Imogen's Creative Fire

Not a good place...

2012-01-31T05:38:00.000-08:00

I officially start my new role tomorrow; and I've got a stinking head cold. I feel grotty. I know it's only a cold, nothing serious. But I am stuffy-nosed and sore-throated, and terribly tired, and the front of my face aches. Miserable condition; and not the way one wants to be when about to start a new job.

I try to console myself, in my lunch break, with planning my May holiday. I haven't yet booked any time off, but I can still day dream about going back to Crete, or back to Paxos, or that peculiar place on the north coast of Lesvos where there was nothing but a huge black sand beach and a few tavernas... Outside the office window now a fine white sleet is drifting on the wind, and the thought of the sunlit mountains and shining seas of Hellas comforts me as I resign myself to February in England.

News

2012-01-27T08:59:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I got offered a new job. Our department is being restructured slightly and everything has been a bit hassled and chaotic for the last few months while this was sorted-out and negotiated. There were some glitches at an HR level, which needless to say did not speed things up, and all in all it's been an unpleasantly stressful patch. But I think everything is now ironed out, and I get a new role out of it.

From February the first I will be working in what's known as Travel Trade, i.e. running group bookings. It's an area I've covered some aspects of, and I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into it properly. The job carries a slightly better salary and slightly more responsibility, too, which is pleasing.

I just wish the process of getting to this hadn't been a tad protracted. I am more tired than I would like, going into a new job. It would be so much better to be full of energy and as keen as mustard...

Mind you, I'm always tired in January. I think perhaps I have a mild form of SAD, for I always spend a couple of months every winter simply longing for spring. As it is I would really love to have a week off in February or March, but I feel I can't really since I'll be learning the new role. Maybe by April I can take a break; I'm owed seven days of annual leave and in fact there are relatively few gaps where I can use it up....

There are masses of snowdrops out at Kew at the moment, as well as a sprinkling of crocuses and wonderful Schiapparelli-pink Cyclamen coum. Today was cold but bright, but it has clouded over this evening and is now grey and dank-looking. well, it is still winter, after all. But the cyclamen are beautiful...

Two guys named Ed

2012-01-24T06:38:00.000-08:00

When I was at school, I was a great disappointment to all the people (i.e. my parents and my school teachers) who thought Bright Kids Go Far. I didn’t go far. I dithered and didn’t know where I wanted to go, and I would only work hard if I enjoyed something (I then worked like a nutcase, to the exclusion of all other interests - this hasn’t exactly changed, come to think of it). I had the good brain, but my ideas of what I wanted to do with it weren’t considered much cop, and I soon learned to stop expressing them, since having them dismissed as ridiculous and unrealistic was pretty crushing. So I was told I ought to go to A Very Good University and I would have a Brilliant Academic Career; and I had nothing much to say in response except “well, okay, I guess so.”

Looking back, I marvel that no-one ever seems to have had any doubts about my suitability for a Brilliant Academic Career. I suppose they were waiting for me to say something; but the only other thing I had to say (“I’d rather do something creative”) had already been comprehensively dismissed. I had nowhere near enough confidence to fight for myself or for my vague and frightened dreams. I acquiesced; and then rebelled passively by not working.

There was a lad at my primary school, the son of some neighbours, who wrote very good poetry, and read voraciously, and who did work hard. Very hard. He went on to go to the boys’ grammar school down the road from my girls’ grammar, and he went on working very hard. His name was Ed, and I was regularly told I ought to be more like him. I wished I were more like him; I wished I were capable of it. He had all the drive and motivation I lacked. He really wanted to go to Oxford and to be one of those people who choose their college very carefully because they are going to spend the rest of their life there. Ed was academically gifted, he worked constantly, his creative writing got published, at seventeen he sang in a pub band; he looked like a hawk and he was going to go far.

As far as everyone but me was concerned, I was meant to be like that. I didn’t want it, but I knew I was meant to. It wasn’t a comfortable position to be in.

In the sixth form, one of my best friends, Sísí, left our school and went to the local public school for two years. Through Sísí I met some of her classmates; some of them were alright, some were ghastly, and every one of them had more confidence than me. Oh well, that’s life. Among them was an extremely ornamental lad called Tom who was the youngest of four brothers. He was tall and slim with prominent cheekbones and a shock of dark hair, and because he was so gorgeous I was too terrified even to speak in his presence.

His nearest brother, a year older than him, was another boy called Ed.

This Ed was nowhere near so attractive – he was tall and dark, yes, but skinny and speccy and with sticky-out ears – and I was consequently just about able to speak to him. He seemed a nice bloke. But as far as Sísí and her friends were concerned, and as far as my family were concerned, he was just a tiny bit beyond the pale, because he had dropped out of school. His parents had supported him, too, which my parents found shocking. He had dropped out, and become apprenticed to a potter.

I envied him so much it hurt. I knew I wasn’t meant to want what he had, but I really, really wanted it – not precisely to be a potter, but to be out of the nightmare race of academic success and failure, and constant comparisons, and being-a-disappointment; out of school, and into a life that made something.

I left school at eighteen, with bad A’levels, and I muddled through, and had some interesting experiences and some less interesting ones. I learned to cook, and worked as a chef for a couple of years. I discovered the joys of travel. I kipped on friends’ sofas. I got stuck on unemployment benefit a couple of times, and did some pretty rock-bottom things to get myself off it. Eventually in my late twenties I began to accept that I needed to have a go at doing what I really wanted, and that I had the right and the responsibility to try, and if need be to fail, on my own terms. So I quit a boring but sensible job in a book shop and went to art school. I didn’t “make it” as an artist, but I had a fascinating time; I now have a life I am pretty happy with, and I have no regrets at all about that bookshop job.

The first Ed did go to Oxford. He was a brilliant student, but then he had a series of breakdowns. He went on doing creative writing, and song-writing, and he took antidepressants that made him put on weight and caused his hair to fall out. He battled on, and did his best, and then in the end he took his own life.

The second Ed did become a potter. A very successful potter. Then he became a writer; a very successful writer. I’ve just finished reading his first book, and it’s good - this is one of those exhilarating occasions when a book that has been greatly praised lives up to the hype. I look at the author picture on the jacket, and he hasn’t changed much. I doubt if he remembers me, his kid brother’s schoolmate’s former best friend from her previous school. It’s hardly likely to have been a memorable encounter, when you look at it that way.

So the Ed I was meant to aspire to be like is dead, and the Ed who I was told had done something rather infra dig lives and thrives, and his work is good, and is known and recognised as such; and I cannot for the life of me tell why one path led where it did and the other led where it did.

I suppose the moral of this story is carpe diem. Pues su vida es efemera...

Is being a romantic a sign of a weak mind? Discuss.

2012-01-20T09:27:00.000-08:00

I should say straight away that my reaction to this question is an instant, and indignant, “No!” – but then it would be, because I am a romantic. I am a hopeless romantic; not so much in the sense of dreaming I’m going to meet Mr Right (although I wouldn’t complain at all if I were to bump into him some sunny day, at the London Wetland Centre, say!) as in the sense that I am determined never to become hardened inside into a complete cynic.

I still believe in human nature, and the human capacity to choose to do good, to be kind, show hope and compassion and put the past behind one. I still believe in love, friendship and loyalty. I do not think we are all going to the dogs; and I am depressed by those who do.

If we were all going to the dogs, and the world were really nothing but a bottomless pit, where the wisest seals gambol in piles of sh*t, as Alfred de Musset put it so charmingly (okay, I’m both translating and paraphrasing there, but you get the idea), then John McCarthy, Terry Waite, Terry Anderson and Brian Keenan would all have died in captivity - and Nelson Mandela too, for that matter. The Good Friday Agreement would never have been signed. The Old City of Dubrovnik and the Great Bridge at Mostar would still lie in ruins. God knows the world is imperfect, and human character desperately flawed, but good things do happen, and to ignore them or dismiss them as inconsequential is bitterly cynical, and fundamentally false.

Life is too complicated for everything to be terrible, after all. “It’s all going to the dogs” is just as much of a crude oversimplification as “Everything’s good and everyone’s happy!”

I’m prompted to these rather banal reflections by my enjoyment of a new television series called “Eternal Law”. It’s a fantasy, and it is profoundly romantic. The premise, at least as explained so far, is that angels are being sent down to earth, all the time; they take human form and try to help humankind at times of personal need. The main focus of the series is on two angels who have become lawyers in York, and the people they encounter through their work. The cast is excellent, the story arc is batty but interesting, there is a basic internal logic (most of the time, at least) and a complicated but touching love story going on; and the ancient city of York is beautiful.

The TV critics have mostly hated it, right from the outset. I don’t think they can handle its complete lack of cynicism. The only character they all like is the unpleasant one; yet I’m sure none of them would like him if they met him in real life – he’s a bastard. It’s a very clever piece of acting, true, but dear me, give me the angels any day! The actors playing them (Ukweli Roach and the ever-watchable Sam West) are also both giving very good performances, and in much trickier roles – making virtue interesting cannot be easy, much less a character who wants to rebel and indulge himself and chooses not to do so - because he believes it would be wrong. Good grief, he's got morals, no less...

Mind you, they do indulge a bit; it appears that angels are immune to the ill-effects of drinking and smoking, and our two heroes drink like fish and smoke like smouldering banksias. On top of York Minster, no less.

Given that this is written by the team who came up with “Life on Mars” and “Ashes to Ashes”, both of which sprang the odd twist on us, the eager viewers, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if things didn’t take the odd twist here, too. I have some theories, which range from the tear-jerkingly soppy to the unsettlingly cynical (I’m not immune, I’m only human!). But I’m enjoying it far too much to do anything but wait and see what happens. And thank the gods that someone is prepared to make, and some other someones are prepared to act in, a story this romantic.

Okay - now I'm off to have supper with friends; to lament our woes, celebrate our joys, plan creative activities, and drink too much. But not on top of York Minster.

Technical problems...

2012-01-17T05:37:00.000-08:00

I finished typing up Fairy Story No1 last night (& started on typing up Fairy Story No2, as well as writing a bit more of Fairy Story No3) and put it on a floppy disc. Brought it into work, together with the Lovely Bit of Kit. But I just tried to open the file on the disc, using the Bit of Kit, and got a message box saying "Hi there, I need to reformat this disc". Clicked "yes, go ahead". Got a green counting-bar thing. Then another message saying "By the way, reformatting will delete everything on the disc. Still sure you want to do this, chump?"

Clicked "No". Sighed. Unplugged everything and put it all back in my bag.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the fairy stories, mind you; they aren't suitable for children, really, but aren't adult enough to be for adults, either. Something is seriously askew in my marketing strategy if I'm writing for a non-existent market...

Oh well. Tonight I'll try putting the text on a different disc and see if that goes down any better. After I get back from hearing Jonathan Biss playing Janacek at the Queen Elizabeth hall...

Good weekend

2012-01-16T05:47:00.000-08:00

It was a bitterly cold weekend – all the bold little crocuses that had come through six weeks early have been felled by the frost, and the nuts in my birdfeeder have begun to go down much faster than usual. I did my grocery shopping, and some cleaning, and some washing, and repotted a plant, on Saturday, and then on Sunday I closeted myself with tea and a chocolate-coated rice-crispie cake, and the radio, and wrote. Bliss. I had a breakthrough on one of the fairy stories; I realised the King had to be a major character, since another of the major characters is going to end up married to him – or rather already is married to him, except that at the moment he doesn’t know it (it’s complicated). Yes, of course there’s a King – this is fairy-tale-land, after all.

I wrote and wrote and wrote; the BBC National Orchestra of Wales played the Lalo Cello concerto and Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, and there was a lovely Choral Evensong recorded in Tewkesbury Abbey. Then the radio got talky, and I reverted to my cd collection, and had myself a little two-man lieder recital featuring Favourite Baritone singing Schumann, and Roderick Williams singing Vaughan Williams... then followed that up with Joshua Bell and Edgar Meyer playing bluegrass, and Iarla O’Lionnard singing unaccompanied Irish traditional music. And I wrote, wrote, wrote.

Wound down at last with a bit of typing-up, a curry, and an early night. The only problem with a day spent so happily is that I have to come into work the next day and earn my living, when all I want to do is take Hierra and Sir Robert, and King Juan, and the stroppy horse, on to their next adventure.

Workaholism?

2012-01-12T09:26:00.000-08:00

I am enjoying myself in the evenings at the moment; I’ve begun typing up one of my fairy tales, and when that is finished there’s another one ready to type up and a third on its way. I have no idea what to do with them when they’re done, but I suppose I can always send them to friends to make them laugh...

The interesting thing about typing-up is that it is becoming rather a favourite activity of mine. It is easier than original first draft writing and not as painful as revision (especially third or fourth revisions!). But it’s still an essential element of writing anything; if it wasn’t written on a computer to begin with, it will have to be typed up at some point. So it is both creative and relaxing.

At the moment I’m getting home from work each night, cooking some supper, checking if there is anything I want to watch on television later, and then typing up until the start of the programme if so. In theory after my dose of tv I then go to bed early – this was one of my resolutions for January – but in practice the siren call of typing is drowning the voice of common sense, and I am tending to go back to the laptop and get stuck in again. Then the next thing I know it is nearly midnight, and my supposed early night is nothing of the sort. Even then I have to make myself stop, for stopping doesn’t come easily – I want to be able to go on till silly o’clock.

It’s something I’ve been aware of for a long time – as soon as I’m doing something I love, I can suddenly understand how people become workaholics. Sitting in the office, at work, I find workaholism baffling; but once I am sitting at my own little computer at home, doing my own work, it makes perfect sense. How could anyone not want to devote all their time to that which they love?

Busy busy bee

2012-01-11T09:39:00.000-08:00

It was a busy weekend (shopping, gardening, washing, cleaning, writing) and has been a busy week so far. Work isn’t so busy, but that means it is good catching-up time, which is useful. Then I go home, cook, and spend the evening at the laptop, typing up my fairy tales. So far, by dint of setting myself that as a project, the “something creative daily” plan has worked.

On Friday evening I went to the ENB “Strictly Gershwin” show at the Coliseum. No-one would call this a show for purists, but, boy, is it fun! The music is, of course, gorgeous, there is some lovely dancing, and as well as a couple of professional tap dancers (one of whom also has a stab at singing), a good twenty of the company get their tap shoes on for a very creditable chorus line number to “Lady Be Good”. The staging of “An American in Paris” is a bit of a jumble – this is the one point when one can really tell that this was originally an arena-style show, set-up for a much bigger stage. But the only other negative is the startlingly ugly shirt worn by the male dancer in “Summertime” – it looks like muddy curtain fabric. When a bad shirt on stage is the worst one can say of an evening out, and one comes out of the theatre tapping one’s toes and grinning, then there’s not much to complain about.

The highlights are two swooningly romantic duets – one for Elena Glurdjidze and Arionel Vargas, to “The Man I love” and one for Daria Klimentová and Vadim Muntagirov, to “Summertime” – a lovely vocal arrangement of “But not for me” for two of the singers, and best of all the treatment of “Rhapsody in Blue” as a sort of “Sapphires” tribute to Balanchine’s “Jewels”; a full-on one-act tutu ballet with a beautiful central pas de deux. The lovely Daria Klimentová sails through this with a rapturous smile, total panache and some beautiful balances, and even manages to make a very silly hat look cool.

Right – back home to do some more typing. It pays to have a project of some sort at this time of year, as I always get itchy feet in January. I start to dream of blue skies and warm seas and sunlit forests and golden mountains, and next thing I know I’m collecting package tour brochures and trying to work out when is the earliest I could get a holiday in Crete at a reasonable price. Oh Hellas, my heart’s home! The scenery – the wildflowers – the swimming – the archaeology – the walking - the food! Mia birra, parakalo...

Rr-i-ip!

2012-01-06T04:52:00.000-08:00

Does mending count as a creative activity, do you suppose?

I went on a Manual Handling training course this morning - which was useful and not too heavy on the grisly medical stuff. It turns out my lifting technique was already pretty good, which is pleasing (it probably comes of having had several bad backs over the years). But the chief way in which I distinguished myself was by splitting my trousers with a resounding ripping noise, halfway through the practical part of the training. They weren't particularly tight or particularly old, but the main vertical seam up the bum split right the way up. Bah!

I'm now sitting eating my lunch dressed in a scarf wrapped round my hips, and sewing. A fetching look, especially with black ankle socks. >sigh<

The weekend can only be better than this, anyway...

A long post; January already, and the Immies for 2011

2012-01-05T09:11:00.000-08:00

Thursday already. Heck, January already. Hey, it’s 2012...

It was, as I had hoped, a very peaceful Christmas and a quiet New Year (apart from the massive firework display down the road and the madly barking neighbourhood dogs this set off). Walking and relaxing with my family, doing a massive jigsaw, seeing a few friends, sleeping ten hours a night, eating too many Pringles... Sometimes it’s good for one just to do very little and simply rest, body and mind.

And now it is January again. Happy New Year, everyone. The weather has been all over the place today; one minute we have had sun falling across the grass of Kew Green and bare trees shining against a chilly blue sky, then next moment the skies turn black and rain lashes down in curtains. It seemed quite sensible to think of new beginnings and new resolutions without irony, each time the fresh-washed sun reappeared; but those periodic bursts of wintry rain make me want to hide my head and go to sleep underground instead.

I’ve had a couple of odd encounters over the last week. At a New Year’s party I thought I saw an old school-mate across the room – she was a tough lass in her youth, so I’ll call her Tuffisa. Tuffisa hardly seemed to have changed at all in almost thirty years; still the same curly black hair, girlish figure, casual clothes and determined expression. I wondered if she would remember me, and was hesitating whether to go over and say “hi” when beside me someone said “Oh, Imogen, Tuffisa Jones is here, do come and say hi” – and led me across to a totally different woman. The real Tuffisa had changed beyond recognition; she is now blonde, elegant, gracious and decidedly voluptuous (not that I can talk!). The weird bit came when she introduced me to her partner, since she was the woman I had thought was Tuffisa herself. She turned out to be really nice, and it was good to see Tuffy again after such a very long time; but it did give me a funny turn to start with. Is it odd of me to have been spooked by an old friend’s new partner looking so like the adolescent appearance of the old friend?

Then on Tuesday night I was at the wonderful “Slava’s Snow Show” (SEE THIS IF YOU HAVEN’T- IT’S BRILLIANT!!) and two rows in front of me was a chap with whom I could have sworn I used to do amateur drama, back in the day. He seemed to be with his family, and I used to have a terrific crush on him when he was single, so in the circumstances I didn’t like to butt in. The last time I had seen him was while I was a student, when he was a tall, handsome Malcolm in “Macbeth”, and I was doing costumes. When I thought about it I realised this must have been nearly fifteen years ago, and that gave me a funny feeling, too. It just doesn’t feel that long.

The moral of this (other than “Hi, ‘Malcolm’, if you’re reading this!”) is Tempus Fugit. Time flies, so have fun, do things that interest you, and don’t let life just slip away.

In the which spirit, I have decided to try and do something creative every day during 2012. I’m hoping that by making my definition of “creative” as open as possible I can avoid the usual backsliding and collapse of New Year’s Resolutions. After all, do something creative covers a pretty wide remit. So far I have made notes, written a bit more of a story, and made more notes about something else. Even if all I do is make notes, I’ll still achieve something if I make a few every single day... That’s the idea, anyway.

The other big thing I like to do in January is to think about the highlights of the past year. So here is my list of “Immies” for last year:

The Imogen Awards 2011

Best concerts:

“Infernal Dance”, the Philharmonia Orchestra’s Bartok season, was everything one could wish - thrilling and revelatory; the Violin concerto no 2 with Christian Tetzlaff, Yefim Bronfmann showing off in the Piano concertos, the delicious “Wooden Prince” Suite, the complete “Miraculous Mandarin”, a marvellous performance of “Contrasts”... The whole thing concluded with a gobsmacking “Bluebeard”. Marvellous!

http://www.philharmonia.co.uk/bartok/

Prom 32 – Christian Tetzlaff (again – oh swoon) playing the Brahms concerto superbly, followed by the extraordinary “Das Klagende Lied” with the BBCSO under Edward Gardner.

Prom 41 – the BBCSO again, under Mark Wigglesworth, in a lovely programme, mainly of Britten, ending with a life-enhancingly energetic “Spring Symphony”.

Best exhibition:

Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, Dulwich Picture Gallery. No contest! This runs for a couple more days, finishing at the end of this weekend, so if you like powerful dynamic landscape painting, hurry down to Dulwich...

Best dance:

I have been seeing a lot of ballet this year. I’m not quite sure why, but for me it is perhaps the most consistently thrilling of all the performed arts. This year was particularly good:

“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Christopher Wheeldon for the Royal Ballet. This was simply gorgeous, and tremendous fun!

“Metamorphosis” by Arthur Pita at the Linbury Studio Theatre. An extraordinary new piece; deeply terrifying and deeply moving.

The ENB “Black and White” mixed bill was excellent, especially the revival of “Suite en Blanc”. At the risk of sounding daft I am going to say it - the moment the curtain goes up on that panorama of dancers is practically worth the ticket price on its own.

The many “Manons” of the Royal Ballet! I saw four performances in total over the year – three in the summer and another one in the autumn. All were excellent, and it was marvellous to have a chance to see the subtle differences of interpretation between performers.

The Royal Ballet’s mixed bills were excellent this year: Asphodel Meadows/Enigma Variations/Gloria and the one that included Ashton’s “Rhapsody” both epitomised everything that is going right for the RB at the moment; ravishing beauty, emotional truth, and technical mastery at every level, from the principals right down to the newest members of the corps.

Best World Music

Ealing Global Festival. What a great day out this local mini-WOMAD is every year!

Best opera

La Bohème at the ENO. I caught one of the last performances of the run; it’s a lovely production with great sets and naturalistic direction. Elizabeth Llewellyn was a revelation; she certainly ought to wind up as a very big star indeed. She has a glorious voice and she can act. She’s also very beautiful. A perfect Mimí in a perfectly-judged production.

“Pelléas et Mélisande” at the Barbican (concert performance). No staging at all, just excellent singers lined up in front of an excellent orchestra, all led by an excellent conductor. Favourite Baritone was an intense, passionate Pelléas and Laurent Naouri a magnificent and tragic Golaud.

Best individual performers:

1) Ballet:

Carlos Acosta and Tamara Rojo in Swan Lake, for a partnership of regal scale and brilliance. La Rojo was even better in the beautiful in “Marguerite and Armand”, a real cry-into-your-lap performance.

Steven McRae; passionate and doomed in “The Rite of Spring”, febrile and anguished as Prince Siegfried in “Swan Lake”, or just showing off his bravura chops in “Rhapsody”; every little thing he does is magic...

Edward Watson, astonishing in “Metamorphosis”.

The lovely Hikaru Kobayashi getting a chance to shine, and seizing it with both hands, as Princess Aurora in “Sleeping Beauty”.

2) Opera:

Elizabeth Llewellyn in “La Bohème” at the ENO – see above.

Kristine Opolais in “Madame Butterfly” at the Royal Opera was terrific and had me crying my eyes out.

Stuart Skelton, John Tomlinson and Iain Paterson, all deeply moving in “Parsifal”.

3) Concert:

This has been rather a year for virtuosos:

Nikolai Lugansky’s fabulous solo recital at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, playing Chopin, Brahms and Liszt.

Christian Tetzlaff playing Brahms at the Proms and Bartok at the Festival Hall.

Gil Shaham restoring the Bruch violin concerto no 1 from saccharine to stunner in Prom 62.

Stephen Hough playing Liszt’s Piano Concerto no 1 with the Budapest Festival Orchestra under Ivan Fischer.

And last but not least

The ever-magnificent Sarah Connolly, heart-breaking in “Das Lied von der Erde” at the Festival Hall last February. Worth missing part of The DipGeek’s birthday party for (and I do not say that lightly, as The DipGeek throws a good party).

May 2012 be as good, culturally and in other ways!

Merry Christmas, everyone!...

2011-12-23T07:27:00.000-08:00

Another busy year draws to a close. I’m unlikely to have access to the internet again before January (& if anyone is thinking “poor you”, don’t! – I could do with some peace and quiet and one less technological temptation is no bad thing). So as far as blogging is concerned, this is the last post of 2011. And an odd old year it’s been, too.

Work has been busy and rather over-pressured a lot of the time. On the creative front it’s been rather an uneventful year, with several things ticking over and progressing quietly, but nothing spectacular happening. The garden has been a blessing as usual, and is beginning to look more like a proper garden as the shrubs I planted in 2009 settle in and put on growth. My vegetable growing was a bit of a mess this year; slug-shredded chard, blighted tomatoes, beetroots that never germinated, but climbing French beans that cropped extremely heavily, although in bursts rather than evenly, and rampaged everywhere, trying to escape over the fence and feed next door as well...

And now it is almost Christmas. Ten days off. In the Gardens, Father Christmas is seeing his last families today, and the carousel is playing a tootling pipe-organ cover of Slade's "So here it is, Merry Christmas" (one year we had one that played Sousa marches, which I liked but everyone else thought was very peculiar). The first snowdrops are out in the Rock Garden, and Juno irises are flowering in the Alpine House, and a fine winter drizzle is falling everywhere in the misty dusk.

Tomorrow my elder brother is giving me a lift down to Kent. Tonight I will have to have a takeaway for supper, because I have wound-down my supply of perishables so successfully that it’s that or a tin of baked beans (& much though I baked beans, they aren’t very celebratory). Tomorrow we slip off to the countryside.

So Merry Christmas to one and all, and may the new year bring you prosperity and happiness, success and good health!

Trying to catch up with everything that's gone on...

2011-12-16T09:09:00.000-08:00

Well, it’s been a few weeks since I wrote...

Life has been hectic; it’s the run-up to Christmas, after all, but being a chump I went away on holiday and have now got dreadfully behind on everything. I have just managed to post my UK Christmas cards, on the last safe posting day for second-class stamps – but I missed the last safe posting dates for parcels and for international post – by miles, in the latter case. And I still haven’t finished dealing with the problem of Christmas presents.

I remind myself that Christmas isn’t about presents. Or cards, for that matter. The problem is, when you are not a churchgoer, and can’t really call yourself more than a fellow-traveller of Christianity, it becomes ridiculous to say “Christmas is about Christ”. But the capitalist subtext (“Christmas is about spending and consuming as much as you humanly can!”) is thoroughly sick-making in every sense.

So for me, Christmas is about the people I love; seeing friends and family, catching up on news from people I don’t see much of (because they have done outrageous things like going to live in another country); it’s about sending greetings cards to say “I am thinking of you and I hope life is going well & hope you and yours really do all have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year”. So giving gifts (which needn’t be anything fancy - I am doing a strong line in socks and home-made jam this year) becomes a tongue-tied-and-terribly-British way of saying “Um er, and I love you”- mumble mumble turn-pink-and-look-at-your-shoes... So I want to buy and send cards, and buy and/or make presents, because they are my annual “Um er I love you”s.

I’m off down to Kent tonight to do something practical and, hopefully, helpful; my mother always has a big, real tree, and lots of greenery and decorations all over the house, and really appreciates a hand getting this all done. She also appreciates a hand with some of the grocery shopping. She is 79, after all. So that is my weekend sorted; lugging a wheely basket of bottles and biscuits back up the hill from Sainsburys; dragging the tree in and setting it up; cutting and gathering armfuls of evergreen from the garden; and decorating the lot. With the final of “Strictly Come Dancing thrown in for good measure on Saturday night. And, you know what? – I’m really looking forward to it. Maybe this is one of the signs of adulthood - good heavens, did I get there at last? Instead of regarding a weekend spent helping my mum as drudgery I am thinking “Great – this will be a lot of fun!”

In a week’s time I will be heading down to Kent again, for ten whole days off. Ten days of peace and quiet with my family; eating decent homemade food, playing board games, walking by the sea. It’s a time I always look forward to, and this year more than most, as I feel in serious need of recharging my metaphorical batteries. The week in Cornwall, though it was lovely, didn’t give me as much of an energy boost as I had hoped for. The picture at the top is one of my holiday photos and makes me feel very nostalgic - wintry afternoon sun over the sea, with the Trinity House daymark on Gribben Head in the distance.

Part of the problem has been stress at work. Things here have been over-stretched and understaffed for quite some time now, and everyone has got more tired and frazzled as the months wore on. Then in late November we were told that the team I work in is being restructured. In the end this has turned out less horrendous than some restructures I’ve heard about elsewhere, but it has still led to a very uncomfortable few weeks of uncertainty, not to mention the hassle of filling out all the forms to apply for new roles, or in some cases our own existing roles, again. For me, matters were not helped by the fact I can’t find a copy of my CV (being as I am a nitwit), so I had to do it all from scratch. I found myself earlier this week laboriously working back through my entire employment history, listing all my jobs and my duties in each, in order to fill in an application form. Given that I’ve done some fairly odd things in my time, the end result does look a bit as if I’m taking the mickey. They can’t see many cvs that include a degree in Fine Art preceded by being a chef, an actor in street theatre, an artists’ model, a cleaner and a furniture restorer. Plus a lot of retail work. I even know how to clean vellum book-bindings, courtesy of my first-ever job in Canterbury Cathedral Library...

Anyway, off for my weekend of hauling and decorating duties. By Sunday evening Mum’s place should be bursting with good things to eat and looking like Christmas at Dingley Dell.

Another Friday

2011-11-25T09:34:00.000-08:00

It's Friday, it's gone five o'clock, and I am about to start a week of annual leave. A week of fresh Cornish air, fresh Cornish fish, strong Cornish cider and scary Cornish clifftop paths! Possibly even all at the same time...

I've been ridiculously busy at work, and haven't even written the ghost of a shadow of a review of the new "Eugene Onegin" at the ENO, or of the excellent Royal Ballet triple bill I saw with my Mum last weekend, or even I think of the previous RB mixed bill - the one with the stunning revival of "Marguerite and Armand" and cry-your-eyes-out "Requiem". The more recent one continued in the emotion-wrenching range, with "Asphodel Meadows", "Enigma Variations" and MacMillan's "Gloria". Magnificent. I am getting a veritable feast of dancing so far this autumn. At this late date I don't think I can single out individuals; besides, the whole company are at the top of their game. Okay, perhaps a special mention for the wonderful Marguerite of Tamara Rojo. And Ed Watson's tragic, tortured soldier in Gloria. And - no, I mustn't, I could be hear all night otherwise.

"Eugene Onegin" although not quite to the "magnificent" line was fairly close; Amanda Echalaz a rivetting, passionate Tatyana, Toby Spence a gorgeous (& gorgeous-voiced!) Lensky. There were some odd directorial decisions (the Larin estate certainly had a very beautiful barn, but I never got why Tatyana slept in it rather than in, well, a bedroom. Like normal people.) and a rather wooden Onegin let the side down a bit. Some fabulously beautiful sets and very well-directed crowd scenes compensated, but Echalaz's thrilling performance is the biggest reason to see this - she is definitely a star in the making.

And now I have nothing to do except finish my packing, drink a beer with my (rather piece-meal, night-before-holiday, using-up-oddments-in-a-curry) supper, and get an early night. Tomorrow morning, to Paddington, and the train west...

TG...

2011-11-18T05:38:00.000-08:00

...it's Friday. Not an easy week. I've done my best to keep my spirits up with Chinese food, chocolate cheesecake, ballet and Bruckner, but I am stressed and tired, and there's no getting around the fact it simply has not been an easy week.

Let's hope it has been better for everyone else.

Odd, unsettled...

2011-11-15T07:05:00.000-08:00

It's an odd patch. I get bad news, I reel, I find my feet again, I realise that until I get more facts I can't make any decisions or plans, and I am left in limbo. I won't get more facts until this Thursday at the earliest.

At least it isn't my health, or that of anyone close to me.

Meanwhile the weather veers between dramatic late autumnal sunshine and dramatic thick mists and raw chill. The ground is thick with fallen leaves now, but even now there are still many more clinging on to the trees, for we still have not yet had a single frost, or a single gale. I am beginning to allow myself the hope that the weather for my winter break in Cornwall may be okay. It's only ten days' time before I go now.

In the last week I have, besides work, been doing some more writing, had an afternoon birdwatching and sketching at the Wetland Centre, baked chocolate orange sultana muffins, had supper with a friend, been to "The Sleeping Beauty" (Marianela Nuñez, absolutely wonderful again as Aurora), sung (badly) in the first Christmas Choir practice and been on a Tree Identification training walk. I've been busy, and happy. But I hate this business of being in limbo. It's like being in the dentist's waiting room, only worse by at least an order of magnitude. Even if in the end the news is bad, I'd rather know, and at least be able to plan for it...

"Manon" poem

2011-11-09T08:44:00.000-08:00

I have been haunted since the weekend by that heart-breaking performance of "Manon". To anyone who isn't into ballet, or isn't into MacMillan, or isn't into doomed love stories, it must seem insane that I have taken myself to see this particular ballet no less than four times in the last year. But MacMillan's narrative works are like the Shakespeare of ballet; endlessly nuanced, their understanding of psychology and character so deep and layered, one can keep on seeing them and always get something new. If I could afford it, I would go back again before the present run finishes; indeed, if I weren't going to tea at a friend's place tonight I could happily go back and see Marianela Nuñez again. She was wonderful. As were both the guys, and the whole cast, and the whole damn' thing. I suppose there may come a day one day when I have seen enough "Manon"s, but that day is not now.

Lovers (MacMillan’s “Manon”)

When he first looks across at her

Shy and yet radiant, turning away,

The whole tragedy is there

Implicit in that moment.

My heart begins to break again

For these two foolish innocents

Who touch, delighting, unawares;

Too far apart to meet, though deep in love.

She is all happy brightness, full

Of certainty; accepts

This adoration as her only due,

Expects the world to be her slave.

He is the honest devotee

Who’ll never waver in his faith

Not even in the face of death.

His goddess is no constant star,

Though brilliant as a meteor.

He must burn with her as she falls.

Neither can see the other’s way;

The other path, untreadable.

The dancing steps must break apart,

And the heartbroken end ensues

Inevitable as every loss.

Hurtling into despair and death

All of us crying with their fall

All of our loves consumed with theirs.

Beauty and busy-ness

2011-11-07T04:42:00.000-08:00

I think the autumn this year is the most beautiful I can remember since I have been here at Kew. The first fall colours began to appear in September, but here we are in early November and everywhere I look I can still see spectacular leaves and berries. What is more, unless we have a high wind, it looks set to go on a bit longer yet, for some trees are still green and unaffected. Because of the weather has been mild and still for weeks, trees have held their colour. Because we haven’t yet had a hard frost, every species has turned slowly, at its own pace, rather than all going over at once. It has been a long, slow passage over from late summer into fall, and it has been as quiet and measured as the rising of the tide.

As I walk through the Gardens here at work I am surrounded by riches. Scarlet and crimson, brick red and Indian red, chestnut brown, golden brown, golden yellow, ochre, Naples yellow, gamboge; everywhere I look are these magnificent colours. Every leaf of Virginia creeper is marked with brilliant patterns, like Venetian millefiori glass; the berries of a crab apple swing over my head like gobstopper-sized jewels, and the Grass Garden is a tapestry of pale golden seed heads and soft, feathery brushstrokes of colour...

Actually I cannot imagine, brushstroke metaphors or no, how on earth one could paint this. It is staggeringly beautiful, but so much of the beauty is dependent on the immeasurably fine gradations of shade and the tiny details of structure. One couldn’t use swathes of colour without losing all that delicacy; every tree looks like a mosaic with each leaf an individual fleck of gold or ruby glass. Yet if one painted every leaf, compulsively, one would lose the sweep and scale of the view, and the result would look obsessive rather than beautiful.

Near the back door of the office I work in are a cedar that has been gilding the pavement with pale golden pollen; a camellia covered with bright early flowers in shell pink; a golden-orange maple, and one that looks as if it has been dipped in grapefruit marmalade. Moving through the Gardens I am blessed by colour. Dodging back indoors again as the rain starts, I can carry, held quiet within me, the beauty and delicacy of the autumn trees, and their grace. Not just the grace of physical beauty, but the spiritual grace of yielding to autumn and flowing with the cycle of the year. Trees are a model of grace.

Of course from a phenological point of view the cycle of the year is a little askew; here is a link to an article by Kew’s Mr Arboretum himself, Tony Kirkham (who knows a heck of a lot more about trees than me!) on the subject:

http://www.kew.org/news/kew-blogs/arboretum-team/a-very-strange-autumn.htm

It’s been a hectic weekend; all the usual jobs like grocery shopping, going to the bank, running the washing machine, gardening and so forth, plus a heart-rending performance of “Manon” at the Royal Ballet (Marianela Nuñez surpassing herself as a subtle, tragic, ravishingly beautiful Manon, Nehemiah Kish partnering her beautifully as a devoted Des Grieux [& on a more carnal note I see with satisfaction that he still seems to be resisting the fashion for chest-waxing!] and Thiago Soares a superb, powerful, charming Lescaut [I have never cried at Lescaut’s death before]); plus tea with my stepmum Jane, plus an absolutely spectacular firework display.

Now I’m back at work, and the whole office is being plagued with computer problems. Strangely the internet isn’t behaving too badly; but our office email system is really not doing well. Ah well, these things happen, in the modern office; but sometimes I long for the days of handwritten ledgers and paper correspondence. So much less liable to technical faults!

A disaster, a mess and an inconclusive result

2011-11-02T10:30:00.000-07:00

On Friday night I went to see Rameau's opera “Castor and Pollux” at the ENO. Fascinating music, beautifully played (far more exciting than the now-so-popular Handel – not a da capo aria in earshot), and a terrific cast, including the lovely Roderick Williams as an almost unbearably noble and heroic Pollux. It’s just such a pity that the actual production was so poor; spectacularly self-indulgent, incoherent, and farcically stupid.

I have seen some bad opera productions in my time, though I’ve also managed to avoid some simply by thinking “I don’t fancy that”. As I think I may have ranted before, I’m not against the basic idea of updating the time period or the conceptual basis of the production. When it works it is illuminating. A few years ago ENO had a “Pagliacci” in modern dress that was revelatory; their late-Soviet-era “Jenufa” likewise. I started off with this performance thinking it was acceptable; granted, modern dress is a bit silly in a story about classical gods and heroes, but one can argue that it is the culturally neutral clothing of our time, and so the obvious choice unless one is planning to use correct period costume.

But then the director had to start being clever. Only not logically clever, not coherently clever, not intellectually stimulating, not ground-breakingly visionary clever. Just a parade of tried and tested shock-tactic formulae, dredged up with a puerile lack of invention (and equally puerile bottom-fascination).

“Oh dear, this bit is a bit dull; I know, I‘ll have them all roll around on the floor all through it. This bit is more dramatic so I’ll add lots of irrelevant sexual imagery. Now I’ll have half the cast strip naked, and bring in several extras dressed as Grayson Perry’s alter-ego Claire. Masses of underpants. Dangling willies. Heaps of earth everywhere. People being buried alive in the heaps of earth. Lots of running round in circles. Deliberately inept and non-rhythmical dancing. And hey, how about a set that is hollow underneath and raised up, so that it functions like a huge sounding board; brilliant, now every time someone dances or runs around in circles the noise will drown out the music completely! – quick, quick, do some more running around!”

It wasn’t shocking, or challenging, or original. Actually the main thing it was was boring. Such a pity, when one has an opera that is so seldom done, and a cast of this calibre.

Saturday I tried to do some pre-emptive Christmas present shopping, and couldn’t find anything I was looking for, and got very tired and frustrated. It began to feel like the day when nothing would go my way. I hate that feeling, when life seems to crumble into an annoying mess, and one can salvage nothing from the wreckage.

Sunday I gave myself backache again planting bulbs and transplanting perennials.

Yesterday after work I went for my latest ultrasound exam, and it was inconclusive. My uterus is showing its age, but I don’t have any ovarian cysts at the moment. Since up until then everything was indicating that I did, I’m rather foxed. But I may have fibroids instead.

Oh well, you win some and you lose some. At least now know that if I’m ever offered an evening appointment for an ultrasound, rather than a daytime one, I should grab it. The last time I had a scan I was kept waiting for over an hour, no fun when you have a full bladder. This time there was only one person ahead of me. I was home and eating my reheated pie by 8.30. Evening clinics rock!

The incomprehensible Muse...

2011-10-26T05:12:00.000-07:00

I just don't get my Muse. She settles down for months to meditate on her navel and say "Not now dear" if I try to do anything creative, and then suddenly, completely out of the blue, starts shouting at me; "Get up off your lazy a&&e, fat girl! Get with it! - we've got work to do!" Two things seem to have galvanised her this time. One was the fact that in my frustration at an unfinished story that simply wouldn't come, I had set out to draft a synopsis, to try and work out if the problem lay with some unresolved narrative issues I hadn't faced up to. This has been a revelatory exercise in the past, so was well worth a try - but on this occasion it simply served to show me I really did know exactly where this story was going. The second thing seems to have been the jolt of adrenaline I got from walking into William Houston outside the health food shop.

I have been writing hard for the last two evenings, and cannot wait to get home and get on with some more. I am even slightly wishing I wasn't going out tomorrow and Friday evenings, because I can't take the laptop and will have to make do with mere paper if I am to write while I'm sitting on the tube, and during the interval...

It is exhilarating when the creative fire is flowing like this. But I do sometimes wish I could control the Muse a bit more. Anyway, I owe Mr Houston a happy thank you, since his appearance on the scene seems to have given her a kick up the backside, just when I was starting to worry she had settled into hibernation.

Good omens

2011-10-24T05:59:00.000-07:00

There have been a few times in my life when I have felt as though I was being swept up in a storm of weird coincidences. Some of them were so bizarre that I have only told them to a select few people - those who I trust not to take the mickey out of me. But each time this has happened, it has seemed to bring me luck. I tend to think of it as the universe nudging me; as if the Almighty, whatever you conceive Him/Her/It to be, has leaned down and given the air around me a stir, so that amazing things suddenly swirl into my ken. So nowadays if it happens I tend to think it is a good omen; heaven is on my side, and if I run with this energy and let it galvanise me, catch Kairos by his forelock and go with him, it will bring me luck.

This weekend I did some grocery shopping, bought a bundle of wallflowers for the front garden, and then took another deep breath and went and sent the sample chapters of "Gabriel Yeats" off to another agent. The last items on my list of jobs were pumpkin seeds, linseeds, green tea and cashew nuts, so I then headed to my local health food store, As Nature Intended. As I turned into the door, a tall-ish man came hurrying out carrying a bag; I sprang out of his way politely, and he caught my eye and gave me a quick grin as he passed. And I nearly fell flat on my face with shock; because it was William Houston, the brilliant actor I would love to see playing my protagonist, Simon Cenarth, if "Gabriel Yeats" were ever to be filmed. I feel all fluttery inside again, just remembering. Be still my beating heart.

I checked my shopping list again, to give myself time to close my mouth and straighten my face out, and then went on into the shop. I fought off the urge to follow him instead and see where he went - I'm rather proud of my self-control, since I would have loved to know what he was doing in my neck of the woods!

When I'd got home, and put away my shopping, and put the wallflowers plants in a bucket of water until I could get to planting them, I was still shaking inside. I made myself a cup of Yogi Teas "Frauentee", which I find very calming. It was the last bag in the box (bother). I don't know if you ever use Yogi Teas, but every tea bag has a little motto on it, rather like fortune cookie mottos (only more Buddhist). My tea bag motto on Saturday afternoon was "Remember that the other person is yourself".

Of course, as I was still fizzing with excitement from seeing The Man Who Should Play Simon, there was only one "other person" in my mind. And I thought "How perfect!". Because in the story, Simon is my alter ego; so the "other person" could indeed be said to be my self... Please, please, lord, let it be a good omen.

The agents I've just sent "Gabriel Yeats" to are the fifth lot on the list. They probably should have been the first, since they're quite a prestigious firm. I didn't initially think there was any point in my approaching them at all. But then I discovered they represent several authors I really admire, and I thought "The heck with it, why am I acting humble and 'oh-no, not-little-me"~ish about this?". So I have given it a go with the Prestigious Firm. Meeting Mr Houston was an enormous shock, but it has given me a real boost. I have faith again that one day this will come together; I will get published, I will be read. It can happen. If I just can walk into Will Houston in a shop, just half an hour after posting GY, then anything can happen. I am in God's hands, but it is a safe place to be.

On Sunday I planted the wallflowers, hand-washed a load of clothes, had a lovely bike ride (not going anywhere, just randomly circling local streets in the autumn sunshine), watered the garden, cooked a vegetable lasagne, and patched a pair of trousers. A constructive weekend altogether.

ENO "Figaro"

2011-10-20T09:29:00.000-07:00

According to my opera-going friend Alan, “The Marriage of Figaro” is the greatest opera ever written. I’m usually a bit frustrated by sweeping pronouncements like this, but with “Figaro”, I can kind of see where he’s coming from. It’s one of those rare works of art of such subtlety and nuance as to be almost limitless in possibility. Like “Twelfth Night”, you can play it for laughs or for tears, with detachment or love, with tradition or with a radical overhaul. Or you can make a bit of a muddle-up of all of those and hope it comes off. The current ENO production, which I saw last night, takes this approach and, as (in my opinion) usually happens with muddled productions, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

Judging from this example, Fiona Shaw’s biggest strength as an opera director is that she directs the singers very well as actors. She has got some excellent acting out of them, with detailed, naturalistic, nuanced performances all round. I am highly in favour of this approach! The majority of opera singers can act, after all (although some are certainly far better than others, and oddly some of the world’s most famous ones can’t), and it pays to focus on the acting and interpretation of the characters. Unfortunately, the rest of the production, in the sense of the underlying concepts and directorial ideas, didn’t really work. It was doubly a pity given the strength of the individual performers and the scintillating playing from the orchestra. They were all so good, and I wanted desperately to love this production, but although none of the weaknesses were appalling, opera-ruining things, they were bad enough to irritate and confuse me, and they did detract from the production’s strengths.

I don’t mind modern dress productions, or odd-dress productions; I don’t mind contemporary relevance and contemporary references; I don’t mind things being different, non-traditional, unconventional, quirky, I don’t mind over-riding directorial concepts, no matter how weird or confrontational; all of these things are fine provided they work. When they work – as with the ENO “Parsifal” I saw in the winter – they justify their existence a hundred-fold. But when they don’t work, they just detract. One of the best ways to make sure they don’t work is to be hesitant about them, and another is to be too busy with them. This “Figaro” manages to be both.

The costumes start in period, but occasionally vary towards modern dress – only half-heartedly, with no discernible rationale and no coherence. Props likewise – mostly these were in period, but the odd modern item (not all from the same period of “modern”) was thrown in, for no apparent reason. New media, back projections and so forth can be immensely effective when they are used with confidence and panache; but not if, as here, they seem to have been shoved in just for fun or to cover patches when the director wasn’t sure what to do. And constant frantic busyness onstage is usually a sign that the director doesn’t really have faith in the work itself or in whether what they and their cast are doing with it is interesting enough on its own. This was a very busy stage; literally. Not only did the cast have to scurry from room to room endlessly, but the set itself scurried, going round and round almost ceaselessly on the revolve.

However, despite the twirling stage and the oddly fudged stabs at doing a bit of Regietheater (I think that’s the right word but I may have spelled it wrong!), this was a very enjoyable evening. The characters came over as real people living real lives, not artificial people in a staged production. Their relationships and their responses to one another were real and credible, their movements were natural, recitatives were shaped subtly to sound like fresh thoughts and conversations and not like “I have to say this just-so and on-the-beat”. Figaro wasn’t the usual uncomplicated jolly chap but an intelligent, angry, politically-awakened man, powerfully aware that in everything that really matters he is the superior of the man he has to defer to; the Count was a credibly neurotic addict, totally unaware of how pathetic he makes himself look as his libido rules him; the Countess was a good deal more troubled, and more stroppy, than the saccharine saint we generally get.

Roland Wood’s Count looks as if he might be Hugh Bonneville’s younger brother (which is actually slightly unnerving) and Kate Valentine’s Countess looks like Julianne Moore, but I wasn’t left thinking “What a pity they can’t act as well as HB and JM” (& I bet neither actor can sing like them!). Both are excellent. I loved Devon Guthrie’s curly-topped, warm-voiced Susanna, Timothy Robinson's Don Basilio is luxury casting indeed in such a small part, and Kathryn Rudge’s Cherubino is also good. Rudge looks about fifteen and splendidly captures the physical gaucheness of adolescence, seemingly not quite in control of her limbs yet; she reminded me vividly, despite being a good a foot shorter than him, of my younger brother at that age. The Count’s aggression towards Cherubino, his desire to victimise and crush a potential competitor before he can spread his adult wings, was pointed up strongly in moments of painfully violent bullying.

The best thing in the whole evening, though, was the marvelous Figaro of Iain Paterson. I’ve become a huge fan of this big rangy Scotsman over the last few years. He is amazingly versatile, his voice is both lustrously beautiful and absolutely huge, and he is one of the best actors on the British operatic stage at the moment. I suppose it comes of having been brought up on the old Erich Kleiber recording with Cesare Siepi (& a gobsmacking cast altogether), but I do love a Figaro who inclines towards the bass end of things. Patterson has an amazing stage presence as well, and this was some seriously sexy singing. He also has very good diction; not a syllable got lost from start to finish (& I was sitting fairly high-up in the gods, so not in the optimum position for catching everything). Roland Wood has a lovely voice, too, but if I’m honest most of the time he could have been singing in Dutch for all I could tell; not so with the ginger giant from Glasgow. I'd love to hear Mr Paterson singing Figaro opposite Favourite Baritone as the Count; now that would be a confrontation worth seeing.

I’ve previously seen Mr Paterson at ENO as a searingly tragic Amfortas, easily holding his own against John Tomlinson and Stuart Skelton (& believe me, this takes some doing), as a gorgeously nasty Mephistophiles, easily the best thing in a dodgy “Faust” last year, and first of all as a powerful Amonasro, dazzling me with his mighty singing even as as he rose above a cringe-making costume and fuzzy-wuzzy wig. All I want to say to him now is “Bring it on!” Anything he can do, I want to see. The man is terrific.

Nostalgia

2011-10-19T06:24:00.000-07:00

I've just been uploading some of my holiday photographs from Thassos onto Facebook. Gasp! Good grief, Imogen does something technical using a computer! Very nostalgic looking at them again.The blue skies, the turquoise sea, coffee on the beach; the deserted village in the mountains, the dramatic silhouette of the island of Samothrakí in the distance; olive trees and pines, flowers, beaches, and mountains shining in the sun...

The highest peak on Thassos, Mt Ipsarion, is slightly higher than Snowdon. Magic.

Absolutely beautiful...

2011-10-14T06:15:00.000-07:00

Today is the sort of day that makes autumn feel close to paradise. The sky is clear, the air is crisp. As you walk along, the sun warms one side of your face, and the brisk air cools the other. Rich brown and golden leaves are lying in drifts around the Gardens, late autumn plants like asters are blazing with colour and the Rose Garden is having a glorious late flush of flowers. As I walked down to the Palm House with three colleagues, a cloud of long-tailed tits flew through the trees above us, twittering to one another. I work in heaven, I think.

We were on our way to be photographed for a marketing publicity shot; it needed a group of "interested visitors" and we had been roped in. We spent about twenty minutes pretending to be given a guided tour by the Keeper of the Palm House. As he is a mine of knowledge, of course we all started asking him questions, and fairly soon it was bordering on a real guided tour; only with a photographer sitting on the floor at our feet, saying things like "Can you point a bit more, please?" I love the Palm House,anyway, even without the chance to quiz someone who knows about every plant in it. I was really sorry when the photo shoot ended.

Of course, I may feel differently when I see the final pictures. I'll probably have my mouth open in most of them. But still, it was a nice mad excuse to get out of the office for a while, and the Gardens are looking absolutely stunning at the moment.

Stale, flat and unprofitable

2011-10-04T09:12:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to explain why I haven't written for a while. I had only been back from Greece for a week when I went down with a rather nasty gastric bug which caused me to vomit a lot and left me with very uncomfortable crampy diarrhoea for several days afterwards. I haven't felt so utterly, entirely ghastly since I had swine 'flu two years ago.

I had gone down to my mum's for the weekend to look at holiday photos, have a nice lunch out, perhaps go to the coast on Sunday; that was the plan. Then Saturday morning I started throwing up, and it was downhill all the way after that... Poor Mum had to nurse me instead of having a nice relaxing weekend with my interesting company. I lay in bed and slept when I wasn't in the bathroom, and was about as poor a house-guest as one can be. I seem to have shaken that actual bug off now, but am still feeling very washed out, over a week later.

Trying to be positive; get on with work, get some early nights, think about making another submission to another literary agent, think about blanching and freezing french beans (my only decent harvest this year has been a bumper bean crop - good thing I love beans), think about the beauties of autumn with its variadated skies and dancing leaves...

But I'd really rather like just to go home and sleep.

Am I publishable?

2011-09-22T07:37:00.000-07:00

Recently a friend suggested to me that instead of stressing myself with the long slog of trying to find an agent, I should self-publish online. It was a useful suggestion, in so far as it helped me to clarify why I don't want to do that. This may sound odd, because goodness knows I don't write with any expectation of making my fortune, and fame isn't much of a stimulus to me either. I write for love; the love of writing, the love of story-telling, and the love of words, and so on the surface the suggestion I should self-publish electronically was not unreasonable.

But it is the second of those three loves that gives me the clue to my answer. I am a story-teller first and foremost (or at least, I think I am! - but that's another question...). I don't mind if I have to have a "day job" for the rest of my life, I'm not in this for the money. But if my writing is published, I want it to be read. I want it to be available to anyone who might enjoy it - and I mean available in a genuine rather than a superficial sense; I want people who enjoy reading to be able to find it, obtain it and read it, through straightforward and familiar routes and normal outlets, and via channels where there is a certain guarantee of quality. At the moment, that still means conventional publishing and conventional bookshops, and the online equivalents such as e-book sales as offered by conventional publishers.

In twenty years' time it may be different, but at the moment, as I see it, that's the state of affairs. Indeed, I find it hard to imagine it changing significantly for a long time, if ever. I don't mean that I think electronic publishing generally is going nowhere - that obviously isn't the case. But online self-published material comes without the safety net (from the readers' PoV) of having received an objective assessment; anyone can stick their writing online, and if it's no good (or even absolutely NBG) that is no impediment to them. At the moment, I can't see how a framework can ever develop, within the field of online self-publishing as a whole, for guaranteeing the quality of the writing. Perhaps eventually there will come to be recognised "better" online self-publishing outlets, alongside places where anything at all can be issued. Yet any system administered by the writers themselves has many possible problems and weaknesses.

In conventional publishing that framework for assessment already exists, and has done for years. It may be flawed in places (is any system devised by and administered by people truly flawless?) but it's there and by and large it works.

So if I want to be read, by more than a handful of people, I need to be published, and so I am left with the slog.

Dear XXXX, I enclose the synopsis and sample chapters of my novel blah for your kind attention... Followed by a three month wait (or longer) to get another polite "No". And this is when I find I am asking myself again if maybe I am unpublishable. I simply don't know if what I write is sellable. I think it's readable (I know I would, but still, trying hard to be unbiased, I think it is). But is it commercially viable? Because that remains the bottom line for the conventional publishing industy. It was in the nineteen-fifties, when my mother worked at the Bodley Head, and it still is now. Will I ever get anywhere, or am I wasting my (& everyone else's) time? My lack of self-confidence drags me down into another patch of mild, insidious depression at the thought. And I give another sigh and then I plug on, because in the end there is nothing else I can do.

Oh England, my England...

2011-09-20T05:52:00.000-07:00

How grey and damp it feels here, how cold, how flat.

The temperature on Thassos was about 33 degrees C, almost fifteen degrees hotter than here, and the humidity was about half this. The sky was huge and blue and the sea like sapphire (albeit rather rough at first - I was semi-surfing rather than swimming for a couple of days). My studio had a view across olive groves to the sea, one way, and across olive groves to the mountains in the other direction. At night, the full moon shone on the mountainside like fairy dust, and fireflies hung in the trees. Swifts and swallows, which had left the UK a couple of weeks ago, swooped over the valley at morning and dusk, and the terracotta roof tiles housed a cheerful sparrow colony.

I ate too much, and probably had too many cold beers. I swam (or hurled myself about in the breakers) every day. I did some rather bad watercolours, and read a nice fat fantasy novel, and did a bit of walking and a lot of sitting looking at the view. I took a tour into the mountains by jeep, bouncing along unsurfaced tracks to a deserted village, a beautiful country church with a fifteenth century painted iconostasis, a hidden mountain lake, spectacular stands of old-growth forest full of birds and wildflowers and with resin-perfumed air, and finally right to the very top of the tallest mountain, Ipsario - which is slightly higher than Mt. Snowdon.

England feels so grey, so dark, so damp and cold in comparison. London seems all grey concrete and grey faces, yellow brick and yellowing leaves. Greece is blue and white and brilliant gold and clear green. Greece is light itself, and England is dimness and the approach of winter.

Last night I had booked a ticket for the first night of a new dance adaptation of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis". I had a feeling I might have post-holiday blues (and boy was I right!). It was good to remind myself, with supper at Patisserie Valerie and a trip to the theatre, that after all it is not the end of the world to have had to come home. I think there are probably very few minor blues that would not be eased at least a little by eggs benedict and buttered spinach, fresh-pressed orange juice, tarte aux framboises and a hot chocolate, followed by Edward Watson being a giant beetle. Edward Watson coated in treacle, what's more.

But oh, how dark and damp it is in my own country. A part of my heart belongs in Hellas, and cannot credit it has to live here...

Holiday!

2011-09-09T08:59:00.000-07:00

On Sunday morning I’m flying out to Greece for a week; after eight years, I’m finally going back to the lovely northern Aegean island of Thassos. I would have preferred, truth to tell, not to fly this Sunday, as I imagine that airport security will be even more hectic than usual on September the 11^th. But as things worked out, that’s the day the holiday begins. Charter flights to Thassos are on Sundays; end of story.

To be precise, it’s a charter flight to Alexander the Great Airport, which is on the mainland at Kavala. From the airport there’s about a thirty minute journey to the small port of Keramotí. From Keramotí, opposite Thassos, another thirty minutes by ferry takes one to Limenas, the main town of the island. From there, about another thirty minutes takes one to where I am staying, the resort of Chrisi Amoudiá, aka Golden Beach. The name says it all, really; Chrisi Amoudiá has one of the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever seen. I tried to upload a picture, but blogger has come over all queer and won't let me. Never mind...

In forty-eight hours I’ll be there - what a blissful thought. I will have stood at the bow of the ferry, watching the silhouette of the island approaching; the little white and terracotta town, the green hills behind, the central mountains soaring above. I will have walked down onto the white marble quay, and been put in a coach and driven up across the nearest ridge of hills, and have been deposited at my studio. I will have discovered what the view from my window is like, the view I will live with for the next week. I will have sorted out how far it is to the nearest minimarket, to the nearest cafés and tavernas. And I will have walked down to the beach, and swum in the warm, blue Aegean Sea.

See you all when I get back!

Mists and mellow fruitfulness...

2011-09-08T06:34:00.000-07:00

Or not-so-fruitful-ness, as the case may be... It is quite misty today, and there are distinct signs of autumn foliage appearing, but fruitful is one thing this year ain't.

So far this summer I've had a good crop of beans, some rather wambly Swiss chard, and about eight tomatoes from the garden. Of the eleven tomato vines I planted, two succumbed to blight a couple of weeks ago without ever producing a single fruit, three more now appear to be going down with blight, with fruits at no more than pinhead-size, four are producing a small number of very green, undersized fruits that by the looks of them ought to be swelling into big Marmande types (but aren't, because of the weather), and two are bearing, albeit only modestly.

The two that are bearing are producing a bland, golf-ball-sized tomato like something from a bad supermarket. I bought the plants from someone at work who thought they were a yellow cherry tom; sorry, Class 47 Student, wrong tom.

The four that are attempting to make tomatoes were a gift from The Crazy Intern; she wasn't sure what variety they were, as she'd had a label-mix-up at the seed sowing stage. Hi, TCI - by the looks of it they're a slow and deliberate cousin of Marmande. I doubt if they'll produce anything before October, though.

The ones that died, and their sibs that are possibly also dying, are in theory Sweet Millions, a favourite of mine, but they look nothing like it. SM usually makes a thick vine that splits into two or more stems very early on, has rather sparse foliage, and produces prolifically, with long racemes of forty or more delicious, scarlet cherry toms per raceme. What I have got are lanky, sickly, one-stemmed vines with big, potato-like foliage and a few tiny clusters of flowers, growing in bunches rather than SM's usual slender, necklace-like racemes. I'm not sure I would want to eat the fruits even if they did produce any, they look so odd.

So I am not a happy veg gardener this autumn. And as I'm going away for a week from Sunday, I'm going to scrap the sick vines altogether before I go, in the hope of salvaging something from the others when I get back. There may not even be enough to make green tomato chutney...

Still, Jane gave me a huge bag of apples from her garden, and they are superb. If nothing else, it seems to be an apple year.

A shaggy dog memory

2011-09-06T08:45:00.000-07:00

In my lunch break I was looking for a picture of a cute dog to send to someone, and I found this handsome fellow. Isn’t this a beauty? It’s a breed called a Schapendoes, originally a sheep-dog from the Netherlands.

We had a lovely dog when I was a kid; he was a mongrel, but he was very like this breed, so much so that the picture above gives me a lump in the throat. It could almost be Goodie. I have such happy memories of Goodie...

Goodie was half Welsh Border Collie, half unknown. He stood a bit less than two feet high at the shoulder, and had a long, plumy tail and a thick coat in a mixture of white, blue-black and brown, in blotches. In a snowy field he was perfectly camouflaged. He had a droopy moustache, like a Schnauzer, a stocky body and “feathers” on his legs, like a Springer Spaniel, and the copious facial hair of an Old English Sheepdog. Up through that thick hair a pair of melting brown eyes would stare up at you; the great plumed tail would begin to thump the instant he knew he had your attention, and if you said “Double you, ay, ell kay” he would begin to bound around the room with excitement, having long ago learned to associate the syllables with their meaning.

He was a very bright dog, though he proved completely untrainable. When he lost my mother once on an evening stroll, he went and sat outside the corner shop, by the dog chains; mum had been carrying her shopping basket, he knew that meant she was going to the shop as well, so he was being pretty logical. Since mum had by then come home in hysterics wailing “I’ve lost the dog, he ran off!” it didn’t go quite as planned, but within ten minutes Mr Searle the grocer had rung to say “Mrs Dent, I’ve got your Goodie here, outside the shop waiting for you,” so it worked in the end.

There was something missing, though. When he was about two we discovered he was blind in one eye, and this must have affected him, yet one was only aware of it occasionally. The most obvious way his partial blindness manifested was in his inability to judge distances, and that had one very odd side effect. In the winter, if Goodie stood near the gas fire, he could only judge how close he was if it was on his good-eye side. He could be standing with his rump almost literally in the fire, but his coat was so thick that he didn’t feel the heat. There he would be, tail swaying amiably against the safety bars, with a column of smoke rising. The smell of burnt dog would fill the room, and a few moments later he would suddenly notice. By spring each year his rear was patterned with scorch marks.

I was eight when Goodie came to live with us - a gangly one-year-old, not really an adult dog but not quite a puppy anymore - and twenty three when we lost him. Sixteen is a good age for a medium-sized dog, and he had had a full life. In his last years, arthritic and white-muzzled, he could still terrify unexpected visitors with his huge, deep-chested bark and habit of rearing up in excitement. People were so taken aback by the noise and the obvious effort it cost one of us to restrain him, they seldom noticed the madly wagging tail at the other end.
He had slept at the foot of the stairs for sixteen years, heaving himself out of the way with a grumble if someone had to go down. Even now, if I’m staying at my mum’s, it can sometimes feel odd not to find my foot landing on fluffy dog in the middle of the night.

Tired again, Friday again...

2011-09-02T05:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got another rejection note. This one was not for GY but for "Ramundi's sisters" - its first. It was courteous, even friendly, and a very quick response, all of which I appreciate, but the agent in question said the writing didn't grab her imagination. For the first time, a rejection note left me feeling really, really flat.

Up until now I've been rather proud of how well I was taking the prolonged application process and all the rejections. I suppose that was bound to slip, at some point. Now a wave of depression arrives, and I find myself thinking "Maybe I'm unpublishable" and feeling altogether really low-spirited. Maybe I am unpublishable. I think my writing is good; but then, a large number of staggeringly untalented people think that about their own writing, so maybe I am simply as delusional as them. Maybe I am unpublishable despite being a competent writer, simply because what I produce is completely uncommercial. Maybe I am wasting my time. Maybe I should just hide under a stone; go in the garden and eat worms, as my grandfather used to say...

Last night I was at the Prom given by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Interesting experience... I never thought I'd see a Prom turned into a political demonstration. Naive of me, I suppose.

It was certainly naive of me not to think about the political connotations when I booked, and invited several other people; I had my cultural blinkers on, and was simply thinking "That's a fun programme, and Gil Shaham is playing; I love Gil Shaham, ergo I must go to this." It literally never crossed my mind that there might be trouble (I guess I share my Dad's attitude that "Musik ist eine heilige kunst").

There were a couple of small "Free Palestine" and "Support Israel no-matter-what" demos outside the Royal Albert Hall when I arrived, but they were both being very civilised; making their point in a calm way without any aggressive behaviour, simply reminding everyone coming in that there are complex issues involved and people who feel strongly about them. But then first of all someone handing out leaflets began to abuse my stepmum Jane after she told them she's a Quaker - I know people get very hot-headed when they are passionate about a cause, but telling someone they cannot call themselves a Christian and will be damned and spat upon by God because they disagree with you is out of line.

Then, when we got inside, we found that a good number of people in the hall had bought tickets solely in order to disrupt the performance as much as possible, seemingly with at least partly the intent of causing not only the maximum noise and interruption but also the maximum of provocation to the remainder of the audience. As Maestro Zubin Mehta readied himself to conduct each piece, people would stand up around the auditorium, and shout and carry on, condemning Israel and chanting "Free Palestine!". As each protester was escorted out (or carried out, in a couple of cases) another one would stand up somewhere else. It was a well-planned demo, I must say that for it; but a pain in the neck nonetheless.

By the time of the (I think) seventh outburst, from a guy quite near where we were sitting, the level of ill-feeling against the protests had reached the point where another member of the audience stood up and began pushing the protester down into his seat with considerable force - he was subsequently ejected alongside the protester, whereupon other members of his party began to make their own protests, the gist of which was that he had been justified, and two of them were then asked to leave as well. The bulk of the audience were just muttering and booing at yet another disturbance, and began loudly shushing both the protesters and those who were shouting at them to shut up.

I doubt if more than a handful of the audience will have felt anything other than extremely angry with the cause of a free Palestine by the end. And it may be cynical of me, but I doubt very much if the irony will have registered with most of the angry people around me, that in having our normal life disrupted aggressively by strangers for no reason except their hostility towards the fact we were there, we were in fact experiencing a tiny, TINY taste of what it is like to live under an aggressive occupation.

It is a pity, though, since this was exactly the kind of situation where a positive impression could have been made on people who hadn't been really thinking about the issues. Instead the impression most of them will have come away with was of a bunch of loudmouths being arsey. Presumably the opportunity for wide publicity at minimal cost of effort and time over-rides the seriously counterproductive effect on the actual audience on the night.

I am saddened by the cynicism of attacking a soft target like the Proms, rather than the people who actually make the decisions. Governments have legal representatives on foreign soil; their embasssies. Outside an embassy is the proper place for a demo against the government of the country in question. Vide the group outside the Zimbabwean embassy in the Strand, patiently making their point, day after day. But that demo will be a long, hard slog, possibly requiring years of work to really get the publicity mill rolling... Whereas this one was loud, quick and dramatic, easily staged, and didn't result in anyone getting hurt or arrested, and I learned this morning that it achieved its goal of getting the BBC outside broadcast taken off-air partway through.

The orchestra, who I fear must be pretty hardened to this sort of thing when they play abroad, were consummately professional and played on throughout, extremely well. Gil Shaham was of course absolutely wonderful. And even in such strange circumstances, it was still good to see Jane, and The Crazy Intern, and TCI's nice fella G., and The Ginger Scotsman. And we had some fabulous Booja-Booja raspberry truffles at the interval. Interesting, weird evening.

After the four days...

2011-09-01T09:08:00.000-07:00

It’s hard sometimes coming back to work after a Bank Holiday weekend. I took an extra day off this time, which gave me four days to flop. The problem is that that’s enough time to begin to relax, but not really to recharge; one needs a few days to get right down the hill, as it were, before one can begin to come up again. So I came back to London yesterday thoroughly relaxed but not much recouped.

The gynae problems took advantage of my relaxing to come on again, and I ended up having to talk to my mother about them before I had planned to (I’ve learned over the years that presenting Mum with a problem without also having a solution in place is simply inviting her to worry, and then work herself into a state of misery trying to find a solution and force one to implement it). I think when my GP gets to the bottom of it (pun not intended, sorry!) the issue is probably going to come down to my age and my hormones; but as I’d feared, Mum is now convincing herself that it’s going to be cancer or coronary heart disease or some other horror. I’ve provided various samples to my doctor and have another appointment next week, at which I fully expect to be told that A) I have had a bacterial infection and B) my oestrogen levels are down. We’ll see, anyway.

It was still good to chill out at Mum’s and do very little.

My brother Steve collected me from work on Friday evening, in the middle of a dramatic thunderstorm. Strangely, despite the atrocious weather and the fact it was the eve of a bank holiday weekend, we had a very smooth easy drive down to Kent. This time last year, trying to do the same journey, the traffic heading south through Richmond and Kingston was barely crawling; after leaving Kew by 5.15 we found ourselves just outside Banstead at about 9.00pm, and parked up for a while in the large Asda supermarket there to get a sandwich and a drink, use the loo, and stretch our legs, before embarking on another two hours drive to Canterbury. Kew to Banstead, about fifteen miles, had taken us over 3 ½ hours - we could have walked it quicker. So this year we set off with a certain frisson of dread, and the speed and ease of the journey was all the more wonderful for it.

Saturday – what did we all do on Saturday? Lie in, lazy breakfast, bit of light gardening, lazy lunch, walk by the sea, tea and cake, large G&T, supper with a bottle of wine. Sunday? The same, with a giant crossword thrown in. Monday, which was Mum’s birthday, same again, only with Stephen and me doing all the cooking. And Tuesday?- still more laziness and another walk by the sea, and for me another G&T (Steve was driving). Then the drive back to London, which again went off smoothly and in excellent time.

Now I’m back at work, and the weather is okay, and I was able to spend my lunch break today sitting in the sun eating rice cakes and melitzanosalata among the magnificent semi-hardy tropical flowers of the Duke’s Garden. The taste of melitzanosalata takes me back with a lovely sensual swoop of memory to Greece, and reminds me that in ten days I’ll be flying out to Thassos for a week. The weather in Kavala (nearest weather station the BBC link up with) at the moment is hot and dry – averaging 28 degrees with about 30% humidity and clear skies. The place I’m staying is five minutes’ walk from the magnificent beach of Chrisi Amoudia. I will swim and read and paint watercolours, and sit at beachside cafés, and relax again… for a whole week… and I can hardly wait.

Four days...

2011-08-26T05:42:00.000-07:00

It's a public holiday on Monday, and I've booked Tuesday off as annual leave, so I am about to have four days off. A little holiday. Thank goodness.

I am very tired and rather washed out, partly from work being busy and partly from some ongoing gynae problems that the doctor hasn't made much headway on yet. I'm taking extra vitamins and iron, watching my diet more carefully than usual, haven't drunk any alcohol in about the last ten days, have been taking probiotics daily, and am getting to bed by 10.30 every night. I really want the problems either to stop, or at least to be explained. I'd like to get through the tests and urine-samples and we'll-monitor-things-for-a-while stage, and just know what I'm dealing with. If I'm going to end up on HRT, then okay, so be it, I'm happy to give it a try; but please, can't we cut to the chase?

Others seem to be okay; K has a new kitten, Miss Robyn has a new house, The Geek is getting ready to finish her PhD research, Baby Bro's most recent operation seems to have been highly successful and has restored him to his previous maddeningly buoyant self... This is all good; the world is not devoid of good. But as for me, I'm stale, flat and unprofitable.

It's just one of those things. Roll on the four day weekend...

When I am troubled...

2011-08-24T09:21:00.000-07:00

When I am troubled I like to walk. Whether it is ten minutes stroll out in the Gardens in my lunch break or forty minutes tramp going homewards, it clears my head and lets me breathe. I feel my shoulders relax and my head go up, my legs seem to stretch out as I move forward, and suddenly I find I can reflect calmly on things that stress me; work falls into perspective, plot problems sort themselves out, and poems begin to stir, and I see colours that make me want to grab a brush and paint for hours. Solvitur ambulando, as someone said, back in the days when they spoke Latin rather than scratching their heads over it - I think it was one of the Church Fathers. He was right, anyway. It will be sorted out by walking.

Today I think I need to walk home; not just for the head-space it gives me, but also because a colleague brought in and distributed some fabulously rich home-made Indian sweets this afternoon. Gajjar Khe Halva, yum; but goodness knows what the calorific value of two slices was.

Yesterday it poured for a lot of the day. My brief walk at lunch was one of pungent wet smells and cold air, my umbrella catching on things, branches reaching under it to slap my face. Today it has turned hot and sunny again and my lunchtime stroll was full of flowers and birds chirruping, and dry, resiny late-summer scents. Most of the time I love the constant contrasts of the British climate, but sometimes I am baffled by them. There must have been a good ten degrees temperature difference between yesterday and today; and the forecast is for another chilly wet day tomorrow…

Off home now to eat warmed up lentil moussaka and get on with the next fairy tale. I don’t know what it says about me, that I’m writing fairy tales at my age. But they are what comes, and I go with it.

Reflecting on what reduces a person...

2011-08-12T08:54:00.000-07:00

It’s been an odd week. The news has continued to be shocking and depressing in turns – and of course the knee-jerk tone of some of the coverage makes it more depressing straightaway. The rioters and looters have behaved like yobs, yes – but no-one is born a yob. The question of the reactions to the rioting is rapidly becoming one of those subjects where I pipe down fairly quickly, though. There isn’t much point in trying to discuss it with people who have already made their minds up. I’ve heard a lot of folk saying “They’re animals!” and then refusing to think any further about it.

I’ve been towards the poorer end of society, financially speaking, for several chunks of my life (not least, most of my childhood). I’ve been filled with rage at times, at my situation and at the hoops I was expected to jump through, the humiliations I was expected to endure, and so on. I knew how to control the anger, but I can see how someone who couldn’t control it and had no outlet for it could just blow up. Does the fact that when I’ve been pushed around and patronised I’ve kept my cool and told myself things would get better, mean I’m entitled to judge those who cannot keep their tempers in the heat of the moment, in the middle of a yelling mob? It’s easy to judge, after all, and hard to empathise with criminals.

As recently as ten years ago I can remember being almost overwhelmed by anger and frustration as I tried to get through the convoluted, dehumanising, crushingly stupid process involved in getting my council tax reduced while I was out of work. It's a sad memory. At the next counter along, a young couple had been reduced to screaming abuse by the injustice and illogicality of the system they were meant to follow, and the unhelpfulness of the person dealing with them. I remember thinking “There but for the grace of god…” as I listened to them. I knew that I had all the benefits of intelligence, education, a fairly mature and optimistic outlook, a sense of humour and a lot of patience, and I was still having to fight not to lose my temper. They, with none of those advantages, were losing theirs spectacularly. The young man ended up being told that he would be expelled from the building by security if he didn’t calm down. I listened and watched, and I thought “If I wasn’t equipped, in myself, to handle this situation, and all the other cr*p that life is dumping on me at the moment, it could have been me getting that warning”. It was salutary. No-one is born a yob; people get reduced to it. And those who are least well equipped to cope with trouble are the most easily reduced by it.

Meanwhile, I’ve been wrestling again with my pitch letter for “R’s sisters”, with the help of some very useful feedback from a friend. I suddenly realised there was one other revision I needed to make in the text, too, so I’ve been wrestling with that as well. And I’ve been carrying on with the long-short-story fairy tale. I’m very near the end of that, on to the penultimate scene, and wondering what the end will be. I know that end is a version of “they all lived happily ever after” (this is me, after all!), but that isn’t the tone of the story at all, even if it’s what the message boils down to. I’m rather happy with it, though, and will start typing it up as soon as it’s finished. It’s the third alternative fairy tale I’ve done. Perhaps I should collect them together?

Mad activity everywhere - sadly mad in several senses...

2011-08-10T09:20:00.000-07:00

Well, it's all been happening (except when it hasn't) over the last few days. I had a great trip to a Prom that was marred only by having The Smelliest Man in London sitting beside me. I cleaned the whole house. I made personalised muesli and a great curry. I went to a super exhibition of Toulouse-Lautrec lithographs at the Courtauld Gallery. It was a good weekend.

Then Sunday and Monday, great swathes of London rioted, and burned and looted one another, including in an area barely two streets from where I used to live. Two streets away from where I currently live, everyone got boarded up and braced for trouble, only for there to be none. But what an appalling business it all was. I'm not going to try and make any profound statements; I'm totally unequipped and unqualified to do so, and also still too stunned by the whole thing. I've had to reassure my mother repeatedly that I am okay and am not going to knowingly get in any trouble, as she's quite convinced I will start taking silly risks if there's trouble in my vicinity.

We can only wait and see what happens next, and hope that there isn't a backlash that just makes things worse.

Going back to more cheerful news items, this morning I typed the wonderful phrase "Guide Dogs for the Blond" in a reply to a visitor's question. It's a good thing I still read through my emails instead of just trusting spellchecker with them. Spellchecker saw nothing wrong with guide dogs for the blond. Admittedly the idea has a certain appeal, but only as humour...

And if you ever garden or do anything with plants, you will love this:
http://www.thisgardenisillegal.com/2011/06/post-nozzle-drip-irrigation.html

I hope that link posts okay.

Rainy day in August...

2011-08-04T09:12:00.000-07:00

For a lot of today it has rained; there was a let up at about 2pm, then another dribble just after I’d had a walk, which was good timing. It’s now looking as though it may pour again, just as we get to going-home-time. I mustn’t grumble, as it’s much needed, which seems bizarre when one considers what a wet summer we have been having. But the wet weather ended two weeks ago and there has not been a drop of rain since, only stifling heat and high humidity. So this is doubly welcome. It waters the Gardens (and everyone else’s gardens too, of course, including mine!) and it brings down the ambient temperature slightly. I went out at lunch and walked with real pleasure in the wet grass.

Rain brings out the subtle scents of lavender and myrtle and escallonia, and the distinctive and delicious perfume called “very-dry-ground-now-wet”, as well as the rather less delicious first autumnal whiff of wet dead foliage. Sweet rain, blessing unlooked for, that washes and refreshes everything, and calms the frazzled mind, and cools the besandalled feet...

Lammas

2011-08-02T09:47:00.000-07:00

It's Lughnasadh, or Lammas; the beginning of autumn, the season of the reaper, but also the time of first fruits. I'm working on drafting a pitch letter for "Ramundi's sisters", and tonight I go home to eat my first home-grown tomato of the year. Writing the pitch letter is agony, easily my least favourite part of this "trying to get published" lark. Seriously, I'd rather write five love scenes than one pitch. But I'm hoping that first red, shapely tomato will be good. I think some of the chard might be just about big enough to gather, too. Here's to first fruits, and baking hot late summer days, and to remembering the blessings of life as I make my way home sweating gently across the baked, dry grass of Kew Green.

A pretty busy few days

2011-07-27T06:44:00.000-07:00

It was a hectic weekend, and Monday was pretty heavy too. Good hectic, in the main, but it has still left me feeling a little wambly-legged with tiredness. Never mind – I can get early nights for the rest of the week now, and I’ve had a bloody good time in the meantime. Of course, trying to have a rest during the week isn’t always feasible, but I'm doing my best, round the edges of the busy "start of the school hols" patch at work.

Saturday I met my mum for lunch and the terrific new English National ballet programme of ballets by the late Roland Petit. Sunday I went to the Ealing Global Music Festival in Walpole Park (a sort of one day mini-WOMAD) and danced my feet off all afternoon and evening. Monday was unpleasantly frantic at work, a classic “we’re short-staffed and the ‘phones won’t stop ringing” day, but in the evening I met my stepmum Jane for supper and the last Harry Potter movie – oof. At the London IMAX, so double oof.

I am now reeling slightly from the amount of activity; a lot of talking, a lot of eating out, three late nights, lots of dancing and a sort of cultural information-overload.

Mum and I found a new place to eat near Covent Garden, which is always good news; a small but pleasant bistro with the unimaginative name of “Bistro”. Mixed meze, pancakes stuffed with creamed spinach and goats cheese, salad, ice cream, a glass of wine; all very straightforward stuff, fresh and healthy (well, apart from the ice cream) and a bill of under £15 each.

ENB can be very happy with their Petit triple bill. Some of the newspaper reviews have tended towards the sniffy, but to me as a common-or-garden ballet-goer this was a cracking programme, full of energy and drama; the only thing that really looked dated was the copious amount of onstage smoking…

It was hard to believe, watching Erina Takahashi’s shy tenderness in “L’Arlesienne”, that the last time I saw her in action was as a practically fire-breathingly evil Odile in the Black Swan pas de deux. Her partner was the febrile, sexy Esteban Berlanga, doing a good line in wild-eyed distraction and frenetic leaps. Around and behind their doomed-love-story, a small corps de ballet dances lovely, folk-dance inflected rounds and chains that somehow convey both the contentment and the blinkeredness inherent in a tight-knit community.

“Le Jeune Homme et la Mort” brought another terrific young bloke on stage; Anton Lukovkin, a handsome young man with an unusually pointy chin, hurling himself with abandon around the stage in a pair of off-the-shoulder dungarees. It was short but very exciting stuff, and a tour-de-force for the two leads.

I’m not very familiar with Petit’s work. I’ve never seen either of these first pieces before, though I saw “Carmen” (the final piece in this bill) once on television when I was about twelve. I could remember being impressed then, but no particular details of what I was impressed by. Part of what grabbed me, then as now, was the sheer theatricality of it all; the sexiness, the aggression, the high drama of the final duet-cum-duel. My exposure to ballet back then had been very much of the order of “Swan Lake”, “Fille”, “Nutcracker”… Not chic-yet-vampy women in corsets standing on chairs and shouting, and certainly not erotic violence and murder.

I can only begin to imagine the impact this had on a London audience accustomed to the delicacy and classicism of the pre-Macmillan-era Royal Ballet… Not just the unabashedly sexual pelvic movements, but the furious energy, the stamping of feet, grinding out of cigarettes, slashing high leg extensions, all must have seemed like the proverbial bolt from the blue.

I loved in particular the way that even in the central love scene, as Carmen and Don José move through their highly sensual pas de deux, there’s a constant undercurrent of muted aggression that suggests their essential incompatibility as effectively as any amount of speech could do. A corking good show altogether.

Sunday afternoon was spent in the boiling heat, with a large water bottle, a couple of pints of Hobgoblin and an assortment of the usual Festival Food – Thai street nibbles, a crepe, some popcorn, veg curry, fruit sticks with chocolate sauce… Plus bluegrass, ska, Cuban rock, Balkan gypsy music, Hungarian traditional dance and Congolese soukous. Great dancing stuff, and one filthy, sweaty, tired and very cheerful Dent at the end of it all.

To finish off on Monday night with “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part two” was a very welcome finale to the weekend (especially coming after a pretty trying day at the office). It’s excellent; fun, exciting, a bit emotional, good battle scenes, cliff-hangers and great special effects. It was my first time at an IMAX, too – corblimey, now that’s what 3d cinema is good for! My only problem was that Jane and I had been to Sagar in Catherine Street first and eaten an enormous supper of aloo chaat and spicy creamed wheat and dosas, and super-rich creamy mango lassis, and we were both absolutely stuffed by the time we got to the cinema, trying not to entertain our neighbours with burping - such a ladylike pair we are...

At least yesterday evening I stayed in, wrote, and flopped. Pushing on with the revision of “Ramundi’s Sisters” I’ve noticed the spacing in my typing is all to pot. Between full stop and capital letter I've got one space here, two spaces there; it’s all over the place. Trying to make it uniform must be just about the most boring job out, but it has to be done. I like to know I’m producing clean copy. Chuntering through it I had a sudden good idea for solving something that has been bugging me in something else; it necessitates a bit of a rewrite there as well, but what the heck. So I think I’ll have a look at that tonight, for a change. And then an early night.

The Flute retains the magic

2011-07-21T09:01:00.000-07:00

Last night I was at “The Magic Flute”. I very nearly wasn’t, because The Crazy Intern, with whom I was going, got us totally lost on the way. This was my second experience of being navigated by someone using a hand-held GPS device, and it was no more inspiring than the first. I am worried when even machines can get dyslexic left/right confusion. Trust these things no further than you can throw them, that’s my advice.

Since we were trying to find St John’s Smith Square, which is in the middle of that horribly featureless Westminster hinterland of giant offices near Victoria Station, navigation by normal landmarks and features like pubs and shops was tricky, too. And it was raining. So we missed the overture (perhaps not the end of the world, as it was a piano version) and got soaked instead. We arrived just in time to scuttle into some seats at the back as the serpent – who looked like a giant, legless, red-eyed papier-maché Snoopy – emerged from its burrow to menace Tamino.

It’s easy to laugh at a small-scale production that sets out, with a tiny cast, minimal budget and no orchestra, to convey the same degree of drama and delight as a performance at Covent Garden or the ENO can accomplish. Oyster Opera apparently spend most of their time doing street concerts, wedding singing and light-hearted performances for corporate events. They are a very small outfit indeed, and it showed. Luckily they were doing “Magic Flute” whose crazy fairy-tale lack of logic can take a fair amount of added peculiarity without caving in under the weight.

A lot of the time, the director had had the sense to play to the company’s strengths, in particular the youth and energy of several of the performers, and to make a virtue of necessity where some of the problems were concerned. You’re trying to put on an opera that needs eighteen soloists, a large chorus and a full orchestra, and you have a total cast of twelve including the pianist? Then you thank god your pianist is excellent, and you double everyone else up, left, right and centre. The final chorus sounds a bit thin when sung by the six characters who can remotely rationally be on stage at the time? The heck with it; you rewrite the plot to have Sarastro forgive the Queen of Night, Monostatos, and the Three Ladies, and then they can all stay and sing, too.

The doubled and trebled casting produced some impressive quick-changes; the Three Ladies must have spent every free minute stripping and changing costumes, as each of them also doubled as one of the Three Boys and as an acolyte at Sarastro’s temple. Monostatos and the Speaker of the Temple also appeared as the Two Priests, the Two Armed Men (unarmed, in this instance), and as the wielders of the puppet birds pursued by Papageno at his first entrance.

There were some pretty major weaknesses, of course, but they were the sort you expect when you go to hear twelve people doing a touring production on a shoestring in a church. The set wobbled. The lighting was poor to the point of stygian. Some of the acting was decidedly sixth-form. The hollow stage platform was pretty noisy underfoot. Sarastro nearly lost part of his costume at one point when it became snagged on the set. A production at my brother’s school years ago managed a more effective staging of the trials by fire and water.

More seriously, two of the cast were completely out of their depth vocally. I won’t name names; I don’t like sniping at people whose abilities fall this far short of their ambitions. If they know who they are, then they know they were over-parted and should have stepped back gracefully, and they’re probably pretty depressed about it already. If they don’t know who they are, then there’s no saving them anyway since they haven’t the self-awareness to make the grade even if their voices could have taken them there (which they almost certainly won’t).

To compensate for having to wince a bit when these particular individuals were on stage, there were no other real weak links. The rest of the singers were good or better than good. We got three good Ladies, a Queen of Night who romped through the grandstanding hissy fit of “Die Hölle Rache”, a charming Papageno, a terrific Speaker/First Priest/First Armed Man, and an excellent Tamino from Paul Hopwood. I had started off remembering that long-ago school production and wondering if this would beat it for clunkiness (believe me, a school production can be pretty damn clunky even if your darling bro is one of the Priests lumbering about embarrasedly onstage); it didn’t, largely on the strength of the good parts of the cast. That and the pianist, who gave a truly heroic performance. I would never have expected a single piano to do such a magnificent job of replacing the orchestra. Much kudos to that man!

The tide of life is at slack water

2011-07-19T05:16:00.000-07:00

I'm having one of those phases when life seems slack and spiritless. Not a serious, full-on attack of the blues; just a flat patch. I seem to be wandering blankly through each day and each week; nothing much happens, yet every day I get home tired and just want to relax with the radio or the tele on, some sewing, and my supper. Preferably an easy supper. Tonight, for example, is going to be an omelette.

I am doing some writing; I'm about halfway through the extended short story I mentioned a while ago. I'm also about halfway through doing the seams on the blouse I let out, and I've finished the panelled dress. I did bake a cake on Sunday (& I've brought half of it in to work to share, to prove it). I even got a little bit of pruning and tidying done in the garden, between the humongous rainstorms. So I'm not being unproductive. I just feel disengaged and dust-and-ashes-y about things. It's like having a timid distant cousin of depression following me about bashfully all day.

I can't complain, really, since I know how very much worse this stale-flat-and-unprofitable feeling can get. It's probably connected to being tired. Tomorrow I'm meeting The Crazy Intern at "The Magic Flute". It may actually not rain for a whole day, today. I'm having lunch and going to a matinee with my mother at the weekend. Things are fine, really they are; it's not the world, it's me. Stale, flat and unproftable.

Another Friday, ahh...

2011-07-15T05:59:00.000-07:00

It worries me, when I wake up on a Monday thinking "Drat, another Monday" and get to a Friday thinking "Oh good, it's Friday". It's the only life I'll get, after all, at least as me (as Rose MacCauley puts it so perfectly, "Whatever follows after, we shall not have this life again"), and I am wishing it away. But the summer is always the busiest time of the year at work, and this summer the "long-term short-staffed" problem is really starting to tell on everyone, too.

There is an early stage in that situation, when everyone is in agreement; we all have to knuckle down and do our bit to keep things going. One stretches a bit, takes on a bit more, finds it is feasible, finds that the pressure is still manageable; then one is asked to take on a bit more, and so is everyone else; and then a bit more again; and once again one grins and says "We can handle it, come on, folks, yo-heave-ho"... After all, there is really no alternative but to try one's best. None of us want to drop Kew in it; and no-one wants to be a slacker, even at the best of times, much less in difficult ones. But over time, as the pressure does not ease but grows incrementally, and the duration of the period for which this will go on increases, too, and the possibility of any improvement recedes steadily, one just gets, quite simply, tired. There's a point (which our team at least has reached some time ago) where there is absolutely no more slack to be taken up. Performing at full-stretch-plus for month after month starts to take its toll; and because everywhere one looks there is the same thing - over-stretched, worried people trying to hang on and do their best - one gets demoralised as well.

It is chiefly just tiredness, plain old tiredness. Compared to other places I've worked, which had much less serious staffing and financial stresses on them, there is an amazing lack of grumbling here. We all want to keep things going and not let our colleagues down. We almost all manage to keep the bigger picture in mind most of the time. But we are all so tired. And there is still no end in sight.

On a more cheerful note, the Gardens are looking wonderful, and despite some very gloomy weather forecasts last week, the Kew The Music open-air concerts were not rained on (well, about five minutes of drizzle, one evening, but otherwise dry).

I have finished re-reading "The Last of the Wine" (& cried my eyes out over it once again) and started on an entertaining murder mystery called "Anthem for Doomed Youth" by Carola Dunn. Carola was at school with my stepmum Jane, and it is enormously pleasing to know that I have this tiny connection with a real, published author.

Carola's books make no attempt to be great literature, but they are enjoyable without being potboilers. Her characters are credible and likeable, she gives one enough of the clues that there is a hope of spotting the killer, and she describes Saffron Walden, where much of this latest story is set, well enough to leave me planning a visit some time this summer. Not bad for a straightforward piece of summer reading.

The Mary Renault also left me dreaming of travel, but going to Athens is a bit more of an undertaking. Besides, at the moment Athens might be rather an odd experience, owing to the strikes and demonstrations (with which I am in sympathy, but which nonetheless I don't want to get caught up in). There's a huge magic in waking up and drawing the curtains to see the Parthenon silhouetted against the morning sky. I shall have to go back there some time soon. Maybe I could manage a long weekend over the winter?

But for now, it's Friday and it's been another tiring week, and I'm looking forward to a couple of days off, not doing anything or going anywhere. I will tidy the garden, bake a cake, and finish Carola's book.

Kew Music week...

2011-07-08T09:01:00.000-07:00

Always a hectic week, this, as the annual Kew summer picnic concerts happen. The telephone enquiry line is inundated with calls from people who haven’t read their advance information leaflets, people who’ve lost their tickets, people who are panicking about the iffy weather, and so forth. The 'phone hardly seems to stop ringing for most of each day.

It hasn't been all work and no play, though. On Monday night after work I went up to Trafalgar Square for another of the Big Screen events; managed to find my friends in the crowds, ate too much, and cried my eyes out at Kristine Opolais’ marvellous performance as Madam Butterfly.

On Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, however, I went home exhausted after a solid day of ‘phone calls and no lunch break, and had a stiff drink and an early night.

Last night I was helping out at one of the concerts, handing out fundraising leaflets and directing people where to go, with all the enthusiasm and good cheer I could muster. I was released from this duty at about 8.00pm; managed to find my friends in a huge crowd for the second time in a week, and enjoyed a splendid concert from the inimitable Jools Holland and his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra. I also enjoyed the good company, some rather tasty paella, and probably a bit more to drink than was good for me. I danced a lot, the others danced a fair amount, the music was great, the atmosphere happy, the weather held fair apart from about five minutes of drizzle, and the final ten minute firework display was gorgeous.

Now I’m off to be a ticket tearer for tonight’s concert, so it's on with the bright smile and the cheerful energy again. Vesti la giubba, and all that. Actually ticket tearing is rather fun, in a crazy sort of way; but I am tired, and really looking forward to a quiet weekend after this.

Lovely afternoon

2011-07-01T05:13:00.000-07:00

It's a lovely day, the best kind of summer weather; sunshine and puffs of snowy clouds, hot but not too hot, with a gentle breeze. I've just been out to buy some vegetables from the Kew Diploma Students, who sell the produce of their veg plots every Friday lunchtime (proceeds go towards funding a field trip). Just as I was raking in my purse to pay for my Swiss chard, purple beans, mangetout, radishes, basil and parsley, one of the students appeared at the sales table carrying bunches of sweet peas, so I added some of them as well. I now have them on my desk in a paper cup of water, and the scent is filling the whole office.

The Gardens are looking glorious, despite the way the weather lately has been veering from drought conditions through hailstorms to torrential rain, and back again. The waterlily pool by the Jodrell Laboratory is filled with floating cups of flowers, and buzzing with dragonflies; the lavenders are all in bloom, and the classic herbaceous borders in the Duke's Garden, just outside our office, are a picture of richness and colour; salvias, heucheras, geraniums, clematis, echinaceas, and great banks of daylilies in darkest mahogany and palest cream.

All that loveliness; and fresh-picked vegetables as well. I shall make a chard and fresh herb omelette for supper, and a salad of steamed beans and mangetout. It looks as though it will be a while before I have any of my own home-grown produce - my chard plants are tiny, ditto most of the tomatoes, and my beans are rampaging up their sticks (& anything else they can lay hold of) and producing masses of leaves, but no flowers as yet.

Hier, quand j'étais jeune...

2011-06-29T09:41:00.000-07:00

On Monday I went back to an old haunt of mine.

Years ago, in my first real job, I worked at the Quaker International Centre in Bloomsbury, just north of the British Museum. I was, heaven help me, the deputy chef. It was a great job in many respects – I learned to cater for large numbers unfazed, and as it was a live-in post I also got to make the most of being based in central London, with museums and galleries, theatres, concert halls and cinemas all within half an hour’s journey. A live-in job has its bad side, of course; one can never really get away from work, and if one has a falling-out with a colleague, there’s no escape from it at the end of the day, there they are sitting opposite one at supper… And yes, in case you’re wondering, Quakers do have fallings-out, too, though they try to be very civilised about it. They’re only human!

Ten minutes walk from QIC, on Drummond Street, was the divine Diwana Bhel Poori House. For a hungry twenty-year-old who has spent all day cooking preposterous amounts of food for other people, a Diwana thali with friends was a perfect evening out. A great platter containing dal, sabzis, pappadums, puris, relishes, pulao rice, pickles, idlis or fritters, even a dollop of something creamy and cardamom-y for desert… For years it was my insider tip for visitors to London – go to Diwana, have a thali, you won’t regret it – and it left me with a serious addiction to bhel poori with sev. I’ve now found a similar place in Hammersmith and can get my fix without having to trail up to Euston, hurrah. Diwana is still there on Drummond Street, though.

Anyway, on Monday I met my stepmum Jane there for an early supper before she took the train to Milton Keynes for the fun of an OU Tutors’ first aid training session. It was the hottest day of the year so far and neither of us had the appetite for a thali, so we settled on dahi vada and dosas, and an indulgent mango lassi each. The dosas were tasty and very filling, the dahi vada – a sort of vegetarian dumpling served with tamarind chutney and fresh yoghurt – were delicious. We talked our heads off, catching up, putting the world to rights and gossiping about my brothers behind their backs (only kidding, guys!). Then I walked her up to Euston for her train.

And then, I was at a loose end, on a hot midsummer evening, back in the heart of my old stomping ground. I didn’t want to go straight back down into the Tube (which had been swelteringly hot and very smelly), so I wandered south and west through the back streets, thinking I’d pick up a westbound number 94 bus.

My route took me down the side of Gordon Square, where once I used to relax under the trees, and right past the old QIC building where I had lived and worked, and the University church where I once gave a reading, and through the streets and past the shops I used to know so well; and it had all changed.

Well; not quite all. The Square looked much the same; same tall London planes, same slightly unkempt grass and circle of rose beds in the middle. The church looked much the same, except in need of a good clean. But QIC seems to have been shut up completely, and most of the windows are boarded. And apart from the Marlborough Arms on the corner of Huntley Street, hardly a shop or café or restaurant was the same. The flower stalls had all gone, Apollo Food&Wine on the Tottenham Court Road had gone, the wonderful Italian ice-cream place opposite Heals had gone, Byzantium on Goodge Street had gone, and the Swiss deli on Charlotte Street, and the Greek taverna, and the Polish bakery...

I walked on feeling very strange, very yesterday-when-I-was-young. It is all so long ago, and that keen, clumsy girl I was is so long gone. It was salutary, and at first I felt very melancholy. But gradually as I walked on I began to feel better.

I would not turn the clock back for love or money, after all. It would be good, of course, to have again the physical vitality of my younger self. I am stouter and slower, and have less stamina, than the Imogen of those days. It would be good to have all the time ahead of me that she had, and for that matter the opportunities (had she but possessed the self-confidence to take advantage of them). But I was an awkward, desperate, cripplingly shy creature, tortured by my inability to make everyone happy, terrified both of solitude and of being overwhelmed by others’ lives and wishes. I lived in a fantasy world most of the time when I was not cooking, and my crushes, instead of being safely distant dancers and musicians, were guys I knew well and saw every day, whose proximity was a torment and whose rejection left me bent double with self-disgust. In short, I was a mess; and terribly, terribly young.

I don’t want to be that immature, unhappy, embittered young woman. I am fearfully glad I woke up, and grew up, and made the choices and decisions I made, and got to where I am today. My world is not perfect, not by a long pole; but it’s pretty good, nonetheless, and it is my own. My life now reflects who I am with a deep truth, and no amount of youthful energy restored could replace that self-knowledge and self-possession. And for this I am very grateful. So I didn’t look around me with any regret, after the first few shocks, but with surprise and a sense of amazement, and a growing feeling of peace, and I walked quietly along to Oxford Circus, and got the bus home.

More than half in love...

2011-06-24T09:07:00.000-07:00

…with Christian Tetzlaff. Who I heard last night at the Royal Festival Hall, playing Bartok’s second violin concerto with the Philharmonia. Seriously, incandescently good stuff. Mr Tetzlaff looks uncannily like a miniaturised version of my cousin Richard (Richard is a very handsome cousin, but he’s also a very tall guy, and Mr Tetzlaff, erm, isn’t). Richard, however, is no musician, and Mr Tetzlaff is a dazzlingly good one.

I’m very lucky to live in a place where I get to hear lots of marvellous violinists; in the last eighteen months or so I’ve heard Christian Tetzlaff, Joshua Bell, Sergey Khatchatryan, Gil Shaham, Benjamin Schmid and Frank Peter Zimmermann, and that is quite a feast, I can tell you, even if they aren’t all quite as easy on the eye as Mr Tetzlaff. Mr Shaham is I suspect part hobbit (& part fiddle-playing demi-god), while Mr Zimmermann looks like a policeman in a borrowed suit, but every one of these men is an absolute joy to hear in action. Bearing in mind that I can also get to hear the world’s great pianists, the world’s great singers, the world’s great orchestras conducted by the world’s great conductors; London may have its down side but the up-side is a pretty big up.

That brings me neatly to the Proms. I’ve been trying to choose which ones to book this year. I’ve worked out a shortlist of six, but I really ought to cut that down a bit. All six have at least one really, really good reason not to drop them; favourite pieces, favourite musicians, things I’d just love to hear live (I mean, come on, the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony, in the RAH, on that socking great organ of theirs? This I cannot miss)… I’ll have to skip “Elijah”, despite the superb line-up of soloists, as it’s on my mum’s birthday, and mum’s birthday is sacrosanct (and is always a day at the beach followed by a good curry or paella supper). But Tetzlaff playing Brahms? Shaham playing Bruch? Stuart Skelton singing Mahler? Britten’s Spring Symphony? Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Janacek, Sibelius? How am I to choose? I don’t think I can…

If I can get the cheapest seats (at the top at the side, or choir seats are okay), then it won’t kill the wallet. And there’s always the radio, after all, my great digital radio that has transformed radio-listening for me; and lots of the Proms are televised these days – I should check what’s being shown on BBC4 before I get down-in-the-mouth about the expense.

Here is my latest I-have-a-purple-crush poem:

To Christian Tetzlaff, playing Bartók

Vibrant disharmony, a pierced sunset
And the wide skies burning like a battlefield.
Slicing between discord and dancing, between
Lyrical terror and song, nothing’s so bright
As this plane of flame, which is sound, which is you
Wheeling undizzied as a gull in the gulf
Of air, with music pouring from your hands.

Bee caught in amber, golden-voiced, longing to dance,
Half of your blood is fire; you plunge
Humming, exploding into furrowed waves
And rise to arrow the dazzled heart. Your wings
Which are hands, are strings, phoenix of sound
Incandescent with energy in your burning field.

Midsummer morris

2011-06-22T09:31:00.000-07:00

How can there be any bitterness or any regret
Here, on Midsummer's Night? In the clear dark,
The pewter sky above, on the silver river
The black specks of geese sail gladly by.
The morris bells are ringing on the quiet green
Where the dancers leap and grin in the dusk
To summon summer's celebrating glance and
Spirit of life. Go, dance! Hearts, rise!
Crops grow, and hopes, and harvest thrive!
Here at midsummer on the bright Thames-side
I cannot admit of bitterness or regret
While the dusk-dark geese go sailing,
Alive through the silver of the midsummer night.

The last of Cardiff Singer (& possibly the last of the summer, too)

2011-06-20T10:17:00.000-07:00

Cardiff Singer is over for another two years, and I am bereft. For a whole week I have had the chance to listen to a bunch of talented young opera singers every night. Some of them were good, some were very good and some were really great. Some were absolutely wonderful. I now have bad withdrawal symptoms.

What a feast of glorious music it has been, and what a pleasure all those hard-working young people were, with their fine voices and their hopes for the future writ large on eager faces. I feel very dull and rather old when I listen to a twenty-four year old with more musical talent in their little finger, and more self-discipline and determination to succeed, than I have in all five foot nine and fourteen stone of me; but I also feel privileged to get to see them in action, so early in their careers, these kids. They are so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and full of delight in everything they do.

The Moldovan soprano, Valentina Nafornitsa, won the Grand Final. My favourite, the Ukrainian baritone Andrei Bondarenko, won the Lieder Prize. I would have given him both prizes, but then I do love my baritones. Mr Bondarenko’s song recital was a sheer wonder from start to finish; effortlessly beautiful singing full of subtle, unforced sincerity and dramatic nuance, and with that incredible feeling of intimacy that a great recitalist can bring even to a big concert hall. At last Favourite Baritone has a worthy successor.

I’m going to see if by some miracle I can get a ticket to Glyndebourne next year – he is singing Marcello in “La Boheme” and I go slightly fluttery inside at the thought. As my late father used to say about certain sopranos, “Gulp, I think I’m in love”.

Despite the vital but restrictive necessity of being in for all the Cardiff broadcasts, I managed to get a good deal done this weekend, too. On Saturday I visited a lovely exhibition of modern Australian prints at the BM, and had a mooch afterwards in the minor Greece and Rome rooms – the ones with real things from real people’s lives and homes in – then spent a happy hour in an art materials shop (& didn’t buy anything stupid – just a few sensible things like a new sketchbook) and then in a sale at HMV on Oxford Street (& only bought one thing, a Dvd of “La Fille mal Gardée”), and had lunch out, and listened to a very good Hungarian band busking outside the church of St Martin’s in the Fields, and bought some concert and ENO tickets for the autumn.

On Sunday I sewed; I finally finished the poppy-print top, then cut out, pinned and tacked two more jobs, a plain straight summer frock in panels of two shades of blue, and a blouse I need to let out. Opening the under-arm seams and piecing in extra fabric on either side is a miserable, fiddly job, but I just relax, listen to the radio, and tell myself I am channelling my grandmothers’ spirits. To throw away a favourite blouse, in silk patchwork in shades of chestnut brown and burgundy, that always looked good, simply because I’ve put on so much weight, offends me. Realistically, I’m unlikely to lose the weight, and the sewing practice is good for me, so I’m going to let it out and get some more use out of it rather than beating myself up about getting stout. With the really twiddly parts, the cutting out and fitting and pinning and basting, all done, it’s just a question of mindlessly plying my needle now, and I can do that peacefully over the next few weeks while I watch tele or listen to music.

It’s just started to pour with rain; now that I can go home, it does this. Guess who didn’t bring an umbrella today? Really, after all these years living in my dear wet native land, you’d think I’d be more Great-British-summer-savvy!

Another day, another lunch break

2011-06-17T06:01:00.000-07:00

I've just tried to go to Kew's new ice cream parlour, attached to the visitor café beside Climbers & Creepers, the children's play area. Sadly I found it was closed for cleaning. I had to content myself with looking in through the windows at a tempting display; twenty different flavours, dozens of choices of sprinkles, sauces, popcorn, doughnuts etc... It felt a bit like being six again - "No you can't have an ice cream, you had one yesterday" - oh well, it's a rainy day, not really ice cream weather. I was just curious.

At least I could still get a sandwich in the main part of the café, where I bumped into Quarantinewoman by the cake section. We had a short chat about cake, how good cake is, and the general necessity of cake, while she tried to squint at my name badge surreptitiously. I restrained the urge to say "You've forgotten who I am, haven't you, Quarantinewoman?" as it seemed a bit mean since she was trying to place me without embarrassing herself. I bought cake (gluten-free chocolate squidgey cake, yum!) and left her still in contemplation of the choices. It's a cake range worth contemplating, goodness knows.

I walked back to the office. In the rain, summer scents like pine and escallonia come out, and the lavenders are veiled with silver droplets. Partway back, near the Orangery, there's a bed that has been planted up with herbaceous plants, all now in bloom in a wonderful array of clashing colours - yellow, orange, purple, more yellow; pot marigolds and day lilies and salvias, all blazing away in the muted, rainy light. There was a wren singing in the tree above the bed, and a toddler in wellington boots was passing by carrying an umbrella larger than himself, jumping in puddles blissfully. Heaven in a garden.

What else? Ah, yes; heaven in music.

Last night's broadcast of heat three of Cardiff Singer produced not one but two of those spine-tingling moments when you feel the touch of angels. The order of play went - one good, one adequate but nervous, then one very good - an Aussie mezzo who bounded through a gorgeously tricky chunk of Handel coloratura, making it sound easy-peasy.

I was just thinking "That's tonight's heat winner, then" when the next singer came on and trumped her. Valentina Naforitsa from Moldova; sheer bliss to listen to, a classic lyric-dramatic soprano with beautiful tone, seamless legato, wonderful awareness of vocal colour, and true acting ability. Oh, and good-looking, too. The famous "complete package" that the jury members always say they're looking for. Okay, thought I, so that's tonight's winner, then.

And then Andrei Bondarenko from the Ukraine came on and trumped her, with a superb baritone voice that was like velvet, subtle and flavoursome as manzanilla, from bottom to delicious top. Beautiful tone - check. Seamless legato - check (and in spades, too). Perfect control, perfect colour, perfectly-balanced dramatic sense - check. Oh, and did I forget to mention? - good-looking, too. A singer who could step straight into Favourite Baritone's roles and do every one of them justice - yes, even Pelléas - he had a beautiful upper register and I can't believe he'd have any trouble with it... indeed, the mere thought makes me long to hear him sing it, and I wouldn't have expected ever to want another Pelléas after FB.

To get two such fabulous singers, one after the other, leaves the hairs on the back of one's neck standing up. This, of course, is why the finalists are the top scoring singers overall, rather than automatically the heat winners; because it would be cruelty itself if one of these two had been dropped, simply from the bad luck of being in the strongest round so far. As it was, I felt it was rough on the Aussie lass, who was delightful, because she paled in comparison with them. I think I've just seen two of the next generation of Great Singers - the people who in forty years will be judging competitions like this, and getting goosebumps themselves as they hear the next generation coming out and dazzling them.

Andrei Bondarenko won, but if the Moldovan doesn't also get into the final I'll fry my hat and eat it with tartare sauce.

You can read all about Cardiff Singer of the World, from commentators a lot more expert than me, and also listen to the performances, on the BBC website:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0120y62
It's worth it.

How goes the heavenly music so far?

2011-06-16T09:27:00.000-07:00

Pretty well, is the answer.

Cardiff Singer, heat two, produced one terrific English soprano, a lovely Chinese baritone, and three more sopranos, one of whom was good, one okay (though in a truly awful dress) and one of whom had problems. Poor lass, her frock was her best point; she launched herself onto "Bel raggio lusinghier" and was swiftly overwhelmed by it. Apparently she was feeling unwell but had decided to have a go notwithstanding; so full marks for courage, anyway. But it is uncomfortable to watch someone so obviously struggling.

The terrific English lass won.

In heat three, being shown tonight, we are due to hear one Ukrainian, one Welsh, one Australian, one Moldovan and one German. I could go to the BBC website and find out who won, even maybe listen to them all on my computer; but I want to save myself for the the fun of the broadcast, while I relax with some supper and a glass of beer.

Then back to the semi-fairy-tale short story I have started writing (as a displacement activity, basically, because I'm finding doing the "Ramundi's sisters" revision number three so grindingly tough). And then an early night, I think.

It has rained a large chunk of the day here, but has now dried up and cleared in time for me to go home. According to the Met Office, it also rained in Crete and southern Greece today. I know how much the tourists will be grumbling, but I can't begrudge a mediterranean country some rain!

Heavenly music

2011-06-15T05:44:00.000-07:00

...and thank goodness for it, too.

This week is Cardiff Singer of the World week. Cardiff Singer is a biannual competition for budding opera and lieder singers, held at St David's Hall in Cardiff and televised by the BBC. Good old BBC! - I'm so lucky to live somewhere where public service broadcasting will toss me a bonne bouche like this every once in a while.

The first heat was last night, and was won by a sumptuous-sounding Russian mezzo. There are three more heats to go, then the Lieder final is on Saturday evening and the Grand Final, for the overall title Cardiff Singer of the World, is shown live on Sunday evening on BBC2. For anyone who loves great singing, Cardiff Singer week is a week in heaven.

I filled the only non-Cardiff evening of the week, on Monday, with another of these Covent Garden cinema broadcasts; Verdi's "Macbeth" (or Macbetto, as he becomes after enforced Italianisation). A luxury cast, Pappano in the pit, and for £16 a chance to see everyone really close up. In the title role Favourite Baritone was giving it his all. He was a much subtler, more troubled and confused Macbeth than Thomas Hampson, who I saw in this same production a few years ago. Where Hampson played Macbeth as a bear of very little brain, not bright enough to realise he isn’t very bright, FB gave us a guy who isn’t very bright and is aware of it, and confused about it, but lacking the resources to handle it; he gave off a bitter, volatile quality that was truly nasty, and sang heroically as well. The Lady M., Lyudmila Monastirska (I may have mis-spelled that), was vocally the real mustard, but her acting was of the Pavarotti-school – roll eyes, flare nostrils and tip head back… yay, dat's acting, dat is...

Steven Ebel’s Malcolm was good, I loved Raymond Aceto's Banquo, and there was a lovely cameo from one of the Covent Garden Young Artists, Lukas Jakobski, as the doctor - I wouldn’t expect to say “delicate and silky” of a bass but those are the words that spring to mind. I'm still not sure I like the production, though; it has some great visuals and also some deeply silly ones.

We also got the felicity of a subtitle c*ck-up; at the beginning of Act 2, the curtain rose on a stage full of whirling, writhing witches stirring their toxic brews, who then began, with expressions of the most poisonous evil, to sing "Welcome back to the Royal Opera House..." With a keyed-up audience, of course, it got a huge laugh. I know they were really singing "Double, double, toil and trouble..." etc (in Italian), but "Welcome back..." was such a glorious disjuncture with the scene.

Work is a bit hassley at the moment, the third revision of "Ramundi's sisters" is causing me trouble as it has thrown me into facing the need for a big re-write >sigh< and I have ballet withdrawal symptoms. Otherwise muddling along.

At least the linden trees are in flower; that heavenly scent comes raining down on me as I cycle in and back from work. "Ich atmet einem lindenduft" indeed... Apologies if that is also spelled wrong, my German has never progressed beyond the "Guten tag" and ordering-things-off-a-menu level...