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Hi diddly dee – a single life for me

15 May Catherine Grey (right) photo © Fernando Bagué

Hi diddly dee – a single life for me

Catherine Gray – on the unexpected joys of being single!

This one had me at the strapline. I’ll expand. Following a longish (16 yrs) marriage, a follow-on semi-detached relationship of a similar length and a small number of dalliances, I’m now contentedly single and absolutely not looking. But it’s taken me time to get to this stage. When my marriage ended, I so wanted to be a couple again. Then I slowly realised that I didn’t want marriage/co-habitation so much as a person. And now? I have no real interest in any of it. That said, were a gentleman caller with a healthy bank balance, a generous nature and a weak heart to rock up … that might be a nice thing. But it really doesn’t matter if he doesn’t. I’ve got Netflix! It’s a lot less bother I can tell you.

So! I related to much of what self-confessed love addict Catherine said in conversation with her interviewer on stage at the Swindon Arts Centre. Having already given up the demon drink and written about it in the Unexpected Joy of Being Sober, she decided to tackle her addiction to the love drug and set out to stay single for a year. The notes she made during her non-dating sojourn formed the basis of the new book. Continue reading →

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Monogamy is dead: long live monogamy!

15 May Rosie Wilby, photo © Fernando Bagué

Rosie Wilby on monogamy or not,or what’s best for life today.

Yes readers, I have been transfixed by Netflix’s The Crown and ITV’s Victoria. Gloriana!

Aside from the fact that thinking of royalty provides a pleasing titular pun, the latter marriage at least was one utterly unsullied by rumours of liaison dangereuse. Theirs was a monogamous relationship that remained so until the end, with Albert’s untimely early death. They managed twenty-one years and there’s no evidence to suggest that anything would have changed had Albert not shuffled off this mortal coil when he did.

Which brings me to the thrust – if you’ll pardon the expression – of Rosie Wilby’s set at the Spring Festival around her book Is Monogamy dead? I use the term set because Rosie’s entertaining appearance was, in part, a talk and, in part, a stand-up gig. A TIG perhaps? Continue reading →

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On dresses, wigs and still being human

15 May Leslie Tate and Sue Hampton, photo © Fernando Bagué

Every time I drag myself away from social media and engage with real human beings, I feel a buzz. With community events over the years, and especially with the Literature – turned Spring – Festival the buzz of attending events is palpable.

Even if, or often especially if, the speaker is not a ‘celebrity’, listening to a person who is knowledgeable and passionate about their subject is almost universally rewarding – heart-warming, brain-stimulating, thought-provoking and fun. I can make a comment or ask a question afterwards. What’s not to like?

No more so was this illustrated than at Sunday night’s event, Ways to be Equally Human. We were privileged to hear two people who, from the start, exuded that they were ‘comfortable in their own skin’ – no pun intended – as one speaker spoke of her alopecia and the other of his ‘cross-dressing’.

Continue reading →

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Shapes of everyone – everybody at Swindon Spring Festival

15 May Everybody by Rapport, photo © Fernando Bagué

An expectant hush descended in the Swindon Arts Centre auditorium as Swindon Spring Festival director Matt set us up for mike-drop moments. We were to have a unique opportunity to listen to the unedited words of a team of teenagers, teenagers comfortable in their own skin, bold and beautiful, in Everybody by teen performance group, Rapport (Revolution Performing Arts).

I said ‘unedited’, but I mean that teachers or mainstream media have not massaged and cleansed their messages for popular consumption. The script, lighting, sound, choreography and music – the whole performance – had been produced by the young people themselves. Refreshing to say the least.

Everybody kicked off with, well everybody, the whole cast, school-uniformed up, with the usual personal tweaks for style, fashion and independence eg bomber jacket worn halfway down the back, ties askew and mini skirts at a level of choice. Cartwheels and mickey-taking ‘floss’ dancing animated the stage.

Continue reading →

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Take back meal times, says Bee Wilson

14 May

Seasoned food writer, award-winning author and journalist Bee Wilson declared Swindon Spring Festival her favourite of all the literary events she has attended globally, not least because it links words to spring and nature.

Our food speaker, back in Swindon from the Big Apple for a lunchtime festival slot, discussed the demise of mealtimes.

Author of four other food books, Bee Wilson is a foodie passionate about the impact of our modern lifestyles on our eating habits and the so-called food we consume, which she shares in her new book, The Way We Eat Now.

The act of eating, according to Bee, was once an opportunity to stop. Today, meal breaks are seen as a disruption to learning and living. A case in point is China, where chairs were taken out of school canteens to reduce the time spent at lunch and increase the overall periods in the classroom.

However, no matter how busy we feel, we have one thousand hours more free time a year than those of previous generations; we use time differently, said Bee, choosing leisure activities like Twitter and online shopping instead of a long lunch break.

Continue reading →

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If only I could write like Eye Can Write – Jonathan Bryan

13 May

Before committing my words to the page on Jonathan Bryan’s Spring Festival appearance, I felt trepidation. After spending an hour in the company of him and his family, I, like many others in the room, including our host, Matt, had been moved from tears to laughter to awe, as a result of his command of language and beauty of his prose.

Jonathan has severe cerebral palsy, a condition that makes him incapable of voluntary movement or speech. This disorder, until recently, blighted Jonathan’s ability to communicate subjecting him to a world of silence, where teachers and alike spoke to him loudly and simply in a tone that, in his words, is usually reserved for babies and foreigners.

It was not until the discovery of a life-changing eye-gaze spelling board that Jonathan was able to unlock the silence and close the void between him and the outside world. His first independently-spelled word was ‘myriad’, a word which ‘heralded the silence of those around him and the ending of his.’ Continue reading →

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Carbon footprint expert wants ‘thinking’ at the core of climate change solutions

12 May

One hundred years ago we couldn’t smash the planet if we tried, Mike Berners-Lee told his Swindon Spring Festival audience on Friday evening. Fifty years ago, we could if we tried. But today we can do it without trying.

In other words, if we don’t watch it, we will blunder into destroying our liveable planet.

And we’re stuck here.

Mike has calculated that the energy required to send one person to the nearest liveable planet, with all the accoutrements to survive in space and to set up a colony, would take the equivalent amount of all humankind’s energy for a year.

Fortunately, earth’s a pretty nice place to be stuck. But it won’t be by the end of the century if we don’t act now and act hard.

Continue reading →

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A man for our time, naturally

10 May Will Abberley, photo © Fernando Bagué

Fittingly, this inaugural Festival Richard Jefferies Lecture focused entirely on Richard Jefferies himself, with the presenter, Will Abberley, introducing the talk with a quote from Jefferies in which he appeals to us: “To find health, happiness and wisdom in natural landscapes. Let us always be outdoors.”

This statement perhaps sums up the underlying message of everything that Jefferies left to us: nature is the answer; the colours, the vistas and the sounds, and the hope and joy that they fill us with, helping us to discover hidden depths within ourselves, through an unnameable ‘divine’ something. Continue reading →

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The Rising: Fijian-inspired dance

9 May The Rising, photo © Fernando Bagué

This amazing piece of work really did put the Spring into Swindon Spring Festival. With powerful dance moves and great music, The Rising delved into the Fijian Culture.

The group made it clear it was a tribal piece by the way they moved, the sounds they made and the music. The dance moves gave the feeling of a war like battle playing out, a whole story made without a single syllable of English. The story consisted of fights, love and a feeling of a community. Continue reading →

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Why do so many of us believe in angels – and what does it say about us?

8 May

Why do so many of us believe in angels?

In this post-truth age, I wasn’t all that surprised when I read that a third of people in the UK believe in angels, and that one in ten say they’ve experienced ‘the presence of angels’.

The findings, so far as I can tell, come from a YouGov poll conducted in March 2016 – just a few months before the referendum that delivered us Brexit.

It was published at a time when the then-justice secretary Michael Gove was trying to persuade us that “people in this country have had enough of experts” – those analytical and methodical enemies of the people. It was feelings, not facts, that mattered.

So yes, angels, why not?

Continue reading →

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