Wirksworth to the fore

As I write, the Wirksworth Festival is about to start and the latest issue of Community Fayre has just arrived in the post. Those who thought this blog would be about our life in France need to adjust their sets, but only slightly - it is about our life, and occasionally that will include our life before France, including 27 years in Wirksworth, the little Derbyshire town that still means a lot to us. Among other things we still have family and friends there.

Community Fayre is the community newspaper. It has just reached its 150th edition and is full of interest for those like us who have Wirksworth connections. Apart from the Festival, of which more below, it has articles on Elliott Rennie promoting his Ellympics (slow motion sprint, paper plane javelin and invisible curling) from the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square - Elliott is son of our architect friends Rosie and Graham and also a colleague 'cellist of Mary's in the community orchestra (a genuinely inclusive musical group that's been going for many years).

The word community appears a lot in Wirksworth life, and there it is not an empty word. Long before we arrived there Anthony Gell School had been a beacon for town activity as well as secondary education, and for a time the whole of Derbyshire imitated Wirksworth's Community Education Council. The Town Council supported community efforts, as it doubtless still does, despite its own slender resources. (We have often bemoaned the way English local government takes away funds from local initiative whereas the French commune system leaves even small towns and villages with much more local control). The paper, the orchestra, the twinning with Die, the festival and much more sprang from this sense of sharing resources and working together. Small as the town is, it punches well above its weight.

The Festival has become a real artistic beacon, both in performances of all kinds and through visual arts - the Art & Architecture Trail is extraordinary, preceded only at the beginning by a few events in much larger places like Brighton, and both visual arts and music have both retained a local element as well as attracting talent from much further afield. It will, undoubtedly, be a great success, and we are proud of all our friends including the current Chair Bill Lounds who put so much effort into making it so.

Community Fayre this time is full of nostalgic memories and touching reminders of old friends - the Sam Taylor award set up by his parents Judie and Paul and brother Tim in his memory (he was killed in a road accident 11 years ago) for an outstanding pupil at the secondary school; our old neighbour Lester Simpson who has brought his huge musical talent into the life of the town, a memory of Ken Wilson who died this year and helped our sons among many others in Wirksworth Cricket Club, Lee Bowyer from our son Sam's year in school now following in his father's footsteps in the family paving and aggregates business. It also recalls the beginnings of Community Fayre itself in the early 80s, shortly after we arrived in Wirksworth. For those of us who have lived there it's a proud product of a real town community.

We can and do keep in touch with those, friends and family, who are still alive and well and living in Wirksworth, so there is special poignancy in remembering some of those who have died. Some of them are mentioned above, and other special friends included Mike Pegg who shared my enthusiasm for wine and passed on to me his home-made wine racks; Maggie Riddle whose friendship reinforced our involvement in twinning and our developing interest in living in France; and Peter Hoon, whose lovely black and white prints of Wirksworth were so often Christmas cards or little gifts we still treasure. His widow Jenny is curating an exhibition of them in the Festival this year, and I have used some to illustrate this post.