A while ago, I said to a friend that I would love to go to the Port Eliot Festival. She suggested we actually went, then – so we did. And it was wonderful. The festival is primarily literary – there are many talks by writers; but obviously this covers an awful lot of things, from fiction to numbers, clouds to history. There were also many bands on, and craft activities, gin bars (and other bars, but we spent quite a bit of time by the river in the Hendricks bar), a Wardrobe Department where you could have lovely flower headdresses, and some wonderful food, too. We were there for the whole weekend, and did quite a lot of things, but the difficulty is what to choose – there were so many things we didn’t do: we didn’t go to the nightclub in a rhododendron bush (though this did
appeal); we didn’t go wild swimming in the river (well, I can’t swim); we missed some talks that sounded great, but we also heard some really interesting and inspiring speakers; we didn’t hear much music.
What did we do? Well, I will blog about some of these in more detail in time, as I have pages and pages of notes, but I listened to:
Matthew Green talking about the origins of coffee-houses
Gavin Turk discussing his ideas on art
Rachel Johnson reflecting on ‘How to be an Idle Woman’ at the Idler Academy
Shami Chakrabati in conversation with Rosie Boycott
Holly and Rhiannon from Vagenda discussing the misogyny of the modern media
Deborah Levy talking about her latest book, Things I don’t want to know – a response to George Orwell’s Why I Write
Rachel Cooke in the DoveGreyReader tent, discussing her book Her Brilliant Career about career women in the 1950s
A celebration of the life and work of Elizabeth Jane Howard
A panel discussion of the new Buildings of Cornwall, including Pevsner biographer Susie Harries, Joe Mordaunt Crook, Peter Beacham (author of the new book) and Giles Clotworthy, chaired by Sir Richard Carew-Pole.
Murray Lachlan Young on Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood
Paul Kingsnorth, whose novel The Wake was recently long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, on the origins and ideas of his novel
And finally, a lovely surprise performance by Cornish choir Canoryan Lowen.
Some of these things I didn’t intend – or expect – to hear; I just stumbled across them, and that’s one of the delights of the festival – the serendipities and surprises. The house itself is also beautiful and was open to the public, with an exhibition about its First World War connections. I’ll blog more in due course!