Port Eliot part 3- this time it’s personal

Okay this will be my third and final blog on the festival. I thought I’d mention about the tent itself and terrors. I think most people can relate to the horror of standing up in front of an audience and reading aloud. I think I mentioned this before, but I can stand up in front of an audience and talk until the cows come home (I know a lot of people struggle with this) but reading is a very different matter.

We all get nervous and then what happens? We start to shake. So now I'm are trying to read from a script that keeps bobbing up and down. As I'm talking about stopping for dinner and  grabbing a snack of sparrow’s bum I reach the end of the line and move down only to realize that I'm about to stop and grab a snack of sparrows bum again! I’ve nearly read the same sentence twice. Whoops! So I do what everyone does and I jump too far back then can’t find either where I finished or where I were going. Then I get more nervous and the whole thing starts over again. The throat dries up and as if they knew what was going on my wisdom teeth decided to grumble all day. All this and   I was still trying to move on from sparrow’s bum snacks.

                                                                   

The Colosseum 

I suppose the answer is to have memorised your work so well that you simply repeat it out loud rather than actually reading it. And although it sounds obvious now I didn’t think of this until I watched the poets in the tent. Each of them was brilliant. There were pieces on O.C.D and A.C.D.C, on Hash cakes and Hadron Colliders, but each were smooth and professional. They knew their pieces inside and out and were able to recite them rather than read them. It gave each piece a drama and an air of performance that I certainly couldn’t match. 

The Arena

            As Jane Pugh called up each of the readers there was a sinking feeling that I hadn’t prepared enough. Eventually I could no longer hide behind the other students and made my way up to the front, where the carpeted floor was as even as a pitching ship. Each of us had to stand in front of a microphone, which was recording our work for The Source FM, and an impressive video camera whose nefarious purpose was never revealed to me. The audience, the mic and the camera really helped to settle my nerves I can tell you.

       A deep breath got me through the first piece about a lady archer I watched one morning in Kamakura, Japan, which became the opening of my Silk Road manuscript. And then, because we only had 3-5 minutes to read, I asked the audience whether they would prefer an embarrassing piece (from the Beijing chapter) or an execution piece (from the Uzbekistan chapter).  Taking up Jane’s lead the assembly of course asked for ‘embarrassing’ and so a little more relaxed I told them of the tale of the Beijing Hairdressers. There were a few laughs and everyone was very kind and then it was done. All that was left to do was open my gifts for performing while watching a brilliant piece by a young poet who had cut up a news article from the nineteen thirties and made it into a very funny and original piece.

I learned a lot in a small space of time and look forward to having a second stab at it next year! 

Before next year I’ll buff up my wellies and my accent, too.

Have a good week folks

Cheers Matt

matthewbutton.co.uk

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Port Eliot Festival. PART 2- on the day

A frighteningly posh ginger ten -year old gave me perfect directions to the ProfWriting tent and then went about his business of advertising someone’s food stall with a cardboard sign. And what food! No hotdogs here, nope, it was all falafels, Jamaican goat curry and Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen.  This was by far the poshest festival I’ve ever been to; I felt simultaneously over and underdressed. Wearing a pair of clean Vans seemed a little over the top when everyone else had wellies on, yet again a pair of jeans and a shirt were very drab when compared to the plethora of fairies and fashionistas swathed in tinfoil and warning tape. 

                According to the brochure this was the seventh Port Eliot Festival and that only 18 paying guests presented themselves at the first one. Festivals are big business in the British summer now and if I can use the misquote ‘if you build it, they will come’. And come they have. The parks and gardens of the Earl of St. German were positively humming with visitors on a muggy Saturday in July. 

                I had a few hours before I had to embarrass myself in front of people so I went to see who I could find.  Sadly I had already missed the River Cottage people. Hugh Fearnnley-Whittingstall’s talk (on Friday) probably had a recipe for raw elk’s bladder on toast or maybe artichoke and afterbirth flan, that said it is all part of Hugh’s eccentric charm and the River Cottage BLTs were very highly praised by all who had the patience to queue. 

          Firstly I went to see the most splendid Diana Athill, OBE. The award winning novelist and memoirist has been the editor to a number of famous and respected authors. This lovely doyenne of publishing and editing was recently honoured with a BBC Imagine with Alan Yentob. She showed herself to be every bit as sharp, funny and eloquent in the tent as she had on TV, not bad for a ninety-year-old. The only downside to the event was that she and the interviewer (the editor Ian Jack) hadn’t been mic’d up properly and consequently you could only hear half of what was said. Sadly this meant that the fat female Aussie behind felt the need to bellow ‘Can you get her to speak into the F**king mic’; not the sort of thing you yell at ninety-two-year-olds, or anyone really. Ms Anthill talked of writing as a therapy as IPhones were held aloft to photograph and video her. She talked of her work with VS Naipaul and how his depressions was a ‘challenge’ and that editing often had more in common with nannying then anything else. There was the warm aroma of canvas and while she laughed about an over-eighties dating agency she had been invited to join some of the audience put down their BlackBerries long enough to do a little knitting. 

Ian Jack & Diana Anthill, OBE

               
 After a lunch of goat curry and rice and beans I sat beneath a beech tree in the Walled Garden and listened to Alexander Masters (author of the most splendid Stuart: a life backwards, go and read it.) and Sam Leith chat about the madness and magic of mathematicians. Alexander had chosen to add a little cabaret by dressing as a man-sized number seven.  What I heard between two kids called Neco and Rupert being reprimanded was fascinating and funny and I look forward to reading their new books when they come out. 

Sam Leith and Alexander Masters (Number Seven)

                There was little else I could do after that but go and prepare for my session in the Profwriting tent. I stopped in to watch a little of Martin Parr’s talk about hoarding but my mind was elsewhere, so I went and sat on the hill over looking the secret Tamar estuary that Kate Rew’s Wild Swimmers would venture into after tea, and pulled out my notes …

Have a good week folks

Cheers Matt

matthewbutton.co.uk

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Port Eliot invite.

Part of the appeal of writing has always been the anonymity, you can hide behind nom de plume and it’s perfectly acceptable to be a recluse. But this Saturday 24^th July I will have to do the opposite. I have been invited and when I say invited I mean coaxed, cajoled and lightly bullied into reading at the Port Eliot literary festival 

      Brilliant, but really scary. Well there comes a point in every writer’s life when he has to stop showing work to ‘safe’ audiences and face real listeners and readers. Now let’s put things into context; firstly it is an honour and I’m both excited and terrified, secondly it’s not as if I’ve been invited to co-host Jarvis Cockers radio  6music show or asked to help Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall cook up a light lunch of Rabbit-a-la-road kill. My tutor merely asked me if I would read 10 minutes of my scribblings from my Silk Road manuscript. 

       I’ve read books by Geoff Dyer, Diana Athill and Alexander Masters, all of whom will be there. It was terrifying enough to do it in school (my formative years in skiving stem from a horror of English classes and reading aloud) but what if someone actually comes into the Prof reading tent?They might actually hear me, sorry that’s the nerves talking. 

Okay off to choose what to read. 

Have a good week folks

Cheers Matt

matthewbutton.co.uk

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