After an August recess, we’re off again. And we’ve got a great group of topics this week.
This is a brilliant piece in the Irish Times - an interview with Laurie Anderson who is so sparkling and raw and interesting in her responses. If I had a modern day heroine - which I don't - it would be Laurie Anderson at 79. She says so much great stuff in this interview. One of them is about how she is practising being sad without being sad. Allowing herself to feel around what is going on in the world without staying there. She explains her attraction to Buddhism as an artist is that no-one is in charge...Also some great stories about herself and Lou Reed. She really never stops being curious - the key to everything. And a great line from JL Borges about censorship being a great prompt for metaphor...https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/2026/06/28/laurie-anderson-on-lou-reed-he-said-ill-get-on-a-plane-right-now-we-got-married-the-next-day/
She is performing in Cardiff on Oct 7th.
Book Tickets by clicking here.
We were thrilled to have our first ever conference - Rebel Later Life: the ideas party on Oct 10th at the beautiful Cecil Sharp House in Camden all day - featured in Lesley-Ann Jones’ column in the Daily Express. And that she got in there about the Funky Funerals and Stepping Into Cronehood. You can book here - https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/.../rebel-later-life-the..
3. This looks like a great night out. Dance and celebrate older creatives at the Bridewell Theatre on Sept 23rd.
We were united and horrified about this one. Although we’d prefer they named her initially rather than calling her an 89 year old grandmother! ‘An 89-year-old grandmother who spent 25 years building a beloved street garden is now facing council orders to tear it down.
Katharine Hoskyns transformed a small patch outside her St John’s Wood home into an oasis of tomatoes, geraniums, and herbs over two decades ago.
But Westminster City Council has now issued a formal notice demanding she remove the plants and a bench.
The council claims the spot is attracting anti-social behaviour and that fallen pots could cause injury.
The 89-year-old insists only one single neighbour has ever raised an objection to the display.
She says the space is completely safe and that there is plenty of room for a wheelchair to pass on the pavement.
“I love it because I can go and potter around with my pots and people come up and talk to me,” she said.
Locals clearly adore the collection, with the nearby Abbey Road orchestra even affectionately nicknaming the quiet street “The Pots”.
Her son Nicky has helped launch a campaign to save the garden, gathering 190 signatures in person from highly supportive residents.
The family points out that a council camera installed near the garden to monitor for anti-social behaviour has uncovered absolutely none.
Yet the council states it was reluctantly obliged to begin a formal process after a series of complaints.
The initial deadline to remove the garden has now passed without any official enforcement action.
Katharine expects the council will be in contact again soon.
5. Brilliant poet/farmer, Wendell Berry has died at 92. Here’s one of his poems.
A Poem on Hope
It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,
for hope must not depend on feeling good
and there’s the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.
You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality
of the future, which surely will surprise us,
and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction
anymore than by wishing. But stop dithering.
The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?
Tell them at least what you say to yourself.
Because we have not made our lives to fit
our places, the forests are ruined, the fields, eroded,
the streams polluted, the mountains, overturned. Hope
then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
of what it is that no other place is, and by
your caring for it, as you care for no other place, this
knowledge cannot be taken from you by power or by wealth.
It will stop your ears to the powerful when they ask
for your faith, and to the wealthy when they ask for your land
and your work. Be still and listen to the voices that belong
to the stream banks and the trees and the open fields.
Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot.
The world is no better than its places. Its places at last
are no better than their people while their people
continue in them. When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.
- Wendell Berry, gone after a long life
6. A phenomenal introduction to the artist Susan Te Kaurangi King who can’t hear or speak.
‘Susan Te Kahurangi King has a riotous œuvre of terrifying, hilarious, lewd, and ornery drawings. In counterpoint stands the artist herself, who does not read, write, or speak. The promotion of her art depends entirely on other people. She cannot give an interview or tell you what her drawings mean. The only way to get to know her, besides looking at her work, is to be next to her in a room. “And so I found myself in Auckland,” Laura Preston writes. Preston travelled to New Zealand to profile King, who, at 75, may be the country’s greatest living artist. Read the full story: https://www.newyorker.com/.../susan-te-kahurangi-kings...’
