PETER BLAKE IN BATH

During the week I went to see Peter Blake promoting his new illustrated edition of Under Milk Wood in Bath.

I love Under Milk Wood; I have visited Laugharne in South Wales were Dylan Thomas wrote it, and I believe it stands as a cultural definer of the time in which I was born.

I also like illustrated editions of classic works:  Doré's illustrations to Paradise Lost, or the Kelmscott Chaucer are markers with which I can compare this new Blake/Thomas edition.

But I was really disappointed with the evening.  It didn't get off to a good start: having boarded his train in London at 3.30, Blake didn't get to the lecture venue in Bath until 8.30, thanks to our now legendarily unlovable privatised railway (especially the version we suffer in Bath, called First Great Western).  But the audience typically forgave that for which Peter Blake was not to blame, and clapped him as he walked slowly up the nave of the church in which he had been booked to speak.  (Please note, normal speakers such as myself might get applause at the end of a talk (if I deserve it), but legends get clapped before they start.  The audience wanted to be in the presence of His Greatness - after all, how many designers of Beatles album covers have you got close to?)

But what followed was just too close to the interview that had been broadcast in BBC's Front Row just days earlier.  Instead of favouring us with a lecture by the Artist Himself, we got another interview, this time with the Holburne Museum director Dr Alexander Sturgis asking the questions.  In these would-be fireside chats, the two participants usually sit in arm chairs - great for TV, but not so good when you're in row 3, and right behind an earnest young art-man in the front row sitting bolt upright to fully absorb the Greatness.

I bought a copy of the book - that's what you're supposed to do at these events.  I have read it, and I admire the real tenacity and the genuine artistic engagement with the original writing.  I understand the characters Blake has given us, and his version of the Rev. Eli Jenkins is a more vivid version of the one I had already constructed in my own mind.

But my ragged paperback of the written work; read out loud - slowly - by myself, remains for me the best way to experience Thomas' masterpiece.