By: Blonde One

Last night I went to the magnificent Great Hall at the Dartington Estate to listen to a modern day, self confessed troubadour. As you know I like literature in general, but I especially like poetry and I am particularly fond of the poet Simon Armitage. If you don’t know his work I recommend looking him up. He has recently walked a large section of the South West Coast Path whilst ‘singing for his supper’ each night. After every 10 miles or so he would spend the night with a wiling host who in exchange would receive a reading from his poetry collection. Armitage has written a book of anecdotes and poetry based on his trip and he was at Dartington to talk to a small audience about his travels.  He claimed that he wrote or recited a word for every step he took and treated the audience to some of those words from his book Walking Away. He talked of many of the quirky things that he discovered and conducted a survey along the way of the ‘back bedroom’. He described most of them as being full of precious things from a life gone by. I think that’s true of my spare bedroom too. Apart from the duffel bag in various states of pack/unpack it contains memories in abundance of Little Miss Blonde’s childhood, gone but not forgotten family members and all manor of trinkets that I can’t bear to throw out.

I think Blonde Two and I should one day do a similar walk and ask the lovely locals to let us sleep in their back bedrooms in exchange for a reading from the Blonde canon. What would we find I wonder?