Cramming It All In

As we're spending two days a week at the moment helping out with the family's temporary childcare shortage in Rochester we're having to cram seven days worth of home life into five  at the moment and boy did we cram it in yesterday.

I started at seven in the morning with a trip to the college for a spinning class. After that it was a quick trip back home for a shower and a bowl of porridge before heading back with Marion to the college for a circuit training class. Duly exhausted it was back home at ten for another shower before heading to Southwold.

We were in Southwold for the excellent Ways With Words literary festival and were fortunate enough to have front row seats for talks by Shane Spall (accompanied by husband Tim), Rev Richard Coles and Melvyn Bragg.

What a great line up it was. Shane Spall was a quiet and fairly diffident presence who spoke enthusiastically about her books whilst her husband Tim exuded bonhomie and an infectious joie de vivre - the Southwold audience loved his reading of a passage about a meeting with a Sole Bay fisherman complete with unintelligible local dialect. 

By complete contrast to Shane, Richard Coles was as confident a speaker as you are likely to encounter which is not surprising given his regular TV and radio appearances and his other job as a vicar. He spoke about his childhood, his coming out and his epiphany in Edinburgh but missed out the "searingly honest" bits of his autobiography which could have shocked his mostly silver haired audience.

At the signing afterwards, Marion told Richard that if he were the vicar of Framlingham she would go to church. I simply raised my eyes and wondered how on earth we could fit that in.

The afternoon ended with a talk by Melvyn Bragg. I've always considered Melvyn to be a serious and confident interviewer but his talk showed a fragile side to him that is rarely seen. He was talking about his novel Grace And Mary which is written as an autobiographical fiction. By this Melvyn meant that he used real people, changed their identities and then wrote fiction about them. The people in this case were himself, his mother and his grandmother who was sent away from her community for bearing an illegitimate child (true, but as the author said, hard to believe today). A third of the book covers the period from when his ageing mother developed Alzheimer's to her eventual death from this ghastly disease and Melvyn was too emotional to complete the reading of each of his chosen passages. It showed a truly compassionate side to his nature and I have great admiration for his ability to share this sensitivity with a group of strangers. He was annoyed at letting his feelings get the better of him but, as the interviewer on stage with him said, if your writing doesn't move you, it won't move your readers.

Framlingham Town Council. Photo courtesy of www.nearthecoast.com/framlingham/

There was no time to dawdle after the event finished and it was back to the car and off to Framlingham in time to get to the Town Council meeting. I believe that there are usually no more than three members of the public in the audience at these meetings but, due to current development proposals which could increase the town's population by over 30% at a stroke, the hall was packed with standing room only. I felt sorry for the town councillors who explained that they were all volunteers and, effectively, asked the audience not to blame them for anything. The most important part of the meeting - the discussion of the proposed development on Fairfield Rd - drew a huge response from members of the audience who repeated the many arguments against the new houses. The outcome of the meeting was, for me, fairly unsatisfactory as, although the proposals were not approved, they were not rejected but simply pushed down the road for further consideration when more information is available.

After the meeting we were home in time to catch the final episode of The Detectorists which was filmed here. As a detector user living in Framlingham the show has been a firm favourite with me and I've really enjoyed it. It was a very gentle and fairly whimsical show which is right up my street and I'm delighted that, with 582,000 viewers last night (way above the slot average), another series has been commissioned.

I enjoyed spotting the town locations. Here's Toby Jones outside our bookshop - the only bookshop in the country stocking my novel at the moment. 

Here's a nice shot of Castle St.

And here's the excellent John Bradlaugh Electrical on Fore St where we bought our vacuum cleaner - I must pop in and try and get one of those toy detectors that MacKenzie Crook's character bought in last night's show.

So that was a pretty hectic day and a pretty lengthy blog too (sorry). This weekend we're off to a pub near Rugby to meet our friends Dave and Jane from our old life in Lancashire. 

Keeping Busy

On Monday we were back in Southwold again for the Ways With Words Literary Festival. The day's session was held in the magnificent St Edmunds church which was completely packed for a talk by Jeremy Paxman. We didn't go to the earlier guest Alan Johnson's talk so when we got inside the building most of the seats were taken and we could only find a pew behind a pillar with a very restricted view of the area set up with microphones. However it was decided that Jeremy would not talk from that area but instead from the pulpit which just happened to be immediately above us so we ended up with the best seats in the house. It was a fascinating talk about his new book on the effect of World War I on the social history of Britain. He was an exceptional speaker and, as he is on both Newnight and University Challenge, the master of the putdown. He was introduced by John, a Southwold man who once worked with Jeremy at the BBC and who commented that their paths crossed about every twenty years - to which Paxman replied that, with current life expectancy, they wouldn't be meeting again. Whether the needling between Jeremy and John which continued in the Q&A session was real or contrived it was great to see the quick wittedness on display. 

We took advantage of being in Southwold by visiting the excellent Adnams shop to stock up on a few early Christmas presents. We're very much on top of the present buying already. I know that there's a long time to go but with several trips north ahead of us in the near future it pays to be organised.

On Monday evening an old colleague came to stay for the night so we took him down to The Crown for a bite to eat. The food at The Crown continues to go from strength to strength on every visit and we had another excellent meal from head chef Matt Ransome's kitchen. Both the dining room and the pub were very busy for a Monday night but, as always, the service was speedy, friendly and attentive. 

After a brief visit to the opticians with Marion I spent Tuesday and Wednesday reading through the final copy edit of my novel. I've paid for it to be done professionally and I'm very pleased with the results. My editor corrected all my errors perfectly and, in addition, made a number of suggestions to improve what I had written by getting rid of a few clunky sentences and descriptions. It's funny that she highlighted a number of passages that I knew were a bit flowery but had left in perhaps to show off a bit - they've all gone now. Traditionally the next step would be to send the manuscript off to scores of publishers and wait for the rejection slips but with the wonderful world of self publishing I can now publish it myself and inflict upon the reading public yet another wannabe's effort. I'm fairly friendly with a few self-published authors on Twitter and some have had amazing success and sold over 100,000 copies. If I do a fraction as well as them I will be happy.

 With the editing done and dusted we headed off to the super Ipswich Film Theatre Trust for a matinee showing of The Selfish Giant. This is a British film that has achieved massive critical acclaim but is never going to make it to the multiplexes. It's the story of two school friends Arbor and Swifty in Bradford. Arbor is small, scrawny, foul mouthed and angry. Swifty is much taller, overweight and a far gentler character who is bullied at school. They're both troubled teenagers from troubled backgrounds and it reminded me of the characters in the early episodes of Shameless before it became a ridiculous parody of itself. After seeing men stealing cable from a railway line and then being excluded from school they attempt to make money from scrap metal, riding a borrowed horse and cart around the streets scavenging for whatever they can. Arbor is hell bent on making money by whatever means while Swifty's passion is for the horses. 

Thuggish scrap metal merchant Kitten plays a pivotal role in the film by encouraging Swifty to train to ride a horse in a trotting race and by encouraging Arbor to steal heavy duty power cable. The horse gives Swifty hope but Arbor is hellbent on self destruction. This is a very powerful film. The direction and the acting are exceptional and those glowing critical reviews are well deserved. But, as well as powerful, the film is also extremely grim and I'm not a lover of grim. So if you want to see a powerful and devastating drama give it a try but if, like me, you like a bit of happiness in your filmgoing, give it a very wide berth.

The Power Of Love In Southwold

The Ways With Words Literary Festival has been running in Southwold for the last few days and we were lucky enough to get tickets for some of the speakers. We had expected an insight into the authors' latest books and perhaps a little background on how they were written and indeed that's what we got with Robert Harris and Salley Vickers but in the other talks, each by a widowed author, we found ourselves witnessing an emotional insight into love and loss - subjects very close to our hearts now that we are in our later years.

Barry Norman, on our screens for over twenty six tears, was widowed in 2011 and it was little surprise to see this veteran presenter fight back welling tears in talking movingly about SeeYou In The Morning the book that he has written about his wife of 53 years. The title is the five words the couple shared each night before going to sleep and it was difficult not to listen to the talk (or even to recall it now) without finding a lump in your throat. We bought the book ( we bought almost all of the books the authors were promoting) and Barry signed it for us. Being passionate about films I thought about what to ask him as we waited in the queue but was for once lost for words when he did the signing - pointedly signing to Marion and John when the man alongside had written John and Marion on his prompting slip. I felt that this demonstrated the importance that he placed on a wife.

But we realised how well Barry had controlled his emotions when, on Saturday morning, we listened to Allan Ahlberg. Anybody who has had children or grandchildren during the past thirty years will be familiar with Allan. I can still recite Each Peach Pear Plum by heart some thirty years after it came into our lives. And it's still in our lives today as Rose, Catherine and, eventually Melody will sit down to hear us read it to them. Allan lost his wife Janet, the illustrator of those wonderful books, almost twenty years ago but from the onset of his talk ,which he gave in the manner of a storyteller gathering children around his feet, it was clear that she has never left him. As he took a teddy bear from his holdall and dressed it in a hat and scarf that had once been Janet's his emotions overtook him and the audience was stunned into silence to see a man who minutes earlier had joshed and joked with us, lose all composure and weep quietly. It was a poignant moment for all who witnessed it and spoke more of the power of love than a thousand words could ever do. I've always resolved to live life as fully as possible and Allan's grief drove home the importance of cherishing every moment we have with those who we love.

Penelope Lively (to whom we will be eternally grateful for giving us the fabulous The Ghost Of Thomas Kempe to read to our kids) was widowed some years ago. Her talk did not dwell on her love for her husband but love was never far behind what she said as there was an overpowering sense of passion for her family in everything she said. She has written a book Ammonites And Leaping Fish a memoir about ageing (again close to our hearts). She's a sprightly and thoroughly modern eighty year old and reminded me of my own mum who is 87 and will probably (like Penelope) be sitting at her iPad using Skype, iTunes or email as i write. I've often asked her about writing down her memories which will one day be lost but she's just too busy to do so.

It's back to Southwold to see Jeremy Paxman tomorrow. I somehow doubt that he'll leave us with tears in our eyes - they'll be for the first person to bring up Russell Brand. Looking forward to it. It's been a brilliant literary festival. We always promised ourselves to get to literary festivals when we retired and have talked about getting to Hay on Wye for years. I'm glad that we finally managed one and I'm sure that we'll be going back next year. It was interesting to see the make up of the audience. The average age must have been over sixty and women outnumbered men by at least four to one. Does this signify the end of reading for young people or did the chosen authors simply appeal to an older crowd?

Here are some of the books we bought while we were there. I'll leave you with a topical and relevant song