The Arts, culinary and other.

[shewhomust]

A weekend full of sunshine and colour: on Saturday we were out walking around the Waskerly Way, the country ablaze with gorse.

And on Sunday, as desperance explains, we went to a birthday party: spent the entire afternoon in the walled garden of the house by the sea, with good company, flowing champagne and good things to eat. Including the mystery substances in the photograph: the green is tortilla chip with avocado (which tasted much like tortilla chip without avocado, and was less avocado coloured - and more pea-green - than the picture implies). The purple was beetroot and ginger dip, every bit as purple in reality, and full of zingy gingery beetroot goodness (words not hitherto linked together...).

Conversation turned, as it inevitably has lately, to Arts Council funding. Over the last few months, a number of literature-related bodies in the North-East have heard that they will not be funded in the coming year, or will have their funding substantially reduced. durham_rambler and I hear about this at second hand, from clients and from potential clients, and at third hand, from wider contacts. Other Poetry, Colpitts Poetry, the Blue Room, proudWORDS and more are all being cut back. E-mails are being circulated, poets are meeting in pubs and muttering, the situation seems at once very serious and very vague.

I don't think that anyone has an automatic right to Arts Council funding. And I'm sure you could point to any one of the organisations affected and detect shortcomings, or else simply say "They made a good case for funding, but someone else made a better one." But the sheer number of groups affected, all of them (that is, all the ones I know about) established for a period of time, publishing or providing a venue for reading and writing, poetry and prose, suggests that more is going on than individual failures to qualify. Either the total budget has been severely cut, or there is a diversion of funding from literature, or some other shift in policy: yet there is no clue on the web site of the Arts Council (Arts Council England, North East, referred to as ACNE) of any change of strategy.

So there was talk about that, and broader questions: is it possible for a public body to exercise patronage in a way that is fair, accountable and artistically valid? is it inevitable that a structure to administer the arts, or anything else, will end up having administration as its purpose? And then we made a diversion on the way home to patronise the arts in a practical way, by buying books from Barter Books, which occupies the old station in Alnwick, and describes itself as "The British Library of secondhand bookshops".