Autumn cultural roundup

All the things I saw, read and loved this autumn

I love this time of year. There’s something about September. It’s the residual connection with the start of the academic year, perhaps - but it’s also baked into our culture. The end of late summer, with all is abundance, was the time when the gathering of the harvest would require all hands on deck. The structure of our academic year still reflects this - in August and early September, children and young people would have been needed to help cut and thresh and carry and dry, to ensure enough provisions were set aside for winter.

There’s something satisfying about this cultural artefact remaining - though these days, I don’t know anyone who was drafted in to help with the harvest. Much more likely, August is a drifting, dreamy time - when (certainly in the UK), sunny days are seized with both hands, work curtailed early, laptops snapped shut.

I am very bad at taking time off. Though - I did manage it this year. So the end of the softness of late summer and the unfolding of sharp, clear, bright autumn - it feels like coming back to myself, somehow.

This year in the UK, autumn came crashing in somewhat earlier than any of us expected. September began and - BANG. Wind, rain, darkness. The evenings stretched out, the nights felt immediately longer. Perfect timing for culture! No one wants to sit in a dark theatre over summer. Curling up with a book on the sofa of an evening is all the more appealing when there’s rain lashing against windows.

So, I wanted to share all the cultural goodness I’ve been soaking up this autumn. It’s mostly books - and what a crop! I’ve been lucky to read some really brilliant and surprising stuff, lately. But also some pieces of theatre and even some live music. A departure from usual form. If you’re receiving this by email, do click through to read it in full - it’s a longer one this week.

Books

Wayfinding by Michael Bond

If you read my letter last week, you will have seen how much I love the London Library. This book was 100% the result of wandering through the stacks looking for something interesting to read. It holds added interest for me, though - as I sustained a traumatic brain injury from a cycling accident that has radically affected my visual memory, and how I create maps in my mind.

Boyd’s book is one of those holy grails of non-fiction: managing to be both meticulously researched and highly accessible, even conversational. From exploring the neuroscience of wayfinding - the different parts of the brain that fire as we explore new environments - to the psychology of getting lost. I was comforted by the notion that you can ‘exercise’ your wayfinding abilities by reducing your reliance on GPS - something I feel determined to try as my brain heals. Well worth your time.

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

A part of this moving, sensitive memoir was extracted in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago and I was immediately smitten. Political advisor Chloe Dalton found herself the unexpected guardian of a tiny, day-old leveret during the pandemic when she was marooned alone at her countryside home. After a life of urgency, adrenaline, travel and borderline burnout (pre-pandemic familiar, anyone?), Dalton began learning unimaginable lessons from the tiny hare she took into her home.

Dalton’s background as a speech writer is abundantly apparent - her prose is finely wrought: balancing gossamer fineness with muscularity and bringing you along moment to moment in her journey with the small hare. So much more than a nature memoir.

Rooted by Sarah Langford

There’s an ecological theme in the books I’ve read in September - because I’m currently writing my next play. It’s set in Shropshire, the largely rural county I grew up in, and the play explores our connection with place.

Fitting, then, that in Sarah Langford’s wonderful memoir of taking on a farm, that I should learn the true meaning of the word ‘kith’. Typically now we erode it into synonymity with ‘kin’, but actually ‘kith’ originally meant country, home, land. The folk that your from as much as the place you inhabit together.

I raced through this book - which balances personal experience slowly turning a farm over to traditional and organic methods, alongside sensitive and empathetic interviews with farmers. A book of balance in a debate that is often, all too forced into black and white.

Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn

I came across this book in the wonderful Crofton Books in Brockley - as personal and haphazard a second hand bookshop as you could wish for. I was immediately drawn in by the haunting sub-title - struck by the notion of a ‘post-human’ landscape.

Flyn’s wonderful book is much less depression than you might think from this subtitle. Finding ecological outposts in dangerous, derelict, or abandoned landscapes and exploring the wildlife that has sprung up there carries an ultimate message of hope. Although - the notion that some wild animals and plants prefer to colonise the nuclear site around Chernobyl than to live in close proximity to humans is pretty sobering.

Containing a beautiful musing on domestication - and the difference between that and taming - and wondering what it means for something to be de-domesticated, this is a startling, fascinating book - not necessarily about the end times, but about hope for the future.

Shows

Hadestown by Anais Mitchell

OK, so - this is hardly breaking news. The sung-through classical musical, Hadestown, has been open in the West End for most of this year. In fact, it was at the National Theatre pre-pandemic. But I’m going to recommend it on the off chance that you, like me, hadn’t seen it.

I’m currently writing a commercial musical, so I’m trying to see as many as I can. Musicals - sometimes not entirely unfairly - have a reputation for being facile, unnatural, corny. Hadestown is not among them.

The powerful, jazz-club aesthetic balances with perfect wilful anachronism with the classical story - twinning the love stories of Orpheus and Eurydice with Hades and Persephone. Considering how dense and rich the music is, it’s an extraordinary feat that the company achieve such clarity in the storytelling. Shout out to personal fave, an actor I’ve had the great pleasure of working with myself, Mel La Barrie who holds the show as Hermes.

If you think you don’t like musicals, I’d say this is one for you. Great tunes, great fun, great night out. It’s not going to change your life, but you’ll certainly have fun on the road to hell.

Live music

Jaminaround at the Ancient Technology Centre

This tiny festival was my last hurrah of the summer. Taking place at the extraordinary Ancient Technology Centre in Dorset, it was a night of live music under the stars and around the fire. The lowest of lofi, with a bar that ran out around 1am, and one delicious dish served on the menu. The music was a mixture of folk and international, with the headliner Sahra Halgan, an incredible artist from Somaliland, bringing the house down.

Will Varley at Omeara

This gig was last night, and it was magical. I came across Will Varley’s neo-folk sounds at Smugglers Festival (my favourite, tiny, gorgeous festival in a wood in Deal), and immediately fell in love. He was no disappointment in a gig of his own, in the atmospheric Omeara, near London Bridge. After a break from making music - I think to take care of his young family - it sounds like Will is well and truly back, with a new record out this month. Have a listen.

Tom Rasmussen at Koko

Talking of new records! The latest from Tom Rasmussen is out today! I was lucky enough to be among the crowd at Tom’s listening party last week at Dalston Superstore for their new album, Live Wire, and gosh it is good. I’ve known Tom a long time - they used to be part of Denim, a drag collective I directed - and it’s just a great joy to see your pals become the fabulous popstars they were born to be. This, Tom’s second album, has a heft and maturity of sound, a real gravitas, of an artist finding themselves. Go and listen to it. It’ll really get your weekend going. You’re welcome.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading, right to the end. I’ll be back next week with a post for paid subs, likely a musing on the writing process and what it means to spend too much time on something - that’s what’s on my mind right now. Eek. But til then - take care of yourselves.

You’re brilliant,

J x