Day 2/10: Albion Grey and Nicole Mollet's Walk, Talk, Draw

I set off to Sheppey Healthy Living Centre to meet Albion Grey, a local writer who's kindly agreed to share some of his work with me and talk about this place with me. It's about an hour's walk away. Google maps says I should walk along the main road but there's no pavement and the cars are going so fast I make 1,2,3 attempts but have to keep heading back, what are you supposed to do as a pedestrian on these main roads? I'm getting angry when I remember THE MAP FROM THE TOURIST INFORMATION CENTRE!!!! When Jo and I were looking at it in the pub we saw the footpaths on it and there's one really close. 

To avoid ending up as roadkill I deviate from the route google maps is telling me to take and use the map instead. That's how I end up in this field at 8.30am. It's dreamy. And also someone's work place. I walk up through Minster, up the first hill on Sheppey I've encountered, past sweet bungalows. They're very pretty. Why does my brain stick to a story I've heard when what I can see with my own eyes contradicts it? At the top, and out of breath, I stop and look down over the fields. I continue through Minster, following my map and pick out the road named Seaside Avenue as the obvious one to go down. It leads straight to a beautiful beach with a brand spanking new toilet block. I message Jo this morning with a picture of the water and the sparkling rocks. 

When I reach the car park where we're meeting it's just about begun to rain. Albion is holding an umbrella. We exchange hellos and get chatting about Thamesmead as it's where Albion used to work. He knows the medieval abbey ruins I live near well and we chat about how it was mixed (with nuns too) and was also a brothel. It's nice to talk about Thamesmead. Initially, the idea of talking to people about the place they're without talking about the place I'm from felt transactional, one-sided and strange to me. But people really enjoy it. And that's the exchange – I'm asking my questions and they're telling me their answers. I'm comfortable with that, I'm familiar with facilitating workshops – asking people to make themselves vulnerable, express themselves and I support them whilst doing that. I thought this should be different.

Anyway, Albion and I walk along to the house on Marine Parade where the writer Uwe Johnson came to live. Lucy from Ideas Test had sent me a link to this Radio 3 programme on Uwe Johnson in Sheppey a few months back and I'd listened to it 3 or 4 times since. It talks about what brought him to the island to finish his book, how the estuary reminded him of the light open-ness and water of the Baltic coast, his annoyance at living next door to an artist, how he felt about being in the vicinity of the Richard Montgomery (sunk but still loaded with explosives and visible from the beach), his wife and daughter moving out, his drinking and his death. Listen here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02tmxjm. The house is nothing like what I thought it would be. Listening to the radio show I envisioned a bungalow high up on the hill, just like what I'd seen on my journey here. This is a very nice terrace smack bang in the middle of town. Maybe it had a different vibe 50 years ago when Johnson was here. We explore down the alleyway alongside the house to see if we can look into his garden. We spot the Napier pub which is where his friends would keep a stool free for him and lay out a newspaper for him to read. He'd sheepishly take notes for his book Island Stories here. It's so exciting to see it as I've always liked this bit of the radio programme when they talk about this stool. Sadly the pub's closed now but Albion says someone called Peter's got the stool. Phew. 

We'd planned to go and see Johnson's grave but by this time it's really starting to tip it down and so we decide to seek cover in Greggs instead. We each get a hot drink and some food. I'm absolutely soaked. Albion gets his book out and we read his short stories and poems out loud from Sheppey Writers and Friends anthology Deeds And Words: Tales from a barbed wire island. It's so joyful meeting a new person and then meeting them again in a new way through their work. Albion's stories mix people from his personal life with characters from history and lyrics from songs. Their mix of reality and fiction layers up the narrative in a mind bending/blowing way. Reading them out loud to each other, soaking wet in Greggs is quite an apt setting. 

I say goodbye to Albion and before I get to Rose Street cottage to join Nicole Mollett's walk workshop I pop into a charity shop to see if I can get something to help me warm up. Greggs was good but had its summertime air conditioning on still. Right there on the 1 pound rail, past the shorts and t shirts is a coat. Furry and padded, a dream come true. It makes me smile as I'd had this fantasy about my first day of the residency (before Covid messed up the format). I was going to arrive, go straight to a charity shop, buy a new top and bottom, go to the naturist beach, take off my Thamesmead clothes baptise myself in the waters and put on my new Sheppey clothes. 

Nicole Mollett's Walk, Talk, Draw is a walking drawing workshop and is part of the Estuary Festival. The description on the website reads The tour will explore some of the town's hidden footpaths, back alleyways and the iconic seawall. Participants will be given a series of short drawing exercises inspired by the local high street architecture and maritime industrial heritage. I've been really looking forward to it but it's still raining!!! Sure enough Nicole's made the very sensible decision to call off the walking element and instead use the time to explore Rose Street Cottage itself though a series of short drawing exercises. We start off by gathering faces. I go immediately to the photographs that Jo showed me yesterday. I draw those funny faces of the things made for the carnival as well as anyone's actual face who takes my fancy. It's peaceful and productive. Kyra's in the same room as me and we draw together in comfortable silence. There's so much to draw, we move around each other drawing masks on table tops and puppet like things that hang down. We share what we've done with Nicole and then she sets us a new challenge, this time drawing shapes. I swap my soft graphite for a fluorescent pencil and hunt out circles of old cameras and, trying to de-function-ify the shapes and let them just be. I think I hear Kyra saying she's going to layer them up (but maybe I imagined that!) so I do the same. We move rooms to explore more shapes and then meet downstairs to share our drawings and some cake! YES! 2 types! Apparently this is commonplace. I SO appreciate this. Artists need nourishment. I think back again to the echoey cavernous places I work with people to draw together, where you're not allowed to eat cake. Those places really lack humanity. This place is full of it. These people are great. We talk about books, befriending, women, local history, drawing and it's a total pleasure. We finish off by drawing what we can see through a frame. I've had such a nice time in this seat that I don't want to move so I stay here and luckily there's a mirror right there so I draw what I can see through(/in?) it.

Chris Reed gives me a map of creativity on the Isle of Sheppey by Victoria McBride to take with me and shows me the original, it's a thing of beauty. 

A BRILLIANT DAY, THANK YOU ALL!