Chance Meetings and Surprising Greetings

The strangest things happen when you're a performance artist or touring artist of any kind...Having sent off lots of proposals to different events and venues earlier in the year, and then ringing various numbers of them up and finding that they'd lost the proposal in the overflowing inbox, or decided they couldn't afford the fee for six of us, or...as administrator and form-filler-in-chief, I was just getting fed up, when...a company in Dorchester e-mailed inviting us to perform and do workshops, having just secured their funding, someone e-mailed who'd seen Widsith & Deor's Epic of Gilgamesh show last Autumn, asking if we were free for another gig, AND, most bizarrely of all, meeting a guy in a bluebell wood who happened to be the ranger, and within two weeks, meeting up again and being offered another gig to perform at the launch of the finished conservation project there in July! All in the space of two days...You can be sure as hell that if you hadn't have slaved away with a load of proposals, the work wouldn't have come in...and yet as so often in this business, you get what you hadn't planned for, expected, or in some cases even suspected! Other storytelling companies we know have said just the same thing. But three in two days...well that was pretty good and out of the blue. We've also been offered slots at Express FM in Portsmouth, the good folks at Phonic FM on their new 'Waves with Words' programme, Spoken/Written stalls and places to sell 'Porlock'...The excellent charity bookshop Bookcycle who run a donation-only bookshop - an amazing place with lots of unexpected gems, tucked away inside the higgledy piggedly Tudor building - who plant trees and send books to education projects in Africa are interested in a small press event for Cartwheels Collective Publishing, the publishing arm of the Collective... The summer is booking up apace...Just as the leaves have sprung into life and the buttercups are livid gold against the brightening greens, so everything else seems to starts happening and gathering momentum. Pip pip!