MAY DAY IN WEST BOWLING

Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood. 

Pablo Neruda 

In celebration of May Day, a short excerpt from Slim Chances:

MAY DAY, NW6

Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by children’s hands, in front-yard plots, – now standing by wall-sides in retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests; the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854) 

Photo by EP

Stay tuned for a special May Day remembrance ...

RINGING THE CHANGES

Bright baffling Soul, least capturable of themes,
     Thou, who display’dst a life of common-place,
     Leaving no intimate word or personal trace
     Of high design outside the artistry
        Of thy penned dreams,
Still shalt remain at heart unread eternally.

Thomas Hardy, ‘To Shakespeare After 300 Years’

What a wide, free, careless spirit was this man Shakespeare’s — incarnate lesson to narrow-headed mortals, their strait moralities, and pedantic hearts! And what a Song he sang; clothing beauty for all time in actuality, in strangeness, and variety!

John Galsworthy, ‘The Great Tree’

Holy Trinity by William Wells Quatremain

This Sunday in Stratford-upon-Avon, as part of the weekend celebrations for Shakespeare’s 450th birthday, a special service will be held in Holy Trinity, the church in which William was christened and buried. The parish register will be on display, showing the record of his baptism on 26 April 1564. 

The film that follows was begun on the Bard’s official birthday, 23 April, and takes us from Chapel Street, Bradford to the Tate Modern on Bankside via the bells of Holy Trinity and Southwark Cathedral.

‘The Immortal Memory’
Photo by EP

COMING SOON

In honour of Shakespeare’s 450th birthday, officially celebrated on 23rd April, a new film is imminent. Stay tuned!

THE RINGING GROOVES OF CHANGE

                              Hampstead is the place to ruralise

                              Ritualise, extra-muralise

                              All on a summer’s day.

Music-hall song by Watkin Williams, ca 1863 

A new film from the heart of leafy suburbia:

Incidentally, Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, who is mentioned and quoted in the film, was a fairly frequent visitor to NW6. A keen student of astronomy, he used to star-gaze through the telescope erected in Sir Norman Lockyer’s garden in Fairfax Road (the same telescope through which Lockyer discovered helium in 1862).

A happy Easter to you all!

Photo by EP

WONDER OF OUR STAGE

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future sees ...

William Blake, Songs of Experience

Last week was the first annual, national Shakespeare Week. In celebration, I offer two new sonnets, written as a tribute from an actor to the one whom Ben Jonson called ‘the wonder of our stage’:

In progress
A new self-portrait, my second in oils, smaller and rather different in style from the one featured in our last film, Reflections.

News

My Perfect Mind returns to the Young Vic for a limited season 1st September. Booking is now open on the theatre’s website.

LENTEN REFLECTION

This, as a coherent whole, only casually observed;
never as yet tried in suffering or succeeding,
held together for an enduring fulfillment,
yet so as if for times to come, out of these scattered things,
something serious and lasting were being planned.

Rilke, ‘Self-Portrait’ (1906)

A new film and a new sonnet:

Here is neither a self-portrait nor a domestic interior but an urban landscape, the latest version of my painting of Mill Lane previewed in our Sensing Spaces film. 

I was walking down Mill Lane yesterday and on the pavement outside our local florist was greeted by these charming flowers which some children had painted in colour chalk. 

Photo by EP

The flowers reminded me that Mill Lane, a name redolent of the old rural hamlet of West End, still has vestiges and echoes of its meadowed past amidst its terraces, shops and modest high-rises – as celebrated in this little film.