I enjoyed the trip to Colchester to see Robin Ince, but the only way to buy a ticket was to buy a book. We don’t need two copies, and nobody in either of our families would appreciate a copy of the book, signed or not. So I went alone. I enjoyed the talk so much that I took Himself along to the next talk in the series – Stop 35, at Norwich – where tickets were £6 each and didn’t supply a book (though they were on sale).
I’m not criticising the Red Lion Bookshop for selling a book as the ‘ticket’ for admission, by the way. It’s an excellent independent bookshop with a major bookseller chain within metres of their front door and Amazon in the airwaves all around them. I was happy to buy a book that would be a small step to keep them afloat; Amazon didn’t send me personal messages during lockdown or organise daft games at a local book festival as Red Lion did.
I used to work near Norwich, and we both love the city. It’s original, distinctive and a great centre for arts, writing, performance. We walked from Tombland in the east to the Norwich Arts Centre in the, er, centre to hear the talk and reminded ourselves how lovely Norwich is. One of the shopkeepers told me that there are more surviving Green Man carvings in Norwich than in any other city in England, and that most of them are in churches – nice collision of the pagan and the church. They’ve kept three churches within two hundred yards on Benedict Street, one of which is the Arts Centre.
I was expecting to hear the same talk as I’d heard in Colchester, but no. Robin Ince genuinely hops from one subject to another, and about half of the talk was completely new. We heard more about Apollo 8 than maybe we should, and I found out why he found half a frog in his coat pocket after a primary school science lesson. Lucky man by the way, to have science lessons and nature walks in primary school.
The audience laughed and urrrrggged and gasped all through the talk and cheered Mr Ince at the end, and so they should. That was no scripted and rehearsed talk. That was one man with a deep interest in science and an enquiring brain just, talking. It was worth the long round trip – even the 40 minute divert on the way home – to hear the Norwich version of his talk, and so tempting to chase him around the country to hear the whole of it. But that’s stalking, not curiousity. Time to read the book.
And on the Scriptly front – well, I did it. I sent the 13th brief in on Saturday night and got the 14th brief, and almost ditched it there at the last hurdle. It was a simple brief, and the simplicity had me stuck. After a fortnight of briefs that asked me specifically for musicals, poetry, TikToks, infomercials with a narrow focus… the final ask was so wide ranging that I had no ideas at all. Woke up with no ideas. Went off to Norwich with a vague idea. Came home late and started to write. Tired as I was, I stuck at it. I knew that anyone who had gone the untimed route would have fourteen scripts to submit before 10am on Monday morning, and that the website would be chockablock in the morning. I finished that fourteenth script at 1.35am on Monday morning and sent it in. And done. I’m one of the 90 people who finished the timed route, out of 135 who started, but even if we’d all done the lot I would have been chuffed. I need deadlines for anything, and this one did me good.
Julia Chalkley 