The first event in the Charleston Festival was Andrew Motion talking about his newest collection of poems, Essex Clay, about his mother, who he has already written about in In the Blood, and his father, who fought in the war and never read, except half a book by Hammond Innes. He spoke with great and sometimes tremulous intensity, not just about England, but also Baltimore, where he has the pleasure of not being so well known; and about his first girl friend, anonymised, who appears in the poem. And about Trump and climate change, brilliantly.