And what? Wait and see. I didn’t want to post a proper review of it for fear of upsetting the organisers. Coastal Currents? Didn’t do much, actually, just visited some Open Studios with Philosopher and step-son Tom, who was staying for a few days. Apart from that, Battleaxe is busy writing again, finishing . ‘Death is a Desirable Property’, the second in what will be a trilogy of Caroline and Olga mysteries. To stave off my stress crisis, have got much less frantic about finishing, despite so many messages from people begging me to get on with it… Meanwhile, ‘Death Deceit and Cake’ continues to do well. As usual, I will put the Amazon link at the end of the post for anyone who might need it.
Here are some pretty flowers waiting to go out onto the tables at the Crown in All Saints Street, where we stopped for a coffee at the start of our Open Studios tour. I complimented the woman on her nasturtiums – ours were eaten to skeletons by cabbage white caterpillars. Coastal Currents is half-way through now – the studios are open this weekend, so you can still visit if you want. Click the link to find the programme.
I’ll only focus on two things. First, when we were at Rye Art Gallery a few months ago we admired the work of an artist called Dominic Zwemmer. I can’t give a link to a website because his appears to be broken, but he is on Facebook and Insta. We loved his massive, dark charcoal drawings of wild countryside. Anyway, turns out his studio in the High Street, Hastings was open for viewing, so we went along. Here is the artist posing by his work. I do recommend you go and look!
At Rye we particularly admired this work. The original is now sold, and anyway would be far too big for our house. But we bought a small print of it from Dominic on Saturday. It looks nothing on here – the reproduction is not great.
Then, in his usual upstairs Incurva studio between George Street and West Street, Battleaxe encountered highly-regarded metal worker/sculptor/artist, Leigh Dyer. He is probably one of the great and the good now, rarely there in person, but here he is:
‘Have you still got the fly-press?’ I asked him. He replied yes, it was in his other workshop in Battle. Only the most devoted and dogged Battleaxe readers will remember one of the earliest posts on here – pause while she rummages through the digital archive – would you believe May 2012? Here’s the link. It tells about how we donated the fly-press, which we’d brought all the way down from Birmingham, to Leigh before we moved into this house. The press was made for the jewellery trade by my grandparent’s firm in Hockley, Hazlewood and Dent, and is probably the last surviving thing the company made. What I didn’t emphasise on the earlier post was what a joke it was to find it. My mother habitually told the most outrageous lies, and was ashamed of having a ‘metal-bashing’ manufacturing past – very low, dears. I always was led to believe the company made something genteel like jewellery cases… but it didn’t!
Anyway, here are a couple of photos of Leigh getting ready to winch the press up to his workshop, and the name plate on the press. This time when we saw Leigh, I got him to promise that if he ever wanted to get rid of it, he would return it to us – I’d have to pass it on to my nieces or something.
Enough of that. So, what was it that I didn’t want to mention at the top? Well, I didn’t want to hurt Barefoot Opera’s feelings. I won’t post any links on here, or any photos. We have been to many fantastic productions of theirs in the past and really enjoyed them. They make opera accessible, fun to watch and deserve maximum support. But last night we went to the first night of their latest, Donizetti’s ‘Lucia di Lammamoor’, in St John’s Church, St Leonard’s. Now, the acoustics in that church are not good, and this time they had sited the action down at the front, so the audience were seated in rows, in standard congregation mode. Firstly, unless you were right at the front, it was hard to see what was going on. They had projected surtitles up onto the chancel arch – but they were too small and faint to make out from where we were sitting. And then there was the sound… the singer who portrayed Lucia had a voice that was OK in her lower, softer passages, but once she worked herself up to her higher registers and let rip it was an ear-blasting screechy blare of sound that was, and I don’t exaggerate, painful to listen to.
We were sitting with friends Antony and Paul, and I regret to say, we all left at the interval. Both Philosopher and I were sad. Lucia is one of the greatest soprano roles, and we had particularly wanted to see the famous ‘mad scene’ which comes after the interval, but it would have been unbearable. I pray the company can take note of what went wrong on the first night, and make some changes. When we got home we had to sit in silence – even a fly buzzing in the room was too loud. Ears were ringing like we’d been to a rock concert.
As usual, I will end with the Amazon link to my novel. If you haven’t read it yet – enjoy!
