under another sun

Blunderbuss communications Got to grips with my Guernsey projects this morning discharging a blunderbuss of email in all directions - the Chief Librarian of the Prilaux Library, to Catriona, the This is Guernsey website, The official Denys Corbet website and so on. Plus Richard of course, and copying Matt as I'd like to take This Concert to Guernsey. A cold rainy day and I walked to The Brunswick at Hove to try to buy two tickets for The Dr Space Toad Experience show this weekend. Dr Spacetoad is Paul, an old friend from my days performing in the Troubadour Cafe. I have recently got in touch with Paul again who now lives in Paris. Annoyingly I turned up at The Brunswick slightly dripping and wearing an unflattering beany hat. The pleasant guys there told me that you can only buy an advance ticket over the Internet. I must have been looking particularly slack jawed as his colleague asked me kindly if I had access to the Internet, and talked me through the web page as if I were som...

Busy being poets Richard and I spent the day in the company of Rufus and Holly the Highland* Terriers. We were discussing important matters such as our Guernsey Doubles collection while driving around Guernsey. A day wandering free as birds about the island is one that's hard to beat. Joan Ozanne had invited us in for coffee. She is a genuinely fascinating woman, a mine of information with a speed of thought, and twinkle in her eye, which completely belies her age. She introduced me to some work by Denys Corbet , another Guernsey poet of the nineteenth century, and told me about a play she was writing set in Costa Rica. She said she'd lived in her house almost all her life, apart from when she joined the evacuation, as a teenager, just before the Germans came. Her father had hastily buried liqueurs in the garden, and found them years after the family's return, still drinkable. We then sloped off to The Farmhouse, a place new to me not far from the airport for lunch of incr...