The Divinity of Bovinity

David Hockney's "Fresh Flowers"

2011-01-17T18:30:00.000Z

I saw an exhibition of David Hockney's early work in a local library last year. I seem to recall it consisting of woodcuts or inky etchings of some kind, brutal dark lines and energetic scrawls simultaneously blessed with a simply naivety and an unsettling darkness. I think they depicted some of the grimmer Grimm's fairy tales, on one level childishly straightforward and yet with more than a passing shadow of something very sinister, a real fear running with the flow of the ink. "Fresh Flowers", the Hockney exhibition currently on show in Paris, could not be more different in many ways. For a start there is no ink, for each of the pictures has been created using the Brushes app for iPhone and iPad. These electronic pictures are also a riot of bright colours, screaming out in all their backlit, screen-filling glory. The distinctively simple Hockney style, however, has definitely been retained.

It is quite unsettling to be confronted with rows of screens in a gallery instead of canvases, perhaps more so when one has to be reminded not to touch them. Touch is what these gadgets are all about. It is the iPhone and iPad's reason for being. To see these devices nailed to a wall, almost crying out to be interacted with, and yet to know that playing with them is forbidden seems wrong. Yet through their constantly changing, cycling screens they gradually start to draw you into their world in a new way and you come resigned to just looking, accepting what is presented to you.

Movement in exhibitions is nothing new, of course. We have become accustomed to installations, physical or even on videos. Screens have been out there for a while, even if they are not in every gallery space as the central object of our desire to visit such places. There have even been journeys in sound and space contributing to the wide expanses of contemporary art. In Paris, though, one of the most attractive things about the iDisplays was the opportunity they offered for deconstructing the artist's craft. Some of the iPads showed the brush strokes - or should that be finger strokes or maybe artistic touches? - gradually building up, at first incoherent, then slowly forming a recognisable image. How appropriate that an interactive piece of technology should be able to involve us in the creative process in this way, even if we were not permitted to physically touch and participate in the work. We could see the process by which the image came into being, which was something that felt very new and refreshing.

The technology enabled the viewer to gain a new perspective on the creation of an artwork. It also encouraged further consideration of Hockney's work as a whole. Looking at the bright, bold, screenbound daubings, flower pictures in primary colours and simple scenes, it would be easy to dismiss them as the work of someone getting to grips with a new method. Perhaps there is an element of this, but there is more to discover. Yes, a lot of the works are almost basic, the sweeps of the finger giving rise to broad swathes of colour, always vibrant and so very, very bright, a brightness beyond the backlight even. There is little to soothe the eyes here, but a consideration of the trajectory between the black and white lines of Hockney's youth and the screaming pixels of his contemporary work reveals a common thread of to-the-point expression. A few simple scrapes in wood and a few dashes of a finger across a screen produce the same effect - the subtle curve of a petal or the searing beam of light emitting from a lamp against a dark background. Using the minimal amount of artistic faffing about Hockney creates light and shade, contour, shape and expression. It is profoundly honest art, be it in traditional media or in something completely and utterly new, a form at the cutting edge.

My favourite pictures were still life representations of lamps and candles, shining out in dark rooms. I loved the way in which light was drawn, reaching out into the unlit space, moving out, onwards and forwards. Now we have light instead of flat, dull canvas. This is the age of light, backlit screens and a constantly forward moving dynamism, learning from the past but in constant motion towards the future. And so David Hockney moves forward and turns his well-honed techniques into something futuristic, with the help of a few modern gadgets. The exhibition was accompanied by a video montage showing Hockney working on an iPad, clearly delighting in what he was accomplishing and in the sheer novelty of the project - the only exhibition where he had sent all of his work to the gallery via email. Thinking back to those early fairytale works of his, we can see that each simple mark on paper encapsulated a raw emotion, a spark of something in its most basic form, namely fear. Now, it seems, each simple stroke of finger on screen encapsulates something equally raw and pared back, but now that emotion is pure joy.

"Fresh Flowers" is at La Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent until January 30th 2011.

Monet at the Grand Palais

2011-01-14T19:09:00.005Z

Life today has become so saturated with superlatives that when something is described as a "once in a lifetime" experience it is all too easy to be skeptical. When newspaper columnists wrote of the monumental scale and unique viewing opportunities presented by the Monet exhibition currently being staged at the Grand Palais in Paris, one couldn't help but think their words no more than overenthusiastic marketing hyperbole. Yet seeing beyond the spin there was still a magnetic pull, a recognition that an awful lot of Monet paintings in one place might be a pleasurable thing to go and see. And thus I went.

It does indeed do the soul good to see such an abundance of colour and shifting light as a contrast to January's leaden grey skies and chill winds. Even images of a magpie in the snow and icebergs in the Seine were imbued with such attractive depth by Monet's brush that they provoked more of a warm glow than a frosty shiver. Monet's paintings reward careful, measured perusal, each one displayed in the Grand Palais in its carefully organised place, taking up position in the well-ordered spread of the artist's career. In each individual one you could find something to admire, something beautiful.

The sheer scale of the exhibition did not detract from the uniquely beautiful elements of each component painting, but it was the enormity of this undertaking to gather so many Monet works in one place at one time that gave the whole experience its powerful undercurrent of constantly present awe. It was the artist's habit to pay great attention to detail, often painting on a number of canvases simultaneously to create many different views of the same scene. He moved from canvas to canvas to capture subtle shifts in light or weather. All of these differing views were presented side by side in Paris, a remarkable thing considering the fact that the individual paintings now reside out there in our contemporary global village, many thousands of miles apart. So the viewer is faced with a sight that has not been seen for decades - storm tossed tempest alongside tranquil mirror sea, late afternoon sun on a haystack beside the same haystack in the pink morning dawn, a painting usually now in Melbourne reunited with its companion piece that has been hanging alone in St. Petersburg. I almost had to pinch myself to prove that it was real. There were paintings grouped together that clearly belonged together, documenting the way Monet worked and making clear all that he wanted to achieve with his art, yet they were together here, now and only briefly. The chance to see them displayed in this manner really did seem to be a "once in a lifetime" opportunity.

Seeing key works side by side provided an insight into the mind of Monet and his motivations, whilst seeing the full array of his paintings throughout his life demonstrated the development of his artistic style. We all know his large scale pieces, impressionist waterlily marvels and Le Dejeuner sur L'herbe, both of which had due prominence in the exhibition. However, the curators had also allowed us to follow Monet's perambulations around France and beyond, taking in his visits and revisits to places, his fresh looks and progressions in outlook and method. In doing so we could come to appreciate how Monet reached his own individual artistic position. His output encompassed portraiture and still life as well as landscapes, shifting gradually with the advancing years from very naturalistic precision to something more... passionate, perhaps, pushing his love of light and its shifting playfulness way out to seek new boundaries and finding a new approach to presenting myriad details. A life's work, all in one place, and the we were carefully led through its twists and turns in a way that allowed us to interpret it, explore it and reach an understanding of it.

Visiting the Monet retrospective at the Grand Palais was a profoundly satisfying experience. The early reviewers of the exhibition were justified in their free-flowing praise. The scale and scope of the show deserved no less. There was no alternative to being there, though. No secondhand review could truly do justice to the immediate moment of being faced with Monet, completely immersed in Monet and the wonders that he lived to produce and yet not floundering in the epic volume of it all. Through careful selection and well ordered presentation the curators seemed to have ensured that each individual visitor could manage to pluck a personal response from the vast array of rich material. Seeing the whole exhibition together one could not help but see real meaning. Appreciating beauty in Monet's work is not difficult, but being gently led towards a deeper understanding of it is something truly monumental.

Monet exhibition website - English version.

Narrative Leaps

2010-04-23T18:36:00.004Z

My too-often repressed sad and geeky side rejoices at the recent references to Quantum Leap that have been cropping up in Heroes. They began subtly, with the character Hiro Nakamura materialising in scenes of mid-western cornfields and weatherboarded homesteads akin to time-traveller Sam Beckett's childhood home, but the latest episodes have seen a marked escalation in parallels between the two U.S. television series. Hiro has had the odd Beckettian "Oh Boy!" slipped into his dialogue and his recent descent into brain tumour induced madness even saw him reciting Quantum Leap's iconic opening monologue. As if more keen eyed viewers hadn't noticed that the poor chap had been "trapped in the past... driven by an unknown force to change history for the better... and hoping each time that his next leap would be the leap home" for quite some time now! The writers managed to put the icing on the dramatic cake for me personally by also weaving in a clever homage to one of my favourite films, A Matter of Life and Death, in one of the latest episodes to air over her in the U.K. Hiro faced a trial while his tumour was being operated on, being judged in a kind of heavenly court and with his life dependent on the verdict. As his friend Ando watched the operation through glass and ultimately celebrated the survival of a bedridden and bandage-headed Hiro, the scenes mirrored the film exactly. For a fleeting moment it felt as if the majority of the major cultural reference points in my head were being shown on my television screen.

So what does all this mean? On a purely pragmatic level I can conclude that the people that write Heroes are a similar age to me and grew up absorbing the same media that I did. The television shows and films that first sparked their creative interest were the same as mine and it was inevitable that this would eventually bubble over onto the contemporary screen. Once you start following this train of thought, though, you begin to wonder what was so special about these particular media offerings that made them so memorable and inspiring. Originality has a clear role to play here. Consider the respective plotlines of Quantum Leap and A Matter of Life and Death. A genius scientist careering around in the space/time continuum, accompanied by an oft-married admiral in hologram form - where did all that come from? Or a hero pilot with a penchant for poetry somehow missing out on his alloted slot in heaven because of a pea souper fog, but finding love instead - could you think for a way of explaining that to potential financiers today? I'm almost tempted to write that you couldn't make it up, but of course you can only make it up, or at least that's what some supremely talented people did several years ago, the consequences of which were two of the most unique ideas for film and television entertainment that have ever graced screens large or small. Originality alone cannot hold the interest of an audience, though. They need to be captivated by a story.

The thing that first drew me to the film collaborations of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, of which A Matter of Life and Death is one, was the quality of the the narrative. These are well structured stories but it's not as simple as providing the audience with a beginning, a middle and and end. In fact, most of the films don't really end cleanly. Yes, Squadron Leader Peter Carter survives his brain tumour, but that seems to be only the start of his life with June, his love interest. In A Canterbury Tale the feared glue man is unmasked, but he is never really punished for his crimes and those complicit in his capture have their own stories to conclude beyond the scope of the film. They go off into battle or to pick up the pieces of relationships fractured by war. There is always some kind of redemption, but it is never complete or total, never too cosy. You get a profound sense of these stories being mere threads in a much broader narrative cloth. They are just spectacular facets of a life that we as an audience can recognise and relate to. They're fantasies grounded in reality, perhaps or just moments in time.

On one level the moments in time presented by Quantum Leap could be seen to be quite self contained little narratives of around forty five minutes in duration; episodic tales usually concluding with a happy ending and a little taster of where Sam Beckett would leap to next. Never having writers shy of piling on the sentiment, heroic Sam could be seen helping a young man with Down's Syndrome into employment, winning a crucial high school basketball game or saving his own brother from a sad demise in Vietnam. Each episode was complete in its own right, but regular viewing was rewarded with glimpses of the wider picture. We learned about Sam's childhood growing up as a boy genius, about his relationships and about the Naval career of Al ("... an observer from his own time who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear..."). Perhaps we start to care what happens to him, even recognise aspects of our own lives in his, and thus we keep on watching. The door is also quietly opened for the viewer to ask broader questions about the collision between science and morality. Is it right for Sam to use his genius in Physics to travel through time and change history for his own benefit? Should he try and stop his fiance leaving him at the altar or save his sister from marrying an abusive man? Should he save his brother's life or tell Al's wife that her husband is in prison in Vietnam rather than dead? Again we as viewers are encouraged to make connections with a broader spectrum of ideas and outcomes beyond the central narrative, engaging and identifying more strongly with that narrative in the process.

In Heroes, too, we have been seeing lovable Hiro suffer as he grapples with both ill health and the ethics of time travel. He was intensely compelled to save the life of the woman he loved, even though several other characters warned against it, citing the clear dangers of meddling with history and the potential consequences of doing so for the present day. Overall as a drama, however, Heroes is very different to the shows and films that it pays homage to. It has a huge cast of characters displaying a wide range of superhuman abilities, each with their own back stories, families and friends. They interact in extremely complex ways across a diverse selection of geographic locations and we can go for several episodes without hearing from some of them, only for them to reappear and their particular story strand to by picked up again. There is an enormous amount for the viewer to have to take in and we have to accept a degree of narrative confusion if we are to continue watching the series. We are aware that the creator of the show, Tim Kring, has some kind of overall story arc in mind, but the conclusion that he is working towards is hidden from us. It's not like Sam aiming to make that leap home or Peter Carter being allowed to love June. We can only speculate as to where it's all ultimately leading , but we can probably assume that it won't be a conventionally satisfying end such as a happy-ever-after romance or a safe and sound forever world.

It is the nature of entertainment today that we rarely have a clear view of the end at the beginning. We sometimes strap ourselves in for the ride and see how the twists and turns pan out, but more than that we like to be in the driving seat too. A recent Sunday Times article about the computer game Heavy Rain spoke about our desire to be presented with multiple options, almost infinite narratives from which we can pick and choose according to how we play the game. Entertainment is becoming individualised. All stories have root in the ideas of one individual, but we are moving beyond just taking that individual's idea and creating something that can be universally understood from it, or creating broadly recognisable worlds to engage the audience. On one level, Heroes is Tim Kring's personal quest to take the narratives from his mind to some kind of public conclusion, much as Donald Bellisario wanted to do with Quantum Leap or Powell and Pressburger with A Matter of Life and Death. Kring's narratives, however, can be seen as modern, or even postmodern. They aren't conventionally linear. They have dead ends as well as loops, twists and turns. Characters come and go, sometimes never to be heard of again and sometimes we struggle to make sense of the flashbacks and connections, the subtle changes in histories and the perpetual shapeshifting. Accepting the Heroes universe is at times very difficult and direct identification with the themes and characters requires the audience to work quite hard. This is television entertainment for the interactive age, where people are used to being confronted with an abundance of choice or possible outcomes and having to navigate their own way through them. We may not be able to actually influence what happens on screen, but there is scope for us to interpret what's going on in many different ways, drawing the multiple threads together to make something very original for ourselves in ways that earlier dramas never allowed.

The references to older iconic television shows and films in Heroes emphasise the kind of time travel with which we are all familiar - the unstoppable forward movement of time, our existence in the present and our memories of the past. These shows and films paved the way for the complex serials of today. Their strong narratives and originality laid the foundations upon which new directions in screenwriting have been built. The writers of Heroes clearly hold them in deep affection, so they refer to them out of respect, but they also seem to want to demonstrate how far filmed dramas have come. They remember the old days fondly, but they recognise that they're at the cutting edge now, and they probably secretly hope that one day someone is going to reference their work in the stories that have yet to be told.

Longevity Explained

2010-03-09T18:04:00.001Z

The husband and I celebrate twelve years together today. Well, to say "celebrate" is probably an overly enthusiastic use of words. Over dinner and Ice Road Truckers on Channel 5 we may somehow acknowledge with faint disbelief the length of our union, before commenting on the quality of the tomatoes or the trashiness of the television show. Still, twelve years as a couple and around six months of those as young marrieds merits some kind of tribute. I offer, then, a small sketch of a Sunday afternoon.

After a weekend buried deep in the Six Nations Rugby, complete with takeaway pizza and a distinct lack of activity beyond the sofa, I felt we were settling into a pleasingly relaxed groove. The Sunday Times flopped down on the coffee table with a satisfying thud and as I started to brew the tea I looked forward to us slowly dissecting the paper in the cosy warmth of our flat. Rain and wind lashed the windows, but the rattle of the sashes didn't detract from the snugness of the indoors. A proper Sunday clearly stretched out before us, unstructured and yet absorbing. Then, just as the comforting smell of toasting muffins began to waft from under the grill, the husband peered at me from behind the Culture supplement and said: "I don't feel like just hanging around the flat today."

I did not share his enthusiasm for venturing out into the tempest, but when he has his heart set on something it is very difficult to argue with him. After twelve years together he also knows exactly how to persuade me to do stuff. He promised a flask of tea in the car and the opportunity for me to wear my snow trousers. Fleecey lined, teflon coated leg huggers, baggy of crotch but obscenely comfortable and warm, with a zip-up pocket for my BlackBerry, I do not have enough occasions in life to wear these trousers. They are not what you would call socially acceptable everyday wear. They require a certain extremeness of conditions and terrain where hiking boots are necessary. So yes, I thought, let's throw those boots in the car and go. Let's throw caution to the sat nav and go on an adventure. Let's twist and turn through the Sussex country lanes and ponder just how the water on the flooded roads seems to be flowing uphill.

As we drove the husband bemoaned the fact that it had stopped raining and the gale seemed to be abating. Clearly the backdrop to his Sunday outdoors wasn't meant to be cheerfully sunny or calm. Of sun, though, there was no sign and under leaden skies we began to skirt the faintly sad suburban borders of Eastbourne, where grey concrete tower blocks blended into monochrome cloud. The sat nav woman commanded that we take a right turn, away into the town's green margins, and before we knew it we found ourselves on the quiet coast road out to Beachy Head.

On the exposed clifftop we were flayed by the strong winds, our layers of fleece fluttering ineffectually about us. It was bitterly cold, but thankfully the rain held off and the husband was able to enter into a manly struggle with his camera equipment against the elements. He photographed lighthouse and cliffs, his freezing fingers attempting to play with exposure settings in the bleak, wintry gloom. I gazed out at the sea below, sipping from the flask and tucking the wayward curls of my unruly hair back into my woolly hat, lest I gave the impression of some tea-toting medusa madly stalking the cliffs. There was no shelter up there to speak of, just the magnificent desolation of where land meets sea and many, many monuments, echoes of civilization in a place where people are quite small and insignificant in relation to the greater elements. This headland was a notorious suicide spot, a place where guns once stood and warplanes flew overhead and a place where people go just to look out at somewhere that isn't there, pondering the locations on the compass rose and drawing lines out to destinations far across the waves.

It was too cold to walk about there for very long. Cobwebs successfully blown away, we headed back to the car, arm in arm and laughing at the sheer madness of the idea of a clifftop jaunt on a day like today. At the edge of the car park was a hardy looking ice cream van, sticking two stalwart fingers up at the weather, defiantly selling frozen snacks to frozen folks. Ruddy of face and unable to feel our extremities, neither of us could resist the desire to have an ice cream. With a chocolate flake, naturally. Ninety nines in hand, we watched the seagulls turn their mad turns, buffeted by the breeze and crying their throaty signature coastal caw. We love to do idiotic things like eating ice cream at Beachy Head in the middle of a February gale and it follows thus that we love each other. Twelve years of being together and I can't sum it up much better than that.

R.I.P. Sir John Dankworth

2010-02-08T19:11:00.004Z

The grey February skies don't cover the promise of a brighter earth beneath them, it seems. My gloomy Sunday morning cup of tea was accompanied by Eddie Reader on Radio Four telling the world how supportive and generous John Dankworth was as a musician, her articulate sadness heralding the news of his passing. The trumpeter Guy Barker was delivering a similar eulogy this morning on the Today programme. These people played with Dankworth, shared his enthusiasm for jazz and performance and now feel his loss as keenly as the millions of ordinary folks who were fans of his music, holding him in great affection in his role as musician, band leader and patriarch of a flourishing jazz dynasty.

The ordinary folks turned out in their droves a couple of years ago when Dankworth and his wife, Dame Cleo Laine, were given the accolade of headlining a concert in the Proms season at the Royal Albert Hall. It was something of an eightieth birthday celebration for them both. A jazz prom with two such legends was more than I could resist, so I attended. The place was packed with an interesting crowd of relaxed retirees for whom Dankworth and Laine provided the soundtrack to youthful escapades. At the pre-prom talk the crowd listened politely to Radio Three's Geoffrey Smith talk about Dankworth's recording career, but they saved their real applause for the great man himself as he casually strolled into the hall. The chipboard BBC table and cheap plastic chairs on stage suddenly seemed to morph into the comfortable leather of a gentleman's club, with the venerable jazzman chatting with affable ease about Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington as if they were simply men at the local corner shop who we'd all met - old, respected friends and colleagues from way back whom everyone must surely have had the chance to play with.

At the concert itself the atmosphere was extraordinary. Dankworth led the orchestra through a selection of his own compositions and jazz standards. People tend to think of jazz as being a rambling, free-form sort of music, but in this case Dankworth's leadership was a model of concentration and precision. He ensured that each soloist had their turn in the spotlight and yet that the ensemble always combined with the most powerful effect. Alternating between playing clarinet and sax himself, he displayed the hunched-over absorption of the reedsman, but never lost that crucial awareness of his fellow musicians. He was an elderly many then but he was still fleet of finger and keen of ear, never missing a beat or a note and still being able to clearly communicate his own personality through whatever he was playing.

Dankworth had a quiet style of showmanship, confident and assured without a hint of ego. When he introduced his wife he was clearly proud that this formidable force of nature, this melodic vocal hurricane, was his partner in music and in life. Dame Cleo had recently had some surgery and was assisted by a walking cane, but happily bantered away with her husband. Her singing voice was certainly unaffected. The marital dynamic between them was almost as entertaining as the musical performance. Entering their eighth decade, their strong personalities were undiminished and it was easy to see how they sparked off each other in happy creative abrasiveness. They performed an encore of "Take the A Train" that was impossible to forget, speedy and deft, tripping between lyric and melody easily but powerfully and completely overflowing with an energy that would put many younger performers to shame. In the heat of the summer prom hall, it was a joyful blast of pure cool. The audience went wild.

Now in February's wrong kind of cool, we feel the chill of fate parting this great jazz couple. John Dankworth died, but within hours Dame Cleo and her children found solace on stage, performing and no doubt letting the music take them over, gaining strength from turning in a performance worthy of the man who was sadly unable to join them that evening. And that's where the sunlight starts to peep through the clouds a little. To say that we will not see the like of John Dankworth again is to give in to unfounded pessimism. The baton has been passed, the music still carries on. As Eddie Reader said, we should all open up our windows and play John Dankworth's music loud out into the streets for everyone to hear. The guy was a legend and he left an incredible legacy of music behind him. Just because he had to saunter off stage, it doesn't mean that the music has to stop too.

Flights of Fancy

2010-01-31T19:40:00.001Z

The more I see of life, the more inclined I am to think that there is a world which I inhabit and a world which children inhabit and they are perpetually distinct. To expect my own peculiar brand of supposedly grown-up reasoning to be understood by a young person is foolhardy in the extreme.

At a recent family gathering my young nephew was playing with Lego at the dinner table. The offspring of my husband's younger sister, he's still vaguely fascinated by having a new auntie to play with and for some reason he was keen to show me the results of his constructive labours. So my meal was punctuated by perusals of various different permutations of cars made from bricks. I responded to each one with an appropriate level of auntly enthusiasm.

A small, familiar figure appeared at my right hand side as I reached for the Merlot. "This one," it said with great gravitas, "is a hoover car." A hoover car? Finally something I could approach with more genuine excitement. As the little plastic vehicle scooted across the tablecloth I suggested it might be picking up crumbs along the way. Concentrating hard on steering around a wineglass, the nephew agreed. So, warming to my theme, I said that I could do with a hoover car to help me clean my flat. I asked if it might hoover the road, too, as it drove around. Here the wheels nearly came off the little hoover car muse that had been gathering momentum in my head as the conversation developed. "Why would it need to do that?" The nephew asked, furrowing his five year old brow. "Erm, because there are lots of hedgehogs that get squashed trying to cross the road and they need to be cleaned up," I replied, slightly worried about the macabre turn I'd suddenly steered our discourse down. Luckily the little chap accepted this explanation with barely an acknowledgement, which allowed my overactive imagination even more free reign. We would create the Dyson Formula One Racing Team, kitted out with brightly coloured hoover cars that didn't have to make pit stops to change their dust bags. From that moment on, any Lego car that did not possess suction capabilities was dismissed out of hand. Hoover cars were the way of the future.

I was so proud of myself for holding his interest for so long and I was sure he was soon going to proclaim me his favourite auntie. To be honest I'd enjoyed spinning a bit of a yarn and making up a totally bizarre fantasy. Only on the long drive home did it occur to me that little boys, for all their bizarre enthusiasms, aren't usually terribly interested in housework. Gradually the penny dropped. I realised that he had meant to show me a hover car, not a hoover car. I am a fool. I still like the idea of the Dyson F1 team, though.

iNarcissist

2009-12-15T17:26:00.004Z

Forgive me for I have sinned.

I went into the Apple Store at Bluewater and put my blog on display on one of the nice, shiny new 27" iMacs for all to see.
It felt naughty, but I liked it :-)

Married

2009-10-10T19:20:00.001Z

So, what's it like, then? Getting married - the whole walking down the aisle and saying your vows thing - describe it for posterity in the blogosphere. Dish the dirt. Put it into pixels. Well, I would have to say it's the most overwhelming thing I've ever done. Nothing prepared me for it. The fact that my husband and I had been together for so long before we got round to actually marrying didn't remotely temper the emotional impact of it all. It was, quite simply, an amazing day.

We actually enjoyed ourselves, which was a fact that took us by surprise. There had been a low level hum of constant planning and organising throughout the eighteen months of our engagement, but this had turned into a full-on, roaring frenzy in the final six weeks before the big day. Returning from our Spanish jaunt marked the start of an unrelenting round of printing, phoning, shopping and general running around that didn't let up until the night before we were actually married. There was no time for quiet reflection and I think we both expected the wedding day itself to be a continuation of the sheer effort we were putting in, rather than the start of a new, long-anticipated chapter in our lives. The summit got lost in the climb, to an extent, but I suppose this made achieving the pinnacle of the ascent all the more pleasurable, coming as it did as a joyous shock and a startling achievement.

Even now we almost have to pinch ourselves to remind us that we are married. I still get referred to as "girlfriend" - a term I've never liked, to be honest. Gok Wan can probably get away with using it liberally, but even he would struggle to convince onlookers that I am realistically still in the full flush of girlhood. For my part, I rather enjoy introducing people to "my husband" but it takes a good deal of effort to remember to do it and, of course, I have slipped up now and then. At another wedding soon after ours, telling people that "my husband is a former colleague of the groom" felt alien, each conversation now etched in my memory as some kind of out-of-body experience. There was a certain satisfaction, though, in having a husband by my side and in not having to join in the scrum trying to catch the bouquet.

This feeling of being settled - of knowing that, however many petty arguments you might have about mud on the carpet or hair in the plughole, you've stood up and made this big public commitment that far overshadows daily nonsense - this is good. It feels like how life should be. This was reflected during the ceremony for me by the utter conviction that what I was doing was right. I dither by nature, but from the moment I got up on my wedding morning and started painting my toenails to the comforting sound of the Today programme, I was gripped by certainty. Today was my wedding day and that was the way things should be. I hoovered the flat early because it was my wedding day - I almost wanted to wake people up so that I could tell them. Walking through town to go and get my hair done I wanted to stop people and let them know I was marrying a wonderful man that day. I didn't, but in my head a dizzy bridal voice was screaming out to all the old familiar places I passed, "hey train station, Waga Mama, BBC Studios, Wine Shop - today I'm a bride!"

As a bride you get burled along in the tidal wave of it all, from getting ready to your walk down the aisle, champagne, photographs, food and dancing, but that's fine. You're at the centre of things, but you're not in control. You surrender willingly. Sometimes, if you're lucky, time seems to slow down and you can look at things from outside of yourself, almost, getting brief glimpses of what you can only describe (somewhat cheesily) as the love in the room. Some of the happiest memories I have are of looking around and seeing other people enjoying themselves, chatting over dinner or sharing a joke. People who I didn't think were dancers took to the floor, shuffling along to the jazz band in the evening as if they'd been waiting all their lives for the opportunity to strut their stuff. I liked that as much as I liked the feeling of flight as the skirt of my dress twirled around when I danced myself.

The intensity of something private made public during the ceremony made the day such a happy one, too. Looking into the eyes of my other half and promising to love him for the rest of my life made me feel as if we were the only two people in the room. I know every millimetre of those eyes now, each subtle change of iris hue, each lash, fleck and lid freckle. Then, of course, comes the moment when you get to see the professional photographs and you realise that, as you were making your promises, there was a room full of people there too. But more than that - those people were looking on, as focussed on your words as you were and smiling, feeling the same happiness you felt. This profound act was shared and people were happy for us. To me it's still hard to believe, but I think it's a truly amazing thing that so many people came so far to be there and be a part of it. I think it's great and I'll never be able to thank them enough for it. So many people showed up, gave their time, made so much effort and spent so much energy willingly to help make our day special and I feel that I owe them many lifetime's worth of gratitude.

The path to matrimony was one that I never thought we'd take, my new husband and I. Looking back on our wedding day, though, it seems like it was the completely natural thing to do. Having lived over a decade of our lives together, it feels fitting to celebrate our achievement. Though the promises we made to each other bring with them no guarantees of eternal wedded bliss, they provide us with a starting point for something new, a future to look forward to with hopefully many more years of happiness grounded in the formal commitment we've made. This thing - this "us" that somehow evolved out of a chance meeting at university and has kind of mapped out a life of its own in the twisted landscape of the passing years since, this strange enduring entity publicly manifested now as "love" - we, me and him, us - provided the best damn excuse for a party I've ever known.

To Africa... With a Garlic Baguette

2009-08-13T18:32:00.000Z

Gibraltar and its Spanish environs are fortunate enough to be located in the part of Europe that is closest to Africa. The ferry trip can take as little as thirty five minutes, depending on where you leave from and go to, which means that taking a day trip to another continent is very easy indeed. Feeling a little nervous about exploring the wonders of Morocco independently in a short space of time, we booked ourselves on a guided tour.

We left on a ferry from the port of Algeciras, which turned out to be just like any other port in the world except that one of the cafes sold enormous jars of honey in Pooh-bear sized portions. The catamaran crossing was thankfully uneventful, though we were very prepared for any possible events. Since the safety video gave all the necessary instructions in five languages (accompanied by the very best in eurotastic dance music) and the crossing was short, it played for most of the trip. We picked up our coach and tour guide on the other side in Ceuta, a little perfect Spanish town and a resolutely Spanish place stuck onto the end of Africa... much as Gibraltar is a resolutely British place stuck onto the end of Spain, I suppose. Then the exciting part – crossing the land border between Spain and Morocco and finally leaving Europe. Except that it wasn't very exciting at all. They didn't stamp our passports, because we were only there on a day trip. They did, however, take our temperatures to see if we had Swine Flu or not. Which was nice. Declared medically sound, we sped off to sample the wonders of Tetuoan and Tangiers.

The terrain around the Moroccan coast was quite different to Spain. Cedar trees punctuated the horizon and flat roofed, whitewashed houses sat back from the sandy roadside. Steep mountainsides and blue, cloudless skies rose from blue rivers and lakes. Everywhere the Moroccan flag waved, be it in town squares, at roundabouts or road junctions or just seemingly in the middle of nowhere, huge, red and green and contrasting with its surroundings, standing out for miles around. This was a country in the grip of a surge in pride and confidence. Construction projects abounded, from the fresh tarmac underneath our wheels to the huge new sparkling edifices of bus and train stations and the new port being built in Tangiers. In the Medina in Tetouan we found a contrasting view of old Morocco. A maze of tiny streets winding up a steep hill was home to all manner of tradesmen, even some selling parts of taps and old remote controls that must have belonged to long-deceased electrical appliances. As we walked through the gateway into the Medina we were hit with the strong smell of pepper and spices. Each successive stall we passed and alleyway we walked down had its own distinctive odour. Meat, leather, perfume, cat – all could be smelled in great intensity in the North African heat. As we passed by a street corner Mosque we heard the Muslim call to prayer and our transition to a place far from home was complete.

Tangiers was much bigger than Tetouan, being a major port city. There was a distinct French flavour to it and amidst the heavy traffic we saw so many “Salons de Thé” that we could almost have been in the Galeries Vivienne in Paris. We didn't have much time to explore Tangiers and we are quite keen to go back and see more of it on our own. Frankly by the time we had reached Tangiers we had grown out of being in a guided tour group. It quickly became clear when we arrived in Tetouan that the primary objective of our guide was to get us to spend money. From the carpet shops of the Medina to the authentic lunch with cous cous and Moroccan music, it was all one huge attempt to extract as much cash from us on a grand scale. Somehow we resisted the temptations of rugs, lamps, teapots and other Moroccan bits that many friends of our guide were very insistent that we buy. We did get a taste of local culture, but it was marred somewhat by regular attempted assaults on our wallets.

It was a bit of a relief, really, to arrive back in Spain and set foot in our apartment again to unpack our few, carefully chosen and prudent purchases. As we opened the rucksack we were pleased to find that our tea glasses and camels had safely survived the journey. Then, from out of the corner of the rucksack, behind the now empty water bottle and camera case, there emerged a Morrison's garlic baguette. It had clearly not been kept chilled, as the packaging advised. It had also clearly not come from the Moroccan souk. The fiancé had popped to the shops on the way home from work on his bike the previous evening, as he did most evenings in fact. Somehow all of the shopping had not been unpacked. Our African odyssey had been undertaken with a small buttery companion. The bag had been x-rayed by Spanish customs officers on the way back and you would assume that such a thing might have aroused suspicion, but it appears not. I suppose people don't usually hide drugs or guns in garlic baguettes... despite their convenient size and shape for the purpose. Suffice to say we didn't eat the baguette. Compared to the average garlicky accompaniment, though, it lead a very exciting and well travelled life. We suspect that some of those pungent odours in the Medina may actually have been emanating from us as the baguette quietly warmed itself up in the African sunshine. Yum. It must be nearly dinner time...

Tarifa

2009-08-13T18:29:00.000Z

This is a picture of the fiance, relaxing at a chiringuito in Tarifa. As you can see, the life of a Ruby on Rails consultant is all work and no play :-)

Tarifa has beautiful beaches, but it is a strange place. Surfing is popular, as is kite surfing. I assume kite surfing is like normal surfing but with a kite somehow attached to something, giving a little bit of extra oomph. Anyway, the sand round there is golden, the sea is blue and the beach is full of beautiful people wearing not very much. In the town there are many leathery skinned old surf dudes, bejewelled with leathery beaded necklaces and leathery bracelets. The cobbles under foot echo with the light tap of flip-flops and people have that far away look of the perpetual dreamer in their eyes. Truly this is the last refuge of a generation of people who read Paolo Coelho's “The Alchemist” and thought that they too could find enlightenment by going to Tarifa, meeting an old guy and catching the ferry to Morocco and back. The problem being, of course, that “The Alchemist” wasn't really based on a true story and now they're stuck in Tarifa with nothing to do but look dazed, give surfing lessons and hand out flyers for bizarre nightclubs located down tiny alleys with even tinier doorways.

At around one in the morning a group of the beloved's colleagues and I rolled out of a restaurant and started to negotiate the buzzing backstreets of the port in an attempt to start heading back round the coast for home. In a small square, not too far from the ferry terminal, there was a tiny shop with a tempting window display. In between all of the shops selling surfing paraphernalia and tourist tat there was a perfect little patisserie in the French style. A small, smart, non-leathery lady was selling cakes and tarts in the early hours, portioned out with great care into little containers and handed over to late night revellers with dainty serviettes. The chocolate gateaux was divine.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen...

2009-08-11T20:11:00.000Z

... really do go out in the mid-day sun, or so it seems on the Costa Del Sol.

The apartment of my husband-to-be is situated in a holiday complex. The recession meant that he was able to get a very good deal on renting here for a longer term, but most of the other apartments are either empty or being let out on nightly rates to mainly Spanish holidaymakers. There are a handful of German and French people about, but generally very few English. The contrasts between our fellow countrymen and their European neighbours is most pronounced around the pool. It's not unusual for the Spanish to go for a bit of a swim around breakfast time. I sit on the balcony with my cup of tea and hear the sound of morning europop floating up to me, punctuated by the odd splash and bursts of Spanish language merriment that I don't quite understand. It's all long gone by lunchtime. When the heat of the day is reaching its pinnacle, that's when the Brits turn up. They're brash and they're loud and they like to complain about the heat, but it doesn't stop them from having a good time. When the apartment shutters are drawn down everywhere else and the siesta hour falls upon the quiet Spanish hillside, they're swimming, diving and shouting for Britain.

The other day a family turned up and had a long, very loud lunchtime poolside discussion about the possible local availability of cheesestrings. Lounging in the shade, feet up and absorbed in a George Eliot novel, I indulged my snobbish side and reflected on just how far away my mind was from a place where cheesestrings are a delicacy. I'm taking advantage of the relaxed Spanish attitude to life and trying not to be too much of a typical Englishwoman abroad. Naturally there are some patterns of behaviour to which I have succumbed, of course. I have underestimated the strength of the Southern Spanish sun and burnt my forehead, shoulders and prominent nose lobster red. I have also begun to use the bidet in the bathroom as a convenient place to wash my feet and swimming costume after a trip to the beach, rather than using it for the purpose for which it was intended. Overall, though, I try and speak Spanish when absolutely necessary, rather than shouting in English to try and be understood, and I make attempts to assimilate culturally, such as watching “Los Simpsons” and “Bob Esponja” on the television. Sometimes I even (briefly) go topless on the beach.

The thing about the beach is that you can sometimes spot a group of English people from a mile away. Consider, if you will, leopards. In the wild their spots act as camouflage to prevent predators seeing them across the plains. Now consider leopard print fabric and in particular that staple garment of the Englishwoman of a certain age on holiday: the leopard print sarong. Marketed as a handy means of covering up undesirable body areas when in warmer climes, it's amazing how a camouflaging pattern becomes quite the opposite when in the wrong hands. The Englishman of a certain age who forms the other half of this matching pair fares little better. It seems as if he bought swimming garments when he was a teenager and kept them all his life, the result being that a very small Speedo is going into battle with a very large belly on the Spanish sand. The belly has the upper hand and the swimwear is attempting to launch a rearguard action, but is sadly on the verge of retreat. Then there are the younger generation, folks who find that work, etiquette and the plain monotony of life conspire to keep them quiet for fifty weeks of the year, so much so that in the remaining two weeks when they are on holiday they must compensate by shouting and bellowing as much as possible. It's as if each person has a noise quota which must be fulfilled.

I know I'm being dreadfully snobby, and probably bitter because I'm too old for youthful nuisances. I'm sure that the Spanish people on the beach all snigger to themselves when my white, flabby English bits emerge into the light of day for the first time in many years, too. I'm trying to move through Spain quietly, though, adopting more of a Latin air. If I glide serenely through the heat and make sure I steer clear of sarongs, or indeed cheesestrings, they may not point and laugh at me too much. Maybe I can be an Englishwoman abroad, but incognito.

Loving the Rock

2009-08-11T20:09:00.000Z

I really feel as if I shouldn't like Gibraltar, but I do. It's kind of wrong, but I feel curiously at home there. My other half has a theory that I like it because it's a bit like Britain in the 70s, so I'm anticipating the point when the 80s finally hit and I can enjoy the hair, clothes and music all over again. He may be right, but it isn't surprising that I enjoy visiting the rock. The road signs in English start it all off when you cross the border. You could be anywhere in the U.K. Well, you are in the U.K., technically, and you can speak English freely and be understood, which feels like a cooling and soothing balm applied to the brain for those whose Spanish is as deficient as mine. The runway helps, too. After crossing the border you have to cross an active airport runway to get into the main town, which feels about as eccentrically English as you could possibly get.

In so many ways the rock is geared up to be an English playground in the sun. Tax free alcohol, abundant casinos, a marina full of extremely expensive looking yachts and pretty much guaranteed warm, sunny weather. What's not to like? Add to this the presence of a giant Morrison's, who have big signs enticing you to buy “the taste of home”, and you start to see why so many people cling with gusto to this little piece of the U.K jutting out from the southern end of Spain. Morrison's means I can have scones with butter and sip an Orange Ovaltine Options drink on our balcony in Santa Margarita, watching the blue sea and African mountains in the distance. Morrison's means I can still procure Quorn to eat in a land where they don't seem to understand vegetarianism. I'm a big fan of the Morrison's. In the heat of a Gibraltar afternoon there's a sense of unreality when you step into a generic English supermarket that could be anywhere, heading for the Quorn aisle.

Leave aside the modern convenience of meat substitutes and there's that aforementioned 70s vibe. It's there subtly in the architecture, though most of the tower blocks and offices sport a liberal use of concrete that gives away their 50s origin. It's more present in the host of small shops along main street, especially independent electrical retailers, named after people rather than big retail chains. Yes, there is a Marks and Spencer, but it hasn't had a makeover for some time and it looks traditional and old, like the St. Michael era shops of my childhood. Visiting museums and tourist attractions confronts you with signs and boards of printed information rather than interactive, whizzy computerised exhibits. A trip up to the top of the rock reveals a healthy and very un-twenty first century disregard for health and safety. There seem to be perilous staircases, tiny clifftop paths and abandoned bits of military building everywhere, few of them fenced of and all of them looking very inviting to anyone with a reckless streak. Actually one of the things that I liked most about the Rock itself was the sense of physical cold war structures and the mindset that went with them decaying all around. Faded “M.O.D. - Keep Out” signs and hefty security gates with big padlocks now swinging open, nobody guarding them and no secrets for them to protect any more. No more spies, only monkeys.

It would be very easy to surrender to this other world, removed from the everyday realities of bad English weather, unreliable public transport and the general petty woe of living in a place that isn't shiny, sunny and fun. I feel the temptation acutely because I'm here on holiday, so I'm in that fantasy fun and frolic-ful mindset from the start. The jolly retirees who were sat at the next table to us at lunch on the waterfront on Sunday were probably feeling the same way, lingering over their cocktails and forgetting the way the damp weather used to make their rheumatism flare up. Even if you're working on the rock, as my other half is, you slip into a routine where the bizarre, absurd and even the indulgent become normal. He gets up, he cycles into the U.K., he works, sometimes a monkey scampers by the window, he cycles back home to Spain and we go off to the beach for a quick dip in the Mediterranean before dinner. The hypnotic weather and the ever present sandy shoreline all too easily take a hold of you. Living a stones throw away from a thriving colony of barbary apes stops you taking anything too seriously and the knowledge that you live in a place of strategic military significance, even though the presence of the armed forces is currently dwindling, gives you a sense of security. Those bunkers are still deep within the Rock – the troops could be back in the blink of an eye. It's all good.

What, then, could be dangerous about liking Gibraltar too much? To confine oneself to this part of Europe because it allows you to relish in the comfort of the familiar is to abandon oneself to the attractiveness of escapism – to enter your fantasy land where the sun always shines and life is very easy. It might blind me to the pleasures of Spain, of which there are many. I could easily become short-sighted and cower in the Rock's familiar shadow rather than realising I am actually abroad and there is another culture out there waiting to be explored. Also, I am on holiday. I get to see Gibraltar in all its high season, pleasure palace glory. It's easy for me to forget that there is a world of daily reality underneath the shiny exterior, a world where problems exist and boredom takes hold in just the same ways as at home. Even if there are monkeys. A place so small and so resolutely separate from the Spain that lives beside it has its own attendant troubles, too. After a while I can see how the Rock might get a bit stifling. It is small and it is so very English. It has limits. So I'll appreciate Gibraltar as a linguistic haven, a place to have fun and drink reasonably priced gin and tonic and I'll not let the sun go to my head. I'll keep my feet on the ground and not get too carried away with heady holiday pleasures, or with getting lost on tracks up the Rock and pretending I'm a Russian spy on a mission. And if Gibraltar ever does enter the 80s, I might consider a permanent move.

The Train to Spain - Part Three

2009-08-04T20:08:00.001Z

The metro system in Madrid was pretty easy to negotiate and we speedily crossed the city from Chamartin station to Atocha station. The announcements on the metro appeared to consist of a man and a lady performing a comedy double act, except instead of jokes they told you which other metro lines you could change onto at each stop. It was all done in a very chirpy tone, though. I'm sure that goes down well in the rush hour. Luckily it was Sunday and our fellow passengers were few.

If you're catching a train out into the wilds of Spain from Madrid, Atocha seems to be the place to do it from. It's a big station and well equipped with the usual stuff: restaurants, shops, large garden, aquatic curiosities. Yes, really. We went to dump our bags in the left luggage lockers and stumbled upon a hot house garden full of palms and misty humidity. It proved to be a relaxing place to sit when the heat of the day got too much and we'd seen all we wanted to see of the city outside. There was even a large pool of filled with fish and terrapins, who basked on rocks and posed for photographs like seasoned professionals working the tourist trade of weary travellers. We came to the conclusion that every station should have a few terrapins. Terrapins aside, Atocha also benefits from being well located for sightseeing and a quick walk from the station concourse gets you to many of Madrid's top attractions, including the Prado and Reina Sofia museums. We plumped for a quick tour of the city's botanical gardens, which had a particularly fine grove of olive trees and some very large insects. I never knew there were so many types of olives... apparently there are more types than just black, green and stuffed with pimentos, so there you go. It was good to commune with nature after such a long journey; far better than sitting squished in an aeroplane seat for hours waiting for the seatbelt sign to go off and the obese guy next to you to wake up so that you can stretch your legs, I imagine! A slow saunter through the park with an ice lolly, a cheese sandwich snack at a kerbside cafe and it was time to hit the tracks again.

A Spanish colleague of my beloved's had recommended paying extra for “Preferente” instead of “Turistico” class on the long distance trains in Spain. As far as we could make out this wasn't the super-swish, ultimate best first class, but it was better than standard. It was certainly well worth paying a bit extra for. Stepping onto the AVE train from the heat of a midday city platform the air conditioning immediately contributed to the feeling of luxury. The seats were spacious and clearly hadn't seen as much action as those on the Elipsos sleeper. They were adjustable, with welcome little footrests to soothe tired lower limbs. There were televisions up above that showed a film throughout the two and a half hour trip. We were given free, Spanish railway branded headphones that plugged into our seats if we wanted to listen to the audio track for this, but the scenery held my interest far more than “Bride Wars” did, I'm glad to say. Well, the scenery and the laser display board at the front of the carriage that kept flashing up how fast we were going and what the temperature was outside. 34 degrees celsius, 290 kilometres per hour, racing through the mountains. Amazing stuff. Outside we passed terrain that grew increasingly rocky and mountainous, here and there littered with half finished apartment blocks, their skeletal frames standing as poignant gravestones for the booming economic age now long gone. Inside we were constantly bombarded with consumables by friendly stewardesses. There were free drinks, including alcoholic options, moist towellettes and a three course lunch served at our seats. Sadly there was no choice for this and the main course was an extremely meaty combination of chicken pieces in sauce, accompanied by ravioli filled with meat of indeterminate origin. As a vegetarian I didn't partake of this, but I ate the starter, bread roll and dessert, and the husband-to-be revelled in the delights of eating lunch for two. We both decided that this was how train travel should be. The standard British commute will always fall short from this point on. We were clearly meant to travel this way. Some people just aren't cut out for standard class. All too soon we were pulling into Malaga station and we had to reluctantly leave our reclining seats in the land of milk, honey and moist towellettes.

Malaga train station was an appropriate extension of the wonders of the AVE train, with its bright, clean and modern look. Across the road, Malaga bus station was pretty much the opposite. We found confusion, queues and many lobster-like English speakers in all their holidaying splendour. When we eventually found the bus to La Linea it was quite a contrast to our previous means of travel. There were no lovely ladies to attend to our every whim. There was a gruff, balding, harassed looking Spanish driver and a pervading sense of damp. Unable to escape the moist odour and unwilling to move about too much in our seats lest we should sense a certain wetness about them too, we embarked upon a mini-odyssey around the Costa del Sol. Instead of waiting for the direct bus, we mistakenly boarded the one that left first. As such we passed through Torremolinos, Marbella and many other places that have replaced the likes of Margate and Brighton as the haunt of the average British family on vacation, before we arrived at our destination. There was some kind of fiesta in La Linea and the streets were lined with merry Spaniards when we showed up. Tired and intimidated, we waited fearfully at the taxi rank for our final carriage to Santa Margarita and the swinging bachelor pad of the man who will soon be my husband.

Finally setting foot in the apartment, I realised that there's as much pleasure in arriving as there is in travelling. That said, I wouldn't have travelled any other way. Taking the train to Spain meant that I saw much more of the country and experienced far more than I would have done if I'd have flown. It also meant far less stress for me, despite the challenges of the last leg of the trip by bus and all its attendant unpleasantness. It felt like a good thing to do together and when we arrived there was a certain sense of achievement. I suppose it's all to do with the long understood pleasure we humans gain from taking the road less travelled, the rocky path instead of the smooth one and the challenge instead of the easy option. Talking it over now that we've been here a few days, we both agree that we'd do the trip again. In fact we've been tentatively discussing where else we can go by rail in the future, which is as resounding a vote for train travel as you're ever likely to get. We made the trip to be together and now we have the ultimate prize – we are together again, and what's more, we got to share something pretty cool in the process of making that happen. Bring a little love back into your life... travel by train.

The Train to Spain - Part Two

2009-08-03T19:20:00.002Z

We've been to Paris so many times over the past few years that it has a homely feel to it. I get on the Eurostar at Ashford International without the usual trepidation I feel when I travel, and when I disembark at Gare du Nord I know where I need to go. I know where the metro station is, where to buy a ticket and which lines and stations will get me closest to a decent lunch. The familiar is indeed comforting and thus revelling in it we spent a delightful afternoon in the French capital. The sleeper train to Spain departs from the Gare d'Austerlitz, which happens to be very close to the Rue Mouffetard and all the parts of Paris that we know extremely well. Once we'd had our fill of food and drink in a couple of our favourite cafes and stopped off to do a spot of shopping, we knew we could hang out in the Jardin des Plantes just across the street from the station until it was time to catch our onward train. Getting the mid-morning Eurostar from Ashford left us just enough time to enjoy a taste of Paris and a break from travelling before continuing onward.

Catching the Eurostar involves passing through barriers, checking in and getting your bags x-rayed in the same manner as if you were flying. The Elipsos from France to Spain has a lady standing on the platform who checks that you have a ticket and a disinterested train guard who confirms that you have a passport. That's it. After these briefest of formalities we wandered into the first class compartment that was to be our home for the next 13 hours. The décor was very green, with more than a hint of 70s British Rail about it, and the seats looked rather battered. Many a rotund businessman's behind had squeezed itself into them for the cross-continental jaunt and they had not coped well with the experience. The poor seats were not so tired as to be unable to perform their reclining function, however, and it was great fun to sit down and play with all the buttons to see what they did. There was plenty of room to stretch out and I had no-one sitting in the seat behind me so I could recline fully without guilt, but we'd ended up with two seats across the aisle from each other, rather than together, so any kind of romance or even conversation was a challenge. At this point it's probably best to mention that first class reclining seats are probably not the best option for travelling overnight across Europe by train. A couchette, with the seats that turn into a bed, would have been far better, but we couldn't afford the couchette for two. This train travel lark, whilst wonderful and civilised and all that, is quite expensive. The cheapest option would have been for us to book into a couchette for six, but these are either for male or female travellers. Mixed sex couchette-ing in the cheap seats is not allowed (the commoners must be controlled, presumably). It might have been acceptable for me to travel in the women's dorm and him in the men's back when we were students, but in our thirties I don't think we would have coped. We needed a little more refinement. We needed to be together. So first class seats were our only option.

There must have been about fifteen people in our carriage and it was a wonderful opportunity for people watching. My beloved's neighbour was a young man with dark hair and a floppy fringe who had brought an enormous bag of pastries on board. He scoffed the lot before donning headphones and dropping off into a deep slumber for most of the journey. Opposite him were two large Mexican gentlemen huddled up in coats, one of whom snored extremely loudly but had an incongruous peaceful look on his face while he did it. The other one got up and left on one occasion, only to be replaced by an equally large, elderly Mexican lady who talked constantly at her male companion, who I assumed by the dynamic between them to be her son. I had to look twice when she came in, as I thought she may have been the man returned in drag. It seemed perfectly logical to me that somebody might be a man in Paris but change into a woman for a new life in Spain. I shared my space with a tiny, bird-like, middle aged lady travelling with a large carrier bag. She didn't come all the way to Madrid, but alighted at a station in the middle of nowhere. I don't even think it had a platform, just a sign. There were a lot of places like that. I opened the twee little green curtain by my window, hoping to watch one country turn into another, but mainly it was dark. I still got very little sleep, though, because the train stopped often and I couldn't help but try to see where we were. I counted off a few stations going through France: Orleans, Poitiers, and others, but the actual point at which we crossed the border was lost on me. Next morning my restlessness was rewarded with dawn breaking across the plains, with parched rocks and scant vegetation glowing orange in the emerging light. A trip to the restaurant car for breakfast revealed vast picture windows and the mountainous outskirts of Madrid, me perched on a bar stool and the train perched above vertiginous gullies, slowly wending its way onward between precarious drops.

Breakfast showed that there was a world outside the train again, because for so many long hours our world had been the inside of the train. This had naturally involved adjustment. An adjustment of gait, predominantly, for moving about something that is in itself moving is actually very difficult. The Elipsos has been designed to travel long distances at moderate speeds and I wouldn't say it's been engineered to give a particularly smooth ride. We were in carriage 84, right at the back, and the trip to the restaurant car was a long one. I was buffeted on the way to the buffet and I still have the bruises to prove it. The movement when seated could be very soothing, though, and the husband-to-be commented that it had rocked him off to sleep. There were also the adjustments to routine and having to adapt to doing private things in a public environment. Getting up and going for a wee in the communal bathroom at the end of the carriage almost felt embarrassing, the openness of the coach at first feeling like a stage whenever I got up even though the actual bathroom was obviously behind closed doors. Thankfully the facilities were clean and spacious – so unlike train lavatories in the U.K. ! By the end of the trip I'd cleaned my teeth with the help of a bottle of Evian, had a bit of a wash with the assistance of some wet wipes and was merrily combing my hair, putting plasters on my heels and changing my socks without batting an eyelid. So much had been out of our control on the train. That's part of the beauty of it, in a way – you just sit back and go with the flow, but it's not all peaceful relaxation. The lights unceremoniously went out at around 9.20p.m., with no warning, provoking an odd generalised twilight groping for the reading lamp switches. Now, suddenly we were being placed at the helm of our own lives again. Pulling into Madrid's Chamartin station was a little disorientating, with the train being left behind and normal life resuming; normal life where the ground doesn't move and your personal space is your personal space. Bright sunshine and city life, getting on the metro and making terrible attempts to speak a language you don't really understand, as opposed to the dim light of the train and the embarrassed hush of humans thrown together and trying not to offend each other. Let loose in Madrid, all we had to do was find Atocha station and the train to Malaga.

The Train to Spain - Part One

2009-08-02T16:58:00.001Z

I don't like to fly. There are various reasons for this, some related to my sheer pig-headedness, I must admit, but fear is fear whatever its root and if there is anything that I can do to avoid travelling by plane, I do it. Luckily I'm no international jet-setting businesswoman and I like to holiday pretty close to home. The presence of my beloved in Spain posed an obvious problem. He was a two and a half hour flight away and I wanted to be with him. He had a rather swish apartment that seemed perfect for two but lonely for one. I considered the obvious solution – the wonder of Xanax, the drug of choice for nervous plane passengers the world over, but it just didn't seem right. There was clearly a more appropriate way of dealing with this. I could feel the fear and fly there anyway, or I could take the train to Spain.

For somebody like me taking the train was clearly the best choice. I've always loved trains; not in a geeky, trainspotting, platform stalking, number noting way. It's just the way I've always got where I wanted to go. When I was growing up I lived with my mum, who didn't drive, so we had to use public transport. As long as I can remember I've been chronically car sick, too, so coaches and buses weren't an option. I'm ashamed to say that this affliction still persists into my thirties and with our wedding venue a forty minute drive away from home along winding country roads I'm hastily trying to get over it. Anyway, trains are how I travel. I feel comfortable on the train. I think getting the Eurostar to Paris is easy, so for me it's logical to add another few hours train journey to that and head for Andalusia.

Just think for a minute about what it means to travel by train. Not the hustle and bustle of the morning commute or the general unpleasantness of short journeys in Britain, squished up against your fellow passengers when you haven't even been properly introduced. Think of travelling long distances and watching the scenery unfold outside your window. There's a sense of surrender that goes hand in hand with train travel. Freed from the stresses of driving, letting someone else take control and allowing yourself to enter your own little world. You can work, you can read, you can plug in your iPod and just watch, letting everything just drift by you. It's true that most of this can be done on a plane too, but in the sky all you can see is clouds. Down on the ground the sides of the tracks are rich with viewing possibilities, a constantly changing landscape of other people's spaces and lives to dip into as you glide past. On a plane you are also assaulted with instructions: when this sign lights up you must put on your seat belt; don't smoke in the toilet; put the oxygen mask on now or you'll die. To my mind this doesn't make for a relaxed trip. On trains there is no safety dance and if anything bad happens you're not thirty thousand feet up in the air, which must surely be a plus.

Looking back through history we can see that there was a time when people travelled by train as a matter of course. When they took the grand tour of Europe, they did it by rail. They didn't whizz around at high speed. The journey mattered as much as the destination. I think that travelling by train is an infinitely civilised experience and something to be savoured. It's also something from our past as humans that it makes sense for us to rediscover now. When we're all concerned about our carbon footprints, surely it doesn't make sense for us to burn several tonnes of jet fuel to get somewhere as quickly as we possibly can. Just because flying is convenient, it doesn't make it right or pleasant. It's a mode of travel that we have at our disposal but we shouldn't always think of it as the first and only solution when we need to get somewhere. I'm a definite proponent of original solutions in all areas of life and I see no reason why that shouldn't apply to getting where I want to go.

An article in the Sunday Times travel section confirmed that it was indeed possible to reach the Southern parts of Spain by rail and it seemed like a sign. God bless the wonderful man who maintains the Seat 61 website and wrote about the wonders of that trip! My future husband and I made the decision that we wanted to be together and that since the plane clearly wasn't going to be an instrument in making this happen, we'd take the alternative route and use the train. Since togetherness was the objective and since I was somewhat nervous about undertaking a European rail odyssey alone, he decided to fly back to Britain and then make the journey to Spain with me. It would be an adventure. A final fling for us before we embarked upon the sensible constraints of married life, or perhaps the start of many happy vacations spent riding the rails. Either way, we were determined to go for it. Our journey would unfold thus: Eurostar from Ashford to Paris, lunch and a happy afternoon spent in the city of light, evening Elipsos sleeper train to Madrid, high speed AVE train from Madrid to Malaga, bus from Malaga to La Linea and taxi from La Linea to the apartment in Santa Margarita. A whole weekend of travelling, but so many sights to see and new things to experience. Overall it would be a journey quite different to just sitting back in an aeroplane seat and waiting to land... or in my case gripping the plane seat in terror and willing the aircraft to land as quickly but as safely as possible. It would be proper travelling.

Musical Interludes

2009-07-14T18:35:00.003Z

Well, it's all systems go on the wedding front. Given that nobody has objected to our union, we need to get planning in earnest. However, since my intended is still overseas, I find myself with all kinds of decisions to ponder all alone. One of the things that preoccupies my mind most is the choice of music for the ceremony. Music is important to both of us. Neither of us can hold a tune, but we're regular Prom goers each summer, habitual overspenders on iTunes and periodic doughball munchers at the Pizza Express on Dean Street. He likes heavy metal, I like more "alternative" modern stuff and we both like classical and jazz. So out of all that, how do we choose a few key pieces that reflect our relationship? Adding in the audience factor complicates the issue even further. Pleasing an eclectic mix of thirty-something friends, a few kids and relatives of somewhat more mature years is far from simple and I would hate for them all to be bored, repulsed or confused while they watch us getting married. Well, they might be all of those things anyway, but I don't want the music choices to make things worse.

If I dwell on approachable classical pieces, I inevitably err towards the jolly, rousing numbers that everybody knows. So while I should be thinking of the romance of a Rachmaninov piano concerto, my brain alights on the William Tell Overture or "In the Hall of the Mountain King". Searching for a way to bridge the gap between the classical and the popular, I tentatively searched online for tasteful piano or string arrangements of modern songs. There is a part of me that would love to walk down the aisle to "Under the Bridge" by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, because we both like it, it's a good tune and it has a nice sentiment. As luck would have it, a string quartet recording of it does exist. Unfortunately it's on an album full of classically reimagined Chilli Peppers covers. Listening to samples of the others, I couldn't help thinking that the version of "Californication" came out rather better. Now clearly that's not appropriate for a wedding. When I appear in the full bridal get up, I don't want everyone dreaming of Californication. Herein lies a fundamental problem. For every song that is special to us or makes sense lyrically for a wedding, there is a matching one just around the corner that is entirely wrong. On the positive side, we have Blur's "To The End" or "Tender" (the latter particularly for the "get through it" refrain, since I fear being overwhelmed by emotion during the ceremony); "Gravity" by Embrace works ("It's been a long time coming... and I can't stop smiling...") as does "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls ("You're the closest to heaven that I'll ever be and I don't want to go home right now...") and "Wild Horses" by the Rolling Stones. Negatively speaking, there are obvious faux pas - Elvis singing "Suspicious Minds", any of the myriad of versions of "D.I.V.O.R.C.E." and a personal favourite of mine: "Perfect Gentleman" by Wyclef Jean ("Just coz she dances go go, that don't make her a ho, no, call up my mama say I'm in love with a stripper, yo...") - but there are also more subtle dangers lurking. The mighty Kurt Elling, jazz behemoth, first recorded a beautiful version of "My Foolish Heart" to celebrate his own marriage. That's all very well, but the first line includes the words "...oh my heart, I'm reluctant to start, since we've been here before...", and the implication that my beloved and I may have tried and failed to marry previously, or may have married other people along the way, springs all to easily to mind.

As you can probably tell, I think far too deeply about these musical issues and my brain is apt to spin off at tangents with minimal provocation. So sometimes I dwell on the Irish heritage of my intended and think that it might be nice to make an entrance to a traditional tune from the emerald isle. The songs that I always think of, however, are "Whisky in the Jar" and the Irish rugby anthem "Ireland's Call". "Ireland's Call" is one of two songs that I find myself singing subconsciously in the shower with alarming regularity. The other one, as it happens, is "Rehab" - perhaps we could get our guests to join in a resounding chorus of "no, no, no" if we used that one in the ceremony! The husband to be is no stranger to the realm of the absurd and for his part often suggests Iron Maiden's "Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter" as a touching tribute to my mum, who will be giving me away.

Out of all this cavalcade of musical whimsy I aim to pick something that is not traditional but that equally isn't so achingly hip that nobody understands why I picked it. So I've pretty much discounted Mendellsohn and Florence and the Machine, and I'm left with everything in between. In trying to please everyone I have to stop myself descending into bland mediocrity, fighting any temptation to simply stick a pin in the Magic FM playlist and extract "Just the Way You Are" or "Groovy Kind of Love". This wedding business can be unbelievably intense. I think it's time to go and lie down in a darkened room with my iPod. Perhaps I shall find some instrumental interpretations of The Prodigy played on the panpipes. "Smack my b*tch up" on the panpipes, anyone? Somebody must have recorded that, surely?

Magic

2009-06-21T18:05:00.003Z

Here's a little meditation for Father's Day. It's a little story that played out in the parking space across the street from where I live, visible from my kitchen window as I wash up and the scene of many dramas. You don't need a permit to park there and there are no time limits, which attracts a wide variety of drivers. Anyway...

A bloke enters my field of vision, wheeling a stroller with the kind of proud lilt that tells me he's the daddy to the cute toddler with bunches sitting in it. He stops beside a people carrier and for a brief moment he doesn't do anything. He and his little girl just look intently at the car, then at each other. Returning her gaze to the vehicle, she raises her hands before bringing them together in a dramatic, exaggerated clap. At exactly the same moment I hear the car alarm beep and the whirr and click of all its doors unlocking. The girl is shaking with laughter and looking extremely pleased with herself. She has the power to make the car obey. Just a clap and it will open. She might be small, but things will do her bidding and that makes her feel great.

How cool is that dad, to think of hiding the key fob behind his back and pressing the button at just the right moment to bring a bit of joy into something as mundane as getting into the car? He rocks. I hope he got something nice today.

An Official Time and Place

2009-06-07T10:55:00.003Z

We went to the local register office last week, my fiance and I, walking across the park in glorious sunshine towards the meeting that finally made our impending marriage seem real. We had to meet a registrar and give notice of our intention to marry. So we, us, this thing that we want to celebrate and make permanent with a ceremony and cake, had to stand up before officialdom for the first time.
Ushered into an oppressively hot waiting room that was filled with advertisements for wedding photographers and funeral directors and a large pile of leaflets about swine flu, we prepared to take our first legal steps towards marriage. Ah, that curiously atmospheric mix of attempts to sell us stuff and give us government-endorsed advice certainly created a welcoming atmosphere.

The registrar explained that we would be interviewed separately, because it was "a kind of test." We needed to prove our identity and, I suppose, that we actually knew each other and weren't entering into some kind of marriage of convenience. My seemingly inbuilt fear of authority figures reappeared like an old friend and I was as nervous as if we were actually standing up and taking our vows there and then. Predictably I could not play it cool and halfway through the interview I thought I may have blown my chances of being granted official permission to marry by being unable to answer a question - I forgot my own phone number. Luckily I was allowed to ask my fiance for help on this one and I think the registrar did eventually give me a passing grade. I remembered who I was, when I was born, who my dad was and who I was supposed to be marrying. I signed a piece of paper to say that I wanted to get married. When I had left the little airless room containing the slightly careworn registrar, who typed labouriously and ponderously with two fingers, my beloved went in and did exactly the same thing. Our names should now be posted on the board outside the register office and the local public has two weeks to object to our being joined in wedlock. Assuming that they don't, then officially October 3rd 2009 will be our wedding day.

Up until now, the actual wedding has been an abstract concept, floating around in space. Now it has entered the realm of reality. To compound that feeling, a few days after giving notice of our marriage we received confirmation that two registrars had been booked to attend our ceremony. This came with further details of the legally binding vows that we will say and the order of proceedings on the wedding day. They were neatly printed out on an A4 sheet, resplendent in a flowery serif script and bedecked with the glorious beauty of Microsoft Word clip art. Hearts and doves abounded. This missive was clearly the work of a bored admin assistant on a quiet afternoon and I loved it all the more for that. The juxtaposition of the mundane with the momentous had a certain charm. It was as if our big day, one of the key turning points of our lives, was briefly breaking into dull, tedious, everyday life. For a few moments in October, normality for us will be suspended and we will be getting married, while for others things will be just carrying on as normal. I like that. That makes me smile.

Being Apart

2009-05-30T15:08:00.005Z

Do two lovers really miss the tranquility of solitude? I'm not usually given to questioning the wisdom of Paul Weller's lyrics, but I only ask because it's awfully quiet around here without my husband-to-be. Perhaps too quiet. After much agonising he decided to accept a three month contract doing something technical for a gambling company in Gibraltar. Within days of saying yes to the post he'd flown around 1080 miles to the other side of Europe and left me here. So I'm living alone for the first time in around a decade.

The changes have been quite dramatic, as one would expect. There's less washing and ironing piling up and the flat seems to be maintaining a higher level of tidiness than usual. I have also received a number of invitations to dinner from friends and neighbours. This amuses me greatly as we never received even half as many invitations as a couple! Actually, I think I should start inviting other people over to eat as I'm finding it difficult to scale back portion sizes. I made enough rice for two the other night, but ate it anyway. If I carry on like this I shall be enormous August.

Together my absent love and I have discovered the wonders of Skype, which enables me to see if he is looking tired or suffering from sore hayfever eyes from the comfort of the kitchen while I'm cooking my gargantuan feasts for one. The laptop lets me make a fuss of him from afar and he gets the dubious pleasure of seeing my ugly mug every night. I'm trying to choose a variety of locations around the flat to host our chats, changing the props and backdrops for each video call so that he doesn't get bored. He likes to play with extreme close up shots. So far a carton of orange juice (because the Spanish for juice is "zuma" or something similar, and that's a funny word), some sparkling mineral water (because it had gas in it, and that was apparently funny too) and a jumbo sized heel blister (because he wore the wrong socks with the wrong shoes) have loomed up at me from my screen. I get the feeling that our chats will soon be stage-managed, epic productions on the scale of "Lawrence of Arabia".

I'm not really totally alone, of course. Thanks to his mad panic trying to find some scales to check that his hold baggage wasn't over the weight limit the night before he flew out, everyone in our building knows that he's gone and I'm still here. Apparently the chap downstairs knows Gibraltar well as he used to live there. His dad used to be an air traffic controller there, which is nice. Neighbours, friends and the internet don't necessarily make this whole process a lot easier, though. I think this is by far the hardest thing we've ever done as a couple. He's only a wee fella, but it's amazing how much space there is around here when he's gone. Still, three months is nothing. He'll be popping back and forth - in fact he should be here later tonight as we're off to see the registrar and complete our legal preliminaries for marriage on Tuesday. Then come October we'll be married and he'll be mine forever. I shall try my best never to let him go again, but I suspect he'll have other ideas. He's full of surprises. He may take a new contract with a yurt manufacturer in Outer Mongolia, or something similar. Or maybe I could get my own back and become a seasonal sheep shearer on Mull. His unpredictable nature can cause a lot of grief, but it's one of the reasons I love him. It doesn't do to make life too predictable, does it?

Anyone for Tennis?

2009-05-29T18:17:00.002Z

I've been dipping in and out of the coverage of the French Open tennis. I like a bit of tennis, actually. There's a strong mental aspect to it - kind of like a duel without the pistols.

As you probably know the home of the French Open is the Stade Roland Garros, situated in the outer environs of Paris. I'm sad to say I've never visited it. The funny thing is, though, that this prestigious grand slam tournament venue is actually situated (according to one of my Parisian guidebooks) on Avenue Gordon-Bennett. 2 Avenue Gordon-Bennett, to be precise.

Makes me chuckle just thinking about it.

Curtain Up

2009-05-17T18:37:00.004Z

Last week I finally hung the new curtains in our living room. We bought a curtain pole and some finials which match the pattern on our fireplace soon after we moved into the flat. For a year and a half they sat, propped up against the wall, their only useful moments being when we cooked sausages and a long pole was needed to silence the smoke alarm. In an optimistic fit of New Year resolve we bought some curtain fabric in the January sales and since then I have been trying to make curtains out of it. At times it has felt like going into battle with the voluptuous quantities of fabric and liner.

The saleswoman in the John Lewis fabric department was very excited about my desire to make the curtains myself. "Ooh, you're young," she said. "You'll always make your own curtains in the future after doing this." I think I was seduced because she called me young, so I set about the task with great vigour. I decided that I wanted curtains that dropped from above the window right to the floor. I wanted a dramatic, opulent look in the room. Also, there was a lumpy bulge in the wall beneath the window that I wanted to cover up. All this meant that the curtains would be significantly bigger than me. They had the upper hand size wise. Wrangling around seven metres of fabric proved to be a significant challenge. Most awkwardly I had to move a lot of the furniture out of the living room in order to provide the only space big enough to cut the fabric and lay out the curtains side by side to match the pattern repeats between them. For those readers keen to eradicate bingo wings and improve upper body strength I recommend curtain making. My poor muscles had never ached so much. Coupled with the pain of sore, pricked and bleeding hands from all the pinning and tacking I had to do, I was in pretty bad shape throughout the process.

It wasn't just me that was feeling the physical strain of the task in hand either. My ancient, secondhand Singer Stylist sewing machine had not been used for some time before it was pressed into curtain making service. Actually I had been keeping it in the living room as a kind of symbolic act since we moved in, trying to show visitors that I was somehow in the process of properly dressing the window in that room. The last thing I sewed, come to think of it, was a draught excluder for a bedroom in our old rented cottage. I bought a load of cheap pink cotton and made it in the shape of a penis. I still have it - I use it to frighten some of our more delicate friends with. Anyway, after making that I carefully cleaned the machine and oiled it before putting it away. This meant that when I got it going again for the curtains it emitted gentle puffs of smoke for a while, presumably as the old oil burned off the newly heated up motor. The smoke stopped after a couple of sewing sessions, but the strong smell of sewing machine oil persisted. There was a certain heady atmosphere pervading the flat whenever I sewed. Luckily the machine held up for the entire project and still seems to be going strong.

Overall it took me four months of spare-time sewing to finish the curtains. I received some very helpful advice from the lady in John Lewis, looked up how to do some things on the internet and worked out the rest myself. I probably could have finished the job more quickly, but frankly there were some times when I just didn't want to look at the damn curtains, let alone sew them. A fine example of this would be when I had to sew on and unpick the heading tape over and over because I couldn't get the thread tension right on the machine. Now, though, they look fantastic. I even made three matching cushion covers out of the same fabric to go with them, and I get the pleasure of telling everybody that I made them. The living room looks great and I reckon that, despite all the effort it took, I would definitely make curtains again. It was worth it. I became even more proud of my soft furnishings when I happened upon an episode of "Kirstie's Homemade Home" on Channel 4 the other day. Kirstie Allsop was going into raptures because she'd made a cushion all by herself, then she promptly turned around and commissioned a professional curtain maker to finish the job and dress all the windows in her fancy holiday home. Having made my own curtains I felt extremely superior. I've earned my home furnishing spurs the hard way... and I didn't feel the need to make a t.v. show about it, so there.

He's a lumberjack and he's okay

2009-03-18T19:20:00.002Z

My other half and I have been together for eleven years now and I'm starting to worry that my barometer of normal behaviour has become alarmingly skewed. For example, I suspect that in other relationships, "darling, let's spend an hour tidying up the garden," doesn't rapidly turn into "let's embark on some amateur tree surgery and minor deforestation." Unfortunately I'd be lying if I said I was surprised when the husband-to-be decided that simple weeding was boring and started chopping things down.

We've been slowly working on our garden since we moved into the flat. Regular mowing and the creation of a rose bed have improved it, but any efforts were spoiled by the presence of a steep bank on the south side that was very overgrown. Holly, brambles, several mature trees (not subject to any Tree Protection Orders according to all the surveys and searches we had done) and a whole lot of ivy sprawled across it. It was unsightly, but worse it provided the ideal home for spiders of possibly the most evil looking species. In late summer it seemed as if the trees were raining arachnids, all with plump bodies and robust looking legs, some of them visibly hairy. I was keen to get the bank cleared before the weather warmed up this year and the spiders regrouped, so we set about it with gusto. We filled our two council-approved garden waste bins with ivy and we'd barely made a dent, but pulling the stuff up was curiously therapeutic. You grab a bit, give it a yank and metres of tendril start coming loose. Roots pop, snap and ping out of the ground and you just have to keep pulling, following the intricate snake in its death dance around the garden. After a while, though, while I was ripping up ivy, my man was starting to look wistfully up at the trees and stroke his beard.

He determined that he required a bow saw and possibly an axe, having established that I wouldn't let him have a chain saw unless he went on the appropriate safety course. We stopped off at Homebase on our way back from depositing a car boot full of ivy at the local dump. By this point the gardening and subsequent dumping had taken its toll on my beloved. His jeans were ripped and he'd covered himself in mud. A muddy stain spread from his crotch down to where the knee of his trousers should have been, but where instead a frayed remnant of denim flapped in the breeze. He looked like one half of a bad Bros tribute act fallen on hard times. People were staring. To make matters worse, Homebase only sold puny pruning tools, so it was back in the car and off to B&Q. It turns out that B&Q is the place to shop if you fancy a bit of weekend lumberjacking... or possibly a little light murder. They actually sell something called a "handy axe". Handy? Lip balm in your desk drawer is "handy". I've not yet felt the need to carry an axe within reach just in case I need it. Anyway, they also had a wide range of saws, so we left suitably equipped.

He started with some small branches which were close to the ground, preferring to denude the tree trunks of their limbs with the saw before reducing the branches to manageable chunks with the axe, which was indeed proving to be very handy. I lurked fearfully on the sidelines, phone in hand, ready to deal with any emergencies (thankfully there were none). There was a slightly manic glint in his eye as he moved on to the large pine tree, periodically looking over at me and shouting gleefully, "this is so much fun!" He managed to bring down quite a large overhanging branch without any damage to himself or the shed and with a mixture of awe and relief I cast my apprehensions aside, wielding the axe (handy) to help chop it up. As we loaded up our second wheelbarrow full of branches to take to the car, we realised that all of the choppings weren't going to fit in the boot to be taken to the dump. It was also starting to rain, the dump was shutting in an hour and somehow we'd forgotten to have lunch. It was probably time to stop for the day.

Instead of an overgrown mess along one side of our garden we now have a large pile of wood and some increasingly nervous looking trees. The saw and the axe were out again last weekend and they may soon be joined by a brazier. He thinks that it will be more satisfying to burn the wood and maybe use it to cook things rather than letting the council dispose of it for us. So soon I shall get to add pyromania to forestry on my list of things that young engaged couples get up to at the weekends. Such is normality, I guess.

Bin There, Done That

2009-03-02T19:08:00.003Z

It sits in the kitchen like a benign, emasculated dalek. It boasts that no finger, however greasy, can mark its satin steel finish. It opens its gaping black jaw quietly, slowly, yet efficiently at the prompting of a single, light tap on the head, receiving our waste in the most dignified manner possible. It is our new fifty litre Brabantia touch bin; it is a rubbish-god to be worshipped reverently and appeased with frequent offerings.

The husband-to-be touched many bins before electing to buy this one. He delivered an eloquent oration about the superiority of that particular brand whilst raising lids in John Lewis. "Feel the action," he cried. We're not used to having bins with an action. Our green plastic swing bin came from Woolies and was bought because it matched the kitchen where we were living at the time. Ten years and two homes later and it didn't match anything any more. It had also developed a large crack in the lid (due, we think, to the over-zealous disposal of a nephew's nappy - this is what growing old does to you). It clearly needed replacing. Thus into our lives came the Brabantia.

Much to future hubby's excitement, the bin brought with it three free bin liners. As robust and well designed as the rubbish receiver itself, they were his dream bin bag. Since moving to a flat with communal refuse collection facilities I'd come to realise that even perfectly personable professionals can be of the type who view bin bags as an optional lifestyle choice. Consequently the building's wheely bin swims with a primordial soup of flat-dweller's detritus. I still await the emergence of new species with interest, but not wishing to contribute to the evolutionary process I developed a habit of double bagging our rubbish. Future hubby saw this as sub-optimal, but Sainsbury's swing bin liners just weren't strong enough to prevent leakage if used in a single layer. The Brabantia liners, though, were man enough to go into battle solo.

As our free samples began to run out, we searched the shops in vain for replacements. Nowhere seemed to stock the correct brand. The husband-to-be refused to entertain the possibility of buying any other kind. The allure of tough plastic bags with a brand name written all over them proved too much for him to forsake - these bags obviously being the male equivalent of the Hermes Birkin. Buying direct from the manufacturer would have meant a costly outlay in Euros. A quick internet search revealed a company with a very reasonable price per bag. The downside was that we had to buy in bulk.

So it was that, shortly after the garbage dalek took root, Parcelforce delivered what was clearly meant to be a trade-sized case of bin liners to our door. One hundred and twenty bin liners to be precise, neatly packaged in tens. We use, on average, one liner per week. Thus we had purchased over two years worth of liners with the single click of a mouse. The future has truly arrived. I managed to stow a year's supply under the sink before putting the rest in storage, lest our flat should be further taken over by the cult of the bin. Ah, the bin. Still it sits in the kitchen, clad internally with its designer lining, silently waiting for the rubbish, waiting for someone to touch it and bring it to life, while beneath the sink the liners wait in their ordered ranks - a silver monolith and its plastic baggy children.

Hitting the Slopes

2009-02-14T10:59:00.004Z

For my first attempt at posting a photo to my blog, I present to you (hopefully, if this has worked) an image of me snowboarding. Yes, me. I'm the one flailing wildly. The other dude on the slopes was my instructor. I spent a lot of time during my lesson thinking I was probably old enough to be his mother!

I'm not the kind of person who does such crazy things as snowboarding usually, but my loving husband-to-be booked me a surprise lesson for my birthday. I had an amazing time and surprisingly actually managed to stay upright most of the time. The picture shows my first solo descent of the slope. I wouldn't say I was a natural snowboarder, but I did get a big kick out of trying something new. Perhaps I'm an adrenalin junkie at heart after all. Or perhaps this is the start of a mid-life crisis? I'll keep you posted. Next stop the alps... maybe.

Building a Reputation

2009-01-21T19:03:00.003Z

So Barack Obama finally took office yesterday after a campaign and electoral process that received far more media coverage in the United Kingdom than any other I can remember. I have become hooked on James Naughtie's stateside dispatches for the Today programme, with his dulcet scottish tones enlightening us about the mood of the American people in these historic times. There's a little something that doesn't quite sit right on this side of the pond, however. It's a little thing and I've tried to escape it, but I can't quite forget that stirring speech Obama gave on the campaign trail where he repeated that natty slogan "Yes we can!"
An erudite political communicator he may be, but the new President borrowed a phrase made famous by Bob the Builder. Forget Joe the Plumber - it looks like Obama thinks he can fix it for us all.

Good for him for taking a positive attitude, but in these almost drunkenly optimistic times I am reminded of my mother's view of the slightly rotund chap in the yellow hat who has conversations with his tools (that would be Bob, not Barack, just to make things clear). Mother is now sixty five and works in a school for kids with special needs. She's a patient teaching assistant who thinks the world of the kids she works with and really wants the best for them. However, after a messy divorce and several other hard knocks in life she doesn't really tend towards being a glass half full person. Bob, with his assured attitude, is just not sensible. So when her class starts up with a resounding chorus of "Bob the Builder, can we fix it?" She doesn't reply Obama-style with a forthright "Yes we can!" Can we fix it mother? "Well, we hope so," she says.
So President Obama, we all hope so too.

Noel

2009-01-12T19:36:00.006Z

Way back in September 2008 my future husband and I had a rather long and somewhat talkative lunch. Somewhere in between a couple of lattes and some paninis we decided to go away for Christmas that year. There was really only one place that both of us wanted to go - Paris, the City of Light and the location for some of our most happy memories from the past two years. So we decided to go. We returned to our computers and tried to ease our way back into working by reading the BBC News... only to find that the channel tunnel had just caught fire and the way to Paris looked like it might be blocked for quite some time. Ever the optimists, we booked the cheap Eurostar tickets anyway. Luckily the fire didn't cause too much disruption and so it came to pass that on Christmas morning we woke up in a rather classy apartment on Rue Vaneau in the 7th Arrondissement. It had a fireplace, a beautiful stone floor and (in the second en-suite bedroom) my mother, a Parisian virgin (remarkable after sixty-five years and one failed marriage, I know, but there you are).

Truthfully I have found the meaning of Christmas to be hard to grasp in recent years. When I was a child it was easy to pin down - it meant presents and staying at my grandparents' house. Growing older I found it to be an occasion marked by overindulgence in food and drink. When I first moved in with my boyfriend it became an opportunity to show off, with me attempting to be the perfect domestic goddess. I remember being so excited about inviting people over to our house. And then I remember discovering, over the course of the following few weeks that everybody else had actually had a crap time while I, in my Nigella Lawson style whirlwind, had been completely oblivious to the fact. Each passing yuletide since then has seen my bitter resentment grow and though I am ashamed to admit it, Christmas has become a time of duty and obligation, endured or at best tolerated.

As a household we had become stuck in a Christmas rut, with the dark sense of foreboding commencing sometime near the end of summer and persisting until the New Year has been rung in. We needed to do something different and Paris provided a breath of fresh air. The presence of mother opened the door to full days spent doing unashamedly touristy things, like a Seine river cruise, as opposed to hours of eating and vegetating. There was not a turkey, Queen's speech or Doctor Who Special in sight. The cobwebs were well and truly blown off the tinsel.

Paris doesn't just grind to a halt in the way that provincial England does on Christmas Day. Shops open in the morning to enable people to buy fresh food, just like any other day. The first thing we did on Christmas morning was visit the bakery to buy bread and an enormous, baroquely decorated, very expensive yule log. Traditional local festive fare, apparently, and very nice it was too. Actually it pretty much single handedly sustained my mother, who didn't adapt well to the rest of the continental cuisine, for the rest of our visit. We had a long conversation in French about the weather with the lady in the bakery. It was strangely satisfying. Walking along Rue Cler, a street famous for its small, exclusive food shops, later on in the morning we were confronted with an array of fresh oysters, meat, vegetables and the attendant throng of Parisians eager to buy them. The Eiffel Tower wasn't shut for the holidays either, so we took a trip to the top for what must have been the best view I've ever experienced on Christmas Day. It certainly beat the sight of mother asleep in a chair or the fiance trying on his Christmas jumpers.

The fact that the Metro was running made popping out in the evening simple. There didn't even seem to be any sort of reduced service on Christmas Day; the only difference was that there were less people traveling and it was easier than usual to get a seat. We rounded off our Christmas by attending a free concert of piano music and seasonal readings at St. Sulpice church. Curiously, we found ourselves sitting close to some Americans who had been drawn to the church because of its connection to the "Da Vinci Code". I have no idea what this was all about, never having read the book myself, but there was a kind of comfort in knowing that somebody else understood as little of the readings as we did. Delivered in sonorous, guttural French by a large man with an equally large beard, the texts were certainly atmospheric even if they were also incomprehensible.

Maybe Christmas will always be incomprehensible to me, too. This year it meant five days of lunchtime wine and being in the heart of a city that I love, sharing it with people that I love. It meant doing rather than dozing. It was different. It was good. So maybe this year it will be good if it turns out to be something different again. If Christmas retains that elusive quality by continually keeping me guessing and constantly reinventing itself (or more accurately being reinvented by me and those I spend it with) then I might perhaps come around to liking it again.

Pants

2008-11-29T10:37:00.003Z

I was waiting for a train at Charing Cross last week when my eye was diverted from the departure boards by a large poster. Resplendent in larger than life size glory were a number of gentlemen who weren't wearing very much at all. In fact they were clad solely in the Dolce and Gabbana underwear that the poster was advertising and they clearly weren't strangers to the gym. A caption read "The Italian Rugby Team." I thought this was rather clever, what with the current round of autumn rugby international tests taking place and Dolce and Gabbana being Italian. Then I began to look closer.

I don't know why, but I'd initially assumed that the fine specimens of manhood on display were professional underwear models. This was not the case. All of a sudden I noticed that one of them was Massi, Italy's infamous non-kicking fly half - an undoubtedly talented player but quite unsuited to that particular position on the field. Then I saw Kane Robertson, qualified to play in the Italian team by virtue of his having an Italian grandmother but still a useful try scorer when given the opportunity. I perceived the absence of Castrogiovani from the picture - a stalwart of the Italian scrum, but one of the larger, heavier-built members of the team who probably wouldn't have shown off the designer knickers to their best effect. "Blimey," I thought, "that really is the Italian rugby team!"

At this point I realised that I'd been gazing intently at the poster for a good few minutes amidst the hustle and bustle of the station concourse. My fellow travelers must have thought I was lost in the pleasant contemplation of exposed male flesh, adrift in a sea of beefcake daydreams. Slightly embarrassed, I averted my eyes, even though I knew my mind was on higher things. I was thinking about the maul, the ruck and the drop goal, and how it's not long to go now before the start of the Six Nations, where I shall drink Peroni and positively will Italy to do better than they usually do. I was thinking about how much I enjoy watching rugby, with its potent mix of brain and brawn, tactics, mud, blood, determination and occasional violence. And of course I was thinking how all of this now has an added dimension since Mr Dolce and Mr Gabbana saw fit to reveal to me the hidden wonders beneath the players' team strips ;-)

Ads - bad and dangerous to know?

2008-10-02T18:13:00.003Z

Here's a modern moral dilemma: if Lloyds TSB actually manage to take over HBOS, should I stop banking with them? You see, Lloyds would then effectively own the Halifax and all their attendant advertising, with the all singing, all dancing staff and Howard crooning about interest rates. The Lloyds adverts are quite good, with their kooky music, distinctive animations and intelligently cool slogan "For the Journey". Looking at the Halifax ones makes me think of corporate team building days gone mad. They fill me with dread rather than the overwhelming urge to invest.

Years ago the husband-to-be and I started a boycott against Tropicana orange juice on the basis of a dodgy advertising campaign. I think it involved singing parrots and it didn't even fall into the "so bad it's good" category. Currently I'm glad that I have good enough eyes to avoid Specsavers, on account of their wanton abuse of the late Edith Piaf. The poor woman had a difficult enough life, without having her latent talent used to flog a two-for-one glasses offer from beyond the grave. Then there are the current crop of commercials for Orange mobile phones, where various people tell us: "I am my mum, I am my best friend, I am my favourite cheese..." and so on. They bring out my cynical side and I think they really should be saying: "I am what this clever scriptwriter told me to say I am." They're all just pretending, however true the statements they're making may be. It's all about created authenticity and stylised identities, which taints the product somewhat in my mind.

There is the argument that there is no such thing as bad publicity and if reading me have a moan about a few firms has made you want to rush out and buy their stuff then fair enough. The ad agencies involved can congratulate themselves on creating phenomenal brand awareness in the online sector (see my previous post about Absolute Radio for a further discussion of these issues). However, if an ad is supposed to be trying to make me want to purchase something, surely it should hold my interest, not make me want to switch off the television. This is even more important in the age of the digital P.V.R. and Sky Plus, where you can record your favourite shows and skip through the commercial breaks at the touch of a button.

So what makes a memorably good advert? Things that are slightly off the wall but not too self consciously madcap seem to work best. Remember the Cadbury's gorilla playing the drums last year? He became must see t.v. in his own right, with people seeking him out on the internet so they could view him whenever they wanted. The same was true of Johnny Vegas and his woolly mun-keh sidekick when they made a comeback after the I.T.V. digital debacle to advertise P.G. Tips. Going back a long while, I still have fond memories of the British Gas privatisation campaign, "If you see Sid, tell him." It was indirect, far from glamourous and certainly not slick, but even now I haven't forgotten it. It didn't sell me many British Gas shares, because I was in primary school, but it was still good. I also find myself mourning the sad demise of the man from Del Monte. He may have had an unpleasant, lingering whiff of colonialism about him, but he did have a strong positive attitude. And lovely tinned peaches.

Looking back over a life spent bombarded by advertising reveals a lot. Iconic humour will sell a product, but creating icons is far from easy, which is why so many ads miss their mark. However hard he tries, Suggs from Madness will never be Captain Birdseye and a singing banker will never persuade me to take out a loan.

Absolutely

2008-09-06T16:12:00.003Z

It was announced last week that Virgin Radio is soon going to be known as Absolute Radio, having been acquired by some new owners a while back. Listening to the station over the past few weeks I haven't been able to escape the constant bombardment of efforts designed to effectively manage the change. Amongst them were a series of little promos describing "what makes this radio station great, by the people that work here". I wasn't sure what reaction this was supposed to provoke in me. My first thought was that they were reminding me how much my life sucked. I don't have a really cool media job where I can just pop downstairs and see a gig while I'm having my teabreak. I've never met anyone famous in the lift. I'm not one of the great and the good who beavers away behind the scenes to make the eighties hour happen, thus bringing the delights of Aha to a wider audience. Well, I might as well give up now. Thanks, Virgin, for that little reminder. If you make a few changes to the radio station I listen to most, it's not really going to make my life any worse, is that what you're trying to tell me?

Naturally Virgin/Absolute radio care not for my personal rancour, broken dreams and unfulfilled ambitions. They have embarked on a fiendishly clever marketing strategy that works on a number of different levels. Firstly it works within the organisation concerned to reassure staff. The good folks that work at the station are, after all, the ones who are going to be affected most by changes in ownership, management and so on, so to get them publicly onside, talking about the happy aspects of their job, makes sense. It's like a big broadcasting hug - "don't quit guys, we love you!" It says that everything is going to be all right in a highly attractive manner. Face it, we all desire a bit of fame, and I'm willing to be that a good proportion of those working at radio stations, from the people that clean the lavs to the receptionists, harbour a few ambitions to actually be on the radio themselves. It's true "...all the stars who never were are parking cars and pumping gas...".

All those new radio stars definitely seem valued by the station management, because they've set up a blog where all staff can post their thoughts about work, change, running the station and so on. This blog is public and anyone, inside or outside the organisation, can read it. I really like this idea. Having worked in large-ish places where change used to happen via various twists and turns of subterfuge accompanied by gossip and rumour, this kind of candour is extremely refreshing. A lot of the things that are being said are interesting too, especially the discussions about playlists, branding and advertising. As a listener I'm well aware that I'm the target for all sorts of messages trying to sell me music, products, maybe a lifestyle even. As the possessor of an MA in Media and Culture I'm also aware that the way in which these messages are put across is changing. I spent a year researching the shift towards online news reporting as opposed to traditional media forms (hey, ma, ain't I clever?), so I particularly appreciated an article on the blog about about finding a place for old media like radio in a new media world. The author saw radio as providing the audience with key words to Google. This struck a chord with me because that's exactly how I found the blog in the first place. I heard something on air about Virgin changing, got interested, typed Virgin Radio into a search engine and eventually found a link to the blog. Now I'm further augmenting the advertising loop by blogging about the experience myself. So that's another way in which the "what's great about this radio station..." campaign worked - they've turned me into a willing soldier in their army. I'm listening, I'm talking about what's going on, and of course I'm not the only one.

The final, possibly most ingenious and subtle aspect of the campaign was that it made me think about what I like about the station. I can listen for sustained periods without getting annoyed by the music or what the presenters say. I enjoy the occasional moments when they play very bad rock, like Whitesnake and Aerosmith, because I can give public vent to what should be a very private passion and turn the radio up so I can sing along. I like the way in which Russ Williams can read out messages from sponsors or obvious advertising scripts without trying too hard or being over-enthusiastic, but still sounding respectful to whoever happens to be helping to pay his salary this week. It's a gift - you can tell he's just saying daft things because he has to, but the man comes across as a true professional. I don't much care for Christian O'Connell, but I think I grew out of oh-so-very-funny breakfast radio several years ago. It's the Today Programme all the way for me, these days, I'm afraid. Anyway, I'm starting to realise that overall I like the station and I'll keep on listening even if it's called something different. There are also bound to be a whole lot of people out there who are thinking the same thing too. So the slightly quirky bit of promotion has achieved its wider objective. I'm interested in what will happen in the future and I shall keep listening to find out what Absolute Radio is all about. And as I've now given them lots of publicity (no doubt my blog reaches millions of readers... well, I have a very loyal following in certain quarters, I'm sure... some people must be reading this, surely), I shall assume that they're sending me a nice big fat cheque in the post :-)

Trawling the Depths

2008-09-06T16:03:00.003Z

It's true. It's not a spoof. There really is a programme on Channel Five called "Extreme Fishing with Robson Green".

Does he sing "Unchained Melody" whilst spearing carp in a volcano perhaps? Or maybe he's just got piranhas inside his waders?

Doing the Lambeth Walk

2008-07-26T14:50:00.004Z

It's Lambeth Conference time again. Hundreds of Church of England bishops from all over the world have descended on Canterbury to spend two weeks doing holy things. Which is nice. They only get together once every ten years, so naturally they have lots of work to do and things to talk about.

The huge rifts that have opened up in the Established Church over women and gay priests have been receiving a lot of national media coverage. Faced with such a monumental news story on its doorstep, our BBC local news team initially showed a rare degree of insight, screening an interview with controversial gay cleric Gene Robinson on their flagship teatime television show "South East Today" when he was due to preach in Ashford (he has been pointedly excluded from the Lambeth Conference proper). However this week they returned to their usual stance of trying not to make waves. Evidently they shocked even themselves with their previous attempt at edgy topicality and they promptly ran back to the safe, warm, cuddly womb of bland vanilla news for the masses. Imagine the editorial meeting: Lambeth Conference is happening, it's the eve of a huge priestly protest about world poverty in London and the air around Canterbury is heady with religious debate - what angle shall we take on reporting this story? I know - let's do a report on bishops wives doing daily outdoor aerobics!

I really have no right to abandon myself to such unbecoming cynicism because the sad fact of the matter is that for me Lambeth Conference represents a series of funny memories and quirky episodes rather than anything deeply religious or political. The conference ten years ago was held (as it is once more in 2008) at the University of Kent, perched high on a hill above the city of Canterbury. Back then I was a young undergraduate there, about to enter my final year, with a summer job on campus. I remember the bishops descending on us, swarming around the bars and lecture theatres in a host of colourful robes and with very large crosses around their necks. Staff in the computing lab set up a "bishop cam" on one of the main thoroughfares and encouraged people to engage in bishop spotting on the internet. Looking back it seems like an utterly surreal experience, with us remaining students and academics set adrift in a sea of holy men.

I don't recall seeing any bishops or their spouses doing their daily physical jerks on the lawn outside the Physics lab, as they were on the local news programme, but I do remember that before the bishops turned up many, many hundreds of portaloos arrived. They seemed to be set up in every available space around the large university site. These were not just portaloos of the "bog standard" variety. They claimed to be "luxury" or "premium" lavatorial facilities. Intrigued by this I thought I might investigate them on one occasion when taken short as I walked across campus. I excitedly climbed the steps up to the loo, looking forward to spending a penny in style, only to beat a hasty retreat when I heard emanating from within the cabin what I can only describe as "holy muzak". These loos were equipped with some sort of sound system that played soothing choral music to the occupants. Deciding that they obviously weren't for use by the likes of me, I left to go elsewhere. As I recounted the tale to the (agnostic) boyfriend, he nodded sagely and said: "Ah, that's what happens when you're a bishop. You go to the loo and choirs of heavenly angels start to sing - it's how you know you've got a calling." I must make haste and phone the local BBC newsroom about that - a decade old tale mixing religion with toilet humour may be too much for them to resist.

Lambeth Conference 2008
Lambeth Conference 1998 - contains a link to the old bishop cam, but unfortunately it's now been taken down. The conference this year does however have an official cartoonist, who has a "tent cam" and a blog.

Delia Derbyshire

2008-07-26T13:58:00.003Z

A few years ago I heard a play on Radio 4 called "Blue Veils and Golden Sands" which dramatised the life and work of Delia Derbyshire, so the recent discovery of some of her lost tapes interested me. Derbyshire was a leader in the field of electronic music who crafted sounds from within cascades of tape loops at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, among other places. She is probably best known for her contribution to the Dr Who theme, despite never being formally credited for it.

A Cambridge educated mathematician, Derbyshire fought to work in recording studios at a time when women just didn't do that sort of thing. There's a resonance in that for me. In all my years skirting the fringes of a radio career, back in my dim and distant youth, I could not escape the fact that audio broadcasting was very much a male business. This probably persists even now and thinking about it in the light of my subsequent postgraduate studies I believe that the intimacy of the medium is the key to explaining it. Radio and music get into your personal space in ways that other media cannot. Television and film are watched from afar on screens. There's a separation between the watcher and the watched. Sounds, by contrast, pour directly into our ears. There seems to be no barrier between the still, small voice broadcasting in the dark and our inner monologue. A particular piece of music is only a synapse away from affecting us on a deep emotional level. Sounds can get right inside your head and with almost alarming speed are capable of providing powerful sensory stimulation. In a patriarchal society, is it any wonder that those in influential positions would want to exclude women from participating in creating noise? It would be almost indecent - women should be seen and not heard.

The concept of Delia Derbyshire as a kind of feminist heroine also ties in with another reason why I admire her - her position as an unconventional genius. She seems to have been able to discover ways of working with sounds, even disparate vocal samples and fragments of noise and music, that others could not. She had, if you like, a unique kind of "audio vision". I love the idea of that singular, eccentric brilliance being barely tolerated by the powers that be at the BBC and yet producing work that was capable of winning widespread acclaim - even popularity. Now I know that talent is no respecter of gender boundaries, but I can't help but wonder if there was something of an element of feminine intuition in the way that Derbyshire was able to create music out of electronic pulses of sound. Was her female brain somehow more receptive to the possibility of harmony amidst the mathematical rules and equations of early computer science? Like Barbara McClintock, who took a fresh approach to Biology by studying the "lives" of individual cells and genes in close detail and thus went against the established male scientists in her field, perhaps Derbyshire brought a new way of seeing , or rather hearing, to the predominantly male radiophonic world that took electronic music in directions that it may not otherwise have taken.

It could be argued, of course, that to emphasise a particularly feminine difference in approach to electronica, broadcasting, mathematics or computers is simply to recycle an argument that men have been using for decades to keep women out of these spheres of creation - it's saying that women are different and thus they are incorrect or wrong. So to celebrate difference on a gender level could be opening oneself up to criticism. It might be better, then, to celebrate simply the "Delia Difference" - the pioneering work and continued influence of Delia Derbyshire that is now receiving a renewed interest as more or her recordings are coming to light.

Delia Derbyshire website

Holding the Baby

2008-05-28T09:10:00.003Z

I am not a confident cuddler of babies. I watch some of those hospital reality shows and maternity ward documentaries with perplexed fascination, transfixed by people who march in and pick up nappy-clad small persons without a moment of hesitation. Whenever I meet friends who have recently become parents, there's always an awkward moment when they ask "Do you want to hold him/her?" And I invariably say no. I'm clumsy. I trip up, spill drinks, drop books, plates, vegetables and all sorts of other inanimate objects. I don't trust myself with ten pounds of wriggling, dribbling human being.

To be honest it goes deeper than that. I don't feel terribly comfortable holding other people's offspring because I feel like I'm being judged - by them and by society. It feels like a million eyes are on me and everyone is asking if I'm holding the baby in the right way and if it seems happy in my company. Is the baby drooling on me and how am I reacting to said drool? In short, am I maternal enough? Am I worthy of my status as a woman because I can demonstrate a basic understanding of the proto-mothering process? Frankly I think, and I assume that everyone else thinks, that I'm a bit of a failure when it comes to dealing with kids, however broody I might feel on occasions. So I try and avoid potential baby interaction situations. The future husband has, however, just acquired a new nephew, and in my position as future wife I suppose he's my nephew too. Thus with aunthood comes a new set of responsibilities.

So it came to pass that in a pub somewhere in North London a somewhat grumpy six week old ended up in my arms. We chatted for a bit. He seemed to like it when I talked to him. It held his attention and he grunted occasionally in reply. It was possibly the most intelligent conversation I'd had in days. Desperate to keep him occupied and stop him grizzling, I sang him a song. Apparently babies like being sung to, even if it's out of tune, so for tone-deaf me he was the ideal audience. He'd been a bit upset during lunch but now he was quiet and not crying, which I accepted as a small but welcome victory for me in my own personal "Help! I'm holding a baby!" war. Truth be told I was actually feeling pretty contented. Then, in the midst of all the constant baby-gurning, the fleeting expressions of "Where's my mum?" of "Have I got wind?" and "Shall I have a wee?" that crossed his face in rapid succession throughout our time together, he fixed me with his dark eyes, looked directly at me and smiled. Amongst the scattered fragments of babyness, the confusion of infanthood, I'm convinced that he did something purposeful and really quite wonderful. Who cares what the big people think - one small person judged me favourably and I rather liked it. I managed not to drop him on his head, too, so it was a good result all round.

Big Bang Theory

2008-04-16T15:22:00.003Z

Apparently it's the Pope's birthday today. According to the BBC, he politely declined a gala birthday dinner hosted by George Bush, but there was still going to be a twenty one gun salute fired from the White House lawn in his honour. All I could think when I heard this was: "that sounds dangerous - I really hope they miss."

Shine a Light

2008-04-07T11:10:00.003Z

Just been listening to Virgin Radio News and apparently the Olympic torch has been "distinguished" in Paris :-)

Virgin is pretty much the only music radio station I can listen to for any extended period of time and I do like it, but it has previously made me laugh in unintended ways. A presenter was heavily promoting a Bryan Adams gig once and was presumably trying to say how much he'd enjoyed seeing the Canadian rocker live - the trouble was he said "Ah, Bryan Adams, he's great; he never fails to disappoint."

However I don't think that anything yet beats the local radio travel reporter on Invicta FM several years ago, who had to warn drivers that a cattle truck had overturned on the motorway and a bullock had escaped. She said there was a bollock loose on the M20. Now that's certain to cause a traffic jam.

Going Bridal

2008-03-31T15:08:00.002Z

I honestly never thought I'd ever be saying this: I'm getting married! A few weeks ago there was a bit of a fuss involving a nice hotel, a shiny ring and a curry, and somehow the boyfriend became the fiance. After ten years of telling me he wasn't really interested in marriage, he surprised me by proposing and I surprised both of us by saying yes. So now we're engaged and planning to marry next year. It's all rather nice, really.

My beautiful, shiny ring had to go back to the jeweller's to be resized, so in a state of giddy excitement I went to pick it up one lunchtime, walking straight out of the shop and into the newsagent to buy a bridal magazine. I don't usually buy any magazines. I'm not very girly and I'm not really interested in celebrity gossip or fashion. I certainly haven't spent all of my thirty years dreaming of the perfect wedding dress, so why I should want a bridal magazine I don't really know. It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Maybe I was just blinded by the bling, somehow hypnotised by the new diamonds on my finger. Anyway, I bought it and I enjoyed reading it, especially looking at other people's real life weddings, but I couldn't quite believe the sheer amount of marketing I was exposing myself to.

There are many strange and bizarre products being churned out for the bridal market. I'm certain I can live without most of them, especially crepe paper bells in my choice of wedding colours, matching paper doves and a "lucky sixpence" garter. I've seen so many adverts for personalised serviettes that can be embossed with our names and wedding date, though, that I'm starting to think they're a good idea (much to the fiance's disgust). There's even a company that will print a photo of the happy couple onto a candle. Now I can think of a few people who'd enjoy watching us slowly melt over the course of an evening, but I don't think that we'll be inviting them to our wedding, so we're not going to be getting any of those.

Bridal beauty is another concept that I'm struggling to get a handle on. Of course I want to look nice on our big day, but I don't think I need "205 hot hair ideas". I was planning on brushing it, but that's about it. I would quite like a tiara, mind you, because when else am I going to get the chance to wear one? The fiance couldn't quite understand this, so I told him he could wear one too if he wanted. He seemed quite keen. There seems to be a lot written about perfumes, too. I really hoped to walk down the aisle without B.O., but I've not been giving a great deal of thought to creating a signature scent style for the day. As well as signature bridal scents, there are also a bewildering array of colour themes, table favours, marquees, bouquets and even wedding insurance policies to choose from. Eloping to somewhere remote and using a couple of strangers picked randomly off the street as witnesses to our wedding ceremony does look very attractive.

Baby, you can drive my car

2008-02-29T16:19:00.005Z

Entering my thirties initially seemed like quite a big thing, so I tried to prepare myself for a bit of a psychological adjustment. As it happens it hasn't been too bad. I'm older - there's nothing I can do about it, so I might as well just go with it. I've spent several years underachieving, so that sense of not fulfilling my potential is nothing new :-) There is one thing, though, that I haven't managed to avoid - the baby thing. I've never thought of myself as a particularly maternal type, but suddenly there are kids everywhere in my social circle. Almost imperceptibly it crept up on me. People started having babies of their own or acquiring stepchildren, nieces and nephews. Suddenly I was required to shop at the Early Learning Centre on a fairly regular basis. Occasionally I began to feel broody.

Apparently this is quite a common occurrence upon turning thirty. Your peers begin to breed, your parents start to drop hints about wanting grandchildren and then you read one of those articles about fertility declining dramatically at the age of thirty-five. Before you know it you're waking up in a cold sweat, wondering if you should just nudge the boyfriend and start to get jiggy with it there and then. Luckily there is a cure for all of this. You should make haste and borrow a car.

Let me explain: the boyfriend and I bought a sensible hatchback a long time ago. It's a great car because it's really practical. We've fitted camping equipment, sofas, a dining table, my rather less than athletic mum and all sorts of other stuff in the back with no trouble. It's been reasonably reliable and we've been perfectly happy with it for years. When we moved over the summer it was a godsend. So when our friends were moving flats recently it seemed like a sensible idea to lend it to them for a while, as they drive a slightly less practical vehicle. In return they let us drive their car - a Mazda MX5. On the weekend when we were in possession of said MX5, the boyfriend got called into work to fix something. Purely in the spirit of supportiveness (and not because I like the idea of posing in a sporty coupe) I decided to accompany him. So, there we were, driving around Docklands in bright winter sunshine, with the top down and Verdi's Requiem blaring out of the CD player. The heated leather seat was warming my bum to perfection and my pashmina was fluttering attractively in the gentle breeze. The car was so much fun! The car only had two seats! The annoying yet persistent ticking of my biological clock was silenced in an instant.

I highly recommend the Mazda MX5 experience to anyone, broody or otherwise. Escape the tyranny of biology through the wonders of automotive engineering. Just a word of warning though - put the top up before you drive through the Blackwall Tunnel. The fumes aren't nice. Mind you, they probably don't do a lot for your fertility, either.

Au Revoir Twenties! (Part Deux)

2008-02-13T10:42:00.005Z

Let me start with a little romantic tale. A few days after Christmas, we dropped my mother back at her house and decided to drive to Bluewater to check out the sales. Negotiating post-festive traffic on the M2, the boyfriend (the wonderful boyfriend, actually) asked me if there was any particular restaurant I'd like to go to for dinner on my birthday, which was fast approaching. I was mulling it over when he said "How about Les Cinq Saveurs d'Anada, where we had such a good meal on holiday?" I thought he was just talking hypothetically until he told me we were leaving for Paris in a week.

Les Cinq Saveurs is not just a veggie restaurant, it's a full on macrobiotic festival. My French is pretty bad, but I swear the label on the beer I had last time I was there promised that it was biodynamic, harvested at a certain phase of the moon and had some sort of friendly bacteria in it. It was such a pleasure to find a really good vegetarian restaurant, especially in Paris where meat is loved so greatly. As a veggie, even though I'm not super-strict, I find myself eating the compromise dish on the menu quite a lot - the cheesy pasta or the omelette, so I love having a wide choice (mind you, we can't eat at such places too often - the boyfriend's stomach tends to react violently to too many beans - but every now and again is better than never). So I was really looking forward to going back to Les Cinq Saveurs, but unfortunately when we got to Paris we found they were shut for their annual holiday. We ended up going to another, random vegetarian place we found on one of our walks instead.

Le Grenier de Notre Dame is a tiny place, rather appropriately established in 1978 (like me). The food turned out to be really good. There were even some extremely healthy looking toasted seeds served as a snack with our champagne apperitif. I rather liked the juxtaposition of health and decadence caught up in that. For my main course I had an immense vegetarian paella, with lots of black olives and cashew nuts, while the boyfriend had a vegetable cassoulet. We topped it all off with mousses - he raspberry, me chocolate. Joy of joys, I cannot describe to you my excitement when these arrived at the table presented in the most gloriously kitsch manner, topped off with plastic palm trees!

Resisting the temptation to hula down the steep spiral staircase in honour of the fantastic plastic trees, we left the restaurant. Paris around the start of the new year was a beautiful place. The Christmas lights, trees and decorations were still up everywhere, there was an ice rink in front of the town hall and from billboards on every street corner the Mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, was wishing us a Bonne Annee. The French make a big deal of Epiphany (6th January - the day after my birthday) so everybody was still in a festive mood. Full of champagne, a rather nice vin d'Alsace and lots of vegetarian food, and buoyed up by the jovial city atmosphere, we decided to go to a famous Parisian jazz club. Le Caveau de La Huchette has a bar on the ground floor, but we wanted to be downstairs in the cellar. The place was full, absolutely crowded with people and very hot. For a long time we just hung around on the stairs, listening to the band play some unfamiliar but frantic swing and be-bop. If we had been at a similar place in England I reckon some officious health and safety person would have told us we couldn't stand there, I'm sure of it, but France is different so we could soak up the atmosphere without being molested.

Revived with cocktails from the bar and taking advantage of the break between sets, we found a better perching place near the stage and the dancefloor. Once the band started up again it was hard to know who to watch - them or the people dancing. There were teenagers, middle aged couples, bald men, handsome besuited men and one old lady in a hat dancing on her own. It was frenetic, but everybody was totally concentrated on their moves. Some sprinkled the floor with talcum powder to stop friction getting in the way of their feet while others made serious looking hand gestures to their partners, seeming to indicate which way they should whirl them around next. Certain couples patrolled their own particular section of floor, cutting off any potential incursions by others with a steely glare. The energy of the whole place was just phenomenal and I had the most amazing evening there.

It all started to wind down at around 2a.m. The boyfriend told the trumpeter how good he was in broken, mojito-tinged French. They seemed to understand each other well. After such a full day I should have been staggering back up the hill again to Rue Mouffetard, but the journey didn't seem difficult at all. Maybe I flew. Anyway we made it back to bed and sleep, but just a little sleep. The following day was the first Sunday in the month, meaning that all French national museums in Paris were free to enter. Free being my favourite price, I was keen to take advantage of this. So in a happy, sleepy, post-birthday fog we took on the Musee d'Orsay, having got there early to avoid the queues that had put us off going there before. It was good. They had a book about Rodin and hands in the bookshop, too. All things considered, it was a great way to commence my thirties. I just hope the rest of the coming decade is going to be as good!

Au Revoir Twenties! (Part Un)

2008-01-31T19:35:00.003Z

Just being in Paris for my thirtieth birthday was wonderful, but the day had a few particular highlights too. Firstly there was breakfast, or rather there were breakfasts (plural). Having begun the day with a healthy aspect, eating fresh fruit and yoghurt from the Rue Mouffetard market, I decided that old ladies such as myself need additional sustenance to get them through the day. Consequently I had a pain au chocolat from the bakery "La Fournil de Mouffetard". Meltingly soft, buttery pastry and a not-too-sweet chocolate centre set me up for the day's activities.

The boyfriend and I spent lots of time just walking around the Parisian streets. The weather was grey and cold, but not too rainy. We decided to give the ferris wheel in the Tuileries a miss (I suffer from motion sickness and he doesn't like heights - the combination of vomit and terror wouldn't have been a birthday treat), but I did get some good photographs of the Louise Bourgeois "Welcoming Hands" sculptures in the park, watery against a menacing cloudy sky. We ended up stopping at a cafe near the Pont de l'Alma for coffee, toasted sandwiches and warmth, but mostly we just wandered around arm-in-arm, trying to do the city justice by looking our romantic best.

In the afternoon we stumbled upon the Delacroix museum. Eugene Delacroix was a painter and he spent the last years of his life creating murals in one of the chapels of the church of St. Sulpice. We saw these when we went to a free concert in the church last time we were in Paris. Bruckner's fourth symphony dragged a little, especially as the seats were very uncomfortable, but it was free and the murals were extraordinary - a religious theme combined with furious brush strokes gives them an arresting power. Visiting the museum we got a glimpse of the man behind the art. There were surprisingly few actual paintings by him there, but there were many of him by his friends and lots of work by his contemporaries. It was housed in a tiny building where Delacroix once lived and worked. He seemed to have been quite a sickly chap and spent a lot of time being ill in bed there. The rooms have changed little since he was alive and the whole place was very atmospheric. The boyfriend and I, ever alert for interior design inspiration in our capacity as new home owners, were rather taken with a red velvet chaise longue in the hallway. Sadly visitors were not allowed to sit on it. There was a sign in French, German and English telling you not to, but maybe if you were Japanese or Russian you could have pleaded ignorance and got away with it - who can tell?

After the museum I was keen to see what was going on at the Pompidou Centre. When we got there the queue to get in was horrendous, so we just hung about outside and watched a magician as the day started to grow dusky. He had a French techno/trance soundtrack on his iPod and a tame pigeon (elle s'appelle Julie) whom he whispered to periodically and tenderly wrapped up in a scarf against the evening chill. He did some tricks with bits of rope, children and people's shopping. In the end he made l'oiseau Julie disappear. He had a nice line in multi-lingual humour, too. He asked us all, in French, for a couple of euros at the end of the show, then said in English "for the English in the audience, that will be five euros please." Ah, yes, we are the nationality everybody likes to mock. Probably rightly so, acutally.

Climbing back up towards the Pantheon, the Quartier Mouffetard-Contrescarpe and our little apartment, I reflected on what a pleasant day it had been. Then I realised I was a bit knackered from all the walking, so I took an executive decision to stop at Le Petit Cardinal for hot chocolate and beer. Slowly sipping my chocolat chaud while the boyfriend savoured his pression of Leffe, I smiled at the fortuitous presence of such a good cafe halfway up the almighty hilly street on our homeward route. Full of chocolatey goodness, I looked forward to the evening ahead.

Paris, je t'aime

2008-01-17T15:47:00.000Z

I spent my thirtieth birthday in Paris. Ever since our holiday there last year I had been vaguely pining to return, saying every now and then how much I would like to go back, but knowing that the prospect was fairly remote. The purchase of the flat and the general day-to-day business of life seemed to prevent it from happening in the near future. Then my wonderful boyfriend surprised me with a weekend trip. He was doubly seduced - by me (nearly ten years ago now) and by some very tempting Eurostar offers that emerged when the new St. Pancras and Ebbsfleet stations opened.

Thus we returned to the same little apartment where we had stayed the previous March, on Rue Mouffetard in the fifth arrondissement. From the moment we took a walk down the street to sip a chocolat chaud in my favourite little cafe (Le Petit Cardinal, just opposite the Cardinal Lemoine metro station) we slipped effortlessly back into Parisian life. I'm not really a city person. London is okay but I have no great affection for it. I have a romantic attachment to Paris, though, that draws on all kinds of disparate threads, from the sublime to the utterly ridiculous. Take, for example, this thought that struck me whilst rumbling through the metro: French women are not yet subject to the tyranny of the hair straighteners. I see kindred heads everywhere in Paris - long, flowing locks left to wave and kink to their hearts content, unconstrained by product or pin. Sometimes in England I feel positively baroque because of my untamed tresses, violently doing their own thing amidst acres of plastic barbie hair, flat-ironed to within an inch of existence. La Belle Femme in Paris seems to know there's more to life than a hair-do. It's the same with shoes. Battered old Converse baseball boots are common on Parisian streets, even with skirts and smartish dress. As such women in the French capital seem to stride out lustfully, going forth into the day with vigour. In London the streets are full of English women tottering and limping through life in shoes with daft heels and pointy toes. I like comfy shoes. Paris is my kind of place.

There's a genuine sense of being oneself that fills the air in Paris. Even the practicalities seem geared up to letting people live their own lives with ease. The shops open late. The post offices are open until seven in the evening, so you can do all your necessaries on your way home from your daily perambulations. Walking home at 2a.m. on the morning after my birthday, several cafes were still open, merrily serving coffee, chocolate and warm milk with vanilla. The cafe culture as a whole is a marvel and so far removed from the British model that it's probably the thing I miss most when I come home. I can sit down with a hot chocolate, the boyfriend can have a beer, a nice waiter brings it to the table and we can watch the world go by while we drink it (at Le Petit Cardinal, the view includes a fire station, patisserie and a pedestrian crossing that cyclists/moped riders often ignore - a people watchers' paradise!) Starbucks just isn't the same.

It shouldn't be forgotten, too, that Paris is a breathtakingly beautiful place. Each day we were there this time we walked by the Seine. From the towers of Notre Dame to the shining golden dome of Les Invalides, and of course everything else besides, the views are amazing. The parks, especially the Jardin de Luxembourg with its ardent chess players, and the Tuilleries, with the Louise Bourgeois statues of hands, and all of the iconic sights like the Eiffel Tower and the Sacre Coeur (but maybe not the Tour Montparnasse - nowhere is perfect) provide a backdrop for a current of culture that I've not felt anywhere else. The art galleries, the concerts in churches and the fierce debate in cafes, the free public bicycles for hire and the entire feel of the city just draws me in every time. I honestly just love the place and I hope to go back again and again.

Back to Black

2007-12-19T12:08:00.000Z

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

2007-12-12T16:28:00.000Z

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

2007-11-30T11:51:00.000Z

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

2007-10-26T09:00:00.000Z

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.

---
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.
---

Not being left on the shelf

2007-10-21T13:16:00.000Z

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

2007-10-09T08:58:00.000Z

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

2007-09-28T09:54:00.000Z

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

2007-07-30T15:01:00.000Z

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

2007-07-25T15:27:00.000Z

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...

2007-06-27T15:20:00.000Z

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

2007-06-22T15:16:00.000Z

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

2007-05-01T15:40:00.000Z

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

2007-04-23T15:03:00.000Z

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

2007-04-16T14:33:00.000Z

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

2007-04-06T09:32:00.000Z

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?

2007-01-22T15:48:00.000Z

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..."

2007-01-16T14:53:00.000Z

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.

Avenue Q

2006-12-12T16:12:00.000Z

This show is the funniest thing I've seen for ages! If you get the chance to go and see it at the Noel Coward Theatre in London, you must go. The boyfriend and I went to see it last week and had a fantastic time.

"Avenue Q" is like a warped version of "Sesame Street", where puppets and humans in a rundown New York neighbourhood share the traditional dilemmas of young adulthood. The agony of trying to work out your life's purpose is rendered into a hilarious series of songs and spoof educational animated films. The puppets face racism, commitment phobia, repressed homosexuality and all sorts of other issues. The most bizarre thing is that you actually come to care for them and identify with them as their lives get increasingly crap, yet you can't help but laugh an awful lot too.

The comedy is so sharp and funny because it has such a powerful element of truth about it. When a large, hairy monster starts singing that "The internet is really, really great... for porn," you know that he's singing what everyone is actually thinking. Actually, I found this particularly amusing as I've spent the past nine months researching whether or not the internet is really, really great... for creating a new kind of democratic public sphere through a fresh approach to news reporting. But really, deep down, I've always known that it's for porn. "Avenue Q" exploits to spectacular effect the fact that it's far easier to sing what can't be said out loud, particularly if you've got your hand up a puppet's bum when you're singing it. This is why songs such as "Everyone's a little bit racist", "If you were gay, that'd be okay" and "It sucks to be me" are so wittily effective, and surely destined to become classics.

The entire cast is extremely talented, not least because they weren't actually trained to use puppets before doing the show. So I guess they've had to learn a whole new form of expression, as well as getting rid of the notion that puppets are cute and cuddly children's playthings (something that the audience had well and truly done by the end of the two hour performance). For the most part the performers were young, too, and a lot were making their West End debuts, so maybe there was a bit of empathy there between them and their puppet characters. Who knows what the winning formula was, but it worked. The show is brilliant and it provides the perfect acerbic antedote to the schmaltzy, sugary overdose of niceness that invades entertainment of all kinds around Christmas time. It made me laugh. A lot. An awful lot.

The boyfriend has been telling everyone to go and see it because "It's great - it's got everything - even puppet sex!" Do you really need any more of an endorsement than that?

The Producers

2006-11-20T12:15:00.000Z

The boyfriend and I took our respective mothers to see "The Producers" at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on Saturday. It was worth the associated stress of meeting our parents to see the show, which turned out to be really funny. It's based on the Mel Brooks film, with the central premise being that two Jewish theatre impressarios put on a spectacularly bad, tasteless musical entitled "Springtime for Hitler", intending to make money from it being a flop via some form of tax scam. Now, I have immense respect for the brain of anyone who can come up with that kind of idea for a plot!

I had a housemate at university who loved Mel Brooks and suddenly all of his comedic points of reference now make hilarious sense. I had not laughed so much in a long time - the show closes for good in January so I really wanted to see it before then, and I wasn't dissappointed. Reece Shearsmith (one of the "League of Gentlemen") turned in a great performance as accountant-turned-producer Leo Bloom. There's always a kind of surprising satisfaction whan you find out that someone who isn't known as a singer can actually sing, isn't there? And not just sing - engage in the full onslaught of musical theatre, with all of the physicality that it necessitates. We went to the afternoon performance, and thus we watched an understudy play the central role of Max Bialystock (Kit Newman instead of Cory English), but he was fantastic too. It seemed like a really demanding part to play. He was in pretty much all of the big numbers and he had a real belting energy in his voice. His characterisation was superb and you'd never have guessed that he wasn't the big-name, first-choice for the part. As if that wasn't enough, the show also had tapdancing grannies with zimmer frames, animatronic pigeons and, of course, the showstopping number "Springtime for Hitler", with the Third Reich realised in true Busby Berkeley style. Who could ask for anything more?

The only problem now is that I can't stop singing "Springtime for Hitler and Germany, winter for Poland and France...". As this floats through the criminally thin walls of our cottage, devoid of context, I fear that it is giving our neighbours the impression that we have become neo-nazis. Perhaps I should try and persuade them to go and see the show.

The Internet is the Answer

2006-11-20T12:04:00.000Z

I came across an interesting message when trawling through the excessive quantities of spam in my inbox this morning. I'm guessing that the subject line was supposed to say enticingly: "melt away fat instantly". What it actually said was "melt away fate instantly".

And suddenly millions of us could start to finally take control of our destiny, with the help of a dodgy online pharmacy :-)

Sculpture

2006-10-10T12:04:00.000Z

We went to see the Rodin exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts on Friday evening. It was worth the price of admission to witness the sheer scale of “The Thinker”, lit to perfection and standing in the final room of the exhibition. Alongside his monolithic pensiveness were a series of rare photographs of other works by Rodin. The photographers were artists documenting art, so they played with light, filters and shutter speeds to try and bring to the fore the complex details of Rodin's sculptures - of which there are many, as the exhibition made abundantly clear. I dabble in photography and the whole Rodin experience made me think about what I try and do with a camera when I get behind the lens.

I would love to be able to take good portraits, but I can't do it. I can set up macro shots of intricate details, leaves, flowers and so on and they come out more or less as I plan them to, but if I get a good shot of someone's face it's by chance. Feet and shoes are different. I assure you this is in no way a strange fetish or related to that old adage about the size of men's feet being an indication of the size of other things! I find foot shots easy to compose, kind of quirky and yet really human. Somehow you get to the essence of a person – these are the feet they use to walk around, to go everywhere they need to go in life. You capture the foot, you capture a bit of that life, I think. Now one of the things you notice when looking at Rodin's sculptures is that the hands and the feet are extremely detailed, but quite out of proportion to the rest of the piece. Apparently he used to often get his students and assistants to make studies for these parts and then sculpt them for him, which may go some way to explaining why they're different and bigger, but from an artistic point of view he could be trying to draw our attention to these parts of the body and how they can be expressive. A face has lots of complex things going on. From a photographic point of view, one slight change, one shadow cast over an eye, a twitch, a wrinkle, cough or laugh and the moment is lost. Everything changes in an instant and you're constantly having to digest a lot of information. Hands and feet make bigger, bolder movements. They tell more simple tales and force the viewer into a slower, more steady and concentrated engagement with what they're trying to say. They represent human communication distilled and brought into a clearer focus.

Rodin made detailed studies of people's head's too, and many of his sculptures do have intricately realised faces (John the Baptist springs to mind), but the large, detailed hands and feet are a recurring theme. Their true artistic meaning is probably a matter of great debate, but they've certainly provided me with some food for thought and inspiration for some new photographs. Does “The Thinker” have big feet because the existence of man is somehow grounded in his thought and inner life? Or... well, who knows?

Little Comforts

2006-10-06T10:20:00.000Z

It looks as if Autumn has finally arrived here. There's a chill in the air, especially in the mornings, and there's cloud, rain and wind aplenty. It makes you appreciate the little things that make life better, like when you get a load of washing out of the dryer and it feels all warm and toasty.

Big cuddly jumpers are fashionable again, too, and soon it will be full-on hot water bottle weather. It's a fine time to be alive.

Green Issues

2006-09-26T11:18:00.000Z

Our benevolent local council began the kerbside collection of recyclable household waste last year. They just collect paper at the moment, but it's a start. Sadly only a few people in our street are currently taking advantage of this service, so I was pleased to see that our neighbours had started to fill their council-supplied recycling crate. Unfortunately they've got a bit confused and have filled it with plastic bottles. The council won't recycle these at all, let alone collect them from your house. They went so far as to produce a report stating that it was uneconomic for them to recycle plastic. It had figures. I'm no maths whizz, but I think that those figures show that it's not economic for them to recycle anything at all, but I guess that it doesn't tick any of the right government boxes or attract any nice government money if you admit that too openly. Economics aside, should I observe good recycling etiquette and let the neighbours know that they've rinsed out all their bottles for nothing?

I probably won't say anything, because they'll work it out soon enough for themselves, but seeing their crate reminded me how fascinating the whole business of recycling can be. People's lives are laid bare on the pavement on collection day. Walking to work in Canterbury after the introduction of clear plastic sacks for mixed recyclable waste was certainly an eye-opener. I would never have guessed how many people living in what I perceived to be a mellow, educated, academic-centred city read the "Daily Mail". The fact that you can't get hold of a copy of "The Guardian" in our village on a Monday (when they publish their media industry supplement) is not such a surprise - it's that kind of place. But anyway, back to recycling. I note with interest that our neighbours use one of those eco-friendly washing detergents. I couldn't quite believe it. My prejudices were exposed. Their consideration for the environment extends beyond recycling into the realms of hardcore green shopping. This doesn't fit in with how I have previously perceived them - loud, country-and-western music loving, motorbike owning, wife-beater-vest wearing types who probably think we're pale and geeky, hippie-like objects of ridicule. Now it turns out that they may care about the environment in a big way. Possibly more than we do. Who'd have thought it?

So that just proves you shouldn't assume anything about anyone... until you've examined their waste, perhaps. It's a brave new world we're entering, as ecological awareness becomes more widespread. I still don't think I'll be brave and tell them they've filled their crate with recyclables that aren't actually recyclable. I will, however, make sure that I continue to carefully screen and arrange the contents of our paper recycling crate, lest it be subject to prying eyes similar to mine. I like to ensure that a copy of "The Sunday Times" is on top (a proper broadsheet paper, none of this compact weekday "Times" lowering of standards) or, failing that, a sheet full of the boyfriend's complex logical calculations, replete with strange algebraic symbols. Being environmentally friendly doesn't make you immune to the anxious scramble to protect your reputation... or indeed outright snobbery :-)

American Gothic

2006-08-19T16:12:00.000Z

... or perhaps more accurately "American Minimalist," or even just "Minimalist," but that didn't sound as good.

I accompanied the boyfriend to the Royal Albert Hall last week to see the American composer John Adams conduct three pieces of his own work, all as part of the current BBC Proms season. We go to the Proms quite a bit. The boyfriend sometimes even "proms" properly, standing with the die-hard prommers down by the stage, but I (being more accustomed to luxury and citing low blood pressure) prefer to sit. John Adams always gives excellent Proms value as he talks about his work in pre-prom interviews before taking the conductor's stand and really going for it. He's an energetic performer who knows how to get the best out of orchestras, especially when they're playing his music, and it's an amazing sight to see.

At an Adams prom the best place to sit is in the choir stalls, right behind the percussion. You get a really good view of him conducting, but you also get the full benefit of the bizarre percussive combinations that underpin his music. Bells, bowls, drums, gongs and the use of a bow to play a vibraphone - it all goes on right under your nose. The music itself, for me, is something that I feel I can really inhabit. Whether it's because I remember all of the composer's descriptions of what the music represents from his pre-prom interviews or because I genuinely connect with it on some deeper level, I'm really not sure, but there's something there that appeals to me. In "My Father Knew Charles Ives" the soundscapes of lakes, mountains and marching bands in small American towns are vivid. In "The Wound Dresser" you can feel the essence of what Walt Whitman was trying to say as he described his experiences as a wartime nurse - the small moments of calm determination to do the right thing amidst the pain and the tragedy that a life spent caring for others comprises. The final piece "Harmonielehre" was tremendously loud and exciting, building to a huge conclusion. It was extremely popular with the audience. John Adams took many curtain calls and grateful bows, but he is definitely entitled to milk the audience's appreciation on account of his being extremely talented.

We're off to the Proms again this Sunday, to see Shostakovich's "Lady Macbeth of the Mstensk District". This is a bit of a gamble for us, as neither of us knows what it's like, but it's good to challenge yourself culturally from time to time, surely? With two hours of opera sung in Russian. Oh well, if it's no good at least they serve decent ice creams at the interval.

Blood, Sweat and Tears

2006-08-06T15:12:00.000Z

Another week, another wedding. This time we are preparing to celebrate the nuptials of my boyfriend's elder sister and it has already proved to be a painful experience.

The sister has decided not to have a wedding list. Neither did the sister send out benevolent, warmhearted greetings to all of her guests saying that for them to be "present" at the ceremony is the only "present" that she requires to celebrate the day. So we really needed to get some sort of gift for her and her new husband. It would just be wrong not to. Now the boyfriend and his sister are not close, and to say that she and I do not get along well would be a serious understatement. We don't really know her and we certainly don't know the future Mr. Boyfriend's Sister, so shopping for them is difficult. Add to this anxiety the knowledge that the gift is likely to be opened in front of the massed throng of family and trendy, London-based thirty-somethings with critical eyes and you have a recipe for extreme stress.

The happy couple threw us a welcome life-preserving inflatable device, though, by planning to get married in the architectural madness that is Brighton Pavillion. I got the bright idea that a framed print of this iconic building might be a charming, lasting reminder of their vows. A quick internet search turned up many prints of John Nash's original pavillion studies, which were nice but not terribly exciting. Eventually I stumbled across a gallery in Brighton that offered a stunning reproduction of a painting of the pavillion by night, painted by a local artist. So we ordered the print and I must say that the service from the Window Gallery was excellent. It arrived really quickly and it is a thing of great beauty. I urge you to buy things from them. To save a few bob and add a personal touch to the gift, we just bought the print unframed and decided to frame it ourselves. I don't really urge you to do this.

We spent yesterday afternoon measuring, cutting, hammering and taking an unscheduled trip to the local craft store to buy white mounting board. White isn't just white, by the way - there are several different shades of white and the right white is very hard to find. Eventually we got to the stage where we could lift the mounted picture and glass front panel into the frame. It was here that we learned an important life lesson - the edges of glass are sharp. Just as everything slotted into place I noticed that the boyfriend was bleeding all over the mount, glass, frame and backboard. He went off in search of a plaster whilst I disassembled the frame and tried to clean up the attendant mess. The print, luckily, was fine, and most of the blood wiped off. The backboard, however, was rather porous and had a murderous red stain on it. We managed to cover this with the authenticity label detailing the artist's name, gallery address and print number - always buy your art from reputable galleries who give you such things! Then we started attempt number two at putting the picture together. Shifting the glass into position, I felt the corner graze my knee. It thought it was just a scratch, but as I looked down I saw my knee rapidly reddening as blood oozed from it. I limped off to get a plaster of my own, taking care to avoid the print in the process.

The print is now framed and it looks great. I'm sure the happy couple can't fail to like it and it's bound to go down well with the crowd. They'll never know the effort that went into it, though, or appreciate the minor catastrophes that befell us as we put it together for them. Still, I feel that we're really giving something of ourselves to them on their special day.

Matrimonial Misadventures

2006-08-02T10:18:00.000Z

Last Saturday the "big day" finally arrived for my friend Wendy and her other half John, as they tied the knot in Mildenhall, Suffolk. For the boyfriend and myself, this meant a cannonball-run style drive up country that nearly culminated in us missing the ceremony. It wasn't the almighty queue for the Dartford Tunnel that caused the problem. Actually, that was a popular topic of conversation at the reception. We dealt with it by winding down the windows and belting out Verdi's "Requiem" at high volume, much to the bemusement of everyone who was crawling past us in the adjacent lanes. Missing our turnoff on the M11 was a bit more difficult to rectify.

In the end we took a long detour through Essex, turned ourselves around and got back on the right track. Somehow we found the right county and even managed to get on the appropriate A road for Mildenhall... only to find yet another queue as part of the road was closed. By now it was extremely hot. The monotony of slowly creeping forward in the blazing heat was broken only by the enthusiasm of a small child waving a stuffed dog out of the window of a people carrier to our right (that's a soft toy dog, by the way, not some freakish example of taxidermy). We passed people whose cars had overheated. Our car was fine, but we were starting to smell distinctly interesting as we sweltered and baked. Half-past two ticked on by, the wedding was scheduled to start at three, neither of us was dressed for the occasion and the deodorant was buried under mountains of stuff in the boot. We were starting to get worried.

All of a sudden the traffic started to move and we found ourselves diverted through the Suffolk countryside around the blockage. Finally we were in Mildenhall itself. At 2.45pm we were on Mildenhall High Street and the hotel was in sight. We screeched round a corner and into the car park, thinking we'd get changed in the loos. We were confronted by a phalanx of nervous-looking bridesmaids and men in matching waistcoats. Thinking better of it, we made a swift exit. We'd have to make a mad dash for the hotel where we'd arranged to stay and risk missing the exchange of vows. Luckily our hotel was only five minutes up the road. Even more luckily, they didn't seem to want to take any of our details as we checked in. They practically gave us the room key as we walked through the door. So, we sprinted up the stairs and found the room. Clothes, hairspray, deodorant (oh precious, wonderful deodorant) and shoes went everywhere as we struggled to make ourselves presentable. The boyfriend had forgotten his cufflinks. I realised that I needed to pin the top of my dress together to prevent inappropriate flashes of cleavage. Still, though, I think we got ready quicker than we ever have before. It must have been five to three or even later by the time we were back in the car, having passed another wedding party on the way out. Driving back into Mildenhall once more, we saw a ribbon-clad wedding car containing another bride and a bearded man in a layby. I was pretty sure that this was Wendy and her dad, which was a great relief. Either she'd got cold feet and decided not to go through with it, or she was exercising her bridal prerogative to be late - and either way we'd make it to the ceremony before she did!

Well, we did make it in the end and we had a great time. It was fantastic to see Wendy again, although it is very strange to see the girl that you sat next to in school and who was your childhood friend in full bridal regalia. Who'd have thought we'd actually be all grown up one day? She looked amazing and she and John are obviously very happy together, so congratulations and good luck to them. All of the effort to get there was worth it so that we could "share the love"... maybe a little even rubbed off on the boyfriend and myself, who knows?

Bit of Fluff

2006-06-24T11:42:00.000Z

I purchased a new can of furniture polish the other day - or rather "multi-surface cleaner" as it is now called. It came with a free "fluffy duster" attached. This is one of those hand-held mini mop-style things that have replaced the old feather duster in the exciting modern world of cleaning. Now tropical birds don't have to die so that we can clean behind our radiators and between the slats of our venetian blinds. The feather has been replaced by synthetic fluff with some mysterious anti-static (or is it static?) charge that attracts the dust with minimum effort. Doing the housework should now be a positive thrill. Lucky me.

On the back of the packet, though, in bold letters, was a stark warning. This fluffy duster should be used "for cleaning purposes only". Oh to have been party to the details of whichever lawsuits forced the good people at Pledge to have to put that down in writing!

Jumping over brooms

2006-06-14T13:56:00.000Z

It seems that we are to be surrounded by weddings this year. Most significantly for me, my dear best friend from high school is getting married this July and I have just bought her wedding gift. I consulted the appropriate list from the store where my friend and her husband to be have registered, chose something I would like myself and bought it. It's sitting behind me now in my study as I'm typing this, actually, looming like a huge monolith. It's not big, but it is heavy, so I'm now worrying about how I'm going to get it from the car to the reception... what if there's not a table for gifts? What if it ends up coming back with us in the car because I didn't know what to do with it and amidst the wedding throng there was not an appropriate moment to ask? How am I going to wrap it? Of course all this worrying about the gift is probably transference. Really I'm venting my secret fear of being left an old maid and never having a wedding day of my own... sob...sob... poor me :-)

Putting all of my highly unattractive bitterness and self-pity aside, all of these weddings have got me in a thinking mood. My friend has opted for a civil wedding ceremony at a pretty riverside hotel near where she lives. I've never been to a civil marriage so I was curious as to what goes on at one (forewarned is forearmed, so they say) and thus I fired up my computer. The wonderful entity that is the internet pointed me in the direction of various running orders and scripts detailing the vows to be made. One of the most interesting sites belonged to Cambridgeshire Council, who provide a helpful list of music that might be appropriate to use at a wedding, along with the full track listings of the CDs which they keep at the Cambridge register office. As I scrolled down the list I was amused to find that the opening track on one of them was "It's Over" by Roy Orbison. Hearing that would certainly make a great start to some couple's new life together, wouldn't it?

Speaking of Roy Orbison, I'm reminded of the fact that the late, great John Peel chose "It's Over" as one of his Desert Island discs, having heard it blaring out from a nearby factory as he stood on Stowmarket railway station early one morning. Since my friend is getting hitched not a million miles away from Stowmarket and Peel Acres, I hope that the celebrations are infused with a hint of the Peelian sensibility, with wine, merriment and good conversation in profuse quantities. Indeed, may her marriage and those of all our friends and relatives who are jumping over brooms this summer be as happy, long-lasting and fecund as Peel and the Pig's.

Country Living

2006-05-02T11:26:00.000Z

I would personally like to thank the enterprising farmer who put up the following signs at periodic intervals by the side of the road, presumably advertising his produce:

Long and thin...
Covered in skin...
Red in parts...
Great in tarts...
RHUBARB!

That had me giggling all the way home. May he sell much rhubarb and more besides.

There are a lot of roadside farm shops around here, with a multitude of signs to let you know what you can buy from them. Most of them sell the same sorts of things, so you see the same lists of stuff everywhere you go and if you go on a long country drive it all gets a bit boring after a while. Much hilarity ensued a couple of years ago, though, when the boyfriend and I drove past a farm advertising "Potatoes, Apples, Blackberries, Leeks, Pears, Hamsters". The diversification of rural business knows no bounds.

Checking it out

2006-03-19T15:48:00.000Z

Going to the supermarket is a generally unpleasant experience, so you need to find ways to alleviate the feelings of rage that are prone to build up when you are forced to make that dreaded trip. Having a foolproof way of amusing yourself as you shop could prevent you from descending into a violent spiral of madness in the dairy produce aisle or taking out your anger on the clueless youth at the deli counter who overfills your pot of olives. I find that casting a critical eye over the contents of other people's trolleys works for me.

When paying for my purchases in an Asda store once, I noticed that the person behind me was loading the conveyor belt with around twenty tins of baked beans. Given their dietary habits, I was glad I wasn't queueing behind them. I worried for the health of the elderly lady who purchased three large cans of hairspray and a bottle of cheap vodka one Saturday night as the boyfriend and I waited patiently behind her at the "baskets only" till, especially as she kept protesting very loudly that the vodka wasn't for her. Standing in the queue in the living hell that was the local Tesco yesterday morning, though, I noticed that the man in front of me had a basket full of goods that seemed to win a prize for the most bizarre collection of purchases ever. A balding, middle-aged chap, he was buying a box of "Mini Milk" ice lollies, a five pack of extra-large tights, some loose bananas and a jar of thousand island dressing. Obviously he was planning to put the tights over his head to conceal his identity and rob a bank, using a carefully disguised banana as a gun substitute, but what on earth was he doing with the lollies and the thousand island dressing?

If you find perusing the purchases of others a little voyeuristic, you can always play a variant of the game. It's immense fun to try and raise a smirk from cashiers by creating your own crazy basketfuls of goods. The weirdest combination of purchases that the boyfriend and I have thus far managed to beep through the checkout is, I think, a pack of ribbed condoms and a jar of pickled beetroot. Since supermarkets are rapidly branching out into electrical goods, clothes and all sorts of other things, the future possibilities are limitless. Heavy duty rubber gloves, courgette and a DVD player? Dyson hoover, thermal vest and some ginger nuts? Cillit bang, sink plunger and a tin of prunes? The choice is yours.

One Day in September

2006-03-13T12:22:00.000Z

BBC Four showed the film "One Day in September" late the other night. It was like the filmic equivalent of a book that you can't put down.

The old Yiddish proverb that opens Primo Levi's book "The Periodic Table" has been echoing around my head ever since the broadcast:
"Ibergekumene tsores iz gut tsu dertseylin," or "Troubles overcome are good to tell."
The particular trouble, or sorrow, told in the compelling film was the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. There were a number of things that made the narrative so strong. The moving testimony of Ankie Spitzer, whose husband was killed, wove a powerful central thread through the film, but it was interspersed with an interview given by one of the terrorists involved in his death, as well as the words of others who were there in Munich, watching the drama unfold. Graphic images of the athletes being held hostage and the tragic aftermath were shown, all accompanied by a soundtrack of 70s music. Michael Douglas provided a matter-of-fact voice over that linked the film together, but his tone seemed to add to the impact of the story being told. The 1972 Olympics carried on, even after the Israeli athletes were killed. Today that seems almost unbelievable. The film gives an appropriate significance to an event that, at the time that it happened, was rapidly pushed aside by the media, the authorities, seemingly the world.

In recent years the Munich tragedy has been the focus of more media attention, with Stephen Spielberg's film "Munich" telling the story (mostly fictionalised, or so I've read) of the operation to kill all of the terrorists involved. I'm not sure about watching "Munich", because the real events told in "One Day in September" seem to speak for themselves to me. The film was so good, so supremely well put together, that it drew you in. Any hint of fiction would muddy the waters too much for me. The clarity of expression and the forcefulness of the truth are two of the things that make "One Day in September" such a good film and something that it is worth watching. If you haven't already seen it, then I really urge you to do so.

In general, too, the feature length documentary is a genre that should be encouraged. It offers the chance for stories to be told in depth, for issues to be explored, for tales of troubles overcome to receive the wider audience that they deserve. Troubles overcome aren't just good to tell, the method of their telling can assure their place in history.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/storyville/one-day-september.shtml
http://www.sonypictures.com/classics/oneday/index.html

Places to go, people to see

2006-03-02T16:56:00.000Z

I had a really good time and about in London a few weeks ago. It started with lunch at Veeraswamy, quite possibly my favourite Indian restaurant. I discovered it many years ago when I was aimlessly wandering around the Regent Street area with the boyfriend, trying to find a place to have a birthday lunch. Attracted by their value lunch menu, we decided to go in and we've kept going back ever since. The food is really good and the waiting staff are something else - really polite and attentive, even making you feel special if you order from the cheaper set menu, but still leaving you space to enjoy your meal. The restaurant has just had a major refurbishment and now has a relentlessly "modern Indian" vibe going on. The food is still fantastic, but I'm a bit dissappointed that there's no longer a vegetarian option on the set lunch menu. I know, I could have asked if they had any veggie stuff... and it did give me an excuse to order a la carte, but I reckon they should cater for cheapskate veggies too :-)
They stopped doing free poppadoms and chutney last year too, which is a shame, but the food, service and decor are all excellent and I highly recommend the place.

We rolled out of Veeraswamy some time in the mid-afternoon and went to check in at the City Inn, Westminster. We booked the hotel room through a great room consolidation site Londontown.com, which we've used in the past. You usually get good deals there, although it seems to be aimed more at American tourists visiting Britain. The hotel turned out to be a really pleasant surprise. The foyer and our room were clean and modern. The room had a dvd player and a stereo, with a free cd and dvd library for guests available at reception. It also had a real duvet on the bed. I hate those all-in-one hotel bedspreads and itchy blankets, so this was a real plus for me! Being located just off Millbank, round the corner from Tate Britain, the hotel was really well located, too.

Our evening entertainment consisted of going to see Jeremy Irons, Patrick Malahide and Jean Boht in "Embers" at the Duke of York's theatre. "Embers" is a play adapted by Christopher Hampton from the book by Hungarian Sandor Marai. As the boyfriend and I had both enjoyed the book, we were keen to see the play. It was really good. It was still in preview when we went to see it and it needed a bit of time to bed down, I think, but Jeremy Irons gave an utterly absorbing performance that really did the book justice. Judging by the audience reaction, a lot of people hold the book in great affection and appreciated the fact that it had been brought to the stage.

Next morning we took advantage of our proximity to Tate Britain and went to the Gothic Nightmares exhibition. The boyfriend loves Milton and read Paradise Lost with great enthusiasm, so he's very attuned to Blake, devils and gothic art. I studied gothic fiction as a response to social change ages ago, too, and we both thought that the exhibition looked good. There was an impressive range of material on display, all spanning out from the central spoke of Henry Fuseli's 1781 painting "The Nightmare". I particularly enjoyed the compilation of clips from films that have taken "The Nightmare" as inspiration. The boyfriend and I used to go to Tate Britain all the time, predominantly because it was free. We used to return to our student digs with armfuls of art postcards, feeling very cultured. Astonishingly, Gothic Nightmares is the first exhibition that we've actually paid to go and see at the gallery, so you can tell it must have been a good one! It looked good enough for us to fork out money to go and see it, and it certainly did not disappoint.

If my iPod is me then am I free?

2006-02-11T10:58:00.000Z

I've acquired an iPod. I've also studied the relationship between new technologies and feminism. This is a dangerous combination.

There are those who believe that new technologies afford us the opportunity to create very postmodern, decentred selves. My blog, here, these words I'm writing now, could be seen as a part of that. My thoughts expressed online are a fundamental part of myself, possibly the simulation or the simulcra of me if you subscribe to Baudrillard's theories. By allowing me to take control, this blogging technology is freeing me from being trapped in any one of those little boxes that society likes to put me in. It enables me to cross boundaries. So, following this argument to a logical conclusion, my iPod is allowing me to do the same thing. The music held within is me and by using it I am freely creating a self that I have chosen.

Now this is all well and good, but I fear the responsibility for this new, liberated me may be weighing rather too heavily on my shoulders. I log into online music stores and browse, but I can't help but wonder what people will think of me if I choose certain songs. Part of the attraction of the 'Pod for me is that it enables me to revisit all of the tunes of my youth, all of those albums I bought and lost along the way, songs that remind me of times and places and so on. All of that is a very personal history that I'm almost afraid to expose, even though nobody else is probably going to find out what I'm listening to. I did go to a party once where people were encouraged to bring 'Pods filled with playlists to share, to be plugged into the sound system and exposed to all. It felt almost dirty, like entering people's heads, reading their private thoughts. There was, however, a perverse pleasure in finding out that someone had a secret fetish for the Nolan Sisters and desperately wanted us to hear "I'm in the mood for dancing." Somehow the 'Pod provokes emotions that rummaging through someone's CD collection doesn't. I mean, you usually have to go to their home to do that, to be invited into their space. The iPod goes everywhere with them. It's a simultaneously public and private space, bounded by those little white headphones.

One little relief from 'Pod anxiety is the sheer hilarity of the software that tracks what you buy so that it can recommend more music that you might like. My boyfriend takes the pragmatic view that, as I haven't bought much from the stores, they don't really know what I like and are thus suggesting a broad range of things. I personally think that they may have got inside my head. The other day I was directed towards the original cast recording of "South Pacific." How did they know that one of the first songs I learnt as a child was "I'm gonna wash that man right outta my hair"? How did they glean, from the smattering of jazz and "90's music" that I've purchased, that I once spent hours hunched over an electronic keyboard struggling to play "Bali Ha'i"? I feel drawn towards attempting some kind of interaction with the software now. I have wicked thoughts about trying to confuse it, perhaps making it crash because it can't figure me out. I heard a reggae version of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" performed by Grace Jones the other day. I wonder how they would categorise me if I bought that?

Edward Scissorhands

2006-01-19T11:31:00.000Z

I'm one of those very lucky people who manages to get all of their celebrations over with in one chunk, leaving the rest of the year free for the peace and quiet of normality. As such, I have Christmas, then New Year, then my birthday in a great big swathe of festivity over the course of a few weeks.

I had a fantastic birthday this year. There were pancakes for breakfast, there were presents, there was lunch in my favourite local pub and in the evening I went to Sadler's Wells in London to see Matthew Bourne's "Edward Scissorhands". Last year I went to see his famous "Swan Lake" with the all-male corps of swans and it was amazing. I'd never been to see a ballet before and I was surprised that the narrative structure of the piece was so clear. I've since learned that this is one of the hallmarks of Bourne's choreography, and as I loved the film of "Edward Scissorhands" I was keen to see his adaptation. It was really good - it can genuinely be described as magical. It even had dancing topiary. Not many shows on in London at the moment can boast that.

Somehow I think that it's good for us to turn off the verbal bits of our brain sometimes and follow stories told through other means. This rings especially true if you're particularly verbose like me! So much can be conveyed through music and movement and you have the ability to lose yourself in the narrative far more when tales are told like this.

"Edward Scissorhands" is on until February 4th at Sadler's Wells, after which I think it's touring round the country. It's definitely well worth going to see.

http://www.edwardscissorhands.co.uk/
http://www.sadlerswells.com/

'Tis no longer the season to be jolly

2006-01-06T13:53:00.000Z

The "festive" season is over for another twelve months. Woo hoo!

Possibly the most Christmassy thing I managed to do was go along to the Barbican in London for the "Make the Yuletide Gay" concert by the London Gay Men's Chorus. This is fast becoming an annual event for me. It's full of energy, there's a bit of audience participation, there's always a good crowd and it's a bit of festive fun for those of us who don't usually feel particularly festive. Having once made my home in the halls of residence of a 1960s concrete university, the architecture of the Barbican also feels comfortingly familiar.

Proceedings this year had an extra frisson of celebratory significance as Civil Partnerships had been legalised only a few days earlier. It felt good to share in the sense of liberation that was clearly in the air. Make no mistake, the government was absolutely right to pass the Civil Partnerships Act. From my point of view it makes complete sense and I'm not even gay. My boyfriend and I have been together for almost eight years. On the rare occasions when he gets very sick, or accidentally hurts himself, I worry. If he goes to hospital and they're wondering whether to pull the plug on him or not, I can't help them make that decision. I'm not his next of kin. Technically they don't even have to keep me informed of his condition. We could easily change all of that by getting married (we aren't likely to, but that's another story). It isn't fair that same sex couples haven't had that choice until now, alongside all the other multitude of things that frankly weren't fair and that Civil Partnerships will go some way towards sorting out.

Politics aside, the London Gay Men's Chorus are great. "Well worth coming out for" indeed.

Is ignorance really bliss?

2005-12-20T14:55:00.000Z

This, sadly, is a true story which I share with you on this hallowed day - the day when it's your last chance to post first class letters if you want them to get there before Christmas.

My boyfriend went into a shop to buy some stamps for our Christmas cards. At the counter he asked: "May I have a dozen first class stamps, please?"
The cashier replied: "Sorry, they only come in packs of twelve."

Bizarre Christmas Nostalgia

2005-12-16T15:33:00.000Z

I don't really like Christmas but you can't escape it at the moment. Idly flicking around radio stations this morning I came across a station that was playing Chris de Burgh's festive offering of many years past "A Spaceman Came Travelling". I assure you that it is as nauseating as any of the other songs in the de Burgh canon and I really cannot stand such music, but I can't get around the fact that it played a fundamental part in my formative years.

I must have been about six years old when a teacher at my primary school, evidently years ahead of her time, decided to base our nativity play around the song. The basic narrative concerned the appearance of a bright light in the vicinity of Bethlehem that was not in fact a star but a spaceship. Issuing forth from said spaceship came - you've guessed it - a spaceman, who went on to locate the heavenly babe in a stable and make an impassioned plea for peace on earth. A recording of the de Burgh music was interspersed with traditional carols and readings.

The performance was traditional in many respects. We had a Mary and a Joseph, complete with scary plastic baby Jesus and throngs of blonde angels looking suitably angelic with tinsel on their heads (being boringly brunette and with a fetching pudding basin haircut I was passed over for angelic duties - I was the narrator). The demands of the story, however, meant that we also had a silver fibreglass spaceship whose design was heavily influenced by the recent smash hit movie E.T. We also had a tall, very blonde boy called Sean dressed in silver lurex, playing a traveller from outer space. The crowning glory of the whole production, though, was a table situated to the left of the stage around which sat several children playing the parts of world leaders of the time. This means that some poor girl had to play Margaret Thatcher, but I can't remember who it was. I do recall that a boy called Stuart got to play Helmut Kohl by virtue of his being born in Germany as his dad was in the army. At a crucial point in the plot all of these world leaders had to erupt into an argument, shouting "No" in various languages. I believe they were saying "No" to nuclear disarmament, these being the days of American missile bases in the U.K., Greenham Common, fear of nuclear attack from the U.S.S.R. and so on. Through drama, our teacher was attempting to get a group of five and six year olds to show just how far we were from peace at that point in time and how ineffectually daft the leading politicians were.

I can't help but wonder what our parents made of it all. I grew up in a fairly deprived area where political awareness was not high. To some, I suspect, the play was controversial. To most it was probably unfathomable. Looking back now, of course, it seems comical almost in the extreme, but you've got to wonder if there are teachers out there today who would put so much effort into taking such a risk with one of the primary school's most long-held traditions - the nativity. In the days of school league tables, relentless testing and rampant political correctness I somehow doubt it. As a small child I got to do something pretty cool. I appeared in an off-the-wall political statement of a nativity the like of which will probably never be seen again. It probably explains why I studied Politics at university all those years later.

25 years since John Lennon was shot

2005-12-08T16:40:00.000Z

So it's twenty five years to the day that John Lennon was shot and there are little acts of remembrance going on all over the place. There were Lennon tributes all over the radio this morning, from the Today programme to Virgin and no doubt beyond. There's been a lot of debate about the personality of the man as well as discussions about his songs and all that. As a whole it's triggered a rather personal memory for me.

Surprisingly enough I remember when Lennon died. I was only two, but I have a vivid recollection of seeing the event on the television news. I was watching with my mum and I think a family friend, Mary, was there. She lived in the house that backed on to our garden and she'd just popped around to give me a knitted soft toy that she'd made. I'm pretty sure it was a piglet (as in Winnie the Pooh's buddy). The bizarre thing about this is that Mary also played a pivotal role in my mum's recollection of when John F. Kennedy was shot. Mum was climbing over the back fence to collect her Avon cosmetics order from Mary. Aside from making me wonder at my mother's youthful athleticism, this clearly provides much evidence for a conspiracy theory. Think the FBI conspired to shoot Kennedy and Lennon? Maybe communists? The mafia perhaps? No, it was bored housewives in suburban England.

I think I remember the shooting because mum found it quite upsetting. She'd seen the Beatles play live in her youth. The came to what is now a faded seaside theatre along the coast from mum's home town. Presumably back then it was a local hub of youth culture. Mum was working in the Co-op and went with her colleagues. She used to talk frequently about this when I was growing up but I think I never quite believed that she would have actually done something as... well, cool, as that. It just so happened that when I went to university the end of term ball one year was held in this old theatre, and as I walked down the stairs there was a poster advertising the Beatles concert that had been held there. There was an odd sort of pride in being able to think "my mum was there".

The passing of time always imparts great significance to events, whether they seemed significant when they occurred or not.

Kurt Elling and Ian Shaw, November 18th 2005

2005-11-23T16:17:00.000Z

I walked along the South Bank from Tate Modern to the Queen Elizabeth hall. I'd never done it before and it was a really wonderful thing to do, especially on a frosty evening when you've just had a hot spiced cider from Borough market. There were fairy lights in the trees, St. Pauls across the river was lit up, the heaving throng of people rushing home along the riverside path was reasonably good natured, it being a Friday evening. It was good. At the end of it there was jazz, which was even better.

The British jazz singer Ian Shaw proved to be a pleasant surprise. When I looked at his website I thought he was a bit of a crooner (nothing wrong with that, but they're ten-a-penny these days) but he turned out to be refreshingly original. He played the piano briefly before he was joined by his young backing band, who attacked the songs with great enthusiasm. He seemed to have a bit of a penchant for picking unusual songs to sing as well as indulging in a few bits of improvisation, vocal gymnastics and relaxed, witty banter, which turned out to be the perfect way to get us all in the mood for Kurt Elling.

I saw Kurt perform with his regular accompaniment the Laurence Hobgood trio a couple of years ago and he was outstanding then. This time he was even better. I think I would happily mortgage my soul just to hit one of the notes that he managed to hit with deadly perfection. His voice sounded warmer and more polished than I remembered it, with all of the effortless scat and vocalese just tripping out. He has often talked in interviews about playing his voice as an instrument and there was such a strong sense of that last Friday. You also get a feeling of honesty in his performances. Like Mark Murphy, when he sings a lyric you believe in what he's saying. It's probably just a performance skill, but you want to believe that it's not, that it's from the heart. He sung a version of "In the wee small hours of the morning" with some self-penned lyrics about missing his new baby daughter and for me it just created such an intense emotional atmosphere in the hall that it almost felt rude to applaud and break the spell that had just been woven. Of course, I did applaud, as did others. If someone bares raw emotion on stage like that they deserve some appreciation for it, but in the little chapel of my brain I was contemplating the beauty of it all :-) Joking aside, it was very moving.

Kurt Elling seems to be in the form of his life. Laurence Hobgood excelled as he always does on the piano (I am promising myself that I will try and get hold of his solo CD) and new drummer Kobie Watkins was very impressive. One of the bonuses of Watkins being so new to the group was that they played a lot of their older repertoire, presumably to allow him to familiarise himself with it. So we got to hear one of my personal favourites "Easy Livin'" as well as "More than you know" and "My Love, Effendi" alongside "Man in the Air" and "In the Winelight" from Kurt's latest studio album. I thought bassist Rob Amster was on particularly good form. His playing seems to have found some kind of new purpose in the two years since I saw him perform last. I mean, he was good before and he comes across well on Kurt's recordings but I just thought he had a new, very cool edge last Friday. From the way he ducked down behind his bass during "In the wee small hours..." I reckon he was moved by it as much as I was... but I'm probably mistaken.

Thus my first trip to the London Jazz Festival was a resounding success. There was poetry, there was lyricism, there was emotion, there was... erm... singing. I would definitely recommend Ian Shaw to others - he has a new album out shortly. My appreciation of Kurt Elling, though, goes far beyond simple recommendation. Listen to his albums. If he plays live near you, you must go. He'll make you fall in love with the love of your life all over again (my darling J, who accompanied me to the gig, can confirm this). He'll make you laugh and he'll make you cry. He'll inspire you to read Kerouac and listen to more jazz. He'll encourage you to sing bad scat in the shower. The guy is quite simply a legend.

Deliverance

2005-11-16T11:39:00.000Z

A thin, eerie mist drifts across the warm, festering swamp and the sound of duelling banjos can be heard in the distance. I'm standing still, trying not to move, afraid but strangely fascinated by the scene unfolding before me...

Well, actually it's a cold November day in a Kentish village and I can hear the builders working in our bathroom on the floor below me whistling the theme tune from "The Third Man". I'm sitting at my computer waiting for a parcel to arrive. I waited yesterday, too. Three parcels arrived yesterday, but not here. They arrived when I was talking to our landlord about the building work and I didn't hear the delivery guy knock, so he left a card saying that the parcels had been delivered to "Number 3". That's all well and good, but there are at least three number threes in the immediate vicinity, plus several more besides around the village green by which our house is situated. So, somebody had signed for a delivery of expensive computer equipment belonging to my boyfriend and I had no idea who they were. Major stress ensued. Luckily, before I resorted to touring the village in search of the stuff, the lady from two doors down came and knocked to tell me that she had taken in the delivery, so I went round to collect it. She was so nice, bless her. She even asked if I minded her accepting the parcels, which of course I didn't. It was so good to be on the receiving end of her neighbourly kindness - as I told her, there should be more people like her about.

Anyway, having recovered from one delivery crisis, I now find myself waiting for the second consignment of the new PC system that my boyfriend has ordered. The online delivery tracker said it was loaded onto a van for delivery yesterday. It didn't come yesterday. The online delivery tracker now says that it has been loaded onto a van for delivery today. As yet it hasn't arrived. I have to say I'm not holding out much hope for it. In the past we have tried to pick up parcels from this particular delivery company's depot, which is situated in windswept badlands surrounding Ashford, and have had to resort to flagging down one of their vans to ask for directions to the god forsaken place. Every time I hear a van outside I jump up to the front window, fearful that the packages will end up somewhere else other than here. I'm existing in a permanent state of cat-like readiness, poised and ready to leap up through the slightly trippy fug of bathroom sealant that is wafting through the house and answer the door as soon as the delivery arrives. If it ever gets here at all.

Mark Murphy

2005-11-14T12:52:00.000Z

I was delighted to find a copy of Mark Murphy's new CD "Once to Every Heart" nestling amongst the oh-so-very-exciting computer programming books in my boyfriend's latest delivery from Amazon. It's a recording of rare, subtle charm that is a pleasure to listen to.

I wouldn't call myself a huge fan of Murphy's by any means. The man's back catalogue is so extensive that it's going to take me a fair while to investigate all of it and come to an informed opinion of his work as a whole, but I like what I've heard so far. I happened to tune in to him giving a radio interview when he was in the UK over the summer and I listened because I really like Kurt Elling's music. From what I understand, Murphy and Elling are quite closely linked musically, with the former being a big influence on the career of the latter, so I was keen to find out what Murphy's music was all about. It was a great interview and it convinced me to seek out "Once to Every Heart" . Murphy is every inch the "hipster's hipster" that he is so often described as being in the jazz press and he came across as being musically adept but also funny and engaging.

His personality is reflected in his latest CD, which contains some of the most heartfelt vocal performances I've ever heard. He has a way with lyrics that squeezes out every inch of emotion from the words but is never overly dramatic. He never goes too far with his performance, but you listen to him and you believe every word that he sings. His arrangements, too, are models of quiet virtuosity, lacking the obviousness of so much that is churned out by the army of young crooners currently crowding the jazz music scene. Those singers might bring welcome fresh blood, but they could learn a lot from a master with such a long career as Mark Murphy.

My enjoyment of "Once to Every Heart" is being enhanced by the anticipation of seeing Kurt Elling perform with the British singer Ian Shaw at the London Jazz Festival on Friday night. Having seen him live once before, I reckon it's going to be great and I'm really looking forward to going to the Queen Elizabeth Hall to see him again.

Super size tea

2005-11-07T15:42:00.000Z

I am not usually given to impulse buying, but I must admit that on Sunday I succumbed to temptation. I purchased one of those extra large cups that are often used in France for drinking hot chocolate at breakfast time. It's fantastic.

Within hours of purchasing the cup and the saucer upon which it sits I was curled up in my favourite armchair, sipping green tea with lemon from it and reading the Sunday paper. It only holds slightly more tea than the average mug, but that is just enough to make drinking from it seem very decadent. It turns tea drinking into a treat, something to be savoured and lingered over with care. The curvy friendliness of the cup, coupled with the warmth of the tea within, is supremely comforting. The saucer completes the sublime picture by holding biscuits in perfect readiness for delicious dunking.

All in all, it is proving to be a perfect autumn purchase. The nights may be drawing in and the weather may be blustery and wet, but I have my new cup and saucer to keep me warm and cheer me up.

I am very fond of bananas

2005-11-04T15:19:00.000Z

The title of this post is a line from a poem/song, just in case you think I'm some sort of strange fruit fetishist.

My boyfriend decided he wanted to send a letter to Fyffes, the banana company, asking them how many times better their bananas are than the average banana (the answer being "Fyffe" - it's their witty advertising slogan: "Fyffe times better than the average banana," how hilarious). So, in order to be helpful, I went and had a look at their website to see if they had an e-mail address or something. Well, they do, but they have so very much more.

The site has games. Banana themed games. What's more, there's a rap that you can download as an mp3, plus a "banana storybook". It's somebody's job to think up games to advertise bananas. It's somebody's job to create little animated banana characters called "The Fun Bunch".

Fyffes have clearly spent a fair bit on advertising themselves and creating a site that people want to spend time at. They're also ensuring that they have a whole new generation of banana eaters in the future by marketing themselves at kids. Brilliant isn't it? The thing that puzzles me is that people don't really shop for bananas by brand, do they? A banana is a banana is a banana. You don't walk into the supermarket or greengrocer and say "Give me a banana and make sure it's a Fyffes," do you? You just get whatever bananas they have. So why would a banana company feel the need to advertise and create brand awareness?

Well, I've given them a bit of a helping hand with their advertising crusade whatever their reasoning behind it. It's a fun site and I recommend it for a little bit of banana related amusement.

http://www.fyffes.com/