Buses

Long ago I knelt up on the back seat of a bus
Looking out into the twinkling darkness
beyond the damp back window,
face shining, thoughts eager,
and sang to the stars.
Life was new and urgent,
there was a hidden world ahead.

Coaches took me to the seaside,
our village dressed up for a day out.
A stop at a pub, crisps and a shandy.
Voices raised, singing you’ll never get to heaven
and ten green bottles on the way home.
A whip round for the driver
grubby sand flags, donkeys and sand in my socks.

A while later I ran away to board the first bus
that left Wakefield bus station,
leaving behind the stress of new people,
new places, new ways of being.
A tiny adventure where nobody knew me
and I didn’t have to be anybody else.
It went to Hull. Of course it did.

Much later, out in the world, far away,
I sat quietly on a village bus
next to a man with a bucket full
Of live fish, and smart ladies
in heavy embroidered skirts and bowler hats.
New smells, new sights, new sounds,
A world elsewhere. New life.

Today I sit quietly, for free.
Just behind the priority seats.
Still here. Unnoticed.
Watching children start their first adventures.
Beautiful young people, so confident, so unsure,
Anxious parents holding their family together.
Loud, urgent, vulnerable.

 

Andy Goldsworthy. Fifty Years. National Gallery of Scotland. 31.10.25

 An artist who knows what he is doing and why he is doing it.

Back in 1985 I was walking past Leeds Art Gallery on my way to one of my last checks after heart surgery when I saw a poster. It was white with a beautiful twisting row of red petals running down a green branch and the name Andy Goldsworthy. It drew me in. What I saw blew me away. I did not know anyone was making art like that and as a country girl brought up by retired farming folk I loved it. It was all around me- not just in the gallery. I could see its beginnings on every walk and on every shelf in my grandfather’s sheds.

Spool forward for most of a lifetime and now, after a lot of looking at environmental art in galleries and in the landscape, I have come to know Andy Goldsworthy’s work- and that of Richard Long and David Nash who were two of his early mentors- well. This huge exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery has been a reward for fifty years of meticulous and determined practice following his own ideas and taking them wherever he or they chose, making places of great beauty whether anyone else was interested in them or not. In the early days sometimes they weren’t – galleries and auction houses like to make money and there is no money in melting snowballs. From the start he knew where he was going and this exhibition is both a celebration of his journey and a triumphant arrival.

There is a lot to take in. A wall of red earth dug from the Lowther hills which has shrunk down and dried into a pattern of broken lines covering a whole wall, woven barbed wire, an eerie darkened space with a circle of high hanging reeds lit from above, a walkway lined with heavy oak branches, two large paintings made by the feet of sheep eating from a mineral block whose absence has left a perfect circle in the centre of the canvas and much more. It is always the doing, the digging, the making, the piling up, the process that matters most even when something beautiful remains. Much of this is done out in the landscape and arrives here by way of photos and videos. The early large snowballs with different additions inside them (pine cones, branches) which were frozen and allowed to melt in unexpected places in summer are represented by a video which shows people’s reactions as well as the event itself with even a dog who has grabbed one of the branches to have a good knaw at it. Much of what Andy Goldsworthy does is ephemeral, a time of creation, making a mark, making your presence felt….. an ancient human instinct. Here something ephemeral that lived in a moment of creation is recorded and given a longer life. There is a delightful video of Andy hiding himself in seaweed in the face of an incoming tide and a group of us watched mesmerised as the water flowed forwards and we waited for him to appear again. If you missed the beginning you had the surprise of seeing a man rise up out of the coastline at the end. A whole room is devoted to a fallen elm tree through the seasons and the years as Andy’s creativity worked on it and played with it finding new things in it on each visit as it changed. This is deeply serious, meticulous, painstaking play but it is still play. There were children in the gallery and they were loving what they saw, pointing and laughing. They were being shown how to look by a master.

In my kitchen I have a tail feather from a swallow which I tried to help get off the ground when it turned out to be at the end of its life. It was eaten and I think of keeping the feather as a kind of tribute. When Andy Goldsworthy ran over a hare he took it home, removed the guts, and mixed the blood with snow placed inside the hare’s stomach before hanging it up and allowing it to drip through its mouth and nose onto a large piece of paper on the floor below it. Three rather beautiful drawings were the result. The hare’s life has been recorded and celebrated. The mythical resonances associated with the creature add extra meaning. The delicate sprinkles of blood really do suggest the soul of the creature leaving its body.

There is nothing pretty or sentimental about what Andy Goldsworthy does. It is hands on, sometimes hard, cold, dirty work that results in things of great beauty. This is an artist who knows exactly what he is doing and why he is doing it. The many visitors to this exhibition responded to that with wide eyed wonder and smiles of delight. I loved it. All of us did.

Inter Alia. NT screening at the SJT. 25th September 2025.

Many women have had to come to terms with the fact that they can’t have it all, motherhood, a thriving relationship, a great social life and a successful career but Jessica Parkes is an exceptional woman and she is going to use every ounce of her energy and intellect to make sure that she is able to do just that, however taxing her job as a high court judge might be. Justice isn’t always just but she does everything that she can to make it work. Her career has to exist inter alia (among other things) as she juggles the many other demands on her. So far she has held it all together. The play sets out what happens when it all threatens to fall apart as her integrity and assumptions are threatened.
Rosamund Pike plays Jessica with great virtuosity and speed of thought. From beginning to end she carries the narrative and gives us a very believable well rounded portrait of a woman who is facing a crisis along with facing the demands of a play which is fast moving and sometimes stylised. She has excellent support from Jamie Glover as her less successful husband and Jasper Talbot as her troubled son, but this is her show and she makes the most of it.
As a former lawyer the writer Suzie Miller knows her subject and the direction from Justin Martin is clear as a bell- something very important to this play.

Inter Alia is at heart a didactic play, which is good- a play should have something to say- but my one quibble is that I would have liked it to wear its message a little more lightly. I’m not complaining though, it was beautifully done and to see Rosamund Pike in full flow is a wonderful thing.

Helen Chadwick. Life Pleasures. Hepworth Gallery Wakefield. October 2025

Life Pleasures, the exhibition of Helen Chadwick’s work at the Hepworth gallery in Wakefield is a playful and startlingly honest look at where we find joy in life. Chadwick was working during the second half of the twentieth century and her work still has resonance today, particularly in the way it addresses feminist concerns. Sometimes beauty and cruelty can be found in surprising places and pleasure can be linked to danger and excess. Simple things, sexual desire, food, give us sensory pleasure in the moment alongside the frisson of danger- where will they lead us if taken to excess- and Chadwick sometimes finds beauty in surprising places linking cruelty and elegance. Above all this is work that makes its points with humour, craftmanship and a sense of open hearted sometimes quite ruthless honesty. This retrospective is long overdue. I should have heard of her and I hadn’t.

Elizabeth Fritsch. Hepworth Gallery. October 2025.

Even though I am very fond of ceramics I didn’t know the work of Elizabeth Fritsch before seeing this exhibition at the Hepworth gallery and it was a wonderful surprise. There are over 100 pots spanning her career from the 1970’s to 2013 and they are like one big cheerful family cleverly grouped in displays which seem to speak to each other as well as assert their own beauty- simple perfect forms. I don’t remember seeing a ceramics exhibition before that was quite so beautifully put together as this one. The background colours, which echo and frame the pots without overwhelming them and the arrangements on each individual table as well as through the whole room are delightful. The pots really do seem to speak to each other. They are very distinctive and you would immediately recognize her work if you saw it somewhere else- again, like a family resemblance. 

Elizabeth Fritsch trained as a musician and her pots have rhythm and musicality both in their simple forms and in the swirling patterns dancing over their surface. They seem to me to be a kind of fusion between painting and ceramics. It is striking how painterly the photographs of them taken in the exhibition are. You could easily frame a high quality shot and put it on the wall.

Ekphrastic poetry workshop with Wendy Pratt. Atkinson Grimshaw. Scarborough Art Gallery. 17.10.2025

This was a really good morning. I concentrated on Silver Moonlight from 1880- an early painting which is on loan as part of the current Atkinson Grimshaw exhibition. We also used Edward Hopper Study: Hotel Room by Victoria Chang and Oi yoi yoi by Vickie Feaver as prompts. I shall be reading more of Vickie Feaver’s work. I got two short (maybe draft) poems written.

Girl in the Moonlight.

Smart as paint.
Straight as a die.
She walks past the big house in silver light,
a day’s work done.
new uniformed and proud,
apron bow carefully tied,
black bonnet ribbon just so,
her basket full of hopes and dreams.
She has places to go,
a mother to make proud.

Painter of Moonlight.

You had your skill,
your quiet moments of genius-
a specialist subject.
The beauty and stillness of twilight and growing darkness.
Did you ever want to come out
into the sunlight of a summer day
and bask in its heat
or did you know that this was your kingdom,
the slow dawning of the night.

Austen’s Women. Lady Susan. York Theatre Royal. 20.09.2025

Dyad Theatre Company was founded in 2009 by Rebecca Vaughan and Elton Townend Jones.  It is not easy to keep a small theatre company going long term and the fact that they have done this is a testament to talent and hard work. They tour a wide variety of venues up and down the country and they are always a pleasure to see.
The production I saw at York Theatre Royal studio was Austen’s Women, Lady Susan with Rebecca Vaughan playing several parts precisely and cleverly. Lady Susan was written when Jane Austen was very young and it is full of playfulness and wide eyed joy at the world. This is a young girl beginning to see and understand the adult society which she was joining for the first time. It is full of open mouthed astonishment at what the people around her were getting away with- a glorious romp where Austen’s wit and irony are already on full display. It’s not subtle but broad comedy never is.
Andrew Margerison’s direction is fast and witty too. There are some lovely theatrical moments and swift, clear changes of character which Rebecca Vaughan makes the most of. This is textbook small scale theatre produced by two people who have a wealth of experience and know exactly what works. Rebecca Vaughan worked with Guy Masterson for a long time and that is a pretty good pedigree.
It is so good to watch a piece of theatre where you know that you are in safe hands and can just sit back and enjoy it. This was not my first Dyad show and I need to see more.

Noises Off. Stephen Joseph Theatre 04.09.2025

I saw Noises Off, Michael Frayn’s famous farce years ago on its first UK tour in the early 1980s and I have been saying ever since that the second act is the funniest thing I have ever seen on stage. It had a wonderful cast and the whole thing ran like clockwork, sending up the kind of hugely popular plays that had made a name for the Whitehall theatre, Ray Cooney and Brian Rix with deadly accuracy. The set up is simple. Three acts, In act one you see the disastrous tech run of a hackneyed farce, in act two you see a matinee performance one month later from backstage, and in act three you see a performance near the end of a ten week run touring the provinces where everything is falling apart and you now know exactly why.
The Stephen Joseph is a theatre in the round and I was curious to see how they made it work. While they absolutely did, and just watching the very clever and speedy set change in the first interval to see how they managed it was a pleasure in itself, I missed the simplicity of that turnaround to backstage in the second act. Backstage and onstage farce is enough to cope with without adding any further complications.
Farce is a difficult genre to get right, and one I usually don’t like that much. It needs speed and concentration and has to be played with absolute truth. I’m not going to pick out any one cast member because if any theatre genre depends on teamwork this is the one and any weak link would be like trying to drive a car with a flat tyre. There were none, the speed and the energy never flagged. This comes from a talented cast, obviously, but also intelligent direction they had been given by Paul Robinson. Michael Frayn’s response when Paul Robinson told him what was planned at the SJT was “an amused Good Luck”. The real hero though was the designer Kevin Jenkins. This play should not have been able to work in the round and his design more than anything else was at its core. He made it happen.
The most fascinating afternoon in the theatre that I have had for a long time.

Eddie Izzard at Leeds City Varieties. 24-09-25

Some of the UK reviews for Eddie Izzard’s one man performance of Hamlet have been a bit sniffy (they loved it in the US) but those of us giving a standing ovation in a packed Leeds City Varieties really didn’t care. I think perhaps some of the reviewers may have been expecting something that they were never going to get. You have to lose your preconceptions and leave your snobbery behind. Eddie began as a street performer and she is nothing if not brave, running marathons, performing stand up in French and always willing to put themselves on the line. For two hours and twenty minutes she held a full house spellbound, just one person with no props and no set- nothing to rely on but her own charisma, experience and unshakable confidence and a costume that was perfectly en pointe. She made it work, against the odds, as she always does. It was careful, delicate, well judged and inventive. I can be fairly sure, for example, that I will never see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern done that way again. We were told at the curtain that we had been a good audience and could come again. You know…… I think I just might.
It has taken me a long while to get to the City Varieties. It is a rare surviving example of a Victorian music hall, designed by by architect George Smith for Charles Thornton in 1865. It was a real pleasure just to sit in it and admire the surroundings. It was a perfect venue for what Eddie was doing. I think she will really have enjoyed this gig and rose to fill the space and feed off the audience as an experienced performer- exactly what the old music hall stars would have done. I have a feeling we saw her at her best. Sometimes everything just clicks.

Note: I have used her as a pronoun hoping I am doing the right thing. I know Eddie has said that they don’t mind either way.

Mark Steel. The Leopard in my House. Scarborough Spa. 14-05-25

Mark Steel’s show, The Leopard in my House is something a bit special. The Leopard of the title is his throat cancer diagnosis (spoiler- he came through it) and he has crafted a moving stand up set, using all his skill and knowledge, finding both the hilarity and the humanity in his gruelling treatment regime as it progresses. There is plenty of both. He uses every ounce of his life experience both on and off stage, to give his audience a taste of what a major illness is like. It is very finely judged, open and honest with no self pity of awkwardness and it suited the stage of the Spa grand hall in Scarborough perfectly. There was an atmosphere of summer seasons gone past along with with some piercing modern insights as we were treated to some sharp keyboard playing and even a singalong during the interval- all from the man himself. By the time we walked to our taxi leaving him signing books at eleven o’clock at night we had been given value for money that even Ken Dodd would have been proud of. We like that in Yorkshire. Mark has a charm and an innate likability which carries you along with him. This is something you can’t fake and it is the greatest gift that a comedian can be blessed with. Everything else- even timing- you can learn. Basically everybody was glad to see him and he was glad to be there. There must have been points where he wondered if he would be able to do a stage show of this kind again. Well trust me, he can and he does. Go and see it. He’s lovely.