The Glory of Trees

Autumn is such a beautiful season. I love it!

Red and Yellow

Went into the main Post Office recently and wasn't sure whether I was in the supermarket queue for the deli-counter or an airport. Most of the shelves for goods on sale had gone and there were groups of "love seats" - back to back spirals of seating - to either side of the doorway. In the centre of all this, a machine which issued tickets to notify you of your place in the queue for service. Hmm...

I have also been noticing that postmen, even on colder days, are wearing shorts. Is this simply a macho trend or is the P.O. too poor to afford the cloth for full-length trousers? No wonder we're heading towards a postal strike. Well, at least post-boxes and postal vans are still red.

Meanwhile everywhere you go in my city you are having to skirt round barriers and huge holes down which are yellow-coated gas engineers uncoiling great lengths of yellow plastic pipe.

And blithely uncaring of all this the yellowed autumn leaves are drifting cheerfully down and I'm busy scuffing my feet in them!

Havant and Ilkley

In the recent month I have had two very happy successes: first prize in the Havant Literary Festival poetry competition, and a Commended in the Ilkley Literary Festival.
The Havant was judged by Anne Stewart who herself was a recent winner of the Bridport, and the Ilkley was judged by Ian Duhig. In both cases I managed, by the kind aid of good friends, to get to the awards ceremony. At Havant we were all surprised to find that we would not be expected to read our winning poems. We just hopped up onto the podium when our names were called, were given our cheques, and off we went.
On the other hand at Ilkley we were thoroughly rehearsed beforehand both in reading our poems and in the running order.Poor Ian had to go a couple of times through his long and thorough judge's report until he was probably wishing he'd never written it! But it went well, with quite a decent sized audience present to hear the poems. Afterwards there were readings from Ian Duhig and Debjani Chatterjee, and sadly I couldn't stay for them: a long drive home, and as our own Literature Festival in Chester begins this week I have a lot to do and could not afford a late night.

And, you know, I felt absolutely terrible: I have never wanted to be one of those poets who come to a reading, get up to read their own stuff and then promptly leave without listening to others. But on this occasion I had to do this. And still two days later I cannot forgive myself for this discourteousy ....
But if you are a reader of this blog, then please understand I very rarely behave like this!

Ilkley Festival will be posting the winning poems on their festival website eventually. So you can have a look there soon if you would like to see the poem/poems in question; Havant, I believe, might do that though no-one is sure...But Havant is only in its second year of running a festival and there is a lot to learn about these matters. I was very amused, and also impressed, to hear them say in their opening speeches that "Havant comes before Hay-on-Wye in the alphabet..." So look out, Hay-on Wye, you have a contender for your accustomed literary eminence ! I have a lot of respect for bravado like this because without bravado nothing gets achieved. And who knows...?

CHESTER OYEZ ! or What's in a name?

October is approaching fast, month of the Chester Literature Festival, which this year has plenty to offer all ages and tastes.
Last year, 2008, a new section was addded, Chester Oyez!, which embraces all aspects of performance work from poetry to storytelling.I have been the Artistic Director for it since 2008. In its first year it succeeded in bringing over a thousand people in to Chester for the weekend and I hope this year, now that people are more familiar with it, there will be even more visitors. Its remit is to involve everyone, from 0-100! We offer participatory events: writing workshops - flash fiction, personal history, poetry, plays; activities - making poem cards, circus skills workshops combined with a look at poetry, writng workshops for children. There are storytelling sessions for children and for adults, performances of drama and the creation of drama; and cabaret performances of poetry and story telling.It's all wonderful fun and most events are free! Pick up a festival brochure from local Cheshire libraries or the Information Centre, The Forum, Chester, or have a look online at Chester Festivals website.

When it was first decided to include this section the greatest difiiculty was not in booking performers, but naming it! Chester is thought of chiefly as a Roman garrison town but has a vast history going back to mediaeval times. We have so much here: beautiful ancient city walls, a very old racecourse, The Roodee, sometimes known as the soup bowl because it's almost perfectly circular, a Roman amphitheatre, tiered rows of shops and a good number of genuinely old black and white buildings (some of our black and white are Victorian recreations). Every 4 years we have a stunning production of the mediaeval Mystery Plays. We have a wonderful riverside area called The Groves, where you can stroll, take a boat, listen to a brass band, or just sit and watch the world go by. Lime trees are the key tree of Chester and when they are in flower the air is heavy with their fragrance, soemthing I love. We also have extensive river meadows connecting Chester to the Welsh Marches route for those who love walking. It's a beautiful city.

So what to call this new element of the festival that would reflect some of this, a name that had cachet, was short, but memorable? The first thing I did was to check through all the other festival websites I could find to see what other people had chosen, wanting to make sure not to repeat anything.I had a few sleepless nights going through phrase after phrase, from "Ecce Scritori" to "Stand and Deliver" (performance work, you see!) Nothing felt or sounded right, until I thought of our Town Crier who stands each day at the Cross and whose powerful voice lets people know what's going on in Chester. In fact we have 2 Town Criers, a husband and wife team (you can't have enough of a Good Thing!). So finally, with the permission of our Town Criers, we settled on Chester Oyez! What Pop Larkin (remember the Darling Buds of May?) would call perfick!
And Chester Oyez! is not just perfick; it offers two whole Saturdays, the 10th and 17th of October, of joyful magic in a plethora of events. Come and join us and share in it!

Great Spotted Woodpecker, PS.

An afterthought as I found this photo of a single camellia in my files: it just captures the wonderful glowing red, almost rich deep pink, on the woodpecker as seen this morning.
Some things are so beautiful you can't move for a while after witnessing them: I am reminded at this moment of lines etched in a slate at Ty Newydd, how in reading a poem a line
"burns into your mind, you close the page, unable to go on".

I feel like that but the day is waiting....

Great Spotted Woodpecker

Just the sort of place you'd expect to see the great spotted woodpecker but the one I saw was on the golden robinia in my neighbour's garden, early this morning. The sun was full on the bird but all I could see among the deep gold leaves of the robinia was the flash of ruby-red from under the bird's tail. I could hear it, however, hammering hard at something, clearly something very resistant and solid as it was a sharp, clear sound with no resonance. Robinia trunks are rarely a source of insects, they're so solid, so the bird had to be breaking something specific. After a while it shinned up the trunk in that bunch-and-let-go/ bunch-and-let-go way it has and I saw it had a hazel nut in its beak! It tried another crevice but clearly thought that no good so down it shinned again. It is a wonderful thing to watch a bird "abseiling" downwards - same movement as in going up, just a reverse direction. But so fast!
The colour of all this was brilliant, pure stained glass with sunlight pouring through:the deepening gold of the robinia leaves lit by sun, the glow of the bird's red, and the richly marked black and soft white of its wings neck and tail were as strong as I have ever seen them. The red was intense camellia. A joyful first moment of the day for sure!

Holes and Roots

The holes of this blog are on account of the gasmen who have been laying new plastic pipes in our road, after digging huge craters at the edge of all our narrow driveways. Or at least they were doing so until last Friday when they downed tools and suddenly left, leaving us with the gaping holes and very few places to park since our road is narrow in any case. Needless to say we all complained bitterly to the company responsible for the digging and this week a new gang came and worked with a vengeance, thoroughly blocking the road with digging machines, vans, and trailers carrying great coils of brilliant yellow pipes. But thank God it's nearly done; it only needs to have tarmac laid to cover up the gouges in the terrain and then the road will be at peace again.

Which is good because this road is an ancient laneway which was used in years gone by for walking and leisurely strolling, and still has that atmosphere about it: at weekends people walk their dogs down the road on their way to a local nature park, people cycle down it heading for the same place, and others jog through it. It's quite normal to see people walking idly in the middle of the road not bothering to use the pavements. I do it myself! It is one of the reasons why I came to live here, the way it feels so settled and still tightly linked to a vanished past. Once the area was a fruit farm, and there are still damson trees, apples, plums in some of the hedgerows and also in the nature park I mentioned. I have just been for a walk with my small dog, and stopped to fill a bag with damsons to cook for supper!

This is probably why I'm so attached to Ty Newydd, the National Writing Centre for Wales, (if I feel I must go an a writing course or retreat it's here I make for). It too has a deep sense of anchorage, first because it was the home of the great politician Lloyd george, and his presence lingers on - I don't mean in the form of haunting but in the knowledge that you can sleep in what was his room, you gather for readings and sharing work in progress in the library, the room where he died - and secondly because the staff rarely change so it's like catching up with friends each time you go.

And from some of the Welsh writers I have met at Ty Newydd I have learned how important their roots and connections with family and birthplace are. Their deep sense of connection with place and people makes me feel like a tumbleweed that has bowled through life with no real place of belonging. It doesn't bother me, as life has been full of rich experience. But theirs is so other to my own experience and has a great richness of its own.

So from holes to roots, and in a way the yellow plastic pipe being laid beneath our road and houses are another form of root, connecting each of us not only to a gas supply but in a strange way to each other by a rooted network of piping.