vagabond shopping baskets
By Alison Park, 22 June 2011 –
Two footsore travelling showmen called in at Low Sizergh Barn last month on their month long tramp through the South Lakes, performing puppetry, stories and songs at sites along the way. Their show, Vagabonding, was inspired by puppeteer Walter Wilkinson who walked and performed his way around the UK in the 1920s and 1930s. I just read Wilkinson’s Puppets in Yorkshire (1931) and was struck by today’s media flurry about the speculation in world food markets that has resulted in huge leaps in food prices. Walter Wilkinson railed against the way large scale production was “being used to produce a record dividend for some nasty group of scheming financiers, who hardly realise that they are playing the fool with so intimate a thing as the people’s food – the bedrock of their health, their joy in life."