Virtue Windows at the Maritime Museum

When friends arrived from the coast they’d heard about these stained glass windows on display at the local Maritime Museum. Apparently made for the Baltic Exchange building that was destroyed by a bomb in 1992, they're designed to impress the public with the fiancial house's lofty 'mission statement', in five panels with allegorical figures and a curved ‘half dome’.

The 'virtues' represented: Truth, Faith, Hope, Fortitude and Justice, had me thinking about the how they'd be represented in today's financial institutions : Spin, No Accountability, Government Bail Outs, Directors Bonuses and Pension Cuts - not virtues at all, really.

The museum staff practise their own virtues, though. My friend was in a wheelchair and as soon as we arrived one of the ‘Meeters and Greeters’ team at reception stepped forward to conduct us to a glass-sided lift and make sure we got up to the right level. When we left she was there again to ask about the visit and to remind us to drop in again.

It’s free to go into the museum and see the windows, with their story on plaques attached to the walls.

It’s a good museum for children and adults, filled with paintings and artefacts connected with Britsh naval history. My favourite item is the coat that Admiral Nelson wore at Waterloo, with a bullet hole in the shoulder. The Museum's very elegant, light and airy, situated at the bottom of Greenwich Park.

About the exhibition:

http://www.nmm.ac.uk/visit/exhibitions/on-display/stained-glass-from-the-baltic-exchange

Scottish Stories

I was pleased when I was asked to reviewing a collection of short stories from Scotland called ‘Bucket of Frogs; New Writing Scotland 26’. I've always felt a connection with Scottish writing.

My love for Scotland started with my junior school singing teacher, Mrs Buchanan, a doughty woman who conducted singing lessons while standing on a bentwood chair. I remember the combined gusto and suspense as we sang:

'Sure, by Tummel and Loch Rannoch and Lochaber I will go.
By heather tracks wi' heaven in their wiles;
If it's thinkin' in your inner heart braggart's in my step,
You've never smelt the tangle o' the Isles.'

Much later I was asked to read a poem by Robert Burns at the funeral of a friend’s husband, a Glaswegian. The words reflected the man's own befiefs in a mix of nostalgia and optimism that seems to characterise much Scottish writing:

'For a' that, an' a' that,

It's coming yet for a' that,

That Man to Man, the world o'er,

Shall brothers be for a' that.'

A more personal connection was set up when as a teenager I hitch-hiked over the border to get married. We were delighted by the generosity and friendliness of the lowlanders, who would stop their cars or trucks almost as soon as we set foot on the road, offering us a lift to ‘Gala’ (Galashiels), the nearest town of any size to where we stayed. Inevitably, sooner or later we were asked whether we were ‘runaways’ our denials greeted with knowing smiles.

Marriage laws are the same all over Scotland, not just Gretna Green, and it seemed a good idea in 1962, when my boy-friend was 25 and I was just eighteen, and my parents wouldn’t give consent. They were still mad at me for leaving my home in Preston a year or so earlier and in those days you had to be 21 to marry without your parents' permission. We lived in Portsmouth, where, as a student, my partner wasn’t allowed to live outside ‘approved’ digs unless he was married. Lack of money meant we'd have to hitch-hike to Scotland and back, but that was just a bonus.

We stayed in a YHA hostel overlooking a romantic ruined abbey, in the tiny village of Melrose. Like Gretna, it had a registrar’s office. This was to establish the required two week's residency in the country. When the hostel warden asked us, reasonably enough, ‘Will ye no’ be moving on to the Highlands?’ we assured him we were happy to walk the nearby Eildon Hills. They had been adored by Sir Walter Scott, who died at the house he built at Abbotsford, his sofa placed so he had a good view of them.

After reading the novels of Ian Rankin, Jackie Kay and Val MacDiarmid, I was anticipating more of the same quirky humour, gritty settings and down-to-earth characters in the collection I reviewed. They were there, right enough, in some beautifully written poems and stories.

I wasn’t expecting dismal urban living, the decline of traditional industries and loss of thriving rural or seaside communities. Maybe the short story format brings these aspects into sharper focus., or maybe it's a corrective to the 'tartan heritage' tourist theme.

Here’s what I wrote for ‘The Short Review’, a website devoted to short story collections:

http://www.theshortreview.com/reviews/BucketofFrogs.htm

Melrose Abbey: http://www.aboutscotland.co.uk/mel.html

Robert Burns:http://www.nls.uk/burns/index.htm

Jackie Kay http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/personpage.asp?author=Jackie+Kay

Ian Rankin http://www.ianrankin.net/

Val McDermid :http://www.valmcdermid.com/pages/interviews5.html

Abbotsford: http://www.scottsabbotsford.co.uk/

Prince Charles Diversion

When we went to the Prince Charles yesterday it was good to see the red lanterns are already up in China town. They’re ready to celebrate The Year of the Ox on January 26th.

I won’t often stray from the Cineworld circuit (unless it’s to the NFT). These and sofa.cinema take care of my foreign film needs. Still, when I’m waiting midweek for a programme change I’m vulnerable. So when R said ‘The Wave’ at the Prince Charles had good reviews I went along.

The German, title is ‘Die Welle’ and it’s about a school teacher who sets out to prove to his class of High School students they could become Nazis if conditions were right. It all ends in tears. The plotline was fairly predictable, but the main problem was the lack of definition to the characters, apart from the teacher, and he had to keep you guessing how serious he was, so acted low-key. I hadn’t expected ‘High School 3’ but these kids were lacklustre to say the least. It was strange, too, that although the wife was heavily pregnant, she and the teacher never mentioned the baby or discussed future plans, such as when they’d move off the houseboat where they lived. It was as if a whole scene had been cut out.

It reminded me of watching films in Singapore, where whole scenes were cut out for censorship reasons, regardless of how it affected the plot. We saw Jodie Foster in ‘The Accused’, for instance, and the rape scene was cut. One minute she’s dancing to a juke-box in a café with some boys looking on and the next she’s hysterical and Kelly McGillis is encouraging her to take them to court. What, for just looking???

The seats at the Prince were less comfortable than Cineworld and the screen a lot smaller than I’m used to. That 'Studio' at the NFT has ruined me. At £4 for the afternoon show it wasn’t bad. The sound wasn’t as good but as it’s often too loud in Cineworld so I didn’t mind that. I thought I might go deaf after ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ at West India Quay.

The huge letters in Leicester Square to welcome Will Smith were startling. I’d be even more impressed if it was Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Prince Charles Cinema: http://www.princecharlescinema.com/

The Wave: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1063669/

Sofa cinema: http://www.sofacinema.co.uk/visitor/home.html

The Accused:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094608/

Crime Reading Group

At first glance, the last two books chosen by my crime reading group have only murder in common: Kate Summerscale’s ‘The Suspicions of Mr Whicher’ is a true story set in Victorian England; George Pelicanos’s ‘The Night Gardener’ is fiction, about a serial killer in Washington DC, in 1985. Both, however, foreground the social setting.

Summerscale’s fascinating glimpse into Victorian society suggests that police detectives, recruited from the working class, were supposed to concentrate on pickpockets and prostitutes. They were expected to defer to middle class suspects, not suggest they might murder family members. Mr Whicher should keep his suspicions to himself to avoid being vilified by the forelock-tugging journalists of the time.

Pelicanos’s hero, Italian detective Gus Ramone, happily married with an African- American wife, worries about his teenage son in a neighbourhood where drug crime is rife among teenage boys. Parents will empathise with the officer’s efforts to establish residency in the right school catchment area and his fears about discrimination.

Family solidarity is key, but it works two ways: the Saville-Kent kind breeds violent resentments between siblings while social status protects them from the law; the Ramone kind struggles to guard vulnerable youngsters from a downward spiral into crime.

A big advantage of a library group is books, chosen months ahead, are always made available for borrowing.

It’s great to hear different opinions and discuss styles in crime writing. Most members know much more about crime writing than I do. I can’t wait to start the next choice, ‘Vanish’, by Tess Gerritson, collected from the library today. Looks like a real ‘page-turner’.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: http://www.mrwhicher.com/

The Night Gardener; http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/07/25/features/bookmer.php


Vanish: http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews2/0345476972.asp

Lewisham Library : http://www.qype.co.uk/place/196911-Lewisham-Library-London

The Gentlemen of St James's

For all government ministers throw up their hands in astonishment at ‘social immobility’ and ‘class divide’, they're embedded in England’s institutions, such as ‘The Gentlemen’s Club’. We spent Sunday afternoon being reminded of this, in St James’s.

J. is training as a Westminster Guide and generously treated friends to an inaugural walk , taking in the arcades and passages, shops and clubs located around the church of St James. It’s an area redolent with the notion of the ‘English gentleman’, and shops which provide the accessories, from fine wines to country house clothes. Woolworths may go to the wall, but here it’s Floreat Asser and Turnbull.

Here, too, are the gathering places. Boodles and The Atheneum, Whites and The Reform Club are concealed behind discreet façades while we listen to tales of gambling, fine dining, and political chicanery within. Admission is by election and our privilege is to be allowed to stand on the pavements and gawp.

That epitome of the English gentleman, George 'Beau' Brummell, commemorated in bronze in Jermyn Street, didn’t worry about pavements. After washing from head to toe, in an age when few people bothered to bathe, he took five hours to dress. Then he had his sedan chair brought into his house so as not to sully his boots by London’s mud on his way to his club.

R once trained as Greenwich Guide and was impressed by the research that had gone into preparing the walk. I was amazed at J’s mastery of a tortuous route and memory for the facts.

The area is not so compact as Greenwich, but the walk was pleasantly varied. Greenwich has some real heroes, of course, unlike the effete and privileged drones of St James’s, for all their tourist appeal. I may be biased, of course.

Beau Brummell :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beau_Brummell

St James's : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_James's

For details of future walks, email: westminsterwalks@yahoo.co.uk

Easter Rabbits

Never mind the Brrr... At Asda we're lining up for the Next Big Thing.

‘Complicit’ at The Old Vic


An essay title in Willy Russell’s ’Educating Rita’ reads: ‘How would you overcome the problems of staging ‘Peer Gynt?’ , to which the time-pressured heroine responds, ‘Do it on the radio’.

For ‘Complicit’ I’d suggest the same, but I’d add ‘Do it in America.’ The play's first night had a polite but bemused reception from the Old Vic audience.

In fact, the staging is the best part of a political three-hander which no amount of hi-tech flashiness can rescue from leaden prose, absence of drama and at best a muddy message. The round, see-through stage resembles a dart-board or spider-web, with overlapping screens underfoot. At times dozens of newsreels, or flaming clouds or pastel shades appear, surrounded by a neon circle. Two overhead screens are used to show a TV interview.

Richard Dreyfuss plays journalist Ben Kitzer, facing jail for writing an article exposing US use of torture after 9/11 and refusing to name his source. His performance is twitchy but fairly restrained in the first half. David Suchet convinces as his untrustworthy legal adviser. Kitzer’s wife Judy, played by Elizabeth McGovern with a voice barely audible in the ‘gods’, has a marginal role, bleating about ‘the family’ and assuring Ben she loves him.


The themes are interesting, although obscure, but a cringe-making climactic breakdown scene with Ben wallowing in patriotic sentiment and sobbing over and over ‘I did a bad thing’ like Lenny in ‘Of Mice and Men’, was embarrassing. The sniggering I heard during the scene itself is an understandable response from many of the audience probably resentful of the UK involvements in the Iraq war.

On the good side the programme is the best I’ve read for a while – maybe because it fills some gaps. For £4 you get a history of the theatre and experts writing on the main themes. There’s even a slightly creepy ‘discussion’ about the value of hedge-fund financing. That helps explain why although the theatre exterior looks the same the converted auditorium is called ‘The CQS Space’. With seats filling the gap where the stage used to be the space is not so much round as, like the play, a bit pear-shaped.

Website details:

http://www.oldvictheatre.com/whatson.php?id=50

New Year Resolution

Apart from access to materials, there are benefits to going out to do research at the British Library. For a start, I'm showered and dressed rather than still in my pyjamas. Instead of the radio for company or disputes with R about interruptions I have a background buzz of fellow workers discreetly interacting with helpful desk staff in the reading room plus people on either side tapping away at key boards. It's a bit like being in an exam room only more relaxed.

I caught a train from London Bridge station to marvellous St Pancras next door. I’ll soon get fed up with ten minutes crushed into standing room only, and not very much of that, en route to London Bridge from Lewisham. Still, it’s my New Year Resolution to do three days a week. I must remember to take out my book in good time, as once on the train it’s impossible to reach the bag wedged between my feet.

The huge BL interior walls and stairs resemble marble, like the British Museum's entry hall. Quite appropriate for a temple of learning, I’d say; very airy and modern. Walkways surround a central area with a kind of four-sided book-case rising in the middle, leather spines adding a touch of gravitas. I read in the handbook that Anthony Horowitz used this place to research for Foyle's War. It's a feel-good building.

Traffic is heavy in the public spaces, now crammed with desk-chairs and sockets for computers, all fully occupied by noon. The demographic profile has gone down by abut thirty years. I saw a man eating salad from a plastic box balanced on his keyboard and another with baby buggy parked at his elbow. Notices say the cafe tables are reserved for people buying food from 1pm-3pm, but plenty of people are talking or reading. The free Internet Wifi must be a big draw: a ‘pilot scheme’.

The Prue Leith specials look good but a room at the top, with canteen-style furnishings and drinks machines is where you can eat your packed lunch. In Summer people sit out in the vaguely Japanese roof garden. Leaflets about forthcoming highbrow activities are laid out on shelves. Maybe later inthemonth I'll go to a day of silent films about the ancient world.

Two of my research days will coincide with my Chinese classes at Frith Street. I aim to break off at noon to get to my class in Soho, and then come back by 2.30pm. It's not a problem keeping a desk, by leaving stuff on it, but by noon all the desks are taken. I used to transfer to the film library off Tottenham Court Road for the afternoon when I was researching my book. I wonder if I'd have a problem there too these days. That's the trouble with an excellent resource; a lot of people want to use it.

The British Library Website: http://www.bl.uk/

Representing the Past

A variety of styles, from near-fantasy to realism, is shown in three 'historical' films I’ve seen recently. All have a political message and two focus on a love-relationship.

In epic-romance style, ‘Australia’ climaxes those tourism ads that ended with someone pleading direct-to-camera, ‘Where the hell are you?’ - as if the cinema audience should rush to fill those wide open spaces. Despite Lady Sarah (Nicole Kidman ‘progressing’ from tight Edwardian clothes and parasol to riding boots and horsewhip); cattle-droving looks less appealing than jeep safaris. The appeal, for me anyway, was akin to that of the Saturday morning cowboy films, when I galloped home neck and neck with my sisters. The ‘exception story’ about an aristocratic white woman who fosters an aborigine child shows liberalism alive and well and living in Oz. Very ‘Over the Rainbow’.

History as a source of today’s problems is shown too in ‘The Reader’, but not so easily resolved. In fact, some critics have thrown up their arms in ‘Not again!’ protest. Reconciliation here is more as suggestion than fact and closure more complex than mere survival. The opportunity to rewrite history and ‘rescue’ the vilified is refused. Unlike the aboriginal child, the illiterate SS guard is abandoned. The causes lie within the protagonists’ complex psychologies, unlike the cartoon simplicity of the Lady and the Drover. A film to be mulled over with friends.

‘Che: Part One’, is superficially about a different kind of oppression, but rooted in similar territorial and cultural conflict. History here is a media matter, partly the hero’s voice-over memoir, pretend documentary style glossing-over the individual’s tendency to selection and interpretation. Scenes of guerrilla warfare and political discussion alternate with recreated black and white news-reel footage. Late on, an incipient romance throws a sop to mere human interest (apart from sympathy for an asthmatic hero), and maybe a hook for Part Two. History is our contemporary, the struggle endless and, as Mao Zedong declared, revolution’s a constant process. At least, that’s how it seems in Part One. There’s a good chance that Part Two won’t succumb to supposed box-office demand for a happy ending. The Spanish dialogue was a bonus that helped make up for a hazy start.

I read somewhere that Horror-genre films reflect society's contemporary pre-occupations. Maybe that's true, too, of History-genre ones.

Australia:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455824/

The Reader:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0976051/

Che Part One:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0892255/

New Year 's Day at the Royal Botanical Gardens

The journey to Kew took an hour and a half from Greenwich. Fortunately, it was enlivened by reminiscesnces with an ex colleague from my local FE college. I’d told her that Kew Gardens was celebrating its 250th anniversary by letting in visitors for free, instead of charging the usual £10 entry fee, so she was happy to join R and myself.

It was getting dark by the time arrived. We had lingered too long at the Waterstones coffee shop, watching friends re-uniting and showing off their babies. Then the aroma of fish and chips near Kew station reminded us we hadn’t eaten since breakfast. As the temperature was near freezing , we warmed up inside the cabin.

Afterwards we walked against the flow of departing people, who resembled a football crowd leaving the ground after a match.

‘What time do you close?’ R asked the man at the gate.

‘In about four minutes’.

But he gave us tickets and let us in. My friend observed, as we headed briskly in the direction of the palm house, that loiterers would take a while to disperse. At one end of a huge lake a fountain still played and ducks swam about in the dusk. The Palm House, bulked like a grey whale against the darker sky, was closed. However, we came across a little building with the lights still on and an open door. Inside, a few people browsed among glass cases filled with a fascinating collection of plant-derived products, from blocks of compressed tea to pith helmets. There was a lovely little machine where you could twiddle a knob to hear different musical instruments – pan pipes, lutes and a wooden xylophone. It made a delightful mini-concert.

‘What are you all doing in here? Now you’ll have to leave by the Victoria Gate!’

An indignant attendant had found us. At his insistence we walked in the opposite direction to that we’d been following until we saw the lights of a huge Christmas tree. It was at the entrance where we’d first come in. I looked into a shop and a café whose floor was strewn with debris like the aftermath of an invasion. It was the same in the toilets. I was glad after all that we hadn’t been there earlier. There’s something magical about Kew in the dark, walking under the shadowy outlines of exotic trees - especially when it’s free and you know you shouldn’t really be in there.

All about the Gardens at Kew:

http://www.kew.org/

Homer’s Not Just for Christmas

This unwanted present was left outside the flats on December 26th . He seems to have been re-housed.

Spring has Sprung

I spotted this early Forsythia blossom on December 27th , as I walked down to the station. The south-facing wall and sheltered position helped it to an early blooming, no doubt. The weather has been dry and sunny for a while and there were more flowers on the same bush by the next day. Although the frost turned the rooftops white last night, it’s good to see the flowers again.

White Christmas at the BFI Southbank

The washed-out visuals and muffled soundtrack of the trailer at Cineworld does this film no favours. Although my partner made approving noises, I put this down to his fondness for the big-band era of Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney, two of the stars. So I wasn’t expecting much, having arrived at the BFI too late for a Mamoulian film, when I settled for ‘White Christmas’ instead.

The BFI studio is the smallest auditorium at the South Bank venue, with only four rows, but the screen seems enormous. The digitalised Vistavision looked freshly minted and the sound was great in what they call their ‘state-of-the-art’ auditorium.

Bing and Danny Kaye play showbiz entertainers, who help a retired General save his Vermont hotel by putting on a show, aided by two showgirls and a troupe of extras. Clooney and Vera-Ellen play the girls. The talents of the lead players and the period interest prevent the film from being overwhelmed by huge dollops of schmaltz.


I was still recovering from the tedium of Baz Lurhmann’s antipodean epic a few days back; White Christmas set a cracking pace in terms of plot development, and flashed by in a whirl of colour. For me it veered too much on the side of dance in the balance between cavorting and plot/dialogue, and younger audience members giggled at the clumsy segues between dialogue and songs. Strange, when you consider no-one baulked at ‘Mamma Mia’s sometimes irrelevant outbursts.



Screening until January 1st
http://www.bfi.org.uk/whatson/bfi_southbank/film_programme

Byzantium 330-1453 at the Royal Academy

The Byzantines were heavy-handed with the golf leaf, as seen in the familiar icons, sacred figures emblazoned on wood panels. There were plenty of them at the excellent RA exhibition I visited with son D on Saturday. The show rooms were quiet so I assume potential customers were taking advantage of the post-Christmas sales, like R, who’d gone to buy an electric blanket. He’d seen the Byzantium exhibition with a crony before Christmas.

The £100 annual entry fee for two members plus two guests seems a lot, but since just one visit with pals could cost £40 it’s good value. Out-of-town friends really appreciate it. I like to make a few visits on my own to these big shows, one using a £3 audio guide. Maps and charts at the start show the size of the Byzantine Empire at different dates and explanatory notices are in all the rooms, but I’m too impatient to look at these on a first visit.

Gold was the signature motif, sometimes overlaying silver on jewelled necklaces, plates, bowls and boxes. Elaborate bas-relief figures covered chalices, some endearingly battered as if trodden into the mud of many an ancient battle-field. One was even said to be the original Holy Grail.

D raved on about techniques and materials. I remembered that he studied Art History before being sucked in by Computer Science.

My favourites were the ivory artefacts, small hinged pieces called triptych, depicting saints in little arched doorways. It was Jane Austen who said her writing was as if carved on pieces of ivory, but these reminded me she was thinking of detail. I like carvings anyway; usually jade so hard it has to be ground, or the crude lines of woodcuts. Ivory’s qualities permit exquisite detail, as in a bishop’s frown with lines scrunching his face as if his mitre was too tight.

The Friend’s Room at the RA is a treat, and a kind of extension of the experience, with well-heeled members making Bohemian fashion statements.

R joined us, miffed from having to unpack the ‘heated mattress protector’ so it would fit the dimensions of the cloakroom cubby-holes. D expressed shock at the price of £6.50 for a miniature quiche and tiny salad, but an accompanying glass of wine at £2 made it a bargain compared with the stand-alone price of £5 for the wine. The water's free.

After that we saw a small exhibition in the Sackler Wing D was keen on, a collection by modern artists. The main interest there was a wall of front covers of an art magazine but the extenuated statuary was agreeable, particularly one of a hound.

This page has some great links, including one to an article about icons, written by the Archbishop of Canterbury

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/

Heathrow Christmas


‘This is known as the world’s biggest car park’, I said to Lu Weiyuan (Luke) as we sped round the almost deserted southern loop of the M25.

‘Really? ‘This had been his standard response to explanations since our re-union the day before. His English is excellent and he has great curiosity, which is what I like most about him. His dry sense of humour is such that I can't always tell when he's being ironic.

With his suitcase taking up all the boot space and his wife Linda’s case jammed in front of the passenger seat, I’d had to leave R at home.

Sooner than risk the cross-London route to Heathrow recommended by Mappy.com, with one false move at Clapham and I end up in Kensington, I’d opted for twice as many miles but all motorway, starting with the A2 at Blackheath, I had to keep my wits about me at the Heathrow end with five terminals to choose from, but with no traffic I could at least slow down to read the overhead signs.

In 1990, seeking a language-exchange partner, I’d posted a notice on a board in Goldsmiths Library. MA student Luke responded and I’ve been involved with his studies more or less ever since. He’s a wild life photographer teaching in a university in Taiwan. Now he was in the UK for his PhD Viva in Durham. His email said he’d be spending a week in London, mostly while I was in Lanzarote. His return flight was on the 25th.

‘There’s no public transport on Christmas Day’, I emailed him.

‘Really?’

So I picked Luke and wife Linda up from their hotel and we visited the dinosaurs on Crystal Palace Park on the way back.

It gave R and son D time to come round from the evening before, spent trying to find a pub in Blackheath where we wouldn’t be deafened by rollicking locals. After one stand-up beer in The Hare and Billet we’d ended up in the basement bar of the Clarendon where a sedate game of pool was in progress. No wonder it was quiet, with drinks at £15 a round for the free of us. As driver, I was on the lemonade.

The whole lunch, apart from the sprouts, had been cooking for hours. The pheasants had been in the electric slow cooker overnight so only needed a reheat.

The long roofs over the drop-off point at Terminal 5 resembled rows of nun’s headdresses, like gigantic angel wings. Quite Christmassy, really.

Back from Lanzarote

Scenery, food and weather were well up to the mark in Lanzarote, where cultural delights are mainly inaccessible except by car, so I passed the week in a daze: walking by the sea, reading and eating fish dinners.

The two-mile stretch known as the 'strip' alongside the main beach at Puerto del Carmen was undergoing repairs to pipelines. They were laying new ones , for all I know, a bit like central London.

It was weird coming back on a kind of ghost plane, with fewer than 20 passengers, all of us spaced evenly with an entire row of seats each. The pilot said it would equalise the weight.

Down to earth with a bump at Gatwick (literally - the landing approach was over-speedy, and the brakes were jammed on, jolting us foward.)

If I'd been wondering which country it was, exchanges with bad-tempered officials would have soon put me straight. At deserted Gatwick I remarked to the passport checker that it was very quiet. 'Do you want to make a complaint about it?' he snapped. I said that he must have had quite a few already that day. Fortunately, he was trapped in his glass box. so couldn't get out to arrest me and there were no spares about. I put it down to worries about pending unemployment.

We took the Victoria stopping train. A surly guard sold us singles to Coulsdon South, the outer-most stop covered by our Freedom Passes. He quoted £11 60 for the two of us, then got stroppy when R asked him if there were concessions for OAPs. He said he could charge us more if it had been later than 4.30am . R fronted him up, which is a bit unusual for him, and said in answer to his exasperation, 'The answer is 'No', then'. By way of aplogising, I suppose, the man grumbled that it was 1am, which we couldn't dispute. It was 1am for all of us.

The queue for the night bus was a mix of mainly foreign young men with backpacks, a few loungers and a couple of wasted-looking characters crouched on steps in shop doorways. The temperature was a balmy 10 degrees. We had an interesting half-hour journey in 'reserved for the elderly' seats -interesting because I read a thriller whilst listening to a young man with a guitar case, dressed in bright 70s clothes with a full 'afro' hair-do. He was talking to an older man about gigs they'd been to.

Journey to the West at the O2 Dome

The journey west from Lewisham to the O2 Dome is mercifully short via the DLR .

The grandchildren are at that in-between age for pantomime when they think it's for 'kids' , so I was resigned to 'Madagascar 2' and a meal at Nando’s for their annual Christmas outing. Then tickets for 'Journey to the West' came up at short notice. For me it was a bonus that the show is based on the Chinese classic ‘Journey to the West’, known to some from the TV series, ‘Monkey’.

The anarchic hero sets out on a quest for immortality with his strange companions. They include aptly-named Pigsy and a Prince who’s been changed into a horse. Journeying through places with exotic names, they meet a set of oddball characters who help or hinder them in their quest for immortality.

Children in the audience were entranced by the multi-media presentation, which had lots of acrobats, martial arts and characters flying through the air on wires. Nine scenes included ‘The Crystal Palace of the Eastern Sea', 'Heavenly Peach Banquet' and 'Volcano City' , all with fancy costumes and live music. There were subtitles for the Chinese dialogue, but most of it wouldn't have made sense to anybody who didn't know the story, and it didn't detract from the spectacle.

My adult companions whinged at the length of the performance and at the rip-off interval prices; with £2 for cokes as well as £10 programmes, they had a point . The green tea was a bargain, though.

The whole Dome ambience, with dozens of food outlets, a cinema at the top of an escalator and an artifical ski slope so you can watch people falling about, has a buzzy feel. ‘You know, Grandma', said 13 year old Gemma, ‘we could come to the Dome the next time we stay with you, even if we don’t see a show’.

(Oh, and I'm off to Lanzarote for a week, so no more postings for a while)

Deadline Thursday

I think everybody should know about the University of the Third Age. It’s open to people over fifty, and they meet in centres and in each others houses. There’s a wide range of subjects, not just academic but everything from meditation to mahjong. They even organise holidays and rambles. I’ve learned Spanish in the home of a Flamenco dancer and I once led a ‘Study Day’ on Chinese Film at Goldsmiths College, the South London Centre.

The annual fee is £10 and all the sessions are free, although there’s a charge for the online courses they also run. I’ve agreed to tutor the ‘Introduction to Chinese’ one, starting in September.

Yesterday I went to the end-of-term meeting of U3A writers’ workshop and was delighted to hear our anthology had raised £120 for the charity MIND.

Every fortnight eight of us get together to read our short stories and receive constructive feedback from the rest of the group. Next, our tutor gives us writing exercises. We generally work on them for about fifteen minutes then read aloud what we’ve written before completing them at home.

A selection of work, ‘Deadline Thursday’ was compiled by after we circulated and critiqued stories and poems we thought might be suitable, and the editor also organised the printing.

Find out more about U3A and a group near you:

http://www.u3a.org.uk/

Changeling

Odd, the things that motivate people. I’ve been encouraging R to take more of an active interest in the Internet recently. Even if he'd just look up and print off the Guardian Quick Crosswords it would spread the burden.

I took it as a sign of progress that he’d researched Christmas cakes online. The crit. recommended Asda’s ‘Extra Special’, and R located a store at Crossharbour, next to the DLR station. We’d call in en route to to see ‘The Changeling’ at West India Quay.

Fine, I thought. It would be a quick ‘in and out’ job and for once we’d leave early enough to get to the Cineworld in time to see the trails.

But no – although there were dozens of all kinds of Christmas cakes, not to mention stollen and mince pies and chocolate logs, the ‘Extra Special’ at £7.98 was not on the shelves.

As for ‘The Changeling’ it was almost as disappointing. The 1930s décor and costumes looked authentic enough, especially the telephone exchange supervisors on skates, but Angelina Jolie doesn’t look right as Christine, the heroine. Her surreal appearance suited Grendel’s mother in 'Beowulf' or Lara Croft, the cartoon-based character. As for her acting as an ordinary ‘mom’, even the LA street cars looked more authentic. In fact, given the general oddness of the performances, even the roller skates were more convincing.

The characters were all one-dimensional, and coincidences notched up the melodrama. Saviour Malkovich arrives just as the asylum nurse is about to throw the switch on the electric shock machine and even worse, when Christine faints at seeing the headlines in the street, he's there on cue to catch her. Maybe the director Clint Eastwood thinks the past just was more melodramatic, or that ‘women’s films’ should be.

Meanwhile R seems to be going great guns online. He’s located the Bose European centre and arranged for the wonky radio to be collected. My own research showed ALDI’s Holly Lane cake as best value and R thinks the other report may be from a previous year. So he’ll be ringing the Catford ALDI before calling in on the way to his bridge game.

Christmas cake report

http://www.which.co.uk/reviews-ns/christmas-cakes/christmas-cakes-compared/index.jsp


The Changeling reviews

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0824747/

Plus ça change...

I'd only called in at the National Portrait Gallery to use the loo. After choosing Christmas cards in St Martin's crypt I had an hour or so before I was due to collect tickets , in Covent Garden. In the downstairs hall, though I spotted one or two people waiting for the doors of the lecture room to open. ‘Conversation Pieces in Georgian Society’ sounded promising.

They turned out to be a type of eighteenth century paintings the speaker had been researching. Slide examples showed well-dressed families in elaborate costumes dealing cards, drinking tea, playing the harpsichord, etc. Sometimes they were in rural settings. These paintings, she said, were not so much about reality as about aspiration: 'exemplars' rather than ‘examples’ of polite society at the time. The pictures were as much about costumes, leisure pursuits and furniture as about the people, she argued and their function was much like that of today’s Sunday supplements – a kind of showing off of the aspired-to ideal. They were very keen on all that - there were best-selling books telling men how to stand in a drawing room. The one in the picture shows the:

‘relatively bare settings of Arthur Devis, which emphasized restrained good taste, in contrast to William Hogarth's more lavish scenes of refined consumption…Such settings were not intended to represent specific spaces. Rather, like the interiors of Hogarth's modern moral subject paintings, they were to be understood as signifiers of abstract virtues—‘

Hmmm. I'd certainly recommend these free talks. There was a big screen for the slides and a steeply raked auditorium with comfortable seats. Well worth dropping in for. I can recommend the loos, too.

More about the speaker and her subject:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hafvm/staff/staff/staffMembers/RetfordKate