Hello! For the past several weeks we have been corresponding with kindly folk across the UK and Ireland, organising a route and itinerary for our August month of screenings and visitations in some of our ancestral places.
The first two screenings: While in the south of England we are attending two screenings/meet ups. The first in London at The Remakery on August 3.
and the second in Ely, Cambridgeshire, on August 10.
While in the south of England we’ll be visiting friends in Dorset and Devon, both of whom are part of the Mythopoetics Men’s Lodge that Patrick is also part of.
Some of Patrick and Woody’s ancestry in the UK is in the Midlands and Yorkshire, and we’ll be staying in Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire, where Sylvia Plath’s gravestone is. We are co-creating a gathering and screening there too – more on that to follow.
While in London, we will get to see Yorkshire v Middlesex at Lords. Woody is super excited for that one-day match. On his Dad’s side of the family, Yorkshire homes many of his old people, and is where the yorker originates, a full pitched ball that aims to get under the batsman’s feet that Woody is getting pretty good at turning on in a game. But more than cricket, Woody will also learn where some of the revolutionary genes comes from. Here is Patrick’s midlands and Yorkshire DNA overlayed by the Luddite Triangle.
Meg’s ancestry hails from Siberia and Poland, and one day we may go on that ancestral pilgrimage too, although that might take a miracle (or a sailing boat) as the most significant oil war in history escalates just as we’re about to depart for this one.
Having spent 15 of the 20 years Artist as Family have been together refusing air travel it feels good to be travelling with intention, just before cheap oil permanently disappears.
A number of years ago Patrick’s father Robert traced (via the records) the family back to around the 12th century, that is to the earliest recorded common folk surnames (that came about for taxation purposes). And then a few years ago Patrick was gifted a DNA kit for his birthday and from this his ancestry was mapped as such:
What follows is a rough map of our August pilgrimage, including both ancestral places and screenings. We are being hosted by goodly folk along the trail and look forward to meeting up with some of our subscribers along the way. Please
get in touch if you’d like more details for the various screenings and meetups.
Well, this is certainly a mappy and information dense post! Hopefully it will be useful for you as you either follow our journey or connect with us along the way. We arrive in London on August 1 and leave from Dublin on August 31.
We’d love it if you could let your friends and kin know of our screenings/Q&As in London and Cambridgeshire (more events to be posted soon). Screenings in Hebden Bridge, Findhorn Bay, Boat of Garten, Penicuik, Edinburgh, and hopefully in Ireland in the later part of the month.
We have one more online session this Thursday before we start packing – Joyful Resistance – online house and garden tour (the nuts and bolts of our systems).
Signing off for now from our cosy hearth,
AaF
