With fellow film-makers Garfield Kennedy and Kenneth Kutsch at the Royal Court Theatre in London

Just completed a very long three day shoot with fellow film-makers Garfield Kennedy and Ken Kutsch to produce a campaign film challenging the proposed library closures. Seventy members of the public in Glastonbury and Shepton Mallet turned up at our temporary studio to speak passionately and eloquently about their love of libraries.

A chartered Librarian, a homeless traveller, a single Mum in tears with her three young book-loving children, a Polish refugee, a local historian, town and county councillors and book lovers of all ages. A day in London in between our local shoots. Interviewing Kate Mosse, Jon Snow, Julian Fellowes, John Bird and our local MP Tessa Munt. In and out of cabs and tubes all day. ITV filming us making the film at the Royal Court Theatre (which was a bit surreal), Jon Snow at Channel 4 taking time out of his editorial meetings to share his passion for libraries with us. Over to the Royal Society of Literature and squeezing into a very crowded meeting room. A young aide rushing in with cups of tea for everyone whispering to us ‘Oh my God, I have never seen so many famous authors in the same room before’. We interviewed Colin Thubron, Maggie Gee, David Harsent, Maureen Duffy, Maggie Fergusson and the wonderful Anne Chisholm.

John Bird (founder of The Big Issue) spoke movingly about learning to read in prison and how important public libraries were to him when he was homeless and wanted to study. We received a personal letter of support from Sir David Attenborough ‘I owe my career to the books I borrowed from my local library in Leicester as much as I do to the animals, plants and fossils of the Leicestershire countryside’ and last night Alan Bennett rang us at home with a brilliant quote for the film. ‘I’m afraid my quote is a bit short’ he said in his lovely soft Yorkshire voice ‘but I do hope you can use it: Closing Libraries is Child Abuse’. Watch this space……we are planning something special for the launch. The four of us (including our brilliant BBC editor Martin Wells) are making this film for free because we love and use our local libraries and we will do everything in our creative power to protect the vulnerable in our communities and prevent a bunch of here today, gone tomorrow, county councillors from conducting such an appalling act of cultural vandalism.

Apologies to Brenda Lee …. Have been working on a rough cut for the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druid’s website What astonished me when filming their Eisteddfod was their extraordinary creativity and bardic talents – in poetry, song and prose. Lovely people with a deep sense of the sacred who also really enjoy a good knees-up. Slightly misleading title to this blog – this film contains no Christmas Trees.

I was introduced to the extraordinarily soulful music of Cesaria Evora in 1997 by an American Music producer, who handed me a plain cardboard sleeve with the two words ‘Cabo Verde’ printed on it. Cesaria was born in the Cape Verde island of Sao Vicente and is known as the barefoot diva because of her propensity to appear on stage in her bare feet in support of the disadvantaged women and children of her country.

Long known as the queen of the morna, a soulful genre sung in Creole-Portuguese, she mixes her sentimental folk tunes filled with longing and sadness with the acoustic sounds of piano, guitar, cavaquinho, violin, accordian, and clarinet. Evora’s Cape Verdean blues often speak of the country’s long and bitter history of isolation and slave trade, as well as emigration: almost two-thirds of the million Cape Verdeans alive live abroad.

That is how Paul Desmond wanted to describe his alto sax playing and I think this track epitomised his huge talent.  Michael Gerber of eMyth Worldwide tells a great story about his saxaphone teacher, Merl. Merl told Michael if he wanted to be the best saxophone player in the world he had to practice 5 hours a day, 5 days a week. One day he said, “Michael, you don’t make music; the music finds you. Your job is to practice.”

And that is what Michael says we should do; practice, practice, practice – looking for the music, looking for the music. And one day after Michael had been practising his saxophone playing for a few weeks, suddenly the music would just turn up, and all the hairs on the back of Michael’s neck would stand on end and Merl would join in and play harmony. It was amazing.

Michael says we can do the same in our businesses. If we practice the right things everyday, suddenly our music will show up.  A big thank you to Dickie Armour for allowing me to share this story

Picture credit: UK Life Sciences

My dentist is well into his 70s.  He loves his work so much he just keeps going (his business partner retired years ago).  The other day I went for a routine check-up and he wasn’t in the surgery.  He arrived a few minutes later, slightly breathless.  ‘So sorry to keep you waiting, but I was running a tango dance workshop’.   He counted off my molars one by one.  ‘Ah yes, there is something I can do for you – a little decay on one of your pre-molars.  I could book you in for Wednesday, but it will depend on the level of cross-wind’. For a moment I thought I’d stepped across the threshold into a parallel universe of arcane dental rules – never offer a patient a filling if there is the risk of a cross-wind.  ”You see, I’m doing advanced training on my private pilot’s licence and don’t really enjoy taking off on the main runway at Bristol if there is the risk of a strong cross-wind.  I hire the plane and I think they would be a little upset if I pranged it’.  Did he ever take holidays?  ‘Yes, every year I go out to India for three weeks and offer my services for free to villagers who have never had any dental treatment before’. A man who has found his true calling in life.

Whitby was wheezing with tourists. Thousands of us clattered down the narrow streets and into the cafes. Breakfast – a bright red pot of strong Yorkshire tea and dark orange Whitby kippers, cooked to perfection and served on generous slabs of granary bread. We climbed the 199 steps to the Abbey, brought strawberry ice-creams and stared at the sea as if we had never seen it before. Children shrieked, fishing boats chugged, buskers sang and an ancient black steam engine hissed into the station, pulling a late summer excursion of cream and red carriages. Whitby is an unforgettable audio-visual experience. We soaked up the last of the August sun before the long drive south to a world of apples, filming, editing and cool autumn mists.

Camping never used to be like this

A week away in a quiet woodland glade in the Yorkshire countryside.  Not a 13A socket in sight.  No laptop. No phone. No emails. No Facebook. The only twittering to be heard was that of long tailed tits in the pine trees. Listening to owls, foxes and birdsong. Sunlight squinting  through beech and oak branches. Acorns, pine-cones, squirrels and a hare. The curling smoke of a wood stove. A bracing walk along the Cleveland Way.

The telephone box at Westbury-sub-Mendip continues to connect people, but this time to books.  As the last strands of BT wiring were stripped out, the villagers brought the iconic phone-box for £1 and transformed it into a book exchange. You read a book and return it, or better still return it with another you have enjoyed. The shelves were full on the day I visited and I had the whole place to myself. There were some very fine novels, a few books on military campaigns, geography, animal husbandry, cooking, mechanical repairs and one on bee-keeping. The great thing was being able to browse knowing that the phone would never ring.

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Great Ideas

Waterstones, York, twenty minutes before closing time. I’d gone in to find a copy of George Orwell’s political essays. The woman at the counter referred to her computer and said ‘I think you’ll find there’s a copy in the Drama department on the second floor’. I searched the shelves to no avail and asked another member of staff if she knew where I could find a copy. ‘I think it’s in the creative writing section. Wait here and I’ll go down to the basement’. On the way down she asked another member of staff who went over and consulted his computer. Soon three members of staff were searching three floors to find me one £4.99 book. Minutes later it was triumphantly plucked out of a shelf in the political biography section and handed to me with a smile.  Isn’t it great when customer service exceeds your wildest expectations? On my way out I passed a glittering mound of Tony Blair’s ‘A Journey’ at half price.  If I was working for Waterstones’ promotions department, I’d have plonked down a large pile of ‘Why I write’ next to the Blair’s biography……

Highgrove reception

It wasn’t what I had expected.  A tour of the rather magnificent (and at times slightly eccentric) gardens at Highgrove House, followed by an evening reception with HRH. One hundred Friends of Mount Athos gathered to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the organisation. It seemed like light years away that I’d been on my hands and knees crawling through the snake and lizard strewn undergrowth of Mount Athos to try and undercover the path of the ancient Kaldarini (the cobbled footpaths between the monasteries) and here I was standing in a lounge suit next to Tyna meeting the patron of the organisation. He’d spent the entire day at Selly Oak meeting wounded soldiers from Afghanistan, flew back almost an hour late, walked straight into an evening gathering, spoke to every single person there and was genuinely interested in what everyone had to say. Call in what you like  - royal duty, service or a lifetime of training, it was a humbling experience.