Continue reading »]]> I usually never write blog posts  when tired, but here I am.  It is the end of four days of utterly bone-breaking, exhausting work, but I figured this merits a few hundred words….

As readers will know, I’ve been working as lighting designer for Jekyll and Hyde – the Musical at the Union Theatre.  It’s been absolutely shattering work.  I think, in the last four working days (each one a 13-14 hour day of itself) I have had a grand total of 70 minutes off, spread across the duration.  Which is fine, because not only am I lighting designer, I’m the entire lighting department and therefore I figure it bothers no one except me.  And besides!  If you think I’m knackered, think of the set designer, who slept last night in the venue after another overnight painting session; or of the (absolutely lovely) video designer, who has spent the last three days glued almost continuously to a pair of screens, running on lucozade and adrenaline, and who stopped counting the number of times his system crashed last night after it hit fifteen in one session.  Perhaps you might spare a thought for the stage manager, who sat down to the show for the first time forty eight hours ago, and last night executed over two hundred and twenty cues, perfectly, without losing her cool; or for the cast, who sing their socks off for nearly three hours of constant music and movement.  Oh no – don’t imagine that I’m the only one running on jammy dodgers and nurofen…

The point of all this, if I can coax my brain to the conclusion, is this:

The production is stunning.

It’s very rare that I say something like that.  As a lighting designer, you work on a lot of shows, and not all of them can be gems.  You get very tired, and very stressed, and often the temptation is to turn around with a cry of ‘cold cover – up!’ and just leave it at that, and no one really seems to give a damn about your job, so why should you?  The temptation is especially heightened when you’re working with appalling equipment, attempting to create something unique with roughly the same amount of power that you’d use to keep your fridge running.  But Jekyll and Hyde is genuinely brilliant.

Let me add, that as a writer I have a few issues with the musical itself, but not the production I’ve worked on.  Whoever decided that rhyming ‘red’ with ‘red’, for example, or ‘life’ with ‘life’, clearly needed a few more days with a thesaurus.  And while music isn’t really my forte, I would suggest that more than three key changes in one song is arguably two too many, that Americans should not attempt to write Cockney, and that yes, man is both evil and good and arguably you shouldn’t go around making such sweeping statements without really considering the semantic implications. As someone who spends a large part of my time writing about characters who are not only confused about their identity, but often about which pronoun they should use for themselves, I do question whether Robert Louis Stephenson imagined his work in musical form… then again, can I imagine mine?

(I think a paragraph break here, while we all take a moment to do precisely that.  Are you imagining it?  Then shame on you…)

Let me also add that as a lighting designer, I am genuinely astonished to discover that with only twenty three active channels and some kindly loaned, very cheap, LEDs, I came away from last night’s run with only nine pages of notes that I need to look at, and possibly my greatest source of pride is the fact that the dimmer packs didn’t explode.

All this said, whatever the words occasionally lack, the production more than makes up for.  And – and I’m astonished to discover myself writing this – a huge, huge part of that lies with the direction and, especially, the cast.  It’s so rare that you look at a company and not only think ‘wow, no weak links’ but also think ‘Jesus, they’re all brilliant!’  I’ve lit opera and musicals before, but I gotta admit, the combination of singing and acting on this is something else.  Despite knowing every detail of the show, almost down to the precise wattage being drawn in every moment happening on stage, there were moments in our first preview when even I was just stunned by how good the cast were.  (Although!  If anyone who reads this blog sees the show, can you please let me know what you consider ‘respectable’ sorrows to be?  Landed with a higher band tax bill, perhaps?  Scratch on the volvo?  Personal writerly bugbear there, just saying…)  As for the bloke who plays Dr Jekyll (and his less pleasant half), I genuinely didn’t know a pair of lungs could do that, and even if they could, I had no idea that it was possible to act at the same time.  My horizons have been broadened.

My CV as a lighting designer is steadily growing, but this blog, being as it is for the scribbler part of my profession, is kept deliberately light of praise for productions I’m working on.  Let, therefore, my praise here be an indication of just how genuinely impressed I was by what I saw last night.  It’s one of the few shows which I will genuinely say I am proud to have been a part of, and will happily watch again, even if I wasn’t still trying to find a way to coax the LED dimming curve into something less obnoxious than it currently is…

Continue reading »]]> I HATE KINDLES!

So readers of this blog will already know some of this.  Kindles!  What a lovely idea.  A world of literature on the go, the future of books, an infinity of possibilities, cheap, accessible, reasonably environmental and so on and so forth; what a lovely idea the kindle is.

But!

Columns!  It can’t do friggin’ columns!  And as readers of the Minority Council will now know, columns are really useful!  (For those who haven’t read the Minority Council, that particular notion won’t make much sense until you do… and then it really, really will…)

And now, something else to make me LOATHE kindles so far that emphatic capital letters actually seem like a perfectly rational grammatical norm!  Which is a big thing for me!

So my Dad had a kindle.  And the kindle was something bequeathed to my Mum.  It was loaded up with exciting books, all sorts of groovy stuff, and getting it transferred over to my Mum wasn’t actually that hard.  Well, I say that… I needed to create an amazon account for my Mum, and send in a copy of a death certificate to make amazon believe that all was as I said it was, but still…

However, it turns out, that while the kindle itself can be transferred without too much difficulty, the actual books on it, can’t be.  Amazon refuses.  When the owner of the kindle dies, so does the content – including books my Mum was half way through reading.  It’s a notion that just strikes some bitter, literary part of me.  Books are a fantastic gift, and more than that – they are one of the few gifts which we delight in handing down from generation to generation, the sums of our knowledge, an expression of who we were, what we enjoyed, the tales we appreciated and the lives we led.  Is that to cease?  What happens when all our books are online, when there’s no paper whatsoever, and amazon decides to wipe the bookshelves clean of every person who dies?  We live in a society where we by things that don’t exist, summoned into being out of the air… and back into the air, it seems, is where they go at the earliest opportunity, just bits of data with a passcode attached.  Am I the only one who finds this idea utterly, utterly horrific?  Give my family back my father’s books!

Continue reading »]]> Here we are, then.  Last run before we go into the rig.  At this stage in proceedings, my draft 1 plan (which has been beautifully updated since this photo was taken) looks like this…

And my notebook looks like this…

Traditionally, also, as an LD, I tend to sit at production tables which look like this…

And I usually end up with notes at the end of the show which look like that…

There’s only one thing I can really conclude from all this.  I’m just kinda messy.

(As a footnote… a function which annoyingly blogging doesn’t really cover… I feel I oughtta add that there’s a short Q&A what I answered about the show I’m currently lighting, what you can see at the website below, if such should interest you!)

http://stagewon.co.uk/news/view/feature-the-road-to-jekyll-getting-to-know-catherine-webb-may2012/

Continue reading »]]> Oh dear.  I am a really terrible writer, it turns out.  (Don’t all rush to agree, by the by.)  I mean, sure, I love writing.  And I can churn out words at a reasonable rate, and hopefully they’re reasonable words, but ask me to talk about writing?  And it all falls to pieces.

Hitting the very, very basic stuff, I still struggle with nouns, adjectives, adverbs and so on.  I’ve heard of conjunctions and can just about work them out based on a not-very-high deductive process.  I’ve vaguely got adverbs but still get them mixed up sometimes, and when people talk about suiting the word to the action, the action to the word I really do just go to pieces like a Danish prince faced with a chilly funeral feast.  Studying Mandarin (which I have been doing for six years, on and off, from a book, with minimal success) only deepens the realisation that I don’t know crap about language.  The explanatory sections discussing sentence structures are impenetrable to me, even in English, and I couldn’t get past chapter eleven (‘Grammar Review’) without sitting down with an old school friend who teaches English as a foreign language, and getting her to explain what it all meant.

Copy editorials – something I’ve done now for thirteen novels – only go to further expose how flagrantly I abuse language.  It’s not simply that I’ve had to turn off Microsoft Word’s infuriating spellcheck/grammar function (‘FRAGMENT!’), but innocent editors are inflicted with an approach towards paragraphing, capitalisation and colloquial language which is so gung-ho as to be practically gunk.  The Tribe talk entirely in txt tlk, a process which was as painful for me to write as I’m sure it was for my editor to read.  Many characters  strut onto the page with a merry cry of ‘oi, so like, yeah, it’s so like, totally thingy to be here!’ and their language deteriorates from there; even the most restrained characters, the ones who have years of experience in framing their sentences nicely, will quite often receive enough abuse that their language breaks down into basic bits, as their grasp on reality deteriorates.  Matthew Swift, one of my principal narrators, switches between ‘I’ and ‘we’ so often it’s a wonder he doesn’t just give up and spend the entire book talking about ‘they’ in the hope that, if nothing else, it’ll give a certain consistency to his life.

And even though, arguably, it all works, and it makes sense for the Tribe 2 tlk lik dis and for Swift’s narrative voice to divide and coalesce like fireflies in a hurricane, if I am asked to explain why and how, I am left only with this one, appalling answer: because it is right.  Because it is how it should be, how it must be, what makes sense.  How do I know when Swift is an ‘I’ and when he is a ‘we’?  Answer: I have no idea.  I just know.  It’s what would happen.  It’s an appalling answer, about as literary as bannister, but it’s also true.  And the unfortunate director I work with sometimes on playwriting, must have nightmares about dealing with me, as he does understand language and how you’re meant to talk about it, and we end up having terribly cross-purpose conversations.  It feels like he’s speaking English… it feels like I’m speaking English… and yet the manner in which we express the same ideas about language are so entirely remote as to be almost impenetrable.  He talks of plot, narrative, structure, conflict, expression and arc.  I speak of colour, texture, sound, rhythm and push.  We are basically saying the same things, he and I, and tend to agree; it’s just that we don’t know it yet.

And yet, I know I can change my ways, if I want to.  Back in school, when my teachers decided to inflict the horror that was English Literature A-Level on me, I struggled hugely for the first few months.  ‘Why does Jeremy cross the road, and what does this say about streets in 1850s novellas?’ the exam question would ask and, as a writer, I’d sit there screaming, ‘because he does cross the road!  Because that’s what he has to do!  Because he needs to get to the other side!!’ and, rather predictably, I’d get a C.  My consistently low grades led me to realise that the last thing the A-Level exam board wanted, was for a writer to write about writing, and so instead, I invented the personality of a critic to write my essays for me.  Her name was Petunia, she lived in Hampstead, drove a Volvo, had two very large, very soppy dogs, and was unmarried.  I knew every detail about the life and character of Petunia, and by adopting her voice whenever I wrote an English Literature question, I managed to push my marks straight back up into A grades.  ‘Why did Jeremy cross the road?’ the question would ask, and in would step Petunia to reply, ‘because the road is symbolic of the gulf between what is expressed, and what is felt, in Jeremy’s subconscious mind.  The road is metaphor.’  Indeed, it seemed that the more I pushed the voice of Petunia into parody, the better the grade I received.  ‘The road is not only metaphor,’ Petunia would explain, ‘but it is symbolic of the perpetual gulf between man and woman, embodied as they are in the ice cream cart parked on the other side of the street.’

So it turns out, I can write about writing, if I absolutely have to.  The problem is, I simply can’t do it as me…

Continue reading »]]> (Not my sexiest post title ever, but there it is…)

Oh the things I do for theatre!  As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m lighting designer for Jekyll and Hyde the Musical, and in honour of this I have spent the last few weeks begging, borrowing, stealing, wheedling, coaxing, cajoling and in fact doing every illicit deed I could up to but not quite including indecent acts to try and get my hands on useful equipment.  It’s just one of the simple truths of the trade – as a lighting designer you might have dazzling ideas, brilliant insight, a borderline philosophical grasp of the nature of the piece you’re working on, but none of this don’t matter shit if you can’t get 240V to every lantern in the rig, and your lighting desk doesn’t want to turn on.  More than nearly every other department, lighting is limited by the technology available.  And yes, even as I write this I can hear the distant, lingering voice of the head of technical training from my time at RADA whispering in my ear… it’s not about the equipment you have, young Catherine… it’s about what you do with it… but be that as it may, when what you’ve got to do with it is light nearly thirty different locations, more than twenty different songs and create atmospheres which range from the scintillating to the suicidal, I dunno, a bit of decent equipment might help.

But then again…

“So yeah, you’ll need a demux to get your DMX to the PMX but you may have to re-wire your DINs because if they were going to Zero88 then the pin 1 and 2 will be reversed onto 7 and 8 so you’ll need to make converters if you ever wanna use that desk ever again.”

These words were spoken to me in all sincerity as part of my epic quest to get all the various bits of kit I’ve been blagging to talk to each other, and god help us, after several days of research I even understand what it means.  I had no idea I could spend this much time getting to know different cable protocols, or spend so long worrying about analogue/digital conversion.  I didn’t realise I could be so shameless in blagging favours off friends, colleagues and even complete strangers, or that something as simple as plugging a lighting desk into a dimmer rack could require such epic amounts of soldering or cost so much.  When lighting West Side Story, the challenge was keeping all the information I needed in my mind.  Between myself and my programmer, we kept track of over two hundred and fifty lanterns, each one with its own unique function, as well as a bundle of moving lights, a massive stage covered with massive pieces of scenery and so many cues that the longest I had between each one was about fifty five seconds, and that was considered a luxury.  With Jekyll and Hyde the task is almost completely different – not only will I know every one of of my limited lanterns intimately, I could probably invent names and life stories for every damn parcan.  No – the difficulty with this show is not keeping track of what I’ve got in the air, but making sure every single unit I have is rigged perfectly, one light doing the job of ten.  It is what I believe is known as ‘a challenge’.  But oddly enough, one which I think may well be worthwhile…

Continue reading »]]> So the Mayoral Election is over, and the vote is being counted.  And who is London choosing between?  A blond baboon and a shriveled newt.  Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone have been slugging it out over the last few weeks for who’ll be the next Mayor of London, and what an ugly, stupid, infuriating battle it has been.  Since when – but since when, oh lord? – were all our politicians so repugnant?  I find it hard to believe that a single one of the bunch, with the possible exception of the odd independent candidate who doesn’t stand a chance, believes in anything else but their own vainglory advancement, power and righteousness. The last time we got to vote for the London Assembly, I voted for Ken Livingstone because I thought he genuinely cared about the welfare of the city; this time I find it hard to believe that he cares for anything other than beating Boris, a man who quite probably won the last election because, and how this horrifies me, people thought he was funny.  Not necessarily witty in his own right, but a bit of a comic figure to look at.  I don’t want a clown in charge of my city!  Have we forgotten the 2011 riots?  Was I the only one watching when this man went down to Clapham, picked up a random broom from the street and babbled about youth and people and how it wasn’t right, only for the locals to harangue him as the pompous ass he was?

And let’s also take a moment to consider the other candidates in the field.  Since when, Christ!  Since when did the British National Party, an organisation which stands for such time honoured British cultural traditions as Morris dancing, bad food, imperialism, repression and hating the French (or indeed anyone who speaks in a funny accent) even bother to field a candidate for Mayor?  A party which would re-introduce corporal punishment for both criminals and children, abolish the Human Right’s Act (because it protects ‘scroungers’), roll back multiculturalism (because god knows things are easier when people don’t talk to each other or respect each other’s point of view), and which seems to believe that strict physical education and Christian assembles are the way forward in failing schools!  Why is UKIP even in existence any more; and Christ!  But Christ why am I also being asked to vote for a party whose main priority is the ‘Traditional Christian Value of Marriage’, five words which are regularly deployed in politics not with a footnote of ‘seriously guys, wouldn’t it be great if all married couples could just get on with each other?’ but are rather rolled out every time with a cry of ‘oh my god, guys, why do guys want to get on with other guys that’s just so wrong!’

And if you think it’s just London elections where there’s a feeling of banging-your-head-against-a-wall, just look nationally!  David Cameron – aptly described by BBC comedians as ‘the human teletubby’ – has rolled over every expert voice that could have been raised against him when it comes to policy making with a cry of, ‘nope!  I’ve got an ideology so damn your expert opinions!’  And yet if you go looking for an alternative, there’s Ed Milliband, humanity’s answer to the herring.  The Lib Dems – god, you have to remind yourself even to think about the Lib Dems, they’re such a vapid, useless waste of space, while up North Alex Salmond is hoping around the Scottish borders with a cry of ‘I want to be Prime Minister of Scotland, I want it I want it I want it even if it doesn’t make sense I want it now!’

So who, in this field of useless pillocks, slimey manipulators and ideological buffoons did I vote for, you might wonder?  Why, I did what all guilt-struck liberals did in the face of their political leaders’ inadequacies.  I threw away my vote, and voted Green on all ballots.

Continue reading »]]> So yes!  I think Urban Magic 4 (The Minority Council) might finally be out in the US!  I mean, I’m not sure.  I don’t have any objective evidence for myself.  But I’ve got a definite suspicion that it is finally on American shelves, after MONTHS of waiting.  I hope, for all the American readers out there, that it was worth the wait…

Continue reading »]]> As it’s now been in a few newspapers and people have started noticing, I figured that my remaining silent here was now rather silly.

My Dad, Nick Webb, died a few weeks ago in hospital.  He hadn’t been ill much beforehand, so it was a bit of a shock, but then, Dad would have hated the idea of it being slow.  You can read proper (and very true) obituaries on the BBC and in the Guardian or Times, but for here, and now, let me say that my Dad was the kindest, most generous father a girl could have wished for.  He loved and was deeply loved, cooked a damn good steak and kidney pie, worried about the curvature of space and put up incredibly wonky curtain rails.  He was also a purveyor of varied and frequently very long jokes, so in this spirit, if anyone wishes to comment on this subject, please leave jokes, the sillier the better, as he would appreciate that thought more than any other.

Continue reading »]]> A new day, a new play.  Actually, two new plays, both of which I feel positive enough about to actually name.

My day started with a meet and greet for a production of Jekyll and Hyde the Musical, at the Union Theatre.  It was ostensibly billed as ‘read through’ but frankly, most of the thing is sang anyway, and if there’s one thing more painful than actors who don’t yet know what they’re doing stammering their way through a piece of prose, it’s actors trying to get feeling out of un-sung lyrics.  So instead, the entire cast, ‘creative team’ (of which I’m, as lighting designer, a part) and technical team (stage management, production management and technicians) assembled in the Union Theatre, near Waterloo, for pastries, coffee and a chat through the show.  And what a show will be.  As I write this, I have the soundtrack running pretty much on a loop next to me, to remind myself of just what I’ve got into.  As a lighting designer on a musical, a lot of your job is providing atmosphere and lifting up certain moments; however there are also one or two numbers where you’re really obliged to let rip with every trick you have in the book, which in a theatre beneath a Victorian railway arch can be harder than you’d think.

But!  All that said, it’s rare to meet a creative and technical team (and for that matter, a cast!) who inspire you with such confidence.  The room was swimming with people, and as we went round introducing ourselves I was thrilled by just how many experts in their field had been assembled for the occasion, and how far advanced so much of the planning already was.  Lighting, in fact, is often one of the hairier departments, in the sense that no matter how good your planning, you only get to test it with anywhere between four days and four hours to go before the show opens.  Still, it’s a good sign when your set designer opens the morning with a cry of, ‘Cat!  Have a pastry!’ before building up to the really important business of the day, such as how to create the atmosphere of a brothel without being cliched, and the best way to suggest a man being pulled apart by a…

… well, you’ll have to see for yourself what the man is pulled apart by, really…

The evening was then a read through for the other play I’m working on, A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg, at the Lighthouse Theatre in Poole.  Again, read through turned out to be a bit of a fib, as it was myself, the director and the two lead actors sat around a table talking about the easiest way to put up a thorough and interesting rig in a very short time space, and whether it’s really humanly possible to do a go0d lighting design with three hours to spare?  (Answer = not really.  But then the key lies in the use of the word ‘good’.)  Sadly, there weren’t any pastries at this particular event, but neither were there detailed discussions about the best kind of blood to use on what type of painted surface, so I guess it’s a swings-roundabout kinda situation.  Unlike Jekyll and Hyde, I got into this production through the usual situation of knowing one of the cast – it’s still rather rare that the acting/technician boundary gets blurred between professional/friendship, and I had to spend a certain amount of the first rehearsal resisting the urge to steal my mate’s glasses or replace the contents of his wallet with comic faces drawn on the backs of of his business cards.  I hasten to add, I am a very professional LD 99% of the time – it takes a lot of time and a great deal of trust between myself and my fellow professionals before I am actually willing to turn round and stick my tongue out at them in response to a creative query.  Which, ironically, is almost the kind of relationship you are looking for in theatre, in the sense that a truly great creative team, functioning at its very best, should be so much on board with each other’s ideas that you don’t even need to say what you need.  Take, for example, my favourite set designer, Katie Lias, who I’ve worked with enough now that she doesn’t even need to do a sharp intake of breath, doesn’t even need to twitch more than an eyebrow and you instantly know that she thinks this is under-lit and that is the wrong colour and do you mind awfully fixing it please?  It sounds too good to be true, but after a while, that is how involved you can get in a production…

As for Jekyll and Joe Egg, while I feel very confident about them both, time may change that situation… watch this space….

Continue reading »]]> There was a form I had to fill out at college, which asked you to self-assess various aspects of your nature.  They were:

Communication Skills, Team Work, Work Ethic, Technical Skills, Health and Safety.

What happened was this: at the end of every six week rotation in college, studying something like construction or wardrobe, your tutor would write up a report assessing what he or she thought of you in these various areas.  Fair enough.  Sometimes the report would be very useful, pointing out skills you might want to work on, or errors you hadn’t noticed yourself make.  Sometimes it was rather more inept, written by tutors who had barely seen you work and even if they had, couldn’t remember your name. And all the time, no matter what, you, as a student, had to fill out a copy of your own, explaining how you felt you’d done in these areas.  And the students, myself included, all loathed them.  The problem seemed to be that there was no way to win.  If, for example you wrote:

“Work Ethic: I believe I worked to the best of my ability and displayed a good attitude towards my work at all times.”  (You had to squeeze a minimum of 60 words out of each category, I hasten to add….)

Then the reply would be, “You think you worked hard, did you?  Perhaps your view of how hard you work is a rather naive one.  Perhaps you don’t realise how much harder you should work, how much harder you could work, how little you in fact worked at all!  What is this attitude problem you have here?”

Alternatively, you might put:

“Communication Skills:  I feel that I didn’t communicate at all well with my team.  We argued a lot and never understood what the other person was saying.”

Then of course the reply was: “Why do you think this about your communication skills?  I hope you’re not trying to impress us by being overly modest, because you’re really letting yourself down with this attitude you have.”

Now, let me at this point say that I am all up for a little self-reflection occasionally.  I keep a diary to this effect, and am, I think, a reasonable critic of my own affairs and genuinely try, even if I don’t always succeed, to take on board what other people say, and generally conduct myself in a way which, if nothing else, does no harm to others and potentially expands my skills and knowledge.  That at least, is the aspiration.  However, I am not a fan of taking this to silly levels.  Perfection would be an incredibly dull thing to meet in human nature, and arguably it’s the foibles in people that makes them endearing, interesting and unique.  No one can spend every single hour of the day being kind, generous, wise, learned and caring for kittens without going insane.  To put it bluntly, even the Pope farts in church after a dish of baked beans; that’s life.

Now, perhaps one or two people found these forms useful, but generally the pattern seemed to be that the people who were most receptive to changing themselves were invariably the ones who criticized themselves too harshly in their self-assessment, and actually had their confidence dashed by the need, the pressing need, to sit down and proclaim, ‘I did this, this and that wrong, and must try better’.  Simultaneously, the few people in my year who really needed a little self-reflection inevitably wrote glowing entries about themselves, and blithely dismissed the criticisms of others as prejudiced or ignorant.

I must admit, at its worst, the forms put me in mind of an (incredibly distant) echo of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when ‘enemies of the people’ were forced to write self-confessions laying out their sins to a judging crowd – a crowd specifically determined to be unimpressed, regardless of the content.  It was something that happened in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Stalin’s Russia, and while I am in no way comparing my time at college to any of these regimes in the slightest, as for the most part my time was superb and the pastoral care from my head of course was many times a live-saver, in this case you couldn’t help but think about the very easy shift that can happen between self-assessment, and self-humiliation.  Humanity is a proud species, and to be forced once every six weeks to sit down and say ‘I am wrong, I did this wrong, I am weak, I failed at that’ is a bitter, horrible pill for anyone, however strong, to swallow.  In a way, writing it down just made it worse, as a record was slowly accumulated in files of ‘I didn’t achieve’ and ‘I could not do’, scribbled over and discussed at length by your tutors as they picked apart every aspect of your soul in a secret, closed session held upon high.

The Catholic Church had one thing right, I think, when handling such matters.  Confession – which in a way this sort of academic soul-searching was – is hugely personal, hugely private, hugely difficult.  It is most honest, and most meaningful when held between two people who trust each other entirely, in full confidentiality and comprehension.  And to attempt to institutionalise self-reflection in such cold, formal terms, without understanding the human need for faith and understanding, seems like a cruel twist on one of mankind’s oldest and most difficult battles; that of knowing itself.

Continue reading »]]> So this is a new and interesting experience.  I’ve never done a sponsored… well, sponsored anything before, really, and I’ve certainly never asked anyone who wasn’t a close family friend or who hadn’t just lost at chess to me to participate… but!  That said, I am, on June 13th, 2012, running a 5k Race For Life in aid of Cancer Research UK in Battersea Park.  And if anyone here DID feel like sponsoring me, well, all I can say is that every penny is going to a fantastic cause and it’d be a good deed all round.  I am going to aim to run the entire thing (I can currently do 2.5k and am going out running tomorrow morning with my mate to see if we can break the 3k barrier!) and while using my blog for fundraising purposes seems somehow… I dunno… not very literary… the cause is so good that I figure, to hell with it!

https://www.raceforlifesponsorme.org/catherinewebb667

I guess I should explain at this juncture, that of all the charities I could be running for, I’ve kinda chosen this one for personal reasons.  It’s a dubious motivator to pick a charity by, in the sense that the ice caps will still be melting and wars will still be raged quite regardless of my personal experience, but I figured a few days of my time and a lot of sweat are a low cost to pay for something which is quite personal to me.  (I hasten to add at this juncture, that I also support the Red Cross and Friends of the Earth as, while the ice caps aren’t melting personally on me, they really still are melting.)

However, in the last few years, I’ve seen close family members suffer from cancer, and more than anything else, it is a disease which eats people up from the inside out.  Not merely in medical terms – medically speaking it kinda does exactly that – but also emotionally, even spiritually.  It is an unseen poison that grows inside the body, no outward signs of the disease necessarily, but a constant gnawing awareness of this ugly thing gobbling up beneath the flesh.  Its treatment is prolonged, painful, and far too frequently no guarantee of life.  Chemotherapy is particularly savage.  For the first few days after a shot, most patients feel fine; then the nausea hits, and nausea is in many ways much harder to control than pain.  Then cramps, that dead dull pain that reaches all the way down to the ends of your legs; skin grows red and thin, gums bleed, hair falls out (as we all know) and your immune system becomes compromised to the extent that standard NHS advice is not to take public transport during most of this time.  And just as you start to feel slightly better… you get the next shot of chemo.  It is a kind of prison sentence, is cancer – a prison built by the treatment, of a chemo-compromised immune system, of time spent in distress, of a disease which can’t necessarily be seen – and more than anything, it’s this which, I personally believe, saps the soul.

So as I said, if anyone reading this wishes to sponsor me – or indeed my running buddy, Ele, or in fact anyone liable to do anything worthwhile on this theme – then please follow the link above.  As for how the actual training and run goes itself… watch this space…

Continue reading »]]> Oh, but these made me happy…

I was going to, at this point, discuss the pros and cons of street art, but to be honest, I struggle heavily to see that many cons.  I am fully aware of the fact that a lot of the painting done on our streets is illegal, and cannot therefore fully condone it simply in the sense that the law is a social binding which must be obeyed, otherwise things really kinda go to pot.  I’m aware that a lot of the street art you can find is mediocre, and why should we have our buildings adorned with it?

Then again… my cultural horizons are currently inflicted by horrors such as Eastenders, by bad films, mediocre writing and works of art that are commissioned for huge amounts of money and which are, frankly, not my cuppa tea.  Whereas some of the street art you can find today, spreading round the world, is vibrant, interesting, often politically pointed or socially aware, and of course, free to view for the passer-by!  And I love it.  I think good street art can liven up a dull bit of wall, protest against an idea in often subversive and occasionally funny days, and if nothing else, add a certain sense of ‘what the hell’? as you pass down a familiar way to work.

Continue reading »]]> I haven’t posted for a while, and as always, this is because I’ve been in a technical rehearsal and unbelievably busy.  But!  At long last I’m back at the wordface, and figured I’d take this time to say what I’ve been working on, and to add that actually, I think it’s very good.  It’s a play called the Dark Room, at the New Diorama Theatre, near Euston.  It was bloody difficult to light, mind you, but all things considered… I’m mostly pleased with the effect!  And oh yes, the writing and directing are damn good too!  It’s lovingly based on a play by Brecht, who is a writer I have yet to fully get to grips with, but it’s so full of energy and enthusiasm and humour that frankly, you’d only really know if you were looking closely…

http://www.newdiorama.com/whats-on-at-new-diorama.aspx?id=120

Continue reading »]]> “Come to Streatham and fly kites!” said a man known as TLC.  And so myself and my Chess/Swimming Buddy did!

I’ve not got much understanding of South London.  I know that it exists – not only that, I know that it exists for far too many miles beyond the southern bank of the Thames than you’d have thought comfortably possible.  I know that it’s hard to get to, and even harder to leave once the trains begin to slow.  I know that on a Sunday if you miss the connection from Balham to Streatham Common, you do so at your peril, and that at 10.58, even if the shop opens at 11 a.m. and your train leaves at 11.02 precisely, the Balham Sainsburys will not sell you a slice of lemon cheesecake for love or money.  (Mostly money.)

I know that, once upon a time, you could buy a pizza topped with Chinese-style shredded duck, spring onions and plum sauce from a pizza shop near Streatham High Street, and it was amazing.  I know that Tooting is a place for amazing curries, but heaven forfend that rash soul who strays beyond Tooting, as the Northern Line quickly vanishes into nothing and before you know it, you’re stuck on Mitcham Common wondering why.  I did not know that flying kites on Streatham Common could be both so much fun, and such hard work… after an hour of trying, we’d barely got it airborne, but we had succeeded in an extraordinary number of crash landings…

Continue reading »]]> I used to hate the half.  The half, as it is called, is that mysterious moment thirty five minutes before a show goes up in a theatre, when stage management come onto the intercom and tell everyone to stop lounging around, get their boots on and generally start planning for a show.  Actors get into costumes; ushers start lining the doors of the auditorium; stage crew do one last sweep; stage electricians check that the lights are indeed still turning off and turning on appropriately, and no one’s left a floodlight plugged in somewhere foolish.

For the rest of us – follow spot operators and programmers who’s systems are already fully working – the half is that moment when you slump down into a sofa in the crew room, in full knowledge that there’s no point trying to start something new as, before you know it, it’ll be the quarter, then the five, then beginners, and then you’ll have to work for three hours of high drama.  And so, with little else to do, and already pretty worn out from the day, you turn on the TV and go searching for a program to watch whose duration is precisely half an hour, in the hope that by the time you have to grab your headtorch and go do that theatre thing, the final credits will just about be rolling.

And this is why I used to hate the half.  On good days, you’d get the Simpsons – which was fine by me.  But for months on end, it seemed that TV at the half was dominated by electricians watching Friends.  I don’t think anyone enjoyed it, I don’t think anyone got anything from the experience, but every day at 7 p.m., there it was, on the TV, the half hour long episode of shallow people leading uninteresting lives to the sound of tinned laughter, and I just hated it.  Although, if I thought Friends was bad, that was nothing compared to matinee shows where, god help us, at 2 p.m. every matinee day, the TV would be on for an episode of Doctors, a show of no discernible merit whatsoever.  Why, I wondered, but why oh why did I waste the thirty minutes before a show, sitting in a stupor on a sofa suffering in this way?  Why did I let it happen?  I tried reading, but it’s so hard to read over the sound of canned laughter.  I tried going elsewhere, but with the auditorium filling and the canteen closing, there’s really no where else to go, nor time to do much else than stomp down to the vending machine and get a cup of water.

And then… one perfectly ordinary day… a miracle struck.  Friends suddenly stopped, and The Big Bang Theory replaced it on the screens of the lighting department’s crew room.  I remember the first time I saw it, looking up from the book I’d been failing to read with a sudden moment of ‘good god, a joke about particle physics!’  I looked suspiciously round the room to see if anyone else had noticed this, and on the realisation that not only had my colleagues noticed, but they were chuckling, I finally glanced at the TV, expecting to be horrified by what I saw, and saw… well, not to put two fine a point on it, four men arguing about physics, food and Star Wars.

And it was funny.  More than funny – it was intelligent, witty, well-observed, funny.  It was a celebration of nerd, a rock concert in honour of geek, what Friends might have been if Friends had been set in a science fiction store.  So now, I no longer live in dread of the half.  The half, in fact, is a time of joy and relief for me, a great opportunity to sit down before a stressful show and enjoy half an hour of bottled scientific comedy, three words I never thought would ever really go together in a sentence.  The only problem left in my day, in fact, is this… can we push the opening of the play I’m working on back to 7.32 p.m. instead of 7.30?  I keep on missing the last two minutes of every episode I see…

Continue reading »]]> This isn’t actually a post about the Tube – the underground network in London – but rather, for the first, and probably the last for a long time in my career, a link to a documentary about the Tube itself, for anyone who can access BBC iPlayer.  I almost never link to active links elsewhere on the net, but this is so interesting, and the Tube itself so fascinating, that just this once, I shall forgo my own principals!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01cl522/The_Tube_Episode_1/

Continue reading »]]> Spring has come to London, at long last.  I cannot say how relieved I am.  I am plagued by poor circulation for six months of the year, and finally, at long last, I can stop worrying about my fingers turning blue.  Leaves are coming out on the trees, the cherry blossom is starting to bloom, and in odd corners of the city, urban gardeners are finally starting to do their thing…

Continue reading »]]> The downside about trying to take photos during a dress rehearsal, is that you’re usually too busy adjusting intensities and moves during the complicated bits, to actually get very good photos.  But!  In a spirit of ‘oh hell here we go’ here are some of the photos from West Side Story, the Show That Ate My Life… the set is by Elroy Ashmore, and the entire thing was a triumph for King’s School Canterbury.  Enjoy!

Continue reading »]]> It’s taken me four seasons of Being Human to grudgingly concede that I enjoy it.  I can’t quite put my finger on what it is about this particular season which has finally broken me, inducing me to come out of a corner and admit that, despite everything, Being Human is pretty damn good.

Let’s face it, it has so many elements I ought to hate.  It’s got vampires (boo) who have either embraced their bloodlust up to the point of deciding that they’re going to take over the world (why?!  Surely the paperwork would be immense?), or are busy being tormented by their very blood-spattered natures.  It’s got werewolves fighting their animal nature, and ghosts longing for a little participation and comfort in the bleakness of their non-existence.  It’s got an epic battle between Sorta-Good vs. Very-Very-Evil and as if this wasn’t enough, it’s got prophecies, and I loathe prophecies.

And it’s set in Wales.

And here, oddly enough, is where Being Human suddenly acquires it’s brilliance.  Because all of this – fairly fantasy-cliche stuff – is acted out not against a backdrop of epic rocks and raging skies, but in a small Welsh town where the highlight of the day appears to be getting a cuppa tea from the greasy spoon or a pint down the local boozer.  It’s the mundanity of epic conflict that I enjoy, in which a battle with bloodlust is combined with a battle over who’s going to do the washing up; it’s the triviality of day-to-day existence as characters try to juggle the need to save the world with a desire to have a stable income and fresh fruit on the table.  It’s the villains drinking coffee from old mugs, and the ‘heroes’ if this is the word we’re going to use, fighting their battles with a cry of ‘you have got to be kidding me’.  It is, in short – and I cringe even as I write this – the very human element of Being Human which is, let’s face it, it’s purpose and it’s undeniable strength.  And somehow, without really knowing why, I am hooked…

Continue reading »]]> Ah lempsip.  You taste so foul, you look so sickly, you always have that odd residue of disgusting grunge at the bottom of the mug.  You are, basically, little more than orange juice and paracetamol, with some extra uch factor thrown in.  I loathe lempsip.  And yet how I would have got through this production period without it?

Although, before this becomes a commercial, let me add… despite the medication, the going-to-bed-promptly, the huddling down beneath my duvet and general attitude of all-hatches-fastened-down that I’ve been adopting I am still horribly, deleriously ill.  Ah lempsip!  How much more would I love you if, having drunk a mug in the morning, I didn’t find myself looping round the room singing (hoarsely) some twenty minutes later as the full force of your chemical cocktail struck?  And on this note – ah, panadol plus!  How much more time I would have for you if a single pill didn’t reduce me to uncontrollable, hysterical giggling in a corner?  If just one of your shiny capsules didn’t cause me to collapse in a corner laughing until I cried, even as snot swam around my head and my ears popped from the strain?  Oh paracetamol.  You are so useful in combatting the relentless pulsing in the synases and yet, during a technical rehearsal, could you perhaps try, oh paracetamol, not to send me straight to sleep?  If we could somehow fuse the singing of lempsip with the drowsiness of paracetamol with the hysterical cackling of panadol plus, how much easier this week would be…

Continue reading »]]> I’m tall.  At five foot eleven, I am informed, in fact, that I am really rather stupidly tall for a woman, and while it’s very handy for reaching high things on shelves, and getting to pesky plugs that are just out of easy grabbing reach, I do suspect that over the years, it’s actually dented my physical self-confidence.

This thought occurred to me during an escrima class.  I am taller than every other person in the room, and when actually practicing stuff, I have no qualms about charging in to do the moves, and feel reasonably confident that if someone comes at me with a pointy stick, I’ll probably get out of the way, one way or another.  It may not be elegant, it may not be pretty, but it will almost certainly happen and I’ll pretty much be in control.  Martial arts, they say, develop your confidence, but as I left the class I realised – my confidence is a multi-layered thing.  When I express myself using the written word, I feel extremely confident.  It’s the medium I know best, and the simple act of writing creates a natural rhythm which somehow seems to serve my self-expression perfectly.  I can hear sounds and tones and shapes in the written word that I struggle to express vocally, and pinpoint the heart of an argument in a single sentence which, if spoken out loud, might take me whole paragraphs to pin down.  Writing, the simple truth is, is where I am most myself.

Then there’s speaking, and sure, if I’m in the right state of mind, I can speak with perfect confidence.  Or at least, with apparent confidence.  As with all social interactions, how I speak depends on who I’m with, and it’s a simple truth that over the years my speaking voice has come to mirror my writing voice more and more, so now, whenever I have to handle difficult conversations or I’m feeling out of my depth, I almost write my words out in my mind before they actually pass my tongue, and thus maintain some semblance of sanity throughout the process.

Finally, there’s physical self-confidence, and this is where it gets tricky.  I’ve already said I’m tall, and by the age of 13 I was already five foot ten in a class of girls whose average height was maybe five foot four if we were lucky.  As a result, I slouched for most of my teenage years, and still slouch habitually now.  Aware that I was, basically, a gormless gawky looking thing, I shied away from making eye contact with people for years, until finally deciding, age 15, to train myself in the art of looking people in the eye by practicing meeting people’s stares on the Hammersmith and City Line, which, to anyone who hasn’t been on it, is a horrible line whose very name strikes a shudder into the deepest part of my soul.  By the time I was 18, I’d learned to walk with my head upright instead of pointing down, mostly because I’d also learned that by walking with my head up I got to see more of the city through which I moved, and it was easier to avoid walking into trees and other such unfortunate occurrences.  By the time I was 22 I’d overcome my fear of heights and had come to realise that, however much I shied away from strangers in a social environment, and cringed up inside and out at awkward encounters, my long arms and legs were really very useful for tricky rigging off ladders.  By 24 it’d been pointed out to me that I gesture hugely when I talk – especially when telling stories – and after a little consideration I concluded that, so long as there wasn’t anything valuable around at the time, this was probably okay.  Decorum, when you’re 90% elbow and knee, seems like a naive aspiration when there are so many other skills out there to be acquired, and only a limited time to do so.

And now?  Now I have the physical confidence to practice escrima once a week in the fairly happy thought that if someone was to come at me with a big stick and a cry of ‘banzai’ I’d have enough self-control to get out of the way.  But alas, self-control, it turns out, still isn’t physical self-confidence, and if asked to dance in a nightclub or, heaven forfend, adorn my body with anything that isn’t stained with paint or scarred with wire cuts, I’d be instantly reduced back to the overly-tall 13 year old standing in front of her entire class wondering why so many of them were having to strain their necks.  The desire to blend in is one of humanity’s strongest instincts, and is usually only conquered through a great deal of work.  There is, it seems, some truth to the cliche that those who are short, can sometimes overcompensate by being loud and brash, to grab the attention of others; while those of us who are tall, tend to shrink down and hide, and hope no one really notices.

Continue reading »]]> So it turns out that the US publication date is not, in fact, in March.  This is as much news to me as it is, dear reader, to you, I suspect.  I mean, I’m sure I should’ve investigated these things thoroughly, but to be honest, the idea didn’t really occur to me until a few weeks ago, when people started asking me what the US release date was and I sat there going… good god… it’s all in English, isn’t it?  Why the delay?  To which, I hasten to add, I have no immediate reply.  Sorry.

Infuriating as this will be for you, America (at least, it’d better be infuriating!) I gotta admit as a Brit there is a tiny twinge of satisfaction whenever we realise that we’ve got hold of something first.  So much of what we read and watch in the UK is an American import, that we spend a lot of our lives infuriated by the fact that a few million people on the other side of the Atlantic not only know who wins the Presidential race in West Wing, or whether Jack Bauer ever makes it to the toilet in 24, that on those rare occasions where the UK actually exports some culture of its own, we, the hallowed devotees of the BBC and UK book imprints, might actually be ahead of the trend.  The urge to bounce up and down shouting out what happens at the end of Sherlock or who does what to whom in the final 45 minutes of Doctor Who, for anyone over the Pond who’s seen either of these, is a mischievous but no less tempting urge.  I must admit, I even experience it with less international occasions… for example, when the final book of Harry Potter came out, I went out of my way to read the last seven pages (but as of yet, not the whole book) so that if anyone grew too insufferable on the subject I could walk up to them and spoil the ending.  As it is, I never did, but it was a nice, naughty fantasy to indulge.  I apologise right now for my ignoble urges on this front… but let’s face it, I’m only human…

Truth of the matter is, the UK runs to a great degree on American culture.  Sure, there’s a lot of rubbish made which we are spared, but Friday nights on most commercial British channels tends to be imported-American-drama night, unless of course it’s BBC4 in which case it’s imported-(brilliant)-Danish-drama night.  We’re also fascinated by American politics.  The Republican primaries, for example, are something of a surreal punctuation to our late-night news, a veritable parade of candidates whose views often range from the astounding to the absurd.  During US Presidential elections, large parts of the UK sit up late to watch the results come in; I remember staying up last time for the result to come in from Pennsylvania, clinging to the edge of my seat with a cry of ‘Come on Obama!’ and almost shaking with relief when it became apparent that the Democrats had taken the White House.  In many ways this fascination with US politics is a symptom of being a superpower; who wears the crown in Washington can have genuine and serious repercussions for the rest of the world, unlike the frequently jumped-up prancing Prime Ministers we get in Downing Street.  It’s also, I’d argue, a fascination with just how extreme American politics seems to us.  ‘Liberal’ as a dirty word?  ‘Socialism’ as essentially being the same as ‘communism’; abortion and gun control as subjects even remotely up for debate?  In Britain the most passionate people seem to get about politics is when little old ladies stand outside government departments and politely request a form letter of explanation regarding the state of the roads.  America is a whole other world to us, yet one we’re continually immersed in and, by extension, fascinated, enthralled and, frequently, impatient as we wait for more.

So, in short – sorry America.  Publication is soon, I promise!  May 1st, to be exact.  And to any Americans reading this – hello!  Greetings from across the pond!

Continue reading »]]> I bloody love podcasts.  I only started listening a few months ago, when a friend suggested something I’d missed, and now I love them.  I’m not very good at just sitting still and concentrating on one thing.  Well, no, that’s a lie – I’m perfectly capable of sitting still and concentrating on one thing, and that very intensely, otherwise I doubt there’d be this many books in the backlist or that I’d ever be able to cope with working in theatre.  But it seems I have only two modes of being – utterly intense concentration on just one thing to the utter reach of my abilities – or wanting to concentrate on at least three things at once.  So when I watch the TV, for example, I like to have stuff to fiddle with and fix by me at the same time; when I cook I enjoy having the radio on; when playing games, I listen to podcasts and so on.

It’s not just the luxury of being able to hear things that I’ve missed.  It’s not simply the entertainment of having a continual supply of sounds at my beck and call which I can dip in and out of at whim – it’s a whole world of stuff, selected and chosen by me for the most interesting and unusual content, which I can access at whim.  It’s knowledge and information about things which I would never have known about before, at my fingertips as if the local library had been beamed up and dumped in a pair of speakers.  Yesterday I cooked supper to a BBC Documentary about marathon running in the Gaza Strip; this morning I got up to a play about the Kennedy family; last night I went to sleep to soothing explanations about the influenza virus and when I put away my clothes from the washing pile, I do so to the (unintelligible) sound of the news in Mandarin, a language I still can’t speak and still don’t understand but which, I hope, but immersion in the same I might vaguely one day come to terms with.  Thinking of which!  I must go online and see if there’s any news reports in German I can download, on the same basic principal.  (My lord, I’ve just been online to look and discovered not only German news, but comedy and language courses too.)

My knowledge, such as it is, has always been rather broad and thin, with a few areas of unlikely expertise.  Should you want to know anything about the second siege of Vienna, for example, I’m probably your girl; ask me about the politics of Indonesia at the moment and I’d be able to manage two sentences of moderately well-informed waffle, followed by an immediate silence as the full depths of my ignorance become apparent.  Podcasts are not, as far as I’m concerned, going to give me a great depth of knowledge on any particular subject, nor would I expect them too.  But what they do, is broaden the mind.  I love to be surprised by the things I don’t know, to discover that there’s a Jamiacan bobsled team, to learn about industrial migration in China, hear folk tales from Ghana or learn about the relationship between yeast and hair.  Knowledge is a gift, we’re often told, and it’s one of the few educational platitudes I actually agree with, and if the internet is good for one thing above all else, it is for giving us a small sense of just how big the world is, and how exciting it can be.

Continue reading »]]> A challenge for all assembled here…

… can you spot the word I was forced to change throughout the text of the Minority Council, to prevent being sued for defamation or possibly trademark infringement?

Have a think about it and let me know…

While on this theme, may I also add… no subtitle!  No subtitle on the Minority Council and I for one, am relieved.  Because I never really wanted one and I kinda felt they gave the game away.  ‘The Resurrection of Matthew Swift’ was, after all, a bit of a clue…

Continue reading »]]> As readers of this blog will know, Douglas Adams was both one of my literary heroes, and a friend of the family.  My Dad was Douglas’ publisher back when the earth was young, and growing up I used to be rather intimidated by this man, who I admired hugely, coming round for dinner of a weekend.  My Dad shared a lot of things in common with Douglas Adams, not least the burden of being a very tall, rather overweight gentleman of a certain portly disposition, and wrote the official biography of him after his death.  This year would have been Douglas’ 60th birthday, and in honour of this a number of events are happening, including an ‘online birthday’ as an appropriate celebration for a man who’s passions were always science, technology and gadgets, and for whom really, the smartphone era couldn’t happen soon enough.  And in the spirit of this, I throw out my small contribution – happy 60th birthday, Douglas Adams!

Continue reading »]]> (Or in my case, B&Bs, since I don’t really ever stay in hotels…)

There are certain universal rules, it turns out, about staying anywhere as a tourist.  For a start, all hotel rooms, no matter where or what time of the year, have a very large radiator recessed into an inaccessible corner of the wall, which is turned up to full at all times and which nothing, not love nor money, can coax into a lower temperature.  They have great big heavy curtains that block out all light perfectly when closed, but somehow always get stuck half way across the window when you’re trying to open or close it.  Embarrassed at this situation, you slink away for the day and hope when you get back, it’ll be fixed, and lo, indeed, somehow it is fixed and the curtain is either fully open or fully closed, as god intended; however, your attempts to move it into the opposite position will once again fail and so the shame of your curtain based inadequecy mounts, night after night.

There’s usually a small kettle, and a fine collection of flash-frozen beverages and little pots of UHT milk lined up like a tiny dairy army for your inspection, inspiring you with a sense that no matter how bad things might be, you’ll never sink so low as to use one of them.  There’s a single solitary mug, or glass, or sometimes both, balanced with pristine care on a paper mat so as to discourage you from disturbing the fung shei of their alignment by actually sipping from them.  There’s the shaving mirror in the bathroom, with that mysterious socket set into the light across the mirror which invites you to charge shavers only, though quite where you’ll balance the charger who can say?  There’s the heated towel rail, which has two settings – on in summer or off in winter – and the extraction fan in the bathroom which either comes on with a roar whenever you turn on the light, even – no, especially – in the middle of the night – or which doesn’t come on at all, but hangs there, like a sad monument to domestic aspiration.  There’s a telephone which, through an archaic and often collection of dialing protocols you can be pretty sure to connect to someone in a fish shop in Wales, and the TV complete with the single most confusing remote control you’ve ever seen in your life.  There’s the bedside lamp, whose ‘on’ switch always somehow manages to get lost down the side of the bed and of course, let us not forget, there’s the classic, the absolute must-be of all hotels – the layers of sheets pulled tighter than a violinist’s ‘e’ string, through which you must burrow like an intrepid explorer in search of the one piece of duvet and the two pillows you actually desire to use.

There’s the two towels in the bathroom – the great big fluffy big one that somehow you always manage to spill something on, and the tiny, pointless little one that you can never find until three days later when it’s discovered mouldering underneath your grubby underpants.  There’s sometimes a safe, with a locking proceedure so simple you can’t shake the feeling that security is a secondary concern next to user friendliness, and by the front door, a collection of leaflets and maps guiding you to local places of interest, the best of which, it turns out, are invariably run by the owner’s cousin.  If you get hot in the night, then of course you can attempt to open your window, where you will discover that there are several layers of glass to coax back, each one tightly secured in place, and upon the success of your enterprise you suddenly realise that the reason there is a lot of glass between you and the outside world, is because the outside world is made almost entirely of kitchen vents and fox holes.  There’s plumbing that sings in the night as the residents of the neighbour rooms begin to regret their overly large first-night dinners, presumably availing themselves of the toilet paper whose leading corner has been formed into a perfect and inexplicable triangle; and should you go seeking something to read to comfort you in your hour of distress, you may find a Bible or, more likely, a local telephone directory to numb you back to sleep.

I say all this, as if I don’t enjoy travel.  I do.  In many ways, all of the above is really part of what makes it such an adventure…

Continue reading »]]> Initially when I started writing this entry, I had just put the title in at the top of the screen, when the phone rang.  In order to try and keep track of what the hell I was thinking at the time, I then added the words, ‘it’s ‘orrid’ to the top of my screen, and scampered off to answer the phone.  By the time I got back to the keyboard, things had moved on and I no longer had time to write the entry, leaving only the title and these two words on my screen as a heart-felt reminder of what exactly it was I wanted to say.

Reality TV.

It’s ‘orrid.

And it’s not something I really watch, but sometimes you’re in the LX crew room before a show, and the TV is on, and this hypnotising – and it is utterly hypnotising – terrifying images appear, and you just can’t look away.  People desperate for fame and glory, for prestige and acclaim, lining up to be shot down, it has a sort of car crash fascination.

“I feel so much better watching it,” explained one of the lampies in the crew room, “Because it makes me realise that my life isn’t this shit.”

Sure, your life isn’t shit, but this just isn’t shit, it’s actually rather sad.  We sit there and laugh as people who perhaps genuinely believe they can sing, or dance, or have some great, unique talent worthy of being seen by an audience of 100,000 to 10,000,000,000 gawping strangers, fail.  We sit and dismiss the appalling inadequecies of X-Factor wannabes, we scoff at people who think they’re the best on dance and music shows.  We despise, with sometimes quite frightening passions, the inmates of Big Brother who seem, for the most part, to be picked for their desperately over-blown self-confidence and character traits designed to clash with their fellows.  After all, the very point of reality TV isn’t to show us how life is… it’s to make a great bit of drama, out of real lives.   And sure, once in a while, someone will come along with a genuine talent, or a very pleasant personality, and everyone will love them, but that’s just not good TV.  A heart-swelling tale of success and brilliance is only heart-swelling if it’s achieved against adversity, and so even the people on our screen who we want to like, will be prodded, poked, pushed, examined and torn apart in often savage and occasionally repulsive ways, before being granted that most elusive of golden trophies – celebrity achieved for being themselves.  Because let’s face it, that’s something else which is implied in reality TV; that through the simple act of being who you are, you can convince the watching world, thousands of strangers, to like, admire and possibly even love you.

It’s a great temptation, something we all secretly yearn for; to be loved unconditionally just for ourselves.  But reality TV doesn’t exist to fulfil this.  It’s not painting a picture of the real world, it’s not a voice for real people, it’s not a tool for social commentary – it is an entirely constructed drama, full of bile and mockery, but unlike most dramas, the victims in its tales, are real, and that’s what makes it both so fascinating, and so horrid.

Continue reading »]]> “So you’re scared.  Figured that part.  I just say the word dusthouse and you look like you’re wearing a python for a jock strap.  But the thing is,” we shifted closer, dropped our voice to a murmur, “we will find Meera.  Heaven and hell will not stop us; we will break every part of you until you help us, but we won’t let you die.  We will keep you alive, if you have to be tied together, so you can even resemble a thing that was once a man.”
His body was so stiff, if we’d struck him it would have pinged.
“I can protect you,” I added.  “You’re frightened now; I can keep you safe.”
Silence.  But it was a silence waiting to be broken.  Finally, he said, “The dusthouse took her.”
“Who are the dusthouse?”
“I don’t know which one…”
“There are many dusthouses?”
He nodded, then flinched as the movement disturbed something inside his broken nose.  His voice was strained and high as he whined, “You sign a contract.  Don’t talk, don’t tell, don’t say nothing.”
“Is that what you have?  A contract with the dusthouse?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the deal?”
“They… supply you.  Good rates, cheap rates, best-quality stuff.  Shit, it’s not like there’s any competition!”  He mopped at a trickle of blood down his chin.  “Only, they’ll fucking kill me.”
“What stuff?”
He hesitated.
“Come on,” I said.  “We’ve gone this far.”
He said; “Fairy dust.”
There was a long silence while we digested this.  I said, “I don’t suppose we’re talking Peter Pan, think your happy thought and fly, are we?”
“It Is,” he explained, one word at a time, “The Best Shit.”

Continue reading »]]> “So, which superhero power would you want?”

Remember that question?  Everyone’s been asked it at some point, and sure, while the sensible reaction is to roll your eyes and get on with life, it’s one of the great alluring fantasies that has always been with us.  Would you like to control the weather through thought alone; turn invisible at will; lift heavy objects with the flick of an eyelid; set things on fire with a sneeze; change into someone else.  Well hell yeah, of course you bloody would.  Let’s not beat about the bush, everyone has always, at some point in their life, even if it was only on one day when you were 14 years old and dreaming of escaping from a school assembly designed to turn all minds into mulch, wanted to have superpowers.  For better or worse.

It’s such an alluring idea, such a brilliant attraction, to think that through simply wishing something to move/combust/change, you could achieve it.  And more than that, it’s such an allure to imagine yourself, special, powerful, unique.  In many ways the fact that superheroes are classically depicted as carrying a great secret and hiding their identities from the world, just makes it that little bit more attractive.  What a buzz it would be, to walk down any ordinary street in any ordinary city and think, you have no idea what I could do…  Let’s face it, it’s as natural a human instinct as breath – the desire to feel special.

But then there’s the question which writers have struggled with for decades.  If you have your superpower, then what the hell do you do with it?  Do you take an easy path, use your abilities for personal advancement and gain?  Or do you turn round and declare, ‘I, Green-Vest-Bug-Man-Of-Slough shall use my epic abilities to fight crime and do good!’  In the old days the question was fairly black and white.  Nice, hearty people would find they had superpowers, wonder what to do with them, suffer a close family loss which would galvanise them into action for the good of others, whom they would defend with modesty, humility and acrobatic prowess, and then spend the rest of their lives struggling with the loneliness of their secret lives and the burden of responsibility bestowed by their superior abilities.  It was a lovely idea – more so because within it was this implicit idea that power does indeed beget responsibility, and abilities beget the need to use them for the benefit of mankind, as noble a social idea as could ever be proposed.  Meanwhile, evil twisted people, who were probably bullied as kids, would discover they too had superpowers and would set out ruthlessly conniving their way to the top of the tower, from which they would sow mayhem and carnage, just for the love of mayhem and carnage.  Or sometimes they’d sow the carnage because it was the only way to advance their deadly superhero battles with their righteous nemesis, while simultaneously demonstrating that at the end of the day, your average villain only wants a bit of attention, and to be loved…

Thankfully, the world is more complicated than this, and so in recent years, the question of ‘superhero’ and ‘supervillain’ has fallen rather by the wayside and instead we merely have ‘ordinary Joe who can throw lightning’ versus ‘misguided Bob who can fry brains’.  Certainly, a lot of cliches still abound – objects which must be found, weapons for/against the evil/good powers of an adversary (how much kryptonite, by the by, is just casually scattered around in Superman’s path?!  Answer: lots) – and of course love interests to be embraced, confused and kidnapped on a fairly regular basis. Arguably some of the best superhero movies of recent years have been the ones which haven’t just embraced these cliches, they’ve invited them out to a salsa class after work and three rounds of heavily spiked cocktails.  Witness the Incredibles, which is one of my all-time favourite movies.  Or perhaps Megamind, where you don’t merely cheer for the blue-headed evil genius who runs the show, you also cheer for his pet fish.  Happily, superpowers no longer seem to be about Good versus Evil, but instead seem to be more about people versus people, complicated people with difficult motives struggling not to make too many disastrous mistakes with the resources available to them.  And that, in its own over-powered spectacular way, is just a lot like life…

Continue reading »]]> When I moved into my flat, I was surprised by how much stuff the previous owner had left.  Furniture – fantastic.  Cutlery – brilliant.  Odd bits of old paperwork, a curious collection of, I suspect, somewhat racist if historically interesting prints… less so.  The cork board on the back of my front door though – fantastic.  I have so much stuff pinned to it.  Local library opening times, details of the local sports facilities, the packets from all the plants which I have entirely and utterly failed to cultivate in the boxes outside my front door.  (My next door neighbour’s cat!  Oh, but I do love cats, but if this feline poops in my flower boxes one more time….)  Leaflets of things I should really attend and explore, righteous reminders to self to sort this or that domestic failing out, a small piece of paper reminding myself of the main reasons why I don’t believe of god, so that when the Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on my door unexpectedly I have my argument immediately to hand, and of course, endless pages of notes on stuff I need to write.

Quite why the notes on things I need to write ended up on the back of my front door, I don’t know, except to say that it is the ONLY corkboard in my flat, and I guess that lent it a certain practical inevitability.  None of the notes I keep there relate to works in progress, but are reminders of things which should perhaps, some day, be a note in progress.  Glancing at the list, I see immediately a reference to Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron and Mary Shelley, who was hailed by the plaque on the front of her house as the ‘mother of computing’.  A few notes below that, and there’s a reminder that after the surrender of the 6th Army at Stalingrad, the German generals were all confined together in the same dacha, creating quite possibly the bitterest housewarming party imaginable.  There’s a fake Afghani village in Norfolk, run by the British Army to train its soldiers in how to handle the local customs; a Belgian schoolteacher who in World War Two led the British tanks into Antwerp on a bicycle; ‘Pope Idol’ suggests a note, a reminder to consider the power of indoctrination, another note reminding me that pirates are cool and that the Blue Road to Goradze is fascinating.  To my delight, I can also see two notes which I’ve already fulfilled – ‘Loopers’ and ‘Locusts’ (watch this space) so might cross them off my list.  Oh god, and here’s a note reminding me that the International Peace Organisation Association is the rather incongruous name by which the major mercenary companies of the world like to hold their parties in Dubai, and another suggesting not to forget the value of the thrill seeker’s pickpocket festival.  In all, I have about twelve pages of these notes, collated over years of sitting up and going ‘oh, that looks interesting!’  Quite what I’ll do with them, I’m not yet sure, but perhaps one day, if I ever get writer’s block, they’ll come in handy…

Continue reading »]]> Here we are at last.  Packing the bags and heading off to Kent for some of the most hectic lighting work I think I’ve ever done.  In the next few days, I will attend twelve hours of rehearsals, cut over one hundred and fifty pieces of colour, receive some of the swishest and heaviest kit I’ve ever rigged, and try my very best not to worry.  Then on Sunday, at 9 a.m., we’ll head into the theatre, and commence the first of four 14-hour days of rigging, focusing, plotting and teching for West Side Story.  My programmer, who is far nerdier than I am when it comes to all things electrical, says it’ll be fine.  A walk in the park.  My director, who is far more experienced than I am, informs me that he has perfect faith, while my tech manager, who goes down as one of the best tech managers I’ve ever worked with, phones me on a fairly regular basis to worry that the orders won’t come through, the colour won’t be right and the circuits won’t take the load.

For my part… I think I’ve decided to stop worrying about the lighting, which is an interesting but I would argue, entirely sensible stance for a lighting designer to take.  At this late stage, there’s really no point sitting down with the plan and trying to move everything again, I’ll just go round and round in circles, and really, if I have made a cock-up somewhere along the line, surely the ridiculous number of options I’ve built into the rig will cover it, right?  No point twitching.  Slow breathing.  Deep breaths.  Maybe a zen Kit Kat to see us on the way.  Which reminds me!  I must remember, somewhere between the rig and the focus, to try and find cake to put out on the production desk.  Whoever said that you shouldn’t eat in a theatre during a tech, has clearly never worked in lighting…

Continue reading »]]> This is the reminder before the event itself, that in a few days time on – on Thursday the 23rd of this month, in fact, myself and Benedict Jacka will be signing copies of our respective books in Forbidden Planet, Central London, between 6 p.m. – 7 p.m., and if you mosey up you can get a copy of these (hopefully epic) tomes before their publication day, say hello and maybe even have a biscuit.  Well, I can’t promise the biscuit part – that may be a fanciful addition spawned from the darkest corners of my imagination – but we live in hope, right?  The more, the merrier!

Continue reading »]]> A few days ago, I blogged about what a lighting designer does.  This is the second part of that blog, covering The Big Event Itself – the move from the rehearsal room, into the theatre proper.

It’s a rather intimidating time, for an LD, the move into the space.  Set designers, prop makers, carpenters, painters, actors, they’ve all had months to try and try again, to craft and compose their pieces for the final production.  A lighting designer, however, has only the images in their head and the rather dubious comfort of a rigging plan to fall back on.  Whether the colours they’ve chosen will work, if the angles are good enough, or a certain unit will make a tricky shot – these are questions which you can explore theoretically in advance, but will only truly get an answer to once you’re in the venue proper.  The moment when the first unit goes live, and you can see its light on the stage, is therefore a very exciting and slightly nerve-racking experience, since by the time this happens you can be anywhere from five days to twenty four hours away from the first public performance, with no time left to cock it up.

A Season Before the Tragedy of Macbeth, 2010

The first stage of turning what you’ve imagined into actual, useful illumination, is rigging.  As a technician, this is the Big Event – where you put anywhere between twelve units in the back room of a pub onto a scaff bar, to rigging three hundred plus lights in the auditorium of a large theatre, it’s the actual heavy lifting stage where you clamp your lights into place, and try to work out a way to get them power and data as neatly, and as quickly as possible.  In the biggest venues, this is often preceded by several weeks of pre-production; some of the largest shows I’ve worked on have involved working on certain elements months in advance, and the fit up itself can last days at a time as you stagger, bow-legged from backbreaking job to backbreaking job, wondering if there is indeed such a thing as ‘too many’ kit kats.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, RADA, 2010

As a lighting designer, I am almost always involved in the fit up, but only because I’m still at that stage where having a crew is something of a luxury.  Should I ever become more successful in this career, I will happily assume the more traditional role of an LD, and swan in and swan out during a fit up, to answer urgent questions as they arise and maybe deliver doughnuts.  For the moment, however, I am on stage with the rest of them, hauling lanterns to my heart’s content.  I would argue that it’s a good thing for an LD to be present during the fit up, in case things do go wrong, and so they can adjust for anything which isn’t going to work.  But it varies from person to person – the only thing worse than an LD spontaneously changing their mind during the rig, wiping out hours of work, is for an LD to spontaneously change their mind on the opening night, when weeks of work might die the death.  At the end of the day, there’s no substitution for just getting it damn right.

Dracula, King's School Canterbury, 2010

In the spirit of getting it damn right, I always try to build as many options into my rig as possible.  Even the most successful LDs have finite resources – only so many places to rig from, only so many dimmers, only so much cash – so your life is a bit of a balancing act between what you want to achieve, and what what is practically possible.

Once you have your rig in the air, the next job is the focus – quite simply, pointing the damn thing in the right place.  This is where an LD really has to start working, making sure that every unit can do the job you want it to.  On West Side Story, I will be focusing in the course of 8-11 hours, depending how it all goes, somewhere between 180-220 units, one at a time.  Cock it up, and you’ll lose time later when you need to re-adjust it, or worse, if you suddenly realise that it can’t do what you need it to, and need to find some other solution, and in theatre, time is money.  Traditionally during this time, the lighting designer is on stage, guiding the technicians who are often miles away in the ceiling, adjusting the light in the manner desired.  In large venues, this has to be done by radio; certainly, shouting your instructions to the back of a giant auditorium to a technician up a ladder, while other departments – metalwork, carpentry, sound – are hammering away around you, is a sure fire way to suffer.

After the End, Battersea Arts Centre, 2011

Assuming your focus goes well – again, you don’t have time to cock it up usually – you move onto the final part of the lighting design, the plot.  This is where you, and if you’re lucky, a dedicated programmer, sit down at a lighting desk and actually start designing the show.  With luck, your rig can do all the angles, colours, textures, shapes and sizes you desire, isolating down to the smallest part of the stage, or flooding it with light, and now that it’s focused, you can start, in simplest terms, turning the damn things on and off in an artful way.  A good plot can often compensate for even a very dodgy rig, creating interesting shapes and angles out of scenery and faces.  With the growth of moving lights in this business, a good programmer can also be worth their weight in gold, as they will be continually working whenever not inputting your commands, to keep all the cues in order and make sure the moving lights are obeying properly.  People eavesdropping on a lighting designer and their programmer will often hear a chain of words, something like this…

“4 at fifty.  At forty.  At forty five.  Grab 3.  Pan 3 onto the window.  Up a bit.  Shutter off the left side.  Okay, update that to track please and can we put a block in on the last cue…”

If you listened without seeing, it would be unintelligible, but in the hands of a decent programmer, it’s not only common sense, it’s their daily bread and butter.

A Lie of the Mind, RADA, 2010

Many hours later, and the show should be plotted.  The shortest show I have ever designed was, I think, 11 cues long.  The longest was two hundred and thirty seven.  Contained within each cue is information on what light is at what intensity or, where movers are concerned, where they’re pointing and what they’re doing.  There’s also information on how long the lights will take to get to that intensity, or to fade out, so that when the show itself is up and running, all the operator needs to do, is press go.  A lighting designer never really operates a show – the relentless cycle of job after job makes op-ing a generally unfulfilling task.

Finally, all this done, you go into the technical rehearsal.  This is where all things technical – sound, lights, flying, automation if you have any, costumes – are put through their paces on stage to make sure the play works.  The shortest technical I’ve done was 45 minutes of blinding speed; the longest took five days.  If your job has been done well, then a technical is a good time for a lighting designer.  You can double-check your cues as they run, make sure it works with the actors on stage, adjust times and eat a lot of cake.  If it’s all gone badly, then a technical is a very stressful time, as if there’s one thing the other departments hate, it’s having to wait for you to catch them up.

The pictures you’ve seen throughout this entry, are pictures of shows I have lit at their very final stage – either the last dress rehearsal, or the actual performance.  It’s time-consuming, often stressful, frequently physically and mentally draining work, but when it does work, the results can be brilliant pieces of theatre, and the immense satisfaction of being a part of that.

Continue reading »]]> It seems that I talk a lot, on this blog, about The Other Job as a lighting technician and designer, yet still, to this day, friends and family come up and ask me what exactly all this means.  And so, in a spirit of enlightenment, I figured I’d do a short series on precisely this theme….

I’ve said it before, and will say it again – I am a far better lighting designer than technician.  Not necessarily because I’m especially talented as a designer, but because I just care far, far more about it.  Which is a pity, in a way, as if you don’t care about the technical side it’s unlikely you’ll even get to the point where the lighting side can be made to work…

A basic lighting plan for a theatre usually includes the grid - the bars marked in red which run across the ceiling - the actual lighting fixtures themselves, of various different types, the channel number that unit is at, and the colour number, in this case marked with an 'L' to indicate that it's from the Lee series of colours.

A lighting designer gets involved in a show several months before it kicks off.  Actually – correction.  A lighting designer SHOULD get involved in a show several months before it kicks off, and in recent years, when looking at advertisements for lighting jobs, I’ve got very choosey about applying for those which aren’t at least a month in advance, unless the words UNFORTUNATE EMERGENCY’ are attached.  After many bitter experiences, I’ve come to realise that those companies which don’t bother to think about getting a lighting designer on board until five minutes before the show goes up, aren’t necessarily going to be the kind who advance your professional prospects… I am also very particular about poorly spelled ads, or those which list at great length the director’s demands, up to and including the use of rose red fresnels in the final scene.

At my, very junior, level in the industry, a lot of jobs are either badly paid, or not paid at all, and all of the above considerations kick in tenfold when the job is unpaid.  Now, I tend to only work for free for political or charitable causes – such as Theatre Uncut – or for good friends or professionals who I know, trust and can count on to offer a challenging and rewarding experience.  Again, it’s not so much a question of the money – which is never great anyway – but of whether you feel you’re going to get a decent bit of experience and a worthwhile credit from the gig.

Lighting designers are freelance – we live hand to mouth on a job-by-job basis, and because our fees tend to be so bad, most lighting designers have at least three jobs on the go.  I am currently signed up for three shows to take me through to April, averaging a show a month, but each job is at a very different stage of production.  The big one – West Side Story – is nearing the point where I’ll actually have to go to the theatre and get designing, and so I’m spending my days attending rehearsals for that one, working out my cue points, finishing up the design for the rig, and worrying about the colours I’m going to use.  At the same time, the show after that is about to go into rehearsals, so I’m in touch with the stage manager, working out when I can attend and waiting with slightly baited breath for a final set design to come through, as I can’t really do anything without it.  Finally, the last job I’m officially on board for, which kicks off in April, is still at the planning stage, and I’m waiting for a script to read, and to have a chat with the director about what he desires.

A very preliminary draft of West Side Story. The units aren't yet channelled, and I haven't decided the colours I'm going to use. One of the problems about lighting in a proscenium theatre, like this one, is you're in a continual battle for space on the flying bars with the set designer. In this case, of 48 bars in the theatre, I've been reduced to about 18 which are actually useful lighting positions.

Talking with directors can be both rewarding, and a challenge.  Directors tend to come with three levels of knowledge about lighting – those who know nothing, those who know a bit, and those who believe that they know everything.  I say ‘believe’ because at the end of the day, lighting is a very specialist skill, and even if a director can tell the difference between two different types of light, the chances that they’ve seen the technical specifications of the theatre or know the reasoning behind your decisions, made painstakingly over several months, is entirely remote.  Then there are three more levels of directorial intervention to look forward to.  There’s the ‘I don’t know what it is that’s wrong about this, but it’s definitely not right’ director, who stares at the lighting state you’ve built on stage, only to reject it without offering a view on what he’d rather have, and can be a bit of a nightmare.  There’s the ‘I’m aiming to achieve this effect and trust you to do it’ director, who is the dream to work with and has faith in the lighting designer but a willingness to assert what he wants, and finally there’s what I personally view as the ultimate nightmare, the ‘show me every light you have in the rig… I want that one!’ director, who will quite literally point at a light in the rig and demand to have it turned on, even if it’s utterly inappropriate and creates a horrifically ugly effect on stage.  Make no mistake – lighting designers need directors with a strong idea of what they want, in order to truly sync the lighting with the acting, set and overall atmosphere of the production.  But directors, by definition, are not lighting designers, and I think most LDs have suffered at the hands of those who assert such a brutal control of all proceedings that by the end of it, you barely want your name to appear on the program.

There have been, irrefutably, a few nightmare experiences in this vein.  I look back on one show where myself, the cast and the set designer had the horrific experience of watching our director have a nervous breakdown over the course of rehearsals and tech.  It’s a phrase used frequently – ‘he had a nervous breakdown’ – but this man genuinely achieved a mental instability that was medical in its depth and damage.  I recall another show, where a very naive and rather brisk director demanded to know what a blackout was.  “It’s when the stage goes dark,” I explained, wondering what I was doing here.  “What does that look like?”  Some people, you see, cannot visualize what the light may look like at any one time, but it turned out, this gentleman couldn’t even imagine dark….

Continue reading »]]> I go to the theatre a lot at the NT.  And so many of my pictures from work seem to involve the South Bank, or the view from a certain fly tower… connection, who knows?

However, as with both the jobs I do, and the theatre I see, a lot of the time I hope you also notice that the productions I praise are mostly defined by their rarity.  There’s no denying that there’s a lot of rubbish written, and a lot of rubbish made, and I’ve been party to lighting a lot of it.  However, Collaborators at the National Theatre, is very much not rubbish.  It is, in fact, really bloody good.  I usually disapprove of writers who write about writers, as I think it’s lazy and not very imaginative, however, this play – about the relationship between Stalin and Mikhail Bulgakov, author of the Master and Margerita among many others – isn’t just about a monster and a writer, or even really about the oppression of the Soviet state on art.  It’s about the destruction of people, their souls and what everything they believe in and stand for, by a thousand tiny cuts, and it is a brilliant study of the same.

Continue reading »]]> Whitechapel is an interesting place, with a history almost entirely defined in popular culture, by the Jack the Ripper murders.  Which is fair enough, in the sense that they did indeed happen there, but in light of the twenty first century, doesn’t really seem to to cover things.

I must admit, I lived near Whitechapel for best part of a year, but never really explored it properly, as my daily commute always pulled me the other way, towards Liverpool Street.  However, head from central London towards the East, and you can’t help but go through Whitechapel down the great artery of Commercial Road, or along Whitechapel Road if you’re heading towards Stratford and the Olympic Stadium.  The new Overground link between, of all places, Croydon and Highbury, also goes through Whitechapel and suddenly, it seems a whole new opportunity to explore the previously inaccessible wilds of Haggerstone, Hoxton, Shoreditch and Whitechapel are now only a fifteen minute trundle away.

Whitechapel itself is many things, but in my mind, what it mostly is is a place between worlds.  It’s rather intangible borders sit between Aldgate to the west, where the ‘City’ of bankers and lawyers stops in an almost visible line where twenty floor-tall glass and steel suddenly turns to two-storey brick and concrete, Bethnal Green to the North, Shadwell to the South, and Mile End in the east.  Architecturally speaking, it’s a place of good intentions gone astray.  In the late 1800s, all the places I’ve just described were linked with poverty, slums and the Victorian ‘rookery’ – a maze where one building flowed into another, and streets dissolved merely into drippy paths through someone’s bedroom to get to another person’s basement.  Then towards the end of the century, around, in fact, the time that Jack the Ripper was killing, the powers that be resolved to get rid of the slums of the East End, and demolished huge tracts of land.  In its place they put up neater, terraced houses and cottages, some of which you can still find in the streets off the fat main roads, tucked into corners.  They built great big red Peabody Estates, built to last a hundred years and doing well so far, and attempted to impose some sort of geographical order on the streetplan, thus leading to the occasional burst of well-kept regal greenland, such as Victoria Park, and the straight lines of streets going down to the river.  Unfortunately, during the Blitz, the East End was very heavily hit, and as large parts were destroyed, so the authorities of the 1950s also attempted to impose their will, creating classically uninhabitable, grimy council estates, a few of which are still clearly visible along Whitechapel’s northern borders, where it meets Hackney.  The collapse of the docklands in the 1970s and 80s did the area no favours either, until finally the arrival of the Docklands Light Railway and the redevelopment of the Isle of Dogs brought a degree of prosperity and even fashion back to the East End.  The DLR now trundles above the streets to Canary Wharf, which serves as a sort of opposing pole to the glass towers of the City itself, with Whitechapel something of an equator between them.

As with much of London, Whitechapel’s character is hugely international.  A very large Indian and Pakistani community is resident in the area, as can be spotted almost at once by the bustling street markets selling bright fabric and samosas, practically off the same tarpaulined stall.  The streets are almost invariably bustling, if not with people then definitely with traffic, and the coppers tend to patiently ignore the questionable shops selling knock-off mobile phones, perhaps having given up on supressing any kind of trade in the area whatsoever.  A large mosque sits just back from the even larger hospital, and various study centres surround it, along with, I was pleased to spot, a much smaller, more discrete synagogue, nestled in opposite a shop selling abayas and headscarves.

The East End is defined in popular culture, to a large degree by Eastenders, a soap whose merit I’ve never been able to fully comprehend.  If what little I’ve seen of Eastenders is anything to judge by, I find it hard to imagine the inhabitants of Whitechapel would recognise it, or be particularly impressed.  There is a long tradition of East End pride, which, as someone raised in Hackney, one of the largest east-London boroughs, I have a great deal of time in.  The East End is often messy, chaotic and jumbled, with polite Victorian cottages opposite great sprawling council estates, expensive suits sold next to greasy takeaways, but for my part I’ve always found that rather attractive.  Life should not be lived in social isolation, unaware of the rest of the world around you, and in Whitechapel, in its own small, often dubious and grubby way, life is very clearly lived to the full.

Continue reading »]]> “I need my Danish political drama fix!” exclaimed my favourite stage manager.

Not words you hear every Sunday, but okay….

I cannot tell a lie, if I think of Denmark, I think of bacon and Sandi Toksvig, one of my all-time favourite comedians.  If I strain, I then begin to think of Norway, Sweden and a whole host of movies that have come from those two countries which begin with suicide, molestation and alcoholism before the entire thing goes downhill.  I do not think of highly intelligent, clever, well-constructed political drama.  But that’s precisely what Borgen is. Who’d have thought it?

I should also say, as I’m here, and passing through, that whenever the Danish cast speak English, it’s actually quite terrifying both how good the English is, and how incredibly British it sounds.  I just throw that one out there, as it made me feel horrifically inadequate linguistically speaking, despite having recently acquired a Mandarin-language buddy with whom to watch kung fu films and email (badly) with.

But for anyone out there who hasn’t seen Borgen… go watch.

Continue reading »]]> So a few days ago, I began a ramble about god, and more specifically, about why I’m not a fan.  This being part two – why I personally don’t believe in the big G.

I do not believe in god.  I separate this out from ‘atheism’, in order to avoid any question of ideology and politics in this fairly simple statement.  When asked why, I will refer you again to the simple starting point – that my parents did not believe in god.  This is a position which is easy to attack, so let me also add that over the years, I, like anyone who believes in god, have thought about my own stance, and reached my own conclusions, some of which I’ll give here, although again, I’ll aim to avoid a militant barrage.

I cannot conceive of any deity such as that which is laid out in the theological texts of our civilization.  I cannot conceive of a universe created purely for the benefit of humanity, nor accept that there is a single, human-observing creator who would permit pain, horror, terror, destruction, sin, who would punish his people for all eternity, send snakes and devils, make hellfire and heaven, or even just touch the blue light paper and walk away.  Before the arguments that are always returned at this point are made – that we have free will being the biggy – let me further add that I cannot accept the veracity of sacred texts whose contents are utterly unverifiable in any way.  A Jehovahs Witness spent a few futile weeks knocking on my door a while back, trying to convince me of the truth of the Bible, but always – always – the argument, which would spin across evolution, fossil evidence, nuclear fusion, the sun and the moon, terrorism and women’s rights – ended up with this simple statement: that his belief must be so because so it is written in the Bible.  I cannot accept that this one, contradictory, bewildering, interpretation-riddled text is the be-all and end-all of philosophical debate and moral reason, not least when that text permits the keeping of slaves, the stoning of adulterers and holy war.  I do not accept that it is an absolute truth.  I hasten to add, I say ‘the Bible’ only because that’s the text I’m most frequently exposed to – the argument extends to any holy work that I have yet been exposed to.

More, I find the notion that the wonders of the universe can be simplified down to a deity, to actually be mildly depressing.  Sitting on the shingle by the sea with my friends one night, we looked up and were able to see the moons of Jupiter, and know that above us are a billion, billion, billion stars, and billions of planets, on which new and alien life may have evolved with its own gods, its own beliefs and fears.  To reduce the universe down to a garden, an apple and a watching, frequently vengeful creator is, I think, rather demeaning for the sheer expanse of creation turning above our heads.

This ramble began with a missionary on the train from Ashford, trying to convince me of his beliefs.  His reaction, whenever I pointed out the logical flaws – and there are many, many logical flaws, make no mistake – was always to fall back on this statement – ‘within a year, you will preach the word of god’.  This was his prayer for me, it turned out, and the holy spirit was going to make it happen.  Watch This Space. Unfortunately, by the time the train pulled into Wye, I had lost patience with his default position of ‘it is so because the holy spirit makes it so’, and so got down to practical questions.  Abortion = murder.  Homosexuality = sinfulness, the sinners to burn in hell.  Islam = a religion of murder and violence.  ‘What about the Muslim Saudi women, imprisoned in their own homes?’ I asked.  ‘What about the politicians in Malaysia, what about the mosques which tend to the sick and poor, the pillar of charity in the tenets of the faith?  What about those lines which advocate peace with all mankind, as does the Bible, compared to those lines which, also like the Bible, whisper of wars with infidels?  Is this not all a matter of interpretation and are you not interpreting this in the blackest way you possibly can?’

‘It is just a facade,’ he explained, a few minutes later reminding me that by my failure to believe, I too was condemned to damnation.  ‘In one year, you will praise Jesus,’ he added.  My director, when I told him about this encounter, slapped his thighs with indignation.  ‘How dare he try to force his beliefs on you?’  Then again, in agreeing to argue with him on this train, I was, in my own way, trying to force my beliefs, on him – except I take some comfort in the thought that my beliefs had within them a clause which reads ‘subject to the evidence available, and with a willingness to adapt’ whereas, I fear, his did not.  The world is far too complex and difficult to boil down to x = sin.

People, individual people, by sheer psychological necessity, have to put themselves at the centre of the world, for they can only have the sense data of their eyes, their ears, their thoughts, and everything else is merely noise imposed by the outside world.  In the same way, societies and civilizations have put themselves at the centre of all things, and the doctrines we create serve to fulfill this fairly basic need, and fair enough.  The depths of what we don’t know are terrifying.  Where we came from, how we came, where we go, if we go anywhere next.  To consider how small humanity is, and how ultimate death may be, is frightening.  Pure and simple.  I don’t pretend that science has all the answers, but I will defend to the absolute its integrity in seeking them, and the hardship and rewards of keeping an open mind.

Continue reading »]]> It’s something you read about a lot in fantasy.  The armies/forces/powers of light/dark are arrayed against each other in an epic and endless battle which will only end when the world is brought into divine light and peace/cast into utter perdition.  It’s a good, old fashioned, Biblical theme, not least since the very nature of light and dark tend to imply a higher power, and further more, imply a heaven and hell.  And that’s cool.  It means that suddenly your battle isn’t just about who’s going to own the Rhineland during difficult economic times, it’s about the future of mankind, the very nature of man’s immortal soul, and whether the entire species is going to have to wear dark colours and eat lava for the rest of eternity.  There’s nothing quite like having a pitched battle between light/dark to heighten the stakes.

Except… the very thing which makes a battle between these two forces so powerful is, arguably, the very thing that undermines it, because the conflict is by definition, so absolute.  Your nice, fluffy, pastel-colour wearing, pleasant-toothed light mages are bound, by their very nature, to go around rescuing kittens and puppies while your evil, black-wearing, mascara-sporting dark mages will take great pleasure in committing kinky sexual deeds and garotting people with piano wire.  This is the distinction, at least, which ‘light’ and ‘dark’ implies and if nothing else, it lacks complexity.  Are we to believe that your ordinary light mage, when faced with yet another cat stuck up a tree, on a rain-swept, toe-curling night, while being harangued by their foul-mouthed next door neighbour to save Tiddles, isn’t just a little bit tempted to turn round with a cry of ‘screw you and your feline, I choose tea!’  Are we to believe that every blackguard minion of the ebon night, when commanded to go blackmail that seven year old, isn’t just a little tempted to go ‘really, you don’t think that’s a touch extreme, what?’  When it’s heaven vs. hell – which is what this scenario basically is – the complexity of humanity and all the morally dubious things it does, really goes up in smoke, and this is a rather sad and limiting thing.

The battle is also often rather one-sided.  The forces of light, by definition, can’t go around beheading their enemies willy-nilly, whereas the forces of dark are perfectly content to butcher anyone who stands in their way and, well, you can’t shake the feeling this is a bit of a strategic problem.  Equally, I have never fully understood why anyone would want to spread endless night across the globe, or would willingly drink the blood of a man who has declared, ‘now you shall become my slave in darkness and despair’.  You may have a few issues of your own, but I just feel this is taking things a bit far.  Also, if we accept for a moment that the forces of dark don’t have a recruiting problem, they must have really tense office meetings.  Even if you don’t believe in ‘being nice’ for its own sake, it is a useful societal reflex, and if it’s something which your nature as a minion of darkness has removed from the toolbox, then arguably the internal politics of evil are going to get very sticky, very fast.

Finally you have a narrative problem to overcome, which is this – being good, all the time, just isn’t very interesting.  Let’s face it, when you watch Star Wars, and you see the Jedi being sagely, noble and wise, don’t you just wish someone would strut in there, wearing black and some really wacky make-up, and invite them all for a trip to the local nightclub and twenty rounds of vodka?  Don’t you just want to bang your head against the wall any time someone nice dressed all in white says, ‘no, we cannot unleash the dragon, for it is forbidden in our sacred code….’  All the time the villain of the piece, whatever that piece may be, is strutting around in scary armour, hitting irritating subordinates, committing morally questionable but politically savvy deeds, and generally having a really good, well-fed time.  Someone once said that the devil gets all the best tunes – he certainly gets all the best lines.  Every now and then, the situation is jazzed up by the presence of your ‘cheeky chappy’ on the side of Light, to try and relieve the boredom of always being pleasant.  In Star Wars, it’s Han Solo; in Lord of the Rings, it’s a mixture of dwarves and hobbits; in most mainstream fantasy, it’s usually the addition of a sometime-thief or a fiesty princess who’s decided to use their dubious skills in the name of good.  As you can see from that list, the technique works better for some, than for others.

All this said, there are a few new twists on this traditional light/dark conflict which give me a bit of hope.  If anyone here has read the Night Watch books, you’ll be mildly relieved to find that even though it’s a story of Light versus Dark, the deeds which Light have to commit in order to muddle by, are often so morally questionable in and of themselves that the distinction becomes not much more than a lifestyle choice, and the books are as much a study of uneasy truces and dodgy diplomacy, as of any epic conflict. There is also a strong theme of temptation, again in a slightly Biblical way.  Frodo is tempted by the One Ring throughout his journey; servants of light are tempted to do evil deeds in order to make a greater good, and so on.  Even bloody vampires – traditionally as Dark as Dark Could Be – have become rather more complicated and, though no one has yet satisfactorily answered the question of why someone might want to unleash the nether forces of evil across the world, people are at least making a braver attempt to provide a solution better than the traditional, ‘cos they’re evil, innit’.

Continue reading »]]> It’s surprisingly hard to get good photos of a city at night.  Lord knows I’ve tried, and lord knows I’ve failed.  It’s said that a lighting designer should be able to take good photos, as it’s all about colour, contrast, angles etc., but frankly no matter how well-intentioned my composition, I always find that the camera tends to shake.  Which is a shame, as a busy city at night is, quite simply, beautiful.

Therefore!  In a spirit of ‘oh that’s interesting….’ these photos aren’t mine at all, but were taken by my favourite ever technician, Ian, who seems to have a knack for getting nice pictures down far more than me.  (A skill which he perhaps regretted the day his department asked him to take a photo of the same thing every fifteen minutes for every hour of a week, in order to create a stop-motion film of not very much happening over great amounts of time….)

Continue reading »]]> Sitting on the train yesterday, on my way to rehearsals, a man in a bright green suit reading a book entitled ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Kaballah’ suddenly stood up, crossed the aisle, sat down next to me, lent across the table and said, “May I tell you about the most important thing you’ll ever hear?”

Oh dear, I thought.  8 hours of rehearsals to go, and it’s gonna begin with some preaching.  But hell, the train had just left Ashford, and I was getting off at Canterbury, so at least there was a fixed time limit on everything so, okay, bring it on…

… and what happened next, I will tell you another time.  For now, let’s go bigger than the St. Pancras-Margate Express… let’s have a conversation about God.

I am atheist.  Could you tell?  It’s been fairly apparent across this blog, but I’ve always danced around the issue of why I’m atheist and why I don’t believe in god – and oddly, I do feel the need to separate these two things into different categories, for reasons I’ll come to – for the simple reason that it’s something people still get worked up about in this day and age.  So!  Here let me lay it down – these are my personal beliefs, you are allowed, indeed, invited to disagree entirely with me, but I am aiming to avoid too many flaming arguments or, worse, opinions from either side of the debate which are precisely that – opinions, rather than reasoned thought.  With this caveat laid, please read on…

Firstly, let me tackle the atheism part.  I am, in all probability, atheist because my parents are.  Simple fact.  Most people are religious because their parents are – converts are still few and far between – and while the nature of faith may differ from generation to generation, it’s never-the-less one of those simple things we have to acknowledge in life.  Kids tend to believe what their parents believe, and I was raised atheist.

Atheism has, interestingly, acquired connotations in recent years which I was not raised in.  At its simplest level, it is denying the existence of a god – which I do – but as our society gets more secular, atheism has itself become raised to an almost ideological level.  At its best, it is the application of rationalism to tradition, the use of reason and the scientific method, and I have plenty of time for it, as these are all sane things and far more prone to clear thinking and, oddly enough, compassion than many religious doctrines are.  I say compassion, in the sense that a big part of being religious is being not someone else’s religion.  Social identities are frequently constructed based on polar opposites – I am a woman in that I am not a man; I am British in that I am not French; I am Christian in that I am not Jew and so on and so forth, and even within various faiths there are distinctions.  I am Catholic, not Protestant; Lutheran not Kalvinist etc. – and we’ve all seen where these divisions lead.  Atheism is arguably therefore a compassionate ideology, in that there is no distinction between man, woman, Muslim or Hindu, none whatsoever, and no reason for there to be.

However!  Put the word ‘militant’ in front of anything, and you’ve got a problem, and atheism can, like all good ‘ism’s be militant, dismissing – with reason – the philosophical structures of religion and, at the same time, also dismissing the people who harbour them.  There is an ugly implication here, that those who believe in god are, for this simple act, irrational, foolish and quite possibly stupid, and at this destructive logical position, I draw the line.  It is a militancy that makes no allowance for those who believe in a god, with a moral code thoughtfully derived from this faith, and those who believe in the literal truth of an ancient text.  Certainly, to believe in the literal truth of often contradictory and unprovable texts does seem irrational; but to believe in god for the answers which have not yet been given, and to follow a moral code derived from this faith, is neither irrational, nor something which any sane person would condemn.

However, militancy is something that has haunted religion for a few thousand years too, with frequently disastrous consequences.  But, as this is already turning into something of an essay, I’ll guess we’ll come onto that in the next part of this ramble…

Continue reading »]]> So it turns out I’m doing a signing on February 23rd!  Which is a surprise to everyone, not least me, as the book isn’t out until March 1st… however, the guys at Forbidden Planet in London have pre-ordered loads of Minority Council in, and with any luck the last of the bruising will be gone from my hand and yes… it’ll be groovy… I’m hoping for biscuits… and hopefully I’ll see some of you there!

http://forbiddenplanet.com/events/2012/02/23/benedict-jacka-and-kate-griffin/

Continue reading »]]> It’s been a few days since I blogged, and the reason is that my hand, currently looks like this:

It is not, I hasten to add, a life-threatening injury!  There’s nothing broken, nothing bleeding, no bits are going to fall off.  All I have are some rather bruised knuckles, and an impressive swollen thumb – hardly life threatening, but a real bugger to type with.  I acquired these injuries while doing escrima, the martial art which I am continually surprised to find myself enjoying.  I haven’t been hurt doing it before, and doubt I’ll be hurt doing it in time to come, as the instructors are alert and the students, generally, very careful.  But it was while doing a drill with a rather more experienced student, that I realised there are certain key things required to be really good at martial arts.  There’s strength… perhaps more debatable with weapons based combat, since a big stick is a big stick regardless of who’s holding it… there’s speed, agility, technique, focus – courage, I’d argue, is also useful as you need to be confident enough of yourself and your adversary to walk up to them with a cry of ‘come on with your big stick if you dare’ and thus hopefully avoid having to use all of the other qualities – and finally there’s awareness.  The person I was sparring with has strength – lots of it – and technique – plenty, and enough focus that I sometimes wonder if he’s trying to fry an invisible ant on my forehead whenever we spar.  What he doesn’t necessarily have, is a wider awareness of the rest of the room.  Thus, when the teacher said ‘now block a side attack’ I went to block a side attack, and was startled to discover a stick coming inbound for my head.  The good news is that the stick did not hit my head.  The bad news is that to save my skull, I sacrificed a few other bodily parts en route.

Once through the initial indignity of physical distress, this entire experience is also a reminder of how difficult it can sometimes be, being the junior kitten in a room of senior cats.  I am still fairly new at escrima, and so if someone with better technique, more experience and a look that could cut through titanium, decides that he’s going to swing his stick at your head when you’ve just heard the teacher ask him to try and take out a few ribs instead, what can a girl do?  I did politely point out, while hopping with pain, that I expected him to go for the side rather than the top, but he informed me he believed he was doing all-round attacks and when it’s junior kitten’s word vs. senior cat’s word, and when senior cat has just removed junior kitten’s right thumb, I ask you again, what is a girl to do other than grin, bare it and hope there’s some arnica at home.  I like to tell myself that the fact this man entirely failed to notice that I was now clutching a rapidly swelling limb, as he came barreling in with his next, very strong and beautifully executed attack, is more a reflection on my warrior spirit, than on his being a plonker.

Make no mistake – I still enjoy martial arts and don’t particularly blame my sparring partner, in the sense that it’s unusual for an attacker to declare their intentions before attacking.  It turns out – and no one should really be surprised – that I am better at weapon fighting than close-quarters wrestling, owing, I suspect, to the fact that I lack any kind of strength or endurance, but can move quickly if pressed to and have a great advantage in terms of reach.  However, considering that I am, in all other ways, forms and means, an utter wuss, I might just carry on thinking about these things as purely an academic exercise…

Continue reading »]]> I keep notebooks – a little obsessively, it turns out.  When I had to go to Kent for rehearsals last weekend, I got on the train with pen and notebook in hand, only to discover that my notebook was only one page from being finished.  That one page didn’t last me to Ebbsfleet, and for thirty five, stressful, borderline traumatic minutes, I had nothing on which to write.  Needless to say, I always have a reserve notebook for just these emergencies, but had, in a moment of naive foolishness, left my reserve at home in London, and so on arrival in Canterbury I had to race to the nearest stationer and get a new notebook, or suffer the dire psychological consequences.

I also have a slightly obsessive relationship with pens.  I write all my novels on the computer, because it’s far faster and, interestingly, the speed at which I write changes my narrative voice.  But I take a lot of longhand notes first – not just on books, but on things I’m studying, on lighting cues gone astray, and on things I need to get done before the day is out.  Writing in biro is, I find, a rather tedious thing, which always makes my handwriting messier and the weight of the pen on the paper feels tiring.  Writing in fountain pen is better, but here is another complexity – I don’t always write left-to-right.  Frequently I write from right-to-left, and need a pen which can handle this indignity.  I hate expensive fountain pens, because they seem like something just waiting to be lost, and have, over the years, formed a deep and loving relationship with the £2.49 fountain pen that Rymans sells for schoolkids, as being one of the few which I can coax into moving easily over the page, with my eccentric handwriting…

I’ve written many exams with these pens, and filled up well over thirty notebooks over the years with them, but it is a simple truth that every 2 years or so, I’ll lose one, and indeed quite recently I went through this trauma and spent an embarrassing part of the small hours of one morning on my hands and knees in my bedroom, trying to work out where the hell it could have gone.  I know that, financially speaking, we’re not talking about a huge expense here, but I do get sentimentally attached to my pens in a way which, I know, is just a little bit odd…

As you will have also noticed by now, I tend not to write in English.  I do sometimes, if it’s something very important which I need to remember, or need to do, but mostly, I write in a mixture of other alphabets and languages.  This all started in secondary school, when two things convinced me I absolutely needed to develop my own code for taking notes in.  Firstly, I had a very long commute from home to school – about an hour and a half each way – and spent a lot of time on the underground scribbling away.  As people will on the underground, strangers would lean into study my notes, and I found this intrusion horrible.  Secondly, I had one or two lessons at school which were just catastrophically dull, and writing was my escape from them.  If a teacher caught me writing something in English which wasn’t about car parks in Argentina or the poetry of Gerard Manly Hopkins, well, I was probably in trouble; if however, the text they saw on the page was impenetrable, then there was no way to prove what everyone suspected – that I just wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention to class.  Thus, I began to develop various codes of my own…

After a while, my codes evolved.  Cyrillic was the first alphabet I learnt, but the absence of the letter ‘H’ and a few other quirks quickly forced me to add in characters from Ancient Greek to fill the void.  Then, when it became apparent that several people I knew could read either Cyrillic, or Ancient Greek, or both, I started using bits from Arabic and Urdu to see me through, again, substituting my own symbols for letters which the alphabets didn’t support.  Interestingly, I found different alphabets lent themselves to different tasks. The fluid curves of Arabic are great for contemplation and introspection; the quicker Cyrillic is good for notes, and by the time I was 16 I was also adding more abstract symbols for words which I used commonly, or for negations of an idea – a grammatical idea pinched from Mandarin.  I acquired a bit of the Punjabi alphabet as well for a while, but actually found the large symbols and erratic joins made for a slower longhand than I needed, so I tend to only trot that one out when feeling tired.  I hasten to add, I am no good at languages – but alphabets and codes have always been something I enjoy and feel relatively comfortable with.  And so, over the years, the notebooks have filled up, and I have a slightly malign hope that one day, some poor shmuck will be paid by an academic institution to try and read them… in which case, good luck to you…

Continue reading »]]> Good god, where did January go?  We are now, officially, only 6 weeks from the publication of the Minority Council.  For lo!  The cover has appeared on the blog, and you can read more about the book in the books section… and yes, it’s all getting a bit imminent really.  I would celebrate on the day itself, but exasperatingly I’ll be in a technical rehearsal, struggling, sweating and cursing my way through a lighting plot.  I might indulge in a bit of extra cake, however…

For those who are wondering, my warning remains – do not read this book on the kindle.  For my full rant on the theme of why, I suggest you look back through the blog, where you will discover a bitter tirade about the inability of kindles to cope with columns.  I know it may seem odd, it may seem petty, but honestly, when you get to the bit where suddenly it’s important, you’ll find it’s really very, very important.  I have no idea if there’s a hardcover version – my instinct is no, but I really dunno – but for everyone who’s just looking for a simple tale of fairy dust, monsters, sorcerers, Aldermen and things not to do while high in Canary Wharf, the paperback is getting pretty damn imminent!

Continue reading »]]> Well it’s stonking, isn’t it?

‘Nuff said, my work here is done….

The basic facts are easy and fairly well known.  The original St. Pauls Cathedral died a horrid death during the Great Fire of London in 1666, along with most of the city and several million rats, a large number of which were carrying Black Death so good riddance really.  The brand spanking new St. Pauls Cathedral which we all know and love was built by Christopher Wren as part of his plan to remodel London post-fire into a glorious new, shiny city.  Unfortunately all Christopher Wren’s good intentions were rather undermined by the determination of the people of London to get on with things regardless of whether the city looked good or worked well around them while they did so, and thus only a few icons of Wren’s metropolis were actually ever built.  St. Pauls Cathedral, I think we can all agree, is a pretty stonking symbol of what might have been.

Although it is still very much a house of God – something I, as an athiest tourist find a little disconcerting, to be honest – there is a £17 entry fee to anyone not intended to say friendly things at the Creator, except for a few rare days of the year.  One of these days – that of the Lord Mayor’s Show – was the day I went for precisely this reason, with my favourite stage manager and script supervisor, to have a nose round the interior.  The crypt famously houses a whole host of bigwigs, of whom Horatio Nelson has got the first class ticket booth, no question.  Rather less well known is that the crypt was also the place where my Great Uncle Reg (I kid you not) spent a large part of the London Blitz hiding out playing cards.  He, along with four other artists serving with the fire service, had been conscripted into fire watch duty from the top of St. Pauls, on the rather naive belief that, as artists, they’d care passionately about the fate of the historical landmarks around them.  However, as the bombs fell and large parts of the city burnt, it seemed that art lost out to the wonders of a well-insulated, underground, reinforced bunker beneath a cathedral…

Miraculously, and perhaps despite my Uncle Reg rather than thanks to him, St. Pauls survived the Blitz unscathed and has, in recent years, been cleaned, revealing that its soot-grey stones are in fact bright white marble.  Tourists now surround its dome, which still commands a fairly respectable view of the city, while more tourists go into the Whispering Gallery just inside the dome where, so the stories go, you can put your ear to the walls on one side of the gallery, and someone can whisper into the stones on the other side, and you will hear them speak as if they were stood right next to you.

Two minutes walk from the Millennium Bridge, and ten minutes from London Bridge, Blackfrairs, Holborn, Clerkenwell and Bank, the cathedral itself is now something of an island in a sea of one-way traffic systems.  It’s also still a camping ground for the Occupy London protestors, who are camped out (very neatly now) in front of its steps.  This is not the entry in which I discuss this particular movement, except to say that there’s a lot to protest about at the moment and I’m quite chuffed someone is doing it, even if I question some of the tactics involved…

In other trivia, St. Pauls Cathedral was the centrepiece for the final showdown of the first Horatio Lyle novel, in which the laws of physics were used and then really rather abused to, I think, spectacular effect.  For anyone out there who doesn’t know what I’m talking about… go read…

The photos below are nearly all taken by Gina Pratsis, my favourite script supervisor, except for the exterior shot, which is mine!

Continue reading »]]> Ronald Searle died a few weeks ago, and this is a brief blog entry to commemorate the fact.  For those who don’t know, he was an artist, most famous for the Molesworth books and St. Trinians – he also drew a series of very famous images from his time as a Japanese POW during the Second World War, when he traded portraits of his captors in exchange for paper and charcoal, creating a stark and rightly renowned visual documentary of his time as a prisoner of war.  He was also, via marriage, my Great Uncle, and though I barely knew him, a drawing he did of my Grandfather’s cat, sits in pride of place above my parent’s mantlepiece, and a fatter, more indulged blue-grey moggy you can barely imagine.  As a primary school kid, I was introduced to Down With Skool, one of the wittiest, most charming books I have ever read, as an incentive for attending dyslexia class in what was, I now realise, a sublime piece of convoluted psychology on my mother’s part.  As it turned out, I wasn’t dyslexic in the least, but it hardly mattered as I had been introduced through this experience to some of the most brilliant drawings and cartoons I’ve ever met.  For anyone who hasn’t seen any of Ronald Searle’s work, I suggest you go looking, and it will doubtless last for many generations yet to come.