Well, that’s that then. In a bid to win a Town of Culture award, yesterday Devizes Town Councillors sent a digital postcard to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and, just like Mick Jagger and David Bowie duetting Dancing in the Street, no one dared to stop them!
Agreed, it’s illustrated with a brilliant and most apt photograph of the Winter Festival by Simon Folkard Photography, one which Simon kindly permitted us to use too when we reviewed the event. And, debatably, the idea to personify Devizes isn’t all bad, but the wording, oh, oh my, the wording is the car crash.
There was me thinking it was a Town of Culture Award, not a Town of Cringe one! It begins informally “Dear Phil,” and describes the town’s “shape” by “markets, makers and people who roll up their sleeves to bring ideas to life,” causing me to fear the postcard might be symbolic of all my sceptical views on this pledge.
Do I want Devizes to win this award? Of course I do. Do I believe Devizes has what it takes to win this award? Yes, that too. We have excellent cultural events and engagement in Devizes, and many of us “roll up our sleeve,” Yet in my experience we do not combine our skills adequately, and squabble between ourselves for the case of our own events we’re staging.
So, we have a vast array of different events, the Food Festival, the Arts Festival, DOCA, and so on. But, let’s take a look at the Frome model for a moment. Their town festival incorporates everything under one banner. There’s food elements, music, art elements too, all combined. If we tried this, it would be pistols at dawn! We can not even agree on one town Facebook group!
We have a writers group in Devizes, another at the Wharf. We have talented writers here at Devizine Towers, and then we have poets in Devizes, one in particular is exceptional (I think she knows who I’m talking about!) We even have writers sitting on the council, for crying out loud!!
Could the council not have commissioned some local wordsmith to come up with something more creative? For this postcard looks either AI generated or scribed by a councillor who fell asleep halfway through a day’s creative writing workshop.
I don’t know who wrote this, I would rather not know. But, the bottom line is that the wording on the postcard is cringeworthy, without any artistic flare. It continues to describe this personified town’s canal. Now, if it is supposed to be a person, I’d rather not imagine what part of the human body the author of it would class as its “canal,” but here’s suspecting they talk out of it.
To make matters worse, it goes on to tell the postcard’s recipient “Phil” about what they smell like! “I smell like malt, warm bread, and Thursday’s stalls…” I have no words left in me. Who writes about how they smell, in a postcard?!
Save for the expectation, in return, they could’ve asked Phil what he smelt like; “how about you?!” And the response could possibly have been, “thank you for asking, Devizes. I’m currently on holiday in Spain, and I smell like shrimp paella.”
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