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High summer is coming and so it must be time for a Wivenhoe tea party. Nothing too traditional mind: poetry, jokes, music, cake and conversations. Oh, and a licenced bar as well - hurrah!

Throw in the Pop Genius of this Parish as your compare and performer, and all of a sudden An Afternoon Upstairs… with Martin Newell seems rather appealing.

The Pop Genius is celebrating twenty years of not being purely a pop genius, with 1990 roughly the time when Wivenhoe’s finest branched out into spoken word.

Saturday 11th June at The Greyhound (you don’t say…) from 3-5 pm is when the Wivenhoe tea party will be taking place. The Pop Genius is keen to explore the Upstairs space outside of restaurant hours, to see if it has a future for other live events in the town:

“It’s an experiment, really. The Upstairs restaurant has become a genuinely classy venue, located above what has gradually become Wivenhoe’s unacknowledged arts centre. I want to see if I can use ‘dead time’ – when the restaurant isn’t being used – to bring a one-man cabaret show to people, at a time when there’s nothing else going on.

Not everybody wants to stand in a crowded pub late at night craning his or her necks to see a show. This will be something different. And if it works, who knows? It might lead to me staging other events there.”

The annual Golden Afternoon shows by the Pop Genius staged at Colchester Arts Centre seem very much in the mould for this performance:

“The idea is to do a two-part cabaret-style show in one of Wivenhoe’s best performance spaces, at an hour when people who can’t make – or don’t like night-time events, can attend. Tea and cakes will be served and there is of course, a bar downstairs.”

Four pounds for tea, cake and poetry on a Saturday afternoon sounds like a decent deal to me. Tickets are on sale at the Bookshop and behind the bar at The Greyhound. Space is limited, but they will also be available on the door.

Not many towns can boast a genuine Pop Genius; not many towns can boast a bar that will put on a tea party. Combining both seems uniquely Wivenhoe.

Chin chin.