UP TO DATE - RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW!

Sometimes, the tales that storytellers tell seem to be set in a distant past, with no planes, no trains, no automobiles, no computers and certainly no mobile phones. That means they don't 'look' modern - but it doesn't mean that what happens, or the way people behave to one another, isn't just like what goes on all around us, right here, right now.

This meeting is dedicated to removing the olde-worlde patina, and polishing the tales up a bit for the present day. One strand will be A Rake's Progress, not Hogarth's from the eighteenth century, but Grayson Perry's from the twenty-first, as shown in the six tapestries of his series, The Vanity of Small Differences, currently on display at the National Trust property, Croome, in Worcestershire. Be prepared to have your preconceptions adjusted. Storytelling is the art of getting the pictures from the teller's head into the listener's.