Framlingham Surreality

I'm not sure which was more surreal - walking four minutes down the road on a winter's Sunday evening to the church hall that doubled as the Detectorists' detecting club and finding it absolutely packed with local residents for an hour long one-man comedy sketch show/monologue - or the performance itself. Framlingham is hardly Edinburgh and yet we were treated to James Bloor's SPLIT which I am sure would (will?) earn rave reviews were it to be performed at The Fringe.

We saw James last year when Slice Of Life, a local group aiming to bring the arts to Framlingham, brought The Cambridge Footlights to the town. I wrote on the blog then how much we enjoyed the event and mentioned James' "randy chameleon" as one of the highlights of the review.  We must thank Slice Of Life for bringing James back to Fram. He is a hugely talented young man who combined an amazing range of facial expressions with near elastic limbs and a hugely intelligent script which, over the hour of the show developed into a jigsaw in which the final pieces finally fell into place.

With just a two tiered stage and a chair as props we started out at a garden centre, visited a tiny garden (with a trellis to hide the oil tank) and were introduced to a camp barber with a propensity for taking the tops of ears off , his demonic assistant, a poetic chain smoking AA member and her schoolboy writer son, some amazing young texters and a couple in mid life crisis. It was both funny and, at times, dark - sad even. The audience loved it and I am sure that James Bloor is a name that we will be hearing a great deal about in the future.

Recognise these two? They started in the same Cambridge review.

It was an otherwise quiet weekend. We had our regular breakfast at The Lemon Tree and had a relax reading the weekend papers.

It was a magnificent sunset last night - we are very lucky to have this landscape on our back doorstep.

I'll finish today with a blast from the past. When I was researching photos for today's blog this photo from my old Instanta blog came up on Google - I don't know why as I had been searching Cambridge Footlights. When we ran our business in Southport I used to write a daily blog. I tried to fill it with a bit of humour as well as commercial news and for some reason (don't ask me why) we once recreated The Usual Suspects poster for the blog. Where are they all now?