Steve_Bamlett_blog

As always, the title is the only way the answer to this prompt will get expressed. The rest becomes a test case and example of what that title’ means in practice. The aim is to extend my learning to state how I prepare to use time in that process – by planned theatre or arts visits, or in writing events in verse or prose (usually with lots of writing errors). Time weighs heavily on me and sadly (indeed ‘badly’ when not used to exercise attempts to organise it in this way, as a resource for learning – not a thing that passes, to which I am passive. There is danger in that – of being overwhelmed by the need to use things like time and space (spaces where you write or think or do) that is so much grander than any use of it I might make. I miss sometimes having the capacity to just sit time and space out in stillness and awe: but that is another issue.

Today I intend to share the planning that Geoff and i have done for a visit to the Edinburgh Festival, including arranging for the care of our beloved dog at home whilst we are away. The aim of that planning – and writing it up here still is ‘using my time for registering or reflecting, consolidating, and furthering personal learning‘. Writing the blog registers and/or reflects the organisation of time in prior preparation for making use of what can be seen as learning opportunities (and possibly pleasure that accompanies some forms of learning).Expressing the intention of learning and naming the possible opportunities for it to happen is about consolidating that learning prior to experience, and the processes that leap from those opportunities, not always in expected ways, whilst the event itself prepared for and my feelings about it revised are about ongoing furthering personal learning – it’s a process that never stops and each event often proposes further present time or planned future projects.

This blog is a re reflection of planning for a week – having booked events over a time, but more concentratedly over the last fortnight. By now , I like to think I have organised events so I can see the week at a glance including the distance between venues. Here is our 2026 visit programme so far.

But how do I organise that graphic schedule into preparation for learning. First, by justifying choices although often these were based on the fact that shows had either fixed dates or ranges of dates, or clashed with other events or are too distant o trave to in the ime available between events (thankfully Edinburgh, unlike London, is compact). Second, by describing expectations based on whatever I know of the event’s subject, if anything. I will write single blogs where the second objective matters most and I am able to do.preparation: by reading a text or prior reviews, and so on.

Here are broad brushstrokes on this schedule:

Having always enjoyed dramas by Alan Bissett, and his novels when he wrote them (Pack Men being my favourite of those because it, unlike many examinations of masculinity by heterosexual men that focus on the psychosocial in the following of football, explores queerness). But his new play (to me at least, since it toured since last year at the Festival) seems a long shot from the Moira Monologues (below), in which sex/gender too is explored in the performative mode (Alan can’t but seem cute to me as Moira fag-in-hand in a still photograph despite the fact that isn’t quite the intended effect of this play about working-class Scottish womanhood as a source of knowledge, feelings and values:

We are seeing When Billy Met Alasdair, a fictional recreation of what might have happened had Billy Connolly met up with Alasdair Gray. both heroes of mine, I Geoff and me have seen both speaking (Billy when he addressed a CHE meeting bring with him a quiche (explaining that gay men are well known to like quiche in that inimitable voice) – Alasdair many times. This will be a great evening – for I can never see Gray in the flesh anymore.

I have blogged on Patrick Gale’s new Love Lane novel (read it at this link) so here is a chance to hear him and ask a question if possible. The writer he appears with is a debut novelist and I will (I promise myself) get Lisa Ridzén’s ‘heartrending debut’ (as described in the programme) When the Cranes Fly South too (I just ordered it for delivery on Kindle in fact).

Lots of things I can know little of prior to going, and this time I will keep it that way, when looking for something new in queer drama The ones we will see that meet that brief are Behind Closed Doors (seen Tuesday) and, on Friday 21st, Safety and Moth and Dog Are Dying to Get Out. I will report back. Of some other drama I am as much in the dark really – one at the Lyceum – a favourite theatre anyway – (from the high-priced International Festival on Thursday at 8 p.m.) being Hang Time. This play I know concern lynchings of black men in USA. Now it is booked, I am finding justifying the choice difficult, except that there are certain atrocities that one cannot overlook – but to see the performance of ‘being lynched’ by black men, is surely a strange spectacle to want to see (as in the lyrics of Strange Fruit) but it is the fact that white people in the South often visited lynchings as if they were a part affair – an immersive performance. Is there an element of ‘white guilt’ in motivating going, for that very reason. I am not expecting to be able to answer that one, even after seeing the performance of ‘Pulitzer Prize finalist Zora Howard’s subversive and moving play’ even though one sanitise the reason for going as the necessity of seeing a black writer and actors take ‘a sharp look at racialised violence in America’. That is always needed but the blend of modes to be expected can only be read with pain at the humour it evokes: ‘Three Black men hang from an old, wide tree. Caught together in this liminal space, they shoot the breeze, sharing the great loves and bitter blues of their interrupted lives‘.

Round the corner from the Lyceum we will see two plays. Supposing (directed Vinnie Harris), I want to see (on Wednesday) because I am currently reading Harris’ version of The Oresteia, This Restless House, and am feeling the pain of having missed it being performed. It is possible given the way this play is briefly written up, that seeing this will make amends: ‘A curse has fallen on Sally’s house. Unexpected, unwanted and hard to shake. Worst of all, no one will believe her. As the line between certainty and doubt begins to blur, Sally must decide whether to trust what she sees, and what happens if she’s right’. That sounds like Greek tragedy! ‘. The play Mrs Stern Wanders The Prussian State Library, despite its forbidding title is supposedly based on the experience of intellectual Hannah Arendt, an expert on the roots of psychosocial violence, at the hands of Gestapo interrogators. We see it on Thursday before Hang Time. That day is one for reflection and psychological self-examination I think.

We are seeing Lear’s Fool on Monday because I could not resist a play that queried what happened to King Lear’s jester when he exited the scriot: the line, ‘and my poor fool is hanged’ being ambiguous; since many refer that to Cordelia’s death, whatever the appropriateness of the term to her (for indeed, it’s appropriateness to anyone must be questioned). i love King Lear. I am hoping this will revise my learning on that too.

As for the Book Festival, I have already blogged on Kae Tempest’s Having Spent Life Seeking (see the blog at this link) . On Tuesday I want to learn more – and the interview is the good queer Scottish hands and voice of Michael Pederson. Black queer themes are so brilliantly dealt with by Dean Atta (see my blog on his autobiography here) but his importance as a writer for children fascinates me, especially in these strange and difficult times in relation to the discussion of what things mean ‘child’, and what ‘adult’, but I am hoping his debut adult novel Big Man will be available to buy at this event, for he is a wonderful writer. Of course I cannot wait to see Édouard Louis for reasons clear in my blogs on (all linked to the novel’s titles: namely Change, Monique Escapes, Collapse. Obviously I will be taking my first edition translations to be signed too, if he will.

Of other literary artists to be seen, two are just heroes. First, Derek Owusu, who I see whenever I can and whose work I blog upon (here are links to those on Hunger Pains and Borderline Fiction, though there are more if you want to search. He is a great writer – hard to classify. Of course, I have ordered Jem Calder’s novel today too [I Want You to Be Happy: ‘I couldn’t stop reading.’ Sally Rooney]. Second, Simon Armitage, I often hear reading – after all, he comes from near my birthplace, living now at Farnley Tyas, near my secondary school of old. He makes Poetry sing and I have blogged on him so many times. I believe this event concentrates on the homage to Farnley Tyas, whether resilient in time or not, New Cemetery, which I have blogged on here). My copy was bought signed so I will be taking only the pieces I have reserved since – poems on the late Queen’s death and jubilee (I have difficulties with monarchy as an idea), his flower poems in Blossomise (blogged on here) and a wonderful programme for an event he did in Durham Cathedral (blogged on here) during a Brass Band Festival.

Of course seeing the Gwen John exhibition is a must – having never seen any of her pieces in the flesh but one, though fascinated by and having blogged on books about her: see that about one by Celia Paul and another on a book by Alicia Foster .

I think I might suspend booking other things now – at last until we get there and test our stamina, though I have a kind of desire to see paintings by Stanley Cursiter. That’s all for today. I think you might see a lot of learning is set up here for either completion or personal failure and disappointment – but you learn from that latter too!

Bye for now, With Love

Steven xxxxxxxxxxx