and undermined him constantly. The relationship between Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother's poorer, more attractive, friend may never be known, but her journal carries a discreetly euphoric account of a long walk together late one night: 'Venus almost like another moon. Lost to us at Alfoxden long before she goes down the large white sea.'
(The picture is not Dorothy but literary writer Frances Wilson, whose biography explores dark secrets of this wild bohemian obsessed by poetry and passion.)

It's actually quite difficult to write simply on nature - even DH Lawrence was capable of sentimentalising, as when he said: "A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself" (how did he know that? Was he fluent in twitter? That small bird might have been griping away like Darnell in the BB Diary Room). As a contrast to Wordsworth's notorious anthropomorphism (babbling cuckoos, pious robins, and a green linnet who sounds more like a Brownies camp leader), try Wing Beats, a collection of of words and images launched soon, with small observations like:
shifting currents . . .
a coot scrambles
to keep mid-river.

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Some of the most scathing put-downs come from theatre, especially the auditorium. My father was a drama critic, and he had a typewriter that must have been twinned with a lemon-grater. He savoured classic sneers, too: "Delusions of adequacy" was one of Walter Kerr's. Less succinct is Bernard Levin's verdict: "the depth of a cracker motto, the drama of a dial-a-recipe service and the eloquence of a conversation between a speak-your-weight machine and a whoopee cushion", but I don't know which playwright writhed under that withering endorsement. Ken Tynan opined- I think of him as someone who opined, rather than just saying - "A dramatist is a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom."
And RT's Allison Pearson recently added to the roll of disparagement: "Why would anyone choose to pay to be cramped and uncomfortable in the same room as hundreds of other people, watching performances that are always too big and too loud and worst of all you can't get out." Theatrical productions, she says, get away with being "yawningly talky and boring", as well as brittle, mannered, stilted, "and nothing actually happens. Can you imagine anyone getting away with that lot in The Bill?"
Well no, I can't, but I don't watch The Bill. It sounds like a fair summary of most of Radio 4 though, but that's probably unfair because I don't listen to that either. I do love theatre, though. That breathless moment when the curtains draw back at the start, and you know your world is about to be changed, perhaps forever. My earliest theatre memory is crying at the end of a London production of Alls Well that Ends Well because I didn't want to go home. Family folklore has me aged three, demanding 'More, more' and refusing to leave my seat. That's the benefit of a critic for a father, even a curmudgeonly one; I'd seen Ibsen and Synge before I was 11, and in the glory days of angry young men, I was wide-eyed in the stalls.
All of which ruminations occurred because my current writing seems to be increasingly dramatic (though without facial lesions or glam cops.) I've been doing some radio shorts for Frome FM, and am keeping fingers & toes crossed my two 15-minute stage plays around the theme of marginalisation will find their way to production next year. It's scary and exciting, writing with no commission and no guaranteed outcome - yet this risky edge is part of a writer's life. Real creativity seems to live in wild places. "You probably have to be unstable to be creative," Anthony Sher says, "All great artists in any field seem a bit mad." I got that from the RT, too.
What else is occurring, as this wet summer dissolves into a damp autumn? Misty walks & cycles, mellow fruitful meetings, disappearance of Scrabulous on facebook, discovery of e-Scrabulous... life goes on in its variously wordy ways.
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Have you ever dreamed of swapping urban life for a rural retreat in spectacular surroundings where mountains circle the valley and a river runs through... finding and renovating old stone buildings where donkeys and chickens can roam - maybe putting up a couple of yurts in the garden ...pictured yourself and your partner following your ideal work here as your children grow up healthy and happy (there'd be a small village locally, for schooling and community)
...imagined evenings sharing meals al fresco with friends as sun sets over the forested horizon and the sky fills with an unimaginable numerosity of stars ...And then thought, Oh it would never work.
Think again.
Sharon and Alex live the dream: they talk the talk (French) and walk the walk, along the wonderful woodland paths of the Cevennes to Gardoussel. There's only one thing to do when you find a place like this and friends like these, and that's go back, which I intend to do, next year and for longer.

This was the first Creative Writing group that Sharon, herself a talented writer, has organised here as most courses are Ayurvedic nutrition and yoga. Le Loft adapted itself perfectly as a venue for inventive self-expression, lyricism and laughter, poignancy and passion.

And who comes to write in a magical story-book place like this? Magical characters, of course: A fairy, a jester, a cat (blue), a witch, a lord and lady, a wandering minstrel, and a colourful company of shape-shifting companions.

Donald opened his comments at our book-review evening:"I suspect that the books we love above all other books are those whose heroes are ourselves: flawed as we are; ideal as we intend to be." Open for discussion in terms of reading choice perhaps, but certainly every personality here glowed through their writing.

This was a fantastic week of word-crafting and sharing, amazing meals, and forest walks - I swam under the waterfall and hiked every afternoon, except the day of the thunderstorm when every surface suddenly became a pit of writhing rain-snakes. Admittedly there was, overall, less sunshine than the terms of the contract (viz: South of France, August) implied, but wonderful writing, wild walks, and white wine were acceptable alternatives.

Hazel & I spent Saturday on an 'Artist's Date'. We've been doing these irregularly ever since we started writing together, sometimes in flamboyant venues like Paris, Barcelona, and last christmas Manhatten, though more often in downtown Frome. This time it was in rural Worcestershire where Haz now lives.

A great day, divided between working on new 'Live & Lippy' material, and walking on the Malvern Hills, where we discovered a wayside shrine where passing poets were invited in Blake's words to
"see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour."
We wrote 7 pieces, walked 3 hours, & rewarded ourselves with fish&chips.

Bristol Harbour Festival expected 200,000 visitors and most of them seemed to be swarming round the docks on Sunday. Streets were in full fairground mode, the river chokka with tour boats, and Cascade Steps throbbing with poetry performances. Rosemary Dun defied an overcast sky with odes to summer passions and the rain held off, till later.

And once more on the theme of writers in their own words... did you know Willm Shakspere never penned his name the way history has selected? I'm engrossed in the Bill Bryson biography, which finds the man himself missing for most of his life but paints a fascinating picture of his theatrical world. This was a time when, despite plagues and casual violence, theatres were crowded nightly with plays seen as so relevant to current politics that performers risked erratic penalties like having their noses lopped off. Ah happy days...
I finished this book knowing a great deal less about our greatest playwright and poet than when I started, but it's a compelling read. And here's Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, one of many conspiracy-theorist candidates to the challenge Will the real Will Shakespeare please stand up - despite being 'sexually dissolute and widely disliked' and prone to murdering his servants, he was the favourite of a researcher named Looney.


Off now to Languedoc for a couple of weeks. Have a good August, y'all!
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