News

It's been a while since I was last at this festival. But earlier this summer, I'd met some of the team responsible for putting this huge event together, so I felt it was time to make a return visit.

Latitude is only a 40 minute drive from us in Woodbridge and is set in the beautiful surroundings of Henham Hall, near Southwold. Offering an arts and music festival beside a lake, in woods and fields in the undulating landscape, it really does sound my sort of place. And on the sunny Friday I was convinced. On the grey, wet and muddy Saturday, less so. (Fortunately, the weather improved again today.)

It was certainly bigger and busier than I remembered. We fitted in as much as we could over the three days and enjoyed seeing familiar names in music, comedy and the media at the various stages, arenas and tents. Undoubtedly I'll kick myself in the coming days for things I missed.

For me, though, festivals are often about the surprise discoveries. I think most of us consume arts, music and cultural events with a fair idea of what to expect - we're investing our hard-earned time and money after all. But at festivals we are more willing, and have more opportunity, to give something or someone new a try with no expectations, pressure or commitment. And sometimes you can discover some real gems...

Thank you for reading.

PS If you haven't been in touch, do let me know if you're hoping to come along to the Book Group meeting in Woodbridge tomorrow. We'll be discussing 'The Coast Road' by Alan Murrin and also making plans for reading the Booker Prize Longlist together - the 13 titles are revealed on Tuesday. 

This week I had the pleasure of visiting the poet Ian Patterson, interviewing him for an article to be published in 'Suffolk' magazine in a couple of months. 

Ian has written 'Books A Manifesto: Or How to Build a Library' which will be published in September. In it he describes how he commissioned an outbuilding of his home to be converted into a library. Through tracing the progress of the work over the months, Ian describes his relationship with books and outlines why they are so important to him, and to society as a whole, and our future.

It was a treat and a privilege to be shown the completed library which houses, mainly, Ian's huge poetry collection. But it was even more of a delight for me to be given a tour around his home seeing the sitting room with the first editions in glass cabinets, the dining room with the 200+ cookery books beside the shelves of crockery, the front room's wall of detective fiction paperbacks and the study with, well, I forget if there was one subject or genre here as I was overwhelmed with the quantity: there were books just everywhere.

I came away thinking about how I order my books, and how accessible they are when I need to find a particular author or title. Do I value some books more than others? What books do I need close to hand, and why? How am I displaying them, and for what purpose? Would I like to have a wall of books of the same colour?

If you could create your own purpose-built library, what would it look like? 

Thank you for reading.

PS It's almost the end of the.month already and so this is your reminder that we'll be meeting in Woodbridge a week tomorrow to discuss 'The Coast Road' by Alan Murrin. Do let me know if you're hoping to be with us so that I have an idea of numbers. Everyone's welcome to come along. 

PPS A date for your diary...
Forward notice for everyone who enjoys the writing of Kevin Crossley-Holland, the children's author known for his stories of myth, folklore, magic and legend. He will be speaking at The Longshed in Woodbridge on 18 September at 7pm, as the guest of Ipswich Children's Book Group. Tickets are available now by emailing jayne.gould@btopenworld.com

Even if you didn't read the report in 'The Observer' last Sunday, you're unlikely to have missed the story that a best-sellng book, and film, which was marketed as 'unflinchingly honest' is actually less so. 

The revelations regarding Raynor Winn, the author of 'The Salt Path' have been covered extensively throughout the media all week, with further details today in 'The Observer' claiming that events in the second book 'Landlines' were also not as they were presented by the author.

Consistently topping the charts since it was published in 2018, 'The Salt Path' tells the story of Raynor Winn and her husband Moth. After learning they are to lose their home when an investment in a friend's company failed, and then finding that Moth has a degenerative and terminal illness, they decide to go for a walk. This turns out to be a 600 mile hike along the South West Coast Path, a journey which transforms them and proves an uplifting, inspiring and encouraging read for millions.

The couple has enjoyed phenomenal success, and wealth, since that first book - subsequent books continuing their story have all sold well, there's been the film starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs released this summer and Raynor Winn has also been drawing crowds fronting the Gigspanner Band with the Saltlines tour of music and words. 

But many people will now feel duped and let down by the revelations in the newspaper article.

So what is the mistake here? Was it naivety, or deception, from the author thinking that no one would check the veracity of the book? If the book hadn't been presented as a true story would it have had the same impact? Isn't the point of the story that when life is stripped back we realise what is important? Would we have forgiven, or accepted, the author if she had been honest about the mistakes she had made from the outset rather than concealing them? Did the author make false, misleading claims about her husband's illness?

And what was the publisher's responsibility here? I think we all believe that there are due processes in place to ensure a book is accurate and true, whether that is an academic tome, a memoir or even a work of fiction. But the pressures of time and money have led to corners being cut and, when we are increasingly aware of 'fake news' and AI generated stories, it is worrying if we can't rely on books to have undergone rigorous checks or to be what they claim to be. 

There are many things to consider here, and we are likely to learn more in the coming weeks. Are there still everlasting truths we can hold on to, even if the individual players prove to be fallible? What is left when the trust is gone?

Thank you for reading.

I hope this newsletter reaches you on time and in the usual manner this evening because I haven't just pressed 'send' and don't have my laptop to hand.

I've been treated to a ticket to Wimbledon so, at this moment, I will either still be lapping up the action on Court One or starting my long train journey home. 

It's another wonder of technology that I can write this message ahead of time and schedule it to be sent by the software at my appointed hour.

Except it's not really a wonder any more, is it? It's something we take for granted. We'd be cross if the facility wasn't available, in fact. When I think back to the start of my working life - no emails or the internet, and when mobile phones had just become a 'thing'...

But now we're all having to get used to AI.

It seems just moments ago that we were talking about the theory of artificial intelligence but it's influencing, directing and facilitating so many aspects of life already.

There is no denying how much it can contribute and achieve so quickly and extensively. And, while it's exciting to see the potential of this technology, we can't ignore how we might pay the cost in terms of livelihoods, creativity and community.

So I was interested to read an article in the Guardian this week where an editor, Hugh Muir, was commenting on this year's implementation of AI at Wimbledon.

We may hear the voices of the line judges calling 'out' and 'fault' but they're no longer sitting around the court - they have been replaced by machines and technology.

The aim is to achieve perfection, to remove the margin for error and to avoid dispute. It's not been a complete success - the volume was initially set too low and some players have actually disputed the accuracy of some of the calls. What's more, many are missing the theatre of the suited officials.

AI has been introduced in other tournaments so Wimbledon was overdue and undoubtedly any teething problems will soon be eased out. But there's more to this development than accuracy and efficiency.

Hugh Muir and others have pointed out that there are implications here, and also in other sports where AI is coming to play. The divide between elite and grassroots sport will grow ever larger, the spontaneity and spectacle of a game will be diminished and a degree of enjoyment, engagement and entertainment will be lost.

Undoubtedly we will adapt to the benefits made available through this technology, just as we have so many times already in the past 30 years. But we do need to recognise the value of people! We should think about how we prize humans, and what we should do about that.

I'll leave you with that thought, if I may. Next week normal service(!) will resume, here at least.

Thank you for reading.

PS A date for your diary...
This week Sarah Hardy is the guest of Suffolk Book League. She will be talking about her book 'The Walled Garden' on Thursday 17 July at 7.30pm. Get your tickets here.

This afternoon I've had the pleasure of speaking to writer Elly Griffiths once again, this time for Felixstowe Book Festival where we were together, in front of a capacity audience, unpicking her new time travel novel 'The Frozen People'.

It's always such a joy spending time with Elly. She has such energy, positivity and humour, and this latest book, taking criminal 'cold cases' to another level, is entertaining and fascinating.

In this book, the first in a new series, we find a police team in London is enabled to travel back in time to investigate unsolved crimes. We are introduced to Elly's new hero Ali Dawson as she has to step back into the Victorian period, at the request of a politician eager to have his past redeemed.

Elly has always had a passion for Victorian literature, she says, and Wilkie Collins is her favourite writer. Her enthusiasm is clear and infectious as she reveals details of everyday life of that time. 

So the Victorian period was very much on my mind in the past week and a newspaper article caught my eye the other day which seemed very timely. It reported on a new exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum and suggested that the great writer had his own 'sliding doors' moment, worthy of any time travel novel.

Charles Dickens it seems could have become an actor rather than a writer. He had received an invitation to audition for a key actor-manager in Covent Garden but had to miss the appointment through illness. By the next season Dickens was established as a parliamentary reporter and his career had taken a different route. 

It's always intriguing looking back on these things, isn't it? And we can do it in our own lives - the 'what if?' question. But in spite of Elly's police team being able to go back in time, we need to deal with the here and now. And I love the quote Elly shares from the physicist Carlo Rovelli: 'Time travel is just what we do every day, isn’t it? Every single day we travel one day ahead in time.'

Thank you for reading.