Ropey as old rope...

I think I ate something.  Something I ought not to have done, that is.

My relationship with food is strong and healthy – not to mention downright erotic at times.  But there’s nothing like a gyppy tummy to make you think “Why would anyone in their right mind want to eat?”  At the moment, the smell of fish pie wafting up from the kitchens downstairs is nauseating; on a normal day it would have had me doing Homer Simpson impressions. So somewhere, sometime, in the last few days, I have had some bad food... 

I’ve sweated out most of the day at work.  I’ve chugged through all the jobs I needed to get done.  I’m wondering whether to ask if I can go home a bit early, as I am now feeling decidedly ropey.  It’s not the worst stomach upset I’ve ever had (not by a long pole - don’t worry, I won’t bother you with any more details!) but I am shaky and headache-y and queasy, and I just want to lie down.   

I had a horrible dream last night, what’s more.  I was attending an interview with an unbelievably rude and aggressive interview panel who all tried to bully me, and who argued with one another in front of me about everything I said and did.  It was like a conflation of all the worst interviews, worst auditions and worst meetings with management I have ever had in my life; to wake up from that and think “also my insides are up the creek” was an altogether miserable start to the day.

The weekend had gone so well, too.  I shopped, I cleaned, I ran the washing machine.  I wrote.  I went for a walk (Kew is looking lovely).  I cooked some good food (a classic tortilla española with a parmesan-and-asparagus twist, and some very garlicky pea soup).  I watched a good movie.  I watched Britain’s athletes and other sportsmen and women continued to distinguish themselves at the Olympics, as well as the great Serena Williams beating the shrieking beansprout Maria Sharapova comprehensively, which was almost as pleasing (Williams is a joy to watch, and Sharapova is a poseuse).   I bought some new sandals in a sale, and I went to see the English National Ballet’s “Swan Lake” at the Coliseum.

I had booked to see the lovely Daria Klimentová and Vadim Muntagirov; one or the other is out of action, it seems, so I got Anaïs Chalendard, who was good but not great (technically polished, so far as I could tell, but her acting is decidedly one-note – Odette total misery, Odile total bitch is slightly too simplistic for my tastes) and, an unexpected treat, Junor Souza stepping up to make his role debut, and seizing the chance with both hands, as the Prince.  Tall, quirkily handsome, lovely clean lines, partners beautifully, gorgeous jump, and he can act.  Go, Mr Souza! 

I’m not too sure about the production in places, though.  We don’t need to see Rothbart enchant Odette to the sound of the overture, so the beginning irritated me straight off.  It doesn’t clarify matters particularly, since one still hasn’t got a clue why he does it (is he after her?  Is he after Siegfried?  Is he after the throne?  Is he just a mean b*stard?).  It’s just a silly fad, pandering to the kind of audience members who won’t stop talking until there are dancers of stage, and so chatter like rude kids through each of Tchaikovsky’s beautiful orchestral preludes.  I’m sorry to say we did have rather a lot of that kind of audience yesterday.  May they go to the special hell, the one reserved for people who talk at the theatre...

Then there’s too much posturing and gurning generally from Rothbart, and there are one or two other moments when the cheese factor gets a little strong (just think “A Bullet in the Ballet” and you will have an idea what I mean).   But the sets and costumes are good, ENB field a fine corps and some excellent national dances for Act 3, and there’s a strong emphasis on making the blossoming of the relationship between the protagonists really clear.  Odette and Siegfried don’t fall in love because it’s in the script but because they click, and then click more, and trust and longing and hope start to flow between them as each realises the other is what they have dreamed of and prayed to find one day.  Of course, that makes the whole thing even more tragic, but then “Swan Lake” should be tragic – and at least we don’t get a happy ending here, even if from the balcony seats of the Coli I could only see half of the dead lovers’ heavenly apotheosis (the lower half – thoroughly nice legs, but it was hardly the full spectacle, and I was only in the fourth row).

Anyway, that’s my last ballet fix until October.  Sigh. 

It’s nearly five pm – can I stick it out?  I still feel grotty and queasy and I’ve begun burping like a drunken marine.  Not nice.   

Crikey, a month since I wrote anything!!

I seem to be forever saying “I’m so busy!” lately.  But tomorrow is Good Friday, which means church for my church-going friends and for the rest of us, a four day weekend.  Oof. A chance to catch my breath...

I worked through my lunch break today; but it was the first time in over two months that I have done that.  In the previous job I had to do it two or three times a week.  The new job remains refreshingly structured and organise-able compared to the old one, too.  And my new manager Paul still hasn’t shown his Dark Side – if he has one, which I am beginning to doubt.  So busy or no I am feeling decidedly cheerful about work. 

Of course there is the odd chaotic group planner, and the odd startlingly rude one, and as always from time to time I have IT problems.  Next spring is going to be a harder sell than usual because we don’t have our regular Trop-Ex tropical flower exhibition in February, which is a great pity.  And the weather has turned chilly after a beautifully mild March.   So it isn’t all shiny, but shiny enough for now.

But Kew is looking lovely, with delicate new leaves opening everywhere, glorious displays of magnolias and crab apple blossom, the first cherry blossom, early lilac species and azaleas, and great banks of native fritillaries near the river; and my own little bit of garden in Chiswick is looking lovely too in its more modest way.   I have been busy outside of work with sketching (I’m having a real fit of duck-drawing) and sewing, and tidying the garden, and I’ve been to the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy (wonderful: if you possibly can, go!) as well as two very enjoyable mixed bills by the English National Ballet and a couple of excellent concerts, including Britten’s “War Requiem” with Mark Padmore, the chap who was at school with my brother Steve, a heart-rending tenor soloist. 

ENB are in good form, though I managed to get rather a lot of Dmitri Gruzdyev, a dancer I find dismally uncharismatic, both nights – I would much prefer to have seen pretty much any of their other men as Nijinsky’s Faun, never mind as Balanchine’s Apollo – I don’t mean to sound bitchy, but Apollo he ain’t!!  The three Muses I saw were lovely, though, and Erina Takahashi was a terrific sacrifice in “The Rite of Spring”.  David Dawson’s “Faun/e”, a new piece on me, was gorgeous despite the men’s silly “will it fall off or not?” costumes, and “Suite en Blanc” looked even more luscious second time around.  

Steve, incidentally, has got his plaster cast off and is progressing well with physiotherapy.

A ray of watery sun has just filtered through the clouds; may it be a good omen for the weekend ahead! 

Against the blanched white clouds

Where last month there were only

Dark branches like scars, now

Everywhere I see shivers of green. 

Birds sing, or hop scuffling

Among the flashing celandines.

The swans stake out their usual demesne

By the lake, and a thousand coots

Chase one another like ninja chicks

Across the grey spring waters.

Busy busy bee

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...

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.