Japanese Art at Hanbury Hall

We don't normally review art exhibitions here at the Passengers in Time blog but there's a first time for everything. Last week we made our first visit to Hanbury Hall, a beautiful 18th century country house near the town of Droitwich Spa in Worcestershire. Hanbury Hall, built in 1701, is owned by the National Trust. The house is surrounded by 20 acres of recreated early 18th-century gardens and 400 acres of park land, and I felt like a character from a Henry Fielding novel as I explored the dairy and the icehouse, and admired the fruit garden, the orchard and the orangery. It must have been quite something, in the 18th century, to be able to enjoy home-grown oranges and lemons in the winter and chilled drinks and desserts in the summer. But, as if Hanbury Hall and its grounds were not delightful enough, we were pleasantly surprised on our visit to happen upon a free exhibition by Japanese artist Takumasa Ono. 

Takumasa (or Tak, as he is known) first visited the UK in 1999 when, as an Official Artist for the Association of National Trusts in Japan, he toured National Trust properties, producing art works to be exhibited in Japan. He decided to settle in the UK in 2002 and, since then, has been holding yearly 'Henro' (pilgrimage) exhibitions of his works at National Trust properties. Tak produces mainly watercolours, silkscreen prints and Sumi-e (a traditional form of Japanese brushwork). While I'm certainly no art connoisseur , I found Tak’s exhibition full of strikingly original and vibrant works. The Henro 2012 exhibition is at Hanbury Hall until 12 July and can then be seen from 1 August to 2 September at Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire. Many of Tak’s images (like the one above, which is a detail from his picture of Hanbury Hall) can be viewed here. For more details visit the National Trust's website.

The Unthanks in Malvern

The Unthanks 
Live at the Forum Theatre, Malvern

Saturday 28 April

The Unthanks are not a barrel of laughs. There were very few upbeat songs in their set but their good-natured rapport with the audience lightened the mood enough to be able to carry the genial people of Malvern with them through an evening of slightly unsettling folk music. This was supposed to be ‘an intimate evening with The Unthanks, with support from Jonny Kearney and Lucy Farrell' but the Forum Theatre, unexpectedly packed, could hardly be called intimate. It's a grand old theatre that reminds me of Shrewsbury Music Hall where, as a teenager, I saw the likes of Ralph McTell, Prelude and Alan Hull. The Unthanks’ music is more disconcerting. Unusually for folk, their sound is dominated not by a guitar accompaniment but by the minimalist piano of producer and arranger Adrian McNally. Adrian's piano suits the often austere soundscapes of the  Northumberland-inspired songs performed by the ethereal voices of Rachel and Becky Unthank, whose occasional bursts of enthusiastic clog-dancing provided some unexpected moments of exuberance.

The band is an extended family and, when Jonny and Lucy were not on stage with The Unthanks, they appear to have been minding Rachel and Adrian’s baby backstage. Rather than the traditional structure of support act/break/headline act, all the musicians took turns to pop on and off stage in the second half, in various combinations, which gave the impression of an old-time variety show (and no doubt facilitated childminding responsibilities.) The audience appeared to enjoy the evening, although I don't imagine all of them were folk music enthusiasts and certainly not all fans of this peculiarly stark and fractured folk. But Rachel and Becky's voices are winningly beautiful and they can be forgiven for sticking with what they do best -- an uncompromising and unapologetic music, inextricably attached to its north eastern roots.

Writing blindfold in a soundproof box

‘There is a Latin tag, solvitur ambulando, which means, roughly, that you can sort it out by walking...’ This is one of the observations made by Richard Mabey in Landscape into Literature: a Writers’ Anthology. Published by Green Books in 2005, Landscape into Literature features evocative, thought-provoking essays by many fine writers (Roger Deakin, Brian Patten and Richard Mabey among them) as they explore their own relationship with landscapes and the relationship between landscape and writing. One of the recurring themes in the book is the importance of walking as an activity for writers. Walking provides both a break from the internal mental activity of writing and an extension of the writing process into the external physical world. To me it seems obvious that walking is beneficial for mental and physical health and that it can be key to stimulating creativity and unblocking creative blocks.

Ronald Blythe's contribution is an essay on the poet John Clare. We learn that it was while ploughing in a cornfield that Clare ‘began his “muttering”, 'his softly speaking aloud of the rhymes which he would later write down...’ This may have been the start of John Clare’s poetry but it may also have been the beginning of his mental illness. As Blythe puts it: 'Boys sang, they did not mutter, and eyes would have been upon him, this child talking to himself, a sure sign of something being wrong or different...' I wonder how much Clare's "mutterings" could be seen as a sign of his emerging mental illness (a sign of 'something being wrong') and to what extent they could be seen as a sign of his creativity ('a sign of something different'.) Talking to oneself is one thing, speaking aloud rhymes is another; but then speaking aloud rhymes that you later write down is something else and, when these rhymes are published to great acclaim, that is something else again. Claire was, at various times, a young boy making up rhymes to amuse himself, someone who suffered serious mental illness to the point where he spent years in an asylum -- and a successful poet. Had he been allowed to roam free, one wonders if Clare might have been able, to some extent, to ‘sort it out by walking’.

Also included in Landscape into Literature is an essay by Penelope Lively, in which she returns to what she calls ‘the abiding relationship between walking and writing.’ She jokes that ‘the Lake Poets set the pace, I suppose, literally...’ and goes on to make a serious point eloquently. Walking, she writes, is 'a good healthy escape from an otherwise sedentary way of life, but there's more to it than that. Writing takes place in the head; theoretically you could write blindfold in a soundproof box. But this solipsism generates an intense need for an alternative, a need for the eyes and ears to take over the mind, a need to look and listen and wonder what kind of tree that is, and why that field is shaped thus -- a need to stop writing, in fact, except that of course in a subliminal way you are not; any or all of it may be grist to the mill, in ways you could not possibly anticipate.'

Shropshire romantics, American humorists and Dutch Zen detective fiction

My friend Linda recently asked me to name my favourite writers. The question took me rather by surprise and I actually found it quite difficult to answer spontaneously so I thought it would be a useful exercise to try to compile a list. Scouring my bookshelves, it's interesting to realise how few of my books I would consider real favourites but some authors keep cropping up so, if frequency of appearance is anything to go by, fellow Shropshire romantic Mary Webb would appear to be a favourite novelist and American humorist William Saroyan a favourite short story writer.

Jerome K Jerome is dotted around the house and his Three Men in a Boat is one of the few books I have read more than once. There are the tatty old copies of classics I was required to read at school or university -- Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Dickens’ Hard Times, DH Lawrence's The Rainbow and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn along with Voltaire's Candide and Rousseau’s Meditations of a Solitary Walker. The fact that I haven’t got rid of any of these indicates I still hold them in some affection. Classics that I wasn’t required to read but remember enjoying included Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (and they remain on my shelves, along with the short stories of Kafka and Chekov).

More modern classics that might fall into the category of cult fiction include Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. I went through a craze of collecting Persephone books (publisher of ‘rediscovered’ inter-war novels and twentieth century fiction by neglected mainly women writers). Among these, I recall particularly enjoying Monica Dickens’ Mariana (which has since been adopted as one of my daughter's favourite books) Denis Macrail’s Greenery Street (which has quite a lot in common with the aforementioned Jerome K Jerome) Jocelyn Playfair's House in the Country and highly evocative wartime short story collections by Elizabeth Berridge and Mollie Panter-Downes.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince left a lasting impression on me, as did Patrick Leigh Fermer’s luminous A Time of Gifts. People seem to think my own writing is influenced by Garrison Keillor and he does make a couple of appearances on my bookshelves, as do the books for adults written by Finnish novelist and painter Tove Jansson (best-known as the creator of the Moomins.) I enjoy Simenon's Maigret books but, more obscurely, I'm a great fan of Janwillem van de Wetering, purveyor of Dutch Zen detective fiction.

Some of the more contemporary discoveries I’ve recently savoured include Gil Adamson's Help me, Jacques Cousteau, Leonardo Padura Fuentes’ Adios, Hemingway and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, (though I found his novel When We Were Orphans disappointing.) Kathleen Jamie’s Findings, Alice Munro's Runaway and Owen Shiers’ White Ravens were all a pleasure but the book I enjoyed most in recent years was Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, whose other books I am slowly working through. I'm not sure I can distil this down to a 'Top Ten' but perhaps this goes some way towards answering Linda's question and may also prompt me to revisit some of those books I should reread (and whittle out some of those books I'll never read again.)

The gentle ebb and flow of dulcimers

Dan Evans Live at The Artrix, Bromsgrove

Saturday, 28 January

I've discovered that, when you tell people you're going to see a concert of dulcimer music, most people react by asking 'What exactly is a dulcimer?' Dan Evans, reportedly the UK's only professional dulcimer player, demonstrated the instrument admirably well in the cosy surroundings of the Artrix Studio in Bromsgrove last night. Some of the audience, it seems, had never seen or heard the instrument before. For my part, I've been trying to play one for nearly 30 years so I'd gone along hoping to pick up a few tips and to reassure myself that I hadn't been playing it in completely the wrong way all these years.

I was comforted to find Dan played in a similar style to my own, finger-style rather than strumming. I much preferred his renditions of some lovely traditional tunes -- Columbine and Blow the Wind Southerly among them -- to his choice of cover versions, and his original guitar piece The Garden Waltz was a particular delight.

My own relationship with the dulcimer has been a rather troubled one. When I lived in Brittany back in the early 80s I came into contact with traditional Breton music and a character (who was seldom sober) who rejoiced in the nickname Guinness. Guinness introduced me to the instrument and, captivated, I bought one from a music shop in St Brieuc.

I began teaching myself to play and compose tunes on it but, after 20 years of loyal service, my poor old dulcimer started to misbehave. Some of the frets had become very worn and the poor thing refused to stay in tune. A music shop offered to 'set it up' for me but, sadly, had no idea what they were doing and the dulcimer sounded unhappier than ever. So I traded it in for a new model from the excellent Hobgoblin shop in Manchester. It was only then I discovered, for two decades, I'd been playing the dulcimer back-to-front! My original instrument had been strung for a left-handed player so everything I had ever learnt now had to be inverted and relearnt.

Just to make it more interesting, I was persuaded to exchange my old three-string dulcimer for a four-string instrument. This opened up a whole new world as my new dulcimer is capable of lovely mandolin-like sounds (two of the four strings are paired in unison.) I used it on the album Untangle the Strings and my friend Phil Richards took a series of remarkable images for the album featuring puppets with the dulcimer (see above left) .

For an old battle-weary dulcimerist like me it was very heartening to see people turn out on a cold Saturday night to watch Dan Evans play, and it's inspired me to take my dulcimer with me — and give the guitar a rest — next time I go out to play on an open mic night.

I must, finally, point other dulcimer aficionados in the direction of Dan’s excellent website, which, among other things, finally helped me to understand why other musicians have always struggled to keep time with my playing. It seems it's due to a phenomenon called rubato which Dan explains is ‘rhythmic give and take’. As he puts it, ‘this gentle ebb and flow of the rhythm adds depth and interest to the music, making the song breathe and so come to life.’ So now you know.

On setting traps for songs and getting inside the jukebox

I've been thinking a lot about songwriting and recording lately. Thinking a lot about both and not doing much about either. I've been working on two or three songs for about a year and I'm almost happy with one of them. When I was in my early twenties, I would write two or three songs a month. For over a year now, I've been recording some songs and instrumentals on my home computer with the plan of putting together a little album. Hopefully, it won't take me another year to complete it.

I was going to write something here about the beginnings of the art of songwriting -- something about Elizabethan sonnets, would you believe -- but I'll save that for another time because I've just read an interview with Tom Waits in the December 2011 issue of Uncut magazine. Tom Waits knows a thing or two about songwriting and recording. Last year he released his twenty-second album Bad As Me. Some of these new songs are as good as anything on Swordfishtrombones or Rain Dogs (two outstanding albums of his from the 1980s.)

In the Uncut interview, Waits says some remarkable things about the process of songwriting and recording. On recording, he says ‘... basically it is a very mechanical process, putting a record together. You could say it starts with, like, music lessons, learning to play an instrument, and working your ass off till you can get a sound out of it, then taking your chances and trying to create just the whole act of recording, hoping you're going to catch a bird in there, y’know?' He talks about 'setting a trap' for a song: ' ... my theory is that songs don't really enjoy being recorded. If you're not careful, you can mangle the whole thing in the recording process. I always thought songs lived in the air. Figure if you open up a window, they might float in, go up in your ear, come out the other ear, and wind up on the radio. I remember when I worked in a restaurant, sweeping up by a jukebox, and thinking, OK, how do you get in the jukebox and come out of it? That's the real trick.’ Waits goes on to consider the risks in combining too many different musical influences: '... when you're making a song, you ... have to decide what belongs, and how far you can stretch it ... ' Comparing the process with cookery, he observes '... sometimes you have to throw a whole batch out, and that really hurts ... You can make something for three days until it's just mush.'

I'm going to try and bear all this in mind as I work on my songs and recordings over the coming weeks and months. And remind me, next time, to tell you about Elizabethan sonnets.

A writerly autumn

I've just got back from a week in London and have barely had time to reflect on recent weeks. Suffice to say, it's been a busy time from the writing angle. My appearance at Bewdley's OctoberFest was very enjoyable. I sold a few copies of A Passenger in Time and got a very positive reaction from the children and adults who came along - so thank you very much to all those keen readers and supporters and to the festival organisers and librarians who helped to make it happen (special thanks to Neville and James.)

Just before I disappeared off to London, I had an article published in the October issue of the British Journal of Wellbeing and, on my return, I discovered I'd had another article published in the delightful Acksherley! magazine. So I'm on a roll and decided to submit a new short story - The Idea of Marmalade - for BBC Radio Four's Opening Lines. Let's hope they like it.