I have been equally lauded and lambasted for reading it. I've been told in no uncertain terms that it's rubbish and what am I doing wasting my time? "It's a cross between Mills & Boon and the Marquis De Sade" was one memorable comment thrown at me with near scorn. But equally I have had the most unlikely conversations with strangers about characters, plot development, narrative structure, and how difficult it is to write a good sex scene and felt a connection that, as an avid reader, I don't often get.  

And on the 17th September we'll have the soundtrack to it too, curated by the author, the 15 classical pieces of music she name checks in the book. That along with the name checking of Portadown artist Jennifer Trouton's work,  it seems that the former Belfast based EL James, married to a man from Newry, is using her new found fame to push and promote other creatives.

And come on, nobody is expecting it to win the Pulitzer Prize. It is what it is, pure escapism and as the grey clouds of financial doom and gloom encircle us, who wouldn't want a bit of the Christian Grey lifestyle to spread some light on us? Once he has removed the blindfold of course! 

And I laugh out loud. Happiness and sad songs do go together!

And I suppose that's what we all loved about her. Not just planting fans' bulbs, but the fact that she wrote like she was our friend. A born storyteller, she said to me that she wrote exactly how she would speak, "wait till I tell you....I always feel I am writing to a friend".

She was open about the agonies she would have about a new book, wondering is anyone going to read it, just as nervous she said after twenty as she was about her first, "afraid this is the one which is going to lose you everyone". Even as she was speaking, I am thinking, but this is Maeve Binchy, surely her publishers must be doing cartwheels every time they see a new book appear. But somewhere deep inside her, she was still that wannabe writer whose first book was rejected 5 times by publishing houses before finally being accepted. 

Some of her last words in my final interview with her make me smile. " You know I'm 70 this year, but inside I still feel 23, I always imagined as you got old, your mind got narrow and you started disapproving of things. I don't disapprove of anything".

She was a one off.

 

I met the artist Basil Blackshaw for the first time last week. He's a hallowed name in the Irish visual arts world, but is quite contrary when it comes to interviews. I kind of respect him for it. Why would you subject yourself to endless media interviews when, as he said to me last week, "the paintings should speak for themselves". He reminded me of Van Morrison. Doesn't he always say his songs do the talking for him? In many respects the two men share a similar world view. Let me be creative, they're saying and then enjoy that creativity, be it a painting or a song. But as an arts journalist it's my job to ask the whys of their art. Not that I've ever had an audience with Van the Man. The closest I've ever got to him was going into an East Belfast coffee shop, seeing someone I thought I knew at a far table, half raising a hand in greeting and the smile freezing on my face in horror as I realised half way through smile of so called recognition that it was Morrison himself. I retreated to an even further table and proceeded to ignore him as much as I could.

Fame and anonymity are uncomfortable bed mates, but both Morrison and Blackshaw seem to have a knack for keeping themselves to themselves, a skill in this celebrity-obsessed world. Blackshaw has taken his desire for anonymity to extremes, apparently once, I'm told, pulling a paper bag over his face for a newspaper photographer at the opening of his own show in a Dublin art gallery!

At least last week we got him to stand in line with us and get his photo taken, brown paper bag free!

I have never met him before and when we arrived at the FE McWilliam Gallery in Banbridge to do the interview last week I was struck by his apparent fraility, but his absolute conviction as he walked around the exhibition of his work for the first time.

I eavesdropped in as he and his partner Helen talked about paintings, some of which he hadn't seen in years, others which he thought could be better lit and others he thought shoudn't have ended up in the exhibition at all. He may be about to turn 80 but his sense of aesthetic is deep. I enjoyed watching the curator square up to him, which he enjoyed back. No shrinking violets allowed in his company. What would he have been like to know 30 or 40 years ago? Portraits of old friends open the exhibition as you walk through the door - David Hammond and John Hewitt (now deceased), Michael Longley and Brian Friel. To have been a fly on the wall during those sessions. The chat, the energy, the sheer delight in each other's talents obvious.

I came to know Blackshaw's work probably best in his designs for the Field Day Theatre Company's posters. Incredible images from the figurative realism of the lamp in "The Communication Cord" to the apparent childlike drawing of a sailing boat for "The Cure at Troy" to the bold, bright yellows and reds brushstrokes of Saint Oscar. I love them all, in very different ways. Each one perfectly complimenting the play.

He tells me Stephen Rea has asked him to create new art work for Field Day's series of three new plays for Derry in 2013. But no, he says, I can't. He raises a hand, flaps it around, and says of his hands, "they're useless". I can't get them to work, and if they don't work, I can't do any of my best work. It's a gut-wrenching moment, a reality check, of a body failing a mind, but a mind so in charge that he can still articulate why. I look at the hands being waved casually in front of me, hands that created some of the most celebrated art work of recent years on these islands being consumed by old age. I know Stephen will be gutted. It's the end of an era to not have a Basil Blackshaw poster. Celebrate him while we still can, and while he still has the mischievous wit to wear paper bags on his head!

Basil Blackshaw at 80 is at the FE McWilliam Gallery in Banbridge until October.

While that year sadly ran out of fizz and finance halfway through, there has long been a message given out that IMPACT 92 had too narrow a focus on what are seen as high arts and culture. But what high arts and culture ! I know people who still talk about events they saw during that year. The city was already riding high on being the place of international art in the shape of the Orchard Gallery and international theatre in Field Day.

While the Orchard Gallery is gone, two visual art galleries and young curators work within two gallery spaces to bring cutting-edge material to Derry -  The Void and the newly-opened CCA Derry~Londonderry. It will be interesting to see what their role will be when the Turner Prize comes to the city next year and what the legacy of that visit will be locally.

Then we look at Field Day, with three new plays being premiered, one of which is by American writer and actor Sam Shepherd. That is a WOW factor. But sadly it's been an absence of nearly 20 years for a theatre company, which prided itself on being Derry-based and on bringing the world to the city. Back in the mid 90's when I was a placement student with Field Day, I stood in a former church on Great James Street with the Field Day board, looking at the potential of the space becoming a theatre where they could base themselves permanently. While this never happened, (and I wasn't involved in the discussions as to why it didn't), can you imagine the wealth of writing, acting, directing and producing talent, that could have been nurtured in a Field Day repertory theatre over the past two decades ?

So if there is to be a legacy (the big buzz word of the year), can we at least start housing our talent  for 2014?

The prize, given to an artist under the age of 50 and with a £25,000 prize, is already famed for its controversy, with annual regular attacks asking is it art?  

The Times' Rachel Campbell Johnston on BBC Radio Ulster's Arts Extra tonight says that it's a "shortlist for a world that feels that things have gone rather wrong.....it has a mad rather vaudevillian feel, like there's been a kind of take over by the clowns".  So even she's a bit worried about where the Turner is going this year.

While this isn't the shortlist for Derry, and we won't know who the shortlisted four are until this time next year, I'm enjoying playing around with the notion of  Lali "Spartacus" Chetwynd doing a Jabba the Hut style performance piece in Ebrington. Ebrington is still the preferred site for hosting the Turner exhibition next October, only the third time to be outside of the Tate, after Liverpool and Gateshead, but locally I am hearing mounting concerns about the ability of the site to sustain not only a major art exhibition, but deal with the anticipated crowds. Some say that the ambition to bring the Turner to Derry hasn't been matched - yet - with the scale, the drama, the sheer, overwhelming Turner-ness of what the prize is about.  

The BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, a purpose built visual arts space, was preparing for the Turner for over two years. With a year to go to Derry, there appears to be no plan. I know there are hopes that by the middle of this month there will be a plan in action and a curatorial team on the ground to start the process. That's the shock at the moment. Not the art, which for the Turner is ironic.

The Turner Prize 2012 exhibition will be at Tate Britain, 20 October 2012 – 20 January 2013. The winner will be announced live on Channel 4 on 3 December 2012

In 1992 I sat within spitting distance of Fiona Shaw as Electra in Deborah Warner's stunning production for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The setting was the Templemore Sports Complex in Derry, the five a side football and badminton courts opened up for what was one of the most important plays to be seen in Northern Ireland. It was part of the year long festival IMPACT 92 and Sean Doran, the festival director, had bravely booked Electra, with Shaw playing it in her Irish accent, to sell out crowds. People were in tears after it finished, unable to leave their seats, the power punch of Shaw's performance and the raw emotion still pulsating through the air after the cast had left the stage.

Last week I was within spitting distance of Fiona Shaw again as she was in Derry at the invitation of the pioneering Verbal Arts Centre to promote love poetry for another collaboration with Warner, Peace Camp (check out a video fronted by Fiona here). White Park Bay in County Antrim, and Mussenden Temple in Downhill Demesne, near Coleraine, have been selected to be a part of the event.

It's incredible to watch her recite poetry, from memory. Her take on an extract from Ted Hughes' Ovid was mind blowing. Earlier in the day, I sat in on an imprompt mini masterclass, in which she dissected almost every word of a poem being read to her and promptly brought new meaning and clarity (and a tear to my eye) with each word. To hear her recite poetry is to fall in love with it. Fans of True Blood don't know what they are missing by not hearing her real passion.

More info on Peace Camp here

I had met with Philip back in late Feburary and he played extracts from the work on his piano at home, but I didn't really know what to expect. A work for mezzo soprano, choirs and brass , it sets words from the original Latin Requiem Mass, so you get six sections, including an extract from Dies Irae (a reduced fire and brimstone one according to Hammond in the programme notes), followed by Domine, Jesu Christe, the words poignantly apt in the context of the night "deliver the souls of all the faithful departed/From the pains of hell and the watery depths" to Lux Aeterna "May ever lasting light shine."

It began at 9pm, and there was a sense of the clock ticking to 1140pm, the moment when the Titianic struck the iceberg in 1912.

We were there, all 800 of us, to witness something. It felt more than a premier of a new work. It was an event. Even the way the performers were placed in the cathedral was thought out, with one half of the choral and brass section of the Belfast Philharmonic Society and Downshire Brass at the front door of the church, the audience in the middle facing each other and the other half of the choral and brass section at the altar, with Anuna walking on in dramatic fashion with candles as the lights were dimmed singing a plainchant Sanctus and Benedictus. Belfast-born, now New York-based, mezzo soprano Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek provided a single voice of haunting clarity and beauty, while the Fidelio Piano Trio (Darragh Morgan, Mary Dullea and Robin Micheal) eerily echoed the Titanic band, the lost souls of those musicians playing on and writer Glenn Patterson took to the pulpit to read a series of literary meditations. His take on the two wireless operators sending out distress messages packed an emotional punch that took me by surprise. He told me afterwards that he had avoided all the Titanic material, for fear of being swamped, but had been struck by the depth the Titanic had sunk to. Two and a half miles. It only made sense to him when he saw two and a half miles on a road sign into the city centre and as he walked it he felt the depth.

But amidst all of this, what struck me the most was the feeling we were all sitting in the hull of a ship because of the placing of the performers. Wih the audience in the middle, it felt like we were in a great ship, as the dimensions and scale of the Cathedral mimicked the overwhelming presence of the Titanic. I was told there were 800 audience members, and swelled by the choirs, brass sections, and various musicians and conductors, our physical presence had eerie parallels with the 1,500 people drowned.

And if the event wasn't special enough, Irish Pages, the local literary magazine run by poet Chris Agee, had printed 1,000 special editions of the programme, including transcipts of the Requiem and short essays. As Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness said to me afterwards, it was a line by poet Michael Longley that summed up the night for him. "We are blessed to have in Philip Hammond a splendid Irish composer who will listen to the sea and bring back to us the voices of the drowned".

You can hear Philip Hammond's Requiem for the Lost Souls of the Titanic on the BBC iPlayer until Saturday the 21st of April. You should listen. It is a remarkable moment of history in which Belfast listened to the dead and let them speak.

Not so with Queen's. There was no handover, and a spare two line statement issued by the University says Mark Prescott is moving on to “pursue business interests in London”. As someone said to me, it made him sound like Dick Whittington!

Mark's going is a real shame. First, he seemed to be fired by programming the 50^th festival. I met him about two months ago for a catch up on plans and he was passionate about the programme. Secondly, with no festival director, it puts the local arts scene into a vacuum. Belfast losing the director of a leading festival in a big anniversary year puts the people working in an already cash-strapped, difficult creative environment under enormous pressure. Queen's says the festival will go on, but at what cost? and isn't it always about the cost?

 

I did an interview yesterday with an Irish artist, Joan Walsh-Smith. She discovered only a few weeks ago that a public art piece she did for Derry in the 1970s had been demolished. She only realised it was gone when her daughter did a search on Google Maps for it when she was updating her website for her. Joan and her husband Charles, now in their mid 60s, co-created the "City People" art work in 1972. They now live in Perth, Australia and are highly-regarded artists there, even being awarded 

 "City People" won an Arts Council of Northern Ireland competition in 1972. A new urban park on Foyle Street was chosen as its location and it made up part of the perimeter wall. In the 1990s Foyle Street Urban Park was demolished to make way for a carpark. I can't get Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi out of my head. 

Now I have only a hazy memory of the park and of the art work. If I'm honest, I didn't even notice the park was gone, and it was only a journalist Sean McLaughlin, writing for the Derry Journal, who broke the story.

I suppose you assume that public art is protected. You would imagine the piece had been carefully dismantled, put into storage or relocated. It's got me thinking about how public art is stewarded after it is put up? Are there contracts now, the rights of the artist respected?

Or does public art have a shelf life? Does it have to cede to new ventures 20/30 years after it's put up? It changes the whole idea of why public art is commissioned if it is to be arbitrarily de-commissioned. It also begs the question about the worth of one piece of public art over another and the fame of one artist over another. Since I started talking about this on Twitter (@marielouisemuir) and on my facebook page last night, I've had some interesting responses. The FE McWilliam Centre tells me that The Judo Players by FE McWilliam, which is part of Derry City Council's public art work portfolio, is going to get repaired. It has had a hand missing since vandalism years ago. The council want to get the hand remade to repair the piece. As the gallery said to me on facebook: "I  think it does beg the question about the worth of art or rather different artists' work. Do you think if The Judo Players was by a relatively unknown artist the council would be looking to repair it?"

Another comment asks about the Emigration Statues by the late Derry-born artist Eamon O'Doherty, whose public art work includes the Anna Livia monument aka the Floozie in the Jacuzzi. It was once a major installation on Dublin's O'Connell Street until it was relocated to Heuston Station. His public art work "The Emigrants", from 1990, was originally located on Waterloo Place. When Waterloo Place was re-developed, the statues were re-located to down by the quay, locally known as 'behind Sainsburys'. But one comment on my facebook page asks about the piece when it was on Waterloo Place "there was a statue of a girl reaching into the fountain there; was she part of the Emigration Statues because she has not made it on the move down behind Sainsburys?"

Where is that statue? Or did she just miss the boat?

The irony is that Joan Walsh-Smith still has the original fibreglass moulds of her piece. She says that it would be relatively inexpensive to recast the work. She is willing to ship them across, especially with the UK City of Culture next year. Derry City Council's Town Clerk Sharon O'Connor speaking to me on BBC Radio Ulster's Arts Extra last night says it is unlikely to happen. She doesn't want to look back. CIty People won an Art in Context competition in 1972. It's context is over.

So why is there a push to reunite Anthony Gormley's 1987 Sculptures for Derry for next year? The double-sided Janus figure cruciforms were commissioned by Declan McGonagle of the Derry City Council-run Orchard Gallery and were put in in three particular locations on the Derry Walls: on the east overlooking the Foyle River, over the Bogside by the remains of the Walker Monument and on the Bastion overlooking the Fountain. Of the three originals, only one remains in Derry, now outside the Millennium Forum. There is an apocryphal story that it was actually found in a skip. The other two are in the United States. It wouldn't have anything to do with Gormley's status in the art world since Angel of the North that this push is on to bring them "home" so to speak? Or maybe it's because his grandfather is from Derry?

Should City People be re-moulded and rise again in 2013? Or did they just pave paradise and put up a parking lot in time for all the cultural tourists in 2013?

Glenn's new book “The Mill for Grinding Old People Young” is a historical love letter to his home town, his many layered research worn lightly, in a way very similar to Joseph O'Connor's “Star of the Sea”. The characters are writ large, against the social, political and economic history.

Gilbert Rice is the central character, introduced first as an 85-year-old in 1897, then taking us back to his teenage self, in 1831, living with his grandfather on what is now Royal Avenue. We stood outside what are now the Clarkes and Zara shops where the house would have been, with Glenn colouring in how the street was mainly residential back then. The young Gilbert then got a job working in the Ballast office at the busy City Port, getting drunk, falling in love and getting exercised about the Donegalls who owned Belfast. There's a beautiful sense of a rite of passage for the young man and for the reader too who is on that journey of discovery with him.

It's almost like we are time travellers, with all our knowledge of what is to happen to Belfast in the future, from the yet to be built City Hall to the sinking of the Titanic to two World Wars to civil unrest to powersharing.  

Glenn said that he found the mid 1800s fascinating, 30 odd years after the 1798 uprising, many of the people who took part in that were still around were politicians and business people, in a way, he says, similar to contemporary Northern Ireland. 

Off mike, he was still pointing out remnants of the past -  alleyways, buildings and streets that map out how little the city has changed, holding onto its past with pride. It's no coincidence that the publishers of Glenn's book, which he finished writing a year ago, have held off publication to the Titanic centenary. The city is now ready to face the horror of the tragedy of the Titanic, and remember it as it was when it left here. Likewise Glenn's book takes us back in time, to a people and a place that fed Titanic Town and shaped what this place, despite all that has happened, remains. 

It's a great read. I'm just sorry that I've finished it.

"The Mill for Grinding Old People Young" by Glenn Patterson is published by Faber on 15^th March.

 I re-watched them a few years ago ahead of an event at the Strule Arts Centre in Omagh which re-united Graham Reid, James Ellis, and Chris Parr the producer, among others on a panel discussion about the plays' importance. With tv drama becoming much more slick and cinematic in the last 30 years, audiences have a more sophisticated televisual language. But while there is a dated quality to some of the shots, with less cuts and pace than we expect now in tv editing, the passion of the writing and the energy of the central performances more than carry them.

To mark the 30th anniversary BBC Northern Ireland is going all out to celebrate the Billy legacy. The season begins on 5th of February  with a documentary talking to the writer, cast and crew about the making of the plays, followed by the first Billy play, and BBC Radio Ulster starts a new series with people's memories of the plays on Monday 6th February at 11.55am. 

Billy was Kenneth Branagh's first job, leaving RADA before the end of his course, and finding himself back in his hometown of Belfast. Branagh is keen to reprise the role which launched his career, as is everyone else associated with the new play. They are in the rare position of having all the original cast still alive.

But Reid is sanguine, aware that with Branagh's recent Oscar nomination and roles pouring in, will he have time to squeeze in a play in Belfast? 

I don't doubt that he will. He is passionate about the part, and I think he would crawl over hot coals to do it. Hopefully he won't have to do that! He has got the part!!

About a year after that workshop, I was living in Dublin and saw that Frank McGuinness had a new play on at the Abbey. Carthaginians. Set in Derry. I booked my ticket and went along. I was struck by the subject matter, Bloody Sunday, set in the City Cemetery. I don't know if the idea of the play was already bubbling in his head or our workshop acted as a catalyst. I just wish I had kept that pen. 

By the way, if you know anyone who was on that course please let me know. I would love to do something on it for the radio.