Tag: ventnor fringe

Summer of song

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A very glossy grand piano stands in a whitewashed church

I probably packed too much into this summer. Two arts festivals, one convention, three counties, two concerts, two talks, one opera patched together from at least six others, fourteen train journeys, goodness knows how many bus journeys, more stuff than would fit in a decently sized Kia, two passenger ferry crossings. Four scheduled family get-togethers, ranging from two people to fourteen.

Two worlds, for goodness’ sake: the flat one on the back of four elephants on the back of a turtle, and the regular round one. Three centuries, although we seemed to keep skipping over the middle one. Potty training. More dead relations than I’d been expecting. My birthday. That weird thing that time does on the Isle of Wight. Emotions, loads of them.

Specifically, all of that somehow folded up and fitted into three weeks, and now I’ve written it down I’m thinking it’s not surprising I’ve been absolutely shattered ever since we got home from the Discworld Convention. Yes, there is certainly a school of thought that says summer holidays ought to be relaxing, but it is fair to admit that this one wasn’t, really. Although I’d go back and do it all over again.

Two festivals and a convention

Music in the Burnhams. Ventnor Fringe. The International Discworld Convention. The two festivals overlapped – that is, the week that was Music in the Burnhams sat neatly within the ten days that was Ventnor Fringe. At least I’d booked the whole lot as annual leave early in the year. Then we had a couple of days of actual seaside holiday, with intervals of Removing Stuff From My Late Mother’s House, and a week at home before DWCon.

Two concerts, two talks

I’d have liked to have got to more. I’d have liked to hear every single piece of Julius Benedict’s music on the whole week-long programme. But aside from the scheduling, there was travel and childcare to contend with, and what I got was two talks by the world Benedict expert (I didn’t know there was a world Benedict expert! but I am very pleased to have found there is, and to have met him and been enthusiastic) followed by two lunchtime concerts in the Burnhams, and the offer of a ticket at Fringe that I couldn’t realistically take up.

But my word, those two were quite something. By virtue of being the featured composer’s great-great-great-granddaughter, I had front row seats. That gave me a very good view of some extremely good musicians playing some fiendishly difficult music. It always takes me several repetitions to get my head around a piece of music, to have any coherent reaction beyond ‘Wow’ or ‘What?’, and until I get to hear these again I’ll be stuck on ‘Wow’ (and also ‘How?’).

And then there was the rather overwhelming awareness of the fact that I am in the church where Nelson was baptised, listening to music that has not been heard by an audience in one hundred and fifty years, written by my great-great-great-grandfather, who I feel as if I am just beginning to get to know, wishing my parents could have been here to hear this too.

Slow travel

My father would very much have approved of my second day at the Burnhams in particular. I took an early train to King’s Lynn, then rode on the top of a bus that headed for the coast at Hunstanton, sat there for a while to get its breath back, and then traced the coastline. I watched the architecture change from red brick filled in with yellow brick to red brick filled in with flint; lamented dried-up duckponds; boggled at a Fat Face shop apparently in the middle of nowhere. Sat outside a rather chi-chi Italian deli and drank a cup of coffee and watched the world go by. Learned more about The Lily of Killarney – and once again regretted the fact that there was an almost-complete recording on vinyl in 1968 and Pa apparently never knew about it.

Then – and this was more something that other members of my family would appreciate – I rode my little orange folding bike from the talk venue to the concert venue, up and down a single-track lane that dissolved into sand at the verges.

As for the other journeys, well, I’ve taken many trains to Portsmouth and many ferries on to the Isle of Wight. I will say here, though, that it continues to be worth the extra twenty minutes or whatever it is to take the Thameslink through London, change at East Croydon or Three Bridges (you could change at Gatwick Airport, but I wouldn’t) and bumble gently along the Southern line to Arundel and Chichester. There are two reasons: firstly, avoiding the Underground, particularly with a three-year-old, is always a good thing; and secondly, Arundel is just ridiculously beautiful with its spires and turrets set against the South Downs.

Island time

Island time is slow time, and Ventnor time is basically geological. It’s because there’s so much geology around there. I have no idea how the Fringe organisers manage to make the shows start on time. Maybe they don’t. I made it to precisely one show this year, and I was late to that. Anyway, it was good. Weird, and sad, because it’s been weird every year since 2020 and sad every year since 2022, but good. We hung around at the Book Bus, and we hung around at the bandstand, and we got some executor stuff talked about, and I’ll be glad when we don’t have to talk about executor stuff any more, but I’ll also be glad to come back to Ventnor.

What worked

I bought a pair of Loop earplugs on something of a whim ahead of the convention, wore them at dinner with a portion of my extended family at a notoriously loud restaurant, and was an instant convert. Of course, just because I could suddenly hear them didn’t help with anybody else hearing anything else, but it was lovely to see them all.

Other things I was glad I brought to the convention: peppermint teabags; a very large bag of (mostly) shelf-stable snacks; my adorable toucan butter knife; Compeed blister plasters; safety pins.

But in Ankh-Morpork…

I married into Discworld fandom, and, you know, as in-laws go, it’s great. Interesting and amusing people. A chance to apply my English Literature brain, particularly in regard to performance, arts, and stories. The food was a bit of a disaster, but I had prepared snackegy, and there were enough places within a reasonable driving distance (and we’d brought the car) that we didn’t go hungry. But the main point of the event so far as this household was concerned was to see my husband sing two and a half Mozart arias in character as Casununda the amorous dwarf (or, in his case, to actually do this, obviously), and this went extremely well. There was a small exclamation of “That’s my daddy!” from the audience but happily this only reinforces the characterisation.

And that wound things up in a surreal but really rather appropriate manner. Summer for me is for the performing arts and for family, and if that expresses itself in the form of my beloved spouse singing Here in Ankh-Morpork my target is eight – ahem – seven plus one!, very carefully not putting any weight on a disreputable wooden stepladder, well, why not?

A new departure: The Book Bus Espace Libre

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Posters in art nouveau typefaces say: The Book Bus Pop-up gallery Sunday -Thursday 10h00-16h00 Espace Libre The bookshop will be back on Friday. In the meantime the bus is still full of stories. Come and see!

This summer I rather unexpectedly found myself coordinating and curating an exhibition. This is a first for me, and I’m rather pleased with the result.

Ventnor Fringe was on. I was going to be there. So was 3267, in the guise of the Book Bus. So far, so normal. I’d missed last year, the baby being just too tiny, and was looking forward to returning to my summer arts hit.

Ventnor Fringe has been getting bigger every year, in terms of both space and time, and this year it was going to be ten days long. It was only going to be reasonably practicable to make the bookshop happen for four days of that, and the preferred distribution of those four days was both Fridays and both Saturdays. Which left a five-day gap in the middle. Perhaps we could have some sort of an exhibition to fill it…

Such was the situation as described to me in mid-June, and to my delight the creative bit of my brain, which has been in and out and mostly out for the past two years, immediately rushed in. Various other people were having ideas too. Brilliant! My brain was coming up with a grand overarching idea to pull it all together:

This bus is usually a bookshop. So what do you get if you take the books out of a bookshop? And what if that space is something that has seen a lot in its time?

A title appeared. Espace Libre. Free Space. Maybe Espace Livre? No, trying too hard. Let it speak for itself. This is just another way to express what I’ve been trying to do with Book Bus Stories, assuming I ever finish the thing. If I had finished the thing it would make an exhibition in itself. But it could make a little part of one, maybe…

I angled for the job of coordinating it all – perhaps a trifle ambitious, trying to do it all from the mainland and with a baby clinging to my legs, but I wasn’t going to let that worry me – and the rest of the gang were extremely happy to let me do it.

So off I went. I selected (extremely select) quotations from my father’s accounts of how he got the bus this side of the Channel in the first place. I polished up three of my own Book Bus Stories to make a small display – and commit myself to finishing the rest of the damn things in time for next year. I spent quite a lot of money on boards and various forms of adhesive. I bought chain and cable ties in the DIY bit of our wonderful local department store, and if the assistant thought it was in any way weird she didn’t let on. I printed out everything I’d written. I posted the whole lot to Ventnor. And I chased and chased and chased the other contributors, and/or my family members who had undertaken to organise the other contributors for me.

Then I got to the Isle of Wight and spent a frantic couple of evenings sticking photos and cards to boards, or, in one case, making holes in a board with a corkscrew and attaching books with string, chain, and cable ties, while the baby was in bed. And we moved the whole lot onto the bus on Sunday morning.

In short, I had a lovely time.

This was a combination of the kind of project and people organising I do in my day job, and the kind of creative work I do in my free time, and it was the first time since I’d gone on maternity leave that I’d got my teeth into either of them in a big way. My brain had come back, and, since I’d been a bit worried that it had dissolved and dribbled out of my ears some time between COVID and quickening, this was incredibly exciting. I can do this kind of thing. Not only is this reassuring in the context of my return to work next week, it’s also encouraging to think that I might be able to return to some of the three or four books I have been attempting to write on and off since 2021.

I’m not going to have a huge amount more free time in which to use reclaimed creative powers. I get a couple of train journeys and a couple of lunch hours every week, and all the fruit trees need pruning. I will aim to get something done. I hope to post here more frequently, too. We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, here’s a look at The Book Bus: Espace Libre.

The posters from the top of the post have been stuck to the windows either side of the rear entrance of a 1930s Paris bus
Board with photos of Paris buses in service and in preservation, with a description of how Robert E Jowitt brought Paris bus 3267 to England
Black and white photos by Robert E Jowitt showing people and public transport across Europe in 1960s and 1970s
Books (Giovanni's Room, The Seven Storey Mountain, This Is Paris, Nine Coaches Waiting, and Seven Ages of Paris) have been attached to a board with string and chain
Short stories by Kathleen Jowitt inspired by Paris buses have been printed out and stuck to a display board
Colour photos by Daphne Carter showing shops in Ventnor in the 1990s
Black and white photos by Ann Putterill entitled The Child in the City showing scenes in London

Art month

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Four glass beads on a page of pencil drawings of stones and seashells, on a collage of flyers and stickers

I like July. It’s my birthday month. There’s plenty of daylight. Granted, I am not particularly keen on the heat, but I much prefer it in July, when there’s the imminent prospect of a retreat to the coast and a difference of five degrees or so.

And even now, long after I left full-time education, there’s a glorious sense of end-of-termness about it. Holiday. I can do as I like.

Sometimes that takes more work than you’d think. Sometimes inertia and life in general and notions of extravagance combine to stop me doing as I like. Sometimes I have to make quite an effort, buy myself tickets so that I have to use them rather than talking myself out of going to whatever it was. Prompted by Julia Cameron’s concept of “artist dates” (not a term that comes naturally to me; I have renamed them “rendez-vous”, which strikes the right balance of glamour and self-mocking pretentiousness for me) I try to take myself out once a week for something entertaining or thought-provoking or indulgent.

It’s not as if there’s nothing out there. I work in London, where if it turns out the Somerstown People’s History Museum is closed (it always has been when I’ve tried to go to it, and it’s always open when I dash past on the way to catch my train home) I can look at an exhibition about cancer treatments at the Crick, or if I daren’t go to Gay’s The Word for fear of accidentally spending forty quid I can go to the British Library and stay away from the shop. I live in Ely, which has plenty going on in its own right and is only a quarter of an hour away from Cambridge to boot. I ought to be able to manage something every Thursday (or maybe Friday), even if it’s only an ice cream flavour I haven’t tried before (Ruby Violet in London; Hadi’s Gelato or Ely Fudge Company or Cherry Hill Chocolates in Ely). And when I do, I’m glad I did. I’ve learned something, or seen something differently, or tasted something new. If it hasn’t been fun (and it very often is) or moving, it will at least have been interesting.

July feels like a whole month of that. Somehow, it’s all much easier in July.

In the last few years – let’s say, six – I’ve been visiting some of the artists who take part in Cambridge Open Studios. The definition of ‘Cambridge’ turns out to be rather loose, and there are a dozen or so in Ely too. (One of them, Andrée Bowmer, made the lovely glass beads in the picture at the top of this post.) July 2022 was busier than either of the last two years, but I got around about half the artists in between my other weekend commitments.

Last week I was down on the Isle of Wight for Ventnor Fringe. I spend all year looking forward to Fringe and it always passes in a gorgeous haze of seeing things (art, shows) I might otherwise pass by and also lounging around at the Book Bus doing nothing. (This year I sold two books despite doing nothing.) It’s like people put on an entire arts festival just to celebrate my birthday. It’s brilliant. This year I went to two circuses, a drag show, an improvised Importance of Being Earnest, two small solo gigs (one in a barber shop, but not barbershop), no, hang on, I forgot about the vicar singing Dylan (very well), and a concert featuring a Scottish harp and a Finnish kantele.

But now Fringe is over and it’s August. I’m feeling a bit flat, I have to admit. Mind you, I was expecting to. But I’m also feeling the urge to read more, read more of the books that make me stop reading and look out of the window and think, go to the theatre more, and listen to more live music. I could do that. I could do all of that. The house is full of books, some of which I brought home from the Book Bus last week, or last year. There are free organ recitals at the cathedral every Sunday all summer… Last year I managed to get to all six Cambridge Shakespeare Festival shows. Well, this year I’ve missed all the July ones, but August’s still there, and I seem to have a lot more evenings free this month. And it’s still ice cream weather.

December Reflections 17: things I missed

kathleenjowitt2 Comments
plastic tumbler with blue design representing the various things that go on at Ventnor Fringe Festival

I did make it to Ventnor, and was very glad to do so, but of course the Fringe was cancelled. I was able to see my family, but I missed the buzz and the music and the hanging around at the Book Bus drinking Belgian beer until it was time to go and watch something strange or brilliant or completely whack. There were a lot of holes in the calendar this year: Ventnor Fringe; our housewarming party; the Discworld convention; the national Ultreya. Whole months went by without my looking at the calendar at all.

I missed the things I’d promised myself I’d do more of – live theatre, yes (I saw two operas in two weeks back in February, though I wasn’t intending to maintain that ratio), but ice skating, too, cinema (we live five minutes from a cinema now!), taking trains to places on the Continent. I missed the things I took for granted: a pint at the pub, being able to sing in church.

I’ve said a few times that I’m quite prepared to continue being an antisocial cow for as long as it takes, and that’s true. But there are things I’m missing a lot, and I shall be very glad to do them again when it’s safe.

Report from the Book Bus: new friends and old friends

kathleenjowitt6 Comments

DSCF7959

I am back on the mainland and back at my own computer, after most of a week at the Ventnor Fringe Festival, most of which I spent hanging around at the Book Bus.

I sold a few books. I wrote a few lines. But mostly I sat in a deckchair and chatted to Tom and Jen, who are in charge of the book part of proceedings (my father and brother look after the bus side of things), and to various family members and friends who were around for the week. I listened to poets and musicians. I bought some books I didn’t know I needed (a leather-bound copy of Prince Otto, which I finished in the form of a Project Gutenberg ebook a few weeks ago; an account of the Oberammergau Passion Play by Jerome K. Jerome; a Val McDermid so early it was published by the Women’s Press; a guide to the Offa’s Dyke long-distance trail).

And I reread my own book. I’m just beginning to work on the sequel to Speak Its Name, which will pick up on the action three or four years down the line, and I wanted to remind myself of what actually ended up in the book.

I knew most of what happened, of course, but I discovered that I’d got Colette’s brothers mixed up, and had given her a niece that I’d completely forgotten about. I discovered that the family dog appeared to be alive and well. I managed to distinguish the two separate parts of the Mel-and-Rose combination. I learned that Colette reads Trollope. I reminded myself of the names of all the churches in Stancester. I found that I’d already sown the seeds for one of the themes that I’m intending to develop in the sequel.

And I found myself filled with an unexpected affection for all my characters, but particularly for Colette and Lydia, who I put through hell and brought out the other side. I have found that all my major characters continue to sit in my head, and quite often I stop to think about what they would make of current affairs that affect them, but this felt rather different. This was more like sitting down with them for a long old gossip than following them on Twitter. It was lovely.

The next book will come from Colette’s point of view. I’m not planning any more Stancester books after this, but, you know, I said that last time. Either way, I’m looking forward to getting to know Colette and Lydia (not to mention Georgia, Will, and Peter) again. And it was great to have a week on a bus full of books to get things going.

Next time I’ll try not to bookend the week with the Discworld convention the weekend before and a wedding the weekend afterwards. But it was great fun, and I’ll definitely be back, so long as the bus is.

 

See you on the Book Bus

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2013 May 232

Later this week I’ll be back on the Isle of Wight for Ventnor Fringe, an independent arts festival that turns every conceivable nook and cranny in this delightfully higgledy-piggledy Victorian resort into a performance space. Ventnor is possibly my favourite town in the entire country, but I have never yet managed to make it down there for the Fringe. Until now.

You may well find me in the Book Bus in St Catherine’s churchyard, where I’ll have copies of both my books on sale. (Mine are new. Everything else on there is second hand.) The bus (which is the one in the picture above) will be there all week, and is open from 10am to 6pm; I have to eat and sleep and would quite like to see some of the other events as well, so I can’t guarantee that I’ll necessarily be there when you happen to turn up. But hey, it’s a bus full of books; you don’t need me to be around to have a whale of a time there.

All this talk of independent events reminds me of an initiative I came across via Twitter this week, Just A Card. The idea is that if everybody who came into a [studio/craft shop/art gallery/bookshop] bought ‘just a [card/brooch/fridge magnet/book]’, that establishment would be able to remain in business for rather longer than it would otherwise.

Obviously I’m not advocating filling your house up with useless crap that you hate, particularly not if money’s tight; but if you find something cheap and pleasing, something that you think that a friend or family member might appreciate even if it’s not your thing, then buying it might go a little way to keeping an independent business going.

(Connoisseurs of British seaside towns may legitimately point out that this is obviously Brighton, not Ventnor. Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of the bus in Ventnor, although by this time next week I almost certainly will have fixed that.)