On Saturday 7 June, we gathered 100 Ernest Journal readers together for a special event at the Cube Cinema in Bristol to celebrate the launch of print issue one. Here’s what happened next…
Thank you to everyone who made this sold-out event such a success - with special thanks to team Ernest and helpers, the awesome Cube staff, Sipsmith for inventing explorer themed gin cocktails, our guest poet, four rather charming speakers and film maker Jonny Clooney for capturing the evening.
Rumours abound of a follow up event this autumn to tie in with print issue two (we’ve picked a theme and everything). Sign up to our newsletter and we’ll make sure you’re the first to know when tickets go on sale.
A little more about our speakers and guest poet...
Our guest poet for the night, Craig Walsh, is based in Oxford where he works as a paediatric nurse. Craig has a passion for the spoken word and always sees the humorous side of life. This is his first poetic collaboration, working with his cousin Ernest Journal's Phil Walsh. Drop Craig a line for a bespoke poem.
James Aiken introduced two short films, both set in the far north. Almost Arctic began as an intrepid surfing trip to the remote Westfjords in Iceland, but soon evolved into a way to experience the region’s history and landscape, offering an unique insight into how long held values and traditions adjust to fit into a modern world. Home Ground is a short anthropological film exploring how two very different, but geographically close, cultures relate to one another within a striking and vast natural landscape. Featuring Siggi the Icelandic sailor and Dines the Greenlandic hunter.
Explorer, equestrian Long Rider and journalist Jamie Bunchuk has ridden horses across Kazakhstan, lived with a hunter in Tajikistan and rafted along a frozen river in marigolds in Mongolia. On the night, Jamie regaled us with tales of his 100 mile camel-supported (and vodka-fuelled) run across the Kyzulkum – or Red Sands – Desert in Uzbekistan, wearing a £3 pair of pumps.
In sci-fi, comics, and films, "Nazis in space" is a ever-popular theme. But beyond crackpot conspiracy theories is there any evidence? David Robinson probed a murky world of rockets, rumours, and flying saucers in search of the truth.
Writer, performer and radio presenter, David Bramwell recounted his extraordinary adventures with a 100-strong community in Italy who have built the world's largest underground temple, taught plants to sing and claim to have built the world's first 'fully functioning' time machine. Their first 'temponaut' goes under the name of Gorilla Eucalyptus.
For more tales from David's year travelling round some of the world's most extraordinary communities, head to The Crown Tavern on Clerkenwell Green, London, this Wednesday 25 June for the official launch of
The No. 9 Bus to Utopia.