Crab and Bee (Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith) are joining us as part of their book tour celebrating the launch of Crab and Bee’s Matter of Britain
Here’s the plan:
Join us 2pm Sunday May 4th outside The Ascension Church, Stretford Road, Hulme.
Crab and Bee will take us for a story sharing walk.
Then, at around 3.30 we will return to the church for q+a and general chat. There will also be an open mic session: a chance for you to share readings, songs and tall tales you wish. To make sure we have enough time for everyone, please get in touch if you fancy an open mic slot.
As ever, all welcome, and free to attend. We’ll finish at 5.
If you have any access needs or questions about the event please get in touch. There is a stairlift in the church and accessible toilets. The walk will be at a pace to suit all participants and is on public space in Hulme
The contact details are the usual LRM ones:
Email mlrose@thelrm.org
Text, whatsapp or call 07974929589
Comment on The Facebook Group “The Loiterers Resistance Movement”
About the book
Crab & Bee’s Matter of Britain is a gathering up of ‘old stories’, drawn from Helen and Phil’s relentless journeying through the UK, from the Isles of Scilly, via the streets of St Mellons to Edinburgh. Perhaps not surprisingly, there are plenty of yarns from some of the places they know best: the GogMagog Hills, the Midlands, and the banks of the Tamar. In every case the stories are ones picked up from the places themselves, discovered on village noticeboards, in church pamphlets overheard in pubs or remembered from childhood.
These are not the stories of the medieval manuscripts, nor their nationalist retellings for the BBC or the readership of the Times. This is how Crab & Bee hear the old stories telling themselves in their own places; how the stories are heard by the bathers in the White Spring at Glastonbury, above the clatter and squeak of the amusements at Wookey Hole, along the old green lane from Llaneirwg to the water, and from the bones of a wolf in a cave under the new town at Sherford.
Familiar figures are here, like Godiva and Merlin, but there are stranger figures like those of Saint Senara, the head of Bran, Finny Gook and the bal maidens; the quiet characters of Britain’s hallucinations and dreams.
Phil says: ‘these are stories we have been carrying around in our heads and bodies, some for a few months, some for decades. They are always changing, with new bits attaching themselves all the time. This has been our chance to get them down on paper, and now we are going to lift them off the page and set them travelling again.”
Crab & Bee’s new Matter of Britain is a banishing spell against nostalgia and a magical working for the remaking of the Matter in the ruins of the present, from the treasures of the past, speaking into the bodies of a strange future.
