Event: Buttercup’s Songbook a fundraiser for Henfield Haven
THIS will be the biggest event in the local charity’s fundraising calendar and Brighton, Hove and District Samaritans is hoping to raise a whopping £15,000 from this one spectacular event.
The Brighton branch of Samaritans is responsible for all their fund-raising throughout the year. The branch supports people in the city of Brighton and Hove, as well as along the coast to Shoreham to the West, Newhaven in the East, and over the South Downs to the north including Burgess Hill, Haywards Heath and Lewes plus the surrounding villages.
In order to provide this vital service the Brighton, Hove and District branch needs to raise £75,000 a year to keep the branch open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Not only Samaritans volunteers will be taking part in this event; there are also heroic people from local businesses who are taking it upon themselves to step out of the pod at 162 metres in order to raise funds for the local Samaritans branch.
There will be fifteen people from One Family as well as nine workers from Legal and General and one courageous worker from local coffee company Small Batch.
The event starts at 6.00pm with the first two people stepping out of the pod to begin the long decent at around 6.30pm. Organisers hope the last two fearless folk will be on their way down the ropes at around 9.00pm. Brighton, Hove and District Samaritans will be making sure there is a carnival atmosphere at the base to welcome them down and encourage the local community to pop along to watch and show their support for the charity and all the abseiling volunteers.
If you would like to donate to this fantastic event and your local Samaritans branch, as well as seeing who is taking part, click here:
And the first event certainly lived up to that expectation.
Writer Eley Williams has had a meteoric rise to celebrity, winning awards left right and centre and having one of her tales included in the latest Penguin Book of Contemporary British Short Story.
In conversation with Simon, she revealed how word play can uncover hidden strengths and weaknesses in characters.
Reading from her latest anthology Attrib and Other Stories, she gave us a roller coaster cascade of stream of consciousness which was a delight to listen to. Smote is a conversation – all one-sided – with an unseen and unnamed second woman – friend, lover or partner isn’t made clear.
It’s an enigmatic tongue in cheek but loving portrayal of an apparently insignificant incident where the female narrator is explaining why she wants to kiss her unseen other half, but in an art gallery looking at a famous op art work by artist Bridget Riley, she really doesn’t think she can.
It’s a story about queer love, about shame, about passion and about inaction through guilt. “I’m not holding you but holding onto you” she tells the unseen other. And the mixed emotions create inner turbulence – what she calls “It’s Guinness-thick, the choke of it”.
In another side-thought she compares the feelings she is having as like “black kelp crawling up against the sea-foam. This is absurd and that’s the power of it.”
Eley tells us that lots of her stories are about a person going into a room and getting flummoxed. Her stories are full of arrested moments where the action stands still and feelings can rush in.
Often abandoning punctuation but never grammar, the headlong breathless nature of her thought processes come across wonderfully in this live reading. And these are not mere flights of an author’s fantasy. She bases the style on medical science which shows that exposure to art can sometimes produce electric nerve impulses that pause us and make us almost swoon.
That knowledge, coupled with her PHD about lexicography means her deep joy of using and twisting words creates a unique style of authorship.
Communication is as much about its failure to connect as its success, she tells us.
Her next work is a first novel – about a lexicographer and a researcher’s digging out fake information in the 19th century writer’s inventive mind.
As a kick-off to the 4-day festival, the organisers couldn’t have asked for better.
The Coast is Queer continues at The Spire, Kemptown, until Sunday, September 15.
Full information about the Coast Is Queer, click here:
Review by Brian Butler
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