The Best Show in Town (Black History Month, Dorchester)

It's a pity if you missed it. Daniel Defoe underestimated Dorchester!

This is a real event to celebrate. Put it in your diary for 2012.

The culmination of Black History Month: exhilarating African drumming and dancing from Bournemouth's Zubida Movements (Natasha Z); great rap from Liryc (South Africa); live poetry from Jamaican-influenced Bristol (Edson Burton); plus Gregg Kofi Brown and the Osibisa Collective. Little seven-year-old Ella was dynamite on the dance floor! I'm amazed that people weren't queuing up and down the High Street.

"From hence we turned up to Dorchester, the county town, though not the largest town in the county. Dorchester is indeed a pleasant agreeable town to live in, and where I thought the people seemed less divided into factions and parties than in other places; for though here are divisions, and the people are not all of one mind, either as to religion or politics, yet they did not seem to separate with so much animosity as in other places. Here I saw the Church of England clergyman, and the Dissenting minister or preacher drinking tea together, and conversing with civility and good neighbourhood, like Catholic Christians and men of a Catholic and extensive charity. The town is populous, though not large; the streets broad, but the buildings old and low. However, there is good company, and a good deal of it; and a man that coveted a retreat in this world might as agreeably spend his time and as well in Dorchester as in any town I know in England." Daniel Defoe