The Plashing Vole: Amongst the literati

I'm going home early tonight (it's 7 p.m., which is early for me) and I have the joy of a long Award Validation Meeting on another campus tomorrow, before dashing back to welcome a trio of Northern Irish loyalist friends for the weekend, in a reversal of last week's Derry Girls. When I stayed with them they hung a Union flag in my bedroom, informed me that I was the first Catholic to enter the house, and took me to an RUC bar to sing karaoke. They made me sing 'The Sash', and declined to join in with my rendition of 'The Fields of Athenry'. It was a great weekend and I'm going to enjoy flying a tricolour and teasing them for their rather hypocritical acquisition of Irish passports since the Brexit vote…

So anyway, I'm still marking massive piles of essays, and recovering from the second Literature Festival we held in this city. 97 events across 26 venues, with loads of contributions from my colleagues. For me, the fun kicked off early when the university authorities got cold feet about hosting a debate on Rivers of Blood 50 Years On. They didn't much fancy attracting the Powellites, and the academic historian on the panel dropped out rather than share a stage with one of the more objectionable UKIP MEPs. Then the Labour MP and another anti-racist campaigner dropped out. Cue a flurry of calls and emails from management, the council, the local newspaper which organised the whole thing (and which the university doesn't like to upset), and meetings to recast the panel (now all-male and covering the political spectrum from rabid right to moderate), set the tone and arrange security. After all that, the SWP decided to stage a demonstration outside, which terrified people who don't know that when they're not covering up rape accusations, these red-blooded revolutionaries have all the fervour of a self-warming sock and couldn't fill a phone box with slavering militants. Once the West Mids Police had phoned me asking for the names of these revolutionary comrades, I started to enjoy the irony. Despite the SWP's many awful characteristics, their local members always turn out to support industrial action and social ills. So there I was, refusing to name people who were demonstrating an event I wasn't involved in, organised by a paper whose star columnist tried to get me sacked, all in the name of free speech.

Thankfully being detained at a different event, I didn't have to witness the clash of intellects, but I'm assured that the demonstration was very polite (how many dangerous subversives own a collapsible gazebo?) and the debate was actually rather dull, partly because the paper's editor refused to let the UKIP MEP try any grandstanding. Still it was quite a stressful few days.

Away from the Battle of Civilisations, LitFest II was enormously successful. We haven't quite cracked the kids' events yet, and a few events didn't attract many punters, but last year's collective audience of c. 2300 became one of 6200 or so. Loads of my colleagues and some students contributed, and lots more attended events. I went along and introduced Lynsey Hanley, who writes about council estates, housing policy, social class and mobility, in conversation with my colleague from a similar background.

Nicola Allen, Lynsey Hanley

Then it was off to Niall Griffiths, the scabrous novelist and intellectual who delights in teasing the prim: his new novel is partly set here, and examines what he sees as England's failure to define itself. The EU, he says, asked England to find an identity, and it couldn't, unlike Wales and Scotland. One of the things I like about Niall's work is that working-class and underclass people (thieves, drug-dealers, prostitutes) get the chance to talk about the big issues rather than being treated as a mute, brutish mob.

Niall Griffiths

Niall's right too: the star of the next thing I went to was Don Powell, drummer of Slade. The crowd was packed with fans who booed mentions of bent managers and cheered early songs' chart successes. They asked interesting questions and Powell reeled off anecdotes and observations with enormous charm. You'd never know that he's been a rock star for 50 years, with the cash from 'that song' as he called it providing him with luxury unimaginable round here. You wouldn't actually know that he'd ever left the area. He even organised a round of applause for his old roadie from the 60s, whom they used to pay £10 a week.

A Slade fan's lonely struggle

Don Powell, ex-Slade

After that, it was off to Cummings Up For Air, a semi-comedic Jonathan Meades-style monologue and series of films about the more deservedly obscure parts of the Black Country - one of the best things on.

Cummings Up For Air

Then a collective reading by my colleagues Kelly Hadley-Pryce and Rob Francis, alongside poet Luke Kennard and novelist Anthony Cartwright, whose novels I really rate. Day 2 started for me with How To Get Away With Murder, a panel discussion between three very different crime novelists and my colleague Gaby, who never lets anybody get away with anything. I don't read contemporary crime to any great extent, and I was fascinated more by the discussion of craft and planning than by the various vile deeds enunciated. The authors were very generous and reflective, which made for an enjoyable hour. Then it was off to Arts Foundry, run by Louise Palfreyman, and featuring creative writing contributions by several local authors, including two of my students, who revealed sides of their personalities hitherto unglimpsed in essays and seminars!

Kerry Hadley-Pryce

Not LitFest but nearby. I liked the idea of Enduring Memorials promised on the side of a building being demolished

Murderers.

An unappreciative LitFest audience

Lousie Palfreyman and Storm Mann

Dreadful light, but I liked the way her hair and the inner surfaces of the sculpture chimed.

Exhausted but not defeated, I headed off to Will Self in conversation with our new professor of English. I like Self's earlier work and am behind on the recent trilogy, but I'm quite an admirer of his, mostly for these two total destructions of morons on Radio 5 and Newsnight. You never quite know what you'll get, but Self was on tremendous form this time: witty, warm, hugely entertaining and almost flirting with the sold-out audience. The things he said fell into two categories: witty bollocks and obviously true. No, three categories: the observation that people with google maps see the world differently from Before felt like something from Grumpy Old Men, and I can't help remembering that we had maps then. Some of them, like Roman maps, were every bit as reductive as those on our phones, simply showing the roads between places. In the 'witty bollocks' category came Self's sterling defence of modernist fiction: 'postmodernism is an architectural style, it has nothing to do with literature. Only me and Eimear McBride are getting it right'. He also cheerfully accepted that 'literary fiction' is dead: 'it's a conservatoire form; even I've got Netflix'. He has a new series on Radio 4 in which he takes the bus to unfashionable places. It might sound like the product of eating too much cheese before bed, but it's very good.

A Selfie with Self

Good hair in Will's World.

Finally, I went to Tim J Jarvis's experimental poetry/music experience. Cut-up poetry in the dark, accompanied by experimental drone music by his colleague. As you can probably imagine, just my kind of thing. Not everyone's though: a fan told Tim that 'I enjoyed it, but my wife left'.