Diary: October 2017

28 October, 2017, Winchester

Sitting on the sofa in Liz’s reading  when an email pops into my inbox from Angelina warning all recipients of a fraudster who is prowling the neighbourhood in London “covered in fake blood, asking for money”. She says he calls himself Paddy. See picture below.

26 October 2017, London

They goosed up a meeting with Cripplegate Common Council last night by including a guest speaker. It was Nicholas Kenyon, top man at the Barbican Centre, and he was there to tell us about Culture Mile. This is the CityCorp’s vision of a post-Brexit Square Mile in which the arts fill the identity gap left by departing financial enterprises. Two things came up repeatedly in Kenyon’s jibber-jabber about the genius of Simon Rattle and what a wonderful artistic environment the Barbican is. First was the arrival at Farringdon of Crossrail, the new train link that will eventually connect Liverpool Street with Reading. Farringdon and Moorgate are Crossrail stations that will deliver loads more people to the City, and these are the ones the CityCorp and Mr Kenyon would seek to ensnare and strip of their hard-earned cash. The second note of repetition in Kenyon’s presentation was the LSO. Aside from the need to keep Simon Rattle very happy in his new job as band leader, the London Symphony Orchestra emerged as a key power broker, bossing big decisions around not only things such architecture and local planning, but the placement of huge sums of money relating to the public realm. This is a face of power politics I have only previously been able to imagine. And here it was, bold as brass, in front of the ward’s elected members, the clear message that CityCorp was eating out of the hand of Crossrail and the LSO.

23 October 2017, London

The couple sitting next to Jane were really pissed off that it wasn’t a documentary.

20 October, 2017, London

Channel 4 posted a clip on Facebook of Scottish MP Mhairi Black giving it loads against the UK government and its austerity policies. I didn’t even have the sound turned on. Just the look of passion, anger and sheer fury was etched into every corner of Black’s face. Every word was a white-hot bullet of vitriol.

19 October 2017, London

Trois Grandes Fugue is a ballet about to open at Sadlers Wells Theatre on Roseberry Avenue. I have just seen a dress rehearsal and refuse to pretend to know anything about ballet. It begins with a B. It's baffling. Er, that’s it.

What we saw were three separate performances by dancers from Lyon Opera Ballet to the music of Beethoven's Grand Fugue. Just to be thorough, I looked up the word Fugue. The entry I picked gave two definitions. One was a musical meaning, which babbled on but eventually hit on the word “interweaving”. This made sense of some of the dancing I saw. But the more interesting definition of ‘fugue’ came from psychiatry, and stated: “a loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy.” This too made sense, but not obviously at the time, so in bafflement I started to concentrate on superficial details like, What colour were the costumes? In order of performance, they were grey, black and red. Other things I picked up on was whether the dancers performed barefoot or in shoes. Answer = bare, shod, bare. Oh, and the third element was performed exclusively by women, whereas the previous two were full-stage romps in which each woman partnered a man.

Before today, ballet was never on my radar. I’d seen it fleetingly on the telly, but never felt any great pull. It was for posh people. In moments  of abandon I could be heard blurting that Strictly Come Dancing was the people’s equivalent, but it probably never sounded very convincing.

I’m not sure I’ve changed my mind. What I found most intriguing was the use of the body as an instrument of expression. We see it sometimes in athletes, especially in gymnastics, but ballet dancing goes several steps further. Dancers need to know in detail not only every bone and muscle in the human body, but every bone and muscle in THEIR OWN body. Sometimes they look as if they will snap in two, such is the seeming impossibility of the steps and poses they slip into with ease. The control is mind-boggling. Most of us see our bodies merely as the vehicle in which we ‘do things’. Ordinary things. The opposite is true for ballet dancers. They take their bodies to the edge, exploring the possibilities and embracing the unknown.

19 October, 2017, London

At St Luke's, G goes into a rant about social housing, the right-to-buy, Thatcherism and the evil emperor's at Islington Council. He is single, has a two-bed social-rent flat, and asked the council if he could take a lodger into his spare room to alleviate, microscopically, the borough's housing problem. No, they said. Contact Shelter. Shelter were not prepared to find a solution, so he gave up and bitched about it to me instead. He also told me that the new council flats Islington has built on the edge of King Square, where he would like to move, rent for £180 (one-bedroom) “that's fifty-sixty quid more than I am paying for a two-bed”.

19 October, 2017, London

I never knew that the French basically started the Vietnam War. This is covered in the first of eight programmes currently on BBC iPlayer. They are by the American history author and filmmaker Ken Burns. I once read a book of his on Lewis & Clark, but had never seen his film work, which is gripping. I wonder if there is a French equivalent somewhere? Not that I would be able to understand it, I would just like to think that they got their say on the matter and that popular knowledge is balanced and not dominated by one national viewpoint. Although implying that Ken Burns speaks for the whole of America is a bit stupid.

18 October, 2017, London

At the fourth Action For Happiness meeting on Golden Lane last night, the subject was compassion. We listened to some quasi-mystical ‘Kindness Meditation’ stuff from a woman named Sylvia who urged us to practise a kind of internal incantation when engaging with others. The Key phrases to repeat to yourself were: BE SAFE, BE STRONG, BE CONTENT, LIVE AT EASE (it might have been in a different order). In doing this you will exude an aura of compassion that other people can feed on to make themselves better people. Yeah, OK. We then watched a talk by Karen Armstrong and the tried to answer some questions about compassion. There was some disagreement on: 1) Whether lobsters and carrots have feelings, and 2) Whether you need to be able to speak fluent Arabic to understand the Quran. One of the set-text questions was: “What wider changes in our society might help encourage greater empathy and compassion for others?” In our group of three, there was some agreement that a new prime minister might help. I felt this was a flimsy answer and attempted to beef it up by adding “LAY OFF THE NHS”. I argued that while we all sat in this room agonising over compassion and kindness, etc, every day, every hour, every minute in the NHS is overflowing with the stuff. And still politicians of all stripes believe they know better and meddle endlessly. As an example of how compassion can work on a grand, albeit a sometimes messy scale, the NHS is it. Later, when we fed this notion back to the whole group, it struck a chord and various members were keen to offer their own input. I still think the problem with the NHS is the letter S. It should stand for SYSTEM and not for SERVICE.

17 October 2017, London

The more I think about the Old St/New St ‘verbatim theatre’ project I saw recently at Shoreditch Town Hall, the richer it gets. It reminded me how as a child I loved to study the words of songs and sing them in my own way. I was also fascinated at how mobile phones with headphones were used. They are such a natural visual marker for today’s teenagers, but nevertheless obviously a machine. In my mind I started to compare phones and headphones on youngsters with hearing aids on the elderly. Then I went a bit far and started to liken the twisted and tangled wires of the earphones to umbilical cords.

Doing teaching assistance with a Y12 class at the Guardian, I encouraged them to roam widely when trying to write a feature headline. The example I pulled out of the hat in that moment was for the story of Romeo and Juliet: ‘Boy Meets Girl, And Then They Die’. Not sure if it worked.