Last week to Highgreen in Northumberland to run a Dark Angels course with Stuart Delves. People came from far and wide to this most remote part of England: from Zurich, Belfast, Newcastle, Chester, Cheltenham, Glasgow, Manchester and London. People coming together to write; to write more creatively for business, away from the normal pressures of working life, to a place with no mobile phone connection.
The previous week I’d stood in the ruined walls and palaces of Troy, looking down on the plains below. I’d imagined ancient Greek armies with chariots, spears and breast plates of beaten metal, as in Homer’s story. While I stood in Troy my phone had beeped with a text message from England. A tiny intrusive piece of modern engineering, using materials unknown to the ancient world.
Now here in Northumberland I walked a mile through vast landscapes studded with sheep that looked like stones and stones that looked like sheep. My walk was a vain one, in search of a mobile signal, trying to make a connection home.
For one of the exercises Gillian went on a wonderful serendipitous trail from one word to another in reference books. Along the way she found “junction” and mused whether junction is a point of convergence or divergence? Where things come together or move apart? It can be both but your attitude and particular circumstances decide which. Highgreen was both.
These few writers came together to discover more for themselves about the power of words. Words make connections.
On the final morning I met William who owns this extraordinary house at Highgreen. He welcomes groups like ours, as well as an artist-in-residence and the independent poetry publisher Bloodaxe. During the week he works as a corporate lawyer.
“In London?” I asked.
“Near London. Hersham.”
“Surely not Air Products?”
It turned out that William works for one of my oldest clients. When we did the obvious – “So do you know…?” – the first name we shared was John Dodds, now in charge of global brand communications for Air Products in Allentown, USA. And John, as it happens, is coming on the next Dark Angels course in Spain in September. www.dark-angels.org.uk
You need people to make connections. And connections make stories.
I got back home after our course and started looking into something I’d considered before, but never really had enough self-belief to take anywhere – creative writing courses.
Down the road from me at Manchester Metropolitan Uni, I discovered that one of the tutors on the MA in Creative Writing is Simon Armitage.
Connections, eh?
Connections, indeed. I think of Simon as the patron saint of dark angels.
Since yesterday evening I have misplaced my phone. Funny that if this had happened a week ago by now my head would be spinning and my anxiety levels peaking. Now, I really don’t mind. It’s sure to turn up sooner or later. Thanks to all Highgreen dark angels for turning my default setting to ‘relaxed’. After all, man cannot make connections by phone alone x
Blimey.
Blimey again. And here’s another connection. Simon Armitage is doing his troubador thing by walking the Pennine Way widdershins in July, stopping off wherever he is welcomed and doing a reading in exchange for board/lodging etc. The Pennine Way crosses Highgreen roughly midpoint between Byrness and Bellingham. So I’ve asked him if he’d like to make us a stopping off point. No reply from him yet. And I’d have missed this if my son Tom hadn’t browsed my spring edition of Poetry News with a bit more attentiveness than me, apparently.
Dear John (I never tire of using that salutation)
I’m thinking about doing a SE to NW trip and blogging my way across the UK, sort of like a mirror-image Lands End to John O’Groats. Where is Highgreen, in Northumberland I know, but is it roughly on the way?! I don’t mind a bit of zigzag action…
I’ll be hitching, walking and taking local transport wherever possible like a younger, yet more ragged version of Bill Bryson!
One of my literary heros, Kerouac, snuffed out at 46, I’ll be 46 in September, call it a mid-life crisis if you will, but it’s a damn sight cheaper than a Red Ferrari or a divorce lawyer…