“There’s a Patti Smith documentary out,” a colleague told me. “I think you’d like it.”
“Oh?” I pricked my ears up in interest. I vaguely remembered two friends talking about the movie but had dismissed it, because I wasn’t familiar with Smith’s work. Although I probably had been more concerned with the food I was about to tuck into at the time. “Is she still around?”
My colleague laughed. “Yes. It’s full of poetry. You should see it.”
And so, this misty, chilly December night, I set out for the West End. In search of Poetry and its comrades, Truth, Beauty and Love.





The End of the Road Festival, 12-14 September 2008, Larmer Tree Gardens, Dorset
Festivals: General
It is a peculiar quirk of the English psyche – call it optimism, stoicism, delusional or plain eccentricity – that any prospect of sunshine, no matter how vague, must be celebrated out of doors, in a field, throwing shapes or gently swaying to live music. Because it’s summer, yeah, and the weather is gonna be wik-ked! Never mind that the chances of extended brilliant warm sunshine during the English summer are, although less slim than Gwyneth Paltrow contributing something of relevance to the average person’s reality, still quite unlikely. It’s summer, and that means it isn’t spring (grey, with the sort of rain which gets inside your socks and winds gusty enough to turn your umbrella inside out), winter (dark, cold, with winds capable of whipping through your outer layers to your bones) or autumn (shorter chillier days wreathed in misty flumes, bonfire smoke and golden sunshine).
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