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

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

Capitalist: remnant forces; see Imperialism.

Imperialism: is the monopoly stage of capitalism

Industrialization: bring about socialist industrialization.

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

Intellectual: must integrate themselves with the workers and peasants.

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

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

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

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

Propagandize: Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought.

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

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

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

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

www.londonist.com

I mean it!

Go now!

It is a shameless plug for my Dad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s why….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m not a huge fan of didactic writing – I’ve always been of the opinion that the story should be put first, and any profound moral messages should emerge as a result of the story, rather than as a thing imposed on the narrative as prime purpose.  I’m definitely not a fan of putting the writer into the story, since it seems anywhere between a cop-out and utterly wanky.  But!  In praise of The Power of Yes, the one hour forty five minutes I spent watching it may have gone a very long way to reforming my opinion of both.  The story was, from line one, put first, but the passion, anger and morality of the story was always its heart, and the device of having the writer directly telling it became practically charming as the characters unfolded.  In brief, it’s the story of the financial meltdown that’s been the source of so much of so much for the last… well, more than a year now, eighteen months, perhaps?  Of how, why, what, who.  The fact that it spends so much time trying to maintain an open mind means that by the end, when the sheer outrage that, for the sake of the rich many, the poor many have had to pay up trillions – trillions - to bail out the banks, makes what could have otherwise been a cold lesson in fiscal politics a far more emotional experience.  I know very little about economics – although, I suppose in my defence, I have a fair grasp of how it has affected history and politics, even if I couldn’t tell a hedge fund from a government bond – but came away from this play feeling both enlightened and, perhaps more importantly, determined to find out more about just how the governments of the world, the UK included (if not especially) found themselves in the pretty mess we’re in now.

As for what a pretty mess we’re in… this is possibly the first election campaign I can remember (not that the election has been called, but hell) in which there’s competition over who’ll bring in the better cuts!  Yeah; we’re in that kind of a mess.  I’ve always kept out of political debates… I think my problem has always been that the people I’ve been arguing politics with are so passionately committed to their views that I lack the ability to sway, or the willingness to be swayed by arguments that are practically religion.  My own views are, alas, perhaps too simple to serve as apt policy – trouble about being a wishy-washy left-wingish environmentalist liberal is that you want everyone to just buckle down, be nice and do the right thing, and when the unlikelyhood of that is presented, the reality of complexity and difficult decisions tends to corrupt any argument before it even gets off the ground.  It is extremely difficult for a liberal like myself to admit that sometimes, perhaps more often than we’d like to admit, the big decisions are being made by people who just don’t care about the bigger picture.  Perhaps because to concede that, particularly when it comes to matters like the environment, is to look a little too deep at a future none of us want to live in.

One last thought on The Power of Yes… as a graduate of the LSE, I’d run into one of the play’s key characters a few times, and it was a deeply strange experience seeing someone I’ve known being portrayed on stage.  I can’t help but wondering… did he go and see himself saying these words up on the stage?  And if so… did he recognise himself?

I’m told that no one ever does.

Chinatown in London is pretty small, in the grand scheme of things.  It’s just to the North of Leicester Square, and still has many hints of the old city about it, not least in the large number of alleys and rat-runs that wiggle through the area.

Piccadilly Circus is, on the other hand, traffic-heavy, tourist-heavy, and just generally somewhere that locals attempt to avoid.  I mean, cool, in a spectacular look-at-the-shiny-lights kinda way, but unless you’ve gone there specifically to glom on the diversity of mankind, (and oh boy is mankind diverse at Piccadilly Circus) it is usually a place that is passed through on the way to somewhere else.

There aren’t many arcades left in London – proper arcades in the old sense of internally contained passages lined with shops, usually selling extremely silly items at very high prices – but the majority of those surviving are cluttered round Piccadilly and St. James, of which the Burlington Arcade is both the largest, most impressive, and silliest.  Knowing nothing about antiques, I can’t say whether the collection of cigar trimmers, silver pots, gem-studded jewelry and vases are antiques, or just… well… what they are… whatever that is…there was an antique arcade at the Angel, which from the outside looked every bit huge a yellow-brick walk-through bank, but alas in recent years, it has closed down and its fate remains, as far as I know, debatable.

Alright, Hoxton.  Or ‘trendy trendy’ Hoxton as it is less commonly known.  Hoxton went through a long period of being a dump on the north edge of Old Street, but has in recent areas been rediscovered and made into a hip and fashionable place full of converted loft flats, old Hawksmore-esque churches, vibrant street markets, ethnic diversity, artistic independence and reasonable proximity to public transport.  Now it is a place where worlds meet – every language, every age, every wealth band and every taste and style, all moving politely round each other through its refurbished terraced streets and beneath its grey council blocks.

I love this image, and regret that my zoom wasn’t wide enough to do it better.  It is the welcome sign that visitors pass underneath on their way to Guys Hospital, just by London Bridge.  Welcome to Guys – and to McDonalds.  What a union was herein made.

(Incidentally, for anyone wondering, Pericles was, from a lighting point of view, tonnes of fun, better than expected and I deny all and any knowledge of the (minor) focus hole DSL.  And I hate Strand 520s.  I mean, for any future employers out there, I can use them – hell, I have got chase effects down! – but seriously, snottiness about the ETC Ion aside, it really is a wonderful bit of kit.  But other than that, Pericles went very well!  Nerdy moment over.)

Anyway, point is, Hamlet was on TV this Christmas, with Mr David Tennant examining the skull et. al., as I’m sure many, many people spotted, and yes, I watched it, spiritually munching popcorn all the way, and yes, it was pretty bloody stonking.  Which I should have kinda expected, really, because (entirely by accident, honest) I’d seen it before.

I am not what you’d call a neurotic theatre-goer – I ought to be, considering my chosen profession – but I don’t have enough money and don’t have enough time considering that RADA likes to work us six days a week until silly o’clock and to be honest, I’m not a queing-from-3-a.m. kinda girl.  But!  The RSC does, praise be unto it, do £5 tickets for the under 25s, and I did, by accident, have a friend studying at Warwick University when Hamlet opened in Stratford and was invited to come watch a football match with her that weekend and one thing led to another… and before I really knew what was happening, it was 7 a.m. outside the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford Upon Avon and we were doing penguin impressions to keep warm.  And playing cheat – you would not believe the ruthlessness the cheat can produce from otherwise perfectly civilized people!  My god!

Anyway.  Stratford Upon Avon is, in many ways, a Very Silly Place.  For a start, you have to take a train from Marylebone and, I kid you not, I was delayed forty minutes because there was a cow on the line.  This may not seem a particularly radical thing, but as someone who grew up in Hackney, I only ever really see cows on the side of milk bottles, and even then struggle to find the connection.  On arrival in the station you step out into the typical car park designed to destroy any optimism, walk up to a road of fairly standard houses that could be anywhere in the world, turn right for cheap B&B land and left for Yea Olde Historicale Centre.  And yes, before you know it, you’re sitting outside the Shakespeare Arms drinking coffee from a mug adorned with a porcelain ruff and being offered a souvenir quill.  Walking round the town, it fairly quickly becomes apparent that this is a place made economically viable by only two things – Shakespeare and swans.  And let’s not under-rate the swans!  The swans are not just numerous and impressive, but they know their market and have an almost cat-like appreciation of humanoids.  (Towit; they appreciate our usefulness but fail to fully grasp or care what we get from the relationship.)  When I was still of that special age when you had that special haircut known as Mum-Did-My-Fringe, I had an aunt who lived in nearby Banbury, and whenever we visited we would go to Stratford to ride the waterways and look for kingfishers and dragonflies.  Let’s not underestimate the swans.

However, remove the swans and Shakespeare, and this canal town would quickly, I suspect, lose its economic rationale.  But if ever the Royal Shakespeare Company justified its presence in Stratford, it did it with Hamlet.  Commercially and for sheer stonking theatrical value.  I was, I admit, a bit weary of seeing it, not least because of the sheer mass of publicity surrounding the fact that David Tennant was playing the lead part.  There’d been so much speculation that actually, in the midst of almost too much information, I kinda felt I knew nothing at all.  My expectation was both increased and dented by the fact that by 11 a.m. on the day we got our tickets, there was a queue stretching around the block behind us, and the thought just kept on sneaking into the back of the mind that at least some of these people might be willing to commit unlawful acts with sharpened sticks to get their hands on my ticket.  Getting my ticket, by the by, was almost KGB-esque in its enforcement – it turns out that the under-25 Shakespeare crowd have quite a history of duplicity on their side.

Anyway, we got it, and while waiting for the play to begin sat, in the mild drizzle, eating fish and chips and looking at the swans as, we felt, was our purpose.  (And if any of you are wondering about the football match, the blue team from the Shakespeare Institute beat the red team hands down.  Tragically.)  While this was happening, I discovered the other reason why me and the countryside have never really got on; I am allergic to it.  People think I jest when I say this – I really don’t.  Take me away from the exhaust fumes of any major city and I become asthma attack ground zero.  I just can’t cope with all that oxygen, it’s like suddenly trying to force-feed a starved pirahna.

Which leads me, entirely irrelevantly, to another sideways rant – what idiot, what total git, decided to make asthma patients pay for their medications on the grounds that it’s a ‘controllable condition’?  Sure, it’s controllable – so long as I don’t walk faster than four miles an hour, do any strenuous physical activity, laugh too heartily, or enter any environment to which my body is not already perfectly adapted.  It’s controllable, in much the same way clothes only need washing if you wear them.  Anyway – end of rant.

By the time we got into the theatre – many pictures of many people looking dramatically fraught on many walls – massive quantities of drugs had brought my respiratory system under some kind of control.  We did the regular trawl of the souvenir shop, failed to buy wooden swords, maps of Yea Olde Englande or teaclothes stitched with the face of Mr Shakespeare himself wearing a smile almost worthy of the Mona Lisa for its ambiguity.  When the bell went we were bundled inside, and every seat in the theatre was pretty much packed even before we’d worked out where the student seats were kept.  I couldn’t see a spare.  I kept on wheezing a bit.  The lights went down.  The play kicked off.

First impression was sympathy for the lighting designer.  The director of Hamlet was clearly a man who believed in practical on-stage lighting and had thus armed all of Act 1 Scene 1 with torches that they could point this way or that rather than using any actual rigged lamps.  Which worked brilliantly!  But must have been rather boring for the lighting designer to plot.  Then lights up and in trot the cast and off they go and it was all warming up nicely right up to the moment when everyone buggers off and Hamlet goes centre stage, takes a deep breath…

… and collapses.  I mean, we all know that Hamlet isn’t going to end well, it goes from bad to worse and then some.  But there was that moment, when suddenly out of no where there was bundle of pure grief curled up centre stage, that I forgot I was in a theatre, forgot I was having asthma troubles, forgot that my socks were soggy and the seats were really a bit too  close together and was just a gonner, completely caught up in the play and everything that happened.  I’ve seen some brilliant stuff in my time, and a lot of merely very good stuff, but the thing that separates the brilliant from the very good is that I don’t remember the brilliant stuff as if it was in a theatre.  I don’t remember the crowds or the queues or the interval drinks or the lighting or anything like that; I just remember feelings and images that have stuck with me to this day.

Hamlet may be the greatest play ever written – I dunno, I don’t know how you’d go about judging.  There are bits, let’s face it, which could do with the blue pencil.  But there are bits of everything that could, and even the blue pencil bits are more about bladder control than actual textual content.  And even the best play ever written can be ballsed up by a rubbish production.  (And arguably the worst play in the world cannot be saved by a brilliant production.)  I’m sure there are plenty of people who left the theatre – and turned off their TV on boxing day – feeling that their day had not been brightened and their heartbeat had not reached triple figures, or that a stage play for TV is something that will never be as alive as the real thing.  And there were differences; of course there were, and that is to be expected and probably, looked for.  But for those who found themselves sitting on the edge of their seats, trying very hard to remember to breathe, I hope that you and I both were part of a large crowd, tempted to feel indefinable things that we might never have felt before, or feel again.

Stephanie Mayer has sold more books, is more read and beloved, than I have imagination to fully grasp.  The fact that people read her books like they were sent from Mount Sinai are a testimony to the fact that they have tuned into something that most writers, myself include, haven’t tapped, and that is a remarkable achievement, whether intended or otherwise, and she deserves nothing but respect for it.  Vampires can be cool… certainly of all the fantastical creatures to waltz across the silver screen, they seem to have the best dress sense and weaponry, and the vampire myth has in its time offered, and continues to offer, cool and interesting ways of telling cool and interesting stories.

But!

… and this is an entirely personal but…

I am so bloody bored of hormonal teenage snogging vampires.  In fact, I am bored of so many kinds of vampire… dark, broody vampires who answer with a maximum of three words at any given time…

“How’s the bloodlust?”

“Under control.”

“Did you enjoy your book on the philosophy of Socrates?”

“Yes.”

“Are you concerned about killing your own brother in order to stop occult powers of evil sweeping across the world?”

“No.  Crossbow.  Now.”

In much the same way often the best way to appear smart in the face of sheer intellectual befuddlement is to nod and smile as though you are wise enough to appreciate the argument being presented, without wishing (though it is within your power) to tear it to shreds, so it seems the key to being cool vampire-style is saying almost nothing at all while looking quietly tormented by What Must Be Done.  Black leather is in; cardigans are out.  Blood is being drunk because of insatiable lust, and you can just bet that there’s a lot of heavy breathing and cleavage happening at the same time.  I mean, I’m not a fan of the vampires = sex argument, because I think vampires if done well can = something more, but I gotta say, the recent trend is certainly towards the sex end of bloodlust, ideally with a bit of emotional trauma thrown in.  Ultimate relationship challenge!  Brad, I love you… but if we fall in love truly one of us will have to die…!  Generally, if your vampire is wearing leather, s/he is into technology, reacts badly to ultraviolet light and has really straight hair.  At the other end of the spectrum, there’s your vampire in big-flowing-robes-with-knobbly-bits, who likes intoning in ancient languages while standing in the middle of occult symbols, and will often speak in sentences of more than three words, but without any particular meaning…

“How was your book?”

“I read between its pages the firey truth of the fall of our kind, and tasted the dust of damnation.”

“So… good, then?”

“As good as moonrise to the wolf.”

“That good, huh?”

“The moon is to the wolf what the falafal is to the lonely traveller upon the suburban highstreet at two a.m..  Both hunger.  Neither are grateful in the morning.”

And so on.  Only without the sensible connotations.  Yet this is still a generalisation – vampires have taken every possible form.  If you were a teenage girl at roughly the age I was, you would have had to bury your head in the syrup sponge and custard not to have found out every detail of the events of Buffy the Vampire Slayer at any average school dinner; vampires then went through a period of killing werewolves and visa versa, they fell in love, the conducted horrible experiments, they walked in the day, they walked only in the night, they walked in the day and the night but didn’t like either, they had swords, they had guns, they had magic, they had machines.  Dracula’s a fine example of this flexibility, and also, perhaps, of why vampires endure so long in our literature.  The guy is just next to impossible to kill!  Crosses, stakes, garlic, sunlight, even when you think you’ve got him there’s always some prat who goes and spills blood in the wrong place and poof, there you are, back dealing with an intractable enemy again.  The rules are there to be perpetually bent.

A historical footnote… there was indeed a Vlad the Impaler, who was killed in the fifteenth century by the invading Ottomans, thus, in my mind, giving brownie points to one of my favourite collapsed empires… even if they didn’t make it into the literature that followed…

All that said!  Like a hypocrite (and attempting to disguise my shame by admitting to it) I can see the use of vampires.  I’m even prepared to use them in the world of Urban Magic.  But my question is this… if humans can only take blood types that match their own, surely the same rule should be applied to vampires?  Imagine how difficult it would be to haunt the night if you had to stop in front of your prey with a cry of…

“Now, trembling mortal, I shall drink your blood!  But can I just check… it is A- isn’t it?”

What will probably never happen?  (I hear the strangled cry.)

To quote a sage… make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait…

After all, the reasons why it’ll probably never happen are numerous and complex!  The sheer amount of money involved, the constraint of time, recession, the credit crunch, the demands of the market and the audience, studio’s whims, development hell, the struggle of getting together a team, the decided lack of teenage vampires snogging, I mean, the odds against it ever happening are immense.  Douglas Adams, when it happened to him, took twenty five years to get anything done and even then the budget was cut and he was, sadly, dead, by the time anything came of it.  People have spent years and years of their lives hoping that there’ll be movement and then when, if it does happen, as usually it doesn’t, it goes straight to DVD with an embarrassed cough and occasionally gets borrowed from the local video shop by men in dirty anoraks who pretend its for a friend.  There are many, many forces against this, which brings me back to my original thesis…

… don’t get excited.

But on the other hand, if something does come of it (and let’s face it, it’d be absolutely fantastic if something did, and I have officially promised to buy the most ridiculous pair of socks ever made by man in the eventuality) (and a new plug for my sink – thinking big here)  … if something does come of it then people might raise their eyebrows and say ‘why Kate, you must have known about this for eons, why didn’t you say something’ and then how daft would I look?

So yes.  A producer in Los Angeles has bought the film option for A Madness of Angels, and now that ink is actually on the contract, I will freely admit that I am absolutely thrilled and delighted by this development.  With, of course, the caveat as stipulated above!   In pratical terms, from where I’m sat, this means very little.  I will sit and carry on writing as usual with my fingers crossed and if something does come of it, there shall be much rejoicing, and if, despite all the best work of the producer (who seems, in case you’re wondering, extremely lovely and passionate about the project, hurrah!) the studios just go ‘you want to do what to the streets of London?’ then…

… I am still young, and this bodes well.

There is just one last thought I have to share on this subject, which comes from the gentleman in his life, who, on hearing about the contract, cackled shamelessly and in between his gasps of breath intoned in his most booming Hollywood movie-trailer voice…

‘Vin Diesel IS Matthew Swift!’

He then, needless to say, went on laughing.

Butin a good way.

Anyway, despite being a decent not-quite-Jewish-enough atheist, and despite knowing that yes, it’s essentially a commercial binge-fest, I love Christmas.  It’s one giant conspiracy to have, for just one day, as much fun, brotherly love and familial affection, yay, though said affection be manifested in TV box sets and the ritual watching of Dr Who, as is possible.  And all of this seems like an excellent thing.

So, to all you lot out there who may find yourself wandering onto this blog during the ad breaks, or sat at your computer wondering whether that wasn’t a bacon-wrapped cocktail sausage too far…

Merry Christmas!

Now!

This entry will hopefully be brief, because I spent many, many months arguing with my editor about the merits or otherwise of the TV-remake of Battlestar Galactica that has graced screens for the last few years.  My position being that it was rubbish; his position being that it was the greatest thing ever made.  My conviction that it was rubbish was, I fully admit, based on dubious information.  I’d seen some of the original series, which was, let’s face it, not exactly Shakespeare Does Robots, and I’d seen bits of the new series, which seemed to involve more sombre staring into the vacant beyond and more sweaty vests than I’d thought one little screen could ever contain.  And my god the vests are sweaty, I mean, let’s not beat about the bush here, more artily-disshevelled-gleaming-sexy-people-having-a-horrid-time-on-the-edge-of-breaking you’re unlikely to ever meet.

But…

… since then, Battlestar Galactica has come to my local library…

… and thence to my DVD player…

… and so, after all this, I grudgingly and with all the grace of a wounded buffalo, reform my position.  I would still argue that perhaps it takes itself a little bit too seriously… ‘light relief’ are not words you’re likely to run across in the course of any of Battlestar Galactica’s series… but on the other hand, in the absence of light relief, it does an absolutely brilliant job of retaining ‘crushing tension’ right up to the very, very end, as humanity, and along the way, the other lot too, battle against each other, themselves, the possibility of exctinction, death, misery, and all the symptoms of all the above on the way.  When there’s action, it’s utterly thrilling; when there’s betrayal, it’s soul-wrenching; when there’s politics, its savage; when religion, it’s fanatical.

And it says a lot about Battlestar Galactica that my one lingering caveat now that the series has run its course, is, naturally, a caveat about the nature of god.  But, if you wish to find out why this is my last narrative concern, you’ll just have to watch it, won’t you?

And there’s the answer… West Wing.

Had I known the day I staggered into HMV armed with a student discount card, a gift token value 25% and a determination that my weekend would be long and lazy what a discovery I would make there…

… well, I would have staggered in a little faster.  For lo!  The complete West Wing, all seven seasons, were there on offer for a ridiculously low price tag, and I had not a moment’s hesitation in buying it.  Back home, I turned down the lights, fired up the computer, wrapped myself in a blanket, got out the hot chocolate and started watching.

And it’s brilliant.  Utterly brilliant.  I mean, sure, I can sympathise with those who say it’s bewildering, too fast, makes no sense to anyone who doesn’t have a degree in American politics or isn’t a supporter of the Democratic Party.  But on the other hand, for decades, programs like Dr Who and Star Trek have specialised in talking utter nonsense at very high speed while being shot at by aliens with unknown motives – hell, anyone who’s ever watched 5 minutes of House or ER will know that it is a) utterly gripping and b) utterly non-sensical.  I’ve sat through I don’t know how much House (enthralled) and to this day can’t tell you the difference between a PET, CAT, CT or MRI scan.  (But I’ll not tell you the difference in a very urgent voice.)  With West Wing at least there’s a hope that if you concentrate very hard, you’ll get an insight into the workings of US politics.

Not that this is the point…

… I know only two people who might be accused of watching West Wing for its political insight…

No, the reason you watch West Wing is because it’s a fantastically constructed, break-neck bit of television, full of intelligent, sympathetic, complicated characters, performed brilliantly, which in its seven years of running swept up and down the gauntlet of political debate, probed those issues that no one really wants to probe, delved into every corner of the American psyche and came out with hands dirty and the conclusion that in governance, there’s really no such thing as an easy answer.  And yes, while we were cheering for the Democratic inhabitants of the West Wing who made up the leading characters, there weren’t really good guys or bad guys (except perhaps for the odd Bush-shaped Republican Senator…) … just people with passionate and opposing views that they struggled to reconcile in an ever-changing and complicated world.  And it’s funny.  I mean, like all good drama, it’s all other things besides, but even when it’s not actually making you laugh out loud, the sheer speed and wit of the dialogue keeps you entranced, and you’ll catch yourself grinning even when you should really be and probably are feeling something else.  For punchy one-liners, I have rarely seen anything better, and for intelligent argument delivered as gripping drama, it gets full marks.

If I have one single complaint against the West Wing, it’s this…

That President Bartlet (who the LSE proudly claims, incidentally, as one of our proudest (if fictional) alumni) seems perpetually to be haunted by a twelve piece brass band.  This brass band tends to only make its presence known at the end of episodes, and usually in the presence of morally ambivalent moments, but, at the very last, there it will be, the trumpets firing up in sombre and portentous manner as President Bartlet pulls off his glasses, looks up seriously to camera, and begins to declaim about the nature of morality in politics.  And as his speech, usually extolling truth, virtue and honour, reaches its crescendo, so this invisible brass band will also reach its crescendo, and if you’re really, really unlucky, I mean, having a really bad day, there might be an American flag in the background, and if you’re in serious trouble, someone, heaven help us, might go so far as to proclaim, ‘god bless America’ and that’s it, the entire EU audience rolls its eyes and cringes in the sofa.  But this is something of a rareity and I can, in fact, only think of one ‘god bless America’ moment in the entire, otherwise utterly brilliant series, when I’ve found myself making rude and fruitily inappropriate sounds at the TV screen.

If you’ve never seen it…

… pop down the local library, borrow season one, get yourself a warm sofa, a big blanket, a cup of hot chocolate and a ‘Dummies Guide to US Politics’ and buckle down for an addictive experience…

I like this Shakespeare dude.  The guy has got something, and there have been many, many productions of Shakespeare where I have caught myself forgetting to breathe.  Why do so few playwrights put ‘Battle’ in as stage directions these days?  The technology has surely improved since 1595, come on guys, a bit of a battle, a bit of a ghost, the odd sword fight, betrayal, death, the torment of the mind, the anguish of the soul, blood, torment, violence, slapdash and a bit in rhyming couplets about seeking after a beautiful yet unobtainable woman, what’s not to love? I have a friend in Saudi Arabia who is planning to teach Macbeth on the basis that it still one of the most exciting bits of drama ever to abuse the Scottish accent; I nearly fell off my chair at the end of a performance of Henry IV (a king who, according to 1066 And All That, wisely resigned half way through his reign in favour of Henry IV Pt 2… nerdy joke, sorry…) and will always remember being forced to stand at gunpoint in a production of Richard II in honour of Bolingbroke’s victory.

Then again… Pericles is what the Reduced Shakespeare Company once lovingly tagged an ‘obscure’ or ‘lesser’ or simply a ‘bad’ bit of work.  It’s not that bad!  I’ve seen some rubbish stuff – hell, I’ve even contributed my time and torchlight to many, many a bad bit of theatre, and Pericles is doing well by comparison.  But neither is it the kind of thing you find being regularly trotted out for the audience to sing along with.  For those who haven’t had the Pericles experience… in brief it’s the story of a king who sets forth to marry a woman, discovers through means of a riddle said woman is sleeping with her father, runs away from both of the above, gets shipwrecked, meets the real woman of his dreams, marries her, has a baby, gets shipwrecked, abandons (presumed but not actually) dead wife, abandons daughter, sails away to feel miserable.  Daughter grows up to be sexy beautiful and wise, at which point surrogate mother decides to kill her; daughter is saved from said fate by being kidnapped by pirates, ends up in a brothel where by means of her virtues turns all the men from sin and is generally virginal and pure.  Meanwhile, Pericles sets forth once more, is told daughter is dead, gets… you guessed it… shipwrecked again, conveniently at the same place where daughter is living, and is reunited, hurrah.  If you think this is a happy ending oh no… because then the goddess Diana appears (and is lovingly lit, in case you’re wondering) and tells Pericles to go to her temple where lo and behold, he meets the wife he thought was dead and mother, daughter and child are all happily reunited hurrah.  Oh yes… and the incestuous king and daughter we met in Act 1, Scene 1, spontaneously combust off-stage.  I kid you not.

Pericles is, in short, one of those plays where the director really, really needs an interpretation.  I’m all in favour of directors doing crazy shit to plays, if the writing is not up to the job… although that said, I’m really really not in favour of the writing not being up to the job, and fail to this day to understand why so much of it isn’t.  Ask me the day after I graduate from RADA for further thoughts on this delicate topic…

As a result of all this, our production of Pericles is having interesting things done to it.  The staging is interesting, there’s dancing, there’s singing, there’s interludes, there’s a strobe bigger than my head suspended in the lighting rig for those pesky difficult moments, there’s choruses being all choral and stuff, it is, all things considered, taking a bit of a hammering and this may not be any bad thing.  The actors are, obviously, all American.  My greatest fear, I must admit, was that these poor American exchange students would get into rehearsal and be forced to drop their American accents, at which point I might have cried.  I am all in favour of people reading stuff in their native accent, since not only does it usually sound grand, it will invariably sound better than people reading stuff in a forced and entirely fake upper-class English one.  Thankfully, sense has prevailed, and our production of Pericles, set in the original locations, will be performed in perfect New Yorker accents!  Thank god.

From a lighting design point of view, it turns out that this production is more than a bit of a headache, as our turn-around time between the first read through and the actual rig was 48 hours.  I am, therefore, flagrantly, shamelessly and with every certainty of having to move stuff later, guessing entirely at what my lighting needs are going to be, throwing up as much of the most flexible equipment with the most adaptable colours as I can get my grubby mits on, as quickly as I can.

Will it work?

… watch this space…

In Switzerland, a law has been passed prohibiting the construction of any more minarets.  As I understand it (being very much not Swiss) mosques may still be built, but the minaret, the more visible symbol of the faith, will not be.  There are currently 4 minarets in Switzerland, and a Muslim population of 400,000.

I’m an atheist and should declare this at once – not only does the idea of a god offend what few scientific instincts I have, for blimey the proof is lacking, but the idea of a god as embodied by man’s theology terrifies me.  As expressed in the holy books of practically every faith, god, in any size shape or form, varies from the hugely self-contradictory to the downright bloody-minded.  I cheer entirely for those passages of text which promote charity, compassion, understanding, mercy, brotherly love etc., but man’s capacity to find in those self same passages justification for expressing all of the above to everyone except the guy who doesn’t conform to whatever the current social fashion of the time is, has led to atrocity throughout history.  Politics may inspire nations to go to war and kill and murder and do all the stuff we know humanity is more than up to, but more often than not religion – or perhaps more specifically, dogma and interpreted theology – make it that much harder to put out the fires once they blaze.  The separation of church and state was written partially for this reason, since the law of the state may be written to the nth comma of exactness whereby all men and all women are bound by the same term, whereas church law is a constantly shifting battle ground based upon texts thousands of years old, within whose conflicting words may be found justification for pretty much anything.  And worse – within religious law what battles have raged and rage still, of Orthodox versus Reform, Protestant versus Catholic, Sunni versus Shia – whereby each may find in the self-same text of the self-same page of the self-same book, justification for entirely different policies.

If there is a god, and as established, I wait with baited breath for that bush to burn on the side of the road, I can only hope he/she/it is much, much more than man’s current understanding, otherwise eternity is a very very long stick with a very sharp point.

Faith in god I can have plenty of time for; generally in my experience people who express faith in god tend to do it followed by offers of cups of tea and a chat, no strings attached.  Faith in theology I have a much harder time with, since that is usually followed by the inevitable philosophical slide into the ‘yeah but how do you know?’ argument which must inevitably fall back upon the ultimate statement ‘because it is written in the holy book which is the word of god’ and there an end to any sort of scientific reason.  Faith without dogma has always been more tolerant, since the predominating feature or aspiration of god in mankind’s history has been one of mercy, a characteristic that has been heavily tempered by politics and economics looking for religious justifications for its less than merciful deeds throughout the course of time, and boy have they found them.

Back to Switzerland…

… it’s none of my business (since when did that stop a nosy blogger?) but I, like, I suspect, most wishy-washy liberals muddling quietly by the EU as a whole, was more than a little nervous to discover a country I have always considered open-minded and tolerant, to not only pass a referendum in which not only one religion, but perhaps even more absurdly, the symbols of one religion is penalized.  It is not a bill which forbids the practice of Islam, but it is a bill which prohibits any visual demonstration of that faith, and its campaign has been fought on the basis that Muslims in Switzerland are not merely Muslim first and Swiss second, but that their belief in Islam is a violent evangelist one, in which the contradictions of a religious text are resolved only by taking the most extreme interpretation possible.  It is the same logic which in Istanbul in the 1500s forbid the ringing of Christian church bells or the construction of synagogues; it is a statement that in this land, one faith is dominant, and the rest is second-class.

I apologise now if anyone feels offended by my opinions here; yet they are mine and it is a blessing of being a wishy-washy liberal in a (mostly) wishy-washy liberal state that I can freely express them.  I have as little faith in the doctrines of Judiasm, Christianity, Islam as I do in Zoroastrianism, Shinto and Confucianism; but freedom of expression, and the freedom to express belief even if I don’t happen to believe in it, are two things I will cheerfully fight for.  I am sure that there are arguments against all I have said and I welcome them, and will be convinced by them if they can manage to be convincing, but in the mean time I am worried that in the 21st century, in the heart of Europe, a bill has been passed in which it would appear, religion and politics are not as separate as I thought.

My camera is broken.

I am deeply upset by this fact for a number of reasons, but thankfully, I discover I’ve built up a silly archive of pics from the last few months, and since I dislike blogs without at least the odd splash of colour here or there, I figured the time had come to write a bit more about favourite topic 1; London.

To be exact…

Broadgate.

I think the best thing to ask about Broadgate, is why.  I mean, not why write about it – I write about it because it’s a not-particularly well-known, rather-obscure-unless-you’re-looking, yet-up-in-your-face-if-you’ve-found-it bit of London that’s worthy of some mention.  No – the question is… why, Broadgate?

First up, Broadgate is sharing a common name, sitting as it is between Moorgate and Aldersgate, above the a road pointedly called London Wall, and none too far from Barbican and Aldgate.  Sensing the pattern here?  There also used to be a Broad Street Station on the site, which was demolished in order that Broadgate as we know and love it, a purpose-built commercial district designed for the financiers of the city could be plonked down next to Liverpool Street Station in the 1980s to general fiscally glamorous rejoicing.  Traffic does not get inside Broadgate, the entire area is pedestrianised and to a large part, raised away from street level by its walls of black-grey and pink-bronze office blocks within which can be found floor after floor of computers, suits and the occasional tax-deductible shrubbery.

It is not what you’d call a discrete, subtle bit of design and yet, rather like the Inns of Court, has pulled off that trick of managing to occupy a considerable splash of land bang smack in the heart of the city without ever really inviting general members of the public to come inside and mull.  At the age of 14 I considered myself to have stumbled on a big secret when, instead of just walking straight out of Liverpool Street Station to catch the bus at Moorgate, I tried climbing those unlabelled silver stairs to one side of the exit, and found myself next to an ice rink, in a wide circle of towering buildings within which lives thronged and passed.  At the age of 21, living in a halls of residence near Brick Lane, I wandered into Broadgate again, and discovered that my initial discoveries had barely scratched the surface of this maze, but whole lost lakes and waterfalls, bars and cafes, tiled passages with glass roofs and carefully tended trees sprouting besides concrete works of art where the skaterboarders liked to learn their trade.  In winter there is indeed an ice rink in Broadgate which is perhaps one of its few public claims to fame; in summer, that same arena can be used for pretty much anything – I think last year it was a site of basketball competitions between well-paid and surprisingly still employed financiers of the city.  An unmarked glass box dropping down through leopard-skin furnishings to a bunker below a courtyard criss-crossed with underfoot LED lights turns out to be a bar where gentlemen of a certain income may flirt with their secretaries.  When the sun comes out, awnings go up by a crystal-clear perpetually flowing shallow waterfall, at the end of which another glass-clad cafe looks down – a long way down – onto the platforms of Liverpool Street station and the freshly painted rolling stock heading to Norfolk.  (Freshly painted, dear reader, because the Norfolk line seems to change ownership every 2 minutes, and heaven forfend a company should keep its predecessor’s colours, if perhaps their inefficiencies.)

For the suited gentleman of Broadgate, Liverpool Street Station itself is an architectural wonder, a reinvented Victorian station whose every bit of iron has been painted and every walkway crammed with shops selling shampoo, soap, ready meals, designer reading glasses and ties.  Do not try to buy a tin of beans on Liverpool Street Station, but if you’re looking for fashion accessories, there’s no where handier within the EC2 postcode.

At the age of maybe 9, I would visit a friend’s house every Friday, and we go swimming and play games for hours on end.  One game I vaguely remember playing (and which I only ever got the demo for, sigh) was called Sim Tower, in which you built, as it suggests on the package, a tower, and populated it with little tiny people who you could see going about their daily lives.  You’d watch great queues forming for the lift, and couples eating in little restaurants on the 7th floor, and security guards with radios on their rounds, and men working late at work, and meetings happening in specially tailored board rooms, and slackers slacking in the rooms next door.  Walking through Broadgate on a winter evening, when the lights are on in the offices and the workers still at work, reminds me of that – a whole little bustling world busy with whatever it is it’s doing, lit up behind glass for me to watch and wonder at.

I’ve been invited back to give a talk at my old school, which I left about 5 years ago, to a group of children attending as an arts festival thingy.  I’ve given talks at dozens – possibly verging towards the hundreds – of schools in the UK and elsewhere, and naturally agreed because, you know, it’s my old school.  The talk is scheduled to last 45 minutes on a day like any other in February, and my plan, as it stands, is to arrive, go in, say hello to the art teacher who taught me AS-Level Drama, and the mathematics teacher who I drew with when playing chess every Wednesday for 7 years.  (Except for those rare and largely wiped-from-memory Wednesdays when he utterly trounced me.)  I will then, under the beady eye of my old English teacher and, I suspect, a few others, give my talk to the children, and leave.

Now…

… for the first time in my life, I have been sent documentation to fill out under the Protection of Children Act 1999.  I must go into my school and under the beady watchful eye of an employee, give over my passport, birth certificate (which is in my parent’s possession, not mine, owing to a domestic bureaucractic hiccup), P60 from my present employer (I have none) and a recent utility bill showing my current address.  Furthermore, in the form I am requested to supply marital status, bank details, employment status, occupancy status, mother’s maiden name, and a referee to testify to my character.  The school will then pay £31 to a company called Capita who will, on behalf of the criminal records bureau, do a background check on me to ensure that I don’t have any criminal convictions, and after 4 weeks, I will be cleared to give my 45 minute lecture.  This disclosure, according to the government websites I’ve been skim-reading (and I apologise if I have any details wrong here, it has been one of those browsing-the-internet-while-burning-disks weeks) will only apply once, to this one event, on the basis that the next time I’m invited to talk at a school, I may have acquired new convictions.  (I have none, I hasten to add.)

Now…

… I have to step so carefully here, because in principal, I am all in favour of this law.  It is the ultimate, ultimate horror, one so horrifying that we hardly dare speak or write or think of it, the thought that children can be put at risk by the adults that surround them.  No parent would hesitate to take any measures necessary to protect their children, no one with a whit of humanity would expect anything less.

But if I am to deliver my passport, birth certificate etc. in person to every single school I visit, is this not the end of my ever visiting any school outside zones 1-4 in London?  Is this not the end of trips to Dundee and Wrexham, of Bristol and Reading?  How does this affect the Edinburgh Children’s Book Festival, or the festival in Bath?  I have been lecturing at and visiting schools since I was 15 years old; had this law come into force five years earlier, would I have been bound by it when still legally a child and yet also a visiting author?  For 45 minutes of supervised attendance at the school where I studied for 7 years, I must slog to the other side of town with documents I don’t even have to be vetted and cleared of crimes I have not committed and yes, I applaud the protection of children, but I also applaud reason in the execution of law, and I begin to wonder whether we are not teetering on that fine line of a law that could shut down through its sheer complexity and red tape a whole culture of bringing the world the school, as well as the school to the world.

Let me repeat; I lack sufficient information on this subject to make a final judgment, an absolute statement of too-much, too-little.  The protection of children is an unspoken law, the ultimate unspoken law – that children must not be harmed and it is the duty of the old to protect those too young to protect themselves – but I question whether this particular law may not do some damage, in its effort to do good.

I welcome all comments and debate on the subject!

Anyway…

All this being so, I was more than a bit surprised and a tad embarrassed to find myself sat in the cinema watching Up, crying (very quietly!) within the first ten minutes.  I had no idea what to expect of Up, and still can’t tell you what it was, or how it happened, or what came to pass, only that it was utterly delightful, funny, moving, engaging and well worth the silly money that my local cinema seems to ask for a Sunday night viewing.  Without wanting to really say more… go see… or if it’s too late to go see… borrow the DVD… it is well worth it…

… something in between.

When we left the cinema at the end of the movie, we were silent.  We were silent because our ears were ringing, our heads were pounding and a lot of people had, in the last 15 minutes, been spontaneously reduced by a blast of electromagnetism to a puddle of blood and fairly explicit dribbling bits.  Finally TLC, said; ‘You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a South African film before.’

We walked a little further, contemplating mechanical killing machines, self mutilation, angry socio-cultural forces, loss of identity, aliens with a thing for cat food, potential things yet to come and really big space ships.  Now, I have seen a few South African films – not nearly enough to pretend to be an expert, but since when did that stop a graduate in a social sciences subject from having an opinion?  And District 9 fell into a fairly strong picture I had of South African films, in that it was, essentially, about apartheid.  It was about more, of course, much, much more, and credit goes to it for many things, up to and including have the brass which very few science fiction movies do of making its aliens both truly alien, yet clearly sympathetic.  (Although yeah, I can see why the Nigerian government has issues with it – but that’s another story.)  But at the end of the day, it was about apartheid, segregation, prejudice and fear, and as such was a noble, blood-drenched, limb-splattered, cringe-making addition to the genre that left a wobble in my stomach by the end of it.

To my shame, I know very little about apartheid, despite 3 years studying history.  I know all the things that everyone knows; of arrests and riots, beatings and murders, prisons, sanctions, the ANC, Mandela – I have a distant memory of Mandela being released from prison on my birthday back when I was too young to really know or care, and being annoyed that my teacher was more excited about this fact than she was about my birthday cake.  I have visited South Africa, and in that sense, I suppose, I know a tiny, tiny shard more about the legacy of apartheid than I do about the history itself, and even then, barely a sliver.

I went to South Africa a few years ago courtesy of the Oneword reading prize, and spent a week moving between Jo’burg, Cape Town and Durban, talking mostly to schools, for the very noble cause of promoting childrens’ literacy, and for the much less noble cause of promoting the Horatio Lyle series that I write as Catherine Webb.  Arriving at the airport in Jo’burg I was stopped at customs and received the look of all young single females traveling alone that you always receive at customs, a look which was only exacerbated by my explaining all of the above.  I remember the smell of Jo’burg when I first stepped outside, green and verdant, as were all the cities I visited, a curious fact considering that you could stand in the bathroom in front of a sign saying ‘there is a major water shortage; please consider your use of water’ while outside the sprinklers watered the rhododendrons.  I was exceedingly well looked after, cared for all the time, the recipient of more hospitality than I’ve ever experienced in my life.  A lot of it was a bit of a blur, since the day would begin quite early (by my student standards!) and invariably end with a collapse face-first into a bed, but some impressions stand out and will stay with me I think, for the rest of my life.

I remember, for example, arriving late at night in Durban and collapsing straight into bed with the gratitude of someone who’s talked far too long and fast throughout the day.  No sooner was the light out than there was a scratching at the walls; then on the roof.  Thumping and banging that went on through the night and, having no idea what it was, my heart raced every time, since it sounded almost inside the room.  I fell asleep eventually, dreaming of all the usual monsters that an over-active fantasy writer’s imagination can conjure up in a strange land, and woke the next morning to find it was still going on.  Getting up, I went outside and found a ginger cat sat on the path outside by room, looking nothing short of terrified.  Beyond it, sat with a mango in one hand and a slice of half-eaten toast in the other, was a monkey, about knee-high, wearing the smug expression of a creature that knows size has nothing on big teeth.  The hotel was next to a monkey sanctuary, a fact greeted with wonder by me (I had never seen a monkey so close before) and irritation by the hotel managers who reported that they couldn’t stop the creatures getting into the kitchen and stealing everything they could lay their hands on.

The same day, in one of the few breaks between schools, the ladies I was with took me down to the beach, and I remember drinking a milkshake and being allowed 30 seconds to run up and down the sand in front of the ocean whooping like an idiot, just so I could say that I had.  The next trip was to a school on the other side of an area of the city called the Durban Triangle, a mess of big, busy roads, in which all travellers hide their bags.  The driving in South Africa is utterly terrifying.  Red lights are very rarely obeyed, partially out of concern for crime, but mostly, I suspect, out of habit.  The ring roads of Paris, the mopeds of northern Italy and the winding mountain roads of Southern Spain, with sheer drops on either side, hold nothing on the terror of South African roads.  I think it’s an experienced best summarised by the attitude that the rules of the road… are more sort of guidelines…

Outside every city, between the airport and the centre of Jo’burg, Cape Town and Durban, there are of course, the townships.  I hadn’t imagined how big they were, how far they stretched along the side of the roads.  From the motorway they look like cardboard cut outs made by children for a Blue Peter project, blu-tacked together out of old toilet rolls and cardboard boxes, crooked shades of beige and brown.  The fences that divide them from the motorways serve as rubbish traps, and stray too close to the townships in the car of a self-respecting middle class citizen and you get a call from a security company enquiring as to your well being.  I saw no crime in South Africa; but I saw the symptoms of it everywhere, from the parking attendants charging five rand to pace up and down a street at night to watch out for your car, from the ladies hiding their bags under their seats whenever a busy junction approached.  Asking about this, a kindly man in a book shop in Cape Town who gave me a discount in his store told me that the two most commonly stolen items from his shop were, firstly, the Bible, and secondly, Tarot cards.  There was no sense of fear; merely of a thing that was lived with, because it was there.

The organiser of the trip was intensely proud of her country, and especially her city, Johannesburg.  She took me up onto a hill between talks, and I have never seen a city so green, moisture in the leaves.  Yet from air, on the flight between Jo’burg and Durban, the land was dull red-brown all the way to the foresty hills above Durban, aptly named after dragons.  She also took me into Alexandra, one of the many townships around Jo’burg.  To this day I’ve never been sure how to describe the experience.  I freely admit that I was afraid of the townships, courtesy of the foreign and commonwealth office website, which can induce anyone to a puddle of terror just by its stern font.  And yes, by every standard that I was raised by, growing up in London, they were wretched, crooked tumbles of bricks and iron, dry mud and dirt, faces by the roadside watching as if, and perhaps because, there was nothing else left for them to do, huddles of men and woman just sat on empty plastic water barrels, watching.  But there was also something more, a sense of heat, of activity, like the calm side of an ants nest and just the tiniest pressure will break through the sand and out will come a whole, busy, bursting world of which there is no end.  Then there was the township school in Alexandra, in which I received the warmest reception of my life.  Approximately thirty students, some older than me, studying in tiny little white rooms, some of whom walked ten miles a day to get to their classes, gave me the heartiest, kindest, biggest welcome I have ever had in any corner of the earth.  I distrust people who proclaim themselves to be humbled by an experience, since it’s usually something said by politicians who’ve been caught doing something shifty, but I think in that little room in Alexandra, it’s possibly the nearest handy word I can find.

I can’t make a judgment based on what I saw; I don’t know enough, I was a stranger, and this is nothing more than a medley of pictures and feelings that I still haven’t really properly filed in my own mind.  On the way to the airport in Jo’burg, the two women I was with fell to talking about their work.  One in particular worked for charities, raising money from the sales of books to redistribute, and told the story of an orphanage catering to children whose parents had died of HIV.  They had started out using the iron freight containers that are shipped round the world on the back of ships, and which in their retirement serve as temporary libraries, moving advice centres and, occasionally even, the foundations of an orphanage in South Africa.  They talked about politics, the government, disappointment with both; my limited reading on the subject of HIV in Africa is enough to scare and disappoint me too.

What else sticks in my mind?  Fruit.  I remember someone would ask me if I wanted something to drink, and I would say yes thank you, and every time, without fail, a glass would appear containing more fruit of different varieties than I’d ever seen in my life.  Salads of lettuce and tomatoes with pomegranate seeds on top.  I remember being disappointed to discover that very beautiful birds make absolutely terrible noises, and that Irish pubs the world over are a disgrace including in Temple Bar, Dublin.

My very last memory of South Africa, before catching the plane home (where I succeeded in spilling coffee on a stranger in the middle of the night… not my finest hour) was this – sitting on top of Table Mountain, watching the sun go down over the ocean, drinking hot chocolate and listening to not very much at all.  I have no doubt that a week of exhausting work contributed to my state of mind at the time, but it is a picture that has stuck with me ever since, an absolute romantic painter’s dream of a crimson sky, black rocks in shadows, a city turning on the lights below, and a sea stretching to the horizon.  It was the furthest I had ever been from home, let alone the furthest I had ever been from home by myself, and to this day I have no pat way to describe it, no easy one-liner that captures the sense of what I saw, just a mix of pictures and feelings tangled up.

Which is probably, even now, no bad thing at all.

For the last 6 weeks, as all here know, I have been Production Electrician for a RADA student production of Crimes in Hot Countries, by Howard Barker – a play that is either utterly, utterly brilliant or a total disaster (writing wise) with very little middle ground in between, and I must admit, the jury is still out for me.

What this has meant in practical terms is four weeks of maintenance and two weeks of rigging.  Now… let’s not beat about the bush here… LX maintenance is dull dull dull.  Occassionally, if you’re lucky, you might find a profile missing a shutter or a fresnel with a broken earth wire, but that’s pretty much the highlight of maintenance and, for my sins, I wasn’t even doing anything that interesting.  I did cable maintenance.  Oh boy yes.  Four weeks of checking the continuity on 15 Amp cable and sorting out Lee colour from our colour stocks.  At the end of these four weeks, I even acquired a crew, who achieved in three days what had taken me the best part of fifteen to do, and to whom I will always be grateful for their speedy use of multimetres.  The work has to be done, as the only thing worse than four weeks of maintenance is two weeks of equipment not working, as the stress acquired in those two weeks will be beyond anything your cardiac system has ever endured.  But let’s not beat about the bush, this is one of those theatre jobs that falls into the category of Very Boring and Extremely Important, and so it goes.

Towards the end of this adventure, my lighting designer delivered a plan for the show, and it was my job to work out how to get it to work.  The theatre in which the show was running, the GBS theatre, is essentially a very reliable workhorse, with only one or two quirks which leave you spitting.  The chief job of the Production Electrician is to work out how every single lamp is going to get power from a dimmer, and, if we don’t have enough dimmers for the amount of kit (which we never do) where we’re going to get that extra power from.  It sounds like it should be harder than it is; and sometimes it can be!  I remember two less than blissful days as assistant electrician in a converted warehouse that had not one in-built dimmer for its kit and over fifty by thirty yards of ceiling space over which hundreds of cables had to be run.  If there is one thing that can frustrate your humble-hearted Prod LX, it’s huge sod-off cable runs.  However, my task was relatively easy, and with a very lovely and hard working crew of 8 people, only half of whom were mildly hung over, we managed to get the entire theatre rigged in about five and a half hours on a cool Saturday morning.

The lighting designer, who was and is an absolute pleasure to work for, then returned to focus each individual lamp, while I pottered around getting the theatre ready with all the other things a Prod LX must care about; cue lights, working lamps in the backstage area, hazers etc..  This done, I waited.

And kept on waiting.

The trouble, it turns out, with having a fully functional venue that does what it says on the cover, is that your poor Prod LX, once you actually get to a technical rehearsal, has nothing to do but sit around and wait for something to break.  How I longed for a moving light with a sticky engine, or for someone to drop something, or even maybe a little flood somewhere exciting… well, maybe not a flood… but alas, no.   Those weeks of maintenance had paid off, and all things considered, everything went as well as it should and better than it could, and the show, when it finally went up, had excellent lighting courtesy of the extremely talented designer and a crew armed with quad spanners.

It’s not much of a reason to have not blogged, but the thing with RADA is that the work is, if not time-consuming, then relentless in other ways.  My new show role is sound designer, and you quickly find yourself waking up in the middle of the night with the sound of ambient sheep, spot cue slamming doors and script-specified music tracks going off in the back of your brain.  When I worked in construction I would wake myself up with my right hand jerking in an attempt to pull nails from the floor; when I was a programmer I would dream of the sound of my designer’s voice in my ear giving ambient lighting levels; when an ASM I would start awake in the night like a guilty thing with a cry of ‘oh god where did I put the dagger?’ and only the neurotic writing of lists would calm me down.  So the work, it turns out, gobbles you up, whether you meant it to or not.  Not that this is an excuse for my non-blogging lately… although it is… but it is a simple truth and honest fact about the new year of working at RADA…

1.  Detroit International Airport does a really, really good jam and peanut butter sandwich.  (Or ‘jelly’ and peanut butter, I discovered.)  I mean, really, really good.  Over-priced but worth it.

2.  You can ride a sort of internal tram-monorail thing up and down and up and down and up and down the main international terminal for hours of entertaining travel based joy while waiting for your flight in relative comfort and ease, and while this may serve no practical purpose whatsoever, it is a nice way of passing the time.  You can also ride the travelators on the ground from sections A-B-C and back again, past the traditional Yea Olde Authentic Irish Pub showing football and the sushi bars and all the usual stuff of the airport, and may finally notice while doing so key point the third…

3.  The cops at Detroit airport ride segways.   Now…

… call me old-fashioned…

… but I find it quite hard to take anyone seriously on a two-wheeled vehicle that resembles something between a pram and a pogo stick.  I mean, I respect that the thing could do a surprising turn of speed and a decent turning circle,  but would James Bond really have a segway chase?   And are not Americans already suffering from a certain cliche of too much burger to too little meat, and does riding back and forth on this device really help encourage the macho image of the immigration service?  I mean perhaps they’re not aiming to encourage a macho vibe… in which case the guns and shouting are a bit of an own-goal… but segways?  Really?  It’s like having your SWAT team on a bicycles only without the charisma, or having the SAS kick down the doors of the building, storm inside and go, ‘oh whoops left the oven on’.   Anyway.  Just thought I’d share that surreal consideration for anyone who has not yet had the pleasure and the pain of trying to change planes at Detroit International Airport…

I have yet to see Mission Impossible 3 in English.  But in French, it was quite clearly a work of towering genius.  I mean, in a totally rubbish way.  Oh the running!  Oh the sweaty vests!  Oh the profound staring distantly into space while declaring love on the edge of death!  I vaguely remember something about a thing going to explore inside Tom Cruise’s brain (and how this was fixed by pumping his heart?), I vaguely remember someone drawing angles on a window in a place that might have been Hong Kong.  I have a vague recollection of Simon Pegg, in French.  But plot?  Narrative?  Not a clue.  And frankly, who needs them?

In many ways, the highlight of seeing Mission Impossible 3 in French were the ads.  My favourite was a Canadian film with the title ‘Good Cop, Bon Cop’, which I’ve always remembered as ‘Bon Cop, Bad Cop’, because that would make more sense, but no, my diary tells me I’ve got this wrong.  ‘Good Cop, Bon Cop’ – according to the ad – tells the story of two policemen from either side of the regional divide, one from Quebec, one from Montreal, who are brought together when a corpse is found exactly on the county line.  Whether or not all sorts of hillarious gags ensue based upon the difference between English-speaking Canadians and French-speaking Canadians, I really couldn’t tell you, not having either the language or the social background.  But it was, I felt, a nice summary of the entire English-French thing that dominated the area.

Street names alas also suffered from this division, with catchy names like ‘Rue la Councillor Bernard Smith’ and ‘Avenue de la John Howard Jones’ (I paraphrase but only a little) and so forth.  We even found some of the history of the place in the form of a largely grassed over military structure on the river now turned into a museum, where I think Wolfe either won, or lost, or both, either together, or one after the other.  I am sorry to report that it’s really not my period, and suggest you look it up somewhere more reliable.  An American hallmate of mine, when I was talking Napoleonic history with him, once remarked ‘ah yes!  1812!  That’s when the British and the Canadians burnt the White House down!’ which at kinda proved that I know absolutely nothing of the history of North American conflict and that he knew next to nothing about Napoleon.  And why should he?  Discuss.

Deciding to explore this whole Quebec thing a little more, we hopped on a bus (trains in Canada are not exactly user-friendly, it turned out) and went to visit Quebec City.  Quebec City felt like a European heart surrounded by an American sprawl, all wiggly uphill streets and crooked power lines with neat supermarkets and doughnut bars on the edges.  It was also in Quebec City where I tried to buy postcards to send to my family (eventually falling back on the time-honoured tradition of handing them over in person when I returned) and discovered that while you can get all the images of squirrels and maple leaves you’ve ever wanted in the tourist traps of Canada, it is remarkably hard to find a picture of a moose.  Hours of frustration ensued.  Quebec City was also the only place where I’ve ever visited a 5* hotel.  I didn’t stay in it, of course, but this thing sat at the very top of the highest point of the city above the oldest and most genteel square, dominating the skyline and looking out upon all it surveyed.  We assumed it was a government building of some sort and went to investigate, and discovering it was a hotel, decided to investigate further.  Finding the door to the gym unlocked we wandered into a world of swimming pools, saunas and white fluffy towels.  Investigating the corridors on the highest floors we found ice makers and endless brass handles.  There were shops selling the kind of perfumes at the kind of prices I associate with duty free, and whiskey, and newspapers in many languages, and men in white gloves and, all things considered, we felt extremely naughty just being there, before heading back to our Bed and Breakfast at the bottom of the hill.

Quebec City will also be fixed in my memory for two more remarkable qualities.  First, was that Quebec was having a regional celebration, so in the evening the streets filled up with every kind of performers.  I remember a fire dancer, swinging great big balls of flame on the ends of chain, explaining her act in 4 languages as she went along.  There was a troupe of three silent black-and-white mime artists who were oddly enough the funniest on display, largely owing to their signs declaring ‘Oh no!’ with matching expressions of dismay.  There were brass bands and we had the strange experience of sitting on the remnants of a winding city wall watching a concert that, we suspected, was highly regionalistic and full of ballads about the misery of being cultured-French-Canadians while surrounded by all these fat semi-American-Canadians, but which, alas, our languages weren’t really up to grasping the details on.  The other thing I associate Quebec with is table football.  Many happy hours spent in that pastime.  I can’t promise that you’ll get a brilliant game out of me; but you’ll certainly get a game.

From Quebec City we headed north, along great tree-lined winding roads laden with trucks (all heading the other way) carrying huge fallen timbers, across a ferry and over a fjord, to the town of Tadoussac.  Tadoussac is an escapee from a Stephen King novel, a small place of silent wide streets, white-timbered houses, low chapel, washing waves and dark trees.  On our first night we walked along the sand of one of the beeches, and found ourselves outside the main hotel (again, a thing we were not staying at) to discover a wedding being presided over by a man that all evidence could only suggest to be a druid.  Tadoussac, it turns out, is a town of fjords and whales.  It was, in fact, in Tadoussac that I saw my first ever whale, a white beluga with a (anthropomorphically unsound) smiling face that examined our little boat with the attitude of a local judging the tourists.  We also went up a fjord, a great massive valley carved out of stone and trees on every side, to a statue of the Virgin Mary raised on a mountain, to which the boat sang songs in the Catholic traditions of the place.  A national park nearby turned out to be all it claimed on the cover, beautiful until the first insect bit.  My boyfriend, being more adventurous than me, tried lobster, since it seemed to be the town’s tourist dish of choice, and I was disappointed when he managed to convince me that it wasn’t staring at me accusingly with its one beady eye, to discover that it was a rather bland dish and he could probably go back to the cheesy chips with comfort.  I have never had such breakfasts, by the by, as I had in Tadoussac.  I have never seen a plate piled so high, or so many different uses of syrup… the breakfasts, and the whales, I think, are what I shall take away from that experience, along with the low long sound of huge freight lorries come from the north, lining up in the small foggy hours of the night, for the first ferry at dawn across the fjord.

The gentleman in my life was invited to attend a conference in Montreal for a few days in 2006, the year of the World Cup, and quickly decided that this was an excellent way to have a holiday.  I leapt upon the bandwagon, swearing that for the days immediately preceding the conference I would eat nothing at all (a pledge I did not keep) so that for those few precious moments when all our needs were theoretically on institutional expenses, I could stuff myself like a barrage balloon.  We would stay in luxury, buy every travelcard and visit every cultural monument expenses could permit… as it turned out, this didn’t entirely happen, but I’ll try not to jump the gun on this story.

Since a writer’s income is, at best, unreliable, and at worst, a bit piss-piddly, I am a natural skinflint.  If my soul is ever captured in art, suspect that attached to the canvas will be a sign advertising a 2-for-1 offer.   But so it goes.  In order to fulfil my skinflint nature, we found the cheapest flights we could which involved the interesting and entirely horrific trick of changing planes at Detriot.  I have been informed that freedom of speech and freedom of thought are, despite the litigation laws of the day, still extant, so let me say two things: 1.  I have never in all my life been so uncomfortable as I was on a Northwestern Flight from London to Detriot and 2.  US border controls are utterly horrific and inane.

We weren’t planning on entering the US at all, since Canada was the final destination, but Detriot Airport didn’t have an international transit lounge and so, diligently, we filled out our green landing cards with questions like ‘were you involved in the Nazi genocide 1939-45?’ and ‘have you come to the USA to commit acts of terrorism’ (pick either box ‘yes’ or box ‘no’.)  We then arrived at customs where for 3 hours, 1000 people tried to shove and elbow there way through the chaos of custom control while one woman with a gun shouted and screamed and on occasion threatened the punters, a very large percentage of whom did not have English as a first language, to get their asses into line.  How I pined for Heathrow Airport and its lovely orderly cues laid out in lovely orderly lines.  How I pined for more than one copper and less than one gun on my side of international arrivals…

Arriving at customs we were subjected to the usual questions.  The answer ‘I’m going to Canada’ was met with appropriate snottiness, and once my fingerprints and retina were scanned, I was let through.  The first sign to greet me on arrival to the US of A was a poster proclaiming ‘US Customs and Immigration – We Are The Best.’  I should point out that on my return via the US back from Canada, my fingerprints and retina was scanned again, and I was met with the statement, ‘I see you’ve never entered the US before’ which leads me perhaps to think that this is bureaucracy too far… but who knows…

Because it had taken 3 hours to get into the US, it only took us 20 minutes to get out again, boarding a little, half-empty plane for Montreal.  We arrived at roughly 2 a.m. local time, and our taxi driver took us to our bed and breakfast where we were, according to both the sign and the man who greeted us, staying in the ‘Princess Charlotte Suite’.  Next to us were the ‘Queen Anne’ rooms and a room related somehow to a Duchess whose details temporarily evade me.  We all shared a bathroom, which alas did not go by the name ‘The Prince Regent Baths’.

Jet lag overcome, we set forth exploring Montreal.

First up, my French is lousy.  I can just about apologise for my inability to speak it, and there my abilities end.  I have, alas, acquired just about enough of a wide and eclectic range of languages that I am now incapable of speaking any at all.  Thankfully, the population of Montreal, while automatically speaking French, was willing to switch to English in the face of my incomprehension.  My boyfriend, having somewhat better French, would make the occasional stab at the language, and on resorting desperately to English, would at the very least be congratulated on the authentic quality of his ‘bonjour’.  Canadian French was, incidentally, not like French as we were taught it at school.  Breakfast was lunch, lunch was dinner, and in between floated a strange abuse of words that would have caused my French teacher’s nose to wrinkle with disdain.  Breakfast was, by the by, one of the great pleasures of Montreal, since it almost invariably consisted of eggy bread with maple syrup, one of god’s greatest gifts to man.

The city itself is…

… well…

… imagine a fairly standard American city laid out on a fairly standard grid pattern.  Stick one hell of a massive river down at its base, around which the streets become tighter and almost European in terms of tourist-trod time, throw in the remnants of major league docks out on the islands, put the menus in both English and French, serve up hamburgers and hot dogs on the same menu as duck casserole, make the buses new and the streets pock-holed and cracked, make the graffiti bright and angry and the department stores universal; stir in regional pride and the latest Hollywood blockbusters, stick a surprisingly steep hill bang smack in the middle, throw in a rusting ancient fun fair of crumbling joy rides and machinery turned into a thing not what it said on the cover, melt a lot of cheese over the chips and you have, in a strange, uneven, yet entirely familiar and recognizable form, Montreal.

Call me a decadent foreign whatsit, but cheese on the chips is a fashion that has yet to really win me over, yet I think it, along with eggy bread and maple syrup, is my dish of choice for defining Montreal.  Other key features that defined it for me was a great long jutt of land heading out to what my mental compass considered the west, surrounded at its tip on all sides by masses of rolling river water laden with heavy freight ships.  We cycled along it one day, and in the curiosity of the ride, encompassing sculpture parks, leafy suburbs, industrial waste grounds and leafy by-ways, I failed to notice that I was a) getting serious sun burnt for the only time in my life and b) had cycled 20 km.  The next day my knees refused to behave properly (cycling is not something I do that often) and I lay in bed experiencing Montreal TV while the boyfriend attended the conference.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer in French was, I thought, about as surreal as it was going to get.  Then Dr Who came on, and there were daleks, and i had to redefine my expectations.  The only bit of French I picked up from that experience came from watching the world cup.  ‘Penalty shoot out’ I worked out after a while, was ‘Le Barrage’, a trivial piece of information that made my linguistic holiday.  I was in a bar when England lost to Paraguay, and curiously enough, no one seemed very sad…

I also discovered the wonderful bonding powers of Neil Gaiman, when, sitting in a coffee shop reading Neverwhere (one of the greatest London fantasies I’ve ever read – although I feel I should point out for my honour’s sake that I read it about 2 months after finishing A Madness of Angels and was a little bit surprised…) – a man turned to me and spoke to me in French.  I mumbled that I didn’t speak French, and he switched easily to English (I have such envy of people who can speak many languages!) and announced that Gaiman was one of the greatest writers of all time.  (A valid point.)  We then fell to talking and, on discovering that I wasn’t Canadian, he cheerfully informed me that he was a surveillance expert who spent his time working for the police on bugging criminals.  Not really expecting to hear this in a coffee shop in Montreal, I blathered emptily and deeply regret now the opportunity to steal his life’s story.  If you’re out there – tell me all!  It was however a pleasant experience in a foreign land, and one which managed to cement in me, especially after the US Customs and Immigration fiasco, the idea that Canada really was better after all…

It turned out that we had chosen our dates for visiting Montreal at a curious time.  Formula 1 had come to the city, and at nearly 9 miles distance we could hear the buzz of the engines like a bee was trapped in the room with us.  Canada Day was also upon us, there was a jazz festival going down, and – joy of joys! – a firework competition had come to Montreal.  I love fireworks.  I mean, I really love fireworks, I’m the girl standing at the front going ‘whee’. In Quebec there also seemed to be Quebec Week happening, but as we discovered, part of Quebec nationalism was being very reluctant to explain itself in any language other than French.  However, our trip to Quebec City and beyond is a story for another time…

There’s a lot to say about the Inns of Court – for a start, there are three of them; Greys Inn, Lincolns Inn and Middle Temple Inn – and they’re extremely old and have a reasonably exciting history.  So I’m not going to really say much about them yet, and simply put in some of the photos I’ve acquired and say that bang smack in the middle of London are three dead sexy historical bits of the city inhabited almost entirely by lawyers and film crews, covering many, many acres, and almost entirely hidden from public sight, although, oddly enough, entirely free to public access.  And unless you’re seeking legal advice, I heartily recommend them as good places to sit and eat cake.  Although you’re not allowed on the grass, irritatingly enough, without having at the very least a wig to put on your head…

Czechoslovakia (as was during the Cold War) was not a country, I vaguely recalled, that had taken particularly kindly to communism.  Sure, there was the whole post-Nazi reaction that swept most of Europe where, for a good 6 months, extreme leftist politics seemed a suitable response to extreme rightist politics and so long as the socialists/communists were willing to let themselves be voted out of government on a regular basis then that was all fair and above board.  But then oh whoops, the Warsaw Pact, the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall, the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, secret police, one-party states and the Cold War as we all know and love…

In 1968 the Czechs had their own uprising that was, in the tradition of the time, brutally suppressed, but a theme remained in Czechoslovakia of protest via art.  The central theatre in Prague was more often than not, a place of dissent, where pissed off people gathered together.  Charter 77 began there, as did numerous movements with such catchy names as ‘ The Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted’.  The actors and writers were ridiculously active – or as ridiculously active as safety permitted – in protesting loudly and fearlessly against the state.  One story tells the tale that in 1989 as communism seemed to crumble overnight, an orchestra set up in Prague and played the Moldau, a song more Czech than alcoholic cough medicine on a snow-shaken night, over and over and over again in celebration of a national identity that had been systematically crushed in the name of universal brotherhood.  And when the world stopped turning and the state looked up between the slits of its fingers, a playwright, dissident, sometime-prisoner-of-the-state by the name of Vaclav Havel was probably a little surprised to find himself the first prime minister of a post-communist state.

But this isn’t really about the politics of Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic.  The point is; I sat down and read some of the works of Vaclav Havel on the tube, and it was utterly fascinating.  The writing (of what I’ve read so far) ranges from the ridiculous to the surreal, the wonderful to the bizarre, but is never anything other than utterly absorbing.  With a history-loving hat on, it’s also absolutely fascinating – sort of George Orwell meets P.G.Wodehouse.  You can see why he got into trouble with the authorities of the time; the sheer ridiculousness of the communist system, which specialised in disguising fear as ideology, is shown in all its absurd glory.  A charge which can sometimes be leveled against the more didactic kinda playwriting is that, with writers like, say, Brecht, the story takes second place to the politics.  Havel’s writing is clearly political and opinionated, but has so much more going on as well.  I have no idea how you’d make it work on stage; with difficulty, I suspect; but if you could get it work, it could be well worth the ticket.

However, despite the desire to say lots about it, I won’t yet, since as established, I ought to really say more about the Midnight Mayor.  Did you, for example, know that the thing that causes most problems in the London sewer system is not so much sewage in the traditional sense, but congealed cooking fat?  Imagine what could go wrong for your average sorcerer when the underground world of London decides to take a wander on the streets above…?

With my historian’s nerdy hat on, I gotta say right now, I love primary sources.  It’s all very well being told by historians of today that in the dark old days the streets of London were knee-deep in horse manure, but when you read the actual documents written by the people of London who lived in London at the time, you get so much more.  You get a sense of the stink of it, the feel of it, the noise and the bustle, the casual attitude of the inhabitants towards filth and the outrage of the people towards the conditions they live in, all jumbled up together; you get street seller’s cries and verbatim stories of nasty things done by improbable characters – you get, in short, a fantastic story, that has the added benefit of being real.  And Henry Mayhew, praised be to historical fore-thought, left posterity one of the most comprehensive, most exciting accounts of Victorian London as he was living in it that I have ever read.

That said, the guy suffers from statistics, and in doing so arguably proves the point that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics – but he also spent years walking the streets of London and talking to everyone and everything from every class and every walk of society, going into places where even Charles Dickens (a man who prided himself on being indomitable) would hesitate to wander.  The London of Mayhew reads like another world, full of rookeries and slums, no-go areas and vast contrasts and, if you ever find yourself contemplating the history of London and wanting to get to know it a little bit more, I heartily recommend the works of Henry Mayhew as an entertaining and wonderfully enlightening read.

… and so on and so forth until very promptly you have achieved a state of enlightenment that, I can’t help feel, you might just take some of the joy out of the business.  No one said the Buddha had fun on the way to paradise… but all these things are excellent aspirations, and things to try and work towards as the situation calls for, but life is, alas, far too complicated to apply good generalities easily to bad situations.

All of which leads to a more relevant question…

… what makes a good writer?

Answer is; buggered if anyone knows.  Everyone, as with everything in life, has a different answer.  My publisher would, without a doubt, inform you with a face only slightly twitching with a wry smile, that the ability to take editorial criticism is vital.  My agent would say that being over 45 is preferable, although experience is the key.  Some might say experience of the world; some might say experience of the soul, which is itself a very difficult and delicate subject to pick up on.  Is that man whose father died suddenly more experienced, is their soul cut deeper, are their eyes opened wider, than that woman whose mother passed away after a long battle?  Is that girl whose boyfriend dumped her somehow wiser than that boy whose best mate turned out to have been lying behind his back all that time?  Exactly how we define ‘experience’ in terms of how it shapes people, and therefore writers, is a thorny one.  Which may be why my agent hits ‘45 years old’ as a general definition and hopes it goes well from there…

My Dad used to inform me with a stern expression that writers were supposed to have suffered in order to be any good.  This statement usually was followed by ’so take the rubbish out or else’.  My Mum would add to that discipline and craft, a grasp of the English language and ability to shape a decent story from it.  Again, a thorny area – the excellent English of Jane Austen bears about as much resemblance to the excellent English of Raymond Chandler as a cup of tea to a kangaroo steak.   At primary school we were told ‘you must never start a sentence with ‘but’ or ‘and” (two of my favourite sentence-starters…) and a story must always have a beginning at the beginning, a middle in the middle, and an end at the end.  Rules like these, you might say, are meant to be broken…

A comic writer should be witty; a large number famously suffer from clinical depression.  Romantics should have passionate and wild relationships, see deep into the state of the human heart and know how best to wring its mysteries; crime writers should perceive the darkness in human souls; fantasy writers value sweeping imaginations and brilliant visions of things impossible.  Academic writers should be both factually on the ball and, preferably, not require three stabs at every sentence before it makes sense to read. Perhaps a good writer is defined by his sales figures?  Deeply questionable.  Is Dan Brown a superior writer to Iain M. Banks?  Kinda doubt it; yet Dan Brown has the queues of people stretching round the block at 2 a.m. to get his latest.  (Dan Brown is, incidentally, one of a proud number of writers who, in response to being told by their primary school teachers not to start a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’ went down the smart route of beginning sentences with ’suddenly’.  A habit my Mum would call bad English and my editor would call excellent narrative pace.  And they’re probably both right…)

Then the problem becomes even more personal.  Is Thomas Hardy a good writer?  (I personally loathe him; yet I know at least one person who in every other way is one of the coolest people I’ve ever met who swears he’s brilliant.)  Is Asterix of the same cultural value as the works of Ernest Hemmingway?  Or to put it another way – when the ice age comes and we’re locked up in the British Library about to freeze to death, do we burn George Orwell or Charles Dickens first?  (I know who I would vote for, but in order to prevent angry letters, I’ll just say (two-facedly) that it’d be a tragedy whichever way….)

Then there’s dudes like Shakespeare.  I personally think the guy rocks, but will freely admit that he has off-days.  (Although to say Shakespeare has an off-day is kinda like saying that the Creator could have tried a touch harder with Wales.)  But there’s plenty of people who can’t stand the guy, and throughout large swathes of the 1800s, the fashion was to nab the particularly nasty bits of Shakespeare (which are, lets face it, generally the best bits) and give them happy ending.  Hamlet gets to turn round in Act 5 and go ‘yo, Claudius!  You were like a total asshole, yeah, but now you and me, we’re blood, man!’  Macbeth gets to the murder of Duncan and goes ‘whoops the dagger was a fake well thank Christ for that, lucky escape all round really.’  In a hundred years time will there be a movement to take the collective adventures of Harry Potter and re-write them to suit a secondary comprehensive theme, and thus make it relevant to the kidz?  Not about to make any predictions on that particular future…

On the very few occasions I get asked what makes a good writer, I usually give the same two answers; imagination and empathy.  Technically speaking, they’re only one answer, since imagination is not just about being able to picture the end of the world and why it might happen, it’s the imagination to think your way into the head of a stranger and understand why they’re pissed off here, now.  But I like to throw in the empathy thing anyway, because I kinda figure it’s a nice human characteristic to have generally.  I’m tempted to throw it into the great ‘what makes a good techie’ debate too, since there are no easy rules on working as a team, or communicating with other people, since ‘yo dude how’s it hanging’ may be the only way to open a conversation with one stressed person, while it’ll result in summary sacking by another.  Empathy, and a willingness to see that sometimes the world is just a little bit more complicated than the rules on the page…

Technically, I’ve had this job before – in the same venue and for the same lighting designer, who is above all else a decent bloke and very easy to work with.  But I figure that it’s a nice warm up for another year of tougher things, and at least this time round, I vaguely know how to change the lamps on the SL profiles.  However, what it will probably mean, is that the rate of blogging decreases, and so, in order to kinda fill some gaps yet to come, I figured I’ll summarise right here, right now what it is that’s keeping me from the keyboard.

Production Electrician is basically the lighting designer’s minion, although her (usually his, lets be honest here) duties also extend to anything in the building that has a current going through it.  This can include hazers, scrollers, working lights, cue lights, practical lamps and, when called for, fridges, toasters and general electrical appliances.  However, the main theme are on the lights in the rig.  Most of a Prod LX’s time is spent doing maintenance; this can be an easy job of just a day spent cleaning lenses on some eighty or so newish lights, or it can be a hellish lifetime spent with hundreds and hundreds of ancient, creaking, warped and battered lamps, up to your armpits in that special thin grey dust that just loves to linger near electrical appliances.  The two great technical theatre buzzwords, ‘health and safety’ are also supposed to be regular partners from a Prod LX’s lips, to lesser or greater effect.

Once the lighting designer delivers on what they want where, it’s the Prod LX’s job to see that it is indeed, there, rigged and working.  Sometimes this is easy; a simple case of whacking up the right light in the right place and turning it on.  Sometimes this is a nightmare job, involving miles and miles of cabling, endless connections and plugs and runs of DMX; and when it’s all run and you hit the ‘on’ switch, something won’t work and that’s it, fifty yards of cabling left to explore with a fault at some point in some part of it, who knows where?  (Even as I write this I can hear the ghostly voice of our Head of Lighting explaining that this, children, is why maintenance is so important…)

If it all works then the Prod LX will help with the focusing of the lights, and occasionally with the plotting, if there isn’t a programmer on the board.  Then when the show is up, the Prod LX’s job becomes one largely of fixing the stuff that breaks, as stuff eventually does.  The cliche of the Prod LX is of a bloke, perhaps a tad overweight, perhaps not the most romantic type you’ve ever expected roses from, not always that beautifully shaved or fashionably dressed, who, when faced with a problem, talks back in a language almost incomprehensible to the human ear.  When faced with the statement ‘why’s this not working’ the Prod LX will usually give one of three replies based on his/her level of enthusiasm.

1.  ‘I don’t know, but I’ll have a look at it and find out.’  [A good answer that does what it says on the cover.]

2.  ‘It’s fucked, innit.’  [A bad answer which, while it may occasionally be true, can also be code for  'lets go down the pub'.]

3.  ‘Well, mate, well, it’s gotta be a PSU problem, innit, ‘cos if you ain’t getting power down there then I mean you’re gonna have the trouble in the 4-pin ‘cos I can see the little green light on the unit but it’s not just getting through from the 13-Amp to the scrollers is it so you know we can order parts or maybe try re-plugging it somewhere else but like if its your PSU that’s a Stage Electrics job unless some wanker hit the panic switch and knocked out the hard power or if those bastards in sound switched it off but yeah, yeah, you know, could go either way, see?’  [An answer which essentially boils down to the syllable 'um', while maintaining as macho and techno-savvy an exterior as possible.  This too usually lends itself to the follow-on statement of 'lets go down the pub'.]

All that said, I’m still kinda learning the ropes on this one, and my opinion of Prod LXs so far is based on a very small sample and may yet change.  I’ve met some very good people who are very good at what they do – then again, I’ve also met one or two people with such a physiological urge to drink tea at every available opportunity, its a miracle anything ever gets done.  At the LSE, back in the day when I was accidentally put in charge of anything lighting-based owing to the fact that no one else had fully mastered the trick of forcing the lock into the lighting cupboard, my experience of techying was a very enjoyable one of ‘well… let’s push it somewhere and see what happens….’ a principal which, I gotta admit, has kinda been carried over into my training at RADA.  After all, in this modern age of circuit breakers and PAT testing, what’s the worst that could really happen?  Really…?

My Dad, as the driver in the family, has a bitter on-going battle with traffic wardens.  He has perfected the art of the polite-yet-steely middle class letter of complaint, which, without wanting to imply that legal action is necessary, nevertheless makes it very clear that hear is an eloquant Radio 4 listener who’s just going to be more trouble than he’s worth.  However, this hasn’t stopped a local council for slapping him with a £120 fine for the day his car parked illegally in their borough.  Curiously enough, this was the same day that Dad was at work with a local charity, and the car did not leave Hackney all day or all night.  The cry of ‘numberplate fraud!’ was duly raised and now an intricate battle of suspicion, reasonable doubt and alibi-affirmation rages between a council stoutly refusing to conceed that it may be trying to rob an innocent man, and an ex-publisher with a knack for letter writing.

(On an entirely different, yet curiously related note, I discovered recently in a battle with my local council the existence of a thing called the ‘Postal Rule’ whereby if a council computer claims a letter was dispatched to a certain address on a certain day, that is considered valid evidence in court that it was so.  The only way to argue against this is by proving that you didn’t receive a letter.  Now… answers on a postcard please… how exactly do you go about proving that you haven’t received something?  Do you hold up the empty air where it should have been?)

Whether this is true for all traffic wardens in all cities, I do not know, but the vast majority of traffic wardens that I see around the centre of London are middle aged black ladies who look perfectly cheerful and pleasant to talk to – until you violate that double yellow line, of course.  Since I find it hard to imagine that the people who recruit traffic wardens have a personality test to determine your level of sympathy (lowest score wins), I can only assume that the people who run the traffic warden system as a whole have laid down a policy of go-get-’em-tiger which leads to the kind of swarms that attacked the families trying to unload at my halls of residence.   I was once told that traffic wardens receive extra money based on the number of cars that they manage to ticket – if this is the case (and I have yet to get this confirmed from a viable secondary source) then no wonder these perfectly decent members of the human race undergo such a magical transformation in the presence of an over-run ticket!

In matters such as this, a literal adherence to the word of the law becomes kinda more problematic… yes, these parents come from Leeds and Cardiff and, in one case, the Isle of Skye, were in violating of London parking regulations by being pulled up for more than five minutes on a single yellow line outside the halls of residence.  But they were not posing a threat to the public order and, more to the point, they were dropping off Little Tiddles for day 1 of university, an event as emotional as it is demanding on the size of the suitcase.  The law has them by the throat, and would duly find them guilty of pissing around with traffic regulations.  But in this case, tragically, the law, as enforced by the traffic wardens, is nothing if not a cruel cow.

On the other hand… traffic wardens notoriously suffer more shit from members of the public than any other member of the emergency services.  Angry drivers will do anything from shout abuse to spit to, on occasion, resort to physical violence against people who are, at the end of the day, just doing their job.  And yeah, it’s not exactly a happy thing when cars park parallel across Oxford Street and my Dad, for all that he writes those steely letters, has been rejoicing these last few years to have a residential parking scheme operating in his area.  Rejoicing, that is, were it not for the hundred plus pounds he has to spend a year for the honour of parking anywhere within a 2 mile radius of his front door…

I am, lets be honest here, trying to find some redeeming features in traffic wardens, since I feel it’s unfair to just condemn an entire profession off-hand, and, far worse, to condemn the people that work in it.  (Have none of us cheered when the guy with the big hair and the fast sports car gets ticketed for parking like a prat?)  But let’s face it, when it gets to the stage that, parking for a few moments to buy a round of fish and chips from your local residential chippy, you have to leave someone in the car to keep an eye out for the traffic wardens and, if necessary, circle round the block 5 times until they’re gone, you can’t help but feel this is a system running mad.

And oh yes…

… did I mention?  Randomly enough, traffic wardens may just prove to have their role to play in the life of Matthew Swift and the Midnight Mayor too…

I suppose upon retrospect that there’s no reason why falcons can’t flourish in London.  There was even a government scheme to introduce falcons into Trafalgar Square to curb the pigeon population, although perhaps upon second thought the great tourist banner – ‘come to Trafalgar Square and watch small grey birds get gutted in front of you and all your family by a bigger grey bird’ – didn’t wash with the London Tourist Board.

Anyway, just thought I’d share that peculiar, slightly surreal thought with anyone who likes their birds of prey big, fast and in London transport zone 1.

Cologne Cathedral

Vienna is, by the by, all whipped cream.  For a start, 90% of the food comes with whipped cream either dolloped on the plate itself or cunningly integrated into the recipe and cake, particularly sachertorten, is the specialty.  Even leaving the food aside, the centre of town is a whole architectural dollop of whipped cream, from the paintings of chubby cherubs up every wall to the great Hapsburg Palaces dumped down left right and centre.  The Austro-Hungarian Empire is famous mostly for declining, but when not actively declining the aristocrats of the Empire were busy building every kind of baroque adornment that expensive taste could afford.  The exterior of the largely baroque buildings look almost austere, great big walls and big windows, but the interiors are packed so full of silver and the images of aristocratic warriors it’s a wonder there was room for people at all.  The cathedral at the heart of the city, St. Stephens, boasts one of the tallest spires in Europe, as well as regular gatherings of men and women dressed in mock-18th century dress trying to sell opera and Mozart concerts to the passers by, and if you look with a religious eye, there is Catholicism galore to be seen in gold crosses and saintly images scattered all over the place.  Culture, art, opera, and, of course, psychiatry, are all big things in Vienna, and it’s hard to turn a corner without encountering at least one of the above.  My family as a collective even decided that, since we were in Vienna, we should do the Viennese thing and go to the opera – my first ever opera trip – and paid a small fortune to sit in the highest, most distant seats I’ve ever experienced in my life, in an opera house of so much marble, real and otherwise, and such grandeur that really you didn’t need the show.  Opera remains not my thing.  The cake, however, was a major Viennese compensation…

Vienna gives the stranger the impression of a rather prissy city, in some senses.  My few attempts to speak German, the only language of which I have even a GCSE-grade grasp, were usually rebuffed by looks of, at best, curiosity, at worst, contempt, and I quickly fell back on letting my Dad doing the talking.  The streets are clean and orderly to the point of feeling slightly unnatural to my Londoner’s senses; the impression you couldn’t help but take away was that this was a society where the scorn you earned for littering was of a deeply penetrating, soulful kind, rather than the usual shrug of the city stranger.  The suburbs, where we were staying, and which are in truth little more than an extension of the inner city, hinted at some of the less imperial parts of Vienna’s past; endless matching courtyard-based blocks, samey shops and empty bars that could have been anywhere in Europe.  Vienna was, after all, the city of the Third Man, a Cold War spy shop almost up there with Berlin for its intrigue.

A canal runs through the heart of the city, built off from the Danube, and as a day-trip, and because we could, we took the boat up the Danube from Vienna to Bratislava.  The Danube is a Real River, at least as far as my imagination marks it.  It’s great, fat, rolling, churning, with a freezing wind on it even in high summer and all along its banks symptoms of its uncontrollable spillage; trees bent backwards, half-submerged shacks and lost wooden pillars for tying off your boat to a long-vanished bank.  This blog isn’t about Bratislava, but since I’m here, I’ll say two things; that is has a lovely small heart surrounded by a great deal of run-down sprawl, and that the Slovakian for ‘Winnie the Pooh’ is ‘Macho Puf’.  These were the two main impressions I took away from this experience.  That, and that on the Austrian-Slovakian border, you can farm ostriches.

One of the reasons why the Austro-Hungarian Empire had such a patchy time of it was that it was constantly being attacked from outside, and I can’t really walk away from this blog without mentioning my all-time favourite bit of history – the second siege of Vienna.  Oh yes, dear reader, the second one, because the first one was really a bit of a wash-out.  The second one, on the other hand, is celebrated in plaques and monuments across the city, since it was the nearest Vienna has ever come to being conquered in its history.  I’m not talking some wishy-washy nearest to being conquered – I’m talking a matter of hours between salvation and disaster.  I guess it’s fair to say that after three years of a history degree, my period, such as it is, are those nine weeks in autumn 1683 when Vienna was besieged by the Ottomans.  In other words, I know a lot about what happened in a two and a half mile radius in Central Europe for 9 weeks.  But make no mistake – it was an awesome, and arguably world changing 9 weeks.  Certainly, if Vienna had fallen, it’s likely the world as we know it would not be so today.

The Turkish Siege Camp

So, naturally, I was kinda excited by Vienna, and very much enjoyed my time there.  However, it was also rather alien to my usual cultural horizon, a fact I think best summed up by my trip with my parents to a modern art gallery.  We found ourselves, as is our way, seeking at the end of some half hour of wandering, the blissful relief of a bench, and after much searching, found what seemed to be the only bench in the gallery.  It was placed directly facing a huge black canvas, just black, plain black, whose title was ‘Untitled’.  We considered this for a while, trying to work out whether This Was Art, before finally noticing, to our left, another black canvas, slightly smaller than the first, but in every other way identical.  We craned in to see it, and this too was called ‘Untitled’.  Art or not art, I dunno, but it was, in its own quaint way, very Vienna….

The history as I vaguely remember it is something like this… theatre built in Elizabethan times, nabbed a reputation for a place to see Shakespeare (although I have a sneaky suspicion that there was a neighbouring theatre, the Rose, which has equal if not better claim to this reputation and academics are cringing… however, it’s not my period and all this stuff is pretty much postcard level history…) – burnt to the ground by cannons being fired as part of a performance of Henry VIII, owing to its straw roof and, as I’m sure many stage managers would smugly add, a certain disregard for the conventions of health and safety.  For a few hundred years nothing much happened, until some thirty-something years ago a gentleman by the name of Sam Wanamaker decided to try and ressurect the Globe in all its traditional Tudor glory.  Therein followed a fairly standard London Development cliche, involving bureaucracy, fiddling, back and forward local council bickering and finally some rather grudging building permission.  From that cliche came the next cliche of all London building projects, towit constant cash problems and the Great British Builder gag, this last probably not helped, but certainly made interesting, by the commitment to using traditional materials and techniques for as much of the construction as was possible.  Finally, after much angst, the Globe was opened, and stands now on the South Bank, as good a guessed mimic of its Elizabethan predecessor, from the straw roof (+ sprinklers) to the wooden balconies and ground level exposed to the sky.  I have a sneaky suspicion that I may have been there for one of the first plays ever shown at the Globe… suspicion only, because I was, I think, 10 years old at the time, and while I remember loving every second of Henry V, the extensive speeches and dinner that followed after are a bit of a blur.  Do not get the impression, by the by, that my family is exactly known for patronizing the arts; but we do know people who do and sometimes this leads to such bizarre occurrences as described above.

Anyhow, whether or not my suspicions are correct, the Globe first really entered my attention when I was at secondary school, courtesy of a highly cultured friend who, for the sake of anonymity, we’ll call Galadriel.  After an initial dubious encounter involving a jazz production of Macbeth, a thunderstorm and a stinking cold, my love for the Globe was sealed by spending a warm, cheap and surprisingly un-rainy summer watching Richard II and Twelfth Night.  While the Globe can be a bit hit and miss with some of its stuff, when it is good, it is absolutely wonderful, and being a groundling, inches away from the stage and in full cover of the same light that hits the actors is a theatre experience like none other.  I remember being absolutely absorbed by a production of Edward II, and laughing so hard that my face ached for hours after an all-female version of Much Ado About Nothing.  The Globe, by the by, while producing some brilliant stuff often, produces some absolutely brilliant comedy almost all the time.  I have never laughed so hard at Shakespeare’s comedies (which lets face it, are sometimes not as funny as his tragedies…) as I have at the Globe.  I’ve also stood through a lot of non-Shakespearean stuff; being bombarded by bread in the name of the French Revolution being my most recent experience.  There are some snags; being a groundling is undeniably tough on your kneecaps, so that by the 3rd  hour there is a growing urge to grab Hamlet by the throat and scream ‘just kill him already!’  But it is a small price to pay for some of the most exciting summer nights I have ever spent in front of a stage… rained on or otherwise…

So, odds are that, if it wasn’t for Terry Pratchett, I wouldn’t have started reading fantasy books.  When I was 10 years old, my Dad, who at the time worked as a publisher, came home one day with a copy of The Colour of Magic, the first in the Discworld series of novels, tucked under his arm and a cry of, ‘give this a go [nickname that shall not be repeated] and see if you enjoy’!

And, having not much else to do, I did.

I devoured The Colour of Magic, and had to go the very next day to the library to get The Light Fantastic and joy of joys, discover when I did that there were more discworld novels just waiting to be read!  Since then I have read every single novel, discworld or other, that Terry Pratchett has produced, and loved every second.  And not only are they all brilliant reads on their own right or as part of a series, but if anything, he’s been getting better.  Everyone who’s ever read the discworld novels will have the conversation of ‘who’s your favourite character?’  Is it Rincewind, the cowardly wizard with about as much magical talent as a carrot, who somehow survives despite everything and is constantly frustrated in his attempts to not be saviour of civilization?  Is it Granny Weatherwax, the old witch who is always right despite everything and does what has to be done?  What about Death, who spends so much of his time attempting to understand the mysteries of humanity, eating fried breakfast and learning to play cards?  The Patrician of Ankh Morpork, a city of guilds, wizards, intrigues, speeding fines, dodgy street food, dodgier sanitation, tabloid journalism and a post office run by a man with unusual fashion sense?  Vimes, copper through and through who seems to find himself constantly being promoted despite his best efforts?  Are you interested in tales of gods and their schemes, in crime and thrillers, in vampires and why they always carry a dustpan and brush, in the legal rights of zombies or the trouble with going to the klickies?  The discworld contains all these things – over the years, this series of books really has become the embodiment of the phrase ‘he made a world on the page’.

And it’s funny.

It’s really really funny.  I mean, it’s a whole load of other stuff too; Pratchett tells the kind of story that makes you forget that you’re looking at words on a page and turning bits of brownish paper with black ink marks on them.  On a slightly more serious note, he has also been in the news recently, after being diagnosed with Alzheimers, which is, lets face it, a crappy trick for the universe to pull on any man, let alone one as brilliantly talented as Pratchett.  What this means for the future, I have no idea, but I for one will be first into the bookshop whenever he puts pen to paper, and even if that slows down, there is still a whole world of books – several worlds, in fact – sitting on pride of place on my bookshelf, ready to entertain and exhilarate whenever the technical rehearsals get long or the tube runs slow.

By now, dear reader, you may have noticed a pattern in What I Did On My Holidays – I do cities.  I vaguely get the idea of going on holiday to the countryside/mountains/beaches/forests etc., and find all of the above very pretty and pleasant in reasonable doses.  But the NHS makes me pay prescription fees for my asthma drugs, and having been born and raised in a city, I now find myself medically incapable of breathing properly unless surrounded by buses, trucks and carbon monoxide, so cities are my destination of choice.

And Istanbul is a city of cities.  For thousands of years it’s been one of the most important urban centres on the planet, sitting bang smack between Europe and Asia.  The Roman Emperors became the Byzantine Emperors in Constantinople; the Ottomans conquered Constantinople and it became Istanbul, the heart of an empire which at its height stretched from Budapest via Baghdad to Algiers.  The fledgling Russian Empire spent many hundreds of years seething over Istanbul’s control of the Dardenelles’ strait (pity the city of Azov on the Black Sea, which spent most of the early modern period being burnt to the ground over this particular naval punch-up) – in the first world war, the Allies attempted a disastrous landing at Gallipoli to seize control of the same stretch of water.  The city itself has suburbs stretching all the way from the Black Sea into the Sea of Marmara, and for hundreds of years was the home of Christians, Jews and Muslims in every size, shape and form.  You can’t really escape the history in Istanbul, since it’s built into practically every wall.

The Hagia Sofia, is every part as huge and towering as its reputation would suggest, if sadly fallen into a bit of neglect despite the tourists, and like much of Istanbul it was built by the Byzantines and converted by the Ottomans.  It towers over the district of Sultan Ahmed, named after its principal mosque, a white edifice of long gardens and fresh running water.  In the early modern period this part of the city, which sticks out into the bay where the strait from the Black Sea meets the Sea or Marmara, was known as the Golden Horn, and has on its end Topkapi, the palace of the Ottoman Sultans, a place of cool shade, endless courtyards, hidden nooks and long stone balconies.  Beneath all this you can walk through a two thousand year old cistern, an underground network of man-made caverns to rival the mines of Moria, where occasionally you can catch the glimpse of fish in the darkness, or eat sticky Turkish ice cream on a park bench overlooking the sea.  Bridges run from Sultan Ahmed to Galata, which was in the old days the quarter for foreign embassies and which now is a great bustling shopping and eating hub, which never seems to sleep and where the average walking speed after the hour of 9 p.m. is lucky to get above 2 miles and hour, the crowds grow so thick.  Crossing the bridges by anything other than the trams which run through the centre of the city can be a little nerve wracking, as they are constantly covered with men and boys fishing, and your time is spent dodging flying hooks and wriggling bait.  Turkish flags were hanging off these bridges when we went to visit, and boats pass by constantly, from the cruise ships and passenger ferries through to fishing boats and a constant stream of freighters coming down from the Black Sea.  Galata and the thrivving shops in that area are every part as globalised and commercial as anywhere else in the world, and the talk and dress could come from any busy, cosmopolitan hub, but further away are districts like Fenir, where the dress is conservative and commerce thrives around a market of spilt vegetables, torn plastic bags and broken cardboard boxes that stretches all the way from the chief mosque down to the waterfront.

It was in Fenir that we encountered gaggles of grinning children, whose English consisted of the two words, ‘hello?’ and ‘money?’ and who followed us harmlessly wherever we went.  It was also the first place we tried to get food on our first night of arrival, and encountered the curious custom of meeting the fish we were going to eat before it was served, a thing our feeble Turkish wasn’t really up to understanding.

Uphill from Fenir, back towards the sea and there is the oldest shopping hub of the city, the Grand Bazaar, where walking speed is a poor 1 m.p.h. and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, not for sale.  It started in a Byzantine covered market, which still exists to this day, and where one hot afternoon we found our way up onto the crumbling thousand-year-plus old roof just as the mosques of Istanbul began the afternoon call to prayers.  This barrage of noise came from all around and lasted a good fifteen minutes as every muezzin of every mosque seemed to be operating to a slightly different time and in a very different key from his neighbour.  Some brisk muezzins belted through their call to prayers like men in need of a trip to the bathroom; others, such as the one who woke us up at 5 a.m. every morning during our stay with friends in the suburbs, would begin and stop, begin and stop, as if constantly self-checking his call for grammatical errors.  A friend of mine once described certain things he had seen or heard in his life as ‘rocking chair moments’ – a thing you would tell your grandchildren about in 60 years time when sitting in a rocking chair.  The sound of an entire city being called to prayer, heard from on top of a Byzantine roof in the very heart of Istanbul, is going to be one of mine.  The bazaar now stretches into the streets all around the area, a bewildering network of alleys and roads thronged at all hours, and hides within it occasional wonders, such as mosques built by long-dead Viziers and queens.

Public transport in Istanbul is a mix of ferries, underground lines, taxis, trams, public buses and a system that I guess I shall call a bus, but which is more like a public run mini-truck headed in a certain direction into which everyone piles elbow-to-elbow and out of which people hop at pretty much whatever location seems most convenient.  It is also the only city I have ever been to in my life in which a funicular is integrated into the public transport system.  Istanbul is a city of many hills, and the sweating tourist quickly comes to think of the well-tended gardens outside the mosques as a wonderful opportunity to sit in the shade, as well as a sight to see.

I was born in a very Turkish area of London, so was looking forward to the food, and was well rewarded.  Pide is essentially a Turkish form of pizza; yoghurt featured quite a lot in many dishes, although its drinkable cousin, ayran, wasn’t really my cup of tea; fish was everywhere.  Throw something into the Bosphorus and it will literally pop and jump with fish leaping up to catch it, although, alas, pollution has encouraged the influx of vast populations of jellyfish, which make for a quaintly alien presence in the water.

A past-time that was reasonably common in the back streets and which myself and my boyfriend indulged in regularly, was the playing of backgammon while drinking coffee (which was essentially raw caffeine with a little water on top) from a tulip shaped glass cup.  One night, the boyfriend, being braver than I, even risked doing all this while smoking chocolate flavoured shisha, although neither his complexion nor his game benefitted from the adventure.  The back streets of Istanbul also throng with cats, thousands of tiny cats of every shape and variety that nose at the feet of strangers and are kicked away by the locals, used to and annoyed by their presence.

Since the Ottoman Empire was kinda my thing at university, a quick word on some of the previous inhabitants of Istanbul.  Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, a dude if ever there was one, built his mosque right by the bridge to Galata, designed by the architect Sinan Pasha, and it is a strange mix of the zen-austere and subtly intricate, both majestic and impressive, and restrained.  When Mohammed the Conquerer captured Istanbul in 1453, it’s said that he was distraught that the defenders had fought so long and hard, thus ensuring damage came to his beautiful city.  Sultan Mehmed IV was rumoured to have run through the streets of Sultan Ahmed at night in his night robe randomly beheading people he saw.  Sultan Ibrahim the Mad was said to have sent out an image of cows udders cast in gold with instructions that women found resembling this physical feature should be bought to his fur-fettish harem.  When he was eventually murdered and overthrown by his own guard, family and staff, his surviving brother and heir to the throne, Mustafa the Imbecile, refused to leave the harem until he saw proof of his brother’s death, and was eventually – so the story goes – maneuvered out of the harem through a hole in the ceiling.  Within the harem itself there were many generations of utterly fearsome women – Hurrem, wife of Suleyman, was one of the most powerful people in the empire, as well as the founder of mosques, schools, hospitals and the champion of clean water supplies throughout the city and land.  For decades, during the difficult times at the start of the seventeenth century, it was said to be the time of the ‘rule of the women’ as the mothers and queens of the Sultans exercised power through them and from behind the shady walls of the harem.  The pirate Barbarossa eventually became admiral of the Sultan’s fleet; Lady Mary Wortley Montague stumbled upon the beginning of innoculation as we now know it in the city in the 1690s, and many floppy-shirted, somewhat stoned poets drooped around the rooftops of the city during the early Victorian period.

A week and a bit wasn’t really time to skim the surface of this city, and I would love to return one day – although perhaps, secret ambition probably never to be fulfilled – perhaps one day, I can do it by train?

Shakespeare’s Globe is another one of those landmarks that I may have to add to the ’something to talk about at great length later’ category; however, I will take a quick 100 words or something to say that Helen was immensely enjoyable, tonnes of fun and lots of other things besides, as well as a brilliant example of what can be done with tires.  I highly recommend to all who have a sturdy pair of legs, a waterproof jacket (to prevent the rain from happening) and £5 at their disposal of a summer evening by the river!

www.dennissevershouse.co.uk

Verona is a city – or maybe a town, I don’t really know how you make the judgment – in Northern Italy with a very pretty old heart and a Roman Arena bang smack in the centre just to cap it all off.  Like most places we visited in our trip through the area, finding a grocers was one of the toughest challenges we had, and every waiter at every restaurant/gelateria recognised us for English before we’d even opened our mouths to speak.  The old town is caught in a loop defined by a fast flowing river, across which are a number of bridges, including one that was part of a castle, which was quite exciting.  A small cathedral lies to the north, replete with golden icons and, in a fashion that slightly confused me, marble statues of saints wearing what looked like triangular halos.  There are symptoms of changing ownership throughout Verona’s history, built into its streets; a church bearing the crest of arms of the Austrians in a square with the book-holding, open-jawed lion of St. Mark, looking down onto a fashion emporium selling Milanese leather shoes with a poster in its window advertising Verdi sung in a Roman amphitheatre.

To be honest, my boyfriend and I had kinda missed the minor detail of there being a Roman arena which was still in-tact enough to be used to house an opera festival capable of sitting around 20,000 people until we were actually confronted with the fact.  Despite the fact that neither he nor I are what you’d really call opera buffs – in fact, this was the second opera I’ve ever seen in my life, and I now feel a bit opera-d out - we figured that for the price of a cheap seat on a stone step, it’d be an experience worth having.

Through a coincidence of timing, the opera we ended up seeing was Aida.  The ticket said it started at 9 p.m., which surprised us, and we told ourselves that we could file in about 8 p.m. and get a ‘good seat’, since being just on stone steps, our place was unassigned.

Oh my we were a bit out of our depth…

Shuffling in at 8.15, the stone steps of the Roman arena, and I kid you not when I say Roman arena, a great giant stone splat on the landscape where once tens of thousands cheered for blood-splattered gladiators – we found the terraces already heaving with people wedged in buttock to buttock, speaking every language within a 200 mile radius.  The arena changes the opera it’s performing every night, so dozens of tech crew were swarming over the stage until right up to the word go, raising the largest set I have ever seen in my life while lighting crew focused some seriously punchy lamps to shine down over the heads of an audience packed in their thousands onto a stage that dwarved anyone on it. 

Announcements were in three languages – the German announcement was nothing short of hillarious, as I have never heard such a sultry voice wrapping itself around the words – and there were four intervals throughout the show for the stage to be reset.

Then the show began.

I have no idea what Aida is about.  I mean, I got the basic gist, but right now I still couldn’t give you a full account without consulting a book.  But I have never, in all my life, seen such a spectacular show.  Not necessarily a very good one, in that much of my time was spent worrying about the state of my bottom and wondering whether it really was 1 a.m. and they were still going, but utterly, utterly spectacular.  At the start of the show, the audience were invited to light little candles as a tradition of the arena, and as the sun went down, hundreds, quite possibly thousands of these little flames were struck in the audience as if at a cathedral.  Then over 60 flame torch-bearing Egyptian soldiers entered and spread themselves around the venue as the performance began.

The piece that I can only guess was the half-way closer was the ultimate in ridiculousness.  It featured continual processions containing no fewer than…

60 Egyptian palace guards.

30 Ballet dancing soldiers.

20 scantily clad ballet dancing slave girls.

20 Captured slaves.

30 High priests.

30 Scribes and general officials.

20 Nubian slave children, aged 3-6.

4 Horses.

Like I said, I have no idea what actually happened.  For the truly nerdy, I also have this warning; if you’re using 6 discharge follow spots to light the stage, for please be sure that 1 of them isn’t more punchy than its neighbours.  Nerdy moment over.  I should also add that even if opera wasn’t my thing, the conductor was worth every penny we paid for the ticket, an entire dramatic/acrobatic performance in his own right…

But I can honestly say, I have never, in all my life, sat through anything quite as ridiculously, astoundingly, absurdly over the top as Aida at the Verona Arena.

Holloway Road, London

Rio Terra M.Foscarini, Venice

Railway line, Milan-Malpensa

Holloway Road, London

Venice

So, I don’t know why, and don’t really know whether it’s an expression of something cultural/political, but as a general impression, I always get the feeling that there is more graffiti in continental Europe than in London.  Sure, most of it – as with most of it in London – is the unintelligable scribble of a mark whose meaning is known only to the painter and a few select friends/rivals.  Some of it is linked to crime; some of it is kids playing, some of it is standard political protest – which in my own quaint way, I sort of cheer for – and every now and then, some of it is a splash of colour on concrete.  The railways of Europe are particularly heavily painted on.  Brussels Midi is a particularly boring, depressing station but the tracks leading out of it are three inches thick with every kind of graffiti you could ever see.  The railway lines of Italy are also covered in paint, so much so that you begin to wonder how the painters got access to some of the stuff they’re drawing.  Alas, I didn’t own a camera until a few months ago, so these are only some of the more recent pictures I stumbled over when last in Europe!

Yes, I was transitting, and yes, I was doing it to save cash on my way to somewhere else.   We flew in at night, and from the air Dubai was an orange-stained sandy blur, a darkness punctuated by the occasional pools of brilliant light, sand dotted occasionally with the white blobs of a mansion and the distant burning orange fires of oil wells across sand and water as we flew in over the Persian Gulf.  But the airport itself was brilliant white, at least on the inside, which was what we were ushered straight into.  Brilliant white with blue carpets and more people than you will find on the busiest shopping streets on the silliest of days.  Once you’re through passport control and into the departures lounge, you enter a world of all worlds.  Beneath lamps shaped like flying saucers and golden palm trees are shops selling whiskey, shisha pipes, DVDs of the life of the Prophet Muhammad, DVDs of Die Hard, clothes, bags, books, magazines, newspapers in every language you’ve ever seen, holidays, destinations, food of every kind; the first thing I saw on exiting was a Starbucks, and between every cafe was a line of computers for internet access, all constantly in use.  There are prayer rooms for men and women, bathrooms and water fountains immaculately maintained, great sweeping windows that allow you to look out onto the constantly in use runways, everywhere noise and hassle and people shopping. 

In fact, the only thing that Dubai seriously lacked, was a place to rest while waiting for the flight.  There were plenty of chairs, but every single one was occupied with people, and where there was space, the places beneath the chairs were occupied with people sleeping, stretched out on luggage, towels or blankets where they had them, while feet passed constantly a foot from their faces.  Flights to every corner of the world were constantly being declared in English and Arabic, five screens of departure information barely enough to contain one hours worth of take off data, and every costume and colour of skin could be seen trying to work out which gate their flight went from.  Gates were called late, which was in its own way quite frustrating as, just beyond the security desk, you could see empty chairs waiting to be filled; but once past the security desk, opportunities to shop declined, which perhaps explains everything.  It was 1 a.m. local time when we first arrived, and 3 a.m. when we departed, and the bustle was still going strong.

On our return trip, we arrived 5 a.m.ish local time, and things were calmer.  Still no chairs, of course; every patch of ground occupied by sleepers and the slumbering.  We found a pillar to snooze against as the sun came up behind us and it was, between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m., when our flight departed, mildly calmer.  There is a romance about still moments in places that have been busy; it is the same in the sound of a train on a quiet night, or that moment in the city when, on a busy junction, the bustle stops, and you can’t hear the sound of cars any more.  Then again, there is also that fatigue from having already been on a plane for 8 sleepless hours, which perhaps lends more romance to a thing than the thing deserves.  Transitting is never fun, and I must admit, I have no great yen to go visit Dubai any time soon.  But I have never seen such bustle in so small a place in my life.

We flew to Seoul via Dubai in order to save money, and Dubai International Airport merits its own entry just for its own ridiculousness.  From Dubai we flew into Incheon International Airport, which is a fair haul outside the city on the coast of South Korea.  Incheon is, by the by, the scene of a very savvy bit of tactics on the part of the US Military during the Korean Civil War, when the U.N. landed troops there, cutting off an invading North Korean army.  Make no mistake; it was a landing governed by bonkers Cold War logic, but if nothing else, you gotta admire the strategy.

Anyhow, it’s a slightly strange thing landing at Incheon International.  By bus from there to Seoul, you get the impression that you’re riding a strip of road set in endless endless yellow sand with the sea washing the edges, and can’t help half-thinking any second now the whole airport will just sink.  Then there’s a short strip of low hills populated with rice paddies – which from train at least, is what most of Korea looks like, flooded paddies of either rice or cabbage – and then a city that goes on forever. 

From what I can tell, Seoul is set around two major landmarks; the Han River, which is a great wide fat sluggish thing with government and financial buildings pressed all around, and Namsan, which is a semi-forested hill in what I came to think of as the ‘heart’ of the city, topped by the red-white spike of Seoul Tower.  Get out of the airport bus at Chongmuro, at the foot of Namsan, and the first thing the unprepared tourist smells, whether you like it or not, is fish, cabbage and traffic fumes.  At first I thought I wouldn’t become used to these smells; I did.  While Seoul gets very hot in summer, every building and most public transport is also air conditioned, and every now and then there’ll be a thunderstorm and a lashing of rain to take the edge off.

It’s a strange city, to a westerner.  A lot about it seems very similar.  The hotels are pretty much like hotels anywhere, although the ‘Korean style’ room comes with no bed, but a pile of usually neon-coloured mattresses and blankets you lay out on the floor.  Oddly, the thing that bewildered myself and my boyfriend most about Seoul’s hotels were the sheer array of buttons you had compressed into one remote control.  You could control room temperature, lights, TV, alarms, and occasionally, the toilet, from a whole array of unintelligible symbols.  Our attempt to work out which of the 8 buttons on the toilet in our hotel made the toilet flush led to a small flood before we finally solved it.

Outside, the streets were both familiar and strange, and this is best summed up by pizza.  Pizza!  (We thought.)  How familiar and western!  We’ve had two weeks of rice and cabbage, as a treat, let’s have pizza!  And indeed, we went into a place that is entirely recognisable from every city from New York to Berlin, and there was fairly standard pizza on offer.  Then there was the pizza by boyfriend had; even were it not covered with an exciting array of Korean spices and pickles, the rim of the pizza was made of cookie dough.  A small pot of blueberry sauce was provided, so that the meal became a main course, followed on the same dish by blueberry cookie pudding.

Breakfast was also an adventure.  Korean food has many Good Things about it, not least the things that can be done to shredded beef.  But a few days of rice, kimchi (which is essentially fermented cabbage buried in a barrel for months on end, soaked in vinegar and allowed to mature, and which no amount of good intention could make pleasurable for me) and strange sliced of rectangular grey slime also made from - you guessed it – cabbage, pulverised and crushed with unknown nuts and chili – and we began to crave something more delicate on our stomachs.  After a little searching, we found a place called Paris Baguette, which did everything the westerner might crave from croissants to coffee.  But like all things Korean, it had a twist; doughnuts containing red bean curd stick in my imagination most.

Fish – or things that may once have shared and ocean with fish – were also a strong theme.  Wandering the streets of Eujiro, a tight network of streets largely populated by trendy youth, the smell of fish was very strong.  By night, club signs flashed all the time, and the clothes shops never seemed to close, letting in a constant flow of kids wearing slashed jeans with copper-dyed hair.  Their older fellow countrymen could occasionally be seen, but most were dressed far more conservatively, unless they were businessmen in white shirts and black trousers out in the beer houses.  It was in the backstreets of Eujiro that I also saw no less than three of the only street fights I’ve ever seen, all between Korean gentlemen who seemed to have become so involved in debate with their rivals that the only way to settle the matter was to attempt to break brooms over each other’s heads.  Sadly – but perhaps fortunately – taekwondo, the traditional-ish martial art of Korea, did not seem to be prevalent among the population, and the mass of onlookers seemed to regard such fights as a fairly standard way of settling a debate.  A feature of Eujiro that I particularly enjoyed were the street vendors selling everything from mobile phones through to Robbie Williams calendars and my favourite late-night snack; chilled pineapple slices on a stick.

Another feature of Seoul are the underground shopping centres which seem a fairly strong feature of most major underground stations; and which make navigation around said underground stations quite tricky, as sometimes it can be easier to go through a bookshop and up through a leather clothes shop than to follow the signs for the exit.  Needless to say the majority of the inhabitants of Seoul had better English than I was ever going to achieve Korean, but there was also a lot of commercialised abuse of the language going on.  T-shirts bearing such mystic comments as ‘Hortative Remarks’ or inspirational slogans like ‘Work, Play, Family United Individual!’ or words to that effect.

Traffic in Korea is quite frightening, being a constant.  The history, while very impressive, is often also rebuilt, courtesy of various occupations, abuse and then a re-discovery that seemed to have kicked off in the 1970s.  However, accident can sometimes lead you to odd places.  A cry of ‘lets see what’s up here!’ from my boyfriend while walking through the national park that lies directly north of the city is and is easily reachable by metro, let to the accidental discovery of a 70-foot tall golden Buddha surrounded by no less than 10,000 miniature golden Buddhas, tucked away, unsignposted, in the middle of a forest.  Thinking of history, the Korean declaration of independence, which can be found inscribed in stone in a small park near Jongno Tower, is a masterpiece of tactfully never once blaming the Japanese while screaming hatred and anger for the occupation of their country between every chiseled line.

As a consequence of history, the U.S. military still has an influence in Korea, and it can be seen in Seoul, particularly in the streets of Itaewon, where the hamburger joints are rolling with American accents as much as local adventurers out for a meal.

Taking the train out of Seoul is an adventure in its own right; the line to Suwon, a city graced with one of the few surviving very obvious pieces of Korean history in the form of a thick city wall along which tourists and dog walkers alike can ramble, reveals just how much Seoul sprawls.  Allotments cling to tiny strips of land by the railways, and great pink towerblocks inscribed on the sides with letters and numbers for identification cluster round little glass clumps of communal living.  One of the most curious and striking features were the repeated blood-red neon crucifixes shining from numerous Protestant chapels and churches scattered across the landscape.  Nearly every town seemed to have a church, whether a wooden chapel or a community-hall brick building, which by night added an eerie quality to the horizon of artificial light.

With my tourist hat on, I have never ever been so impressed by a tourist office as that that Seoul boasts near Jongno Tower.  Almost entirely deserted at any hour, it was staffed by the most multilingual, helpful staff I have ever met.  This in contrast with the tourist office in the small town of Bulgoska, in the south of the country, whose answer to the question ‘where can we stay here?’ was to judiciously purse the lips, consider and then reply, ‘why you want to stay here?  I don’t think here good for you…’

One final word on the strange juxtaposition that was Seoul, and came in the form of the TV channels we watched.  A huge range of US TV had been imported, most of it subtitled rather than dubbed, and you could not turn on the TV without an episode of CSI in one of its incarnations playing.   On the channel over you could find Korean historical drama, which consisted to my uneducated eye of many men with substantial beaded hats looking judicious at each other and stroking their impressive grey beards.  On the next channel, Chinese drama continually and frustratingly failed to have any spectacular kung fu battles, despite the number of hands put on swords; the next channel was Korean modern domestic drama, which seemed an odd escapee from the 1960s school of drama; then the Buddhist evangelical channel; then the Protestant channel; then a channel dedicated entirely to the playing of one computer game over and over again and then, finally, the channel that myself and my boyfriend found so strangely compelling, the channel dedicated to playing the Korean game of baduk, or go in the west.  I cannot describe how fascinating it was watching this thing that neither of us fully understood to the ‘oooohs’ and ‘aaahhhs’ of many judicious commentators.

Seoul was a fascinating experience, one I feel I barely scratched the surface of.  Strange, fascinating, and in its own special, neon-lit, bustling, smelling, cabbage-stained way, traffic-honking, train-rumbling, fan-whirling way, deeply magical…

Oh yes… did I mention the sequel to A Madness of Angels?

So, for many, many hundreds of years there has been an individual in London called the Lord Mayor.  In Magna Carta it was set down that the Lord Mayor of London could prevent the king entering within the city walls which at the time defined the city.  He was the chief authority in the city, a leader during disasters, a powerful figure within the guilds, wealthy and for a long time, the nearest thing London had to any sort of definable legal authority.  In recent centuries his power has declined, and now the Lord Mayor is chiefly regarded for the firework display put on in his honour every November, and for his excellent ability at shaking hands.   Certain symbols of the past remain; chains of office, a particularly shiny coach, big red robes and a lot of dead rabbit.  Around the Corporation of London, the oldest part of the city, you can also see practically everywhere you look, the old symbol of the city; a dragon holding a shield, bearing the red cross of St. George in its middle, and in the top left hand corner, a red sword.

Needless to say, if the Lord Mayor developed over the years to maintain law and order during daylight hours, in charge of the ordinary ticking over of the city, there would be left a vacancy for a more mystical counterpart, whose remit begins when the sun goes down…