THE catalogue for Bridport Museum’s Auction of Promises is now available, with an extraordinary range of offers from around West Dorset including bread-making, paragliding, a knitted garment and a mini-facial.
About £2,000 must be raised this Friday night (March 12) to ensure that entrance to Bridport Museum in South Street collection remains free this year.
Star lots include the use of three holiday homes, one in [...]

TANTALISING PROMISES of goods and services are flowing in to the appeal to Keep Bridport Museum Free.

Offers so far include portrait photography by George Wright, a £100 restaurant voucher, pottery and bread-making lessons, a guided walk along the Jurassic Coast, and a police security check.
Pledges will be auctioned at Bridport Arts Centre on March 12.
Bridport [...]

BRIDPORT is to host the UK’s first ever Hat Festival.
It could become the world’s biggest celebration of headwear and millinery, and it should provide an additional incentive for tourists to visit Dorset in the early autumn.
The plans are being backed by some of the industry’s biggest names.
The first Hatfest will run for three days from Friday, [...]

ONE OF Lyme’s best known characters, Dr Colin Dawes, will be revealing the secrets of metal detecting in The Undercliff at a talk being arranged by The Friends of Lyme Regis Museum at the Woodmead Hall on March 4. Even those with no aspirations to treasure hunting themselves will be fascinated by this man of many [...]

BRIDPORT 1/D/09/002009 & 1/D/09/002010 Conservation area and listed building. Satellite dish Electric Palace, South Street (From the latest list of planning applications issued by West Dorset District Council)�
THIS is a cool idea. Honestly, it is. The 1.2m satellite dish proposed for the south wall of the Electric Palace is not just any old dish. It is bespoke.
It will [...]

ONE OF Lyme’s best-known residents, the playwright Ann Jellicoe, will be guest of honour at a luncheon in aid of the town Museum on 4 February at the Alexandra Hotel when she will talk on “Trials and Triumphs: a Life in Theatre.”
A long time supporter of the Museum, and at one time co-curator with her [...]

COMPOSER Rachel Leach has created a dramatic score to bring to life a silent film made in Bridport in the late 1930s.
Dope Under Thorncombe, a melodrama based around West Bay, was made by local people under the direction of amateur filmmaker Frank Trevett.
His daughter, Vivienne Smith, pictured with the camera that captured the story, handed [...]

THE POET W H Auden used to say – “no meal for an Englishman is complete without potatoes.”
I suppose it’s true these days that there might be girls and women who genuinely prefer pasta or even rice or cous-cous… and I can think of men who don’t mind eating these potato-substitutes (sometimes), but their inner [...]

From dorsetforyou.com’s What’s On listing
By Category > Activities/Nature (sports, gardens, walks, trails, wildlife)
<http://tinyurl.com/yl6du5u > Flight’s Country Music Club
Top class country music banos – no lice dancing – Last Saturday in the month
Happy Christmas!
(And thank you for this to Trevor Bevins)

BRIDPORT Arts Centre has just released its Spring theatre programme for 2010 and Trigger’s take on Harold Pinter is officially one of the highlights.
Roger Lloyd Pack (aka Trigger) is going to be reading through Pinter’s 1995 play Ashes to Ashes. He’ll appear with Harriet Walter as part of A Pinter Celebration day on January 30.
Also [...]