Back to Black

Sometimes I just feel like I have to make a little effort with my appearance. Once in a while I'll find it necessary to do a little more with my hair than simply trying to part it so that the prematurely grey bits don't show, and that in turn will provoke a bit of experimentation with eyeliner. After a bit of preening, I like to think that I achieve the twisted glamour of Amy Winehouse. Staring in the mirror the other day, though, I had to face the sad truth. I actually looked like Russell Brand.

Comfort and Joy

Last week we went to see singer Ian Shaw and trumpeter Guy Barker at the Pizza Express jazz club in Dean Street. We'd seen them separately and liked them, so seeing them together seemed like a good bet. We got there pretty early, because attempting to cut into a pizza close to the stage when musicians are playing can get a little risky (I haven't hit anyone with a flying dough ball yet, but it could happen). Anyway, the gig kicked off just as they were bringing out my dessert. Ian Shaw welcomed us all, then announced that they were devoting the evening to playing tunes from old movies - I *love* old movies and I had no idea that this was the theme for the concert, so that was a brilliant surprise. I was sitting there with in the front row, with my boyfriend, eating a Tiramisu, listening to old movie tunes and I thought "can life get any better than this?"... And then the waitress brought me my peppermint tea... and then Ian Shaw launched into a rendition of "Moon River".

The joy is persisting even now.

The High Life

Living in a second floor flat definitely has some downsides. We don't have an entryphone, so when the doorbell rings we have to run like mad down three flights of stairs to see who is at the door. Sometimes delivery people assume we aren't in and give up. This is somewhat annoying. Sometimes callers are incredibly persistent and decide to keep ringing the bell. I wish they wouldn't - it doesn't make me run any faster and it's really loud and annoying. In fact it makes me shout out things like "I'm on my way" loudly as I belt down the stairs, further confirming the views of all the neighbours that I am quite insane. Having to carry the washing downstairs and out to our bit of garden to hang it out can be a bit of a pain, too. These things are pretty trivial, though. There are a lot of compensations that more than make up for them.

The view of the sunset over the town from here can be spectacular, as can the sunrise. Planes seem to congregate, waiting to land at a nearby airport, and there's a kind of romantic nature to their flight against a dawn backdrop. At the beginning of the month we saw fireworks from all angles for free - no standing outside in the cold or forking out extortionate amounts to get into any of the big local displays for us! We also have good aerial views of the kamikaze squirrels that leap from tree to tree in the gardens below. Best of all, being so high up is really good for spying on the world below. A woman walks a multitude of greyhounds most days as I'm making my breakfast. One day it was raining and they were all wearing little coloured raincoats. They were so cute it made my day. Slightly more evil thoughts can be provoked by all this high-rise living, too, though. There is a perverse pleasure in spotting from above a crafty comb-over that would have passed for normal hair from below. I know who's bald and doesn't want to show it. Truly, I have the power.

Kurt Elling and Claire Martin, October 25th 2007

Mr Elling is a legend and he, Laurence Hobgood, Rob Amster, Kobie Watkins and Claire Martin and her band turned in a great performance at the Barbican in London last Thursday. It was terrific and it's good to see that Kurt seems to be developing a bit of a following in merrie olde England. All the hard work seems to be paying off for him. However, I grow weary of writing straight-up reviews of performances. Thus with many apologies to the man himself, here's my attempted homage to Elling-style lyricism. Don't take it too seriously. Just go with it. It could have been worse. I could have tried to write it in hipster.

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The heady whiff of intellectual jazz is hanging like a benevolent, blessed fog over the chilly, dark streets of an autumnal London town. The slim, hunched afficiandos of the genre shuffle through the city, averting their eyes from the rampant eroticism of Lord Foster's gherkin as they pass it on their way to the Barbican. Once inside they drink wine and reminisce about times past, loves lost and books read but most of all they talk about the music. The music is what they live and breathe. The music is why they have ventured out from their offices and homes. Music hangs in the air, blended with poetry and expressed with a slight hint of sixties hipster patter - the language they long to speak in their everyday lives but that can only really be let loose in such a space as this. Kurt Elling must be in town again.

They fall silent first for Claire Martin, who makes this jazz business look easy. Effortless and easy yet totally in command, the quiet contemplation of the gathered throng retreats into the dark corners of the wood-panelled walls. Wood could have returned to elemental carbon and back again without them noticing, for this siren held them in the palm of her hand. From Sting to Streisand and beyond, she sang each song with something sublime that sent the crowd out dazed and dancing for their half-time refreshment.

More wine warms the soul and launches them headlong into the flow of the music once again following. Old, comfortable and friendly sounds, "My Foolish Heart" lifted with poetry, a classic standard now wholly owned by Elling and brought to life again here and now. In this moment they stop, start and stop, so concentrated with Kobie Watkins as he believes in the beat. Laurence Hobgood rides the ebb and flow of his piano keys and Rob Amster embraces the bass, driving "The Waking" beyond brain, body, below-dwelling things, up, up and heaven-bound. Homage and hymn, "A New Body and Soul" and "Luiza", from now to times gone, with curious loops in "Minuano" echoing memories from their own histories. They rise to their feet with a glorious noise of their own and they are rewarded. "In the Wee Small Hours..." eases them back into the outside world, the unmusic space, but now with grateful joy. "'Nightmoves' indeed," they think. The music. And wine, more wine.
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Not being left on the shelf

The boyfriend and I have been a couple for almost ten years now. We've seen our relationship outlast those of most of our peers and whilst most of the times have been good, we've weathered a few storms along the way. In all of our time together I don't think anyone has ever asked me why I love him or what I see in him that's special (well, it would be a bit rude of them to ask, I suppose). If they did, two things spring to mind straight away: he loves books the way I do, reading ferociously and enjoying spending many hours in libraries and bookshops, and he's enthusiastic about things. When he develops a passion for something, he'll devote all his energy to it and work to see any related projects through to the bitter end. Yesterday he demonstrated both of these traits by putting up some shelves.

He went into town before I was even up and dressed yesterday morning and bought a hammer drill. The drill needed to be charged up for three hours before he could use it, which annoyed him a great deal. He was determined to get drilling as soon as he could. His toolbox was primed and ready for action. His spirit level was out. The shelving board was sawn to the right length and the position of the brackets was accurately measured out. When the drill was charged, he drilled like no man has ever drilled before. Soon he'd moved on to screwing up the shelf brackets, taking advantage of the ability of the drill to be a power screwdriver (he was fast becoming very attached to his tool). In no time at all we had six shelves in the alcoves either side of the chimney breast in our back bedroom (known to the estate agents as "bedroom two" and hopefully soon to be come a "study/dining room"). Even though he had been working like a demon all day, he seemed to have reserved the bulk of his energy for the next part of the process - sorting and shelving all of our books. Apart from a brief break to watch the rugby, he spent all evening categorising books and deciding where to put them. He agonised about the fine line between social science and philosophy. I got angry with him for classifying one of my military history books as fiction. At one point I casually remarked that the room looked like a branch of Waterstones and he came over all misty eyed, saying that was the nicest thing I'd ever said to him. When he'd finally finished filling half the shelves, put up some shelf lighting to illuminate the books and hung a picture on the wall I've got to admit that the room did look nice and he seemed pleased with himself. The rest of the books could wait. We both went to bed happy.

Half an hour later, as we drifted peacefully off to sleep, we heard a low rumble followed by protracted thudding, crashing and banging. The boyfriend was initially confused and sleepy, but it eventually dawned on him that there had been an incident in his new little library world. He went to investigate and found that the middle shelf (biography, history and reference books) had ripped itself away from the wall. There were books everywhere. Some had lodged themselves in a comedy manner behind the radiator. He was upset, but philosophical - it was only one shelf, one bracket in fact, that had come adrift and he could clear up in the morning. He returned to bed. At around 4a.m. we were both deeply asleep when the literary apocalypse began again in the room next door. This time it was louder. More books went flying, along with metal bookends. Philosophy and social science were now making a break for freedom. Only one book-laden shelf now remained standing, and the boyfriend took the sensible decision to take down the fiction section before it found its own way to the floor, taking chunks of plaster and paint with it.

The gentleman in the flat downstairs was very polite about it all. He said he didn't realise that the noises were coming from our flat. It must have sounded like the world was ending in his flat, though, because it sounded bad enough in ours. We apologised and bought him a bottle of wine (people in our building exchange bottles of wine a lot - it's all very civilised here). The boyfriend was a little upset that his shelving went wrong, but he's not been put off d.i.y. for life. In fact he's in our garden right now, with a friend and his trusty drill, putting up a shed. Next weekend he wants to try and shelve again, using more brackets this time. He doesn't give up easily - another reason why I still love him after all these years.

The Mail Menopause

The recent postal strikes have given rise to some particularly bitter verbal wrangling between strikers, union officials and Royal Mail managers in the media. By way of some respite from this, the Today Programme this morning featured a specialist "postal economist" who was convinced that once people are exposed to e-mail they no longer want to write letters, and thus the postal service needs to adapt rapidly to a completely new market or it will be doomed. He's probably right, but I am a sad, anachronistic fool and I like to write and receive proper letters. Electronic mail is a quick, simple and cheap way of keeping in touch. I use it as frequently as anybody else does today, but somehow it doesn't match the romance of pen and paper.

I love the mechanics of writing. I own proper writing paper, envelopes, stamps and a fountain pen. I bought an extension cable for my computer keyboard so I can lift it off my desk and set it aside, enabling me to actually write, not just type. Each Christmas my cards are always sent at the last minute because I try and write notes to my relatives and tell them what's going on in my life. I detest those awful "round robin" printed, generic news sheets that some people send out, detailing their achievements in the past year and how great their life is - I try and inject a little humour and not brag about anything good that happens (mainly because I have little to brag about, but there you go). I don't come from a close family and letters are an easy way to reach out to all the folks I don't see. When I do see them, the letters mean we have some connection and we have something to talk about. Elderly relatives like them especially. When my uncle was ill, he mentioned how much he liked my Christmas letters, so I made a point of writing to him regularly until he died. It wasn't hard to find stuff to write down. Sitting down and thinking about it, the little things I took for granted actually gained a significance - shopping on the internet, a day trip to Kew Gardens, a meal out or a daft announcement on the tube that made me laugh were all potential tales that might cheer him up or give him a glimpse of a world that was increasingly going on around him but that he couldn't be part of. I think maybe that without the meditative flow of ink onto paper I wouldn't have been able to see how I could reach out to him, how I could draw him into my life and give him something as his life was ending.

These days I write cards most often, especially "thank you" cards. I even wrote one to my friend to thank her for inviting me to her wedding. I had more to say than could be said comfortably face-to-face, and I had things to say that merited being committed to paper, held in time briefly by some sense of permanence and elevated somehow by being written by hand on a page. I like receiving letters and cards, too. When we moved into the flat and people sent us cards it was such a nice surprise. It's not like seeing someone pop up on MSN or say "I'll e-mail you this photo". There's something more to it. It isn't an instant, quick form of interaction - it requires time, thought and effort. I admit I write less now, because it can be a hard thing to find the time to do. When I first went away to university I wrote much more - we all did, all my friends from school, even though we had e-mail we still used to write. The same is not true today, but making the effort to write proper letters can bring rewards. Let's not sound the death knell for proper correspondence quite yet. Send something and you don't know what you might receive in return.

The Writing on the Wall

I don't usually like those big, long-running American TV series as a rule. I can't usually get really absorbed in them. I tried to watch "Lost" but gave up after episode three - it was a bit pretentious, the writing wasn't good and above all it wasn't funny. To capture my attention, or indeed my heart, and make me want to keep watching, these programmes need to have an element of humour. I used to enjoy "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" a great deal, mostly down to the fact that Joss Whedon (the creator)is a self-confessed anglophile with a real appreciation of the British sense of comedy. I think that's what appealed to me, anyway, but having said that maybe British and American comic timings aren't as out of synch as people make out.

At the moment I'm really enjoying "Heroes". It can be annoyingly intense at times, but it's got enough lighthearted content and decent plot development to draw me in and make me care what happens next. I even had a discussion with the boyfriend the other night about the parallels between Sylar and Mr. Renfield from "Dracula" (he's nuts, in his cell, with his insects - it's uncanny, I'm telling you). You've got to admit, too, that the mantra "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World" is pretty catchy. Which brings me to last night's episode of the American karmic realignment comedy "My Name is Earl" on E4. I do love that show - another example of American comedy making me laugh. Anyway, in this episode there was classroom scene with a bunch of kids standing in front of a blackboard. On the blackboard somebody had written, plain as anything: "Screw the Cheerleader, Destroy the World". Now that's funny, and an excellent antedote to the lingering temptation to take any of these shows too seriously.

In Tune with my Inner Geek

We've had digital television for a couple of years now. It's pretty good - without it I wouldn't have seen what Derek Acorah looks like when he gets possessed by a spirit (deceased, not alcoholic, for those unfamiliar with "Most Haunted"). There are a lot of repeats, but sometimes old stuff deserves to be seen again. Shows I enjoyed in my youth, like "Quantum Leap", "The Crystal Maze" and the now sadly defunct "Forty Minutes" strand of documentaries have a charmingly retro appeal now I'm approaching my thirties with trepidation. I like to think I'm expanding my cultural horizons by watching the American version of "Whose Line is it Anyway?" on Five US, too. Even if I'm not, it makes me laugh. The freeview box seemed to break a few weekends ago and I wasn't happy about it.

The boyfriend had begun his usual weekend breakfast routine of stalking around downstairs in his dressing gown, making a big pot of coffee and collapsing on the sofa to watch one of those music video channels. The picture kept breaking up and getting pixelated, so he decided to rescan to try and get better reception, at which point the box gave up. There was no electronic programme guide. There was no picture. There was no signal even. He was very apologetic as he thought he'd broken everything (although he used the event as an excuse to look at huge tv sets with built in freeview tuners on the Comet website). Luckily I stepped in before the monstrous screen that we really can't afford was ordered.

The BBC have some really useful webpages that should be everyone's first port of call when they're having trouble with tv or radio reception, digital or otherwise. Here they produce a list of transmitters that are undergoing essential maintenance work and details about whether this work is likely to cause interruptions to your tv viewing or radio listening. If you have freeview, the box should tell you which transmitter you use when you start scanning for channels, but there is a handy map that shows where all the transmitters are on the BBC website too. It turns out that our local one, Bluebell Hill, was liable to severe disruption for five days, including that weekend. So all we had to do was wait until the danger period was over, rescan and lo and behold, the signal had come back and we had television again.

The only reason I know about the ready availability of BBC advice on reception is that in the past I skirted around the periphery of a career in radio. I was a geeky teenager who read the news on hospital radio and generally hung around with people who knew about engineering, transmitters and other such things. Back then reception advice was on Ceefax and if you rang a lonely engineer in an office at the BBC local radio station and asked him nicely, he might send you a handy leaflet on how to build your own FM booster aerial. These days similar engineers are online and they're providing an amazingly comprehensive service. You can e-mail them questions and they provide links to the websites of all freeview box manufacturers to help people get to grips with digital tv. The service seems to have grown and obviously moved with the times, but it's still friendly and kind of excited about the joy of technology. I don't reckon that many people know that it's there, though. I bet a lot of people around here bought freeview boxes over that weekend, plugged them in and assumed they didn't work because they didn't know that the local transmitter wasn't working. Thus I am trying to make the world a better place by telling people about this great web page. Honestly, the BBC should put more effort into advertising its existence. And there endeth the geek sermon for the day :-)

Legal Technicalities

In the run up to exchanging contracts on the flat, the boyfriend and I have received huge bundles of papers from our solicitor that required our attention. One of these was an old deed of covenant from 1860, when the building housing the flat was put up. This worried me a bit to start with, as the flat is near a large church and I'd read that ecclesiastical covenants requiring property owners to contribute to the maintenance of local religious buildings are more common than people realise. Luckily it wasn't anything remotely like that. It set out restrictions on what activities could be carried out in the building. Among other things we are not allowed to skin dogs, gut cats or boil horse flesh on the premises. So that's my top three home business ideas out of the picture then :-)

Our Survey Says...

The boyfriend and I are about to take our first tentative steps onto the housing ladder and the other day we received the survey report for the property that we want to buy. We had been warned by those in the know that surveys don't usually tell you anything useful, but we weren't entirely prepared for the kinds of issues that the surveyor thought needed to be brought to our attention.

We were pretty sure that the flat didn't have any really bad structural defects, based on our own inspection of the property. I mean, we aren't experts, but nothing looked wonky, subsiding, damp and so on. The communal areas of the building were really well maintained and recently redecorated, too, which was nice. The surveyor agreed with us on all of these points. However, presumably so that we don't sue him if any problems come up in the future, his report mentioned a few generic problems that might or might not surface once we've moved in. So the report told us that "buildings of this age and type" have in the past been known to suffer from woodworm. Woodworm in the floorboards would mean considerable work would need to be done, which might cost us lots of money. If the worms turn up. They don't seem to be there now, but they might surface in the future. Or they might not - who can tell? Oh, and by the way, it has been known in these types of conversions to find amounts of asbestos. Which might or might not kill us, if it is there, which it probably isn't, but it might be. For a natural worrier like me, all of these things are a bit frightening. I think I'd rather not know about them. Let the flat fall down around my ears while I sit in oblivious bliss. But there we are... I know, we know, and we shall not sue the surveyor for not doing his duty because he has told us about them, whilst also telling us that the flat represents a good monetary investment.

So, I do understand why the poor surveyor has to be cautious, and I've just about stopped worrying about woodworm and asbestos. I think that by the end of the report, though, he'd just got a bit bored and decided to start finding minor, insignificant faults just for the sake of it. One of the things that attracted us to the flat was its neutral decoration, which we felt was perfectly decent yet still offered some scope for us to "put our own stamp on it" when we can afford to do so. The surveyor, however, wrote that we would probably want to redecorate at the earliest opportunity since the decor was rather basic. It isn't very exciting, for sure, but it's hard to see what fault you could find with white painted walls. He could have been diplomatic and wrote that it was "decorated in the minimalist style" or something. He saved his really harsh design critiques for the kitchen, though. Although the fitted units were serviceable, they were of a style that most people would consider dated and we would most likely need to replace them. Ouch. I must admit I didn't think they were spectacularly nice, but they obviously did their job and they weren't that bad. Obviously the boyfriend and I have outmoded domestic tastes.

Despite all of this, the survey didn't turn up anything that would mean we didn't wish to proceed with the purchase and things seem to be moving along fairly smoothly. When we finally move in I look forward to inviting our friends round to have a look at our terribly unfashionable, basically decorated, woodworm-ridden, asbestos-filled death trap of a flat, and cooking them a meal in our shamefully outdated kitchen.

A Matter of Life and Death

A wartime bomber pilot bails out of his doomed aircraft without a parachute and survives because he gets lost in the fog. Then he falls in love and has to appear before a heavenly court to fight for his right to carry on living. Such is the plot of the great Powell and Pressburger film "A Matter of Life and Death", in a nutshell. Of course, it is far deeper and more complex than that, which is why I came up with the bright idea of adapting it for the stage a while ago. It's also probably why Emma Rice and Tom Morris beat me to it. Their adaptation is running at the National Theatre until the end of June, so I went to see it out of curiosity. It was a strange experience.

I think I responded to the play as I did because I feel such an emotional investment in the film, an intense affection for it that reacts badly to attempts to somehow erode its purity. Some aspects of the theatre production would have unsettled anybody, though. When a man started rapping and people started setting beds on fire at the beginning I couldn't quite believe it, but the jarring incongruity of it all was only momentary. The acting, the original music and the staging, with bicycles circling the stage, dance and lots of visual spectacle, was very impressive. Unfortunately the excessive narration kept detracting from all this. The writers should have trusted the audience to understand the plot and the Second World War more, showing us rather than telling us things. It was sad, too, that they felt the need to introduce an overt anti-war message, for example with a black-clad woman speaking out against the bombing of Dresden. In doing so they invented a motivation for adapting the film which didn't come from within the heart of the film itself.

My motivation would have been different. The moment in the film when I first thought that it would make a good stage play is quite near the end. The pilot, Peter Carter, lies on an operating table while his love, June, watches through a glass window. Three representatives from heaven arrive and freeze time. At other points in the film this time freezing and other odd things, such as visions, hallucinations or the arrival of heavenly visitors, are slickly realized. The screen is rendered motionless - nothing but nothing moves - and sometimes there is a shift between bright technicolor and black and white. In this scene, you can see that the actress Kim Hunter (playing June) has just been directed to hold still, but of course nobody can be totally motionless. The camera moves in close and you can see her obviously quivering. It makes her seem at once more human, more real, emphasizing that she is very much of the physical world in contrast to the metaphysical world that the heavenly characters inhabit. Meanwhile, on the operating table, Peter hovers somewhere between the two. It struck me that something very subtle like this would be realised to perfection in the theatre, perhaps in a small, intimate play. In an all-singing, all dancing spectacular like the current adaptation, little things like this are lost.

I do understand that writers want to be big and bold, making aesthetic and political statements through their adaptive processes. In this case, though, the film is so rich in ideas and visual beauty that I felt they could have taken more of their cues from the original text. Crucially, the film shows Peter as a very British war hero and June as an American servicewoman. The relationship between Britain and the United States during wartime is a constant subtext. Ultimately Peter pleads for his life before an American prosecutor and a jury of American people. The jury are Americans of diverse heritage, showing it to be a country of immigrants and thus profoundly caught up in world affairs by its very nature, not by any supposed greatness or abstract power that it perceives itself to possess. In our current political climate, surely we need look no further than this to provide a pertinent reason to explore aspects of "A Matter of Life and Death" on stage and elsewhere. For good or ill the United States of America continues to forcefully carve itself out a role in global politics based on what it thinks it is rather than what it is in fact, or on the needs of itself rather than other nations. Likewise the "special relationship" between that nation and Britain remains uncomfortable, seen as abhorent by some and politically necessary by others. In our time "A Matter of Life and Death" still makes profound sense. Yet in the National Theatre production, there was no American jury and June was English. An opportunity was sadly missed.

I am glad I went to see the play, but it didn't leave me feeling satisfied. Perhaps there may one day be a market for my as yet unwritten, smaller scale adaptation after all.

Musical Interlude

The boyfriend has a nephew who has just had a birthday. He was turning three. A present was required, which I had the privilege of shopping for as the boyfriend had no time.

I bought him a pair of maracas and a triangle. Then I sent a text to the boyfriend saying "I've got rhythm!"

Many a true word is texted in jest :-)

Dirty Laundry

The boyfriend has decided that he needs to take more exercise. This means that we now spend Sunday mornings going on increasingly long bike rides in the countryside surrounding our house, which is great and I'm all in favour of that kind of thing. It also means that he feels the need to buy lots of new sports equipment and clothes, so he can look the part even if he isn't quite as fit as he'd like to be.

So we found ourselves in the section of TK Maxx called "Technical Clothing" (I do so love TK Maxx... I don't know if this is true of all branches, but our local one has an entire rack devoted to kaftans) and he decided to buy a top. It was not just any top. It looked like one of those natty airtex numbers that used to be compulsory for school P.E. classes, but it promised so much more. It would stop you feeling sweaty. It would let air flow freely around your underarm area. It would look good even after vigorous activity. Unfortunately the one thing it wouldn't do was take itself from the dirty laundry hamper and put itself in the washing machine, so when he got it covered in bike oil over the weekend I ended up trying to get it clean again. I checked the label to see what temperature it was supposed to be washed at and it said "wash when dirty." I couldn't help thinking that this was truly a garment designed for a man.

War Art

The BBC News "In Pictures" section is currently featuring some of the work of Michael Fay, a U.S. Marine and official "Combat Artist". He's been to Afghanistan and Iraq and created sketches, paintings and sculptures depicting what he's seen there. Whatever views we each hold about those particular combat zones and the presence of America within them, the fact that there are stories there that need to be told is something which we cannot deny. Acts of creative witness are fundamentally necessary.

I have kept a picture by the World War I artist C.R.W. Nevinson by my computer for the past eight years or so - "Bursting Shell", created in 1915. It's an inspiration. It gives me something to think about. It shows a rainbow star of colour and disjointed fragments of trench supports looming out of the dark, trying to represent something terrifying yet strangely beautiful. There is a vast body of war art by Nevinson, most of which does not see the light of day very often. A few years ago the Imperial War Museum in London put on a retrospective of his work. He also painted a series of studies of industrial Britain in a construction boom, with cranes and tower blocks. Out of the march of progress, the emergence of mechanised warfare and the sheer out-of-controlness of what humans can do to each other and the world around them, he found something that he felt he could document in art. Work like his, and that of Michael Fay, adds a powerful dimension to our collective memory. It enriches and illuminates the key aspects of history that we absolutely must reflect upon and that we certainly must never forget.

Michael Fay "In Pictures"

We'll always have Paris

I've just returned from a wonderful holiday in Paris with the boyfriend - our first proper holiday in many years. We rented an appartment in the Latin Quarter, bought fresh croissants for breakfast daily, climbed the Eiffel Tower, saw the Louvre and generally had all sorts of little adventures. As we had no internet access in Paris I couldn't blog from there. Consequently I have many stories to tell, but I don't know where to start, so I think I'll just drop them into the blog as and when they crystallize into appropriately sized little tales. Watch out for them - a sort of "narrative confetti".

Returning to mundane English life has been surprisingly difficult. On Monday morning I found myself craving a chocolat chaud, but I didn't just want a hot, sweet drink. I wanted to walk into a cafe and sit down at a table, have a waiter wish me good morning, take my order and bring my drink. I wanted to sit and watch interesting things happen outside as I enjoyed my hot chocolate. Somehow waiting in line at my local Starbuck's wouldn't have cut it. By Monday evening I started to wonder what to get for dinner, having been used to the boyfriend popping out to get fresh veggies, cheese and fish most evenings from the market outside our holiday flat, or to us stolling round the corner to a little bistro for a meal. Then I realised that we had to get in the car and drive to Sainsbury's. To add insult to injury, Sainsbury's was full of drunken teenagers because of the school Easter holidays. This didn't improve my mood. Some of them were singing "Vindaloo".

Now it's Friday and things are almost feeling as if I've never been away. The challenge, of course, is to maintain some of the relaxed, cheerful holiday escapism in everyday life. So next time I absent-mindedly say "merci beaucoup" to a cashier in a shop, I'll allow myself a wry smile and a momentary dream of Paris... and start to plan my next trip.

Patriarchal Society?

An odd thought popped into my head when I was doing the washing up the other day. I suddenly noticed that you can't really say "happiness" without saying "a penis".

All that feminist theory I've studied over the years and my brain manages to come up with an anti-feminist slogan in one of its idle moments. It's just not right :-)

"And all the world is biscuit shaped..."

I just downloaded XTC's "Senses Working Overtime" for my iPod. The reason behind my sudden rediscovery of Andy Partridge and Co.'s genius lies in a great play that I went to see on my birthday. "Love Song" by John Kolvenbach is currently on at the New Ambassador's theatre in London, starring Cillian Murphy, Neve Campbell, Kristen Johnston and Michael McKean. Kristen Johnston wasn't in it at the performance I attended. Her part was being played by an understudy called Romy, who was really good - her friend was sitting next to my boyfriend and was justifiably proud. But I digress - the whole cast worked extraordinarily well together to bring this play and its little world to life. It was funny, it was touching and it was very clever.

Generally speaking, theatre is theatre film is film, music is music and that's it - those are the categories and each is separate. In "Love Song", though, there is innovative intermingling going on. The play runs for ninety minutes with no interval, which means that the story gets to develop as a whole, much as a film would, and the audience can really engage with the character development (which is central to the plot). The use of established screen actors reinforces this effect. There are lots of scene changes, which for the most part are done mechanically. No stage hands appear - things just move in, up and out on wires and castors. When loose props need to be carried off, the actors do this themselves. Thus the impression of an intimate little world is created; a seamless world draws you into itself and into realtionships with its inhabitants. Scene changes and some of the key moments of the plot are accompanied by bursts of music - love songs in that raw, late 70s, early 80s vein. Sometimes you can see the actors waiting for musical cues before they move and this, combined with the physicality of the way in which the piece is performed (particularly by Murphy and Campbell), makes parts of the action seem almost like dance. As you can see, the play defies categorisation. It stands outside and between imposed boundaries, much like its central character, Beane.

Beane (brilliantly realised by Cillian Murphy) is the outsider around whom all of the action revolves. Sometimes he is tragically endearing, sometimes he is frighteningly elated, but it is always his journey that the plot centres on. He finds love and it changes him. To say much more would ruin the story for anybody else who wants to go and see it (and you should, really, you should), but there is much laughter along Beane's route, as well as many poignant moments that are touching but never sentimental or mawkish. You always get a strong sense that Beane is the only sane character from the start, despite his status as somebody who others are trying to "fix" or help. So it is only fitting that , ultimately, he gets to help everyone else as well as himself. They learn from him and grow because of him.

The whole play, from plot to staging, is a triumph of the imagination. As adults we forget how powerful imagination can be and "Love Song" reminded me, at least, of how it felt to just let your mind be free sometimes. It also reminded me how intense music can feel, especially when you're young, maybe most when you're a teenager and you feel as if the lyrics of every love song have deep, significant meanings. And on that note:

"I've got 1,2,3,4,5 senses working overtime...."
Go and see "Love Song" if you can. It's great.