It’s a toy town.

I mean, make no mistake, as toy towns go, it’s a very nice toy town.  For a start, it’s the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company which is, as previously established, a Good Thing.  It’s got some of the most excellent theatre going on that you are likely to see for £5 of your English pounds (if you’re under-25, that is…) and this is its major draw. Stratford was the birthplace of our Mr Shakespeare and oh boy has he left his mark on the town.  You will be lucky to leave without buying a mug entitled ‘Yea Olde Stratford’ or possibly a tea-towel bearing the serene, almost enigmatic face of the scribbler.  Whether Shakespeare imagined when writing Hamlet that his face would be used for drying dishes in the future, no one will ever know.  You are likely to have a drink in a pub somehow related to his works, or maybe stay in a bed and breakfast honouring his plays, or possibly even have a local drink that is somehow derived in his honour – yeap, there’s no getting round it, Stratford is heavy on the dude.

But personally, for me, Stratford Upon Avon is all about the swans.  I mean it’s about patching and theatre and lighting too, but if you take those out of the equation and for a moment play purely the tourist, then it’s about the swans.  Spend any great amount of time working in the town and you quickly discover that besides the theatre, the place you are likely to spend most of your time is along the canal or the river, looking at swans and listening to brass band music played on a weekend, or to the cricket scores being blasted out over a loud speaker that can probably be heard half way to Warwick.  I lived in Stratford for just under a month, and when not working, my main occupation was to sit by the river and watch boats and swans go by and read about witch hunts in the early modern period and write plays.  (All of the above seeming the most apt response to being in the town.)  On a weekend there’s a market by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre where you could buy anything from Indian dreamcatchers to home-made soaps with bits of raspberry in, and of course there was the perpetual traffic of little tourist boats paddling up and down the waterways.

Other than that, though, there really isn’t much to do for a stranger in town.  If you’re a local the situation is clearly different – the family I was lodging with seemed abuzz with perpetual activity, from local amateur productions of plays to continual production of baked goods to raise money or test recipes or just have legendary ‘pudding parties’ in local villages, to football matches and skating challenges, not to mention while working 9-5 – but as a stranger whose sole occupation is based around cable and electricity, your day off can quickly become something of a muddle.  Unless you’re already involved in local activities, and unless you’re sticking around long enough to get involved, there’s really only so much soap you can buy or so many Shakespearean monuments you can visit.  The near-by hubs of alternative activity – Leamington Spa, Birmingham or Warwick – aren’t much to write home about if you’re by yourself, and quickly the project on a day off becomes one of filling it.  My first serious day off work was spent in quest for a cheap haircut, under the slightly naive belief that everything was cheaper outside London and that after a year, even I should probably consider getting a trim.  I eventually received a haircut for free, from a lovely trainee hairdresser from Zimbabwe who admitted as she practiced her art that she had never once seen a show by the RSC and didn’t really have any interest in theatre whatsoever.  Her bosses laughed and said they’d been invited to see the latest show at the theatre for free, but had drunk a little bit too much before going in so didn’t really get the plot and prefered modern dramas…

“Stratford is a dump,” was the opinion of another local resident.  “No one who works in Stratford would ever actually live in Stratford.  You’ve got to live in the countryside, which is beautiful, and keep boats, and never, ever go into Stratford unless you’re actually being paid.”  In the coffee shop which I quickly established as my base of operations on those days when work merely consisted of changeovers and where I would sit for hours writing and nursing one much-loved muffin, even the character of the tourists became kinda apparent.  This is a town where your visitor will not only complain about the level of the music being played in the back room of the cafe, but they will name the composer and opus as they do it to politely request that the works of Mr Mozart, while very fine, be turned down a little so they can hear themselves think.  Outside the cafe was a regular pair of living statues, complete with gold-sprayed ruffs and Tudor trousers (not a flattering fashion…) who would occasionally jerk into life, inducing screams from passing gaggles of teenage tourist girls in headscarves or neat school uniforms, who’d never seen such things before.

So all things considered… with my best tourist face on… Stratford Upon Avon is probably worth a weekend of your time, particularly if you’ve booked your tickets to the theatre first, but make sure to see the swans, avoid the souvenir shops, and if you’re staying for long, pack your football boots and a good recipe book first…

Okay, so, once upon a time, in the deepest darkest depths of the early modern period, Covent Garden was a proper fruit and vegetable market renowned for prostitution and gin.  It sat bang smack in the middle of all sorts of dubious goings on; riots, murders, bored aristocrats running wild, drunken locals and notorious playhouses where you really weren’t there for the quality of the verse.  In the Victorian era you could throw in the added joy of rookeries – slum areas where event the coppers went with fear, and where the easiest route from A-B was through someone’s basement or across the crumbling rooftops.  Yet somehow through all this Covent Garden hung on in there and in recent years has become one of the tourist-friendly, shopping-tastic hubs of central London.

So now you have posh restaurants, markets selling hand-crafted bits of stuff, fashion stores and soap shops, street performers on stilts or doing acrobatics while juggling knives.  (The phrase you are most likely to hear from any street performer… ‘ladies and gentlemen, reach into your pocket for some money to give to us to say thank you for our act… then fold it….’)  The performers are absolutely one of the draws of Covent Garden, savvy and spectacular and worth the watching; so are the musicians.  In the pit below the main covered market area you will find string quartets and opera singers doing the Good Bits from classic music, while in the cobbled streets around you can find anything from the greatest hits of Queen done on electric guitar and harmonica, to the Chinese sheng player churning out traditional classics of the motherland.  Sometimes you get larger structures coming in, from giant trampolines to the traditional merry-go-round of the fair and of course, the obligatory Punch and Judy Act which is forever associated with Covent Garden as its starting place and geographical patron.

There’s also plenty of more formal tourist-catch attractions.  The Royal Opera House dominates the eastern end of the market, and while the tickets are getting cheaper it remains the prime source of gentlemen in ties and women in silk dresses leaving the area in the later hours of the evening.  The London Transport Museum sits on the southern corner next to the warren of Jubilee Market, while the departure of the Theatre Museum next to that remains to this day something of a tragedy.  Restaurants abound, ranging from the silly, where a piece of bread and some butter in a jar can cost as much as a hot dog with extra onions from the vender below, to the slightly less discovered Thai and Vietnamese Restaurants tucked away at the end of half-seen alleys towards the river and Trafalgar Square.

St Pauls Church sits on the western corner of Covent Garden, with a churchyard round the back that is something of an escape route from the business of the market itself.  You’re also with easy throw of Drury Lane and all its theatres, Leicester Square and Holborn – do not, guys, do not take the underground between any of these stations and by the time you’ve got down to the Piccadilly Line platform and waited for the train, you could probably have walked the distance overground yourself.  Distances are deceptive in this part of town; judicious wiggling through unlikely streets is the secret.  Thinking of secrets, you’ll also find near Covent Garden the not-very-secret-at-all Masonic headquarters, based in a building about as subtle as a scud missile fired at an oil refinery, complete with little shops nearby offering various medals and bits of ribbon to denote this or that other highly hush-hush status within the order.

All things concluded, Covent Garden is a lot of fun and well worth visiting at pretty much any time, whether as a passer-by looking for an interesting shortcut between Cambridge Circus and Aldwych, or as a tourist looking for an interesting time.  The one rule is – don’t go there with too much cash in your pocket.  Despite your best intentions, you’ll probably spend it before you’re done.

… guess where I was working on this day…

Was anyone else really, really relieved to discover that actually, it was good?  Oodles of fun, and strangely both respectful and innovative.  Full marks!

Authors, you see, are starting to be dead long enough.  When a writer dies, a clock starts ticking, and 70 years after their death, an alarm bell sounds that proclaims ‘here is their work!  Have it for free and go crazy…’  Thus in the last 12 months the world has gone a bit Sherlock Holmes-tastic as across the globe people wake up to the realisation that not only can they now go treading all over these characters, but they can make them do kung fu too and get away with.  Thankfully, in the case of Holmes it’s currently been a mixture of huge fun and surprisingly reverent… in a strange sticking-to-the-spirit-if-n0t-the-plot kinda way… although needless to say no movie will ever exceed Basil the Great Mouse Detective for sheer adventurous/detecting kaplunk.  (Not a real word.  But a good one.)  But hang on in there and soon other estates will start coming up too as authors start being dead long enough… D.H. Lawrence (be afraid), T.E. Lawrence (also be afraid, but in a better way) and George Orwell (respect) could wake up in the next few years to discover that their amorous characters are conducting epic love affairs against the background of world war one in the Arabian Peninsula while totalitarian powers chase them with rats through an underbelly of socialist dissent…

Let’s just hope that Steven Moffat is there to catch them when that moment comes…

I’m lighting designer for a production of the Virtuous Burglar, being performed at the Edinburgh Festival.  And while I’ve been lighting designer for plenty of stuff that I’m not going to name because, let’s face it, my artistic credentials aren’t exactly glorious and neither was it, I’ve got a good feeling about this one.  I mean, I say that now… I haven’t yet got up to Edinburgh and sat at the lighting desk and looked at a fixed rig shared with seven other shows and thought ‘oh shite what now’ but it is my contention that even if, even if this should happen, the Virtuous Burglar would probably still be worth the 54 minutes of your time that it currently runs at.

When I first read the script my initial thoughts were ‘oh god, it’s a farce, how depressing’.  I get depressed by farces as they’re usually not very funny.  With, that is, the notable exception of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off which goes down as one of the few bits of theatre where I’ve laughed so hard I’ve had an asthma attack.  (Michael Frayn = A Good Thing.  Go see plays by him.)  (Alistair Beaton = A Good Thing too.  Just in case you’re wondering.)  But then good news!  The Virtuous Burglar is by Dario Fo, who I was forced to study at AS-Level Drama and who despite the rigours of the AS-Level syllabus (designed to destroy any joy in anything) I loved.  In a kinda pedantic Italian way, but again, howled with laughter all the way through Accidental Death of an Anarchist.  So that was kinda a look-up.

Then we had the read-through.  These are soul-destroying occasions which as a technician you invariably leave with two thoughts:  1.  Oh my god what have I got myself into and 2. How on earth have the actors managed to do so much work on their texts already?  I haven’t even got a sharp pencil and a ground plan…

Yet strangely, even in the read-through, I was starting to giggle.  And by the first run it was really quite funny.  And even in the sound plot, another event guaranteed to undermine the strength of any reasonable soul, it was actually heading at high speed towards hilarious… don’t ask me why, don’t ask me how, certainly don’t ask me if I had anything to do with it because as this post presently stands I haven’t even touched a dimmer, let alone recorded its intensities into a cue… so the sneaky suspicion is growing on me that actually, this might almost be quite good.

With which in mind!  Let me do the flagrant advertising bit now and say, dear reader, if you are in Edinburgh in this coming month, the Virtuous Burglar is running at the Assembly Rooms for the whole festival at the comfortable hour of 2.15 p.m. and while I cannot yet guarantee that the lighting will be an LED-tastic orgy of sexy luminescence, I can promise you that though you have the face of iron and the hangover of a recklessly liberal Viking, you will laugh.  Lots.

Every profession has its own uniforms.  Soldiers were khaki, police wear blue and black, doctors wear white, techies wear steelies and writers are no exception.

Romantic novelists, according to my Mum, wear skirts and floral-pattern silk scarves and don’t tend to have such good parties as the crime novelists.  Thriller writers incline more towards the blue jeans-and-shirt end of the spectrum and, I am finding out, fantasy and science fiction writers wear black leather jackets.  And either have very big hair indeed, or almost no hair at all.  (I’m afraid I fall into the big hair category.  My hair doesn’t have to be long to be big; there are strange and repellent electromagnetic forces at work somewhere in all this lot.)

What most fantasy writers aren’t, it turns out, are female or under 35.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are some fantastic female science fiction and SF writers out there – figures like Ursula le Guin or Anne McCaffrey spring immediately to mind – but the industry is largely dominated by blokes.  I was surprised to find myself the only female and under-35 attendee of an SF event a few weeks ago, and even more surprised to discover that while I stood out like an iceberg in the Sahara, at least I had, as if by magical instinct, brought my black leather jacket.  Perhaps it’s a genetic condition – all those who are born with the disposition to write fantasy/SF are also immediately destined to be the owner of the obligatory coat, without needing to be told.  In much the same way it seems all people are born knowing the chorus of ‘We All Live in a Yellow Submarine’ but not the verses.

It’s a curious thing, being an unlikely candidate for membership of the black-leather-coat-coven.  Writers are generally a grouchy bunch anyway, since while you may talk to your peers in merry and jovial tones of monsters you have written and rights you have sold, the thought is always lurking at the back of your mind… you’re the bastard who nabbed my shelf space…

Remarkably, it’s even possible that writers hate writers more than they hate publishers, which is an achievement since no matter how successful you are as a writer, and how well you’re published, the second you get a single editorial note from your publishing house the certain and irrevocable realisation dawns upon you that actually, your editor is a philistine nit who can’t understand the brilliance of your life’s work.  And if you happen not to be no.1 in the bestseller charts right here, right now, then it has nothing to do with the words you’ve written… it’s because the publisher isn’t trying hard enough, damnit!  And worse, it’s because they’re trying too hard with that writer there, that ungrateful bastard whose wouldn’t recognise a coherent sentence if it danced the polka on his bellybutton wearing stiletto heels, your bloody publisher is wasting there time on him and you’ve got to stand at a party and hold a drink and smile… keep on smiling… at that… bloody… useless… writer!!

And so on.

Me – I don’t know many fantasy writers.  Instead I have something of the opposite problem to the one described above.  In my work as a lampie, and more commonly in my condition (now ended, yay!!) of being a perpetual student, not even the black leather jacket seems enough to let people actually believe a word I say, when I say I am a fantasy writer.  It is, perhaps, unfortunate that I am forced not only to admit to being a writer, but a fantasist too – and thus open to mis-understanding.  I mean, for a start, admitting that I’m a writer isn’t something that comes up commonly in conversation.

“So, you’re the lighting technician?” quoth your average theatre profession.

“Yes, I am,” I reply.

“How many watts can the dimmers take before they trip?”

“2.4 kW, but personally I think they’ll bite the dust at 1.8.”

“Really, really, that’s interesting… uh, incidentally, you aren’t a fantasy writer, are you?”

… is not a line of conversation that ever really crops up.  And that’s absolutely fine with me, since, let’s face it, admitting that I dream of dragons will probably not enhance my street cred in the world of well-kept spanners and steel-capped boots.  Keeping strategically schtum seems the way to go.

But every now and then the day ends and we all go down to the pub, or there’s a lunch break and so-and-so is talking about their hobbies and what they do for fun and someone asks me and… well… I can either lie (‘Yes, I like white-water rafting and keep a yoyo collection’) and try and bluff my way through the conversation, or I can own up to the fairly simple truth that I sorta like writing books for a living.  First few times I admitted to this I expected a barrage of questions and a reasonable amount of shame  – ‘you do what?  What books?  Why?  And you call yourself a lampie when you’ve betrayed the sacred cause to have another career on the side?!  Get back to Mordor, loser!’  But actually the truth is far more mundane.  90% of people I admit this to, ignore it.  Blithely skip over the sentence to the point where I sometimes wonder if I’ve uttered it.  Which is sometimes a bit of a blessed relief, as it saves having to explain the whole psudonym, writing-business.  And sometimes is utterly befuddling.  I mean, as hobbies go, professional novelist is, if nothing else, a conversation starter and I’ll be the first to admit that socially, I’m pretty damn rubbish and any starter will do.  (I write much better than I speak.  And tragically, write other people much better than I write myself.  Sigh.)  But generally polite moving-on is the order of the day, and I sometimes leave wondering whether the thought in the mind of the person I’ve admitted this to isn’t ‘yeah… fantasist… says it all…‘

Perhaps its not.  Perhaps it really is just that daft a profession that really, there’s nothing to be said.  Or perhaps not even a black leather jacket is enough to earn a reputation for writing… perhaps the time has come to go to the next level of fantasy-writer nerd-tastic, and I should learn how to back-comb the hair, or maybe just shave it off entirely, and see if that makes the difference…

Henry IV was, according to 1066 And All That (the book I never quite had the guts to reference in my historiography essays…) a Bad King who wisely resigned half way through his reign in favour of Henry IV Pt.2.  There is my one and only medieval history joke out of the way.  Now read on.

Now, so far, I seem to have loved every single production of Henry IV that I’ve seen.  This means one of three things:

1.  I’ve got very, very lucky.

2.  I’m easily pleased.

3.  The plays are just that damn good.

Pick whichever one seems most likely…

… and I am thrilled to report that the production (so far of only pt 1) that I saw at the Globe on the South Bank fits perfectly into my catalog of plays-what-I-have-loved.  The Globe is in many ways a hard taskmaster, if only because by Act 5 your knees and lower back are generally in so much distress from standing that if what’s happening on stage isn’t of the highest bloody order then your mind is just not going to get off your own physical distress enough to care.  (If it happens to rain as well, then you’re seriously screwed.)  Therefore!  All praise to this season’s production of Henry IV in that by Act 5, as various kings/princes/wannabes were bashing away at each other with swords and various soldiers/drunkards/dukes/knights were dying/feigning death all over the place, I was still hooked.  For obvious reasons, the Globe just doesn’t do theatre like other companies, and at the point where Hal was high-fiving the audience anyone left hoping for a little sonorous intoning of sacred texts is probably going to have to leave.  It’s a play about oodles of stuff, but mostly about Falstaff and Hal, the fat knight and the heir apparent, and in the case of this production they were absolutely brilliant.  When you can go from laughing so much it hurts to feeling a shudder down your spine at the promise of things yet to come, then you know there’s something excellent happening on stage.

Go spend five pounds.

Go see!

A male lampie in attendance, who I’ll guess we’ll call Ebenezzer for the purpose of this story, immediately embarked on something of the following rant:

“Jesus, I hate f-ing things like that, I mean, you’re not f-ing discriminated against any more, you women, you’re like totally not, I’ve worked with f-ing women in the industry and it’s not like you need an organisation.  I mean I think it’s actually sexist for women to have this thing, like, you know, sexist against men!”

Now,  I already owe Women in Lighting a lot, and I’ve only been a member a few months, so I figured I’d take this time to answer a few points raised…

I do not consider myself a feminist, although, it turns out that possibly, I am.  The reason I was surprised to discover that I was one was because, until very recently, there had been no circumstance to test this assertion.  At no point had I been (to my knowledge…) challenged on the basis of my gender, and thus whether I had anything resembling a gender-political conscience hadn’t really been tested.  And whatdayaknow?  I do…

That’s not to say equality = sameness.  After all, I fully confess that men are physically stronger than me and are thus better suited to certain tasks.  Like, say, moving steel deck.  Oh woe.  And there are men out there that are better techies, and there are women out there that are better techies – of course there are, I mean, obviously and of course!  The point is this; that I do not wish to be judged as a woman, I wish to be judged as a person, real and whole, and not on the basis of whether I have breasts and, heaven help us, the quality of both the same.

“I would never judge you because your a woman,” or “of course I look at breasts, so do all men,” would probably be the two majority retorts.  The latter – well, there’s a whole can of worms waiting to be opened up there and if anyone wants my Sociology 101 analysis on the nature of gender/sexual identity, just lemme know…

As for the former, sure, there are a lot of guys out there – great guys – who would not judge me because of my femininity.  They’d judge me because of my wiring, and go from there… and that’s how it should be!  Sink or swim, let it be because of my qualifications!  But there still seem plenty working in the technical side of theatre who don’t get it.  Sometimes its an innocent thing – an attitude of ’she’s a woman, she can’t do it, let’s keep her safe’ that leads them to chose a man for a job that a woman perfectly if not more qualified at – or the same attitude that leads to the addition of the word ‘darlin’ to make alright the sentence that went ‘yeah, if it’s okay with you, I’m going to send one of the lads, just because, you know, it might be kinda tricky… darlin….’  Sometimes it’s just people being tits.  Because people sometimes just are.

And yes, this is active (if perhaps unconscious) discrimination and yes, it’s the minority position.  Men are in the majority in theatre lighting, and I have learnt 99% of what I know from men who looked at me entirely as a lampie-in-training and where kind and generous with what they knew and did what they did absolutely superbly, with the added bonus that it mattered not who did the job so long as it was done well.  Although that said, it is impossible to give the battle cry of ‘men – do not generalise about women!’ when in order to make a concise argument, women find themselves generalising about men.  If you don’t mind me saying, I will, as a good historian, acknowledge the own hypocrisy of that argument and then with a swift academic vigor, move on.

No – my main reason for joining this ’sexist’ organisation is, if you don’t mind me waxing sociological on you, a bit more complicated.  Your 1st year LSE sociologist basically is worried about identity – who and what you are within society.

For example, I say:

“I am a woman.”

“Ah-ha!” (quoth our sociologist) “But what is a woman?”

“Well,” I say, adjusting my hair pointedly, “a woman is the female of the species – she has babies, wears dresses and will probably chose wine over beer.”

“So all women have babies?” demands our sociologist.

“Well, no, some women may chose not to have babies…”

“So all women wear dresses?”

“Well, no, it’s just something that sometimes women can do to make themselves feel feminine…”

“So its feminine to wear dresses?”

“Well, yes, but you can be feminine while not wearing a dress…”

“So a woman doesn’t actually have to have babies or wear a dress to be a woman?” exclaims our sociologist, by now looking rather smug.

“Well… as you put it like that… no.”

“And can men wear dresses?”

“Well… yes….”

“Ah-ha!” he exclaims and then trots off smugly to write a paper on the subject.

Gender, it turns out, is a lot more complicated than simple biological function – its an identity, built up out of ideas of ‘wears and dress and has babies’ into a figure that society accepts and can classify.  (Don’t even ask about sexuality.  Whole other story.)  But in technical theatre you can rely on one thing above all else – there’s only one gender identity going on, and it’s a bloke.  Every cliche is somewhere founded in a little grain of truth, and there’s a sackful of truth in the cliche of the lampie who drinks excessively, lives on a diet of cigs, beer and cornish pasties, swears like a Satanist, and treats exciting bits of technological development with an almost libidinous affection.  And to mingle in techie society, to be accepted as part of it, your average woman will, at some point, have to behave like your average bloke.  Sometimes worse; will have to prove themselves to be one of the society, and it’s a man’s society.  The word we’re heading for is macho, or machismo.

And fine.  Okay.  We all do it; it’s like finding yourself putting on a Scottish accent in Glasgow even if you were born in Cambridge – you may not consciously angle to do it, you may not realise you’re doing it at all, but the need to mingle with a social group just pushes your vocal chords over the edge.  I’m not a militant feminist, I have no desire to ask technical theatre to change its ways.  But I would like to ask it to expand its horizons; to look beyond the macho lampie world that has been constructed and say ‘hell, I may be a bloke who likes my beer, but actually, there’s no shame in liking a cuppa tea and a movie with the girls…’

So coming back to the very beginning of this tale, I’m back in the green room with Ebeneezer being told that I am the member of a discriminating group, and I have, I’m afraid, one simple answer.  Cast aside, Ebeneezer, your pre-conceptions!  It’s not about biological equipment, who is stronger and who has babies more reliably, it’s not about a conspiracy of bitter spanner-wielding female lampies looking for a bit of a bicker – it’s about introducing a new idea, a new identity into the world of technical theatre.  Don’t write angry letters to your union about our existence, do the smart thing, go one better.  Open yourself up to a world of tea and biscuits, of friendly social events and affection that isn’t shared over hangovers, in short…

Join us.

www.womeninlighting.com

You may notice I’ve started a new category in my blog – Lighting – in honour of the fact that from this moment on, my cunning life-plan is this: to be gainfully employed in the world of theatre lighting as much as I possibly can and in those (surely far-between!) moments when not being employed in the above manner, to while away my sorrows by writing as many books as there are bytes on my computer.  And maybe a few plays and graphic novels as well, just as soon as I’ve cracked the art of getting my character names to capitalise nicely.  (You’d be amazed what an art it is…)  As life plans go, I’m sure my Dad would be quick in pointing out that it’s not as good as being, say, a doctor – at least from the point of view of his supported old age.  But it will, with any luck, combine the two things I love – theatre and writing – into one gainfully structured life from two utterly chaotic ones, since I firmly believe that no writer can just be a writer and not go a little mad, and likewise, no freelance lighting technician can just do lighting and not go equally bonkers.

With which said…

… deep breath…

I am a freelance lighting designer and technician based in London.  When I lit Pericles I went in too steep and didn’t consider the potential of cross-light enough; on Midsummer Nights Dream my cold profile cover was too narrow (although I’d argue that was the fault of the kit list, not necessarily my focus!) – on the Tree I think the cover was a bit too wide and I really should have thought harder about the follow spots.  On A Lie of the Mind I went too shallow – BUT!  Birdies are cool.  Let no man even attempt to deny it – birdies are entirely, utterly brilliant.  On Macbeth my profiles were focused too hard, but I have learnt that there are other ways to animate a scene without using wheels and that toplight is startling in sensible doses; strobes are cool but sunfloods can be curiously programmed with a little cunning.  If stuffed a two-point cover can do the round but beware low grids, tight walls and tall actors.  On Into the Woods I learnt that a ten minute fade is no shameful thing; from the National Theatre I learn that parcans can be brilliant and a 5k at 15m is surprisingly dim; that window gobos have nothing on profiles well-focused; that sometimes bounce is useful if you just charge straight at it with a cry of kill and sometimes it’s a right pain in the backside, especially if you’re sat uphill.  I discovered that you really should check if your birdie bulb in a practical is 12V or 240V before testing this too empirically; always keep your 3-5 pin converter with the glaciator; Mac IIIs can invert their face panels if you’re trying to read them upside down in a darkened grid, there is no such thing as too much L200, neither is there such a thing as L120 that isn’t high temperature if we’re being serious about this.  NEVER give your gaffer tape away, and always label your screwdriver.  Tea is good.  Biscuits are better.

All these mistakes I have made in the last… oh… three, four years?   Good news being, is that I am very unlikely to make them ever, ever again.

And naturally, in the realms of urban magic, there are shamans too.

They tend to take on two forms.  In institutions such as the Tribe – a medley of outcasts and angry social pariahs – the shaman is a leader, a keeper of memories or, more often, feuds, a guide and a mentor, such as it is.  In less structured societies, the shaman can fulfill a more flexible role.  They are the ones who see the truth of things – not a simple black and white truth of ‘my dog has five legs and this is a lie’ – but rather the truth of things that are just beneath the surface.  They are the ones who see the hands that built the streets, who see the shadows that lie just below the shadow that you cast as you walk, who know which lampposts hide the dryads and which alleys you should and should not walk down once the lights have gone out.  They walk a fine line between the world that is, and the world that is just below the surface, and as a result can make for excellent counselors, albeit not very good tour guides.

And one or two may have noticed that for a period of roughly 12 hours, a blog entry did appear explaining what I was doing, before vanishing again.

And then silence.

Well!  I am here to explain quickly that I can’t actually say what I’ve been doing with the last… oh… seven and a half weeks.  It turns out that the places I’ve been working at – mmmnnn and mnnmnn  – have policies prohibiting discussion of their work.  (Although I can say that after 2 years studying technical theatre I am, in fact, not a spy.  Although, obviously, if I was a spy, I’d still say that, thus leading, arguably, to nothing but confusion.  Which would of course be part of the plan.)  But as this is a universal policy to be applied to all, and as I’d really like to be employed again, I’m afraid I must honour it.  Therefore!  I’m afraid I am in no position to tell you what an absolutely excellent time of things the last seven weeks has been, or of the fantastic things I’ve seen and learnt… or even to heartily recommend that you see mmmnnn and mnnnn. I cannot sing the praises of mmmnnmnmn or suggest that you go to see mm mmnnn for that moment with the 3000W strobe at the end of Act 1.  I can’t tell you how the mmmmn department have absolutely excelled themselves for the end of mmmn’s mnnmn or what a shame it was when the dragon got cut from mnnnmnn.  In no way am I permitted to tell stories of adventures around the fly gallery of mnnmnnn or the secrets of programming in mmmnmnnn.  I cannot tell you of men duelling for all sorts of things in mmmnnn or of high ideals being cut down in mmnnmnn.  I can’t even tell you how many chocolate brownies I ate during the tech of mnnnmnn.  Yeap – there’s no getting round it.  I am gonna have to belt it.   Entirely, utterly and, quite possibly, mistakenly.  But very adverbially.

Although!  It seems to me that, though I have this bubbling authorial indignation at being told to keep schtum and carry on, if nothing else, all of the above is a wonderful, brilliant exercise in that great principal of narrative suspense…

On which note…

Theatre rocks.

And that’s about all I have to say on that.

Oh yes, Kate Griffin is not my real name… however, since my real name is hardly a state secret, being fairly easily accessible on this website, I’ll keep this brief and say hello!  As Catherine Webb I write books for kids and young adults and as this is my damn website and I’ll use it to say that my latest Catherine Webb book – the Dream Thief – was published a few days ago.  And I’m not saying that if you like Kate Griffin you’ll like Catherine Webb (that’s probably one of the most schizophrenic sentences I’ve ever written, and let’s face it, writing characters like Matthew Swift that’s saying something) – but you might!  And you’ll never know until you’ve gone out there, bought a copy, or maybe several, of the Horatio Lyle series, and a few for your friends just to make sure you’ve got a decent sample to do comparisons with, and found out.

In case you’re wondering, the Horatio Lyle series is about a Mr Horatio Lyle (go figure), a Victorian inventor/detective who spends an inordinate amount of time dabbling with mysteries, stepping on toes, only some of which are human, causing trouble and blowing things up.  Admittedly he never plans on blowing things up, but there just comes a point in every chemical-toting scientific detective up against the odds and great evils in a city at the height of the industrial revolution when even a decent upstanding citizen has to say ‘ah, to hell with it’ and reach for the nitrates.

It goes something like this…

I am from North London, and therefore have experience of real London.  I can actually find an underground station without having to ride a bus for an hour and a half, I am within easy throwing distance of Hampstead Heath, Ally Pally, Soho, Westminster, the Golden Mile, the Tower of London, the BT Tower, Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Leicester Square, the British Museum and so on and so forth.  My side of London is rich with history, eighteenth century mansions and nineteenth century terraces, in my part of town you can find pretty much anything anywhere and don’t have to shop at Argos to achieve it, in short, all things considered, North London, it’s where the action is at.  Poor South Londoners – all that suburban landscape with nothing of any note in it, semi-detached houses looking exactly like the next street of semi-detached houses and my god but you have to wait for the train to get anywhere and you’ll be so lucky if it happens to be going that way to begin with.  Urban poverty, transport failure and commercial decline – south London, who’d live there?

Whereas!  As a South Londoner the thought goes something like this…

You ignorant North London smug bastards, you have no idea what you’re missing.  We’ve got Richmond Park, Clapham Common, greenery everywhere, room to move in, low rents and big houses, some of the best curry that London has to offer.  We’ve got rich and thriving local communities, we’ve got easy access to mainline trains to carry us swiftly to places like Brighton and other non-London destinations wherever they happen to be.  We can get bags of exotic vegetables at half the price you lot can, actually find a place to park, and hell, the London Eye, London Aquarium, Tate Modern and Globe Theatre are all on our side of the river so you lot just take your inner city squalor and rising crime rates and piss off back to Barnet you ignorant Northern gits.

I’m very firmly a North Londoner.  I did dally with the concept of South for a while, and can sorta see the other guy’s point of view, but no.  Sorry.  I remain up north and up north is where I intend to stay.  However!  Even once you’ve chosen your side of the river, there’s still more dividing up to do.  I am from Hackney, therefore naturally dislike Tottenham – not because the borough has done anything personal to offend me, but merely because it’s good to have someone to look down on, whether for geographical or footballing reasons, who can say?  Equally, my nearest borough growing up was Islington, where the sense of ‘oh god, not Hackney, what a dump’ was unmistakable.   As someone from the vaguely eastern corner of the city, I naturally view the West with deep suspicion.  Where is Acton anyway and were North, East, Central and West Acton stations really the best names that could be come up with for the local area?  Is Knightsbridge a real place?  Do people really shop at Harrods?  Really? Wherever you go there’s always someone to look down on and feel pleased not to be… even if, as luck would have it, they’re looking back at you and thinking exactly the same thing…

First up, the history-technical theatre link.  Okay, simply put, I ended up running a lot of technical stuff for the student societies at LSE for two basic reasons.  1.  I really liked lights.  (And still do, who’d have guessed?)  2.  I was the only person in the student union who knew the secret of accessing the dimmer room.  A secret which can only be passed down from technical munchkin to technical munchkin, and which, for reasons of honour and legality, I will not herein repeat.  Sorry.  Anyway, at the end of three years of doing that, I kinda figured, ‘hey, I’ve spent three years doing lighting with a bit of history on the side… maybe I should look at doing this a little more seriously?’ and here I am now.

As for history-writing… let’s not beat about the bush, history is the greatest story ever told.  I’ve said many times that I have a thing for the Shakespeare Dude – I particularly have a thing for his history plays.  Give me kings killing queens and visa versa!  Give me battles and the stake being the safety of the realm, give me adventure and sword fights and questions of politics and honour and betrayals!  History is full of the most wonderful, amazing, implausible, incredible stories!  And not just that… it’s full of the same story told a thousand different ways by a thousand different people, each one pushing an agenda.  It’s full of little bits of human tragedy and great sweeping cataclysmic events, sometimes at the same time.  Take Chernobyl – I was born the day after Chernobyl happened, so have a lot of time for the story.  The firemen who were sent to put out the fires were given a shovel full of sand – and we’re talking nuclear fuel burning here – a shovel full of sand and told that they had 4 seconds to get their sand onto the flames.  More than 4 seconds and they’d have received so much exposure to radiation that they’d die, and these firemen in the middle of a nuclear blaze in the middle of a collapsing empire that had ruled half the world for 45 years with its bonkers ideology – they went out and threw on their shovel fulls of sand.

On collapsing empires – only in history can you sit back and watch the slow crumpling of an empire, the sickly march of decline that at some point, and boy there will be arguments about when, becomes irreversible.  I love collapsing empires (not a phrase I say every day) – the Byzantines, the Romans, the Ottomans, the British, the Soviets – I also have a big fondness for political and military history, for stories of battles that were won or lost because of the wrong kind of rain or because someone drunk too much ale the night before or because – as in the best dramatic traditions – the cavalry really did turn up at the last minute.  Read about the second siege of Vienna – one of the most dramatic sieges ever.  I mean, you’ve heard of an 11th hour intervention… this was more like a 5 minute job…

One of the best things about history is the bits we chose to tell ourselves.  Take the Spanish Armada.  As I was taught it in school, it was a tale of plucky English courage prevailing against lumbering Spanish arrogance.  Our great naval heroes harried and pestered those ignorant Spanish tyrants and finally scattered their fleet with brilliant fire ships, stroke of genius, saving us all and Good Queen Bess hurrah!  And oh yes, the weather may have helped.  No one really mentions the part of the story where Francis Drake managed to misplace the entire Armada… or discusses the nature of piracy vs. privateering in Spanish waters or the thorny issue of shallow waters and the Dutch fleet… absolutely no one mentions the 1589 English Armada, Gloriana Regina’s particularly disastrous attempt to capitalise on the Spanish defeat by sending her own ships to burn what was left with theirs.  (An episode best summarised up by the incident where the women of Coruna – the women, let’s just note – drove the English back to their ships with domestic tools.)

So yes.

I love history.  I loved studying it, I loved reading about it and arguing about it.  For the sake of posterity I should probably also add that I especially loved my dissertation supervisor, whose lectures in the first year of my study on piracy in the Mediterranean and the foreign policy of Suleyman the Magnificent single-handedly converted me to the wonders of early modern history.  I wouldn’t have traded those three years for anything.

In the world of urban magic, this is a genuine medical problem.  Magic long since passed the point where a griffon’s feather was a source of power – true power lies in the Zones 1-6 London Travelcard, good for free transport on every bus, tube, tram, light railway and overground service within Greater London, and a hefty discount on the river bus too.  I mean, if this isn’t urban power in ticket form then frankly, nothing is.  And like all things with surplus power attached, it’s perfectly possible to go mad with a travelcard; thus, a traveller may find himself standing at Leicester Square wondering how to get to Piccadilly Circus and sure, the two are visible one to the other, but oh no!  When in possession of a travelcard something as simple and easy as walking fifty yards is unforgivable!   Trains must be caught, buses must be used – as many as possible, ideally – and even if they take you miles out of your way you’ve still gotta use them, because that is the magic of a travelcard.

When I was a kid I went to school in Hammersmith.  Grew up on the other side of town, mind you – right on the other side of town in Hackney.  (‘Is that anywhere near Kensington High Street?’ asked one perfectly affable 12 year old in a geography lesson once, when we were discussing our home boroughs.  The answer, dear reader, would be a resounding no.)  I had a travelcard, and prided myself on never quite taking the same route into and from school every day.  I circled round my final destination like a hungry vulture in a butcher’s maze, sometimes striking from the north via Piccadilly Line and a bus, sometimes from the south via Northern Line and a different combination of buses, for Hackney is not renowned for its tube connections.  I took the Hammersmith and City Line for a while, until I realised that the stations between Goldhawk Road and Royal Oak were full of bigger, scarier people than me in my baby-pink school uniform.  (It wasn’t a uniform big on dignity.)  Then I switched to the Piccadilly; then realised that the Piccadilly didn’t have anything on the Victoria Line, then discovered that actually, a Victoria-Northern Line combo was a deadly weapon.  Violin lessons in the Barbican were an especial treat, as I had an option on at least five perfectly justifiable tube stops I could get off at each of which would lead, in roughly even times, through entirely labyrinthine passages, to the same destination from a completely different direction.  Travelcard craziness was how I got to know most of central London, picking my way between tube stops with the reckless disregard of someone who knows that if I do get horribly lost, there’ll be a bus to somewhere where there’ll be a tube to somewhere else where I’ll probably be able to pick up a route I vaguely know in a reasonable direction.

Now that I no longer need to commute across half a city to get to school, I have travelcards less frequently, and thus go a little bit more bonkers when I use them.  This weekend, for example, I needed to get from my home to the Old Kent Road for a job interview, and then to a wedding in Putney, and then back home. I can proudly report that I managed to achieve this, with my travelcard, through use of four tube lines, three buses, two mainline trains and if only the service had been running on a weekend, I damn well would have taken the riverbus too.  Sensible, level-headed geographical planning goes out of the window.  I see a bus heading vaguely west, and I am heading vaguely west, and I will jump on it with a cry of ‘ah hell, it’ll probably work out for the best!’   So all things considered, my advice to you would be… beware travelcard madness!  And perhaps every now and then, give into it too.

But you know what, let’s save time.

Neil Gaiman.

Read him.

Now.

It’s watching you.

Grafitti, Soho – source unknown.

I guess the Barbican Library was where I first started turning into a fantasy writer.  I had violin lessons in the Barbican every week (in answer to the inevitable violin question – many years, and badly) and so every week was to be found waiting for the lesson in the fantasy section.  By grade 2 I’d done A-G, by grade 5 I’d made it from A-S, and by the time my violin teacher realised I might actually be more suited to the viola, I’d gone all the way down to the bottom of the shelf and met Roger Zelazny, on who much praise has already been heaped.

At university I got into the habit of borrowing as many books as I could carry, dragging them back to halls and renewing them on a daily basis before the other buggers could get their hands on my essay material.  Everything I know about the Algerian War of Independence I learnt in the bath.  (My hall of residence had wonderfully high water pressure combined with a fantastic boiler, and I was learning karate at the time and thus baths seemed the logical learning environment.  On an entirely irrelevant note, I freely admit that for the first six weeks of learning karate, if someone had tried to mug me I probably would have been too physically shattered to even try and put up a fight…)  Simultaneously, when being forced to take a subject that wasn’t history as an external option, I would go to my local library for ‘dummies guides to…’  Thus, my room ended up full of books on the Korean Civil War, Piracy in the 1500s and graphic novels.  (All praise Neil Gaiman!)

In my final year at university, I found myself back in the Corporation of London, where my initial love of the Barbican Library developed, and discovered that box sets of shows like West Wing for £1 a week were really the only way to try and muddle through a dissertation and stay sane.

Now that I’m Domestic Woman, complete with my own (terminally ill) basil plant and council tax bill, my local library has become if anything even more important.  How to books, computer and printer access, leaflets on recycling in the borough  (tragic but useful) films, comics, hardbacks I can’t afford to buy, music galore, ads for free haircuts, cheap swims, local parties and classes in taekwondo, books in Farsi, kids learning how to sing ‘the wheels on the bus’ – popular history!  Say what you will for studying history at LSE, there does come a point in the middle of every essay on the economic policy of Charles V that you dream of a book about sieges and adultery, and imagine the face of your historiography tutor crinkling up distressed at the two words… ‘popular history’…

So yes…

… I love my local library.  And if we are indeed about to have, well, pretty much everything slashed in half during the economic recession, I really hope that my library isn’t one of them.

By the time David Tennant took over as the Doctor, I’d discovered a whole corps of people at LSE who were quietly addicted.  We were, admittedly, a group of people at the technical theatre crew/Dr Who lovers/Cluedo playing end of student society, but, and this is the bizarre thing, we weren’t ashamed of it… I mean, if nothing else, let the new series of Dr Who go down in history as making it practically acceptable, maybe, and this is a big maybe, but maybe even kinda cool to be a nerdy science fiction/techno-geek… which is a blessed relief to me, because, really, I was never really going to shape up to be anything else.

I have no quiver of cultural shame when people say ‘it’s a kid’s program’.  Sure, it is, but it’s a kids program with jokes for adults, and huge ideas, and witty scripts, and great big rollicking story lines and, frankly, a lot more craft in its big toe than the average 9 p.m. weekday fare has in a whole fist of themes.  I mean, at its most basic level, the setup of Dr Who allows you to do pretty much anything.  Any place, any time, any situation, any species, any state of mind – anything.  I’ve been meaning to write this blog entry for a while, but it was the fact that last weekend the plot of Dr Who included – and please avert your eyes if you haven’t seen this already – the entire universe going phut and then some – that really kinda nudged me into thinking that the time had come to mentioned how much I enjoyed this series.  You gotta love the combination of tragically geeky and utterly cool, of ridiculously domestic and world-shatteringly big.  Your average episode of Dr Who jumps in with forty something minutes of space to play with and an idea to dabble in and just charges.  It’s funny, hugely entertaining, (huge in general) and I love it.  More, please!

(And if anyone finds themselves reading this the day after I wake up to discover that any of my works, as either Kate Griffin or Catherine Webb have soared to huge international success… then yes please, do hire me as a writer.  I mean, there’s being cool… and then sometimes there’s just plain, unashamed, unabashed being a nerd…)

Of course, the only problem being, that if you need someone to keep a gate, there’s usually something nasty waiting on the other side.

http://www.artsderbyshire.org.uk/whats_on/events/altfiction__derbys.html

But!  I love the Cally Rd tube station, for a number of reasons:

1.  The continual playing of classical music.  (I’m told that this is only ever really played at stations where it’s considered dangers of violence are high, in the theory that it’s hard to swagger tough when listening to Mozart.)

2.  The fact that, for whatever technical blip as yet unknown, there is a tendency of Piccadilly Line trains pulling into the station to announce their arrivals on the little orange LED panels inside the carriages like so:

The Next Station Is!!

Caledonian Road!

Which if nothing else, adds a certain zinginess to the event.

3.  The announcements at the station itself.  At every London underground station there is a continual display of when the next train is coming, at the bottom of which roll little announcements of the kind like There are delays on the Northern Line.  Please seek alternative routes.

However, at Cally Rd, someone has taken control of the system and now the messages read…

If you find an unattended bag, please report to the nearest member of staff.  Ta.

Amazing the difference a ‘Ta’ can make to proceedings.

4.  Art.  I mean, you may not call it art… but on the other hand, have you ever, in your life ever, seen a service update board that looks anything like this…

Looking East…

Looking North East….

Looking North North East!

Can you see where it is yet?  Who’d have thought a Novotel would have such interesting views…

It’s another one of those… ALTHOUGH… I’m actually holding back two pictures which would give you the immediate answer to your contemplations and there is already a stonking clue in one of them… so deep breath… are you sitting comfortably?

Lincoln is none of these.  For a start, imagine my shock to get my ticket and discover that I actually had to change trains at no less unlikely a place than a town called Newark North Gate in the middle of ??? in the vicinity of ???.  Changing mainline trains – already this had me a little unnerved.  And it’s no ordinary train you catch at Newark North Gate – oh no… it’s a one-carriage train, a sorta go-kart for Network Rail, a thing with probably the same standing capacity as your average double decker bus that clatters through a flat landscape of fields, level crossings and occasional industrial sprawl.

My trip to Lincoln was justified by going to the Lincoln Book Festival – where, I gotta admit, I had a very lovely time and ate more chocolate mini bites than the mind can comfortably conceive.  It was also my first trip as Kate Griffin, which led to a certain amount of confusion at the hotel as I tried to work out and explain exactly who I was and why my signature seemed to bear no resemblance whatsoever to the name on my check-in card.  (If anyone has any legal views on the thorny question of whether it is against the law to sign a hotel check-in card with a perfectly fine and honest signature, one that just happens not to be the same on your passport, then please let me know.)

I’d been advised to take a taxi from the station to the hotel, but looking at google maps I had one of those rash moments of confidence that goes ‘I know what to do!  Find the cathedral and walk towards it and everything will be fine!’  And let me add, navigationally speaking, everything was perfectly fine… found the cathedral, found the hotel no problem… but I was a little let down by my history degree.  I should perhaps have looked a little closer at the map and thought ‘hum… a medieval city… a cathedral… a castle… now what do I know about the building habits of medieval lords…?’  Alas, this reasoning failed me, and it was only as I slogged up the aptly named ‘Steep Hill’ that the recollection of just how much those pesky medieval architects liked being uphill of their enemies struck me.  My survival of the Steep Hill experience owes more than a little to the magic of ventolin inhalers.

Lincoln (she says from her sagely 24 hour experience of the place) seems essentially to be divided in two.  At the bottom of the hill is a fairly average reasonably-sized town, complete with shopping centre, clothes shops, more charity shops than the eye can perceive (and as a fan of charity shops, this pleased me) chippies and one-way traffic systems designed to send any driver into apoplexy.  Arriving on a Friday evening at around 6 p.m. the lower part of the town was oddly silent – shut doors and closed shutters, empty pedestrianized curling streets inhabited only on the odd corner by the traditional feral youth that is quaintly more observable in someone else’s town than your own.  Leaving the same way on Saturday afternoon it was all elbows go to push through crowds of shoppers, that seemed to have poured out of every crack in every brick to fill their bags with goodies.

As you head uphill a change begins to take over the streets, subtle at first and then growing more and more noticeable.  Shopping chains give way to art galleries selling bowls of semi-precious stone and pictures of flowers caught in heavy cold winds.  Second hand bookshops start peeking out with large sections on local folklore and history.  There’s the obligatory not-quite-magic-shop selling brightly coloured dreamcatchers, incense and smelly candles; little shops built in straight on steep cobbled roads offering cream teas and home-made pots of chilli; shops offering home-made stationary and antique shops selling five different kinds of three hundred year old grandfather clock.  Suddenly you look around at the top of the worst part of the incline and over your shoulder you’ve got a view above the buildings towards green countryside and there are cobbles beneath your feet and suddenly everything is a little bit Yea Olde and Traditionale Crafte, albeit for the most part with the sensible good taste not to proclaim itself that way.  And of course, there’s a cathedral.  What I think Eddie Izzard would probably describe as a huge sod-off cathedral.  It’s a sneaky thing – from the station you could half believe that you weren’t going to bust an artery getting there, and from the rectangle where on Saturday there is a farmers market you might almost think that it’s actually quite a modest cathedral, and once you’re inside and looking down the length of it you realise that actually, this is a TARDIS in cathedral form and if you did pay your £5 entry fee there’d probably only be a 1/20 chance of you coming out alive.  It’s a proper gothic monster, all vaulted roof and leering, tongue-waggling stone faces carved above every arch.  Some cunning wag stuck an organ bang smack in the middle of it so as you stand at the entry point, you can’t actually see the back wall, even if there is one.  And if you’re still feeling unconvinced as to Lincoln’s historical credibility, then there’s a castle not two hundred yards away, just to make the point, albeit with a lawn for playing croquet and having tea has grown.  Around these two monuments is a street sprung up heavily with restaurants of every cuisine… although sad to say as I wandered towards the theatre where the Book Festival was happening, all I could really think of was fish and chips.

Anyhow, all things considered… an awesome 24hrs somewhere between ??? and ??? in the city of Lincoln!

Anyhow, details at this website…

http://www.sfx.co.uk/2010/05/05/compo-win-a-ticket-to-our-author-party-in-london/

All of which largely leaves me without a party to support in the coming general election.  I mean, my instinct is to vote Green, simply because when all other issues are stripped down, the continual survival of the planet really kinda tops them all.  But in the first past the post system, I do find myself playing an amateur’s strategic voting game.  I live in a marginal constituency, and the Greens don’t even seem to be trying to win here.  What good are my ethics if they have no political consequence?  (I ask myself.)  I won’t beat about the bush – I find the idea of a Conservative government rather horrifying, as it seems that they either have no ideas, or their ideas are founded on a doctrine of get power first, get a plan last.  Douglas Adams had it right when he suggested that those who wanted power should absolutely be the very very last people to get it.  That said, Labour’s main intention seems to be the retention of power, and again, past that there doesn’t seem to be a plan, although I can at least sympathize with some of their basic principals, even if the past however many years seems to have twisted and corrupted the core ethics to squat.  As for the Lib Dems… I couldn’t even recognize Clegg until two weeks ago and I still don’t know what they stand for.  They have some sympathy from me in that they haven’t done anything that seems absolutely inane these last few years – their MPs were reasonably not-too-corrupt-overall compared to some of the obscene corruptions that have emerged from 2009, and they were opposed to the Iraq War which was quite clearly another obscenity that shall go down in the history books as one of the most politically stupid and morally reprehensible acts of the British government in the last 50 years.  Then again, they were a 3rd party in a parliament of two parties united on the war and thus had very little to lose by opposing the war, not least when 2 million protesters were marching through the streets of London on this very theme – quite what they’d do in government when idealism met practicality who knows?  Perhaps it is just an innate truth that power always corrupts, that the brightest of idealists when they decide to become MPs will soon find themselves so lost in the combat of politics that ethics gives way to survivor’s instinct.  Democracy, as Winston Churchill put it – the least bad form of government.

It is also possible that I am basing my decision on seriously iffy information.  The newspapers are hardly squeaky clean in their election reports – some are so blatantly pro one party or another that there’s no point even pretending that journalistic neutrality exists.  When did we reach a point where a newspaper could ‘declare’ itself for one party or another?  And the BBC, my usual source of all knowledge, is in such a hurry to deliver information that often the depth can be hard to find.  It makes a murky contest even murkier, not fully knowing what information to trust.

Some things I can soundly declare myself to be opposed to.  The British National Party causes me nothing but fear and offense; fear because they seem to be getting better at putting a slick mask on what is an inherently offensive operation.  Even if the BNP denies that it’s a racist party, their core doctrine seems still to be the imposition of one culture – a fantastical ‘British culture’ – on everybody.  I don’t recognise this Britishness that the BNP seems to describe; to me, there is nothing more British than having a lamb bhuna while watching American TV in the company of friends from across the world, knowing that tomorrow morning I can get baklava from across the road run by the man who watches epic Hindu drama on a tiny TV screen above the cigarette counter, before getting on a bus in which the common language of conversation is Arabic, Farsi, Russian, Polish, French, German, Cantonese and as well as English.  What is London if not a city of everyone and everything; and is this not something that makes it great?  To impose a culture on anyone or anything automatically implies the absolute superiority of any culture, and that I cannot accept.  And yet to watch the BNP at work… it reminds me of student union debates, in which everyone had to come armed with a battery of statistics and examples and figures plucked from who knew where to prove god knew what, sounding incredibly impressive until you noticed the lack of footnotes.

It would be politically correct of me to say that I respect people who hold other political views from mine.  And certainly, some I can; that which is supported by argument, by reason, that view which can hear the views of others, recognize the broader picture, base its views on evidence and understanding; that political view which has at its heart the needs of others, regardless of race, creed or colour, sure I can respect that – our political aims are the same, even if our methods for achieving all of the above are different.  But I see no sure sign that the BNP fulfils even this ambition, let alone holds methods I can respect.  So I guess that even if I can’t guarantee which party I’ll be voting for in the coming election, I can at least tick a few off the list.

Technically, if we’re going to wax literal about this, I was born in St.Bartholemew’s Hospital, Smithfields, the day after a nuclear disaster and a few months before the maternity ward shut down, and while this is not in Hackney, by dint of being within the sound of Bow Bells it does technically mean I’m supposed to be a cockney.  I mention this only because, as you might have guessed, dear reader, my syntax isn’t very cockney.  I am the product of my education, which was ridiculously academic, so don’t hold your breath if you’re looking for my blogger’s guide to rhyming slang; I’m just not your girl.  All this being so, Hackney is the borough where you were traditionally supposed to stumble on your cockneys, although you’re more likely to stumble on dialects of Farsi these days, and you’d probably have an easier time understanding if you did.

I guess I should start off by explaining the title of this blog – London Borough of Hackney.  I’m a dead proud Hackney girl, not least because there’s a snotty knee-jerk reaction that happens generally in London when you mention the borough’s name, a certain curling of the lower lip or, in some cases a cry of ‘but is that safe?’  The estate agents would probably tell me that I grew up on ‘Islington borders’ – in other words, I nearly practically grew up in a borough that is in every way considered brighter, better, cleaner, safer and basically nicer than Hackney.  However, I mildly resent this accusation, since I can’t help but notice that the people on the other side of the borough line never describe themselves as being in ‘Hackney borders’ so why should I return the compliment?

Let’s not beat about the bush, there’s plenty about Hackney that’s wrong.  The local council once had a reputation for being one of the most corrupt in Britain, although I think in recent years there’s been so many councils that they’ve been reluctantly forced to relent.  The bureaucracy remains fiendish, but this may just be a common local borough trait.  (Certainly none of the boroughs I’ve lived in since have exactly gone out of their way to make life easier.)  There are plenty of grotty areas; Hackney possesses both a very large number of council estates of the kind that were built with an ideal in mind and not much sociological reasoning, and poverty remains a quiet under-note for much of its busy streets.  It is not a place for Waitroses or Starbucks, but rather the streets of Hackney are ruled by pound shops and greasy spoons and I for one kinda cheer for this.  Hackney has a reputation for gun and knife crime; whether this is earned I’m not in the best position to judge; with guns and knives there are also drugs.  If you look, you can find all of the above; however my one weak comfort to those who cringe at this thought is that if you don’t go looking, it’s not going to seek you out either.

But!  With all this doom and gloom out of the way, let me explain why I remain a proud Hackney girl.  For a start, I challenge anyone to enter the borough and not be able to find something of anything.  It’s a great big sprawling place, with its southern border stopping at Old Street, nudged right up next to the Corporation of London, the oldest part of the city where the bankers do their business behind extremely polished glass while wearing very expensive ties.  Its northern border makes it to Tottenham, a place where inner city density and suburban sprawl fight tooth and claw for which will be the winner.  (Currently 0-0.)  At the eastern edge, Hackney meets Tower Hamlets, and at the bottom edge of Mare Street the lampposts are hung with banners proclaiming each borough to be superior to its neighbour, as if the daily inhabitants might somehow want to reconsider their place in life while jostling for the Central Line at Bethnal Green.  It is a mixture of old and new; grand Victorian terraces, black and white houses with sashed windows, sit opposite 1960s orange brick council estates and all shop at the same local newsagent.  Rather optimistic council initiatives, such as bright white offices and the perhaps ironically named ‘Ability Plaza’ sit bang smack next to the old-made-new, such as the Hackney Empire.  The Empire was resurrected a few years ago from a run-down music hall with barely a lick of paint left on its walls to a brilliant, bright new theatre with all the extravagance of its past brightened and raised up.  Throughout the year you can find panto, comedy shows, high drama, amateur dramatics and soap opera all being acted out in fairly even quantity at moderate prices.  The Empire itself sits at the top of Mare Street, which is the nearest thing to a main thoroughfare that Central Hackney lays claim to, a mixture of grand terraces turned into shops selling mysterious unnamed root vegetables and hairdressers specialising in bright nails and the Afro style.

The ethnic diversity of Hackney is one of its most notable features.  Halal butchers and telephone shops specializing in cheap calls and money transfers to Jamaica, Sudan and Pakistan are as common as parking fines, and in the bustling market at Dalston Kingsland you would have to be blind to not be able to find cassettes of the greatest hits of Trinidad, or love music from Bollywood on sale in between the fish and cheap clothes stalls.  It is as easy to buy a sari as it is a pair of sandals, pide is as cheap as pizza and baklava is the dessert of choice.  Council leaflets to all its residents come in a minimum of eight languages, and no self-respecting Hackney library would be without its foreign language and gay interest sections.  There’s a large Orthodox Jewish community in Stamford Hill, noticeable a mile off for their uniform of black fur hats and black coats, smart suits and skullcaps, clustered to the edge of the railway lines that run out of Liverpool Street towards the north; around Green Lanes there is a Turkish community who, when Turkey came 3rd in the Football World Cup some years ago, drove round and round with the roofs of their cars open and flags waving, much to the chargrin of the Cypriot and Armenian communities that live up towards Wood Green.  On Stoke Newington High Street, one Turkish supermarket has set up shop inside what was once a mosque, a building covered almost entirely in green and blue mosiac tiles, while towards Clissold Park you can find church sat opposite a synagogue with only a kebab shop and some rather over-enthusiastic traffic to keep them apart.  Towards Whitechapel you will struggle to miss the minarets of the Suleyman Mosque, but it is far easier to not notice the Regents Canal as you cross it on your way heading south, running from Camden, through Islington, slicing across Hackney and finally moseying out towards the Lee River Valley. It is a place of transitory immigrants, people passing through on the way to somewhere more stable, as well as a borough where the newly settled plant their first solid roots; you don’t have to look hard in Dalston or Clapton to find a wedding dress, first or second hand.

The density of buildings can often disguise secret patches of calm in Hackney as well.  Clissold Park, London Fields, Cambridge Heath, Bethnal Green and the sprawling marshy mass of Hackney Downs all seem to pop out between the buildings when you least expect them, a simple turn down a simple street like any other and bham, open grass and swings and people playing football badly.  Buses are the traveler’s means of choice in Hackney, almost entirely because it has barely a half dozen underground stations to claim as its own.  (Although all in the borough wait with baited breath to see what will happen to the East London and Crossrail projects, come the election…)  There are a few unlikely travel options available though… with the underground so dominant in north London, few really considers the potential of the mainline trains that chug out of Liverpool Street station and up the side of London Fields on route to the edge of the city, but they can illustrate with immense ease how a train can in ten minutes cover a distance that on foot would take an hour.  Likewise, there is the Overground railway, which has in its time been known by many names – ‘Silverlink Metro’, ‘North London Line’ or more often than not ‘you aren’t seriously thinking of taking that, are you’?  Recent years have improved on the Overground and it is now possible to get from Hackney Central to Camden on one train in one journey in roughly fifteen minutes without having to beat little old ladies over the head to do so.

So you see, when I say that I come from the London Borough of Hackney, I’m only giving its full name to make sure you understand… it’s not just any old place I grew up in…

In this modern time, the djinn naturally have adapted to the advent of urban magic, and the terminology has become rather vaguer as a consequence.  Certainly, there remain the desert spirits of old, rolling across the sands on wings of flame, but their urban cousins are a far more varied breed.  The djinn of the London underground, for example, exist as living winds that dance forever through the tunnels in the wake of the trains.  Only rarely are they spotted, as when a gust of wind catches a pile of discarded newspaper left on the platform and for a moment, as the pages are turned in the wind, there is a face, a shape that might almost be living, defined in old paper and air.  Their surface cousins can often be seen in the same way, in the plastic bags that get caught in the vents of air conditioning units and which turn, just very rarely, to take on the shape of a living thing.  Sometimes they are tricksters – your average djinn gets a ridiculously high level of pleasure from turning the umbrellas of commuters inside out, or from splitting open a briefcase and catching the papers within in a gale of wind.  Sometimes they are downright malign, pushing against the feet of travelers who are standing too close to the edge of the platform.  Occasionally, sometimes, they are protecting spirits, defenders in the night who tumble through the tight streets of the city on wings of airborn rubbish, paper and steam, watching over the early-morning travelers.

There are also tales of more exotic familiars that urban wizards have been known to acquire.  One witch was said to adopt a motorbike as her pet familiar, which would somehow manage to appear wherever she went regardless of whether she’d driven it there, as loyal as a pet puppy.  Needless to say, this resulted in a lot of parking fines, and was for that reason abandoned as being a rather foolish choice of animated pet.  A member of the Beggar King’s court managed to bond with his own fleas, turning them into a rather irritating weapon of choice that could at any given moment hop onto the backs of his enemies and annoy them to death; and it said that in Miami one rather reckless sorcerer adopted a baby crocodile as his familiar, only to discover that the tinned meat bill once his familiar reached adulthood was prohibitive.   Thus, while it can be said that having an animal familiar magically bound to you can be a useful tool for any self-respecting wizard, the advise always stands – call your local borough council first, and consider your budget before making any major mystical choices on the subject.

It’s one of Shakespeare’s sexy plays.  I mean, in narrative terms, we’re not talking about profound art.  The plot involves two sets of romantically dubious lovers, a gang of squabbling fairies and a magic potion, which should put any sane person on their guard immediately.  But the language is Shakespeare at his showing-off sexiest.  Frankly, the speeches where the fairies go about describing their environments and events and stuff that has happened is pretty much the Tudor era’s answer to the non-existence of lighting rigs – if you can’t do it with wattage, Mr Shakespeare seems to suggest, then damn well do it with words!

Which, naturally, as a writer I’m entirely cheering for, and as a lighting designer I have mixed feelings about.  I mean, sure, it makes it easier to create an atmosphere is the script is doing it for you, but the language is in its own way so sexy that it just kinda ups the stakes for the lighting designer to try and achieve the same level of magic as the words imply.  From a practical point of view, this often means that Midsummer Nights Dream is not cheap on haze fluid. 

We have yet to have a dress rehearsal… hell, I have yet to get my rig in the air and see if it even works… but it’s a cool play to light and, for that matter, a cool play to read, so, fingers crossed… watch this space…

Needless to say, some members of the urban magic community have come to realise the power of the yellow fluorescent jacket as a tool of magic.  It is the next best thing to an invisibility cloak, since while people will very much see anyone wearing it, they will often fail to perceive anyone wearing it, and thus it serves just as well when times are hard.  A few more cynical members of the magical community go one step further, arguing that this power has been corrupted for evil purposes, and there in fact exists a sinister society of men in yellow fluorescent jackets, who can access anywhere and see everything, to achieve an agenda unknown to those not garbed in their sacred uniform.  The ‘lovely pair of tits’ business is therefore, it is argued, not so much a manifestation of blokes being blokish, but in fact a secret code phrase used to identify members of this secret society to each other.

And let’s face it…

… there may be something to this.

This, combined with a rising concern about blood quality and personal hygiene in general, following the discovery that vampirism did not, in fact, render immunity to certain blood-borne diseases, has naturally inhibited the lifestyle of many otherwise merrily predatory vampires, as a victim of Seah’s Syndrome, while he or she may enjoy stalking their prey, will often have to conclude their hunt with a series of personal and probing medical questions before risking even a casual drink.

Once upon a time, in days of yore, the magic of the world lay in the land.  Wizards and witches walked the muddy paths between forests where the trees sang to each other and the water of the river whispered of mountains and seas; sorcerers sang and ivy grew, druids opened their fingers to the sky and the rain fell, and everything was, all things considered, pretty fine and dandy.  The dryads were scantily clad, the unicorns didn’t smell too bad, and the centaurs appreciated a good pint in the pub.  It was the time of classical magic, and at the heart of classical magic there was, hidden in fog and shadows but undeniably beating away, the Faerie Court, ruled by the Faerie Queen.  And she was beautiful, the most beautiful woman on the earth, one kiss of her lips enough to turn any man to her slave, one look from her eye enough to make mortals weep tears that turned to diamonds when they struck the earth.  She lived in the heart of the forest, a spirit of the wind and the earth, and all worshipped her, and all were afraid.

Then, as things will, the world changed.  Men discovered about iron and metal and steel and steam, and before you knew it there were railways and factories and roads and ships and empires and before you could say ‘where’d I put my sacred rowan branch?’ the wizards and witches of this world were discovering that actually, the spells they used to weave from lighting in the sky, they could now cast from electricity in the wires; and the gods that used to wear nothing but a well placed fig leaf over their private parts, now liked to dress up in denim, and that really all things considered, while no one would actually want to fly Easyjet, it still beat a freezing cold broom stick clamped between the thighs.  And so the Faerie Court began to wither and decline, its power fading as the magic went where the life was, moving to the city, until one day, it became no more than a shadow of the past, its glory withered to nothing.  And then one day, it vanished entirely.

Except…

… except shortly after the Faerie Court disappeared, rumours started of another Court.  A new Court, something different.  Rumours of a place in the heart of the city where the lights never went out, rumours of a woman too beautiful to look at, of a palace in Tokyo where the servants of this new court danced from dawn to dusk, and dusk to dawn, of music with a pounding bass beat that, once it was in your mind, would never leave.  Rumours of fashion magazines in which eyes of the models really, and quite really, did follow you round the room, of enchantments made in the back of fast cars.  Rumours of a new kind of faerie dust, of a dust breathed in on the air that fulfilled your every desire until suddenly, you had no more desires left to feel and just danced and danced and danced because that was all your body was capable of doing, until you too dissolved, and became dust on the air.  And in time, these rumours were given a name, and that name was Lady Neon.  Strange, everyone said, how quickly her enemies fell, and how easily she made new friends.  Remarkable how quickly people became accostomed to the idea of the Neon Court; almost as if it had always been there, or as if the Faerie Court had never quite gone away.

… watch this space.

I’ve read the 39 Steps… I enjoy it… it’s part of a series of books by John Buchan in which his hero, Richard Hannay, fights conspiracies and unearths deadly, usually German, plots involving military secrets and occasionally illicit uses of hypnosis.  And I promise you, the upper lip has never been stiffer.  Danger and daring-do are the words,  and if the works can be summarized in any way, it’s probably by the sentiment ‘oh jolly gosh, I seem to have been shot’.  Only much, much better than that.

The phrase ‘oh jolly gosh’, while I’m sure it never actually appears in the works of John Buchan, does seem to have been the idea that was seized upon by the powers behind the theatre adaptation of the 39 Steps, with brilliant results.  The play is a rip off of all things Hitchcock, performed by 4 actors in 40 hats and the strategically materialized arm of one ASM, with a set for which the word versatile was really created.  It is honestly hilarious, exciting and basically, at the end of the day, just tonnes and tonnes of fun.  And for £10 a throw, all I can really add to this is… GO!

… where was this?

… in short… it’s the end of another production week.  As per tradition, I’ve been Production Electrician on a play at RADA – this time, Measure for Measure by Mr Shakespeare the Dude.  And oh my goodness it’s been different from the last show.  The last play I was Prod LX on  – Company, by Stephen Sondheim – was an all singing, all dancing, hoola-hooping spectacular featuring more snazzy equipment in the rig than the retinas can comfortably conceive, as well as a range of American accents, jazz-club atmosphere and recurring themes on the value of knowing lost of people and getting married.  This time round, the set is quite literally made from a scrap yard, and all things are shades of black, white and steel grey, with interval music torn from the operas of Vienna and costumes cut to the early 1900s, complete with spectacles and a collection of spectacular moustaches.  And it’s really, really good.  I mean, obviously, I’m a bit biased, because I did a lot of the cabling for this show and thus have a certain sentimental attachment to it, but honestly, it’s really, really good.  If you knew what the set was made of you wouldn’t believe the things that it can become; the lighting is both dramatic and subtleplaying tricks on the eyes that again, you wouldn’t spot unless you’d been actively involved in rigging it, but which manages to make everything sort of glow and suggests times and feelings without ever screaming ‘this is so’.  The acting is absolutely brilliant – and as a techie it is my job to be automatically sniffy about any acting, but I kid you not, it’s grand – and all things considered, I am dead proud to have been a part of this play.

Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’.  It’s not a tragedy because no one snuffs it, and it’s not a comedy because, while in places it’s very funny, there’s not one set of identical twins to be found in it.  But yes, for those of you who are wondering, it does have a nun in it, and a Duke who pretends not to be a duke and a great deal of lusting and a riff about being hanged and a number of rather dubious cases of mistaken identity and a lot of chit chat about prostitution.  I mean, I’ve always been of the ‘come on guys, have a man with a gun come in’ school of narrative craft (as immortalized by Raymond Chandler!) but I gotta say, without any weapons of any kind getting flourished at any point, I was still sat in the front row being gripped through the dress rehearsals.  (Which isn’t bad for a dress rehearsal!)  You can sense intelligence dripping out of every word – my god, but the director is a bit clever!  It’s reached the point now where every time he speaks, my Assistant Lighting Designer grabs me by the arm and tells me to write it down because when he does speak, there’s such a great deal of casual intellect casually being brilliant that you can fairly much guarantee there’ll be something worth writing down as it happens.  I have never yet heard any other man inform his cast that actors must develop photo-tropism (in order to find their light!) or to request a lighting designer to make their cues less bi-phasic.  This is, for that matter, the first show I’ve ever worked on where the production desk, as well as having ridiculous amounts of chocolate on it, has a book on biological morphology lounging around between the toffee wrappers.

All in all… a fantastic experience!

That said… for all that snatches of birdsong heard when the traffic falls briefly silent cannot fail but to be evocative, the kind of feeling that gets evoked when that damn pigeon that’s decided my window sill is a fascinating place to coo in at 6.30 a.m. every damn morning, is probably best not put down in words.

Communism: The ultimate aim of the Communist Party of China is the realisation of communism.

Capitalist: remnant forces; see Imperialism.

Imperialism: is the monopoly stage of capitalism

Industrialization: bring about socialist industrialization.

Industrious: the brave and industrious Chinese people; run the communes in an industrious and economical way.

Intellectual: must integrate themselves with the workers and peasants.

Intelligent: the lowly are most intelligent; the elite are most ignorant.

Lead: Chairman Mao leads us from victory to victory.  A local poor peasant led the guerilla fighters through the forest.  In grasping revolution and promoting production, this commune lead the county.

Leadership: March forward heroically under the leadership of the Party.  Give correct leadership to the struggle.

Nuclear: smash the nuclear monopoly and nuclear blackmail of the two superpowers.

Propagandize: Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought.

Religion: the pursuit of super profit is a religion to the monopolists.

Revisionism: It is revisionism to negate the basic principles of Marxism and to negate its universal truth.

Revolution: revolutions are the locomotives of history.  The theory of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

To all and sundry who live/love London, visit here!

www.londonist.com

I mean it!

Go now!

It is a shameless plug for my Dad.

Now… as you may have gathered from previous posts, I come from, heaven help us, a family of writers.  We did not, by the way, set out to be a family of writers!  Oh no!  When I was 7 years old, in fact, my mother took me to one side and made me promise never, ever to be a writer.

‘It’s a ridiculous job.  Unreliable, badly paid, you never get out of the house enough… be a doctor instead,’  quoth Mum.

My Mum, whose professional name is Susan Moore for anyone wondering, has pretty much done it all.  Publisher, editor, novelist and ghost writer.  As a child, I liked the title ‘ghost writer’ the most – it had an aura of mystery about it, the sense that here was my Mum, secretly making the words of others better behind the scenes.  I learnt the secret of editing from her at a swimming pool when I was 10 years old.  Climbing out of the pool to get a towel, I found my Mum sitting on the side of the pool with a manuscript she’d been hired to edit and a pencil in her hand.  As I approached, she frowned at the page and then, with a single decisive stroke, crossed out the entire thing with a triumphant swish of blue pencil on messy page.

Saying this, my Dad has been the victim of some nasty editing… an entire chapter was struck by an over-enthusiastic editor from his biography of Douglas Adams, to much wailing in the house.  I’ve generally been very lucky with my editors, although will always cherish the editorial query I once received to a particularly fantastical bit of writing… ‘Are you sure that would happen?’  My Dad started writing after me, to my great delight.  A publisher since time began he’s always been the voice of steady commercial advise since I’ve been a kid.  When I was about 12 years old, he left publishing and by the time I was 18 he was writing.  What personality changes raced over him!  As a publisher, my Dad had always told me that authors are difficult, wingy, moaning gits.  As a writer he suddenly came to realise that 35 years of experience lied and in fact, authors were under-rated, misunderstood, underpaid and under-regarded lambkins tossed between the merciless hands of evil editors.  As Douglas Adam’s publisher, he was in a good position to write the official biography – feel free to flick through the photos, dear reader, to discover exactly what I mean when I say that as an 8 year old I had that haircut known as ‘mother did my fringe’.  He later went on to write the Dictionary of Bullshit and is in the process of publishing its updated version in expectation of the great surge of oily manipulation that will be the 2010 general election.   I am proud to report that I am the dedicatee of a dictionary of bullshit… as well as an avid contributor.

Anyway, point of all this is… my Dad is my Dad, and this is a shameless plug for his books, as is frankly, a good daughter’s duty as well as a sensible writer’s pleasure…

My favourite definition (reproduced without permission but in the fervant hope that my Dad won’t sue me)…

Growing as a person: This is Good.  Growing as something else would not be so good.

Here’s why….

RADA!  (Ate my life.)  We have been putting on a production of ‘Company’ by Stephen Sondheim which featured among its many lighting features… deep breath… UV cannons, mirrorball, 18 moving lights, 2 robocolours (thank you Royal Opera House), 1 glaciator (thank you National Theatre), 150m of festoon and 300 lightbulbs (thank you Sparks) two hazers, two wireless dimming lamps, twelve practicals and…

… and you know, a set, props, costumes, actors, musicians etc. etc. etc..

It’s been a little bit bonkers.  One of those experiences where you work 12 hours a day and then wake at 3 a.m. wondering what happened to supper.  Boritos!  How I have been dreaming of boritos!  Guacamole and grated cheese!  In the last weekend after the show went up, I’ve hardly stopped eating; it’s as if my body is attempting to compensate in 24 hours for the abuse of 15 days.  In an odd way, I haven’t really had any major, major jobs to do in the last two weeks, just a continual series of small jobs which have added up and added up until all I can dream about is DMX and the chorus line of ‘Side by side’.  (One of the camper moments in this otherwise surprisingly un-camp musical.  Glowing hula hoops?  Oh yes…)

And tomorrow, it all kicks off again, as we go into rehearsal for Measure for Measure where I am, again, you guessed it, Production Electrician.  But!  Prod LX for one of the coolest lighting designers in the country, on a play by Shakespeare The Dude, which so far promises to be nothing but an adventure from start to finish, so let’s keep those fingers crossed…

In other news, the Midnight Mayor publication date does indeed rush upon us.  Currently I’m a little bit concerned that I’ll be in a focus session on the great day itself (which is, in case you’re wondering, advertised on amazon.co.uk as 4th of March) but I herein solemnly swear that upon that day I will at the very least have a take away curry in celebration.  Lamb bhuna – is there anything in the world that lamb bhuna cannot make good?

It’s a peculiar thing being both a student and a writer at the moment.  At LSE it wasn’t something that really bothered me, since as a student I was in classes maybe 6 hours a week and the rest of the time I was reading, writing, in the theatre or with friends who cared as about as much for my literary exploits as they did for the Battle of Lepanto.  But at RADA, being a student is a relentless experience, a continual ritual that next to nothing is permitted to disrupt.  A phrase was thrown at me… ‘people who do lights professionally, take it seriously, live lighting’.  Well, here I am, taking lighting seriously, but live lighting?  I would no sooner live lighting than I would live writing, since both are equally important to me and, let’s face it, only one is paying my electricity bill.

There’s a lot to say about being a student at RADA, none of which I will say now!  It has its amazing moments, it has its absolute downers, (as radio 4 would put it… ‘and that’s like life…’) but I think all things considered, no matter how good or bad things are or may be or get, I’m ready to stop being a student now.