Binsted Arts Festival back on track, with fifth festival finally going ahead

It was all ready to go two years ago but had to be cancelled due to Covid-19. Now, two years later, it was felt it was 'just about safe' to go ahead and organisers rebooked for June 10 to 12.

It was still somewhat affected by Covid, with a few cancellations, including Mike Copley unable to lead his planned pottery workshop and Naomi Foyle, judge for the Binsted Prize poetry competition, unable to attend due to the virus.

Emma Hughes, who teaches creative writing at Chichester University, stood in for Naomi on the Friday and read her summing up. The competition is run alongside the South Downs Poetry Festival and the anthology of winning poems nearly sold out. The 13 prize winners were asked to read out their poems, along with those who had been commended.

Emma Tristram, Binsted Arts committee member, said: "It was lovely to meet and chat with so many poets from far and wide in Binsted’s quiet churchyard in the evening sun, surrounded by beautiful countryside with waving Oxeye daisies, and to listen to music from the ever-popular band Rattlebag."

Earlier in the day, Oliver Hawkins’ talk Dickens’ Women: Angels or Demons? demonstrated that the author's female characters fell into two categories, either young, beautiful and destined to die, or old and mostly disagreeable. Oliver related this to events in Dickens’ life, especially meeting the young Christiana Weller, who married his friend Tommy Thompson and became Oliver’s great-great-grandmother.

Tony Whitbread, president of the Sussex Wildlife Trust, led an unusual walk in Lake Copse, the private woodland at the back of Mill Ball, on the Saturday morning.

Emma said: "This is a ghyll, or wet valley, with a stream running through it and plenty of ancient woodland indicators were found, as well as a rare small-leaved lime and a large stone deposited in the melting events after the last ice age – an erratic, the right size for sitting on."

That evening, Simon Brett performed his rhyming police procedural, Lines of Enquiry, and the text was available to buy, with some of Simon’s parodies included, rescued from the waste paper baskets of great authors.

Emma said: "He didn’t just do the police in different voices, he did every character, including the attractive pathologist and her noises off. Urgh!"

Sunday started with James McInnes’ talk Halnaker Hill and Beyond, with a wealth of documentary evidence about the age and various stages of the windmill, and plenty of asides on other subjects, such as the gravestone at Lavant of a young man who was executed for an 'unspeakable' crime.

The festival concluded with Climate Emergency, reflecting on climate change through poetry and prose, with music from Storme Watson on the kora.

Emma said: "One reader cancelled because of Covid but Mandy Pannett and two last-minute stand-ins, Camilla Lambert and Sue Martineau, read beautifully, and the festival ended with more partying in the sunlit churchyard.

"Let us hope that the charm, peace and nature that contributed so beautifully to this arts event is not ruined in the future by the proposed four-lane highway, due to be only 90m from the church."

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