When 'normal life' is exciting... with fingers crossed...

Frome last week was abuzz about the return of the Saturday Market, a proper outdoor do with stalls selling everything from carved curios and tantalising jewellery to garden glories and amazing edibles - here's Liam's Cake Stall offering scandalously delicious vegan specialities.  Stoic local buskers Paul Kirtley and David Goodman were on the bridge to enhance the market yard browsing experience, too.

Across the town in Merchants Barton, the ongoing debate on the Saxonvale development moved  forward with a weekend-long presentation to the public of the preferred project, described as "an exemplary development on the banks of the River Frome, meticulously designed taking the historic grain of Frome as its starting point and delivering a characterful, vibrant, residential-led mixed-use community, with flexible commercial uses, high-quality public realm, and homes for all ages." It really does look what Frome needs, and local enthusiasm is high (especially for the lido.)

Also in Merchants Barton, the car parking space has been embellished by a project to raise awareness of Mental Health Awareness Week and to further highlight the need for creative development of the Saxonvale site.  Photographer Tim Gander shot pictures, which have been paired with poems and comments from users and staff at Mind in Somerset. Tim's aim is to highlight "what happens when a former industrial site is left to deteriorate. Fly-tipping, vandalism and natural decay take their toll" and his project has much to commend it, but it is worth remembering that the abandonment wasn't all negative: birds and wild flowers flourished among the trees and the old buildings were a prime site for the ingenuity of young street artists as Frome's graffiti Hall of Fame... here's a sample:

This week's zoom drama is Transition Tales from The Travelling Talesman, promoted by  the Art House Southampton with the tagline 'When gender fluid gods saved creation...' Not only in Greek mythology but in cultures across the world, deities changed gender as well as species, and his transformation tales ranged from the same-form duality of Hermaphroditus to flowers (Hyacinthus, remade in blood and tears), stars (Ursa major & minor) and in the unfortunate case of Actaeon, a stag promptly torn apart by his own hounds. Zeus had a particular penchant for metamorphosis, apparently, seducing his many lovers in multiple forms such as as a parrot, a pig, and a shower of water. Although this talk clocked in at 2 hours 20 minutes, the chronicles never flagged and the zoom audience was enthusiastic and articulate: the chat line was really interesting, posing questions like How does root sex work for fungus? (the answer is mitochondria) and comments on the gender of quabbatic numbers. Performances like this, with an option for audience participation, are as valuable for community health as Open Mic poetry online sessions, and hopefully will all outlive the pandemic and continue to zoom.

My week ended excitingly with a train journey to Gloucester, taking advantage of new freedom to meet my publisher and iron out various issues relating to my upcoming short story collection: not only a useful visit but a delightful one, as we had time to walk around the docks - which are beautiful - and the older parts of this odd, somewhat bedraggled, city. 

Relics of medieval buildings, religious and secular, are everywhere, though mostly overwhelmed by modern build, but there seems to be a will to reclaim civic history more effectively. There are quite a few boards explaining the history & context of some features - there's a storytelling bench designed by the master mason at the Cathedral in 1999 - but there's not much street art around the city. This alleyway, however, has been turned into a Van Gogh art gallery, with posters of the artist's final works all along the hoarding,  in a designated 'covid friendly outdoor exhibition.'  There are some interesting curios too, like the team of clock bellringers above the old woodwork & jewellery shop, the new gargoyles on the cathedral, and even the unpretentious centre of the old town where road signs to Eastgate, Southgate, Westgate, and Northgate once referred to the old main roads London, Devon, Wales, and the North - as shown in this 1805 map:

This was a week when summer came in starts and stops, rather like everyone's social plans, and a busy one for me: the deadline date for my quarterly round-up of drama in the southwest for Plays International (amazingly, and encouragingly, there was much to report even though not a single production was live), a restarted writing group, new fiction project underway, and sense of renewed freedom.  I'll end with a view of a sunny walk along the river path from Frome to Great Elm. 

Mostly outdoors, with added foraging, art, and a look ahead

What a difference a week makes. Last Sunday's return to real-time contact with the band at Prestleigh seemed almost surreal, but seven days later it feels not only delightfully relaxing but perfectly normal to be meeting friends at Marston Park, the still-in-development glamping site with fabulous lakeside views, so I'll start there - thanks Rosie Eliot for the introduction, the walk, and the snap of our bubbly-pitch watching a grebe swanning around the ducks. Marston Park will be a featured site in the upcoming Frome Festival too, with several local bands booked to play - and it's a wonderful afternoon stroll, especially when the woods are thick with garlic and bluebells.

My trip to St Algars Yard to see the art studio work on display for the Wyle Valley Art trail once the gales had subsided was rewarded not only by some fabulous paintings, glassware and pottery, but also by a tour around the studio grounds which are simply beautiful. Legend has it that the bones of Ælfgar of Selwood, or Saint Algar, were buried in a chapel here, with a 16th Century report by John Leyland, Henry VIII's chaplain that they were venerated "superstitiously by the folische commune people". After Henry's land-snatch of all monastic property, the chapel was absorbed into the farm but this area is now thought to have been making glass since Roman times, making St Algars the first glassworking site in the southwest. Here's the site, and the gorgeous glass I bought from Sonja Klinger.

And as wild garlic colonises the woodland around Frome - with a total takeover in North Parade woodland, a secret parallel world running alongside the main road largely unknown - the tiny trees installed in and around the town are beginning to show leaf. The baby oak in the Millennium Green is in leaf, and so too is another protege of tree-guru Julian Hight: the sycamore planted last year to commemorate the Tolpuddle Martyrs - this is how it looks now, and you can read the full story here.   

Still with an eye on life outdoors, though the talk organised on Wednesday by Tina Gaisford Waller, manager of Hunting Raven Books on Wednesday was on zoom: David Hamilton has written another fascinating book about the treasures of our natural landscape: Where the Wild Things Grow is a forager's guide, and David's lively talk illuminated the nourishing and tasty possibilities growing all around us. Mushrooms and nuts, obviously, but also grasses, leaves, buds and roots, all discovered by taste trial - and possibly occasional error - by David over his years of study in town & countryside, coast & woodlands. The talk was organised as following a long walk in our local area, with daily recipes all created from plants passed in that day's terrain.

Also on zoom - for the last time, fingers crossed - was the Proof Pudding Club meeting to share book reviews of upcoming possible top-titles for Hunting Raven Books, always an interesting session though my overheating MacBook required me to leave before the end this time. My random pick from options offered was a story collection entitled The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans, which appealed since my own current writing project involves gathering my previously-published short stories into a collection.  Danielle's book is worth buying for the title tale alone: a Kafkaesque narration which turns slowly fearsomely, inevitably, violent as the significance of such 'corrections' is explored. With the conflictive responses to Colston still resonating, we in England should perhaps take heed.

So as we edge cautiously back into what we used to once consider normal life, hopefully with lessons learned and not too much sorrow incurred, a quick preemptive look to the summer ahead: as well as the camping and glamping sites around the area, Frome town is looking forward to the return of its annual Arts Festival - reduced in size but with plenty of outside activity and a covered stage on the ECOS amphitheatre. I've already plugged the Poetry Cafe - Tuesday July 6, 8pm - only £5 for the always-brilliant open-mic session plus the ever-sensational Liv Torc as guest - but there will be much more on that stage - see the Merlin lineup - and of course elsewhere. So hopefully we can all look forward to less zooming and more meeting, connecting, and laughing. 

Beltane, bluebells, bits of history, and a band gig!

Remember the days when a sunny weekend meant bands playing outside pubs? Frome's Paul Kirtley and his amorphous group The Tribe never forgot, and the easing of lockdown rules plus Beltane weekend's sunshine saw a multi-talented assortment of musical friends outside the Prestleigh Inn playing for 3 hours on Sunday afternoon. Huge performance skills with an impressive array of instruments were delivered with table service and social spacing - big credit to the team, and a happy step forward for us all. Here's sound-man Steve, with David on guitar & mandolin, Monty on cajon, Carl on harp, Paul singing and strumming, Danny on bass, Ray on slide guitar, other guitars, and vocals: Jim Cook joined us with his magic double saxophone act, and Keith Horler provided the guest spot. A small event for us, a giant leap for hope for performances of all kinds returning.  

Still on the subject of music, Pete Burns (not that one, the folk musician) has completed his collection of 41 songs created for lock-down listening.  Pete came to Frome in the final year of the Grain Bar Roots Sessions, and shared a thought-provoking song about his hometown, Belfast: The Riches of America.  And here's the fabulous Swervy World buskers, on tour from Ipswich, enhancing Frome precinct on Saturday as the market bustled with shoppers in the chilly sunshine, buying everything from cakes and cheeses to garden gear and glittery gaudies. 

Poetry events organisers, unlike bands, having discovered the wider audience possibilities online are maintaining their profile online with Zoom performance sessions. The popular Poets Prattlers & Pandemonialists hosted their monthly Yes We Can't session on Sunday evening, with a cracking posse of open-mic voices and Frome's own Liv Torc as main guest - she is, of course, also Womad's Hip-Yak Liv, BBC's environmentalist Liv, HAIFLU's Liv, and even Fyffes-bananas' Liv, but Frome maintains its prime claim and - just to remind you - Liv will be guesting at the Festival Poetry Cafe on July 6th, on ECOS.

Moving Voices at the Art House in Southampton has also maintained their regular open mic session on zoom: held on the last Friday of each month, this session was a smaller group but the poetic voices were strong and the feelings shared went deep. B Harwood Parsons collated an enjoyable event with contributors from as far afield as The Withdrawn in New York, and a music spot from Winchester's local hero Stevie Simkin from the Railway Inn roots session.

Still with words, but the on-the-page kind,  Hunting Raven Books had another stunningly successful pop-up book-shop at the Silk Mill on Saturday, offering reductions on a big range of titles. So popular was this that the queue snaked all around the yard and into Saxonvale.  I've posted this pic from manager Tina Gaysford-Waller's page, just to show how superbly socially-distanced we all are: how strange these images and priorities will seem in years to come. We hope...

The Wylie Valley Art Trail is another happy example of first steps back into real space: the nearest hosting venue to Frome is St Algars Yard at West Woodlands, where seven artists are showing paintings, prints, ceramics, glassware, and metalwork during the first week of May. I'd intended to include a report in this bulletin, but had to postpone my planned Bank Holiday Monday visit due to winds of a ferocity that even King Lear howling on the heath might think were overdoing it a bit.  So here's a picture from the online catalogue to be going on with: a ceramic piece created by Hiro Takahashi who takes her inspiration from the wild animals and the ruins in the woods. 

And as May's arrival alternates blustering winds with sunshine, this image is from my best walk of last week: wandering through a trillion bluebells in Black Dog Woods (allegedly so called after a highwayman was hanged here leaving his dog continuing to roam), as pools of sunlight on the silver birches transformed the woodland into a set for A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Final funky footnote: my walk around Mells to reconnect with the grave of Siegfried Sassoon and the round barrow burial ground nearby, skirting the estate stolen by the Horners during Henry VIII's dissolution days, took me past the gateway to Mells Park House where the documents which released Nelson Mandela were signed in 1990, with apartheid laws amended and the ban on the ANC lifted. The original Mells Park House had burned down by then: the 1925 replacement looks a more like a private boarding school, but views aren't accessible from the public road anyway so here's a picture of the gatehouse. Walking in Mells is a potent reminder that we live, always, in historic times.

The scrapbook edition: sunny walking, and talking about theatre

Picture of the week was a tough choice now that sunshine and car-repair allow a wider range of walking as spring brings bluebells and wild garlic along the paths and may-blossom dazzling in the hedges, with birdsong everywhere. Frome market yard on Saturday was a pop-up picture-book of enticing stalls, with creative crafts as well as food and flowers. Irrelevantly, but a new discovery to me, this majestic elm not far from the town centre is probably the last local survivor of the 1960s Dutch elm disease blight that killed off an estimated 20 million trees in the UK. Constable was mad about elms: his famous landscapes are thick with them and the V&A has a painting of an elm trunk by him that looks exactly like a photograph - you can see it here. 

As indoors venues are still off-limits and sunshine is enticing, the only performance to report this week is A Winters Tale from the Royal Shakespeare Company on BBC4. Although officially regarded as a romance and one of Shakespeare's comedies, the storyline is very dark.  A sad tale's best for winter, declares the little prince: his mother is thrown out by his deranged father and he dies of grief, so you could say he got what he wanted, but transposing the action to the 1950s & '60s - despite some powerful tableau moments and jolly revelry in the second half - doesn't alter the grim storyline and resolution takes nearly 3 hours with much angry shouting and that famous death by bear-pursuit. This BBC Lights Up production is available on iPlayer here, with a more comprehensive review here, and a couple of screenshots of from the opening and final acts. 

 

Speaking of the bard's works, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory has issued a series of podcasts focusing on the speculation What Would Shakespeare Do? in a pandemic, comprising recitations of speeches that have uncertain relevance and interviews with Bristol residents about their dreams and opinions. The first two - both out now - are quite niche, in a Home Service way, but free to listen here.

National Theatre more entertainingly offers filmed conversations of Life In Stages, with episode 1 on Thursday featuring its Artistic Director Rufus Norris talking with actress Olivia Colman. There's no attempt to make this seem an informal chat at a casual encounter, and both seem a bit uncomfortable out of their professional role, but the rapport is good, and interesting insights emerge about the apparent glamour of their profession - both admit to stress, and familiarity with 'imposter syndrome'.  Insightful and interesting - you can watch the series here. 

Also free, static but very well illustrated: a Webinar talk on London Theatreland from Andrew Warde, swooping entertainingly through the history of the city's 241 buildings, their owners and designers, their dramas and dramatists, their technicians and traumas, plus a peppering of spicy anecdotes. Our oldest theatre now is the Bristol Old Vic (opened 1776) but the first was built 200 years before that by Richard Burbage, and playhouses have survived closures for plague and civil war, often rebuilt after fires - they often burned down as stage lighting was by large candles until Drummond's 1816 invention of 'limelight'. The entire talk was crammed with fascinating detail and tasty soundbites - Samuel Pepys' view of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Kings Theatre in 1662, for instance ("The most insipid ridiculous play I ever saw in my whole life,") and Sheridan's response when reproached for drinking as in 1809 he watched the Theatre Royal Drury Lane ablaze: "A man may surely be allowed a glass of wine by his own fireside?" A fascinating dramatic time-tour from Mirthy - worth checking out their topics.

Clare Reddaway, playwright, fiction writer, and since lockdown organiser of the Storeopathy online fiction events currently has a story with the Tempest Productions story project: Living in the Shadow of Venus, a delightfully quirky and satisfyingly upbeat tale of our times. Clare would have been one of the writers in I'm Talking to You, the planned event by Nevertheless Pub Theatre for the Frome festival last year.  It hasn't been possible to revive this project for 2021but there's plenty of good stuff in the offing for the festival's return, with a Frome Poetry Cafe session in ECOS, the town's famous amphitheatre - look out for more details of a whole raft of other events coming soon. 

Still with words: this week has been a good one for me, with the conclusion of a poetic project - wonderful to reconnect zoomily with my Live & Lippy partner Hazel Stewart for this - and the start of a fiction-related one. Partial release from lock-down still feels strange, neither total freedom nor the seclusion that allowed us - me anyway - to indulge in private pastimes like jigsaws, painting, online games and reading.  Several irresistible books are still as yet unfinished: the brilliant Book of Trespass and Who Owns England now joined by The Assault on Truth, countered by the optimism of Human Kind, and the compelling, sad, funny, account of his journey to death & back by Michael Rosen: Many Different Kinds of Love.  For a daily dip into etymology there's Susie Dent's Word Perfect (word of the day today was guillotine, which despite its menacing connotations was actually introduced in 1792 with the aim of reducing the unnecessary suffering of botched-job sword and gallows executions.)  Final footnote: if you go to this website and paste in a paragraph of your own work, you receive a comparative analysis of your writing style. Apparently my fiction is like award-winning novelist David Foster Wallace, while my non-fiction is more Arthur C Clarke, noted for his sci-fi. I tried to catch it out with an obscure chunk of Salinger, but it wasn't fooled, so maybe there's something in it... 

The week we remembered ordinary life

The 'glorious twelfth' of April has brought many openings, one of which is Hauser & Wirth in Bruton, where there are two art exhibitions and, of course, the famous Oudolf Field garden, designed to complement the gallery by looking like 'a giant artists palette'. A trip here is always a pleasure but at the moment it's not at its most dramatic & felt a bit like visiting a friend who's laid out the paint cards and wallpaper swatch to show how nice the flat will look later. The pond is lovely though, as is walking up the hill to the dovecote above the town.

Performance poetry zoomed in again on Thursday from the Rainbow Fish Speakeasy run by Take Art, the excellent events organisation for Somerset rural areas. Superbly compered by Liv Torc, this has developed a wide audience with contributors providing poems from their sofas, kitchens, and other areas of comfort, sometimes with delightful interruptions from children and cats. Guest of the night was Kat Lyons, who introduced me to the poignant word solastalgia: "a feeling of despair when one's home environment changes" and a neat 'group poem' from audience comments was woven by Jaime. Liv's vivid & moving poem on how her hair sacrificed its life for hers was for me the highlight of an excellent event - you can read it on her FB page here.

From poetry to prose: Andy Wrintmore's Giant Pod this week features Eleanor Talbot, another brilliant exponent of audio sessions, definitely not one to miss. "I have no problems with borders," Eleanor explains when Andy asks about her eclectic choices in music in her weekly show Variations on a Theme, where Kazakhstani hip hop is likely to be heard alongside Noah & the Whale, or Elvis.  Eleanor talks with refreshing frankness and genuinely upbeat vitality about 'touchy' topics like mortality and libido and her lifelong chronic kidney disease.  

The last year has tested the ingenuity of all performance groups and a range of ways have emerged to present productions online and, even more challengingly, to rehearse them. Stepping Out Theatre Company in Bristol maintained their programme of activities via whatsapp and zoom, compiling a presentation with a topical theme: Putin's Mist, on-line for two nights, imagined an hour in the life of the community of a tower block as a mysterious toxic mist confines them to their homes in an intriguing metaphorical processing of reality.  Credit to all the team for this provocative and disturbing look at the effects of disinformation when 'nothing is what it seems.'

And now we can look ahead with confidence that  Frome Festival will definitely go ahead in July - it's already been featured in the Guardian Top 10 summer festivals. "Quirky cobbled alleyways" always seem to head the bill in London-based publications but it's great news anyway, and festival director Martin Dimery expects the line-up to be online by the end of the month. The ECOS amphitheatre will be a major venue for performance, including on Tuesday (6 July) the return of the Frome Poetry Cafe with Liv Torc as guest as well as our popular Open Mic - check it out on the Merlin page here, but note there's no advance booking - it's turn-up-on-the-night in the traditional spoken word way of the 1960s beat poets and here in Frome since the first festival twenty years ago. 

Concluding this bulletin on another upbeat note: the longed-for return to socialising with near-normality has seen a new bar opens up in the French antiques shop in Frome, serving widely spaced tables in a car park that looks as good as the Alhambra gardens to our friendship-starved eyes. Here's me with thespian friends Rosie and Tracey, and a toast to everyone able to enjoy meeting friends and family again - hopefully that's all of you. Cheers!

Soliloquies, books, self-absorption and bluebells.

Southampton's Art House continues to find ways to share entertainment and this week offered After Shakespeare, a quartet of monologues created and performed by Lexi Wolfe. Weighing in at 2½ hours zoom-time this was quite a heavyweight session but raised intriguing questions about the bard's plays: what was Hamlet's relationship with Laertes? Why was Lady Macbeth so avid to see Duncan dead? How did Portia really feel when her betrothed failed to recognise her in barrister's disguise? Was HenryV heroically brave, or pathologically vicious?  

Taking tiny clues and clearly with intensive research as well as imaginative intuition, Lexi explored these and other depths, creating a sense of interactive listening without too much of the 'what's that I hear you ask?' device. Setting the four characters does take some time, but the reveries are all provocative & interesting. Here's Portia, the chat-line's favourite. 

Sunday evening saw the return of the famous Proof Pudding Club initiated by Hunting Raven Books manager Tina Gaisford Waller, held on zoom since live book clubs and actual pudding-sharing have both been off the menu. Tina's very good at picking new titles that will intrigue, and this busy session covered a wide range, with Tina as host choreographing our contributions: The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams, inspired by the discovery that the word 'bondmaid' was discarded by the compilers of the first dictionary, and Jackie Polzin's debut novel Brood emerged as fiction front-runners.  

My last post pledged to avoid the politics of Northern Ireland, but last weeks news stories are inevitably my main preoccupation.  The Assault on Truth, Peter Oborne's exposé of the UK's catastrophic decline, charts the ruthless sacrifice of Northern Ireland by our mythomaniac prime minister: newspapers are focusing on the rioters but my thoughts are with the individuals & families living in cities on fire. Hobnob Press published my novel The Price of Bread, about living in the fringes of similar 'Troubles' fifty years ago, with this press release: ‘This powerful evocation of a fractured and dystopian society may be read as history – an insider’s chilling recollection of a conflict which most people not directly involved failed to understand, and saw unfold with incredulity. But it can also be read as a warning to be heeded: the anger and hatred, suppressed for decades, never went away. It could and quite possibly will return – it may even now be reigniting.’ It's a distressing thought. Thanks to those who sent comments - they're on my novel's Facebook page here - and my piece was published on American online journal Medium last week. Credit David Goodman for this compilation created for my website.

On a more upbeat note: last week's sunshine allowed more walks along paths where the green carpet of wild garlic leaves will soon be a forest of white blossom: in the meantime, there are violets and celandine, wood anemones and primroses - and the first bluebells are already showing. so I'll end with that happier thought as we edge gingerly towards the first steps of what we once called normality.  

The cafe edition - short, but with an otter.

The  Barrel House Ballroom in Totnes has been home to the Word Cafe created & run by Julie Mullen since 2019, and on Thursday Julie introduced a 30-minute film of poetry and music from local poets and performers which hopefully will stay on YouTube because it's delightful. Beautifully filmed in a variety of enticing local locations (cinematography by Chris Plant) this features poetry and music by local creatives, including Matt Harvey, with an acrostic about Totnes to compensate for his recent move to Dartington, and Brian Patten, still ruggedly scouse. Brian Patten was one of my poetry heroes - the title my published collection Crumbs from a Spinning World is derived from one of his poems - and his book launches unmissable, a fact I confided to him after his eighth, Storm Damage, and received the sighed reply 'Yes, we're all getting old.'  That was back in 1995. Here he is now, and here too is Susie David reciting her poem The Sea Calls.

Back in Frome, Black Swan Arts is preparing to reopen its gallery and the cafe reopened on Friday as the River House Cafe relocated - lock, stock, and staff - from its popular but cramped location on the bridge to the spacier premises - with courtyard seating too - of the Black Swan building. It's another upward step for this 17th Century alehouse, nearly demolished in 1974 until rescued & reopened in 1986 as an arts centre. Here's me looking very happy to join the queue on the official opening day. Thanks Emma Warren for the snap! 

Also in Frome: Our last couple of weeks' sunshine has coaxed the swirling mudscape beside the river bank to regain its role as a path, thus widening the range of rambles available in town and beyond. Frome's online Wildlife Watch group, a treasure trove of birds, butterflies, and recently beavers,  been getting excited about otters, and I was lucky enough to spot this sleek-headed little guy in the exquisite garden of Marston Mill on the Mells River after a writing group meeting. 

Drama has been coming at us from all sorts of places since our theatres, initially muted apart from pleas for donations, have regrouped and come back with online options and now National Theatre has premiered their Romeo and Juliet on the telly - Sky Arts on Sunday night. Directed by Simon Godwin and commendably contracted to 90 minutes, this pandemic production of Shakespeare's violent love story becomes a timeless tale of families and passions. Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley are the lovers, but it's Tamsin Greig as Juliet's powerful mother who stands out in a production that changes relationships and scythes speeches but creates the constraints of family dynamics and social controls in a fantastic, and memorable, way. Look out for repeats.

This blog, or rather this blogger, is determined to chicane through our present Troubles, as the Irish so eloquently delineate stuff too big to name, without discussing either of them, nor the western religious calendar,  so this spring holiday bulletin will conclude with a 'poem for today' as chosen by Poem for the Day (1) ed. Wendy Cope which is by Maya Angelou: Still I Rise was written 1978 and is shockingly still relevant, read it and weep. More cheerful is the other choice for today, from Poem for the Day (2) ed. Andrew Motion, which is Adrian Mitchell's ditty to Celia: 

When I am sad and weary
When I think all hope has gone
When I walk along High Holborn
I think of you with nothing on

They later married & lived happily ever after, which shows there's more than one way to look at Easter.