Now my latest book really is launched

I was at Blaxhall village hall yesterday, talking about my latest book Where are the Fellows who Cut the Hay. The hall was packed, with people having to stand because we ran out of chairs. After being interviewed by Rob Leverett, the new rector, I signed and sold copies of my book and had some fascinating conversations . It was a delight when later, someone came over to point out her great grandfather John Goddard in the book she had just purchased. He was born in 1855 and was one of the first to buy a Suffolk Punch steam tractor from Garretts of Leiston.

We were also treated to a screening of A Writer’s Suffolk (1980) which was written and narrated by George Ewart Evans Here’s a Health to the Barley Mow (1955) which was filmed at the Blaxhall Ship, a unique pub that for 30 years has seen folk singing and step-dancing in its bar.

To complete the afternoon, Sheila Scopes and Daphne Gant, who knew George Ewart Evans when he lived in the village, unveiled a blue plaque that will remind all who visit the village that it was here that he wrote Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay.

Many of the conversations were about climate change, and how the publication of Ask the Fellows in 1956 had come at the start of a 70 year period over which global CO2 emissions had risen, to a point now, where we are slowly learning how to reverse that trend. The are so many clues to our future hidden in the writing of those almost forgotten 20th century Suffolk writers, George Ewart Evans, Adrian Bell and Ronald Blythe.