A Little Leeway
This November, the mural painted by students at Stroud College, which was commissioned to celebrate the centenary of Laurie Lee's birth, will be unveiled in its new home at Stroud's Library.
The mural spent a year on the wall in the Shambles market in Stroud as a cheery splash of commemorative colour opposite the corporate sameness of a Costa coffee shop. Laurie's daughter Jessy will be unveiling it, and I'll be reading an extract from my book A Thousand Laurie Lees. Also this month, BBC 4 will be broadcasting an episode of The Secret Life of Books on Cider with Rosie, for which I recorded an interview. Also, excitingly, this week a book of recently-discovered essays by Laurie goes on sale. Laurie's centenary year, one of the hardest-working years I've come up against as a writer, seems very far away all of a sudden, though Laurie himself remains very present.
It was a remarkable run of months - an exhausting, exhilarating time - and one that I'm very glad of. Not least because of Michael Caines' lovely review of A Thousand Laurie Lees, a scan of which I have attached below, which was published in the TLS almost exactly a year ago (I confess I was overjoyed with the 'modern Richard Jefferies' quote). Though I must admit that my inclusion in the glass-fronted box of Laurie's books on the wall of the Woolpack probably tops everything.
The reconnection process with home that my writing that intense celebration of Slad valley, and of Laurie's persistent influence on it, began feels like it has fully taken root. Enough that this year I undertook to write a show for the Stroud Fringe Festival, Little Metropolis, that celebrates my other place of nurture, Stroud, in poetry and music.
That show, written with an old school friend, Josef Reeve, came from a place of distance, albeit a distance of only a couple of miles as the crow flies. It fascinates me, this process of finding one place, and allowing it to find you, only to begin thinking about somewhere else again. Even in the depths of my green and growing thumb offshoot of the Slad valley, the grass is always subtly suggesting that it just possibly, you know, may be greener elsewhere.
That's not to say that I'm restless to move on from the Slad valley physically. It's more that, had I travelled to Spain as a young man, I think I'd be starting to write about that now. I have had different adventures, however, and there are new intellectual horizons I am hoping to explore...
Part 1 of Michael Caines' review of A Thousand Laurie Lees
TLS review part 2
