Still on a Common Ground note, this month saw the launch of the book itself at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The event was a spectacular success, selling out the 190-seat venue, with more eager punters waiting outside for returns. Chaired by Jamie Jauncey, the panel included John Simmons, Stuart Delves and Whitbread Prizewinner Ali […]

Arriving early at Colchester’s Arts Centre, we immediately suspected someone had pulled a fast one. The cabbie dropped us at a dark church and even darker churchyard on a cold, misty evening and we wondered if he hadn’t liked the look of us. However, once the lights came on, the bar opened and the audience […]

It was billed as a candlelit evening in Milton’s Cottage, the tiny bolt hole in Chalfont St Giles where he spent the years that the Great Plague infested London. In the end, it was fluorescent lights in the village hall over the road. Heath & Safety decreed that there were too many people for the […]

The café at Falmouth’s magnificent, modern Maritime Museum was filling up with tanned, greying women and men, with taut, toned muscles. They stood with their feet slightly apart as if they expected the ground to tilt at any moment. These were people who were clearly not at home on a floor that doesn’t sway with […]

A look back at Rishi Dastidar’s Arts Council-sponsored Common Ground event, by Justina Hart. We met, appropriately enough, in the Met Bar above Baker Street station on Saturday 2 December 2006, on the promise of a poignant but pointless journey to the end of the Metropolitan line and back, to celebrate Rishi Dastidar’s Common Ground […]