This is Morcambe. This is where I am. It’s where 23 Chinese Cocklers died. They were trapped in the tide. This weekend a show – THE LONG WALK was performed in their names.  I helped write/devise it with Pete Moser the main instigator and the artistic director of the entire project. It is a soul searching project – how did this happen?

Pete Moser’s house faces the bay and he and his family remember that fateful morning. Pete and his wife work at More Music Morcambe, an incredible organisation who  promote support and encourage the North West community to live through music and have music live through them.   Pete is the artistic director and approached me a year or so ago about this project.

Morcambe is a run down community in parts, like many of our beach resorts its hey day is in the past – these coastal towns feel almost resented by the rest of the country. But it is set around a most beautiful bay.   The amusement arcades lights flash against the night FUNTIMES it says in a thousand small bulbs.    I was filming there just the otherweek for something entirely different.

Pete has spent a year researching those Chinese cocklers,  Chinese music and China itself.

The event was amazing – there had to have been one hundred people on stage at one point.  Goose pimples are always a sign of something special. Either that or someone left a door open.    For me, hearing poems that I had a hand in sung by an elderly lady from Morcambe backed by an orchestra was just incredible – and so too hearing the words coming from the amazing voice of Seaming To a sign I went to my hotel afterwards and to the local Chinese for food as I hadn’t eaten all day. The poster for the event was up on the wall,  already a part of its own past.