Cae Mabon

I first heard Bob Dylan when I was about thirteen. A teacher was giving a talk about folk music and he played a crackly recording of a song called ‘Blowing in the Wind’. I thought it was by an old black man from the South. Then I found out about the young Dylan, less than ten years older than me. And so began a lifelong relationship with the music of a man I’ve come to think of as THE romantic poet of our era. I was never one of the obsessive fans who know all the songs and

The Background ‘Ken Campbell is amazing’, they said. I’d never heard of him but he was about to do a show, ‘The Meaning of Life’, at the Eden Project in Cornwall. I expected a Pythonesque spoof. It was funny but completely serious, stimulating beyond measure. Next day we met and talked. I had the naivety of someone completely ignorant of Ken’s extraordinary work so we got on well. He described his one man shows as ‘oral novels’. He’d seen a performance I’d done and at the end

Annwfn is the name given in early Brythonic (British) myths to the Otherworld. Middle Welsh sources suggest that the term was recognised as meaning ‘the very deep’ or ‘the great deep’ in medieval times. It is neither similar to the Christian notion of heaven nor the underworld of Classical mythology. Instead, it appears from the literature as a realm from which all symbolic, mythic and idealised forms arise. Mortals from our world journey in and out of Annwfn, just as the arc

Over the last few winters I’ve been writing a memoir, ‘Not Even A Stick… To Support That Dream’. The core of the book is the tale of my long and winding travels through Oregon, California, Mexico, Louisiana, Guatemala, Hawaii and Samoa between 1972 and 1976. It’s taken four decades before, with the help of scribbled journals, I’ve had time to write the story down. Scattered through my diaries I found glimpses of my journey’s ultimate destination: ‘I want the freedom to work h