City Voices : 14/06/11

Well, it's been a long journey that I've travelled with City Voices since I first attended, and performed at, it way back when it used to be upstairs at the Clarendon. Last night was, at least for the foreseeable future, my final visit, as work will soon be taking me away, first to Harrow and then to China.

So how did it go?

Recently Simon Fletcher, the organiser of the event, has been mixing up the format slightly and last night was another departure with the whole of the second half being taken up with a folk duo, Billy and Loz. First though we had a three readers to entertain us for the first half, all of them regulars at City Voices.

We started with Yvette Rose, a quiet performer of personal poems. She started with several poems about nature - In The Garden, What A Blessing and Hibiscus - which she followed up with the slight but clever Love With Maths before moving on to the very personal poems about relationships, especially her relationship with her Grandmother. 

Yvette was followed by Dorothy Baruch, who read a single poem, followed by extracts from a work in progress, a novel that she is writing. The poem was a short and quite strong piece revealed to be about adoption only after she had read it. She introduced the extracts from the novel by telling us that some of it is quite dark but she had chosen the "less dark" sections for the performance. She has a strong expressive voice and a good ear for dialogue. On one hearing of this short section I found it quite hard to work out what was going on but the rhythm of the words and the authentic and convincing way that she read carried me along as she described a naming ceremony for a child in the Caribbean. It was a fine performance.

Finally for the first half we had Jane Seabourne who, as I've said before, is a very accomplished poet. Her set was a mixture of some things I've heard before and some that I haven't.She opened with a favourite, At the Family Fun Day, which contains the great line "it's rumoured there'll be Morris dancing". She rattled on through a fast-paced series of excellent poems - Wilfred and I Celebrate Our 40th Anniversary  - about how, as a teenager she discovered the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Note To a Non-Cooking Man - sharp and funny with a bitter twist in the last line, Wriggly Monkey - a well observed description of an old man who doesn't "want to be any trouble". She finished the set with two poems about school games lessons amd a gently observed one written for, and about, The Race For Life cancer charity.

After the break we had our folk duo, Billy and Loz, or Brian Dakin and Lawrence Hipkiss to give them their full names. Lawrence played the guitar well, adding occasional comments in the gaps between songs, while Brian alternated spoken word with song. Their songs and poems were all based firmly in Black Count history and were thoroughly entertaining. Drovers was introduced as being a Black Country cowboy song and was precisely that. Rag Time Roll was about old fashioned pub entertainment, The Bricklayers Daughter was a poignant and touching tale of a man bringing up a child alone and Hard Times was a bleak description of workhouses. My favourite though, my favourite piece from the whole night in fact, was the rousing Shut The Curtains, Gerald which told the tale of Queen Victoria visiting the Black Country and insisting on going through Tipton with the curtains closed so that she wouldn't have to see it.

Excellent stuff. I shall miss it.

City Voices

This month gave us a very different City Voices as a combination of intention and circumstance threw the normal format out and replaced it with no fewer than nine performers, five of whom didn't appear on the printed program.

The first half was taken up completely by the Scribblers writing group, of which I'm a member, launching our latest anthology with a selection of readings from it as well as a few additional pieces from our individual writings. Silvia Millward kicked off the proceedings with two pieces from the anthology and a brand new poem. They are fine poems but her rather quiet delivery was done no favours by the noisy air-conditioning from the bar. She writes and reads very well but still comes over as a little tense and stilted in the links and will be even better when she is able to relax more into the performance. 

She finished by introducing Andy Moreton who read both his pieces from the anthology - a short anti-war poem and a long and amusing story about a dirty old man. Both were very well received with the short story generating frequent laughter from the small but attentive audience.

Andy was followed by Janet Bogle who chose not read her story from the anthology but gave us instead her accompanying poem and a second short poem from her other writings. Both pieces were excellently crafted and very perceptive, characteristics of all of her work.

Jill Tromans was next delivering a dialect poem about buying a new oven that had the audience chuckling and her lengthy and amusing piece documenting a month in the life of a computer. This was not the easiest piece to read, having a rather awkward structure but it had enough about it to please the audience. 

Neil Howard followed in his first public performance. He read his slight short story "Tiger Waits All Night" and a poem reflecting on mortality, "Gone", before introducing my section. 

Years of teaching mean that a noisy environment is no match for my loud voice but, having performed last month and with one member of the group still to come, I kept my offering quite short. My three poems, two about homelessness and begging from the anthology and a third about Alzheimer's from my collection, Chaos Theory, were very well received and drew gratifying compliments in the break from a number of people whose work I respect a lot.

In turn I handed over to Mike Narroway who has a pleasant mannered delivery and gave us his poem, "The Garden" in which an exasperated Eve has a conversation with a rather naive Adam. It was a good end to the first half.

If the first half had been different in form by intent, the second was different by accident. One of the billed performers Jonathan Collings had failed to turn up leaving the other one, John Thomas, to carry the bulk of the time. After an introduction that was, perhaps, rather too long, he read three sections from his modern gothic novel "Beyond This Wilderness". The writing was rather stylised and reminiscent of the classic era of gothic writing but the necessity to set the scene and explain the background, combined with the descriptive nature of the chosen extracts made it all seem a little slow and ponderous though he read with confidence and conviction.

To fill in for the absent reader we were treated to a set of poems from Jane Seabourne who is one of the most accomplished of the regulars at City Voices. It was a short but varied set including poems about butterflies, staff training, dogs and a walk in the woods. The one about being expected to sit through training in an aspect of your job that you have done for years, given by someone who has never done it, struck a particular chord with me.

All in all another fine night out.

Forthcoming Attractions

Just a quick reminder.

Next Tuesday members of the Scribblers Writing Group (including me) will be filling the first half of the bill at City Voices in Wolverhampton as we launch our latest anthology of poetry and prose which includes the winners and runners up from our open writing competition as well as our own work.

The event takes place at The City Bar, King Street, Wolverhampton on Tuesday 10th May and usually kicks off at 7:45, finishing at 9:15. Best to be there from 7:30. And, of course it's free! At the moment I don't know who the second half performers will be, but be assured they will be worth seeing. They always are.

A couple of weeks later, I will be doing a full slot at the sister event, Bilston Voices, where I am intending to do a set of mostly autobiographical verse in my swansong Midlands performance. Once again I don't know yet who else is performing.

That one takes place at Metro Cafe, Bilston (opposite the Town Hall) on 26th May and starts at 7:30. There is a £2 charge but it's well worth it. Like City Voices it is usually all done by 9:15.

So, if you can make either event, please come along and enjoy.

City Voices: four fifths of a review

Well, I finally made it to the top of the bill at City Voices and all I had to do to get there was promise to leave the country. I can't really review myself so I'll restrict this to the other four performers from last night at City Voices.

It started with Susan Fearn who warned us before she started that she liked experimental poetry. Now the term "experimental poetry" means different things to different people. It can encompass experimental techniques of creation, experimental verse forms, experimental use of language, experimental topics. Almost anything. In Susan's case her introduction made it clear that she uses experimental creation techniques - making links between randomly chosen postcards for example - and the poems themselves demonstrated the use of language and verse forms. So, was it any good? Well yes and no. Many years ago I saw a concert by Phil Collins side-project Brand-X. It was all technically well done but at the end of the evening I couldn't say if they had played eight ten minute songs or one eighty minute song. I felt more or less the same way about Susan's performance. She announced the title of each poem and told us little about it. Even so I found that I was listening to the words with very little understanding of their meanings. There were a couple of more traditional pieces but on the whole experimental poetry isn't really to my taste.

Nick Pearson followed with rather more traditional fare which, consequently, I enjoyed more. Whether he is talking about  how towns have changed during his lifetime, television talent shows or memories of his step-mother his poems are sharp and perceptive and often both funny and painful at the same time. Aided by his confident delivery he gave us a very pleasing and entertaining set.

The first half was rounded out by Hazel Malcolm who gave us two long prose pieces rather than poetry. The first was a reminiscence from her childhood  about people visiting her mother who was acting as a banker in an informal financial club. She painted the picture authentically and confidently. The second piece was about hairdressing, not a topic that I am greatly enthused about, but the same comments applied. Her great skill is in drawing the listener into an unfamiliar world in a convincing way.

The second half started with Iris Rhodes whose poems were mostly about strong women, real and mythical: Ariadne, Cleopatra, Boudicca. The poems were assuredly structured and well-delivered and, though I personally prefer descriptive poetry to narrative poetry, well-received. When she moved away from the strong women theme she nevertheless continued in a feminist vein for most of the set which demonstrated her undoubted ability. The only real problem was in the length of her introductions which were often much longer than the poems themselves. Shorter introductions and more poetry would have made the set even better.

And of course the final performer was me. For obvious reasons I can't review it but, for the record, I read two extracts from my book about travels in North And South America and two poems: Bangkok Hustle and Sunset On The African Plains.

As a short postscript, I will be at the May City Voices where Scribblers are launching a new anthology and I should be able to attend, though not perform at the June one but after that City Voices and I will be, at least for the time being, parting company as I go to work away for a couple of years. As it usually clashes with Scribblers I probably won't be able to find a substitute guest reviewer but if anyone wants to provide guest reviews for this blog, please contact me.

City Voices

Yesterday was International Women's Day and so it was entirely fitting that City Voices presented us with an all woman line of entertainment. It was a brilliantly well-thought-out selection too, featuring artists of Canadian, German, Indian and West Indian origin. And one from Wednesbury.

We started with Carol Howarth  whose long introduction led into a story and a number of nicely observed poems. The story was a vignette about a girl smoking in front of her parents for the first time and drew a sharp picture of the different public and private relationships within families. Her poems too were mostly observational word-pictures including poems about childhood, Guy Lombardo, Linda McCartney and limestone kilns in an eclectic selection. What really sold them for me though was the delivery. Told quietly and confidently in a Canadian accent they were expressive and thoughtful.

Yvette Rose followed with a West Indian slant to her poems which were mostly about childhood and her grandmother but also included included some love poetry and a descriptive piece about Barbados. While the style was a little too sentimental for my own taste it was well-received by the packed audience and a very good example of the style.

The first half was finished off by Ruth Parker who moved to England from Germany many years ago in her teens. She gave a slightly tongue-in-cheek apology to the men in the audience before delivering a set of largely feminist poems, often about the burdens of being a woman - though Heroes was rather more equal ops in that it criticised not just the heroic tradition of Wellington or Alexander but also Boadicea and Joan of Arc before suggesting rather more pacifist substitutes. There was also a good poem about the Chilean miners and a couple that she had chosen written by others. As with Yvette and Carol it was a very good set.

After the break we started with Raj Lal who told us that her first person narrative was not autobiographical but it was, nevertheless, convincingly rooted in her own life experiences. It was a vivid description of the drudgery of being the oldest teenage sister and having to balance school life with home life when looking after younger siblings is involved. It included my favourite line of the evening, "Mom always left the dishes unwashed to prove my laziness."

Marion Cockin was up last with a very balanced set that was probably the best I have seen her perform. Opening with a couple of travel poems - Havana Balcony being especially striking - she moved smoothly through an excellent performance that included poems about Christina Rossetti, a weekend at home, childhood holidays and sparrows in Wednesbury. All of the poems were sharply written and well-delivered and she provided a fine end to the evening's line-up.

So, overall, another fine evening and one that couldn't have been better chosen for International Women's Week.

City Voices 100th Event

Like most of the performers at last night's City Voices I did my first ever public reading at City Voices back in the days when it was upstairs at the Clarendon Hotel. As I recall it was for the publication of the Wolverhampton Writers' first anthology which I had got into after being a finalist in the Poems on the Metro competition. 

My, haven't we come a long way?

A poetry event that's managed a hundred performances over more than eight years; it's unthinkable, isn't it?

City Voices 100th

Left to Right Simon Fletcher, Emma Purshouse, Roy McFarlane, 

Roger Jones (front), Win Saha, Jeff Phelps

(Image (c) John Davies)

City Voices goes from strength to strength and for the 100th Simon Fletcher, who has organised it from the very beginning, had chosen a line up of some of his personal favourites among many performers who have appeared there. He started with Roger Jones, whose writing always shows the easy charm of a great raconteur. His tales are drawn from his life and are always very entertaining. Last night he gave us the story of how a disaster in his first job, aged 15, gave him a chance to play rugby every Saturday. A light tale, very well told, and a great start to an evening's entertainment. 

He was followed by Win Saha who, more than anyone else, defines City Voices. She is a regular with her humourous take on life and has, in the course of her life of writing, produced more than two thousand poems. She views the world through an amused, though sometimes slightly scornful, eye and writes about every subject under the sun with skill and wit. Last night's set gave us poems about men's perceptions of women, hedge funds, a family with a flagpole, undertakers and a visit to the theatre among many others. All of them were new to me and all of them were as good as we've come to expect from Win.

Roy McFarlane, who came at the end of the first half, is the Birmingham Poet Laureate, and his performances are always marked by the passion of his delivery as well as the quality of his writing. Whether it's a poem, written for the Holocaust Memorial, about how stories never remain untold, or an angry piece about library closures or a poem about walking with someone you love, he delivers it with such power and life that it's impossible not to get caught up in the words.

After the break we moved on to Emma Purshouse who gave us a set of mostly new material. There was no cause for concern though. All of it was what we have come to expect. A piece about booking poetry shows into theatres without mentioning that they are poetry was followed by a very short piece entitled "Alice Cooper does Poetry Criticism". A trio of poems about butterflies, including one about the Comma Butterfly that was particularly clever, followed and she finished up with the only one that I have heard before, about the voice of a pub slot machine. As good as ever.

We finished up with a very different kind of performer, Jeff Phelps, who read an extract from his book Box of Tricks and another extract from his current work in progress. Both were excellent. The extract from the book had the narrator and his girlfriend getting cut off from the shore by the advancing tide and bickering a realistic way about what they should do about the situation, while the second was a tale of a girl playing hide-and seek with some younger children. Both tales had a realism and the second managed the difficult trick of being convincing in a present tense narrative which often comes off as contrived but here gave a sense of time and place that the more impersonal past tense narrative might not manage.

And that was it - the 100th City Voices over and done. Here's to the next 100.

City Voices

"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -  only I don't know exactly what they are."

Through The Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

I know how she felt. This month's city voices was, to use a ridiculously outworn sporting metaphor, a game of two halves. In the first half we had a trio from Nine Arches Poets in Coventry - Matt Merritt, Jane Commane and Matt Nunn. Matt Merrit's subdued performance was drawn from two collections, Troy Town and Hydrodactylopsychic Harmonica. The poems he read had all clearly been very carefully crafted and polished and I'm certain that they were all about something but I couldn't for the life of me tell you what exactly it was. I enjoyed the flow of the words and rhythm of the language without at any point coming anywhere near an understanding of what I was listening to. Given that the title of the second book refers to the musical instrument that consists of partially filled and tuned glasses that are played by rubbing a finger round the rim producing unsettling and ethereal musc, this may well be the point of it. Or perhaps not.

Jane Commane was more straightforward and more animated, though at times still rather obscure. She delivered a lively set of descriptive poems encompassing little old ladies, landscapes, ghosts and Coventry. Once again I am sure that there were levels of meaning that escaped me on one hearing and that they are the sort of poems that would benefit greatly from being written down and studied. I enjoyed it though, even when, as with the previous performer, I wasn't at all sure of what it was all about. Matt Nunn, who finished the half, stepped up the volume of the performances by several notches but maintained the air of impenatrability* that had so far marked the evening.

Things became a good deal more straightforward when the young performers came on after the break. We started with fourteen-year-old Emily Oldham who gave us a confident set prepared on her iPad - a telling mark of how times they are a-changing. Her poems may have lacked sophistication but they were clearly rather heartfelt and if anything that added to their appeal. And they were a good deal better than anything in my notebooks from when I was that age. Roxy Lal followed with a nicely doneshort story which was reminiscent of the Arabian Nights - a comparison made by Simon Fletcher as he introduced her and met by a blank "if you say so" look from the author. She added a couple of nicely evocative poems to round off the set. Tom Jenkins finished the evening. He goes from strength to strength. I've seen him four or five times now and each time he is a notch or two better. He started with two lengthy humourous poems - both of which I have heard before - and both of which demonstrate his skill with words. The two more serious poems that followed - an early twentieth century Americana pastiche and a kind of love poem couched as a description of a garden - showed that he can handle the serious stuff as dexterously as the frivolous stuff. All very nicely done.

So the verdict this time round? Another good night if, on balance, a slightly perplexing one.

(*by which of course, like Humpty Dumpty, I mean "we've had enough of that subject and it would be just as well if you mention what you mean to do next".)

City Voices

I wasn't able to stay for all of City Voices last night as I had been unaware that it was providing a nice buffet and hence running a little longer than usual. Had I been aware I would have arranged to meet my friends in the pub round the corner a little later.

So I was forced to miss the final performer, Dave Reeves, though I am sure that he would have been as good as the previous occasions on which I've seen him.

The acts I did see were due to start with Roger Jones but he was unfortunately unable to appear. Simon Fletcher stepped in with a nicely observed memoir of childhood about preparations for Christmas. The introduction to it, as Simon talked about an elderly couple that he had known as a child was as interesting as the piece he read in which he described making a Christmas pudding and joining with his sisters to entertain the family. 

The first billed performer to appear was Bridget Robertson who read the story that appeared in the recent New Writings From Wolverhampton anthology. Its evocatively written but I have to say that I've heard Bridget read it twice now and read it through a couple of times and I'm still not sure that I understand it. The ending seems a little obscure to me. Nonetheless the writing and the reading both flow very well.

Then it was my turn. I had edited down a much longer piece about Christmas in the Philippines. I have many reasons to remember that holiday fondly and the large number of complimentary comments I received afterwards have now given me another. I shall post a copy of the edited version here for anyone who may be interested.

After the buffet I stayed for Madge Gilbert who read a number of Black Country dialect poems, mainly about Christmas, some of which I'd heard before, others of which were new to me. Her performance was slightly marred by noise from outside the bar which combined with her quiet voice to make it quite a strain to hear properly. Nevertheless they were entertaining and well-crafted poems that were well worth hearing.

I felt a bit conspicuous leaving before Dave's set but I really didn't have a choice as by then my friends had already been waiting for me for thirty minutes. I hope that I'll be able to make it up to him by watching through next time, especially as he'd been nice enough to compliment my piece during the interval.

City Voices

I decided on a whim last night to drop in to City Voices in Wolverhampton. It's a while since I've been, though I do try to attend the sister event, Bilston Voices, as often as I can. On offer we had four of the writers who contributed to the recent New Writings From Wolverhampton anthology and one former resident of Wolverhampton who now lives in Scotland and had travelled down especially for the event. 

We started with Michelle Moore who read us two stories. The first, Starting Block, I recognised from the anthology. It's a short but well told tale of the pressure that can be put on children by their parents. The second was new to me and on a similar theme of childhood but more about the pressure of children's own expectations.

Second on the bill was our visitor from Scotland, Neil Ledbeater, who gave us a set of lyrically descriptive pieces. He started with a few about various aspects of nature. When he moved on to some reminiscences about his Wolverhampton childhood they were still lyrical and rather nicely observed though the poem I liked best was about the rail journey from Birmingham to Wolverhampton.

Next came Marion Cockin substituting for the absent Yvette Rose. Marion gave us the two poems from the anthology and a fairy tale told from memory. The two poems were very good but the fairy tale, though well enough constructed and well enough told, left me a little cold. It would have been completely suitable for its intended audience of young children but I prefer more complex material.  Still, she had substituted at very short notice and I wouldn't be able to remember enough of my own material to put together a full set if called on to do it.

After the break Nick Pearson did a mixed set of humourous and serious poems. They were very observational about life and the surrounding world. They included his contribution to the anthology, Dwellings, and a very nicely drawn portrait of a not particularly nice coffee bar. 

We finished up with, as Simon, the MC put it, "not a national treasure yet but certainly a local treasure" Win Saha who had been kind enough to come over to me in the break and tell me how much she had enjoyed my work at the performance workshop last Saturday. Her set was about half and half material I had heard before and material I hadn't. Mostly her poems were her customary clever and witty verses on all sorts of topics - from the shape of the faces of the members of the royal family to why she won't were purple. I was quite taken with the rather more sombre  mood of Requiem which was especially relevant as we approach armistice day. 

It was a good, mixed set and, as I feel I ought to make the effort to get along more often even though Tuesday is not a great night for me. I shall certainly be at the next one though as I am on the bill with a reminiscence about visiting the Philippines at Christmas.

See you there.

A fine quintet

Last night I went along to the second poetry event at Bilston Voices. It was a little less well attended than the first but the standard was uniformly high. Peter Hill kicked off with a short poem and a long entertaining fairy tale about why the leprechauns moved from Ireland to Bilston. It was inventive and well-written and had plenty of chuckles and a few laugh-out-loud moments.
Following Peter was Jill Tromans, a writer from the group that I sometimes attend*, who matched Peter's poem/story format with a poem that I've heard her perform before but which was still pretty funny second time around. Her story, about an incident in a charity shop, was perhaps a touch long but was funny enough to carry the length - playing to her usual strengths of character dialogue.
Roy McFarlane took us into the break. Roy has the twin advantages of being a great poet and a great performer. His poetry was half and half romantic and political and, for his final poem about the man who threw a shoe at George Bush, he strode up and down the room declaiming mightily and brandishing his own shoe in the air.
After the break we had a rather calmer performance from Marion Cockin. I don't always like everything she writes but the ones she chose for last night's performance were uniformly excellent. I was particularly taken with the quartet of poems about a cholera outbreak that claimed one in twenty of the people in my home town in 1832.
Finally Geoff Stevens gave us an entertaining and humourous mix of dialect and non-dialect poems that lightened the tone considerable after Marion's relatively sombre set.

Sometimes City Voices (Bilston Voices' progenitor) can be a bit of a mixed bag. It's never bad but the performers (myself included) range from quite good to truly excellent in both the work and the performances. This particular outing at Bilston Voices was at the top end of the scale throughout. An excellent night out.

*I used to attend all the time, never missed for years, but sometimes real life (and changed work schedules) can intrude on our hobbies.

Metro Voices

Last night was the first night of a new spin off venue from City Voices, the Wolverhampton group where local writers read their poems, prose or whatever to a generally appreciative audience. The new venue is close to my home at the Cafe Metro in Bilston and I was very pleased to be one of the readers invited to perform at the inaugural event. There were some teething problems, the room is long and thin and the furniture layout wasn't perfect. It also got rather hot in there, but that's a good thing in its way because the reason for the closeness was the unexpectedly high attendance.
The five performers were a mixed bag. One read a story - more of a vignette, really - about a prostitute in a cell, and part of a memoir about making and selling toffee apples as a kid. I was on second with my account, reproduced below, of my recent trip to North Korea. Last before the break one of the regulars read an anecdote about her own life. After the break we had poetry from two readers, one relatively sombre and the other a lively performer (shortly to do a stint on the plinth!) who gave us a mix of humorous and serious poetry including a couple in Black Country dialect. Everyone had a great time and, as I was leaving, I was invited to reprise my performance in September at the main City Voices event in Wolverhampton, which I think is on September 8th.

So, for anyone who wants to know exactly what I performed, here it is - a piece adapted from several previous entries in this blog.


In my travels, I've been to some strange places, some surreal places, some disturbing places.
I was once in San Francisco at a time when the city was simultaneously hosting the X-games and the Gay Pride march. That was fairly strange.
For a surreal time you'd be hard pressed to beat the Star Trek ride at the Las Vegas Hilton. As for disturbing; well I was in Beijing just a couple of years after the Tiananmen Square incident. But without any question the strangest, most surreal and most disturbing trip I've ever made was just a couple of months ago: to North Korea.
I could tell you about the grand concert hall and the program of revolutionary music from the State Symphony Orchestra, weirdly interrupted by a spirited rendition of Those Were The Days. I could tell you about the circus that was performed against projected backdrops of the proletariat, building power stations and pylons. I could tell you about the fanatical fervour of the army of schoolchildren in Kaesong performing music and dance in honour of Kim Il Sung's birthday. I could tell you about the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum where I learned, to my surprise, that World War Two had been a local conflict in which North Korea had single-handedly defeated the Japanese.
But I won't tell you about any of those things.
Instead I'd like to tell you about three visits that together sum up the feeling of the trip which was, taken as a whole, like a collision between Franz Kafka and Lewis Carroll.
First though, you need to understand how a trip to North Korea works. As a foreigner you are free to wander wherever you like, providing that wherever you like doesn't involve leaving the hotel, and talk to whoever you like providing they are hotel employees or the polite, pleasant and above all vigilant minders that are with you at all times. Your view of the country is restricted to a very carefully controlled itinerary.
On the third day of our visit we assembled in the hotel reception in our smartest clothes to go to the Kumusan Memorial Palace, the Mausoleum of Kim Il-Sung.
The rules were clear: smart clothes, empty pockets, no cameras, no outer jackets, no inappropriate remarks or humour, lots of respect.
At the memorial palace, which is certainly more of a palace than a memorial, it was clear that this was a place that everybody has to come. Probably literally "has to come". There were groups of soldiers, schoolchildren, businessmen and ladies in traditional dress in a queue that was several hundred yards long but we were marched straight to the front of it and into the buildings. It felt uncomfortable but the people waiting seemed to accept it as part of the way things are. Inside, we were led through what felt like miles of marble-lined corridors. Automatic devices cleaned our shoes and blew the dust from our clothes. We were searched and X-rayed. Periodically we were asked, for no apparent reason, to line up in three columns, or four columns, or two columns, or single file - groupings that were inevitably shuffled into some new arrangement moments later so that the only reasonable explanation was that it was simply to show us who was boss.
We were led, this time in fours, into a room the size of a concert hall. At the far end of it was a statue of Kim Il Sung. The tuneless, but vaguely uplifting, martial music that had been playing throughout the experience was much louder in here. The wall behind the statue was lit with pastel lighting. It reminded me of something and for a moment I couldn't place it. Then it came to me. It was very like the statue of Christ that I had seen in the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City. The statue, the lighting, the music were all designed to produce the same effect.
From that room we were led to another, with another statue and this time we were given audio sets to listen to. It was very hard to listen with a straight face. Imagine someone with a deep voice, full of gravitas, perhaps Orson Wells or James Earl Jones, solemnly intoning, "When the Great Leader was taken from us the hearts and souls of the people were filled with a great grief and sorrow and with one voice they rose up and demanded a memorial be built to honour his name."
Now imagine about ten minutes of it.
After another trip through a wind-tunnel to clean us up we were led into another hall, this time with a glass coffin at the centre in which the body of the Great Leader lay. We lined up in fours again and walked to the coffin, circling it and bowing three times to show our respect. After that there was a museum showing all of the honours and awards bestowed upon Kim Il Sung from leaders and universities of the world. Most of them seemed to be from other Communist countries or dodgy Central African republics. The dodgier the source the more elaborate the award.
Afterwards we were led back through the corridors and out into the fresh air where we were allowed to retrieve our cameras and take a couple of shots of the outside of the building, providing we were careful not to accidentally include anyone in a uniform in the shot.
I had found the whole two hour experience deeply disturbing. They may say this is respect for a man, that this is politics, but I know religion when I see it. This isn't hero worship this is plain and simple worship. Regardless of what they are called it has temples and rituals and a God figure. It's a religion.

That afternoon we left Pyongyang to drive out to the mountains so that tomorrow we would be well placed to visit the International friendship exhibition.
The drive to the mountains was through a drab, flat landscape that looked anything but fertile. Here and there, there were workers in the fields. They appeared to be doing everything by hand with no agricultural implements, however primitive. Only once did I see as much as a simple Ox-drawn plough. It was a depressingly Medieval sight to encounter in the modern world. Next morning we left our hotel for the exhibition. In its way this was as unnerving as the Memorial Palace had been, perhaps more so because we had now observed, albeit from a bus travelling along the road, just how impoverished the majority of the country actually was.

As you approach you see what looks like two very traditional Korean buildings. They are no such thing. They are a decorative front for an extravagant exhibition of gifts received by Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. As befits his higher status we visited the Great Leader's section first. Once we had passed the smart, unsmiling, armed guards, handed in our coats and cameras and put cotton outer covers over our shoes, we proceeded into somewhere that was every bit as overblown as the Memorial Palace had been. Room after marble-lined room has been built into the side of the mountain, joined by marble lined corridors. In every room there are display cases containing the gifts. It's a bizarrely eclectic selection. There are statues made of every conceivable material from wood, to metal, to stone, to ivory, horn, Bakelite, plastic, glass. They are of every kind of subject, from revolutionary scenes to animals to abstracts to sports figures. There is furniture and there are costumes. There are cars and a train. There are silver bowls and golden tea services. There is a drinks tray made from a dead crocodile.
As you read the captions or listen to the guide certain things become obvious. As with the Mausoleum, the greater and more elaborate the gift the more disreputable the country it comes from. Valuable gem-studded artefacts often turned out to be from the countries, communist or otherwise, with the most apalling human rights records. There were, for example, several very large (not to mention illegal) ivory carvings presented by Robert Mugabe. The gifts from European nations tended to be not from Governments, but from individuals, business organisations or fringe left-wing political groups with tiny memberships. Where there were official state gifts from western nations they tended to carry an apparently unnoticed level of ironic comment. The gifts from the UK for example filled a single small cabinet and included the kind of "Present from London" souvenir rubbish that you'd be ashamed to give to your least favourite auntie. In the only slightly larger United States cabinet a present labelled as being from "Ex-President and Mrs Jimmy Carter" was a cheap and nasty glass ash-tray.

Part of the way round there was another compulsory opportunity to bow to an effigy of the Great Leader. The lifelike wax figure was at the end of a long room. It had been placed in a setting of artificial trees on a footpath that merged into the painting of the mountains on the wall behind. There was more of that music playing, this time rather softly, accompanied by the noises of birdsong. Fans ruffled the faux-foliage with a semblance of a summer breeze. We duly lined up in front of this figure and bowed though it was such a ragged affair that it looked more like a Mexican wave.

More rooms full of more gifts followed until we were led back outside, across the car park and into the second building. Smaller, but similar it was devoted not to Kim-Il-Sung, the Great Leader but to his son Kim-Jong-Il, the Dear Leader. If anything his gifts were a weirder selection than his dad's. In addition to the statues and paintings and tapestries, the exhibition had more furniture than a branch of Ikea. There were radios and computers, cameras and telescopes. There was a Basketball signed by Michael Jordan and presented by Madeleine Albright.
We rather rushed this second experience as time was moving on and we needed to get to lunch before taking that dull drive back to Pyongyang for a visit to a flower show.

The flower show proved to be the sole time in the whole trip that we were allowed to be out of the direct sight of our guides. We were escorted into the ground floor of the building housing the event. There we were told to take the escalator to the next floor where the main event was held and work our way through and round the exhibition until we reached the far doors where we would be met again.
It was certainly popular, filled with crowds of Koreans, mostly in their best clothes, all looking at the hundreds of displays. Of course the displays were what made it such a bizarre event. There were exactly two varieties of flower on display - the purple orchid, known as Kimilsungia, and the red begonia, known as Kimjongilia. Here and there, there were very small splashes of white but clearly set to show off the contrasting red and purple in front of them. The displays themselves ranged in size from tabletop to hall-filling but had a startling uniformity of theme. Probably ninety percent of them were models of the Great Leader's birthplace, surrounded by forests of those two flowers. The few that were different were models of the country's various revolutionary monuments, also surrounded by those same flowers.

I was first at the exit door where I found one of our guides waiting. Cautiously I asked him a few questions about the exhibition, questions which I also researched independently later. The flowers, he said, were grown locally in hot houses. Everyone expressed their great love of the two leaders by entering displays. The smaller ones were from companies and individuals working in DPRK, the enormous one in the middle (at least twenty yards long and twelve wide) would be from a combination of Government ministries and organisations.
Translated by my independent research this comes out as "if you are a company that wants to go on doing business in DPRK you had damned well better enter a stand" and "if you are a Government employee who wants to find himself moving up instead of out, ditto". As for the hothouses, it seems that they are the only buildings were the power supply is guaranteed to be maintained, the rest of the city being subject to regular powercuts.

There were other incidents in my trip, far too numerous to go into now but all reinforcing the sense of a country that has built itself on a myth, and an unlikely myth at that. Overall North Korea was quite possibly the most chilling place I've ever been and recent developments in the country are even more chilling. In most countries with nuclear weapons, even the ones most hostile to us, I think the leaders might hesitate before pressing the button. I don't think Kim Jong Il would miss a heartbeat. And from what I saw of the fanaticism of the people I think they would probably just accept things as he dragged the world into hell. They might even do a dance to celebrate.

Metro Voices and walking round with my eyes closed

I've been asked to do another reading for City Voices. Well, not quite. There is a second regular venue opening up right in my home town of Bilston, Metro Voices. On Thursday 23rd July at 7:30 I will be reading selections from my descriptions of a recent visit to North Korea. Of course with the speed with which the situation over there is changing, I may have to rewrite it before then.

One interesting thing is the venue, the Cafe Metro. What's interesting is not only that I have never heard of it, but that when I looked it up it seems, according to the map to be no more than a dozen yards from my regular pub. This isn't the first time this has happened. Some time ago I was having a drink, and intending to have a meal, in that pub with some friends. Unfortunately there was a power cut so we had to change our plans. Another of my friends was coincidentally in the pub and he suggested that we should try an Indian restaurant on the High Street. I was unaware of any Indian restaurant on the High Street but sure enough, when we followed his directions, there was one. Granted it was hidden behind a fairly nondescript door in a fairly nondescript wall but it was there and I had walked past it thousands of times without noticing it.

I wonder how many other things there are that I have sleepwalked past all my life.