Festival Fever

All the people at breakfast on Sunday were there for the Folk Festival. All the people in Sidmouth were no doubt there for the Folk Festival. The whole town was taken over. J and I were the ingenues, attending our first full week, having only tasted the festivals at Whitby and Sidmouth since 2007 for a few days at a time. That was not the way to do it.

For a start, the festival choir is a full week's commitment. I had decided to give it a go, which meant 6 morning rehearsals and a public performance on the last day. Stephen and Deirdre, at breakfast, said they had been singing in it every year for a decade. It was definitely addictive, even if you weren't a regular singer, as I wasn't.

It was a great decision. The choir was led by Sandra Kerr, a singing teacher extraordinaire. In the 1980s she had been the voice of Madelaine the rag doll in the TV children's series Bagpuss. She got us to learn not only Jez Lowe's wonderful Bonny Boat the Bergen in 4-part harmony but we also eventually managed to get our mouths around a Rabbie Burns poem put to a Northumbrian pipe tune. The whole thing was recorded on a CD which will be available next year. I think I know where I will be spending the first week in August.

This short article can't do justice to the full range of events. A proper review has been done on this website: http://www.efestivals.co.uk/festivals/sidmouth/2010/review-overview.shtml.

Being surrounded by music and dancing in the streets, in the pubs and in the performance venues was very special. Highlights abounded but we will remember seeing many folk acts for the first time, like the very loud Wilsons - only 5 unaccompanied singers from Teesside but the MC said they could be heard 3 miles away. They are on the photo below.

Also new to us were Sarah Matthews and Doug Eunson, from Derby, just down the road, who played immaculate fiddle and melodeon. Three of their tracks are on myspace: http://www.myspace.com/dougandsarahduo

Among the established performers, it was good to see Lester Simpson, John Tams (both from Derbyshire), Coope, Boyes and Simpson, Martin Carthy, Martin Simpson, John Kirkpatrick and the concert, in front of 1000 people, given by a dozen artists in honour of the folk legend, Nic Jones. He had retired in 1982 after a car accident but was present on stage, all smiles. A delight was seeing Chris Wood again, after seeing him for the first time at Nottingham Playhouse last year. He is rooted in traditional folk singing but has developed a highly individual song-writing ability, mixing a passion for ordinary people and ordinary life with extraordinary poignancy. One of his best is a song about a chip shop romance - here is a good recording of it from the Shrewsbury Festival:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoGbjx-KIb0&feature=related

Our lasting impression was of the torchlight procession of morris dancers followed by the fireworks. How odd to see the painted faces, the mummers, the drummers and the dancing in the dark. And yet, somehow, very English.

Bandit Priests and Gunpowder Plotters

"Do join us for coffee".

Chris and I, in the second of the eleven churches we were to visit that day, were only too ready for a drink and so joined the half-dozen members of the Belton-in-Rutland ladies' coffee morning at the back of the nave. After a pleasant quarter of an hour's chat, in which we discovered that house burglary was the scourge of rural living, we paid our 20 pences, bade the good ladies good day and pressed on with our mission.

Some have called it "church crawling". I prefer to see it as a visit to a different world: medieval churches with wondrous architecture that contain fascinating stories from an age when villages were where most people lived, not just wealthy commuters. And there is no denying that Rutland, England's smallest and most rural County, is a world away from life in Nottingham.

Chris, who lived in Rutland as a teenager, had planned a route that covered much of the southern part of the County along with the adjacent edges of Leicestershire and Northamptonshire.  As on our first foray last year, it was a chance to peer into history, discover the unexpected, look at some fine landscape and find a decent country pub.

Ah yes, those stories. How about these.

In the fourteenth century the poor folk of east Leicestershire were bedevilled by a gang of kidnappers and cut-throats, the Folvilles, who just happened to be the lords of the manor in a village near the Rutland boundary. Their behaviour was so outrageous that the local Keeper of the King's Peace decided to round them up. One of their number, Richard, was the rector in the Rutland village of Teigh. The authorities caught up with him in his church tower, from where he started to fire arrows at his pursuers, killing one. He had no chance of escape, of course, but met a grisly end when he was summarily beheaded in the churchyard. A colourful history, has Rutland. Teigh church has the original tower, much repaired, but an 18th Century nave and chancel.

At the village of Stoke Dry the lords of the manor were the Digbys. When James I came to the throne, Sir Everard Digby, a Catholic, was persuaded by Robert Catesby to lend support to the Gunpowder plotters. The story has it that they met in the room above the porch in the parish church. The plotters were betrayed and Sir Everard confessed. He was held in the Tower of London, to be hung, drawn and quartered. The family prospered, however. Sir Everard's son, Sir Kenelm Digby, an alchemist, glassmaker and one-time privateer, became one of the founders of the Royal Society in 1660.

Inside some of the old churches there are features that mystify, like carvings of local village characters in the form of grotesques on the walls and columns. One, in the church at Wymondham, has intrigued me ever since I saw it. The poor man looks terrified. This is one story I think I'd rather not know more about!

The Lives of Others in 2009

Glancing through Hello magazine today at the dentist's, it occurred to me that we are all in thrall in one way or another to the attractions of celebrity. My own interest is less in the voyeurism of reality TV or glamour journalism than in memoir and biography but the motivation is similar. We all want to identify with success, whether to live vicariously a better, or more exciting life or just to share intimacies.

Such intimacies from people with a talent for humour can be particularly entertaining. Looking back on highlights of last year's reading, I enjoyed Roger McGough's Said and Done and Humphrey Lyttleton's It Just Occurred to Me, primarily for their amusing outlook on absolutely everything. They cheer you up. My life has also intersected with theirs, which is another reason for reading about certain people and not others. 

McGough grew up deep in Merseyside and went to a Catholic school a little bit like mine, on the other side of the Mersey. He was a mate of Arthur Dooley, an amazing Scouser who was a Communist with religious leanings when he sculpted Saint Anselm for our school entrance hall in the mid 1960s. I saw Roger McGough perform a couple of times in the 60s and 70s as part of The Scaffold, purveying  music and poetry popular among students and, briefly, on TV's Top of the Pops with their hit "Lily the Pink". The Liverpool Poets, of whom McGough was one, were just as famous as The Liverpool Sound. The other members of The Scaffold were Paul McCartney's brother Mike McGear and namesake John Gorman, who went to my old school. McGough is still to be heard on radio poetry programmes and as a continuity voice on Classic FM (how the mighty are fallen). And Humph was probably the most amusing (and oldest) presenter on radio, fronting I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, an "antidote to panel games", which I have listened to for 30 years. I don't feel more important through these associations but I do feel enriched.

Equally enriching are well-written memoirs with an unusual tale to tell. Miranda Seymour's In My Father's House; an Elegy for an Obsessive Love is on one level a recent history of her family home at Thrumpton Hall, just outside Nottingham. As a piece of writing, though, it is remarkable in exposing a fractured relationship with an eccentric father, who was devoted not only to the ancestral home but also to motorbikes and young men friends he used to take as pillion passengers on night-time burn-ups down the M1 motorway. She employs her mother as a character in the story who is constantly challenging her interpretation of events, almost like in a drama.

It was the BBC dramatisation of Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford that led me to re-read the book. It was a favourite of my mother's and, being set in the 1880s, describes real people who were alive when my grandparents were children. As an evocation of the past it is extraordinary. Flora Thompson had a vivid eye and ear for detail and I was fascinated to find the words of a song that her Oxfordshire villagers sang every year in the month of May that was included on a folk album I had just bought. Ordinary people living simply in changing times brought completely to life. Hence that dramatisation... 

Someone who has spent her life in drama is Sheila Hancock. Since watching her at an early age in The Rag Trade on TV I have been aware of Sheila for most of her career. I read her book about touring the country with the Royal Shakespeare Company many years ago, so I knew her talents didn't stop at acting. Her style is natural, honest and candid. Just Me, the story of her life after the death of her husband and fellow actor, John Thaw, is particularly moving. I'm sure we read biographies partly to be inspired by the lives of others. "Coping with bereavement is difficult but it can be done" is one implicit moral in this lovely book.

The last one I'll mention was less inspiring, although it was certainly meant to be. I bought Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson in 1971. Unfortunately, at 1400 pages, I just couldn't get around to reading it. For 38 years. I had taken a university module on Johnson and, after I left, probably thought the biography a bit academic. Johnson was indisputably a clever fellow but Boswell wants so much for us to believe it. I had to skip read I'm afraid. The 18th Century seems so unlike ours, especially the way educated people used Latin so much. The book is a documentary record of that century and it is tantalising to glimpse so many names we still recognise, like Sir Joshua Reynolds, Richard Sheridan and David Garrick. At least reading Boswell reminds us that biography fills in the human detail, however imperfectly, that history needs in order to be understood.   

Following the Bloodline, or books of 2009

Novelist Susan Hill's latest book is a commentary on everything she read in 2009 (Howards End is on the Landing). They were books she had already read or had neglected but couldn't be without. In snowy January it seems worthwhile to look back on last year's reading and try something similar. I didn't manage to read quite as many books as she did but all of mine were new discoveries and deserve to be shared.

Or, at least, some of them do. I won't attempt to cover the whole list but the highlights neatly illustrate my current tastes in history, biography and fiction.

To be honest, that should be "pseudo history". It all started in that den of seduction, the Nottingham Subscription Library, where the attractively-jacketed The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail caught my eye, in the miscellaneous and war section, of all places. Setting aside my inherent prejudice against anything that had been so much in the media, I picked it up and found I couldn't put it down. What a bold sweep of history and geography, weaving fact, myth and legend into an almost believable tale of secret societies, bloodlines and conspiracy. I wanted to believe it. Why shouldn't Jesus have had a private life and a family that moved to Southern France, after his death, to escape persecution, living on in the Merovingian dynasty? After all, I'd been to the town of Saintes Maries sur Mer on holiday and the legend of Mary Magdelaine arriving there from Egypt was very much alive.

Finishing the HBHG inspired me to set aside my prejudice once again and have a look at The Da Vinci Code. I  was aware of the controversy surrounding Dan Brown's famous thriller from the coverage in 2006 of the copyright lawsuit brought against him by the authors of HBHG. I was curious to see what Dan Brown had made of the story.

You know what? I couldn't put that down either. "Irritatingly gripping tosh" was BBC critic Mark Lawson's opinion. Certainly gripping. And, yes, Dan Brown's style grates a bit. Why do cars always "gun" down the highway? The academic lectures from the "symbologist" hero Robert Langdon and other experts are somewhat long and tedious. But what a plot! And humour. I couldn't believe my eyes when I came across the character "Leigh Teabing", who propounds the Mary Magdelaine bloodline theory. What impudence, inventing a character based on the HBHG authors Leigh and Baigent!  "Tosh" is certainly a bit strong isn't it?

Looking into the lawsuit proved irresistible. It is general knowledge that Dan Brown won the case and that the copyright of HBHG was not infringed. However, I haven't read in any news reports that the written judgement of Mr Justice Peter Smith is almost as gripping as the novel (see the report at  http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2006/719.html).  It clearly sets out the factual background and presents the judge's scathing impartiality in an most entertaining way. For example, he is not afraid to be blunt:

"It would be quite wrong if fictional writers were to have their writings pored over in the way DVC has been pored over in this case by authors of pretend historical books to make an allegation of infringement of copyright."


The HBHG authors are wittily put in their place:

"Mr Baigent was a poor witness. Those are not my words: they are the words of his own Counsel in his written closing submissions (paragraph 111). Those words do not in my view do justice to the inadequacy of Mr Baigent's performance."


Yet, Dan Brown is also roundly criticised:

" I do not believe he consciously lied. His failure to address these points in my view shows once again that the reality of his research is that it is superficial."


Which brings me back to the "tosh" point. Judge Peter Smith carefully avoided opinions about the content of the books in dispute, but the cold light of his judgement was suggestive, if not dismissive about the bloodline theories. Fortunately, for me, a new book came out in 2009 that shone a searchlight onto the credibility of  those theories.

David Aaronovitch's Voodoo Histories, the Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History includes the court case in a dispassionate, forensic review of twentieth century media controversies. David is a journalist on The Times newspaper and I read and enjoyed his previous journalism in The Independent and his book Paddling to Jerusalem. In true investigative style, he probes the events and biographies of the protagonists in the Da Vinci Code case, as well as the Stalin show trials, the McCarthy witch-hunts, the deaths of John Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana , the 9/11 attack in New York and the suicide of David Kelly, the UK government science adviser.

Aaronovitch's research suggests that critical evidence used in HBHG was clearly a hoax. The Frenchman who approached the book's authors with information about the secret society, the Priory of Sion, had a track record as a con-man. It is possible that the authors knew this but didn't let it get in the way of their story.

But it was an enjoyable story and it led to a good thriller. The HBHG and DVC created scenarios that were perhaps best described as "conjectural history" or fiction based on some factual material. Voodoo Histories persuasively clarifies misconceptions on this score created by conspiracy theorists who, in Aaronovitch's words, see themselves as "lonely custodians of the truth...understanding what everybody else doesn't and what everybody else would most like to deny".

Nottingham Playhouse

"She just fainted into my arms. Honest."

I think J believed me. We had just seen a particularly realistic eye-gouging scene in King Lear at Nottingham Playhouse. As we headed for the bar at the interval, the lady in front of me keeled over right in my path. I'm sure she was grateful I caught her.

That must have been my most eventful evening at the Playhouse. We had gone there on an outing from Keele University in about 1969, not long before we were married, and it was therefore a special trip in more ways than one.

My first trip, thee years earlier, had been equally special. The English teachers at school had arranged for us to travel from Merseyside one Saturday to see Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra. It was rare to get the chance to see the two plays on the same day. It was a treat to see Barbara Jefford in the lead role. Nottingham Playhouse was cutting edge; the artistic director, John Neville, a distinguished actor himself, was making a name for provincial theatre. The modernistic-looking building had been built in 1963 by the City Council from the compensation it received from the nationalisation of its gas supply business. And we got to visit a pub in the interval. At 17, that is significant.

The Playhouse has held me in its spell ever since. I've lost count of the number of visits I've made there since moving to Nottingham in 1974. Many actors I saw were, or soon became, well-known: Michael Hordern was the knock-out Lear but there was also Jonathan Pryce, Beryl Reed, Zoe Wanamaker, Peggy Ashcroft, John Hurt, Ian McKellen, Ken Campbell and the amazing Anthony Sher. I was amazed to see from old playbills that I'd seen  stalwarts from TV classics like Bill Frazer (The Army Game and Bootsy and Snudge), William Russell (Sir Lancelot and Dr Who's assistant in the first series), Sylvester McCoy (Dr Who himself) and Alun Armstrong (New Tricks) in various plays.

However, Nottingham friends and neighbours did not seem particularly aware of, or enthused by, their producing theatre. The Playhouse had a reputation in the 1970s and 1980s for being highbrow and serious, unlike the Theatre Royal, the touring theatre across town. There were some seasons, I have to acknowledge, when I did little to boost their attendance figures.

Over the years, thankfully, productions have diversified and there have also been folk music, dance and comedy evenings. In 1984, I took the children to Kenneth Alan Taylor's first Playhouse-produced panto, competing directly with the Theatre Royal. He's still going strong 25 years later. And we saw Sandi Toksvig in a hilarious re-write of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, with actors from the TV programme Whose Line Is It Anyway. I'm all for TV crossovers if they help keep theatres alive.

Theatre has the ability to constantly innovate or reinterpret, showcasing the talent and skill of directors and actors. I saw Steven Berkoff's On the Waterfront last year and loved the slow-motion fights. A classic film made to work in the theatre. Stephen Lowe's Old Big 'Ed in the Spirit of the Man, on the other hand, was brand new, a wonderfully witty tribute to Nottingham Forest's legendary manager Brian Clough who had recently died. It certainly brought in the punters.

This is the first season I've been to all three of the autumn productions and they symbolise why the Playhouse still appeals. We've had the bourgeois world of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit and Brecht's communist message in the Caucasian Chalk Circle. Such a contrast but there are delights of language despite a nonsense plot in the one case and a belief in common humanity in the other. In between, a realisation of Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana, played for laughs with TV ex-stars Philip Franks and Norman Pace taking multiple roles. Old fashioned, yes, but still good theatre and a good night out.

The Planets in the Year of Astronomy

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy. I didn't know that when we booked to hear Holst's The Planets in Birmingham (another trip to hear the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra) but the coincidence is pleasing.

What a piece. It is so well known, through the popularity of Mars and Jupiter, that hearing it live has never seemed necessary in 46 years of going to concerts. Thinking about it, I don't think I've often been aware of it being performed live. Now I know why.


It is written for a huge orchestra and must cost the earth to stage. It has instruments I have never seen on stage together before : bass clarinet, bass oboe, contrabassoon, cor anglais, tuba, euphonium, two harps, alto flute, 7 kettle drums, celesta. I counted 116 players altogether, not to mention the 60 or so female voices who sing only in the last piece, Neptune. I suppose Mahler would be a comparison for sheer size but the Holst is exciting and subtle at the same time. The noise, and length, are not quite so overpowering.


The colouring of the sound is fascinating - the way the unusual instruments are combined and can be heard clearly in solos or small groups. Like the 4 flutes at the beginning of the last movement, Neptune the Mystic, when the alto flute helps set the etherial, eerie tone that is perfected by the offstage voices which bring the work to a close.


Gustavus von Holst, the grandson of a Russian emigre with Swedish ancestry who came to England via Germany; whose father, Adolphus, settled in Cheltenham to teach music; producing a Suite that everyone regards as typically English. It struck me as so unlikely. One of those stories that makes you see things in a new light and listen afresh.


YouTube has the whole work at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6NopU9K_8M , starting with Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity. Use headphones. It is fantastic.

Remembrance Day

It's November and the week of Remembrance Day. It's a sobering thought that we've had them for 90 years now but they seem to be as relevant and important to the public as ever, no doubt reflecting the prominence of the Afghanistan war. Two of our friends went to London on Sunday to join the parade and another went, as she always does, to the service in Nottingham parish church and to see her dad, a WWII soldier, march through the city. J and I were in London on Remembrance Day last year and had a couple of hours before catching the train home to watch from the back of the crowd on Whitehall. It was an impressive and moving spectacle.

I'm reminded of the event after listening to an Eric Bogle song on Folkwaves tonight. Eric has written some fine anti-war songs, especially And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda, famously recorded by June Tabor, but tonight it was No Man's Land, which has equally haunting lyrics and a memorable melody, especially the chorus: "did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the pipes lowly, did the rifles fire o'er you as they lowered you down..?" Poetry, as Ian McMillan would have said, that hits you in the guts.

I see from Eric's website that he emigrated to Australia from Scotland in 1969, just before my family did the same, from Cheshire. Hence his caricature. He's currently on a world tour of 88 gigs and is planning a 2010 tour of Australia. These folkies just keep going, thank goodness!