Festival Sights

Normal life carries on during the Festival - so the first thing I did this morning was to go to the dentist's to fix my crumbling teeth.
After that (blessedly painfree) interlude, though, I was a tourist for the day. I had a quick look at the stalls in the Honesty Gardens, where a Zimbabwean sculptor was exhibiting for the first time, alongside others who come back year after year. His name is Bernard Mavunga, and his website is www.marasculpture.com. It was all very simple, clean lines, and beautiful.
I met Sarah, who invited me to a private view of her art exhibition Painted Faces, Human Traces at Booth's Cafe, and another friend gave me a spare ticket to a talk this afternoon. She didn't even tell me what it was about. "Just go and be enthralled and impressed," she said. So I did, and I was.
I had a ticket to see Justin Hill talk about his book Shieldwall first, so I went down to the Festival ground early for a mooch round. Feeling lazy, I took the shuttle bus from outside Tinto House. It was a small audience, but he did have Rowan Williams as a rival speaker in another tent. This is Justin Hill's first foray into historical fiction, and he's planning a series. He started off thinking about the Battle of Hastings, and while doing the research realised that it needed to be set in its wider context - and that wider context started about 50 years before, with the reign of King Cnut and the coming to prominence of Godwin, son of the hero Wulfnoth and father of Harold. As someone who stood in the shieldwall at Hastings on the Saxon side in 2006 (actually not a warrior, but a water carrier - I passed the combat test, but decided in the end it was too scary!) I agree with him that this is a fascinating area of history, and far too little known. And Godwin is a fascinating character. I just wish I'd asked him if there were any women in his book at all!
From there I wandered over to the Elmley Foundation stage - and found myself in a queue for The Mystery of the Last Supper by a Cambridge academic, which was not quite what I had been expecting. While I was there, I met Judith and Chris, who had just been to the Caerleon talk that I'd considered as an alternative to the Anglo-Saxons. Judith said it had been very good, but she rather lost the thread in the middle as they spent twenty minutes talking about granaries! And they'd just missed the shuttle bus I was on, so had walked up to the Festival site instead.
As it turned out, there was a switch of venues, and I had to dash right across the site to the Starlight tent - which is lovely. The roof is all black cloth with thousands of little lights. Which the speaker thought was rather appropriate for her subject, who turned out to be Samuel Palmer the painter. I knew of one picture by him. It's sort of sepia and has a rabbit in the foreground and a rather odd looking tree. He did other pictures, it turns out, of quite luminous beauty, and I found myself wondering if he had any connection at all with William Morris, who also had a thing about peasant craftsmanship and rural life. Rachel Campbell-Johnston was a wonderful speaker, describing Samuel Palmer's part in a group of painters and medievalists called the Ancients, and his association with the then elderly William Blake, with real enthusiasm for her subject. She's written the first biography of Samuel Palmer for 35 years, and it was obviously a labour of love.
I had intended to go to Evensong at St Mary's, where the preacher was Archbishop Rowan, but the Samuel Palmer talk carried on past the time that Evensong started. Later in the evening, though, I met someone who had gone to Evensong - he was waiting for someone double parked behind him to let his car out - and he said that Rowan Williams had been a splendid speaker, and it was a shame I'd missed him.
I did have time to go to the opening of the exhibition in Salem Chapel Gallery, on Earth Art by a variety of artists. I think my favourite was a series of aerial photos of a ploughed field (somewhere in Herefordshire) on which the artist had laid out thousands of limewashed pieces of sandstone in a swirling pattern that could only be seen properly from the air. It had taken her nine days to do. Another artist was Peter Horrocks, who goes into Clearwell Caves to collect the ochre he uses himself (the caves have been mined for ochre for something like 4,000 years).
There are always dis-satisfied voices, though, and I met one lady who was furious about all the temporary cafes that spring up around town over the Festival. "I bet they don't have to do all those health and safety courses that the rest have to do!" she said. "It's all money money - they don't do it the rest of the time for the benefit of the locals."