Continue reading »]]> Look!

Something I can talk about!

I wrote a short story for these dudes…

http://alchemypress.blogspot.co.uk/

… and it’s being published and everything in a book called Urban Mythic, scheduled for later this year.  I mean, I grant you it’s short, but in fairness, other cool dudes wrote loads of short stories too so technically it’s like getting extra quality from lotsa people who have loads of quality, but in a compressed-yet-extensive-way.

And it’s not top secret.  Which is good, right?  (Also, technically, thanks have to go to my doctorate friend, and I grant you there are several, but you know who you are, who sat up and ate Chinese takeaway with me and talked about how it should work, as I don’t usually do short stories and was a little nervous.  Also, technically, thanks to her Mum, but that’s more by spiritual association rather than direct narrative input.  Anyway – you – you know who you are – thank you!)

Continue reading »]]> I’m a theatre lighting designer.  We take 3-6 weeks to think about a design.  Every instrument is carefully positioned, focused and plotted.  We pick our colours carefully, analyse scenes and then spend anywhere between 12-72 hours stuck behind a lighting desk carefully constructing every single moment of a play.

Added to this, I know little about music.  Don’t get me wrong… I can play a couple of instruments, sorta, and have lit more musicals in the last few months than the mind can comfortably conceive, but it’s something of a running gag among my friends that my knowledge of ‘popular culture’ (whatever that means) gets a little rusty around 1707.

Which makes the fact that I’ve been lighting gigs at a local venue, really kinda odd. And I’m loving it.

There’s a fine balance to be found between trying to enhance the music, create a mood or lift an exciting experience, without actually becoming distracting.  It’s a similar balance to what you do in theatre – light a moment or make a place without drawing attention away from the thing happening on stage – but far more heightened and (this being the slighty nerve-wracking bit) you have to do it without the advantage of fore-knowledge.

That said, I always try and do my research, and look up whoever it is I’m about to light to get a feel for their songs.  But even if you know what you want to do, trying to achieve it on the fly is tricky.  Particularly when using a lighting desk that was obsolete in conception, let alone in construction – a hideous bit of technology manufactured by people who wouldn’t know a good lighting desk if it fell on them from a great height with a ribbon round it.

Sometimes, I’m beginning to suspect, you run into less technological, than creative difficulties.  One group in particular wanted everything dark.  As a lighting designer, I read ‘dark’ for being ‘moody’.  But oh no.  We’re not talking moody.  We’re talking dark.  A very lovely lady stood by me throughout the gig going, ‘darker, darker!’ and as I pulled channels out and intensities down I felt the overwhelming urge to scratch at the back of my eyeballs.  ‘It looks great!’ she exclaimed.  ‘It’d look better in blackout!’

‘It’d look black, in blackout,’ I replied.  ‘It’d look like nothing that can look at all.’

How to describe the horror of this experience.  Of having everything you know, everything you’ve experienced, everything you’ve been trained in, dedicated years of your life to, pulled out beneath your feet by someone who is, technically, more senior (but less experienced) than you hollaring, ‘darker!  Darker now!’

I came away from that gig actually shaking.  Not merely shaking with aesthetic displeasure – that’s fine – but with the horrible thought that perhaps this was what people wanted.  Perhaps people liked their gigs to be invisible, perhaps they wanted to not be able to see the band, perhaps they were okay with the only light source on stage being a bit of red front light.  Perhaps all my career I’d got it wrong.  The thought horrified me, and for a few days I actually fretted that perhaps I was wrong.  Perhaps what I’d been doing was wrong, and I was only a theatre LD, and didn’t know how to light gigs, and I was… wrong.

Thankfully, one week later, my faith in lights, gigs and to a degree, myself, was restored by another event at the same venue.  This was for a group led by a woman called Laura Mvula, who I hadn’t heard of (presumably because she was born after 1707) but who it turned out was something of an up-and-coming someone.  More to the point – and this is why she actually gets named here – her gig was one of the best I’d seen, both musically and in terms of atmosphere and interaction with the audience.

And she had a proper lighting designer.  Proper, in the sense that he was clearly a trained LD with experience of lighting gigs.  Lighting designer as well in that, as I had done first time I walked into the venue, he sat down in front of the desk, took one look at it and pulled a facial expression of horror and dismay, at which point my respect for him surged.

And he started programming, and building states, and I helped out as I could with advice on the (hideous) desk (blimey, even as I write this I’ve just had a minor revelation about attribute control off submasters… anyway, moving on…) … and as I watched him work the realisation hit me – joy!  Joyous revelation, but he was doing PRECISELY what I would have done in his circumstances.  In fact, as I’d already been in for an hour and a half already, he was exactly replicating what I did, but in a slightly different control manner.  As there wasn’t time to tell him the full story of how my faith had been shattered the week before, he must have been a bit confused my my jubilant grin, but lo, the gig started and he made exactly the same artistic choices I would have, and I was relieved.  Deeply, and utterly relieved.

Lighting designers and writers both don’t get out much.  Lighting designers certainly get out and meet directors and designers a lot, but very rarely do we interact with other LDs and thus, after a while, you start to forget that you are part of a community of peers.  Sure, there’s the once-monthly meeting of the Association of Lighting Designers you could attend, but generally the conversation is about plugs and control equipment, and you can’t exactly turn on a theatre lighting grid in the pub and go, ‘what do you think of this?’  In short, LDs spend a lot of their time working with people who don’t really get what they do, and trust them to do it well, and thus it can become easy to forget that yes, you are doing a thing that is generally considered Good.  And Right.  And what others of your professional kin would do in your circumstances.

Writers in many ways have a similar problem.  We can read other people’s books and judge them extensively (and we do) but being so immersed in our own writing it can be hard to remember that there’s a world beyond the pages we are absorbed in.  This in many ways is why bad reviews hurt writers (and LDs for that matter) so much.  We exist in a little bubble of unlikely expertise, absorbed in doing something that not many others do, and when strangers disapprove, we take that as a universal condemnation, having nothing better to go on for ourselves.

Continue reading »]]> After my week (and a bit) off from all the scribbling and shows, I am now in a position to update my views on 24 with the following note on things that Jack Bauer (who, at the time of writing, has been shot, stabbed, tortured twice, beaten, electrocuted, suffered a collapsed lung and is still ok) has NEVER done.

Jack Bauer has NEVER:

1. Waited for a bus.

2.  Filled out a tax return.

3.  Bought a Japanese peace lily.

4.  Sung ‘I did it my way’ at karaoke night.

5.  Had to reinstall Windows.

6.  Played sudoku.

7.  Made a souffle.

It can be tough, serving your country.

Continue reading »]]> Thanks must go to a very lovely scribbler who’s had to listen to too many of my rants for showing me this… which, as a scribbler and an LD who’s been on the receiving end of such sterling criticism as ‘can light the little red ball seem more red than the curtain it’s on?’ or, ‘is there any way you can make them visible without actually letting us see them?’ and my personal writerly favourite – ‘are you sure that would happen?’

- this appealed to me hugely.

http://www.boredpanda.com/sharp-suits-worst-client-comment-posters/

Continue reading »]]> Remember when 24 first came onto our TV screens?  I was at school, and I was riveted.  As who wouldn’t be?  Every hour of real-time ended on a cliffhanger, a twist, a betrayal, a gunshot, a mysteries baddy doing something mysteriously bad.  It was the televisual equivalent of every paragraph opening with the word ‘… suddenly…!!’

I was recently reminded of this when finishing the last round of lighting designs.  Two weeks in tech is bad enough – two weeks teching musicals back-to-back is bone-shattering, and at the end of it a week of doing very little at great length seemed called for, and what better than eighteen hours or so, stretched out, of adrenaline-rush American drama?  Buckle down, wipe the sweat from your brow and start asking the immortal question… is Jack alright?

That said… certain lessons can be taken from this wonderfully over-the-top bit of TV.

1.  Never trust foreigners.  They’re out to get you.  And if they’re not out to get you, then someone’s out to get them, and you’d better say goodbye to them now because pretty soon a mysterious assassin with a questionable accent is probably going to kill them anyway.  Thankfully, foreigners can easily be identified by their incredible leers.

2.  Never trust politicians.  At best they’re wishy-washy liberals unwilling to Do What Needs To Be Done; at worst they’re shifty war-mongers out to manipulate the people of America for their own nefarious ends.

3.  Of course there’s a mole at CTU!  OF COURSE THERE IS!!

4.  Torture – it’s gonna hurt me as much as it hurts you.

5.  Everywhere in Los Angeles is no more than twelve minutes away from everywhere else.

6.  Bullets interfere with microwave transmission.  For observe: when your colleague needs to phone you during a quiet moment, that’s okay, but the second the bullets start flying and you need to call for backup, that’s the moment your phone runs out of signal.

7.  Bad facial hair is the sign of the devil.

8.  Love can only hurt, almost as much as the torture.  Which often stems from the love anyway.

9.  The United States of America does not negotiate with terrorists.

10.  For god’s sake, if you see a bathroom, use it.  Play safe, people.  Plan ahead.

Continue reading »]]> There is an accusation levelled against theatre that it’s ‘not for the masses’.

When Margaret Thatcher was buried, the funeral cost ten million pounds.  When the Arts Council budget for the entire country for the fiscal year was announced, it had been slashed by eleven million pounds.  Again.

Every year publishers seek this year’s success, and they model it on last year’s triumphs.  Thus – vampires were popular in 2010, so the shelves were flooded with rip-offs in 2011.  Bondage and sex was popular in 2011, so the shelves were flooded with the same in 2012.

It’s not about what we want, say the makers of TV soaps, the producers of glittering musicals and the producers of mild porn.  It’s about what people want.

To which I say: enough.

I love my trashy TV, my entertaining books, silly films.  I lounge in the sun and read comic books, tune in for Dr Who, turn up the radio for harmless rock.

And I love theatre.  I believe that Shakespeare is one of the greatest writers in human history, that politics are for the masses, documentary should be complicated and challenging and that it would be a brave publisher in this day and age who promoted Catch 22 or 1984 over the next Fifty Shades of Whatever.  My views are not elitist.  It is not elitist to love good books, or be moved by a brilliant story.  It is not elitist to be frightened for a character, concerned for an outcome, to be moved by music or enthralled by fact.  It is not elitist to enjoy complexity, or to say that this is to your taste, and that is not, without reducing the entirely subjective thing you dislike.

And it is offensive – so unbelievably offensive – to say that there is such a thing as a ‘lowest common denominator’ in culture.  How will this play, ask producers and executives, but how will this play to the stay-at-home Mum?  How will this play to Middle England Grandmas, how will this play to the 18-something demographic with their iPods and smart shoes?

How repulsive – how utterly demeaning it is that those who hold the reigns of cultural power in our society ask such a question.  How angry every stay-at-home Mum must be, every Gran and every iPod owner to hear themselves so grouped and demeaned by the notion that theatre is not for them, that they will not love this thing for it is elitist.  Beyond their scope and their reach.  So let us promote the next Fifty Shades of Whatever; let’s make sure that the world knows the airing times for Eastenders but that no one’s challenged by a documentary with too much content.  Let’s simplify the news in case people get bored, let’s cut back on theatres and spend the money instead, on a day of spectacle that comes and goes with as much significance as match in the rain.  Let’s fill our newspapers with celebrity tattle and not distract anyone with stories of global significance, because this is not what people want.  It’s too elitist.

To which I say: to hell with that.  Because time and again our culture has proven that it can love stories which are beautiful, not merely spectacular.  We are held enthralled by intelligence, we – the great big ‘we’ that is far too big a demographic to be easily contained, the great big ‘we’ of a species that thinks for itself – we can delight in so many things that are powerful, not merely punchy.  Yet now, where there were just a few tabloid newspapers satisfying our guilty pleasure – and it is a pleasure, and that is fine – our guilty pleasure for celebrity tit-bits and catchy headlines about stranded cats – now they are everywhere and it isn’t simply that we want a little more complexity in our lives, it’s that more and more, no one seems willing to give it.  No one will promote the complicated thing; no one will risk putting the difficult story on the shelves.  How much longer, I wonder, until as a society we fulfil George Orwell’s prophecy and take not-thinking for granted?

Continue reading »]]> I am asthmatic.  And that’s absolutely fine.  I’ve had asthma as long as I can remember, and only one has it landed me in hospital, when I was young, and only a couple of times have I been forced to go onto a nebulizer to breathe clearly.  It’s just a part of my life.

But sometimes I wonder – that same ‘what if’ that I’m sure hangs over every only child (another box I tick) or schoolgirl with spectacles.  What would it be like without asthma?  Or with siblings, for that matter?  I have no way of knowing, having never experienced this for myself.  Perhaps nothing would change at all, save a tweak in my routine of daily inhaler and prescription costs saved once every three months.  Perhaps more than I imagine.  Perhaps when I run, my breath will flow easy and clear, for certainly, particularly in winter, it’s not my legs that let me down half so much as it its my lungs.  Perhaps in spring, I won’t become hayfever ground zero, and if I do, perhaps that hayfever won’t trigger throat and nose trouble.  Maybe I’d sleep better, sing better – and then again maybe a runaway brain and the inability to hold a tune have very little correlation with lung capacity.  I take it for granted that I carry an inhaler everywhere – it’s not a worry, it just is.  Just like asthma itself.

And in that I have nothing else to measure my experience against, the question of ‘what if’ remains entirely hypothetical.  Yet every now and then; endlessly engaging.

Continue reading »]]> Colonic hydrotherapy.

I think that’s the bit that makes me really, really angry.  Every few days I get emails inviting me to go to the theatre on the cheap, have an over-indulgent meal at half the price, take out a not-very-cheap couple of sessions at the gym, or have a haircut.

But mostly, what the email suggests I do, is experience colonic hydrotherapy.  Because what I really need is a hosepipe up my bum.

This is accompanied, invariably, by pictures of serene looking people against a warm background, their lives restored, improved, enhanced by this altogether absurd, medically disproven and scientifically unfounded practice.  Not even scientifically unfounded – scientists have had a rare moment of unity on this one and declare without  hesitation that not only is it unbeneficial, it can be actively harmful and has serious risks of long-term side-effects.

When did we get to this?  I mean, I understand the bliss of relaxing as much as the next girl, and as soon as I’m earning enough money and have enough time, I’m sure I’ll rush to spend a long day in a hot bath eating fresh fruit and getting my feet rubbed – it simply happens that right now I’m not, and I don’t.  But how did this perfectly understandable human yearning evolve into something as mind-numbingly STUPID as the emails that land in my inbox?  And worse!  How is it that we let it be so?  Why isn’t there shouting from the rooftops, why aren’t people being informed, why isn’t information available, why – in short – WHY do we let ourselves get so stupid?!  I would have thought that the internet offered us a chance to get smart, for lo, a click away are scholarly papers, judicious articles, years of journalism and medical research but no!  The desire to believe appears to trump the need to know and this, more than anything else (and sorry, I did just pick on one of many bugbears there) is what makes me fume.

Continue reading »]]> You know what I’d like to see?

A really good film or play adaptation of the Odyssey.

I mean, I love the actual text.  The text is awesome.  And in no way do I suggest reducing it or demeaning it or any other of the accusations that are usually levelled at film adaptions, particularly of something as awesome as a +2000 year old piece of spoken poetry.  Hence the word ‘good’ in my initial suggestion.

But!  We have the technology now.  We can do cyclops, we can do oceans, even on stage (with suitable budget) and at the end of the day, the Odyssey isn’t just a great fantasy adventure, it’s one of the oldest known texts which deals with loss, loneliness, homesickness, seduction and betrayal on a really personal, exciting level.  And the character of Odysseus – clever, cunning, stubborn, and generally surrounded by idiots – has been appealing from the first touch of rosy-fingered dawn.

And sure, sometimes people have tried.  I caught a few minutes of a made-for-TV attempt at the Odyssey a few years ago, and had to turn off it was so terrible.  Mostly because Odysseus isn’t a well-oiled heroic hunk of a man; he returns to his wife as a sea-tossed beggar, and spends most of the book clinging onto bits of raft or trying to satisfy gnawing hunger.  Arguably the best attempts at doing the Odyssey are the less literal-minded adaptations.  I’ve been informed that Cold Mountain (desperate soldier trying to get home to determined-yet-pursued love of his life) has a lot of the Odyssey in it, and in that it’s a tale of two people divided by distance and adversity, I totally see it.  However, my personal favourite attempt at (lovingly) re-working the Odyssey has to be O Brother Where Art Thou?  Because no, it’s really not the Odyssey, but yes, it has a cyclops, and a long-lost wife who’s being pursued, and tempting sirens, a great deal of travelling, and even if all this were to be ignored, it’s still be a great film.

But yes….

… so, read the Odyssey.  But if someone wants to actually have a punt at doing something more with it, that’d be groovy too…

Continue reading »]]> Yeap.

It’s deja vu.  The overwhelming sense of ‘haven’t I read this before?’ even though technically, I’m the only person in the world (so far) who’s read what I’m currently reading.

And worse – a worry that my word count, as I edit, is getting longer.  Longer!

I believe in deletion.  Editorials are a glorious opportunity to cut out the nonsense, trim away the redundant crap, hone and refine.  What the hell is this stuff doing getting longer?

Clearly I need to stop editing, take a long holiday, and maybe try again later, when it’s less fresh in my mind…

Continue reading »]]> This is a cry for help and information!  (All gratefully received.)  It’s not going to be my most exciting blog post, but it will be, I suspect, on a theme to which we are all familiar…

So as we all know, energy and gas companies screw us over.  You look at your ever-rising bills, you look at the ever-rising profits of the companies and the uncanny ability they have to always raise prices in time for winter… and yeah, we’re screwed.  And angry.

But over the last few months there has been a campaign to ‘simplify’ energy tariffs.  The government has harped on at great lengths about this.  I mean, hell, they’re not actually making things cheaper for us, just simpler – in the same way that it’ll be ‘simpler’ for GPs to decide spending, oh yes, but anyway, different rant.

So I’ve received a letter detailing my new, ‘simple’ tariff from NPower, and in it, metre readings based on my daily usage have gone out of the window and instead I must pay a daily standing charge for what I receive, totalling over £210 a year.  AS WELL as my standard metre readings.

Now, I am a woman who goes out of my way not to use much gas and electricity.  I turn lights off, never leave things on standby, go out of my way to minimise my use of hot water and make things as energy efficient as possible.  My average monthly combined gas and electricity bill is around £20 regardless of the time of year.  The addition of these standing charges has effectively doubled what I will pay in the year – all in the interest of ‘making things simple’.

To put it bluntly, I am being screwed because I try and be efficient.

And I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Continue reading »]]> So hungry it hurts.  So hungry that actually I’m not sure I can eat.  It’s a hard thing to describe – that moment you pass through hunger and out the other side and the notion of food is actually strangely repellant.  Must eat.  Can’t quite work out how.

But!

The reason for the hunger is that today marks nearly the end of two weeks of technical rehearsals.  Musicals musicals musicals – you know, I’m not sure I can remember what it was like not lighting musicals.  I feel sure that there was a time when I didn’t dream in quavers, or wake at three a.m. in a cold sweat over the cue partition that I clearly missed but would make everything better.  I close my eyes and all I see are coloured lights moving over the back of my retina, or channel data shrugging along a dubious dimmer curve.

Let’s see if I can drag my brain towards what I’m trying to say.

The show I’ve been lighting this week is called the Universal Machine.

It’s a musical about the life of Alan Turing at the New Diorama Theatre.

Now.

When I read the first draft it was with with trepidation… and finished with delight.  Because – and here’s the odd thing – it works.

It more than works.  And through the mild delirium, I’m really, really proud of the show, and of every single person who’s worked on it.  One of those few pieces where I found myself, despite being thoroughly saturated in the script, forgetting to catch my breath.  Not often I get to say that; happy to say it now.

Photo by Richard Davenport.

Continue reading »]]> So, I don’t like Star Trek (though might see the new film…) … but always had to admire the way it got on with a narrative.

“Sir!” says Spock, staring into a blinky blinky screen, “I can see from my read out that we are orbitting above a planet of Earth-like qualities, resembling, in fact, no more and no less than a studio lot with some concrete rocks in it and a pink backdrop.  On this planet are human-like creatures except that once every year they sacrifice an alien wanderer to their gods in a sexually charged ritual of exhaustive pain and anxiety, and this year it looks like there’s trouble.”

“Wow!” says Kirk.  “Let’s beam down into the middle of that!”

The creators of Star Trek envisaged all sorts of things for their future.  Teleportation, faster than light travel – guns that seem to have an uncanny ability to knock a man unconscious wherever they hit him, or kill him stone dead wherever they hit him, UNLESS that character is a leading actor in which case he/she/it will usually only be mildly mauled.  What they didn’t envisage, however, was wireless internet.

“Hey – Spock!  So we’re down on the surface of the planet and there’s this strange lumpy formation ahead of us.  What do you think it is?”

“Just give me a moment, Captain, let me take a photo of it with my iTricorder.  Just looking for a network… running a bit slow… okay… that is the rock of epic judgment which, if a visiting stranger climbs it and declares three times from its peak ‘Try to react positively to the world around you’ all things will be made better immediately.”

“Wow!” exclaims Kirk again.  “If you didn’t have your iTricorder enabled for interplanetary roaming, it might have taken us 45 minutes and a lot of angst to work that out!  I guess we can just go home now.”

Wireless internet hasn’t just changed the world, it’s changed the nature of narrative.  Mostly, it’s made it faster.  Want to find something out?  Pop on a computer.  Want to contact someone on the other side of the planet?  Send an email.  Want to do a background check on a shifty looking sort without leaving the crime scene?  Roll on google and the pdf.  No longer are pages spent on going to the library or waiting for the one bit of data without which the entire thing makes no sense.  Instant access – instant gratification.

Internet has also, I’d argue, changed what writers write about.  It’s not merely that our plots now contain mobile phones and email; it’s that at a click of a button I can bring up images of Belgrade and Beijing on my computer.  I can zoom into streetview in New York and get a complete history of the Taj Mahal without ever leaving my desk; without even closing my novel.  The world really is my oyster, although whether that makes the quality of writing any better, I really couldn’t say…

Continue reading »]]> So I’ve been learning Chinese.  （你好！  如果你读我的汉字， 告诉我！)  And, to my surprise, I’ve been really enjoying it.  I’ve also tried to resurrect what tiny bit of French I have, not least after the French translator of Madness of Angels greeted me with the immortal words:

‘So I translated your book, and I really enjoyed it, it was very interesting, very new for me.  But this thing you do in English… this I/we thing… in English it is beautiful, but in French it is how we say… uh… f******d.’

And all this got me thinking.  I went to a very good school.  Well, I’ve a couple of gripes – their insistence that I did English Lit at A-Level (shudder) instead of Drama somewhat gets my back up in retrospect, in the sense that no one even mentioned that RADA existed and there was a thing as technical theatre for me to do, but anyway, like I said, ignoring that particular raised eyebrow towards the careers department, a really excellent school from which I came away feeling reasonably scholarly.

But!  I do feel staggeringly let down by my experience of learning languages.  And I don’t know if this was the syllabus, the teaching, the school, me, or what, but I came away from my obligatory GCSE in a modern language feeling thoroughly inept.  I was bad at languages.  This was my firm belief.  I hated them, they hated me.  I didn’t understand how they worked, and would never excel in any language ever.  I dreaded lessons and was consistently, not only in the lowest stream for a language, but the lowest part of the lowest stream, and after call I remember my French teacher would continually take me to one side and say, ‘Well, Catherine, what are we to do with you?’

What she decided had to be done with me, was chastisement.  Because I clearly wasn’t going to be good enough and had to try harder.

Nearly a decade later, and I am furious that I walked away from my school education believing that I was pathologically incapable of languages.  Don’t get me wrong – I doubt I’ll ever be bi-lingual in anything, not to a proper standard – but I really enjoy learning Mandarin.  I love the satisfaction of being able to look at a page and even get 60% of the characters right.  I like the sound of French, take huge pride in my ability to say even a little in German, and from that to have a surprisingly good shot at reading bits of Norwegian, hearing bits of Danish, catching a few words of Dutch and beginning to piece together other things.

My school experience didn’t merely leave me feeling like a bit of a failure in this regard, it also undermined my willingness to seize other opportunities.  At LSE, us International History students were obliged to take ‘outside options’ in our first two years in subjects which weren’t history, and as someone with a fondness for the early modern, how useful it would have been for me to brush up my French, work on my German, or even try and grab a few phrases of Arabic or traditional Chinese?  But no – my dread of languages and the conviction that I was destined to be rubbish at them held me back and instead – how I shudder at the memory – I waded through Sociology (interesting for the first 15 minutes of a lecture, soul-destroying for the rest) and International Relations (basically common sense with obtuse footnoting).  Now I wish – just wish I’d taken advantage of the language department, and its extensive, available and willing staff.  It’s an opportunity I missed entirely, and hugely regret.

To a degree, maths teaching at school has something similar to answer for.  Not nearly so much – I very much liked my maths teacher – but GCSE Maths, like GCSE languages, was a lot of learning by rote.  See this equation?  Apply this method.  See that verb?  Derive it thusly.  The ‘why’ of it was considered not really necessary to the passing of exams, and so I struggled through GCSE mathematics with about as much initiative as an amoeba.  Only at Physics A-Level did the elegance of mathematics begin to come alive, as finally we applied equations to tangible things, saw the ways in which numbers had their own logical sense, and drew our triangles not between imaginary points, but between distant stars as viewed from orbitting planets.  Even then, as the only Physics student in the class who wasn’t doing A-Level Maths (believing again, I would be inept at it) I struggled when we started doing circular mechanics, as all the other students had been taught concepts I entirely lacked.  To this day I cannot explain why we had to use ‘rads’ when doing wave mechanics, or quite what applying the ‘ln’ function to radioactive decay really achieves, other than an extra 5 marks on the exam paper.  Of my Physics teachers, one – the immortal Miss Ingham, praise be upon her – was incredible, grabbing at distant concepts and making them real and whole.  As for the others – well, my A-Level Circular Mechanics paper was best summed up by the immortal words, ‘You’re all going to fail!’ which voice haunted me all the way through my indeed, very low-scoring paper.  ‘Just press the button!’ shrilled this particular teacher.  ‘That’s all that’s required of you!’

How now I lament these words.  Not only did I miss out on opportunities, but it has taken me another eight years – eight years! - to overcome even the entrenched fear of daring to find out answers for myself.

Continue reading »]]> I shall bake a cake!

Do the washing up!

Sort out the laundry!

I shall…

… do my lighting design jobs!

Tidy paperwork.

Organise my folders on my computer.

It seems…

… but is not the case…

… like this is the kinda thing you do when you have writers block.

But no!

This is what you do when you have FINISHED,

FINISHED I say!!!

another top-secret writerly project!

WHEEEEEEE!!!!

Continue reading »]]> For those who don’t know, Iain M. Banks is, as he puts it, officially Very Poorly.

He’s one of the greatest writers of modern science fiction, a lovely member of the human race and an all-round amazing man.  No more really needs to be said, but it is important that all of the above, is said first.

Continue reading »]]> A very short, very quick question:

Hands up everyone who’s had someone – almost invariably a family relation aged 50+, call you up in a fume with any of the following statements:

‘I can’t find ‘send’.  What do you mean the left?  Which left?  I don’t see it.  Open ‘email’.  Where’s email?  Yes the computer’s on, I’m not dead, you know.  Wait… oh damn.  It’s vanished.  I mean vanished!  It’s just vanished, it’s taken all of it, all my work!  What’s ‘minimize’.  I’m looking at the bottom of the screen.  No.  No I don’t see it.  Shall I just click on everything?  I’m clicking on… alright, I won’t click on everything, what do you want here?  I’m being patient – you’re being snappy!  Okay, it’s back again – why did it do that, I wonder?  Now I want to make sure the message sent.  I know that you think it’s reliable, but I’ve tried to send emails before and it hasn’t worked.  Of course it’s the computer’s fault, I know how to send an email!  So how do I check the sent message log.  No.  That’s not right.  It’s not there.  I’m staring right at it!  You’re not helping here, you know….’

Just wait.

In fifty years time, you and I could be on the other end of that call….

Continue reading »]]> I don’t often read other blogs.

Um.

That’s bad for a blogger, right?

Ah well.  Busy times.

Point is!

I did read this:

http://www.touretteshero.com/

… and really admire it for a grand example of what a blog ought to be!

Also, as I seem to be in blogging-about-blogging mode (which seems like a fail, so let’s get it over and done with asap) I should also say that on facebook (shudder) one of the few organs I like and respect is a group called I f*****g love science.  Whose founder is a lady and whose gender was revealed in passing (as why would it be revealed any other way, it being, frankly, irrelevant) a few days ago, prompting this:

http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/popular-science-facebook-page-run-by-woman–holy-cow-people-cant-believe-it-164254248.html

Not a webpage I would hang out on much, but a topic I would definitely consider worth a nod.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve been accused of being a tease!

Moi?

A tease?

I grant you, I’m still not going to tell you about

topsecretprojectwhatI’mnotallowedtotalkaboutreally

because I’m really, really not allowed to talk about it.  I mean seriously, there’s whole contractual business about why I can’t tell you about it.  Sorry.

But!  I can tell you that the Glass God‘s cover has now been released and looks shiny, and apparently, according to its tag line, what was promised must be paid.  And I can tell you that it’s no fun cleaning up after the bodies, and that 1666 wasn’t that long ago really, and that velcro is good and umbrellas aren’t always just for keeping off the rain.  And to beware Aldermen bearing doughnuts.  And always keep a backup copy of your contacts list, just in case some nit steals your mobile phone.

Look!

That’s LOADS of information.

Go figure.

Continue reading »]]> I loathe our government.

Don’t get me wrong – I understand why austerity.  But austerity which penalises the poor, which closes hospitals, makes going to university an impossible dream, crams schools, slashes support for the elderly and the infirm – this isn’t austerity.  This is an attack on anyone too poor to afford private healthcare, too poor for their parents to pay for their education – this is an attack on the vast majority of the population of this country, executed by a government whose policies are led by bigoted ideology, not care for the welfare of the people.

So a couple of days ago I was walking through Holloway, and ran into a protest to save the Whittington Hospital from government cuts.  To which I say… yes.  It may only be one battle at a time, but yes.  It’s a fight worth having.

Continue reading »]]> So there’s this thing.

And I’m part of the thing.

And I think I should ask you to vote, or maybe like, or perhaps comment, or in some manner be part of the thing.  Because that’d be awesome!

And this thing is explained better here:

http://www.bookspotcentral.com/2013/03/18/7th-annual-book-tournament-complete-lists-and-schedule/

So.  Yesssss.  I think I should ask people to say nice things about me.  Although I dunno, you might like the other dudes, in which case say nice things about them instead, because that’s only fair really.  Just like stuff.  There’s cool stuff there to like.  I know I do.

Continue reading »]]> Another day, another musical.  And to think, a few years ago I hadn’t lit a single musical.  Now I’ve done… more than I can comfortably remember.  Oh god the triplets.  Oh god the key changes.  Oh god the sense that there isn’t enough heat proof blue gel in the world…

Anyway.  What should interest you about all of this, is that of the musicals I’ve lit, I haven’t actually talked about any of them on this blog.  Being as it is, my wordy blog rather than my shiny lighty blog.  (There isn’t, by the way, a shiny lighty blog, because lighting designers are famously non-communicative unless with other lighting designers.)

But!  I am gonna give The Revenge of Sherlock Holmes a mention because, frankly, I trust the guys who are doing it.  This is the same production team who did Jekyll and Hyde last year, and while I still maintain that rhyming ‘red’ with ‘red’ was perhaps a little thesaurus-light, the production was stonking.  Absolutely stonking.  And if they want to take a musical about Sherlock Holmes and transpose it to Hoxton Hall (authentic East End music hall in Hackney, what is where I is from) then oddly, I’m going to cheer them all the way.  Not least because I’m lighting it.

And there’s a lot to light.  An awesome set (albeit one that limits my backlight options, growl…), epic costumes, lots of smoke machines for reasons which will become apparent, magic, mayhem and a skeleton who I personally think we should call Doris.  And oh yes… a cast and a director who’s stated ambition is to have the audience riveted from the word go and who, based on what I’ve seen so far, might actually achieve it…

And hell!  Even if a rip-roaring Victorian music hall experience isn’t quite your cuppa tea, did I mention the shiny toys and the magic?  Hoxton Hall was built in the 1860s (at the same time the Horatio Lyle books are set) and if it’s possible to bring the house down with exuberance alone, then I think this production might just do it.

Continue reading »]]> … take it out on fictional people!

Look at Matthew Swift.  In the 5 novels he’s appeared in so far, he’s been….

… shot, stabbed, burnt, kidnapped, chased, bitten, blinded, dropped from great heights, punched, ensorcelled, haunted by the ghosts of those he’s slain, tormented by meta-mystical dragons, betrayed, locked up, drugged, drained of blood for nefarious purposes, chemically abused for nefarious purposes, electrocuted SO much, suffocated, bombarded with sound, cement and flying glass, and if you think that’s bad enough, just you wait for what happens in book six.  Hell yeah.

And I feel great!

Continue reading »]]> So a few weeks ago, scientists dug up the corpse of Richard III.  Analysis of the skeleton showed that he had a twisted spine, though there was no indication of a withered arm.  Members of the ‘Richard the Third Society’ were very excited by this find, as they seek to ‘rehabilitate’ a character who was portrayed by Shakespeare as both morally and physically grotesque.  (Curiously enough, in Scotland, a similar project is underway to ‘rehabilitate’ Macbeth who was apparently, a pretty okay kinda guy.  Because when the three witches start doing rhyming couplets in that particular play, we naturally take it as primary historical evidence… anywho…)

Productions of Richard III in recent years have often pulled back from the almost comedic villain of Lawrence Olivier sliding his way through crook-backed flourishes of murder, but the simple fact is – he was written as a hunchback monster, and so he remains.  And this kinda leads us to a fairly obvious truth: that in mass modern culture, evil is ugly.  In fantasy this is particularly apparent.  Orcs dribble and drool their way across the page, rending raw flesh from the still-hot bones of their victims.  Monsters more skin than flesh limp and lurch; zombies gnaw pasty-faced and great, drooling aliens with many rows of nasty biting teeth, spring out of the dark places ready to strike.  Thrillers too are frequently guilty of the crime – scarred men with dark pasts battle beautiful heroes who are only out to protect their families, damnit!  Sinister corporate men with really bad skin pursue beautiful youngsters with amazing hair.  Here’s a question for you – how many bald heroes can you name?  Three or four?  Tops?  And how many movies have you seen where the eternal symbol for ‘I am now going to become a rugged man who will do battle with my enemies’ is a symbolic shaving of an unkempt beard?

Even if the ‘ugly’ isn’t a physical ugly, it can perhaps be seen in what the sociologists would call an ‘otherness’ instead.  Take again for example, the vast number of British Baddies who infest Hollywood.  There’s nothing like the sinister slide of an upper class accent to make you feel that yeah, this guy isn’t only Not One Of Us, he probably steals sweeties from children.  I love looking at villain’s faces on the silver screen, because they’re often so much more interesting than the heroes.  Lines of torment and ages of sin are written on a villain’s face, and you wouldn’t call them handsome – not compared to the Whoever-It-Is with the Heroic Jaw and the Big Hair and the Steady Gaze of all universal heroes ever.  I guess what I’m saying is – even if a villain isn’t somehow defined as ‘ugly’ or ‘other’, nor do they regularly fall into that very narrow line of anonymous faces that are splashed across every movie poster and cinema screen as if, really, there’s much difference between that action hero and this.

Not every genre is affected by this, and increasingly books – especially fantasy – are actively running away from it.  But I think in any big blockbuster, or suitably trashy bit of written word, we can instantly identify the man with the receding hairline, protruding lip, dodgy accent, sweaty skin – whatever – as the baddie just BECAUSE.  And that’s not only a bit dull, it’s also dead on stupid.  Not least because ‘ugly’ is, like most things, a subjective point of view.  In 1500s Japan the samurai were repulsed – horribly repulsed – by the body hair of the Europeans, while ginger hair was considered the mark of utter shame.  In 1600s England it was considered thoroughly vulgar to be tanned; in 1700s France the black beauty wart was the stamp of taste and in the 1800s if you didn’t have a set of facial whiskers to kill a cat with, you really weren’t trying.  In parts of Brazil and Africa, scars are a badge of pride and sophistication, while the size-zero models who flounce across the fashion stages of Europe are, to my eyes, hideously, dangerously thin examples of a physicality lived on the edge of collapse.  (Likewise, I’ve got to admit, I’ve always felt that overly-muscly male bodies, while apparently I’m supposed to be allured, are too often a symbol of a man who’s spent a great deal of time at the gym, but not enough time working on his language and trigonometry skills, which seems a tragic loss.  But hey – that’s just me.)

To put it another way – and aware that I have been guilty of the writing of some truly unpleasant looking villains in my time – writing ‘ugly’ and writing ‘other’ may be a useful shorthand for proclaiming ‘get uneasy now’, but it’s also a really lazy way and ultimately, I suspect, only goes to date the time in which the work was written.

Continue reading »]]> The West is always indignant.  It’s what we do.  Protestors are shot at in Bahrain; we send a strongly worded letter of complaint.  War crimes are carried out in Syria; we tut and say it’s an internal affair.  Women are told that to work is to be damned in Saudi Arabia; we write a postcard.  We – the decadent rich, the indulged ones safe in our pampered lives – get very outraged, do very little, for the simple truth of the matter is that the options available are limited, our power is questionable, our moral authority is barely worth the spit it dribbles with and all things – but all things – are complicated.  In Syria a repressive regime that murders its own people fights a rebellion that murders civilians and, increasingly, is manned by those who would impose strict Sharia law.  Is this how its soldiers see themselves?  Obviously not.  No one stands up and says ‘yes, I believe in repressing human rights’ and ‘yes, I think it only fair that women should become little better than a material and sexual object’.  Everyone is always the good guy, everyone is always right.  What use is our indignation?  Arguably: none whatsoever.

In the Maldives, a 15 year old girl, who it seems very likely was systematically raped by her step father, grew pregnant, and whose infant child was murdered at birth by her own family and buried in the front garden, has just been sentenced to 100 lashes for fornication.  In Pakistan, a 14 year old girl was shot in the head for blogging about going to school; in India, women are being systematically targeted for unnecessary operations by doctors out to make a quick buck.

We who read about these things, from our comfortable computers far away, do not have the knowledge, the experience, the resources, the will, to act.  We tut and we chide and we do very little, and there is a great deal of righteous anger at the comfortable middle class of this world chiding the actions of people far, far away.  Are you going to give up all you have to go to a land you don’t know, where you’re not welcome, to see if you, somehow, ignorant as you are, can make a difference?  I know I’m not.  I don’t have the answers, I don’t have the skills, I don’t know what I can offer, save this:

That to not speak is worse – a thousand times worse – than to be silent.  Yes, I am all of the things I have stated above – remote and powerless in this – and these cultures are not my cultures, these stories are not my stories.  We do not have the right to impose our views.  But if you genuinely believe that the victim of child abuse deserves to be imprisoned and flogged; if you think that it is okay to shoot teenagers in the head, and if you regard it as merely good manners to stay silent while women are abused and mutilated, then shame on you.  Because this isn’t a culture clash; this isn’t respecting the complexity of a situation.  This is the plain and simple destruction of a woman’s choice, a woman’s right, and the freedom to decide for yourself, cut off by the lash or the gun.

And in some places, silence is judicious, and silence is respectful.  And too often, silence is cowardly; and no, we don’t have the answers, but damned be to hell if our ignorance and our fear stops the debate.  We have the freedom to speak – a glorious freedom.  Let’s use it.

Continue reading »]]> The top three tips are from my favourite lighting designer, Paule Constable.

The rest are mine!

1.  Look after yourself.

(Or: ‘It’s a show, not a kidney’ as one of my favourite set designers says.)

Lighting designers spend a lot of time sat on not-particularly well-designed chairs, for hours without break, leaning over plans and squinting in the semi-darkness.  It’s uncomfortable and straining, and I for one, at the end of three or four days straight of it, am shattered.  The same thing could be said – but more so – for lighting technicians.  After one particularly long fit up, which lasted the best part of a week, I found it actually rather difficult to walk, let alone without pain, and lifting my arms above my head was a no-no for days.  Technical work in theatre is hard; look after yourself.

Beggars Opera, London College of Music

2.  Bring a water bottle.

Amazing how much money you can waste on food and drink during a technical rehearsal.  It’s not that you won’t eat it; it’s just that you’ll be eating while trying to do a lighting design.  Last show I did, I found myself programming with one hand and eating a ham sandwich with the other, as there simply wasn’t time to stop and get a proper meal.  If you get a chance – plan your meals.  Make sandwiches in advance.  Stock up on marmite for breakfast.  And bring your own water bottle.  Because if not, you will suffer and so will the environment at large, and when you’re done, your body won’t let you work for days after.  (Also, any theatre manager who says you shouldn’t eat in the venue during tech, has clearly never been in tech.)

3.  Less is more.

I used to have this written on a postit note stuck to my LX desk.  If you can do it with two lights instead of four, then do it with one.  Or as Paule put it – if something isn’t working on stage, don’t add, take away.  Odds are you’re losing the clarity of what it is you’re trying to create by having too much stuff there.  Sure, if you’ve got a guy bang smack centre stage and a lot of movers in your rig, there’s a certain glee in having twenty different units pointing at the same place, as you end up with shafts of light through the air to pull the eye.  But sometimes a single unit in a world of darkness is oddly enough, far more powerful…

Dracula, Kings School Canterbury

4.  Haze is your friend.

Haze is expensive.  Haze is irritating to control; sometimes you pump it into a space for hours and it still won’t fill  – sometimes you turn it on and instantly the room vanishes behind this wall.  Haze is the difference between a space becoming infinite, with darkness vanishing into an unknown void, and just being a box theatre.  Haze is the difference between someone standing in a blob, and standing in a shaft of light.

5.  Warm and cold.

A director once began his relationship with me with the immortal words, ‘Now, I don’t know much about light – I know there’s orange, and I know there’s blue.’  If ever there was a way to make a lighting designer weep, it was with those words.  In theatre we talk a lot about ‘warm’ and ‘cold’.  To put it simply – walk into your living room and turn on a nice, old-fashioned tungsten bulb.  It feels soft and yellow and kinda pleasantly sleepy.  Then go into your kitchen and turn on a fluorescent strip.  It’s far brighter, harsher, whiter, and feels sorta alert and unsentimental.  These two colours both claim to be ‘white’, but neither is.  They’re only variations around a theme.  Between these two sensations – warm and cold – lighting designers can create very interesting and subtle emotional effects, as well as suggest time and place.

The Lower Depths, Barons Court Theatre

Witness… the warmth in the picture above is both soft, but also was also intended to create a sense of claustrophobia, of just one light source and a great deal of shadow, of heat and threat all at once.

Whereas….

After the End, Battersea Arts Centre

.. arctic chill is usually associated with ‘nastier’ environments.  It’s the kind of – not exactly ‘colour’, merely atmosphere – that Macbeth would monologue too, or Hamlet would shudder beneath while looking for his Dad’s ghost.  Which isn’t to say that ‘warm’ = good and ‘cold’ = bad – the opposite can easily be true!  It’s simply a case of using very subtle shifts to trick the mind into a sense it didn’t realise it was falling into!

And when you put the two together, you can oddly create some very beautiful effects, which both pull the eye and tell a story.

Beggars Opera, London College of Music

Continue reading »]]> I am shattered.  Officially shattered.  It’s not like I’ve been doing long nights – by my standards, February so far has been fine (though that is about to change).  It’s simply that, as a freelancer, finding actual time off is proving to be a bit of a challenge.

Take the last few weeks.  I have, technically speaking, had no work.  I mean, sure, I’ve been writing, but that’s only when I get a moment.  I haven’t had to be in tech, I haven’t had to submit anything to a deadline, I haven’t had to rig, I haven’t had to focus.

However… somehow, the days have vanished.  For a start, there’s a lot of domestic stuff going on.  I’ve been up at 8 a.m. on the dot every day for the last week to paint my flat.  (A long story which will be told as soon as I have legally guaranteed reassurances that it has a happy ending.)  A few hours and a lot of stickiness later, and the daily email list is already dozens of messages long and very few of them bring me peace of mind.  There are rehearsals to attend.  Kit lists to chase.  Lighting designs to… well… design.  Every new theatre I work in equals a brand new model I have to build on my computer before I can even start to work out lighting positions.  There’s scripts to read, meetings to attend, budgets to be argued, tech specs to lament over, technical managers to chase and production managers to avoid.  And somehow the simple act of prepping for a play consumes days at a go, and are the reason, more than the hours I’ll spend in tech, why lighting designers should get bigger fees than currently we do.  But that’s a different rant…

On top of that, there’s writery stuff coming in and out.  Contracts signed and contracts returned; blurbs to discuss and novels to conclude.  Ideas to pitch and finances to be monitored.  Switching from lighting to writing one email at a time takes a re-gearing not simply in terms of priorities, but in terms of the side of the brain that’s being used.  And that’s great – that’s why I do it – but it’s also knackering.

There’s plenty of socialising too, and I’m very grateful for this; but as a freelancer, I tend to see people for a few hours in the day, which means I return in the evening needing to work, and so the rhythm of the day, the sense that at 5 p.m. everything stops – simply doesn’t apply.

Endless admin bogs me down.  If I spend one more minute on the phone to the Department of Work and Pensions being played frickin’ Vivaldi I may go impale someone on their own baroque bow.  Endless research, endless being redirected from this telephone number to that telephone number to being told to call a completely different number altogether because Judith in Customer Services can’t handle and what you need is Customer Support, please redial.

A lack of weekends is beginning to tell.  Even when my Sundays aren’t spent up a ladder preparing a venue for another rig, weekends are still full of rehearsals, more meetings, and prepping for tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, one day at a time.

Now, I’m aware that, in the grand scheme of things, all this is largely my own fault.  I’m a girl who likes her lists and likes to be busy.  But that said… I look at so much of my life and wonder – can I really not do this?  And not do it now?  The very nature of my job(s) means that if I’m not actively pursing a thing, I’m almost certainly prepping to pursue it, and without the prep nothing will be achieved.  So here I am – soggy in rigging plans and colour calls and emails begging for a hazer and notes from my agent and an unfinished chapter that I really, really want to get done because if I don’t get back to words sooner rather than later I might implode, and tins of paint and letters from the DWP and the local council and…

… and you know what, right now, I think I might just go to bed.

Continue reading »]]> My family is small, and in an odd way, I’m grateful for that.  I have a grand total of three first cousins, two aunts (one of whom I’ve never met), two uncles and no siblings.  And while my extended family are both lovely and intelligent – actually frightening how clever the cousins are – so often I hear tales from my friends that makes me grateful that they are also limited in scope.

Take, for example, Christmas.  A time of festive cheer and relaxation?  Not so, it seems, if you have a large extended family.  For on Christmas Eve it is your duty to drive to Small Piddle to see your paternal Grandparents, your disgraceful Uncle, (for every family has a disgraceful uncle) your friendly Aunt, your two cousins with their mewling children whose relationship to yourself you can’t really solve, particularly while they’re dribbling on you.  After five hours of driving and more tea and biscuits than you can conceive, you struggle home in time for Christmas Day, where more relatives await your attention.  Parents bicker in the kitchen, while a mother-in-law dismisses the effort of whichever parent isn’t her offspring, and a father-in-law reads the Times and grumbles about how hungry he’s getting; and no sooner have you finished digesting than you swing over to the home of brother/sister/cousin who’ve been snowed in or are have produced yet more infants that you’re supposed to buy presents for every year, just in time to fail to watch the Queen’s speech.

But!  Even if your desire, after all this, is a nice sit down on a thermonuclear device, wait!  For Boxing Day comes round and should you be rash enough to be in a relationship, then Boxing Day is when you go to see the extended family of whichever partner hasn’t yet done the rounds with their side of the equation.  Cue – more uncles, more aunts, more cousins, more brothers, sisters, children who’s relationship you can’t quite solve and inexplicably, more time stuck in traffic on the M25 as you wonder where your life went and why Dotty Great Aunt Doris decided she had to live in a lighthouse.

I am therefore grateful – so grateful – that my family is contained.  There for me, should I need them, but there is a handy, south-of-Northampton, not-too-demanding kinda way.

That said, there are some interesting tales in my family.  For example, I am not really a Webb.  (For anyone wondering, I’m DEFINITELY not a Griffin, but even more importantly, I’m not a Webb.)  My great grandmother was, by all accounts, a formidable woman.  Finding herself pregnant in the 1920s – a decade when it wasn’t good to do anything out of wedlock, let alone give birth – she sent out telegrams to four of her most promising admirers.  ‘I’m ready to marry you now,’ it said, or words to that affect.  ‘Come at once.’  The four gents raced to claim her not-so lily white hand, and the first to make it was a man by the name of Webb.  She took his name; he took responsibility for the child that was born, right up until the moment he decided that the hugely tall, dark-haired child growing up before him really didn’t fit with the neat, short stature of his family, and the marriage ended.  Thus, I am a Webb by name… but definitely not by DNA.

On the same side of the family, the genealogy becomes even more shady when you look at my grandmother.  She is a German-Jewish refugee, who came over to England on the kindertransport – a train organised by the British government in the late 1930s that evacuated Jewish children from Berlin, just before the outbreak of war.  Aged 13 years old she said goodbye to her family on the platform of Berlin station, and none of them – not sister, parents or grandparents – were ever seen again.  Decades later, and I’ve been in touch with the Holocaust Memorial Museum, trying to track down information, and what few bits we can find are heart-breaking in their simplicity.  A list of names, a tick by each one; there, my great grandfather on his way to Auschwitz.  A deportation document for my great grandmother; a couple of numbers, a name, a tick saying that yes, this deed – it is done.  These are the few traces that still remain of an entire family, struck off from the face of Europe.

Thankfully, my mother’s side of the family offers in its own way, a little light relief.  From my Mum I’ve inherited good eyesight, blond hair (with a genetic inclination towards ginger that keeps re-surfacing generation by generation) and the dubious privilege of being my own great aunt.  By marriage, I hasten to add.  The story goes like this:

My grandfather, Frank, had a sister, Doris.  Doris married a man who’s name I genuinely don’t know – so we’ll call him Bob.  Bob had been married before, and was much older than Doris.  By his previous marriage he had a daughter, Zoe.  By marrying into the family, my grandfather became Zoe’s uncle-in-law, and Bob became his brother-in-law.

However, Frank then fell in love with Zoe, and the two married.  Now Frank was in the interesting position of his brother-in-law, also being his father-in-law, and his wife, also being his niece-in-law.  And since that union, any children born of it are also destined to be related to themselves, since Frank’s offspring were both his children, and his great nieces and nephews; and so it shall continue unto the nth generation.

I suspect this complexity, more than anything else, is something which has, ironically, steered me away from investigating my own family too seriously.  I fear it’d just give me a headache.  Never-the-less, the stories which run through both sides of my family are both exciting tales in themselves, and an inherent part of how I came to be, and thus I shall preserve them, cherish them, and as now, maybe even go so far as to write them down.

Continue reading »]]> I was trying to explain a TV program to a couple of friends of mine.  It goes like this:

“So there are two dudes… one’s clever with machines, one’s clever at hitting things.  Every week they’re told that someone is going to do something – maybe kill, maybe be killed – whatever – and they have to work out why and how and, if possible, prevent it.  Without using commas.  Colons are acceptable: colons are terse.  And while doing this they have to deal with the fact that mysterious Them are hunting them, one because he’s clever with machines, the other because he’s a Rogue Agent with Those Kind Of Capital Letters.  And they’ve both got… a Past.  Oh yeah.”

There was a bit of a pause, on concluding this.  Then a friend piped up, “If he’s a rogue agent, how does he deal with utilities bills?  Only, whenever I move house – and I’ve moved a lot – I’ve had to list all my previous addresses, and bring along utilities bills and that, but if you’re a Rogue Agent On The Run then how are you going to deal with things like the water company and getting registered with a GP?”

Another silence.  This was not a question anyone had really expected.

Then a solution was offered: “Perhaps, instead of knowing someone mysterious in a basement who makes fake passports, he knows someone who makes fake Thames Water claims?  Besides, they’re American, right?  They don’t have GPs to be registered with.”

At this, the room relaxed.  One of the great narrative problems of our time: solved.

I love detective dramas, but I must admit, look a little too closely and even the most thoroughly conceived dramas fall apart.  In this day and age, detectives have to be… quirky.  Or if they’re not quirky, they have to have alcohol problems.  Or be traumatised from an operation that went wrong.  Or have a dark and guilty secret.  Or be sleeping with someone who has a dark and guilty secret.  It is unacceptable – absolutely unacceptable – for any modern detectives to enjoy knitting and have a stable home life.  Even something as bland as CSI – where the detectives tend to manifest about as much character as a catheter – insists on having highly trained scientists, skilled in such arts as blood analysis and fibre testing, go charging into dangerous situations with a gun in their hand and shockingly unreliable backup.  A golden rule of criminal drama – if someone says ‘maybe we should wait for backup?’ then seriously, honest to god, you should wait for backup.

And now we, the viewing public, can pretty much list the cliched detective types without having to draw breath.  Eccentric geniuses seem to be in fashion.  (Did anyone else notice the copyright to the complete works of Arthur Conan Doyle go public?  I’m sure you did…)  Your eccentric genius is both a challenge and a godsend to the tired crime-writer.  A challenge because writing genius, in a way which makes it clear that this is genius, would seem to require, by definition, a bit of genius of your own.  A godsend because, where life is bogged down by evidentary procedure, waiting for lab results and testing a smeer of blood, your eccentric genius can walk into a room and go, ‘ahha!  I see the cat has not drunk it’s milk tonight and the left boot by the door has been worn by a man with six toes!  I therefore conclude that the answer is inside the handcart – next!’ – and thus a lot of time is saved.  If that’s not your cup of tea, then the computer genius is a modern narrative stalwart, famed for his/her ability to go, ‘I’m just gonna hack this hard drive… okay I’m in… and what do you know, he’s left his bank statements in a file marked ‘bank statements’ and has an email folder entitled ‘secret plans for world domination’!  How handy!’

Then there’s the hard men of crime.  Wounded by their pasts, sickened by the violence they see around them, they shuffle through life in dark clothes and broody expressions, waiting to be tempted only to turn, at the final moment, and do the right thing.  Because they’re good men in a dirty world.  Because even though it’ll cost them, the law is all that matters, and they’ve got the weight of a dead wife/daughter/comrade/favourite aunt still bearing down on them from their dark and dangerous pasts.  The curious thing being, with such detectives, that somehow, on every single case they work, they seem to personally know the main suspect or the victim.  And it hurts.  But they carry on.

And finally, let us give honourable mention to Strong Female Detectives.  These tough (yet frail) ladies of crime have worked their way up to the top through grit and backbone.  They don’t take no nothing from no one; they’re mean, they’re kind, they’re intelligent; they’re gonna bring you down no matter how big and how tough you are.  And if you’re lucky, they’ll be wearing a sexless wooly jumper and have a neat haircut while doing it…

Of course, where would the broody detective be without the plucky sidekick?  The voice of conscience that brings them back to earth in a moment of rage.  The helpful hacker who can find the one document that proves a brilliant hunch is correct.  The solid support who stands by the genius’ side and keeps their madness tame.  And of course, the reliable victim waiting to be taken hostage by a demented killer (for all killers who take main narrative characters hostage, tend to be demented…) … just in time for a stunning showdown in which souls are bared, truths revealed and dark mysteries unravelled on the end of the gun.

All of which – as we know – bears about as much resemblance to modern policing as flamingos to pigeons.  But that’s not the point.  Because bureaucracy, inefficiency, hard slog and the ever-grey question of what right really means – really actually means in real actual life – is something we can get at home.  Whereas tales  of black and white, of adventure, mystery and truth triumphant, are as ancient a part of human culture as Cain and Abel, and regardless of the form of it, the story at the heart still pulls us in.

Continue reading »]]> I’d forgotten how much I enjoy lectures.

May sound odd, but stick with me.

At LSE, I found lectures deeply relaxing.  Less so, it must be said, at RADA, where I found lectures got in the way of the vital work of completing the hard patch and getting more scaff, but that’s a rather different story.

My favourite history lecturer, a Professor with a slight Spanish accent and a fondness for voice recognition software (of which one joyous outcome was a paper entitled ’1606 – The Piss Between England And Spain’) would stand at the podium, spread out her notes and gleefully proclaim, in such a year, at such a place, upon such a drab morning, was x beheaded for treason.  Let me tell you why…

When on Monday I was invited out for a giddy afternoon of cake and gossip, I was therefore surprised – but perhaps quite pleased – to discover the event transformed into cake, and an hour and a half talk at UCL on the latest technological developments and interpretations in cognitive neuroscience.  This is an area about which I know nothing.  Diddly squat.  Which, I begin to realise, is a little shameful in that thinking is something we do constantly, without ever thinking about how.

The lecturer – a gentleman with a shaking right hand and a classically professorial wooly cardigan – stood up and, with images and graphs at his back, proudly declared that, in the past, he’d been wrong.  He’d been wrong, he explained, when he mis-read a data set and concluded that the mind, in switching from one task to another, suffered no delay.  He’d been wrong when he dismissed a theory of neuron connections which posited pathways through a limited area of the cortex and, most of all, he was delighted he’d been wrong.  If you’re not wrong every now and then, he explained, you’re clearly not investigating anything interesting enough.

And here’s why I really like lectures.  It’s not always about the content – though even the horror that was one module in sociology was interesting for the first 15 minutes when you were calmly informed that everything you knew was wrong – nor is it the format, which can itself be very, very dull.  It’s that academic education, at its very best, is one of the only disciplines on the planet where it’s okay to admit that you don’t know something.  Historians argue and bicker constantly about the interpretation of this or that event, forthrightly declaring that their view is most probable, but behind that inherent question is the simple truth that, short of a ouija board, we simply can’t know.  Scientists push against facts and figures, searching for more solid truths.  The apple dropped from the tree will fall towards the centre of the earth, but why will it fall?  What is it that makes it fall?  And once again the answer is – damned if we really know, but from our ignorance, how many incredible and exciting questions may yet be asked?

In life we all go to great lengths to proclaim ourselves right, and find a little certainty.  Politicians declare increasingly implausible absolutes, and drive themselves through language alone to greater extremity.  Teachers tell their pupils ‘this is so’ and in every workplace in every country, we cower from admitting fault or confessing ignorance, lest we be judged.

How glorious, then, to be reminded that life, the universe – even thought itself – is far too complicated, giddy and unknown for such pride.  How brilliant to remember that ignorance is not a sin, merely an invitation to look a little more closely.

Continue reading »]]> … Picocon! 2013!  London! Imperial College!  16th/17th of February 2013!

I’M REMEMBERING TO TELL PEOPLE!

See how I’ve grown.

It sounds awesome, some really groovy writers are going to be there, there’s liquid nitrogen, there’s hammers, there’s fish duelling – or rather, not fish duelling, absolutely not, I’ve been promised that there isn’t fish duelling in very explicit and big words – and I’m gonna talk about stuff with dudes.

And if any of you guys were to be there, that too would be groovy.

https://www.union.ic.ac.uk/scc/icsf/social/events/picocon/

Continue reading »]]> It’s been a few years since I left Ra-de-da (as it’s known) to become a lighting designer, and in that time, I have met, I think, possibly every size, shape and extremity of theatre director you can imagine.  From the cankerous through to the charming, the cultivated through to the crude, there’s no getting round it – theatre directors do not live or work by the same rules as the rest of humanity.

Thankfully, as an LD, neither do I.  Lighting designers are notoriously hard to understand any under circumstances.  Ask a simple question – ‘why is that bit of stage dark?’ and if you’re unlucky, you’ll get an answer like this:

‘Yeah, we’ve got an issue on the hard patch up to the 5k that should be doing the coverage.  Basically the IP on the smartrack’s off and we’ve been trying to reset it but it isn’t sticking so we were gonna bring in a beta but it can’t handle 5k output so now we’re trying to run some 32A in from the other side but the cable isn’t stretching so we’re looking at stepping down then stepping up again from a local source and just inhibiting the output on the desk, you get me?’

After a while, you notice that directors stop asking precise questions.  Instead, they learn that the secret is to point and go ‘fix it’. As tactics go, this seems to work…

However, even though as an LD I try to be adaptable and work to the style of whatever director I’m currently dealing with, they come in so many shapes and sizes!  There’s the old-school of director, the, ‘too dark.  It’s too dark.  It’s too dark!  Oh, wait, where are my glasses…?’  These elderly gentlemen – invariably, I’m afraid, gentlemen – neither understand nor trust this newfangled technology thing, and dislike moving lights on basic principal.  ‘Shakespeare didn’t need moving lights!’ comes the cry, to which the only answer could possibly be, ‘King Lear?  Tempest?  Pericles?  Midsummer Nights Dream?  Call me nuts, but I think with all that thunder and magic, he might have just given them a go….’

‘Now then,’ added another director, his hands folded earnestly on the table before me, eyes looking seriously into mine at our very first meeting.  ‘I don’t know much about lighting, but I know what I like.  As I see it, there’s only two colours in lighting – blue, and orange, and I like orange.’

Being the hardened hack that I am, I managed to put off weeping until I got home…

In the venue itself, as you attempt over three desperate days to tie together a show that the actors have worked on for six luxurious weeks, directorial guidance can be no less soul-destroying.

‘It’s a bit… well, it’s rather… I think it’s a bit… so if you could just… then that would be….’ explains the director.

‘Darker, lighter, warmer, colder, glumer, chipper, sexier, bluer, greener… give me something!’ wails our struggling lighting designer in response to this loose assault on their sanity.

‘Yes!  Yes.  Try that!’ comes the reply.

At the other extreme of directorial ignorance about lighting, I have had a couple of directors who will sit in the auditorium, or worse, stand on stage, and point at a unit and say, ‘That there!  Why isn’t that on?’

‘Because it’s not needed,’ I explain, attempting to channel the spirit of the Gautama in my reply.

‘But surely it should be on?’

‘Nope.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s not needed.’

‘I think you should turn it on.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Can I see it on?  There!  That’s much better already, isn’t it?’

‘I haven’t turned it on yet,’ the LD sighs.

Such directors fall into that classic school of ‘up five percent… up five percent!  Too bright!  Down five percent.  Too bright!  Down five percent.  Down five percent.  Too dim!  Up five percent… ah, that’s perfect, isn’t it?’ that you can all too often meet as, sat behind the lighting desk, you wish your brains were splattered across the nearest smoking parcan.

Then there are the genuine tyrants.  I’ve met only a few, and avoided them since.  ‘Do it better!’ roared one particularly unhinged director at his sweating actors, while all around him the technical team hoped he didn’t notice that we existed.  ‘This is f***ing s**t!’ screamed one director who was later not only banned from the theatre where he was working by its management, but who was later sued by equity for non-payment of his cast and crew.  ‘Why the f**k are you all so f**king s**t!’ he would growl from the back of the theatre, never to anyone in particular, but loud enough to the entire theatre to hear.

‘They’re all against me,’ came the whimper of yet another director who, having decided to perform quite possibly the worst script I’ve ever read in my life, and having failed to rehearse his cast to any semblance of expertise, at once concluded that the production manager, set designer, musical director, stage manager and of course, lighting designer, were all conspiring against him for reasons unknown.  Don’t get me wrong – I understand how the complete immersion in a play, the absolute commitment and strength of vision required to get a play off the ground, can send people just a little bit do-lally.  But there’s fun, doughnut-scoffing do-lally that all creative teams know and love, and then there’s plain, blind bullying, and it’s too easy to teeter on the wrong side of that line.

However, before you think that it’s all egos, tantrums and ninnies who wouldn’t recognise a nice bit of backlighting if it hit them in the face, there are some genuinely wonderful and occasionally inspiring directors out there.  Two of the finest examples in fact work, not with professional actors, but with children and youths aged 12-24.  Their skill is not only in picking good scripts and following it through with fantastic clarity, but in raising from their junior actors such commitment, passion and confidence that you would barely recognise the frightened cast of week 1 from the talented, engaging actors of week 8.  ‘Alright you little baggots!’ declared one of the few female directors I’ve ever worked with, and incidentally, loved working with, ‘It’s sexy time!’  And at this rousing call to resume the technical rehearsal, what cheers came from her cast, but also what dedication and delight in the thing they did, above and beyond anything you’re likely to see from a professional cast of full-time actors.

‘It’s okay,’ declared another of my favourite directors, as I sat screaming abuse at a particularly difficult bit of lighting technology.  ‘I have perfect faith.’

How wonderful these words, how delightful to know that your team actually trusts you, knows that you get it, that you get the thing that they get, and trust you to just get it done.  Because the simple truth is, a lighting designer isn’t paid enough to deal with all the grief of a difficult director.  Economically, we have to survive by flitting, moth-like, from one production to the next, and so if YOU give me grief, rest assured I will be gone at the first available opportunity.  But a few intelligent words, an understanding nod and a director who knows that you’ll do the best by them, and is happy to work with you to do the best by them, makes the world of difference.

Continue reading »]]> London in the snow is beautiful.  A black and white landscape, children playing in the parks, snowmen on the lawn, icicles hanging off the traffic lights and a horizon made magical by the blur of silently falling snow.  No getting round it – it’s absolutely stunning.

But.

London is a big, moving city, and unless the snow is kind enough to fall over Christmas, or during some other time when no one particular is doing anything much, snow cripples the city.

On day one, the trains stop.  In North London this isn’t so bad, as most of the lines are underground, but south of the river and every mainline service collapses with a cry of ‘oh god!  Ice on the tracks, ice on the wires, passengers on the platforms… too much!’  Last week, when six inches of snow fell in ten hours, my favourite producer spent five and a half hours trying to get into work.  The grand distance he had to cover – fifteen miles.  Of that journey, the first three hours was spent going to Hither Green station, waiting for the promised train, only for the promised train to be cancelled twenty minutes after it was supposed to arrive.  Half an hour later he’d return… be informed the train was imminent… wait half an hour… be informed the train was cancelled… as weather continually trumped optimism.  Every year the city is caught off-guard by the weather, and every year the train companies boldly declare it’ll be okay, right up to the moment where a hundred angry people waiting on the ice-covered platform are told it was never going to work out really.

On day two, the transport tends to be working.  Major roads are gritted, the lines are cleared, trains run and commuters waddle carefully through the streets.  But, unless fresh snow fell in the night, day two is the day that every A&E department in the city dreads.  Thick inches of snow on every road and path which wasn’t gritted in advance – and there’s only so much grit – have been compressed down and compressed down and finally at last, turned to solid ice.  Now no one walks, but everyone sidles very carefully through the city on a surface of black ice, and ambulances scream on their way to the next broken ankle and fractured wrist.  On the edges of the pavement, where the snow is least disturbed, the commuters in more of a rush leave great big footprints as they waddle through the only pathways left where their shoes might have any grip.  Radiators steam in offices as trousers, soaked to the knee with seeping ice, are whipped off and left to crinkle in their own way.  Schools open their gates fearfully, lest the children, rushing screaming into the park, rush screaming straight to the nearest hospital after.  By now snow men have been built, and the first-day joy of snowball fights and sliding down crispy slopes, is beginning to diminish in all save the youngest children.

This ice can last days, depending on the weather, but when the thaw comes, it often comes bittily.  The frozen pavements turn instead to black smush, a necromancer’s milkshake gone horribly wrong.  In the morning, when you wake, the inside of every window is dripping with condensation that breeds inner-city black mould, and rooms smell of sweat and radiators.  You might open a window, but even the thaw chill makes you regret this decision, and for a while the city hovers in a slightly drab greyland – all the beauty of the thick snow gone, but with enough limp patches here and there to still regret the passing of the beauty that was.  The snow melts according to the urban layout.  In long rows of housing, you can tell who runs their central heating high and who does not, as great squares of snow will clear first around the hottest segments of roof, creating a picture of the relative gas bills for street.  On the street, the snow almost never manages to settle on the drain covers, whose natural warmth create squares of metal; and where hot pipes run near the surface, clear lines of meltwater quickly form.  Grass is warmer than cobblestone, so clears to brilliant green quickly; while those corners which are perpetually in shade can stay icy for days longer than their surroundings.

Then, almost in a blink, the ice is gone, and while you might be a little sad to see it pass, there comes a moment when you draw back your curtains at 7.30 a.m. and for the first time in as long as you feel like you can remember, the sky is blue, and the sun is almost up over the top of the houses.

Continue reading »]]> So I’ve been asked this question on a regular enough basis now to make me think I should maybe… you know… answer it.

Will there be more Matthew Swift books?

And the answer is…

… drum roll….

I have no idea.

Now, before irritated eyebrows start happening, let me take this opportunity to say that I’d quite like there to be more Swift books.  I’ve got plenty of ideas and there’s plenty of stuff still to be done there.  Swift still appears in the next book – the Glass God – and I’m in no hurry to close any doors.  However!  There are Other Things also going on.  For example there’s

mysterioussecretprojectI’mnotallowedtodiscussatallonpainofdeathsodon’tevenbotherasking

and all of its ilk, which is eating up both a lot of words and time, as well as a large part of my publisher’s concentration.  That said, there’s also the ongoing adventure which is the Matthew Swift movie, which is still being pursued by a scarily awesome producer in Hollywood about whom my agent, with awe and terror in her voice, admitted ‘cautious optimism’.  Which is incredible, as the rule with ANY film of ANY book ever, is you always assume the absolute worst.  ‘Cautious optimism’ is, therefore, a huge step forward.

However, until a bit more time has passed, secrets revealed and more words negotiated, I’m afraid I still can’t say.  I genuinely don’t know.  Which is an infuriating answer, I’m afraid, but I figured… no answer at all would probably be EVEN more insufferable.  If only just.

Continue reading »]]> … I had no idea I was on youtube.  Turns out I am for all of 30s.  And as, reluctantly, I must admit pictures do sometimes say more than a hundred words, I figured I’d share.  Odd feeling.  Hum.  Well, oh well, I figure my ugly mug is already on the internet regardless of what I do about it, so may as well own up to the fact and on that note, I’ll shut up and say that THIS:

Warming Up

… is what I do to relax of an evening.

Continue reading »]]> I have some family in Norfolk.  For anyone who’s ever been to Norfolk, you’ll understand how this East Anglian county has an inexplicable ability to retreat from you, the closer you get.  Something about the M11 in the dead winter hours of the night seems to protract not only geographically, but also spiritually as you crawl through the darkness hoping against hope that the signs for Newmarket and Swaffham, Faversham and the wonderfully named Saxlingham Nethergate are in fact posthumous descriptions of places you’ve already long passed.

On these seemingly endless drives into the darkest reaches of the fens, my father at the wheel would always want to have the radio on to keep him alert, and one of the firm favourites was Letter from America.  As an eight year old, I found nothing quite as soporific as this programme, mostly, I suspect, because Alister Cooke had to my mind the voice of a rather lethargic vicar, and I’d grumble all the way through, wondering why we weren’t listening to a Terry Pratchett tape or music.

It’s only almost twenty years later, that I’ve actually come to appreciate this, courtesy of the BBC putting hundreds of samples up on its website for the podcasting fiend to access and download.  For over fifty years, until only a few days before he died, aged ninety five, Alister Cooke broadcast ten to fifteen minutes slices of American life, seen through the eyes of one of the most humane and intelligent journalist voices on the air.  The result is an archive of first hand American history that stretches all the way back to the Great Depression.  It documents listening to Malcolm X; witnessing the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, dinner with Roosevelt, watching Reagan’s Presidential Debates, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the end of the Cold War.  And more.  It’s also a social history, seen through the eyes of a liberal man of his time, as he catalogues the rise of the computer, the growing power of the TV, changes in films, in social attitudes, the fight for equal rights, alterations in tastes and fashions, cuisines and the use of language itself.

As if this wasn’t interesting enough to the historian – and it should be – it’s also one of the few examples of how good, clear journalism can still be enlivening, enthralling, inspiring.  As the years roll by, Cooke increasingly came to lament the power of TV to distort or over-condense complicated issues and ideas; to bemoan the tabloid infection of journalism and the death of good fact finding in favour of a popular quick-hit headline.  Though he never seemed to judge, nor take sides in a conflict – unless that was, he declared and explained in clear language why a side had been taken – yet his broadcasts were proof that intelligence, rather than being intimidating, is liberating, and that the complexity of an idea is not a weakness, but a glorious, enticing strength.

Continue reading »]]> My Nan is moving nursing homes.  She’s 85 years old, and has been living on government benefits for decades.  After my Dad died, I became largely responsible for managing her affairs, and in the process have learned  that, as the adage goes, old age is not always kind.

Sometimes it is!  Sometimes old age is a liberation, a freedom, a chance at last to live the life you were too busy to be living before, an opportunity to go out and have fun, to spend your heard-earned wealth, and make merry.  Sometimes old age is freedom, for we spend our lives desperately toiling to be ready for it, and when it comes then damnit, we may as well make the most of this new and interesting passage of our lives!

However, while this is the dream, and can be lived, so often – too often – old age is cruel.  Sit for only a few minutes in the lounge of the nursing home where my Gran is moving, and the truth of it emerges.

The freedom to live a good, merry old age is, let’s face it, almost entirely dependent on money.  On the money to buy comfort, freedom – both of which cost a lot more money than that which is simply necessary to ticking over on a day-to-day basis.  Poverty haunts the old.  A life lived on only a state pension is a life lived at the whim of a government to whom you are merely a line in a box, a number on a page.  Money brings freedom to choose your fate, and too few of the old have money to choose.  Anxiety and discomfort haunt the aging poor, and with this comes a development of dependency on the young, who must turn round and support their elders wherever they can, with whatever they have.  Which, all too often, is not enough, for here is the dilemma – the young must live their lives in turn, as the old once did, and where do you find that line, between doing right by your elders and doing right by the youth?  I don’t know.  I doubt there is any universal formula to find the same.

Old age is frustrating.  An assumption that anyone old cannot be functional seems to haunt large parts of society, and so even the finest minds are treated by unknowing officials and strangers as if they can’t tie their own shoelaces.  It’s not merely embarrassing, it’s downright humiliating, particularly since age is so often dependent.  The price of getting disability allowance or pension benefits is not only a great deal of national insurance paid when young, but the ritual humiliation that is the endless paperwork, doled out by suspicious strangers who will ask if you’re quite sure you know how old you are really?

And when you’re poor, and when you’re in need?  The government has many a care home on its books, ranging from the pleasant, vibrant and comfortable to great institutional wards that stink of disinfectant and hand lotion, where the inmates sit for hours a day in front of the TV, lost, quiet, and alone, and the staff shuffle around with water in plastic cups and a menu of cold baked beans and undercooked chicken for dinner.

Age brings physical decline.  Even the healthiest of bodies will decay.  Physical pain destroys lives.  Doctors are afraid to treat the old for the simple reason that hearts are weaker, blood pressure is higher, bones are crumbling and what could have been a simple operation when you’re 35, is now a life-threatening operation when you’re 80.  It’s all very well saying ‘we took the risk because the patient’s quality of life was untenable’, but when the doctor is marched up before the surgical board and asked to explain why the patient died on their table, even those very true words become hollow in the medic’s mouths.  And so, out of fear of causing harm, yes, but also fear of being seen to even risk causing harm, the old are neglected by the medical establishment, unless, again, they have the wealth to buy their way out of pain.

And more – pain collapses the mind.  A long-term, nagging, constant pain can grow to fill your whole world.  It hinders mobility, shrinks horizons, shortens tempers, slashes concentration and before long, the world you knew has reduced to the room where you suffer, the journey you cannot make, the fuzz of drugs and distress you cannot think through.  It brings yet more dependency – dependency on those who feed you, water you, bring you shopping, help you up, help you down.  It brings a breakdown in independence, in pride; bed pans and someone sponging you down in the shower.  And where your world was once big and bright and wide, now it is small, and crumpled, and full of sharpened edges.

Age brings disease.  Sometimes it’s slow, physical disease.  Sometimes it’s mental disease.  Dementia is so cruel, mental decline is cruel.  Cruel to those who have it, and cruel to those who live with those who have it.  Sat in the lounge of the nursing home my Gran is moving too, I listened to a conversation between a son and his mother; he trying to convince her to eat, she refusing.  “I don’t want it.  I don’t want it.  It’s horrid, I don’t want it,” came her voice, and there was within it an eight year old’s pout, a child’s stubbornness, battering against her son as he tried to fight the anger rising in his tones as he exclaimed, “You must eat, Ma, you must eat.”

Then, almost as a game, he asked: “How old am I?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, not with anger, or frustration, but a simple statement of fact.  “I don’t know how old you are.”

And again we ask; what do you do?  What formula is there, what government decree, which declares ‘now, you may abandon your elders, because you cannot look after them and they cannot remember your name so hand them over elsewhere, and live your life, while they decline, unseen, forgotten, in some other place’ for this is the simple, cruel mathematics of the case.  The young must be permitted to live, the old must be loved, and cared for, and what do you do when these two fundamental needs collide?  Guilt dogs both old and young, for different reasons, attached to the same conundrum.  And again, I don’t think anyone has an answer which is anything better than for finding, one individual at a time, the ‘most kind’ option going.

Sat again in the lounge, and here was the same story acted out.  A woman, in her fifties at a pinch, leaving her mother, late eighties if she was a day, for a few weeks to stay at the nursing home.

“I don’t want to,” said her Mum.

“You have to Mum,” said her daughter.  “You know we can’t look after you over Christmas, you need proper care.”

“But I don’t want to.”

“We talked about this – you know we can’t give you the care you need.”

“Yes, I know.”

“So you need to stay here for a few weeks, just until after Christmas.”

“But I don’t want to!”

I do not write this to say that all old age is like this: many a life is lived well and good up to the moment where it ends.  But we shy as a society from admitting a few obvious truths: that the old can be a burden on the young, on the state, and that ‘burden’ is the word – emotionally, financially, thought and time.  We also shy from admitting the other simple truth – that too often the young abandon their old, running away from the harsh truths of it and leaving those who raised us to diminish out of sight, out of mind, as if, somehow, old age is not a fate which awaits us all.

Continue reading »]]> A friend of mine – and you know who you are – has an argument with me occasionally.  The theme of the argument is this – why the hell should we get involved in other people’s affairs?  What right do I, bourgeois scribbler in an obscure corner of London, have to pronounce my opinions and views to the world as if somehow, they meant a damn?

And of course, in many ways, my mate is right.  The West is famous for preaching piously to the rest of the world about this and that, as if somehow we’ve got some inalienable right to command the rest of the world, and it is naturally enough, hypocritical bullshit.

“We only think we’re right,” explained my friend.  “In a hundred years time, people may look back at us and laugh.”

That is generally speaking, a simple truth of history.  The Victorians firmly believed themselves to be the moral leaders of civilization, so long as that civilization was male, white and played cricket.  The Romans absolutely knew themselves to be the most enlightened civilization on Earth, up to and including the slaughter of slaves in the Colosseum and the invention of the vomitorium.

None-the-less, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that certain universal truths may yet stand the test of time.  Treating women as inferior, for example.  We’ve done it for thousands of years, and in large swathes of the world it’s still done either by habit, or as an enshrined doctrine in law.  “It’s their culture,” exclaims a different friend.  “Perhaps it has advantages for those women.”

Perhaps so.  Perhaps some women enjoy not being allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, or having to cover themselves at all times – perhaps there is luxury in being reliant on men to do this for you.  And perhaps some women would appreciate the choice in this matter, so they can  choose their situation, and if you’re about to tell me that culturally, ‘having a choice’ wouldn’t be appropriate then I’m sorry, but this culture is wrong.  Plain wrong.  We’re not supposed to say it out loud, not supposed to condemn a whole way of life, stand upon our lofty perch but I would say it of any society anywhere, including my own, which is itself highly flawed.  If you are depriving women of their liberty and not letting them choose freedom, then it is wrong.

Curtailing freedom of speech, curtailing the right to protest – again, let’s have the guts, just this once to stand up and say that this is wrong.  I may not agree with what you have to say, I may regard it as nonsense, but so long as you’re not actively advocating violence against the innocent, or discrimination on grounds as stupid and irrational as gender, creed or colour, or actively attempting to deny MY voice, then say what you will.  ‘Liberalism’ has become a dirty word, but to me, in my understanding of it, all that liberalism means is the willingness to have a debate.  A proper, informed debate, not a shouting match, but a meeting of opinions and the formation of consensus, and I will defend that process to the hilt.

That said, there are also certain bits of common sense that I think are universally applicable.  I’m all in favour of freedom of speech, but if you are about to go around informing us that bombings are a good idea, then frankly you need to have a good sit down with some reasonable people in a quiet corner.  I applaud free debate, but when that debate is twisted and corrupted by extremist ideology, then it isn’t debate, it’s a shouting match, and gets no one anywhere.

Then there are ideas which are plain and simple stupid.  Actually, offensively stupid.

Such as the American National Rifle Association’s suggestion that the best way to safeguard children of the USA, would be to put armed guards in every school.  Rather than ban the sale of guns.

Sure, let’s debate, let’s have an informed discussion, but if you look at the NRA what you see is not a body willing to engage in reasonable debate, but an ideological institution rooted to one spot, regardless of the simple truths of the matter.  Because that’s the problem with a free debate – it requires both sides to listen, and that is something of a rarity.

So here we are, back where we began.  Sat in an obscure corner of London preaching my morals to a world which is, let’s face it, not in a hurry to hear.

But then again, if I cannot fight for other people’s freedom of speech, if my views will not change the world, I never-the-less stand by, more than anything else, MY right to speak my mind, and as I have that right, where so many do not, I think it becomes almost a responsibility, as well as a privilege, to use it.

Continue reading »]]> Dear TalkTalk,

To describe your service as ‘irredeemably rubbish’ is, I feel, a bit of an insult to rubbish.  At least some bags are now biodegradable; at least vegetable matter may yet mulch down to fertilise the ground as maggots and worms writhe through the decaying goo.  You have no such merit.  In the three years in which you have been providing me with internet, phone and TV, I have watched prices rise and services decline.  Your modems reset more often than the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.  Your telephone calls are over-priced and your definition of ‘free weekend and evening calls’ applies only once you pay the compulsory extra money to have free evening and weekend calls, which you must pay even if you don’t in fact, want this.  Your TV service is the most glitchy thing I’ve seen since cross-wiring a 12V driver to a 24V LED.  If it works for five minutes, it will not work for ten.  If it works for ten, it will not work for the hour, and over the years while I have grown used to the notion that everything must be turned off and turned back on again throughout the day, I have not yet found it in my heart to forgive the same.

Your customer services.

Ah your customer services.

It is not merely that it took seven people, two phone calls and an hour and a half for me to be put through to the technical support department, nor that five of those seven people attempted to sell me services I didn’t want for money I didn’t have throughout this rather frustrating process.  It’s not merely that the immortal words, ‘Miss Webb, I understand your anger and will call you back with a solution’ are inevitably, just inevitably the prelude to silence, incompetence and lost file notes.  It’s not simply that the engineer who was finally booked in to come and fix my three-year-glitchy TV box couldn’t come for over a month, and when the day finally came, decided not to show up because ‘your equipment is obsolete and we cannot fix it’ after I’d waited in all day for this individual to fix my equipment as had been pledged.  It’s not merely that no matter what I say, your service staff read the same futile information back at me from a screen without any comprehension of the words I’ve spoken.

No.

TalkTalk, what incenses me more than almost any of this, is the fact that you are the living embodiment of the death of free and independent thought.  For lo, on my third call I finally crack and demand to be put through to the manager of the department which is currently stalling me, and what am I told?

“Your service is being phased out.  We will be upgrading your contract.”

Indeed?  First I’ve heard of this – and will this upgrade fix my TV?

“Absolutely, you will get a new TV box, one of the best in the business.”

How delightful, except…

“Your new box will only receive freeview channels (fewer than I have now) and will cost you more.”

Beg pardon?

“You’re going to pay more, and get less.”

And this is your solution to my broken TV?

“Yes.”

And, dare I say it, this was in fact your ONLY solution to my broken TV, yes?  Because having made me wait a month for an engineer to turn up, you’re now telling me that the engineer was never capable of fixing my TV.  Because having made me sit on hold listening to tinny pop as my life runs through my fingers, you’re finally informing me that not only has my time and money been wasted, but your only offered solution is that I waste more of my time and money and…

… and here it is….

“If you wish to leave us we will charge a contract cancellation fee.”

“And that’s it, is it?  That’s all you have to say to me?”

“Yes.  That’s it.”

“Nothing else?”

“No.  That’s the situation.”

Ah Talktalk.

You senseless gits.  You provide a bad service – a service so bad I would argue it is in breech of your contract to me, to provide.  You fail at every turn.  Your employees, while some of them are charming, never-the-less seem laced through with a strong vein of people incapable of thinking, listening, of having any sort of independent thought whatsoever but rather your entire institution is stuck on repeat, churning out the phrases that appear on your screens without any thought or room for actual independent judgment.  Not one department talks to another, not one employee has the full knowledge to judge, nor the liberty to say anything of any use whatsoever.  You hold your customers hostage, providing bad services and offering, as the only solution, that the customer pays more for what they receive.  You demonstrate no interest or empathy for your customers, no self-awareness or sense of responsibility, but rather the machine turns and turns again and we, who are fool enough to pay for it, are ground down by the endless walls you throw up until finally we throw our hands up, and submit.

Dear TalkTalk.

I think I’d like to write to Ofcom about you.

yours sincerely,

Catherine Webb

Continue reading »]]> I have passed an exam.  Well, technically I’ve passed three, but two of them happened on the same day, at the same time without my really noticing, and only the third was announced beforehand with dire warnings of ‘check your syllabus or suffer’.

I am now, therefore, after many bruises and a few knocks, at level 3 of escrima.

‘You mean there’s no belts?’ squeaked one of my friends indignantly.  ‘How do you know how good you are?’

There are, alas, no belts.  I don’t know why I say alas – I flipping hate belts.  One more thing to carry around after a busy day.  My escrima uniform is a t-shirt and a range of slightly paint-stained tracksuit bottoms.  The t-shirt is black and carries not particularly glaring logos.  When I suggested that perhaps walking around in black with a sign on your back declaring ‘urban escrima’ might give people the wrong idea, and that pink was far more approachable, no one seemed to really appreciate the idea; which is a shame as I personally feel the odd sequin and a splash of purple could be really confusing for any would-be attacker discovering your fist up their nose.  Anyhow…

It seems very fitting for the style of martial art I’m learning that there aren’t any belts, and exams happen in the hurly-burly of an average class with a cry of ‘yeah, you’re alright, but THIS would be better….’  At higher levels you start being called exciting titles like ‘Technician’ which, as a theatre technician, just confuses me.  However, at lower levels, you simply work your way up through the levels, and if someone asks, I can now say… I’m level three.  I can hit you with both this hand and that hand.  I have a vague concept of the idea that there might be such things as control techniques but if in doubt, my first move is still going to be to break something and then think about the mechanics of the body.  I can move this way, and then move that way and still, with any luck, keep hitting while doing so.  I’m beginning to learn how to do scary things with biros.  I am cautiously optimistic that, should I ever find myself in a fight, I can at least analyse the means of my own defeat in a really well-informed manner, and were I permitted to wear pink, and thus lull my opponent into a false sense of fluffy security, I could possibly even live to fight another day… oh yeah….

And, to my surprise, I love it.  There’s something incredibly therapeutic about spending a couple of evenings a week sparring, learning how to fight, learning how to read the things other people do as they fight, and having a remarkably fun time with a group of diverse people I absolutely love and trust.  I suspect my Gran would be outraged – what kind of young lady chooses a weapons-based martial art over more soothing physical pursuits, like ballet?  (I went to one ballet class when I was 7, and even then knew I would never, EVER be a delicate fairy.  Thankfully the school burnt down the next week, and I never went again.  Fact.)

I am, however, probably the only person in my class who mentally heard the sound of the old Gameboy machines in my mind when I was told that I had ‘levelled up’.  (Or at least, I’m the only person willing to admit to it.)  I suspect I’m also the only person who would a) be tempted and b) find it funny to write, in tiny, tiny letters, ‘+3′ on my sticks, and see if anyone notices.  Or even gets it.  In many ways, learning escrima is a highly nerdy thing to do – it just so happens that the escrima nerdiness is a rather different kind of nerdiness from the Mario Bros./D&D school of nerd, and I suspect that the two don’t meet that often.  Which is a shame, as they have more in common than they know…

Continue reading »]]> 1.  I WILL complete HSK Level 2 before the end of January, and HSK Level 5 by the end of the year.  As an addendum to this, I will get to the end of my ‘Teach Yourself Mandarin’ book and along with my learning-Chinese friend (你好我的中国朋友！） continue learning this skill.

2.  I will be infinitely patient in the face of bureaucracy, obstruction, obtuseness and the daily infuriating… I mean, inevitable and patiently understood… frustrations that are thrown up by this universe as a side-effect of life.  My natural default position of speechless rage is unhelpful in this regard…

3.  I will take my rubbish out and hang my laundry up before either can start to smell.

4.  I will remember to publicize my own book events more than 24 hours before they happen.

5.  I will seize the moment when the moment comes, even if the moment happens to come in the middle of something really interesting on the TV or at an inopportune moment in the middle of a good chapter, because, damnit, how often does the moment really come really?

6.  I will try to learn not to squeeze the toothpaste from the middle of the tube.

7.  I will learn to master my own look of ‘are you kidding me?’ that creeps across my gaze whenever faced by a silly lighting question from someone not necessarily that well informed…

8.  I will write more novels.  Lots.

Happy New 2013!

Continue reading »]]> In an odd way, I’m growing to really enjoy the barrels of spam this website blocks out every day.  Make no mistake, it pisses me off that naughty people are attempting to abuse, manipulate and exasperate for their own nefarious purposes, but I do rather enjoy the occasional cleverness – or downright flagrancy – of some of the spam I receive.

Take, for example:

“What a material of un-ambiguity and preserveness of precious familiarity
on the topic of unpredicted feelings.”

This is from a company – a company I’ve actually heard of, shame on them – attempting to convince you to take out questionable loans, whose name I will not mention simply because, while I’d love to condemn them outright, I kinda feel that even giving them a briefest mention will achieve the purpose they desire, towit, raise their google search engine standings.

“Merely wanna state that this really is really beneficial , Thanks for taking your time to write this” – came with a string of numbers at either end which I’ve removed for no reason I can particularly name, and was linked to a rather nice, if a bit grainy, photo of the Shard.  If, perhaps, it had targetted entries on copy editings, or how authors make their money, it might have snuck through but alas, the incriminating numbers and the fact that the email source is entirely alpha-numeric, threw it straight into the trash can.

“Amen to that indeed! This made me laugh and some great lines there, fantastic read. I’ll definitely look out for more of your posts   Thanks for the great post.”  Now, this one I really don’t know about.  It could go either way.  Evidence for it NOT being spam – it’s well spelled, there’s no numbers and the email address looks vaguely valid.  However, it arrived simultaneously with this: “Very funny read, some great points which I’ll take on board. I’ll look out for any future posts, thanks ” and the sudden presence of two smilies all at once, praising my apparent wit, rather led me to suspect it was not, in fact, my wit being praised.  However, the argument could still be swung either way – which is almost precisely my point on this, that spammers are getting so good at what they do, and write such marvelously flattering things that even if you do suspect it to be nefariously intended, you still kinda let it pass.  (If the comments are real, then my genuine apologies, but you can see why the filter kicked in…)

“Yet it’s not a good idea to get carried away and make the blog about your family or outside interests. There is a way to show personality while keeping things professional. A good rule of thumb is: if you wouldn’t say it in an email to a client, it shouldn’t go up on your company’s blog.  With a little bit more research and time from you, we are sure you’ll come up with a profit-building blogging strategy!”

I love this one.  (I’ve removed the links it came with, I hasten to add.)  Just when you thought you’d nailed the art of spotting the compliment too far, in comes a judicious, corporate bit of spam which not only catches your eye for being a bit of a novelty in the spam queue, but also lulls you into thinking it’s an ongoing conversation with some genuine comments you missed.  Until your brain kicks back in and you think – what the hell kind of blog am I running, where anyone whatsoever would be discussing a profit-building blogging strategy!  (I suspect that my editor would love me to have a profit-building blogging strategy, but I’d love to understand Mandarin and I don’t think either of us are getting our way any time soon… and perhaps, in the long run, this is no bad thing…)

I must admit, after all the thousands of spam comments my filter has found and removed, I am rather disappointed these days to receive the rather more bland xoiearlkjkdsfoiuwerkkfdfsk@dfsuiodfsoielkjd11 … sorta stuff.  I know it seems a bit perverse to enjoy the ongoing battle with spammers, in the sense that spam = waste of time and data, and occasionally dangerous and damaging data at that; but in that I always enjoy seeing anything that’s well-crafted, from a nicely turned phrase up to and including the fortifications of Vauban, I can’t help, just a tiny-weensy bit, but admire my enemy…

Continue reading »]]> Well, here we are again.  A new Christmas and touch-wood, the year 2012 doesn’t appear to have contained within it the predicted disasters that various apocalyptic sources heralded.  The world has not (yet) ended, the 2012 Olympics were, despite everything, a triumph, and the American President does not in fact subscribe to the belief that poverty is the moral sin of those who suffer from it.

That said, I am writing this blog entry with a few days to go before Christmas, owing to the fact that my Christmas day is going to be spent with my Mum and my mates, by a fire, with a cat in my lap, doing not much at all really.  And, assuming that the world hasn’t ended in the intervening time, I wish you all a Merry Christmas, full of fun, festivities and a nice seat by a warming fire.

Covent Garden at Christmas

... complete with the world's cheesiest mirrorballs...

Continue reading »]]> The Mayan calendar declares that today (21st of December, 2012) is the end of the world.

Actually, no… conspiracy theory spins on the Mayan calendar declares the same.  The Mayans declare it not.

The day is nearly ended, but then, I do live on the Greenwich Meridian, so technically, 12 hours still to go.

So far, so good….