The Village Society assembled en masse for its September lecture, which was “Don’t be afraid of Virginia Woolf”, given by Carole Bourne-Taylor, our resident Oxford don, who has written a book and many articles on the subject. It was quite the best one so far this season. Although I have heard much of this before, this is a lady I often listen to and shall never tire of her chattering French accent. What she said seemed to provoke much interest in that eccentric and eclectic group known to history as the “Bloomsbury Group”, but to its contemporary cognoscenti as “The Bloomsberries”. The Pie Chart she showed at the end of her lecture, which made the numerous intimate connections between Bloomsbury personalities; colour-coded to represent participants’ sexual proclivities, and which soon resembled a multi-coloured spider’s web in its complexity, certainly seemed to summarize the content of her lecture as well as further sharpen the audience’s interest (as if it had shown any sign of flagging, during Carole’s extraordinary catalogue of bed-hopping in Bloomsbury!). For a change (!) there was a VW quiz afterwards (everybody groaned as Valerie announced it). The vote of thanks was given by her husband, who seemed to know something about the subject, too. And the raffle was, as usual, won by Parsons.
The second talk this season will be about the Abbotsbury Swannery, by the Swanherd, Dave Wheeler, and will be at 7.30pm on Friday 16th October, in the Village Hall.
GBT
for more information about this and other talks go to the Village Society's programme