Blue drapes, and a Van Gogh vase of sunflowers centre-stage, mean it’s time for local tellers to take over A Bit Crack. Chris Bostock and Malcolm Green havebeen bundled downstairs, where they sit at the bar, nursing pints. It’s the first time in thirty-odd years they’ve not hosted. That falls to Chris Adriaanse. We’ll be embarking on Journeys to the Lands Between, he explains.
There follow seven tales, seven tellers: familiar faces in liminal places.
Greg McCormick conjures up a dark fable of Scottish sea elves, out to replace ayoung wife with a waterlogged timber beam.
Lara Gow infuses the story of Child Wynde and the Bamburgh toad with a very wicked humour.
Martin Manasse offers the antidote to a Tsar’s chronic second-guessing. “You only had to ask!” says Vasilisa, when he resorts to subterfuge to determine who she is.
Richard Birmingham locates exchanges and gifts of all kinds in a genuine Land Between, a beach in Kenya: he has visited it.
Claire Randles’s exchange is between the Sidhe and a mortal woman, who catches them by their greed in a transaction to win her child back.
Gill interrogates the Hexham Riot of 1761 to ask, pointedly, what turns protest to violence. Desperation, accident – and how swiftly forgotten by the powers that be.
Finally Chris Adriaanse closes this night of vibrancy and skill with a wise, hilarious encounter between a woman and the Beast in her Bean Garden.
The sunflowers are given away at the end of the evening. Much else has been given by the tellers: wit, passion, enchantment, worlds of words, subtlety, adventure. I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did.
Bostock and Green have returned from the bar.