Fetes Accompli

All those summer festivals in the local area that you’ve already missed

Vintage Mobility Scooter Rally
Madeira Drive, Brighton, 22nd July, 11am onwards.
Classic, collectable ‘Ollertons’ – from the 1970s state-issued, battleship grey model, to today’s ubiquitous, red-glitter runabout. With inane commentary over a loud tannoy that there is absolutely no escaping.
RAINED OFF.

Aldrington Festival
Wish Park, 21st July, 11am – 11pm
Day-long festivities in a part of the city that doesn’t seem qualified to consider itself a communtiy. Expect face-painting, over-priced cake stalls, a band that one of your mates is in, English belly-dancing, five minutes’ acute angina when one of your kids goes missing, and an unsupportable distance from the nearest offie.
RAINED OFF.

Slack Lane Farm – Open Day
Slack Lane, 14th July, 10am-5pm
Tractor rides, farmers’ market, livestock to gawp at, a few old bits of farm machinery, and some hay bails– all in a beautiful setting. Hours of fun for the kiddies.
RAINED OFF.

WHAT WAS THAT?

Can’t remember the name of a book, song or film? Mike Hunter is the man with the answers….

Dear Mike,
When I was a teenager, I went to the cinema to see a film that made a lasting impression on me. Set in a lunatic asylum, it followed the story of one of the inmates there, a rebellious figure who was almost certainly not mentally ill, and his daily battles with the ward nurse, an unsympathetic tool of state oppression. There were other notable characters, including an innocent young lad called Billy,
and an imposing, possibly mute, Native American.

Somehow the story did not seem confined to its setting, but tackled the nature of society as a whole, with the anti-hero embodying the spirit of the ‘Counter-Culture’ pioneered by such notable 1960s figures as the thinker Dr. Timothy Leary and the celebrated novelist Ken Kesey. I would love to see this film again, but can’t for the life of me recall its title. I have read several editions of Halliwell cover to cover, and scoured IMDB, but can find no reference to it, and attempts to summarise the plot to my friends have drawn blank incomprehension.

Please, please help, or I might wind up in an asylum myself!
Yours desperately,
Darren Richards, Hangleton

Dear Darren,
Well – you are a ‘One’! Your attempts to describe it probably ‘flew over’ your friends’ heads, and they all no doubt thought you ‘cuckoo’, but the film does exist, and is none other than the 1975 classic The Naked Civil Servant starring John Hurt as gay author and raconteur, Quentin Crisp. Keep those letters flooding in!
Mike. x