Here are some of the things I do, and have done, apart from books and columns.
Story-Telling
I tell grown-up stories every year during Penzance's Golowan festival. Some of these have been reprinted in the Cornish writers' magazine "Scryfa", and I recently contributed to a Cornish story-telling feature on BBC Radio 4. In collaboration with a friend from Penzance I am hoping to commit some stories to CD, and thus continue the oral tradition of the area.
Some of my contributions are in the form of poetry, which I prefer to read and hear in a nice noisy pub, and I am very fond of rhyme and the Cornish form of comic rhyming doggerel. (
Song-Writing
I do less of this than I would like, but I wrote several songs for the late Cornish folk-singer Brenda Wooton - for whom I also acted as occasional accompanist - which she recorded. I continue to write songs, but need the stimulus of demand to take it more seriously.
Script writing
Having a theatrical background I have always loved writing scripts. These are always hard to get away, but I had a full-length play presented at the Acorn Theatre in the 1990s - "Magbeth", a Shakespearian pastiche on the rise and full of Margaret Thatcher, much of it in blank verse and some in rhyme, which was great fun to write and perform, and is howling for a revival. A script I wrote for older children called "Birdbrain" is an exploration of the Virgin Mary as a person rather than an icon, taking considerable liberties with the accepted version - be honest, would you really be delighted if a human swan appeared in your living room and told you to expect God's baby? - and this received its first performance by a Westminster youth group in 2007. I've also written a film script on the extraordinary career of Perkin Warbeck, featuring a very nasty Henry VII.
PUBLIC SPEAKING
I've a variety of subjects on which I regularly speak - the RNLI and Penlee Lifeboat in particular, which I usually do for RNLI funds - and other subjects on which I've written (see 'books'), including The "Rosebud", St Michaels Mount, Serpentine, Glasney College, as well as other Cornish themes, and on being a writer.
VOICE-OVERS & BROADCASTING
Plenty of experience of recording and a history of contributions to BBC Radio Cornwall, for which I used to do a weekly press review