Friday at the Festival

It's been wet all day, but it does really feel like the Festival now.
This morning I went into Shepherds to see Lizzie Harper's exhibition (and buy some gooseberry and elderflower crumble ice cream). Francoise and Pierre were there, sipping coffee and reading the morning papers - they were looking forward to several Festival events.
Adam Tatton-Reid has pictures in the Granary too - I'll try to get round to seeing that exhibition during the week. He does some wonderful photos.
My first event, though, was not at the Festival site, but at the Poetry Bookshop, where Owen Sheers, John Retallack and Dan Krikler were doing a free event, meeting the creators of the play Unicorns, Almost, which has started its run at the Swan.
Sadly, Owen Sheers couldn't be there - struck down with a migraine, he was tucked up in bed, so he couldn't tell us himself about how much the poet Keith Douglas meant to him. John Retallack, the director of the play, said that Owen first discovered the poetry when he was 24 - which was the age that Keith Douglas had died in the Second World War. He also talked a lot about Owen Sheers other play, Pink Mist, about three Bristol lads joining the army and being sent to Afghanistan. Pink Mist is an extended poem, originally written for radio - which caused a few problems when trying to stage it, according to Dan Krikler, who also starred in that play. On stage, you can just pick up a cup of coffee - for radio, the text actually says "I picked up my cup of coffee", so they had an interesting time getting that to work. However, Pink Mist ended up being a very physical play, and when John Retallack directed it at the Bristol Old Vic he wanted to work with someone else who had a particular type of theatrical training, to get the right physicality (I forget the name of the place that did the training) and the Old Vic had just taken on someone who had exactly that training.
So Dan performed the beginning of Pink Mist - first asking if there were any Bristolians in the audience, because his accent was a bit rusty!
He also performed some of Keith Douglas's poetry, which was quite different, complex and beautiful. Dan mentioned some criticism that Keith Douglas had from poets back in London during the War, complaining that his later poems had lost some of their musicality, to which Keith Douglas replied that he was in the middle of people being blown up in the Western Desert, so of course he'd lost some musicality! At the same time, though, he had access to the big luxurious hotels of Alexandria, which is why there's a chandelier hanging from the roof of the tent in the set of the play. Dan was wearing a flying jacket with a polo neck sweater - with the small moustache he has, he reminded me of Douglas Fairbanks!
When questions were taken from the audience (nobody left when Melanie announced that Owen Sheers couldn't be there) one man said that he had been stopped by four people already who all told him he had to go and see the play, because it was so good. Another lady, who had been unaware the play was on, asked where she could go and see it, because what she'd heard so far had been so interesting (tickets are available at the Poetry Bookshop). Another question was whether the play would be shown to children with no experience of war - and children from Fairfield School locally are being brought to see it.
I hadn't noticed it when I went to do my shopping in the morning, but the shop which used to be St David's Hospice, by the Buttermarket, has become Grove House Gallery for the Festival, with paintings by Martin Andrews round the walls, bog oak sculptures, Irish handmade woodcraft (many beautiful bowls) by Malcolm McAndrew The Wood Wizard, and leather belts, pouches and purses - and two friendly rough coated lurcher-type dogs.

Then it was down to the Festival site - there are a few stalls along Brecon Road as usual, one selling "posh kebabs", the usual woodturner and craft tent, with rebound notebooks and a Christian tent outside Cartref, and a couple of others, but the weather wasn't really on their side today.
I had time to browse the Oxfam bookshop, and the Festival bookshop, and look around the Festival site. The Quakers are here again, and I got a little bag of leaflets from them. There's also wine, cheese, vinegars, Celtic Spirits, and ice cream, vintage clothes, and charities including Greenpeace, the Woodland Trust and the Cat's Protection League. There's an art gallery, which will be open tomorrow (they were still setting up), and a Make and Take tent....
Which leads on quite nicely to the talk I went to see, which was How to be a Craftivist: The Art of Gentle Protest. This was supposed to be Jonathan Porritt talking to Sarah Corbett, the author of the Craftivist book - but Jonathan Porritt has had to go into hospital for a knee operation, so Martin Wright stepped in instead.
Sarah Corbett has had an interesting life - brought up in one of the poorest areas of Liverpool where her father was (and still is) a vicar and her mother a nurse, on the 14th floor of a tower block. That's what started her life of campaigning and activism, when her mother was worried about fires in the block and couldn't get a satisfactory answer. From that beginning, Sarah grew up around lots of local campaigns, and got to see what sort of things worked and what didn't work. She also once made an old lady cry, during a conventional placards and petitions protest outside Primark, which made her feel awful, and made her think about the wider issues - the old lady couldn't afford to buy clothes for her grandchildren anywhere else.
As she started work, that was the sort of thing she went into, working for several big charities, and one of her successful campaigns, using craftivism, was to get a large department store chain to pay the living wage to its staff - by sending the Board members a hanky.
Each Board member got a personalised embroidered hanky (the craftivists did research on what sorts of things each person was interested in to personalise them) and the gifts were given, along with a handwritten letter about the benefits of the living wage, at the AGM. By the next AGM, the Board members had persuaded the CEO to change his position, and introduce the living wage. The name of the company isn't in the book, for legal reasons, but they did say who it was on stage, which made me sad, as I grew up believing that this particular company was well known for looking after its staff.
There were some good questions from the audience. One lady wanted to know how to do a Plastic Free Challenge with her Rainbow and Brownie group (so girls between 5 - 7, and 7 - 10), and another lady wanted to know how to be a craftivist if you'd never picked up a needle before. Up to the age of 7, children have less dexterity and find some crafts difficult, but there's always scope for something creative to be made to give to a local politician, for instance, and if an adult has never tried any crafts, then a gift from them, even if it's a bit messy, is all the more thought-provoking, because they'd made the effort.
Something else thought provoking were Sarah Corbett's thoughts on the "pink pussy hats" made by women who marched against Trump in the early days of his presidency. Yes, they were hand made, but the movement didn't really go anywhere because they didn't have a clear aim in mind, and they didn't have a specific question to put to Trump, so he could ignore them. Another question from the audience was about the effectiveness of gentle craftivism against an opponent such as the NRA gun lobby in the USA. Sarah Corbett said that the best way to approach something like that was to see what the two sides had in common, and to have a clear vision of what they want the future to look like - so for instance someone who didn't believe in climate change (she worked on campaigns for this, too) might be persuaded by something local like clearing up pollution in their local area, rather than "Climate change is terrible, we're all going to die, and it's all your fault". She also pointed out that using crafts to protest is just one thing in a toolbox of different methods - alongside marching and placards and petitions and so on.
It was a fascinating hour, and I'll be looking up the Craftivist Collective online.