Sunshine, sanding and demon fiddlers

Yes, you did read that right.  Sunshine.  We actually had a sunny weekend.  Bang on time for the start of the school holidays, the summer has arrived.

Friday evening was passed grouting and sanding and gloss-painting (& eating curry) with TCI and her lovely (albeit knackered) fella G.  They’re both getting seriously frazzled after living in a house under renovation for well over two months.  The place is still filthy and cluttered; but it is completely transformed from the last time I saw it.  It is going to be lovely, eventually.  In fact “eventually” is almost upon them (though a good cleaning session would make this more obvious).  I am terribly envious; I would love to be renovating my own place >sigh< for me to live in >sighs again< and love and make my own >sniff< and do my best Candide thing in the garden...  Anyway, I enjoy grouting and sanding, and I hope I was some small help, for a few hours.  The curry was good, too.

Saturday was a normal Saturday.  Grocery shopping, washing-machine-running, vacuum-ing, etc.  Plus the inevitable writing, afternoon and early evening, assisted by a wee drop of rather pleasant Islay single malt; and to finish the day off, Tom Hiddleston as Henry V on the tele, looking beautiful and tormented and very muddy, speaking those great speeches of patriotism and honour as if he’d never heard a word of them before and had absolutely no idea that they are, well, kind-of well-known...   It's a lovely magic act; give a good actor a cliché and watch it disappear.

Sunday was the Ealing Global Music Festival.  Festivalette, perhaps, as it’s only one afternoon and evening.  The sun shone all day, and I wore a gypsy top and got sunburnt shoulders (& a surprisingly large number of men looked down my cleavage – hurrah, the old bazzoom still has its mojo!)...  Drank too much cider, danced a lot, ate festival-type food, and listened to good music: Romany pop, Peruvian rock, latin funk, straightforward reggae, lovely country & western (the mellow rocky end of C&W, not the weepy-waily end) from Roosevelt Bandwagon, and total bananas they-made-my-feet-dance-boss-honest mayhem from The Destroyers (think klezmer-inflected lovechild of Bellowhead and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). 

Best act of the day, though, was the first one up; The Long Notes.  It was rough on them; a group this good shouldn’t be having to play the warm-up to anyone, and there they were, giving their considerable all to a half-empty marquee where no-one had yet had enough to drink to get up and dance (not even me, and I dance easy).  Cracking good stuff; Scottish/Irish folk fusion played with passion and stunning musicianship – squeezebox, rhythm guitar, fiery-fingered banjo and one of the best fiddlers I’ve heard in years...    The three blokes were even cute!  Bloody lovely, and a band I will watch out for in future...  If they play anywhere near you, go along and revel in sheer tradtastic genius. 

And in between acts, sitting on the damp grass, drinking cider in the sun, I wrote.  And on the bus home at 11.00pm, I wrote; and sitting up in bed at midnight, trying to finish the scene before I keeled over with tiredness.  To my great delight, the story seems to have gotten enough headway now that the Muse can go off and play fantasy games about actors with nice behinds, and leave me to get on with the work.  This is a Very Satisfying Feeling.  When the story is only going because the Muse is driving its car, I know that the engine may fail at any time.  This engine seems to have its own firepower by now. 

So all in all it was a good weekend, but as happens sometimes I am more tired after my R&R than before it.

A pretty busy few days

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.