Loud and clear?!

With Jean Aitken and Chloe Garner,
Director of the Ledbury Poetry Festival

Well, until yesterday I couldn't say that I'd ever done a poetry reading using a megaphone! But at Hellen's Garden Festival in Much Marcle our intrepid band of troubadour poets, led by Jean Atkin, the  current "Troubadour of the Hills", was issued with one to do battle with the elements and the clamour arising from several hundred (if not more) festival goers. Fortunately the awful weather of the previous day had abated - though  I was kitted out in wellies just in case - and the sun eventually deigned to come out as we read a variety of "hill" poems in the beautiful old gardens within sight of the Malverns. It was a very pleasant afternoon that hopefully saw a good amount raised for St. Michael's Hospice in Hereford.

This morning I was having coffee in the cafe at the Millenium Centre in Cardiff and was taken with the above Roald Dahl quote inscribed on the wall there. It struck me that you could put a lot of others words in place of "magic" - success, for example. It's all too easy when you're struggling with something - a piece of writing perhaps - to feel that you'll never achieve anything with it, the poem or the prose will never go anywhere;  I've learned that indeed it won't go anywhere unless you have a firm belief in it, a belief that gives you the determination to keep going, to put everything you can into it. On Wednesday evening this week I saw that exemplified a dozen times over. I was privileged to be a guest at the Inspire! Adult Learning Awards in Cardiff, where individuals and groups who had had the desire to challenge a variety of health, social and work difficulties, who believed that they could change lives for the better, were recognized for their achievements in doing so. My own daughter was among them; it was a moving and a humbling experience.