Night lights

March brings many things to Canberra: a much-needed long weekend, autumn (not much sign of it at the moment), and balloons. This year it brought tourists and all sorts of shenanigans, since it’s the 100th anniversary of the capital’s founding. In 1913 the Governor General’s missus stood up in an empty and dusty paddock to announce – and, unfortunately, mispronounce – the name of the compromise capital. To this day (if you’re a local) it’s CAN-bra rather than Can-BEH-ra. This is one of the few situations where our American cousins get the pronunciation of an Australian city right (tip: it’s MEL-b’n, not MEL-born) even if Australians technically don’t.

With an anniversary like that we had to have a big party to set off a year of special events, starting on the Canberra Day long weekend. It was a hoot – so many people, so many families out and about all weekend. I  made a special effort (hiring a car) to take in some of it, not least because my father was visiting.

The thing I enjoyed – the thing a lot of people seemed to enjoy – was this year’s Enlighten festival. For 2013 it went way beyond lighting up national monuments: there were shifting displays on major buildings like Parliament House and an array of bizarre and humourous projections on Old Parliament House – everything from graffiti to political cartoons to pictures of major events in Australian history. Even at 11.00 at night there were many many people – and as I said, many families – out and about, taking in the lights.

And of course lots of cameras.

One of the astonishing things about the evening – about the whole long weekend – was how good-humoured people were, even in the face of queues and some questionable choices for entertainment. When random strangers offer to share their chips you know something special is going on.

I’m determined to take in as many of the other events on this year as I can. And to take pictures.

Not the man I play

Back to it. The year wears on with too many interesting things happening unremarked upon, and too many bad habits remaining to be broken.

Summer in the southern hemisphere is pretty much over, although like winter on the other side of the equator it seems to be hanging around long past the point where it’s welcome. We in the antipodes will match the heavy snows and rains in the US and Europe with lingering sunny weather after a record-breaking hot summer. And our own weird weather.

In February I took a trip up to the Big Smoke for the Sydney Shakespeare Festival. It’s been running for a couple of years but this is the first time I’ve pulled my finger out and gone along. It’s happily, and enthusiastically, an amateur affair: some of the people involved are studying drama in various places, and can draw on that experience. Others, not. And it didn’t matter. One of the blessings of Shakespeare’s comedies is that enthusiasm makes up for a lot; when your season involves two popular and very forgiving plays that enthusiasm can go a long way.

At the tail end of a sultry and stormy Friday the little company put on As You Like It – and a little company it was, maybe fifteen people all up and only eight or nine in the actual play, which made for some interesting doubling (though I’m not sure having Charles the wrestler re-appear as the ousted Duke is a wise choice – especially, in this case, with such a weak actor taking on the roles). There was some real creativity, too: when talking to the Duke about his desire for a motley coat the actor playing Jaques put on a very Carmen Miranda hat and then reappeared a few scenes later ‘playing’ the sluttish Audrey to a rather camp Touchstone. All the ensuing exchanges between the two were played out as if Touchstone knew exactly who he was talking to – and Jaques/Audrey knew he knew – but with as much romantic sincerity as Touchstone could manage. Both gave every impression they were enjoy the game, the pursuit. Nevertheless, at the end of the play Jaques still goes off to converse with the convertite Duke Frederick. Touchstone is left alone and Jaques’ parting shot – “thy loving voyage Is but for two months victuall’d” – becomes both poignant and vicious.

I’ve asked and looked around and I can’t find any indication that anyone else has tried this approach, so kudos to the team. I thought it lent something new and interesting to the characters and the plays – which is, after all, about trying on roles and playing with gender.

While some of the performances were patchy and the short and zaftig Rosalind made for an unconvincing boy, this was, overall, a fun production played out in a spectacular location: Jubilee Park in Rozelle, looking out through the ANZAC Bridge to the Harbour.

The view got more amazing as the sky darkened: incoming weather and planes, lighting up the low clouds before wallowing their way into Kingsford Smith.

Alas, the weather got more weather-y. That Saturday in Sydney brought a succession of storms with heavy rain. Sydney doesn’t cope well with rain: the appalling traffic gets worse and it’s quite surprising how few people have umbrellas, especially given the forecast, the lowering clouds, the fact that it was probably raining when they left the house …

I noticed on this trip that compared to a lot of cities in Europe, Sydney has a serious deficiency of enterprising street vendors ready to swap their knock-off handbags for crappy umbrellas come the first drop of rain. Well-enforced trading laws probably have a lot to do with that, as does the threat of violence from competitive convenience store owners. It would be a brave hawker who set up within a coo-ee of a 24 hour mini-mart in Sydney. And there are so many mini-marts. And so few of them have umbrellas.

Like I said, the Festival had themselves a great location – but it’s not one amenable to heavy weather. The Saturday evening performance of Much Ado About Nothing was cancelled – and further kudos for the Sydney Shakespeare Festival team for giving people plenty of notice – which just meant creative dinner arrangements were required.

But not this creative:

A few weeks later it was the ever-professional Bell Shakespeare Company and a new production of Henry IV, the two parts conflated into one play. Obviously this requires some cutting, and for the most part this was well done. The critical central story survived but the end result did have rather more Falstaff than was required – there comes a point when you just don’t need to be reminded any more of his drunkenness, debauchery and disease – but since it was John Bell himself in the role I suppose there was no one involved in the editing willing to trim back on his lines …

This is a modern dress production in minimalist decayed urban set – a giant wall of milk crates (which doesn’t survive long), a battered shipping container, assorted trash. A somewhat blokey Hal plays his games with Falstaff and his ‘crew’ – who could have passed muster at a casting call for Waiting for Godot – while clearly not being part of the gang. In the scene where Hal and Falstaff take turns at playing the King, where Hal effectively warns Falstaff that one day he will shun the drunken knight, the young Prince gradually becomes cooler, even more distant, more commanding. And Falstaff can see this in him, too. He recoiled from it – but his pride and stupidity and self-justification require him to shake off his emerging fear and carry on oblivious. Even when Hal makes good on his threat Bell’s Falstaff shows no signs of having learned anything.

This is the darker side of Hal, the man behind the lad who is prepared to deceive absolutely everybody because it suits his purposes to do so. And he’s happy to admit this to the audience. It’s a Hal who plays the roles he chooses, and plays them the way he chooses. It’s the prince-as-sociopath, the manipulator and Machivell who’s prepared to hang Bardolph as an example and kill the prisoners at Agincourt – the Hal glossed over by Olivier and Branagh in favour of the myth of the mirror of all Christian kings.

This isn’t an original way of looking at Hal, I know, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen Henry IV or Henry V – a decent production, anyway – and the Branagh version of the character in particular had settled into my brain. He’s gone now.

So – good production, worth seeing, look out for the rendition of Jerusalem and sing along if you can. Just try not to think of Johnny Rotten’s voice creeping in from an unexpected direction.

Arch-nemesis

The Sunday morning archery continues, after a Christmas hiatus and a short break occasioned by a competitive event (for other people) over the Australia Day long weekend.  This had some useful benefits to the recreational twangers like me: there are now distance markers running down both sides of the field. Very handy if you’re one of those people who are terrible at judging distances. Which I am.

Best I can figure the first couple of times I went, to the open sessions where anyone can have a go, I/we were shooting at targets around nine metres away. Things can get crowded. And messy.

But manageable. The thing about shooting at something that close, though, is that after a while it becomes hard for anyone but a complete duffer to miss the target. And the long ago muscle memory from teenage archering woke up enough to find it a bit meh. So the gaggle of us going and shooting together started to stake out a target to share, and move it out. We shot at 12-15 metres for a while, and pretty soon that started to become not much of a challenge, too. The weather, and I think mood, became the main variables – especially once I started using the same bow every week.

I should explain that when I say ‘not much of a challenge’, I don’t mean I was walking away from a session with ninety minutes of bulls-eyes behind me. I mean I could reliably hit the target every time, and get pretty close – increasingly close, and increasingly consistently – to where I was aiming, if not on the spot. For me, that’s pretty damn good: I’m not a sporty person, I don’t have the same kinesthetic senses and hand-eye coordination that many people do (in fact I have been notorious for most of my life for my lack of hand-eye coordination) – or indeed the skills that one of my shooting companions has: one of those people who gets good at pretty much anything they try in a fairly short time, and bloody good after a little practice. And yet, as I’ve said, I could sense that I was getting better at this. It’s a very satisfying feeling.

Yesterday marked a step up, in several ways. First, a fairly crowded session meant we were steered toward the serious end of the field. One side is always taken up by the hard core: people with everything from hand-made traditional wooden longbows (and arrows to match) to expensive and complicated carbon fibre compound bows (and occasionally some scary camouflage gear).

(I will say now that I’ve always thought of compound bows as cheating. If I were to buy my own bow – which looks increasingly likely – it will be a simple recurve bow. And probably wood!)

Second, this meant a target 30 metres away. Not, as far as I understand things, a competition distance (all Olympic events involve shooting at something 70 metres away. And some of those targets are damn small.).

Third, we were shooting at a more robust target – more like competition standard. I will come back to this.

So: more than double the distance me and my archering companions had become accustomed to. For me, this meant I had a problem tracking the arrow in flight, and seeing where it landed – a real problem because for most of the first half hour I missed the target almost every time. I just can’t see something as small as an arrow – as narrow in cross-section – over that distance. And yet all those target-missing arrows were easy to find, as they weren’t going too far beyond the target, and – reassuring, this – they were all ending up in pretty much the same spot. At least I was consistent. The serious folks we were sharing the target with suggested that the light draw on the bow (24lb in my case, i.e. the equivalent, at full draw, of lifting a 24lb weight one-handed) was maybe going to be a problem over that distance. It wasn’t, really, but that probably explained why the arrows weren’t going much further than the target.

After fiddling with the very basic sights on the bow, and compensating for a fairly steady breeze (both novel experiences)  I started hitting the target almost every shot. And that gave me a very definite sense of accomplishment, since there were multiple challenges – eyesight, distance, cross-wind, being no kind of sportsman at all – to overcome to get to that point. True, the shots were all over the target, but I hit the red a couple of times.

And then, alas, there was the last round of the day.

The target was a fairly solid thing. The ones rolled out for the casual shooters (a group that still include me … for now) are a dense foam with a competition standard paper target pinned to them. They’re either resting on the ground, propped up by a tripod, or elevated slightly on a metal frame.

The target we were shooting at yesterday was elevated about a metre off the ground. The butt itself (ooh! technical term) had a foam centre but that was mounted in a hard wood frame. Which we hit, a lot. And even with a puny little 24lb bow, even with aluminium or carbon fibre arrows, a good shot hitting that hard wood, or the metal stand, could be … amusing.

A chum’s carbon fibre arrow was blunted from hitting the wood: the steel tip was flattened down into a classic truncated cone. That meant when she hit the metal frame, any ‘crumple zone’ protection the arrow might have had was gone, and all the shock of impact was transmitted to the shaft of the arrow. The result was carbon fibre showing clearly why it’s called carbon fibre:

No shrapnel. Just textbook delamination and the beginnings of a high-tech whisk.

Alas, the aluminium arrows I was using didn’t fare much better. On the last round of the morning I hit the metal stand twice. One arrow bounced half-way back to the shooting line, losing its head along the way. It can be repaired. The other … went to arrow heaven.

But It still felt like an accomplishment. I killed an arrow! And I may do so again, since there’s the opportunity to take things up to the actual next level by joining a six-week ‘intermediate’ class.

Which I think I will do. I know I’m never going to get exceptionally good at this – not a sporty guy, eyesight, coordinawhatnow? – but I enjoy it. It accords with what little sense of sportiness I have: that ultimately it should come down to an individual’s capabilities, and if there’s equipment involved it should be as simple as possible (I have a pet rant about the need for an Olympic standard bicycle, for use in all events). Plus it’s archaic, not quite useless, not especially strenuous, and just social enough.

Sounds like me.

Westward ho ho ho

Sitting in a rather deserted Qantas Club in Canberra Airport, much earlier for my flight than I need to be. I was expecting mayhem but apparently there are few Canberrans foolish enough to organise their holiday flights for Christmas Eve.

I’m absolutely confident of getting my dose of Christmas travel mayhem at the other end. Perth Airport? Worst Travel Hub Anywhere. There are third world dirts strips that only ever see rusting DC3s which are better organised and run than Perth Airport. Fortunately, I’m being picked up: it’s a challenge to make the Perth Airport experience worse, but trying to get a taxi there will do it.

In keeping with the Christmas spirit – at least as expressed by Sinatra, Doris Day, Dean Martin and others – the weather outside is frightful: low cloud, storms, squally rain. Lovely flying weather (but now I think of it, exceptionally Christmassy: if we have Donner and Blitzen then Rudolph and the others can’t be too far away).


So far the flights don’t seem to be delayed, and I know once we get above the weather it should be a smooth flight. But the take-off is going to be white knuckle, maybe.

I’m confident of getting out tonight, though. There is only one daily direct flight from Canberra to Perth, and if I have to do the trek across the continent I always make sure I’m on it. That probably seems strange: only one direct flight each way between the national capital and the far-flung western province, but it’s symbolic or symptomatic or something of the odd relationship between Western Australia and the rest of the country – the ‘eastern states’, as we used to call them … and the natives probably still do; lumping the rest of the country together as a homogenous mass to be distrusted, blamed or ruthlessly exploited for money and talent as the situation requires.

There are, of course, plenty of indirect flights, via Sydney or Melbourne or even Brisbane and, on the odd occasion, when one has a discount fare, several other cities in succession. And indirect flight to Perth, though, can mean seven to ten hours of travel time to get from one end of the country to another. The four or five hour direct flight is long enough, thanks.

And at the other end – other that bloody Perth Airport – will be the traditional Perth Christmas (hot) with a traditional Christmas lunch (roast beast &c, something which makes less sense every year) and the traditional visiting relatives melting in a corner. The difference this time is that the holidaying cousins may be on reconnaissance; economic refugees from the Celtic taiga (flat, cold, and largely devoid of activity).

Yes, I’m dreaming – so to speak – of a fine and hot with a maximum of forty degrees Christmas, just like the ones I used to know. Where the only thing white is the sky, or the sand on the beach, or the unexposed flesh of visiting relatives (if it isn’t already pink).

Although to be honest, I’m more inclined to dream of a real white Christmas. With snow. Somewhere all the traditions make sense. That would be nice. I think I should start planning.
On to the plane. Once we get off the ground, the only thing to worry about will be flying kangaroos.

PS: I spoke too soon: the plane landed late, and the flight has been delayed pending hail inspection! This is probably normal in a lot of the Christmas world. Not so much Australia.

An unexpected pleasure

Apparently I am now grown so predictable that “I have no plans for Sunday” is taken to mean “I’ll be on the couch with a new book.” What’s galling about this is that I was made aware of this predictability by a 10.30 Sunday morning phone call which found me, yes, on the sofa with a new book; that was where I was for most of the day; I eventually got showered and dressed about 4.30 that afternoon. I make no apologies for this. In fact when I am asked about my weekend, and I say (not as often as I used to, nor as often as I should) that I spent most of it on the couch reading, the most common reaction is “wish I could do that …”

On this occasion it was unexpected, most definitely not planned, and yet another instance of ignoring the appalling backlog of unread books in favour of something new: the latest from Lois McMaster Bujold, a book I didn’t even know was coming.

Bujold has written many (N>14, as she explains in a note to the latest) books, novellas and stories about the world of Barrayar, its expanding empire and its military mad (but not militaristic) culture. Most of these have been about Miles Vorkosigan: a unique and memorable creation – not that I’m going in to that now. Most of the Miles books have also included his much-abused, much-used, much put-upon and much-underestimated cousin Ivan, who now – and I never imagined I’d say this, finally – gets a book of his own.

Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance opens with cousin Ivan on Komarr, Barrayar’s gateway to the universe, doing the kind of work he loves: predictable, stimulating, and entirely without physical risk. Under other circumstances it would also leave him plenty of time for socialising, but the planet’s nights are too short for that. Best of all, his cousin Miles is a world away: happily married, newly a father and unlikely to drag Ivan into another adventure. But of course there are other relatives more than willing to take advantage of Ivan’s good nature, sense of honour, and weakness for a pretty (and pneumatic) girl. As a result, Captain Vorpatril finds himself making an unexpected and increasingly complicated alliance, digging for buried treasure, gambling for the fate of worlds and – most surprising of all – making his mother happy.

Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance has no grand battles, few spaceships (serving only as transport), and little of the intrigues and politicking of the other Barrayar books – although this being Barrayar, and Bujold, there has to be a bit of both. It’s more reminiscent of A Civil Campaign than the other Barrayar books, being as much a comedy (truly) of manners and morals as anything else. It’s a far more likeable and readable book than Bujold’s last, and all the more welcome for being so. I’d even go so far as calling it a return to form: cleverly and tightly written, amusing in places, insightful throughout. The pace isn’t exactly breakneck but neither does it drag: it draws you in on a pleasant ride to a satisfying, somewhat predictable (but no less satisfying for being predictable) conclusion.

Like I said, I never thought I’d see or welcome an Ivan-centred book. Of course Miles Vorkosigan gets a look in – Bujold wouldn’t dare not give him a walk-on role – but in many ways his story is done. It’s hard to see where else Bujold could take that wonderful character, short of backfilling imagined gaps in his imagined history. But Barrayar the world and the panoply of characters Bujold has populated it with do offer scope for more. Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance makes me hope for more – in a way that Cryoburn most definitely didn’t.

Which is curious, because I was wondering lately why another author kept re-using characters and settings. He gave a very good answer to the question when I asked him …

Where the hell have I been?

Well …

1. Cut off from the rest of the world as a result of a lowest-bidder subcontractor for the local pay TV company deciding, for reasons passing mere human understanding, to chop through the phone cables to my flat. Rectifying the problem involved finding the fault (30 minutes), figuring out who was responsible for fixing it (body corporate – four days), cutting in to a concrete floor to expose more wiring (20 minutes), re-connecting the wires (not sure but surely no more than 10 minutes) and then waiting for a technician to come around and check on things (two weeks and three appointments for which he failed to turn up).

For personal internet access I have been limited to my phone, which I used as a personal hotspot once a day to download the newspapers to my iPad and otherwise served as my sole internet access platform for non-work stuff. I was cautious about using the personal hotspot option too much as I’ve also been

2 Arguing with a telco about charges for data use overseas, which is a popular Australian recreation. Despite undertaking extensive research before going to the UK, estimating data use (difficult, when the monthly bills don’t give very detailed information), buying an ‘international roaming data pack’ before I went, using wifi as much as possible while travelling, turning off data services when not in use &c &c – everything the telco and the industry ombudsman and so on tell you to do – I was hit this month with a phone bill of more than $4000. Which, without that data pack, would have been more than $5000. For net data traffic of less than 350MB.

This, my unknown reader, is sheer extortion, and a consequence, so a barrister friend told me, of misleading and deceptive conduct. I’m inclined to agree: I did all that research and still wasn’t exactly sure I had all the information I needed (like, for example, a good idea of my routine data use). The telco couldn’t tell me how much data that data pack would give me – just a dollar value, hard to map on to an amount in MB when you get hit with a $0.50 fee every time you connect to a 3G service. A fee which seems to be unique to this telco – the others I’ve looked at offer international data packs for 250MB, 500MB and so on (and for much lower rates … serves me right).

Even more annoying is getting asked to pay $4000 for frankly crap service: 3G reception for the provider my own telco defaulted to in the UK was rubbish. There were times in the middle of London and on major highways when I had no 3G service – no phone signal at times – despite my travelling companions (who bought local SIMs, something I will definitely do in future) having excellent reception on another network. In four days in Northumberland I hardly had a phone signal, and there were only a few hours on two days when I had 3G access, and yet I somehow managed to use $1300 worth of data.

But there is good news. I disputed the bill – the amount of data used, the charges, the poor service, the time it took for the telco to respond to the complaint – and as of this afternoon they have knocked $3000 off the bill. Still a big bill – the equivalent of a year’s phone bills in one hit, but better. Manageable.

So here is today’s valuable advice: argue with your telco.

And then take a shower afterwards because even if you win they’ll leave you feeling grubby.

Although taking a shower can present its own challenges, as I’ve found in

3. Getting the bathrooms done, specifically resealed and retiled in response to the depredations of age, damp, and changes in taste in fittings. It’s easy to date the bathrooms in my flat: the pastel grey on dusty pink tiles just scream 80s, and it’s likely no work has been done on them since the complex was built. So: power tools, tilers, plasterers, plumbers, concrete dust everywhere and no point in cleaning up because there’s more to come. Being blessed with both a proper bathroom (hardly used) and an en suite (location of the most serious damp problem) I could at least count on having one functioning bathroom at any time … except the first shower in the renovated en suite revealed a blocked drain, and I only barely avoided a flooded bathroom. Nine floors up and I had to bale out the shower recess. Such fun.

The accumulated frustration from all of this (no, I don’t have a lot of other stress in my life) has sometimes inspired a desire to go out and shoot something, but I’ve been dealing with that by

4. Committing archery on a Sunday morning. Yup, having tried it for the first time in (cough) ages on the recent holiday and been reminded of how much I enjoyed it, my erstwhile travelling companions and I have been going along to the open sessions at the Canberra Archery Centre for the past five weeks. And, gradually, getting better at it. I would feel much more chuffed about the result in the picture – yes, I shot those arrows – if the target wasn’t so damn close. But for the time being the focus is on form: it’s not exactly a natural sequence of actions, and the idea is to reduce as many variables as possible by at least having a consistent form, so the aim (so to speak) is to get all of that right, or better, and then worry about hitting something a decent distance away. For me there’s the added challenge of shooting left-handed – that’s bow in the right hand, draw with the left – because I’m left-eye dominant.

But I am getting better. It seems like I did have some muscle memory somewhere. What has come back, in spades, is how satisfying a good shot can be: the way the arrow wobbles through the air, the thunk when it hits the target, the reassuring lack of pain when you remember to rotate your elbow so the bowstring doesn’t take a couple of layers of skin off the inside of your arm …

Even so: I’m having trouble getting my head around the fact that I own sporting equipment. In fact I think this is the first non bike related sporting equipment I’ve ever owned.

Hell, some time in the near future I might buy myself a bow.

In spite of all these distractions, though, I have managed to churn through a pile of books (possibly even more than usual, what with Issue 1, above) and even mange to ask a question or two of some authors – a rare treat in Canberra, since visiting international writers often give us a miss.

More on that later …

Too much information

Home. Where, unless things have gone horribly wrong, the shower is close to ideal, the coffee is how you like it and the bed is just right. It’s hard not to come over all Goldilocks when you get home after a long trip. Except for the stuff about breaking and entering. And the bears. And – you have to hope – the gruesome, Grimm-original ending.

Although breaking into your own house or flat at the end of a trip is one of those things some people possibly wind up having to do. Things get lost. Bags end up on the wrong continent. I’ve never had to do it, myself. Important safety tip: when flying home, the house keys go in the carry-on luggage.

Yes, home to the necessary washing machine; to not too much unopened mail and nothing unspeakable in the fridge. To plenty of sleep, welcome back messages and the unsurprising news that everything at work has been changed. Again. Fortunately, I don’t have to worry about that until next week.

The last few days in England were not exactly jam-packed, a mix of the fun and the … not. Other than washing clothes and a trip to the post office my only other plans for Friday involved an evening event at the British Library, celebrating the 75th anniversary of the publishing of The Hobbit, and then a trip to Paddington Station to pick up a bear meet a friend who flew over from Prague for the weekend. That meant staying up late, talking, and not getting enough sleep. Which may have had a material effect on where the weekend ended up.

Saturday involved the last (for me) seriously touristy and pre-booked thing for the trip: a visit to St Paul’s Cathedral. It’s a place I’ve walked past and photographed and even ducked into before (to use the loo), but never actually explored. So it had to be done.

It’s an impressive pile, absolutely, from outside and inside. But it’s also clearly suffering a bad case of St. Peter’s envy and one of my chums quite rightly observed that – with apologies to Sir Christopher Wren, a lineage of Deans and anyone who worships there regularly – the atmosphere has little of the religious about it: St. Paul’s is a monumental declaration of state and commercial power and the relationship between them. Consider the location: almost on the border between the City of Westminster, home of the government and the bureaucracy, and the City of London, the City proper, the square mile of money, machinations and fucked-up Masters of the Universe. The only place in London where the shops are shut on the weekend, ’cause the bankers and the lawyers have gone back to Sussex and Somerset.

The decoration in the nave is, of course, focused on religious imagery but the spiritual essence is lost behind an ostentation of gaud, especially the ceiling mosaics, which seem to be a collision between Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement, with due acknowledgement to the great and good and well-connected who paid for them: in the South Quire aisle, for example – right next to the High Altar – there’s a mosaic bracketed by Masonic symbols.

The most unambiguous religious sentiment I saw was up in the dome, in the frescoes and the statues of Augustine and others – but from floor level, you’d hardly know they were there, and you certainly wouldn’t know who the statues were supposed to be.

The focus on state power and state purposes is there in other parts of the building, too: the American chapel at the west end of the quire, the OBE chapel and the prominence given to Nelson’s and Wellington’s tombs in the Crypt. Nelson’s is right under the dome: the floor of the nave was removed to allow his body and the monument to be lowered in. Wellington’s tomb is under the dome altar: it looks remarkably like Napoleon’s memorial in Les Invalides. The Crypt also contains tombs and monuments to many other servants of the Empire: not just generals but artists and composers, too. After ‘Sir’ I swear the most commonly-used three letter combinations were CMG, FRS and FRA.

For me, the most moving monument in the place was the relatively small plaque dedicated to those who died in the Arctic convoys. I couldn’t say why it affected me as much as it did but I have a similar response to the Battle of Britain memorial down on the Thames: I dare anyone to go look at that thing, to look at the average age of those who died, and not be moved.

Anyway. I couldn’t go to St. Paul’s without climbing the dome (thinking, on the way up, about the poor buggers who pretty much lived up there on fire watch during the Blitz). It’s a looong climb, and a tiring one: less dark and narrow and squeaky than some of the castles and cathedrals I’ve visited before (the Duomo in Florence springs to mind) but still a trial. A trial made all the more exacting by the poor reward at the end. Not the views, which are as spectacular as you might imagine, but the mass of people, half of them on the phone. The top of the dome was probably never intended for visitors; the walkway around the cupola is narrow, and access is made more difficult by the knots of people who thought the best way to observe the occasion was to call someone. (I confess to a Facebook post – with a picture – but I did so quickly, discretely and quietly.)

From St. Paul’s we took a plunge, for reasons I’m still not altogether clear about, into the madness of Saturday afternoon streets in central London, specifically Covent Garden, Oxford and Regent Streets – for Hamley’s, of course. We saw the Queen:

Tackling any one of those places on a sunny Saturday afternoon is a bad idea. Hitting them all, and Knightsbridge, was just dumb dumb dumb, not my idea and most definitely not recommended. Go somewhere else. Go anywhere else. Shop online.

And then, for my last day in England, some real fun. Please be warned I have a freshly loaded sarcasm trowel here.

First: raining. One of the few spells of heavy rain in the whole trip. It really does make getting around London difficult. I saw off my Prague friend at Paddington, and got a taxi back to Pimlico because I had no desire to deal with the Tube when it was raining, and I was feeling less than optimal. Now, London taxi drivers – the black cab drivers – are legendary, and for good reason. It takes at least three years and multiple attempts at the test to acquire ‘the knowledge’ and get a license: the result is drivers who really do know all the alleys and short-cuts, where to go for this and that, and often a fair bit of history besides. However, this doesn’t stop them being arseholes, and I encountered one on the way back from Paddington: obscene, racist and dismissive. Fortunately, he was more than cancelled out by the two other drivers I encountered that day.

Then: lunch. At Claridge’s. My travelling companions were celebrating a special occasion and wanted to do so in style. I’ve mentioned before that this kind of brand name dining (Gordon Ramsay, in this case) is not my thing, and now I have another reason why. The service and presentation was everything you’d expect, the menu suitably obscure, the food rich. But it was too much, in a number of ways: the restaurant made me feel uncomfortable and the food made me ill. Whether it was a previously unencountered ingredient, the richness and fattiness of the food, some kitchen slip-up or some weird chemistry between one or more of these and the fact that I was incredibly tired … well, the result was unpleasant. I made it back to flat in Pimlico OK – nice driver – but lost half my lunch in the flat and the rest in full view of the glorious public on the concourse at Heathrow a few hours later. How I managed to pack my bags, get a cab – in the rain, long wait; got wet – to Paddington and then the train to bloody Heathrow, through check-in and everything else without falling over I do not know. Necessity, I suppose – my travelling companions were staying for another day, so no back-up. I wound up paying for a few hours access to a non-membership lounge, to clean up and get at least a little sleep in a cubicle bedroom. I made it to Singapore without embarrassment with the help of a very understanding cabin attendant, who fed me pretzels and lemonade – needed the salt, the sugar and the fluids – and let me in to the galley to top up my water bottle.

I was really, really glad to get home.

By the end I wanted to come home, which is a good way to feel at the end of a holiday. In 11 days me and my travelling companions drove 1712 miles – 2755 kilometres – across the literal length and breadth of England: from London to Cardiff (the only part of the trip outside England proper) and from Bath to the Farne Islands. I took more than 900 photos, already culled down to about 700 (there was much fiddling with exposures on some occasions). I picked up about 15 kilograms of books and souvenirs, the bulk of which I have been guaranteed will be delivered tomorrow. I saw eight Shakespeare plays, three fresh episodes of Doctor Who and wrote six (including this one) blog posts, which at least a few people seem to have read and liked. Thanks for that.

On the flight from Singapore to Sydney – on an A380, definitely a better flying experience than the 747 – I sat next to a chap who’d just finished a holiday with his wife in South Asia. Through the flight, in the dark, he painstakingly drafted an update to his own blog on his laptop. I confess I took the occasional peak at what he was writing. It was … very detailed. Every meal. Every encounter. Every stop. Everything recorded, right up to – I swear – dinner on the plane, the fact that his wife had gone to sleep and that he was wrapping up his trip blog. And after he wrote that he opened a different document, an electronic task list. The last two entries – written who knows when, however many weeks or days before or into the trip – were ‘wife to sleep’ and ‘ me to finish trip blog’.

Very thorough.

Not me.

Normal, erratic service will resume shortly.

The north side of this pleasant chase, Part 2

Chillingham Castle. Home to some famous cattle, apparently. I have been patiently explaining to one of my companions for more than a week that when it comes to animals domesticated or otherwise I have enough trouble discriminating between edible and not. I can tell a cow from a sheep; differentiating the varieties thereof is not a skill I ever felt I needed to acquire.
As for the castle – James VI/I stayed here, on the way south to claim the English throne. William Wallace once butchered the residents. Edward Longshanks came to the rescue. It lays claim to being the most haunted casle in England, but since the ghost tours are £20 a pop, that claim will go untested. Colourful place.

The decor is all huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ knicknackery with odds and ends of empire and bad art; the plumbing is about what you’d expect from a castle, and an English one at that, but it’s a fine and blog-worthy place to stay. They don’t seem to make much of their tea associations, though. And the cattle don’t seem to be on the menu in the cafe …
Chillingham served as another base, for explorations of Northumberland, of the coast and Roman ruins in particular. We spent one morning on Holy Island, accessible via a low-lying and risky causeway only when the tides permit. Yet there was no shortage of visitors (and their dogs), all come to see Lindisfarne Priory – and, possibly, a castle some Victorian romantic turned into a holiday home.

The Priory – once home to St Cuthbert and source of the famous illuminated gospels – is one of those places I always thought I might like to see, albeit not on my ‘must do’ list. It was, though, for one of my companions, mainly on account of its importance in a favourite childhood book. I completely understand this approach to travel: many or the parts of Ireland I’ve most wanted to see – and mostly have seen – were featured in a jigsaw one of my relatives sent me when I was about 10! I was quite amazed when I realised that was what had put them on my list. This visit to England has been full of this kind of resonance: for me, even driving through places I have heard and read about for years – exotic locales like Stow-on-the-Wold! – has its own kind of thrill; stopping and walking around York and other historic sites, especially those featured in Shakespeare’s plays, is even better.
From Lindisfarne to the strangely-named town of Seahouses, for a cruise around the Farne Islands. This is a cluster of a couple of dozen islands (the exact number depending on the tides) which, among old lighthouses and older chapels and forts, host a wide variety of seabirds and other wildlife. No puffins on this trip, unfortunately, but plenty of seals. Two of the islands host groups of rangers, who spend nine months of the year counting birds – a job one of them mentioned is sometimes made easier by RAF overflights – something that seems to happen a lot in Northumberland. The sound of the jets startles some birds into flight, and makes the ground-dwelling birds like puffins pop up for a look.
While the islands aren’t far offshore the rangers don’t have a boat. Or running water. Or reliable power.
Nine months on very small islands. Young, attractive rangers, mostly recent graduates, with nothing to do but … count birds.

They don’t warn you, when you buy your ticket for the boat, that it costs £5 a head to get off on one of these islands for a walk around (and a chat with the rangers, who seemed desperate for the distraction). Cash only, and we’d used all of ours for the cruise …
I swear I am going to send a care package to the Farne Island rangers, for letting a bunch of crazy, disorganised Australians on to the island for free.
We went inland the following day, to the excavations and museum at Vindolanda. This is a large Roman fort and village, built for the troops posted to Hadrian’s Wall. I was in Rome two years ago, and I walked around the Forum and the Colosseum; I couldn’t help but think about that as I walked around Vindolana: from the heart of the Roman Empire to its furthest reaches. It would have taken some of the soldiers who served there much longer than two years to make the same journey.

The most amazing things at Vindolanda – probably the thing that has done most to secure the significance of the site, other than its size – are the tablets, matchbook-size samples of Roman writing from several centuries. They include accounts, birthday greetings, party invitations and pleas for more beer. They give names to and a sense of the lives of people who lived and died at the fringes of the Roman Empire – at the literal end of their world – two millennia ago. I’d go so far as to say that these and the other displays at Vindolanda, artefacts and reconstructions both, surpassed anything I saw in Rome. The museum at Vindolanda is quite new, though to my joy I discovered it was built to look older than it is: it certainly feels like it was planted there decades ago. Unfortunately, I think it renders the nearby and associated Roman Army Museum somewhat redundant: while that’s sited near a larger fort the ruins are less well-preserved, or at least less thoroughly excavated, and it’s hard to justify visiting both.
After that it was a long drive through crowds of pheasant, a visit to Durham Cathedral for the tomb of the aforementioned St Cuthbert (and the bones of the Venerable Bede) and then the long drive down the M1 to London (enlivened by a burning truck on the other side of the road and a shed load on ours) and another rentable flat, this time in Pimlico. Not an area I’m familiar with, but it has a washing machine and a post office, both critical at this stage of the trip. I’m heading home in a few days; I need clean clothes at least for the flight and I needed to shed some impedimenta; I’ve just spent £150 sending 13kg of stuff, mainly books, back to Australia. This happens every time I come to the UK!

The north side of this pleasant chase, Part 1

Stratford proved to be a reasonably good base for diving into the heart of England: day trips to Bath, to Cardiff (for the Doctor Who Experience), and – for my companions – a drive most of the way back to London, to the Fat Duck. Not my thing, so I stayed in Stratford for a look around again.

Bath was crowded, even on a weekday; narrow Georgian streets with too many vehicles and too many pedestrians. Even so – lunch at the Pump Room was lovely, and the baths themselves are ever more astounding, with new finds and displays. Cardiff was sunshiny and busy, and probably unrecognisable from my mother’s childhood. The Doctor Who exhibition was so much more fun with a 10-year-old in train. Even if you’re not 10, however, walking through those Tardis doors is a thrill …
The exhibition includes the costumes of all the Doctors, and many companions; every variety of Dalek and many other famous monsters, some unjustly almost forgotten. And of course the shop includes many inspirations to separate you from your money: but then the Doctor greets you at the start of the ‘adventure’ with “Hello shoppers!”

As for Stratford – well, I’m even more convinced that it’s cursed. It’s lovely enough, as I said, but the people seem downcast, somehow. By comparison the people in Tewkesbury – where we stopped on the way back from Cardiff – for a bloody nice and very English afternoon tea – seemed cheerful, the town seemed brighter and cleaner, and it was altogether a nicer place to be. Like Stratford, Tewkesbury could be said to have a single draw card: the eponymous battle from the Wars of the Roses. The town has clearly embraced its history, with banners of the nobles who fought in the battle hanging from most of the buildings in the main street. But Tewkesbury in no way depends on that historical association for its ambience and what little attraction to tourists it might have, and I suppose that’s the difference.
A last-minute decision to have a non-travelling day led to a surprising discovery among Stratford’s local attractions: Mary Arden’s farm, in a village a few miles out of Stratford and close to the cottages where we were staying. The farm – once owned by Shakespeare’s mother – is maintained as a working Tudor farm complete with costumed workers and animal breeds from the period. It has all the smells you might expect from a small, working farm, and many other distractions: a falconry display (with owls) as well as working smithies; the opportunity to try archery (for the first time in years, for me; for the first time for the 10-year-old, and she seems hooked); and surprisingly good food from the little cafe. The staff throughout were pleasant and knowledgeable and the experience justified the all-in-one ticket for Shakespeare’s birthplace and Nash’s house, in town – which, as I’ve sort-of said, were disappointing, and, for the price, would probably be so even to someone who isn’t a Shakespeare snob.
After a week in Stratford we took off to the north: to York, and a night in the Guy Fawkes Inn. Which involved lugging suitcases up several flights of stairs – the last more like a carpeted ladder than a stairway – to a small suite of rooms called the Belfry. Head-crackingly low ceilings but nice views over the old town and, from the bathroom, of York Minister. Heaven help any early-walking monks who were up on the roof …

If the whole Inn had a true horizontal surface above the ground floor I didn’t see or find it. Coins placed casually on the dresser in my room slid off. The bed itself had a slight tilt and you could probably hold marble races in the small sitting room. But we didn’t mind. It was a great place to stay.
York itself was a delight, and offered more that we could see in an overnight stay. We managed a walk of the walls, and a visit to the excellent Jorvik Viking Centre. The thing that struck me most about York – other than the fact that has a ridiculous number of churches for a town that size – is that in the past someone had the sense to leave most of the streets in the oldest part of town closed off to traffic, or to only allow vehicle access a limited times. The various little lanes and byways were well-exploited in the ‘original’, Equity-accredited ghost tour; the guide was well-rehearsed and made excellent use of his voice, hands and props: entirely unnecessary (but for their dramatic effect) cane and gloves. We are to suspect that he might have been tailoring some of his stories to suit where people were staying – but we didn’t mind!

York itself was full of people and life and pleasing vistas and tea-rooms, and it made me wonder why Stratford or even Bath doesn’t follow suit and pedestrianise the core: it would make them both much nicer places to visit. I would find it hard to believe it would have any real negative effect on commerce.
And finally, after an afternoon’s drive and a fabulous lunch in the George and Dragon in the village of Heighington, we reached the far reaches of the kingdom: in Northumberland, at Chillingham Castle, the ancestral seat of the Earls Grey (what a pity I don’t like tea).
More later.

And another such

From London to the wilds of Warwickshire; to a farm cottage just outside Stratford-Upon-Avon and a week of plays.

The middle of Stratford seems like a lovely, almost clichéd English town: the river, a canal, barges, a nice little park and some quirky shops. What’s unique here, of course, is the Royal Shakespeare Company riverside theatres and their new tower, not quite looming over it all. Don’t get me wrong: I like the RSC, I have a week’s worth of plays to see that I’m looking forward to – in addition to what I saw in London (more on which later) – and I’ve no doubt that they’re worth the ticket prices and the massive public subsidies. And my love of Shakespeare is well-known.
But Stratford is a town cursed by a single famous son and a lazy tourism industry.
I started writing this in a lovely little cafe just up the street from Shakespeare’s birthplace. it’s highly recommended on tripadvisor and other sites – but those same sites also warn of the generally poor-to-average quality and high prices of food in Stratford, and it’s true. It’s symptomatic of a lack of effort in many places: they know the tourists will come; tourists who need to be fed and watered and accommodated and souvenired. Too often the result is lowest common denominator. That seems to have extended to the efforts of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, too.
At this point I feel obliged to insert a Shakespeare snobbery warning.
Travel site warnings aside I think things have improved here since my last visit six years ago: there are more, and more novel eateries. Accommodation routinely includes wifi, even on a farm three miles out of town. The new park and the new theatres are fabulous – there’s no doubt that the RSC’s digs needed an upgrade. And if you come here and think about that curse for even a moment you know you are going to face Shakespeherian everything. Erasers with ‘out damn spot’ on them. Busts. T-shirts. Several varieties of Shakesbear. Liberal use of character names (I’m staying in Falstaff cottage, for example). But what you might not expect – what I didn’t expect – is official efforts to set your teeth on edge.
The Shakespeare Birthplace, for example, is now set up with an audiovisual tour which seems to be aimed at know-nothings – and I mean nothing – and the worst kind of bardolaters. Just off the foyer is the first step: a short film narrated by Judy Dench and Patrick Stewart which you are obliged to watch: the door to the next section doesn’t open until the film finishes. Same for the rest of the building. The narration itself is dewy-eyed with wonder and unfortunately stretches credibility from the get-go. Here is a ring, found in the grounds of the Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried. It has the initials WS on it. Maybe it belonged to Shakespeare! Maybe … but let’s use it as the logo to the exhibition. And highlight – or more literally, spotlight – various items with an even more tenuous connection to Shakespeare as we work through the rooms …
I escaped into the garden by ignoring the ‘please do not push this door’ signs. And eventually to the shop, where you can get postcard summaries of the plays; graphic novel adaptations in original and modern English renditions; many many texts, explications, summaries; and DVDs and books, some of which, perforce, indulge the taste for popular history and cover the ‘authorship question’.
Colours. Mast. Nail. There is no authorship question. The authorship question is the last refuge of people who do not understand the nature of genius and have nothing original or insightful to say about Shakespeare. It’s the recourse of the paranoid and misunderstood, the literary conspiracy theory par excellence, and a sad sad sad excuse for scholarship. The authorship question is, in short, the climate change denialism of Shakespeare studies. It’s disappointing to see the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust indulging it. I can understand why they do: the books sell. And I’m sure they get daily questions on the matter. In a just universe, though, the officially approved response to such queries should be a rolling of the eyes, a sigh, and a disdainful “do we have any intelligent questions?”
Stratford’s relationship with Shakespeare seems to be an odd mixture of the worshipful and the distant. The town is full of monuments paid for by various (in many cases, American) benefactors, all the way back to the early 1800s. There are the aforementioned souvenirs, and no doubt that many businesses depend on the tourists, the playgoers, and the vast apparatus of the RSC. Locals I’ve spoken to understand, even respect this dependency. But there are places – like this morning’s cafe – that refuse to give in to the kitsch and adorn their walls with Shakespeareana. And on this visit and others I have met people born and raised here who have never been to see a play.
Even that is understandable. I cannot imagine what it must be like growing up and living in a place where you are surrounded by reminders of ‘The Greatest Genius Who Ever Lived’ (TM). What must that do to your sense of what you can achieve with your life?
Maybe the appropriate responses are polar opposites: embrace it, wallow in it, get a job with the RSC – or deny it, escape, focus on football or finance or whatever else might be a viable route out of a regional English town and the long-stretching shadow of its famous son.

***

Parenthetical note: the little cottage is quiet and comfortable and more than sufficient for a roving group of four. Alas that it’s afflicted with that peculiarly English appliance, the power shower.

This is a device intended to make up for the manifold deficiencies of English plumbing – including, especially, the water pressure – but the result is almost always the same: a steady but not energetic stream of water which only warrants being called a shower by comparison to the natural phenomenon of the same name. It’s impossible to get clean without detaching the head from the mount and spraying where required. In the current case these efforts are helped by splash-back from the walls of the very tiny cubicle – though this seems to contribute to the general flooding of the bathroom. Previous experience with English plumbing encouraged me to get my hair cut very short before I left home, and I’m glad I did!