In the summer we had rainbow posters and art trails and now, with Christmas looming, we have a Bauble Trail and an Advent Trail.
The one thing Hethersett people don't do is rest on their laurels. Someone, somewhere is always organising something for the benefit of residents.
There has also been the call to light up the village and I expect Hethersettians will rise to that challenge as well as we approach the festive season.
The Bauble Trail will see people buying plain baubles for £2 from Woodside Primary and Nursery School which they can decorate and place in their windows before December 4th. Trail maps will be issued from 4th December and baubles are available from the school until the end of November.
This is a win-win-win situation: Firstly it will give people fun and allow them to be artistic, secondly it will provide a lovely trail for people to follow and help them to increase their exercise and thirdly it will raise funds for Woodside School.
Then there's the Hethersett Advent Trail. This will be a trail featuring 24 windows to visit throughout the village. A list of advent addresses will be released tomorrow (Friday).
Of course I will be following both trails to do reports for the Hethersett Herald.
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I mentioned yesterday that I would talk about the difficulties of being a reviewer/reporter.
Some people might accuse me of being self-obsessed when it comes to listening to music/reading books/going to the cinema or theatre. I cannot do any of these without writing a review somewhere. It might be in a notebook or it might be on the internet or, in the past, in various publications. I find I just have to give my views.
I guess it comes from decades of professional reviewing. Often people will say what gives you the right to sit in judgement when you have never had a book published, never written a piece of music (although I have), never played a professional game of football, tennis or any other sport and in fact aren't qualified to comment on anything?
My answer to that is I have listened to thousands of pieces of music, read hundreds of books, watched thousands of games of football (and coached hundreds of games), played hundreds of games of various sports and I am a professional writer so feel I have every right to comment.
The problem is, of course, that it is all subjective. How do you review something you hate? I have a distinct dislike of ballet (sorry ballet fans) so how do I review a ballet? Well the answer is you have to suspend your general views and give an opinion on an individual performance i.e how good was the particular performance irrespective of what you think of the art in general terms.
A perfect example of one man's meat is another man's poison came when I was at journalism college. I went with friend and fellow student John Andrews to London from Harlow to see a performance by Stomu Yamashta's Red Buddha Theatre Company. John loved it. I was bored rigid and just wanted it to end. Now if I was reporting on that show I would have given it a glowing review because I recognised it was hugely colourful and very artistic - it just wasn't my cup of tea.
Reviewing becomes more difficult when you are reporting on say a concert by an international superstar or an artist you have seen many times before. I will explain this.
I went to Norwich Theatre Royal to review a concert by Don McClean. At the time he was a megastar. The audience loved it because for them McLean could do no wrong. They would have cheered and clapped if he came on stage and stood there without singing a note. In other words he could do no wrong in their eyes. But my job was to comment on how he performed in this concert and it wasn't good. I felt he was going through the motions, trotting out his greatest hits package without any thought or interest. So I gave one of my favourite artists a poor review. Same thing happened with Glen Campbell a few years later.
A few nights after the Don McLean concert I was down to review a gig by another American songwriter - Tom Paxton. I wasn't looking forward to this anywhere near as much but Paxton gave an excellent concert where he seemed really to care about his songs and conveyed that to the audience.
Then we have what I refer to the Daniel O'Donnell syndrome. Daniel O'Donnell is, for some reason, particularly popular in Norfolk. O'Donnell is a charming Irishman of very limited talent but what talent he does have he uses to the full. His concerts are always the same and he does what he does well, so it's very difficult to give him a bad review.
The second difficult area is reviewing things you love. This is particularly difficult because you end up comparing the artist with themselves. This has happened when I reviewed two of my favourite artists/bands - David Bowie and Barclay James Harvest. I saw both when I was at journalism college in Harlow. For me Bowie's appearance at Hethersett Playhouse was a landmark concert.
It was one of the first where he appeared as Ziggy Stardust with backing from The Spiders From Mars. His first set was a solo one at the piano and then the second set was electric in more ways than one. This was epic stuff. A few years later I was called on to review Bowie at Norwich Theatre Royal. It was a pale imitation of the Harlow concert. His voice wasn't that good. So here I was giving a music icon and legend an average review because I was comparing that performance with a previous one.
Same thing happened with reviewing Barclay James Harvest which I have done on numerous times. They are my favourite all time band and the first time I saw them at Harlow Technical College I was blown away. I always compared subsequent concerts to that first one. So, although I loved the band, one of the headlines of my reviews read "Good but not Golden Harvest." Had I have been seeing the band for the first time I'm sure my praise would have been more fulsome.
So reviewing isn't as easy as it may seem. You try to stay neutral and review what is happening in front of you, but it isn't always that easy.
My favourite piece of reviewing, however, was a play at Norwich Theatre Royal many years ago by Tom Stoppard. It was a play within a play including a monologue. Entitled Dirty Linen with New-found-land. Here is a description taken from Wikipedia:
Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land is a pair of two 1976 Tom Stoppard plays that are always performed together. New-Found-Land interrupts the two parts of Dirty Linen.
I went along to review for the Eastern Evening News. On the first night people started walking out. Many didn't return after the interval. We reported on this in the newspaper and the following night exactly the same thing happened. People were leaving in droves. Whole rows were walking out and they weren't doing it quietly either. This continued night after night for the entire run. I even went and sat in the bar for a number of nights to watch people walking out.
The reason for the walkout was simple. This was an utter load of rubbish. People are usually polite about this sort of thing and grin and bear it, but not on this occasion. Mind you there was another side to this. When the actor finished the New-Found-Land monologue he got a standing ovation from a half full theatre with those staying on obviously appreciating his professionalism under trying circumstances. After all he was only working with Stoppard's script.
Audiences can be tough. Many years ago at the Theatre Royal a warm-up artist was so bad that people left to go to the bar early and others started talking quite loudly. "I have two more numbers but I don't think you want to hear them so I'm stopping now," he said. There were cheers all round as he walked off. I cannot remember his name or who he was supporting - details lost in the mists of time.
A similar thing happened in reverse a few years ago when I went to see another of my favourite groups - Focus - at Norwich Open. The concert was in a side room which was quite small. One of the support bands was a retro eighties new romantic style band and they were pretty good. A moron at the back of the room started heckling them and telling them to "get off you're f-----g rubbish."
Such was the heckling that the band stopped in mid-song. "Do you want us to stop" they asked the audience. "No came the reply we think you are good." They played on and the heckler was ejected.
That Focus gig was an interesting one. They played for approximately one-and-a-half hours and then their leader Thijs Van Leer announced "this is our last number" and then added "for the first half." I think that number lasted 10 minutes. Then he walked off the stage, went to the bar, got a pint and wandered back onto stage. "This is the second half," he declared.
Tomorrow I will bring a little Christmas flavour to the blog.