Tag Archives: Christian beliefs

Steve Harley made me smile – some thoughts

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In 1991, Steve Harley played the Greenbelt Arts Festival at Castle Ashby in Northamptonshire. Greenbelt had it roots in the Christian music scene, and for some Steve was a surprisingly inclusion. For others – who wanted to check your faith credentials at the door, he perhaps shouldn’t have been there.

He chided the audience jokingly about why they had not been in church this morning instead of hanging around in a field in Northampton. What they hadn’t realised was that at the time Mr Harley was warden at the church he was part of in his home neighbourhood.

Steve suffered with polio as an infant and as a child spent at least 4 long periods in hospital. This hobbled him physically, but it gave him room to develop his love of words and to develop his art.

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The pleasure of poetry with Paul Cookson

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I first met Paul Cookson in the early 1980s at an Arts Festival called Greenbelt. Back then he was writing poems for adults and selling them in self-published booklets on the “fringe” area of the festival.

A couple of years later he had found his true vocation and graduated to writing poems for children. We started doing schools presentations of his work about 15 years ago and when I opened the theatre “Ravenscourt Arts@ Ravenscourt Baptist Church”, his performances became a regular if occasional part of our repertoire at the theatre as we have invited Paul to work with local schools groups.

This tradition continued in March 2016 as over 800 young people joined Paul over 6 events and laughed, worked with words, invented rhymes, and wrote their own poetry.

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