The Habit of Art

I like to think this is what K and I both have, but in an active, positive sense, not in the passive, resigned sense that W.H. Auden expresses in Alan Bennett's excellent new play at the National Theatre... which we saw on Thursday night - at the cinema!

The National Theatre have been running a new initiative with their last few productions, called NT Live, whereby live performances are beamed into cinemas around the country and around the world. We were slightly wary of the idea - the magic of the theatre surely comes largely from being there, with all the electricity generated by the living interaction of the actors with each other and with the audience - but we really wanted to see the play, and were having problems finding any available Travelex £10 tickets (somehow these all just evaporate the moment they are released for sale - I am sure there is a way of playing the system, but I haven't figured out what it is yet) and didn't fancy bankrupting ourselves for a seat in the gods...

So partly out of defeat and partly out of curiosity for this newfangled technology we booked tickets to see The Habit of Art down the road at the Ritzy. And it was absolutely brilliant!! There was no less a buzz as we all waited through the countdown for the performance to begin, and rather than the fixed view of the stage which I imagined would be what we saw, we had an absolutely privileged view of the action from a variety of camera angles. It was often very close in to the actors, so you didn't quite get the sense of set which you do when you're at the theatre itself, though the cameras did give wide shots of the stage at the beginning and during the interval. The strangest thing was the interval, when the cameras turned on the audience, and there were we, another audience, watching them, but they couldn't see us... Slightly bizarre.

But the play itself was fantastic!! So so funny and poignant at the same time. I hadn't realised it was a play within a play - perhaps I had read this, but forgot - but effectively the play is a cast of actors rehearsing a new play about Auden and Benjamin Britten, and an imagined encounter between them soon before their deaths, after decades of estrangement. I loved the sense of theatre - so to speak - and how theatre works which was encapsulated within the 'rehearsal' bits, where the play moves out from the intimate focus on Auden, to comment self-referentially on the play itself, on the National itself, on the whole process of making art, how it's the work that counts and what lives on... Really really excellent. Another classic from Bennett, who really is a master of his game.

There were students in the cinema (some annoying ones, who left after about 10 minutes), including a girl sitting behind K taking notes. I loved how this initiative made the theatre so accessible. As a schoolgirl and student I used to get cheap standing tickets at the National, and just lap up the performances - Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, with Felicity Kendal, really sticks in my memory for being a moment when I awakened to how wonderful the theatre was - and this idea of beaming plays into cinemas makes that available to people who can't afford the National's prices, or who live a long long way from where these landmark productions are happening... The list of international venues which broadcast The Habit of Art last Thursday was long in all senses of the word!

London Assurance is the next one, another play we have been having difficulty getting affordable tickets for. Can't wait!

Lambeth Life

This excellent picture - taken by Stefan Finnis - was printed in the most recent edition of our local newspaper, Lambeth Life (15 April). It shows someone riding his pennyfarthing through the BMX and skate park on Stockwell Road. I love it! Somehow it sums up the quirkiness of London and perhaps of Lambeth in particular - or the little part of it that I live in anyway. That meeting of respected cultural icon with the realism of the modern world - and a meeting which is not a clash, but a perfectly happy adaptation of one to the other.

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Today has been a glorious spring day - and I have spent it indoors, at the computer, finally making a start on the joyless task of preparing the portfolio I need to submit in 10 days' time in support of my promotion. At least I have made a start, which makes me feel ever so slightly better about the whole thing.

I have had a 3-day weekend - I needed to use up my leave or lose it, so I am taking the last 3 Fridays off this month, which means that with the two Easter bank holidays, this will have been a month of 4-day weeks. All very well, but I always find that you are busier and more stressed, since there is the same amount of work to squeeze into less time.

But I went and sat in Brockwell Park on Friday afternoon, and read my book with a cup of tea from the rather rundown café that occupies Brockwell Hall. I know it's a complete pain for people not being able to travel by air because of the ash cloud spewing out of the volcano in Iceland... but I have to say, it is delightfully quiet without the constant flyover of aeroplanes. We are on the flight path out of Heathrow (I suppose) and there is usually a plane flying through the sky at least once a minute. We don't actually hear them very loudly, but it is amazing what a difference it makes not having them at all.

I have been getting bulletins from friends stranded in various places and trying to find alternative ways of travelling back. A couple in separate parts of the US on different business trips - they've now found a way to get together, and are waiting for flights to London to resume. Another couple who flew to Istanbul for their first holiday without the kids, about to embark on a 2-day bus journey across Europe to Berlin, from where they hoped to get a train to London - sounded epic and quite fun actually. (My parents did something similar when I was about 6 weeks old, except going in the other direction - they drove in a camper van from London to Istanbul. Perhaps that's where my wanderlust comes from?)

Then people stranded here - there has been a big archaeology conference in London, and a big art history conference in Glasgow, and the delegates can't get home!

My sister was sent home early from the Smokehouse on Friday - no planes from the mainland meant no postal service, so no point packing perishable goods like smoked fish as there was no way to send them out! And there are reports in the papers about food shortages in the supermarkets for the same reason...

Amazing how occasionally nature reasserts itself so unequivocally over man. With all our modern technology and communications, there is just no way to safely fly through a cloud of volcanic ash. I heard one commentator mention that the last time this volcano had erupted to this extent was in the early 19th century - and it lasted for two years!! Are we going to have to completely rethink long distance travel?

The photographs have been amazing - this satellite image of the ash cloud was in the Guardian's picture gallery, courtesy of Getty Images:


I went to Eyjafjallajökull once - though I think at the time I didn't realise it was a volcano. Once upon a time, when I was doing Geography A-level, we had a fantastically memorable 2-week field trip to Iceland, led by our inspirational teacher, Mr Job. He looked like a pixie. We camped - it was in July, and it took a while to get used to the fact that it never got dark outside the walls of our tent - and trekked from one end of the small country to the other. Absolutely brilliant. And the first time I had really travelled, since neither I nor my parents had ever been able to afford it, but I worked a Saturday job at The General Trading Company in Sloane Square, which was not much fun but that was not the point. I earnt my way, and enjoyed the trip all the more.

We climbed Hekla - the biggest volcano in Iceland, not far from Eyjafjallajökull - only a few months after it had erupted. The slopes of the mountain and all the surrounding landscape were carpeted in black rocky ash - as I imagine the environs of the current eruption are looking at the moment. At Eyjafjallajökull, we climbed over the glacier and even went down inside it - I remember that it was amazingly blue, and that the view of the glacier from our campsite as the sun didn't really set was one of the most beautiful experiences of the trip. Incredibly, I find I still have a mental image of it in my mind's eye. There are photographs somewhere, and a diary - the first time that I coherently wrote down my observations and experiences - stranded at my parents' somewhere I think.

All these happy memories are coming back as I read about the volcano. Still, I hope it gets sorted out soon as I want to go to Tunisia in 3 weeks!

Aaah, electioneering in the springtime...

Spring has finally arrived, thank goodness, and everyone is turning over a new leaf (no pun intended). I, for example, have finally started cycling to work again. Rory Bremner on Newsnight last night commented, "People are starting to see things again that they haven't seen for months - blossom, warm weather, their local MP..."

And it's true! Brown finally got round to announcing that the General Election would be on the date that everyone was expecting, and suddenly canvassers have sprung up from the ground like new season's buds! The clusters of people going door-to-door of an evening are not Jehovah's Witnesses, but canvassers checking you're going to go out and vote ... so strange to think we used to do that ourselves. Not any more. I don't even have any idea how I'm going to vote.

But MPs have certainly been unpopular around the UK in the last few months, as the result of the huge and ever-worsening scandal over expenses claims. People have been very angry about it, so I don't envy the canvassers the reception they're getting on the doorstep. 120 MPs are standing down at these elections, and many of the new candidates are campaigning as Independents, as the confidence has gone out of party politics.

We went out on Sunday - had a walk down to Abbeville Road to buy cheese in the deli, and stopped for a drink at the pub, sitting outside, slightly over-optimistically since the temperature was pretty low and breezy - and had great fun watching some Tories being harangued by a little old lady they had had the naïvety to stop and campaign to. Haranguing is definitely the word, though we were too far away to hear what she was saying, but there was something almost violent about the gestures her arms were making, while the poses of the two blue-rosetted Tories somewhat shrinking and defensive... And it went on for a good long while.

The worst thing about it is the endless media coverage. I am not sure I can cope with watching the news or listening to the radio over the next month! I am fast tiring of Michael Crick's sleazily arrogant style in his Newsnight reports from the campaigning front line. Although The Vote Now Show will be funny... political satire, that's what we need.

It's all so petty and pointless, but they're trying to make it out like it's something as important as the election of the President of the United States! There's a TV debate between the three party leaders tomorrow night, the first of three, which I am sure K will be tempted to watch, but I'll be tucked up reading in bed. Our new local Labour candidate is being 'marketed' as if he were the new Obama, and there is endless talk of 'Change' in the hope that this will catch fire in an Obama-esque way, whereas everyone is just so tired of same old, same old, so change is just good and appealing because it's different.

Well, only 3 more weeks of all this to go...

Letter to the Editor

This is fantastic, and extremely funny!! It encapsulates perfectly how everyone feels about banks and bankers these days! Though it doesn't inspire confidence when, like us, you are imminently about to apply for a mortgage ... because - and I still can't quite believe this - they have accepted our offer on the flat! More soon...

(OK so it's a jokemail, but it's still excellent! See the background story here - with thanks to James)

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A SENIOR MOMENT - An elderly lady actually wrote this letter to her bank. The bank manager thought it amusing enough to have it published in The Times and this newspaper thanks him most sincerely.

Dear Sir,

I am writing to thank you for bouncing my cheque with which I endeavoured to pay my plumber last month. By my calculations, three 'nanoseconds' must have elapsed between his presenting the cheque and the arrival in my account of the funds needed to honour it. I refer, of course, to the automatic monthly deposit of my pension, an arrangement which, I admit, has been in place for only thirty-eight years. You are to be commended for seizing that brief window of opportunity, and also for debiting my account £30 by way of penalty for the inconvenience caused to your bank.

My thankfulness springs from the manner in which this incident has caused me to rethink my errant financial ways.

I noticed that, whereas I personally attend to your telephone calls and letters, when I try to contact you, I am confronted by the impersonal, overcharging, re-recorded, faceless entity which your bank has become. From now on, I, like you, choose only to deal with a flesh-and-blood person. My mortgage and loan payments will, therefore and hereafter, no longer be automatic, but will arrive at your bank by cheque, addressed personally and confidentially to an employee at your bank whom you must nominate.

Be aware that it is an offence under the Postal Act for any other person to open such an envelope.

Please find attached an Application Contact Status which I require your chosen employee to complete. I am sorry it runs to eight pages but, in order that I know as much about him or her as your bank knows about me, there is no alternative. Please note that all copies of his or her medical history must be countersigned by a Solicitor, and the mandatory details of his/her financial situation (income, debts, assets and liabilities) must be accompanied by documented proof.

In due course, I will issue your employee with a PIN number which he/she must quote in dealings with me. I regret that it cannot be shorter than 28 digits but, again, I have modelled it on the number of button presses required of me to access my account balance on your
phone bank service.

As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Let me level the playing field even further. When you call me, press buttons as follows:

1 - To make an appointment to see me.

2 - To query a missing payment.

3 - To transfer the call to my living room, in case I am there.

4 - To transfer the call to my bedroom, in case I am sleeping.

5 - To transfer the call to my toilet, in case I am attending to nature.

6 - To transfer the call to my mobile phone, if I am not at home.

7 - To leave a message on my computer (a password to access my computer is required. A password will be communicated to you at a later date to the Authorised Contact.)

8 - To return to the main menu and to listen to options 1 through 8

9 - To make a general complaint or inquiry, the contact will then be put on hold, pending the attention of my automated answering service. While this may, on occasion, involve a lengthy wait, uplifting music will play for the duration of the call.

Regrettably, but again following your example, I must also levy an Establishment Fee to cover the setting up of this new arrangement.

May I wish you a happy, if ever so slightly less prosperous, New Year.

Your Humble Client


Addendum from The Editor:

IMPORTANT to remember that this letter was written by a 98-year-old woman. DOESN'T SHE MAKE YOU PROUD!

Doctor Who?

Dinner on Wednesday night with Melanie, over from California for a job interview (still got my fingers crossed...). Over drinks in a genuine historic-ish pub near Russell Square, we fell to talking about TV shows. We are fairly stereotypical in our almost exclusive adherence to imported American drama shows, the good stuff though, frequently HBO. We have been fanatical about The West Wing and The Wire, now we're watching Mad Men, Brothers and Sisters, The Good Wife, sprinkled with a bit of CSI for light relief - only the Las Vegas show, mind, not any of the others...

Melanie was extolling the virtues of British TV shows, a subject about which we were able to say very little (apart from your occasional Agatha Christie production), but somehow Dr Who came up, and suddenly this cultural chasm opened up between us... She had never heard of Dr Who!!! And this from an American who had lived in London for 12 years!! Obviously during the years when it was off...

Not that we watch it very regularly, but trying to explain Dr Who and the iconic theme tune which everyone in Britain instantly recognises and sings along to or Daleks which immediately fill everyone in Britain with fear and dread, and being greeted with utter incomprehension... really made me understand what a unique British phenomenon Dr Who is! Strangely, it has never been exported! It actually filled me with a new respect for the programme...

K drew a diagram of a Dalek (see above) to see if Melanie would recognise it - she didn't. The only paper to hand was a chapter on iconography from Anna's PhD draft which I was reading in the restaurant while waiting for the others to arrive! Iconography seemed an appropriate subject though, in light of our conversation...

I am also reminded of the two guys we saw dressed up as Daleks on the beach at St Ives, when we were there for the fancy dress extravaganza that is New Year's Eve - alas, I didn't catch them on camera. As they went running past us, one of them said to the other, "No - you have to run like this!" and demonstrated a stiff-limbed pseudo-mechanical form of run which of course no Dalek would ever be able to do, seeing as they can't even walk upstairs. It was hilarious though!

Happy Easter!

Nick sent this to us as an Easter greeting a couple of years ago - it always makes K giggle like a little boy!

Thank goodness for the Easter bank holiday weekend - four days of enforced time off work! It has been a festival of cooking and eating and an orgy of relaxing...

We kicked off the proceedings by hosting a dinner for eight here on Thursday evening, in honour of one of K's colleagues whose contract has come to an end. We started cooking for that on Wednesday night, to fit all the preparations around work, but somehow I still managed to get chained to the kitchen for two hours on the night making salads... The first recipes we have tried from our new cookbook purchase, Ottolenghi, but how yummy and worth the wait! One with broad beans and radishes, another with fennel and feta and sumac, and lots of lemon juice and olive oil in both. A lovely evening, but one which reminded us that it is difficult to entertain eight comfortably in our flat!

On Good Friday, K went into work - it was the first day that the Tudor wine fountain he has been involved with recreating was going to be up and running and serving wine, and he wanted to be around to make sure all went smoothly. I went in to meet him for lunch, then to be introduced in person to the wine fountain - which is just amazing, but more on that anon! I gained the distinction of being the first person ever to pay for a glass of wine from the fountain! I also went round some of the parts of the palace they had made changes to since the last time I had been - and went round the Georgian apartments, which for some reason I had never visited before but really loved, in large part because they were the Hampton Court home of Caroline of Ansbach, wife of George II, who is one of the characters in the second Neal Stephenson book, The Confusion, which I have just finished reading and which in all honesty has made me far more interested in the 18th century than I have ever been! On the train there, I was reading about the celebrations of her 18th birthday, and here I had jumped forward - or back - in time to the apartments she lived in at the end of her life!

Home long before K to prepare some of the food for our Easter Sunday lunch party - braised broad beans in tomatoes and herbs, the first time I had cooked beans from dried, and I think the only advantage of this was that they held together better during the long cooking process because in the end I am not sure the dish was all that tasty! I also made lemony biscuits and blackberry ice cream for dessert, using the blackberries we picked on my birthday last year, which have been taking up space in the freezer since then - along with a blackberry and apple pie filling, and quite a few raspberries as I rediscovered to my interest...

On Saturday we journeyed out to Little Chalfont - via the urban wasteland of Watford, due to multiple engineering works on the railways - for the interment of K's grandfather Robert's ashes, in the churchyard in Chenies where he now rests with Betty, his wife of over 60 years. We had a nice family lunch in the pub nearby, then back to the flat for the last time, to choose any books and CDs we wanted to keep, and help K's parents and uncle load furniture onto the hire van, to clean out cupboards and sort what remains into boxes. The sale should be completed by the end of April - fingers crossed - but the flat should be empty by the end of this week. It suddenly struck K as we were leaving that he would never go back there.

Home to marinade the lamb for Easter Sunday lunch and mix up another batch of blackberry ice cream.

On Sunday morning we had to prepare the rest of the food for Sunday lunch but also receive K's father and uncle and the hire van full of furniture K was inheriting from his grandparents, which he had loaded up the day before. This included two bookcases - one of which was made by his great grandfather who was a cabinet maker - and to make room for these, K had to take everything off the two (smaller) bookcases we already had ... so at one point our sitting room was just a pile of books, and 6 lunch guests due in less than half an hour...! But amazingly everything got delivered, fitted into place and books shoved back into them at random, and by the time the doorbell rang for the first guest, it was as if nothing had ever been out of place!

They're rather beautiful pieces of furniture but they give the flat a strong feeling of living in the past that I haven't quite got used to yet. They're the kind of cabinet that might have furnished this flat when it was originally built in the 1930s.




And so to lunch. We followed a Greek-inspired menu by chef Maria Elia, from the food magazine we subscribe to, Olive. Over the years it has come to seem very repetitive and there is far too much Gordon Ramsay in it for my liking, but in every issue there are always 2 or 3, sometimes more, new recipes which we try, and which keep us experimenting with food, and for want of a good substitute, we keep buying it.

This lunch menu started with halloumi and a nice salad made with fennel, celery, olives and parsley; and in addition to the braised broad beans, was accompanied by lemon-roasted potatoes with capers, and wilted spinach with pine nuts and a dressing made with sultanas, herbs and red wine vinegar. But of course the star of the feast was the paper-wrapped leg of lamb that we had marinated overnight with garlic and plentiful herbs and spices and more lemon juice - quite a number of lemons lost their lives to put our lunch on the table! This was the result:

served up on a lovely mid-19th century platter which I inherited from my grandmother, and enjoyed by all - but especially by K and I for whom this was the first meat to pass our lips in 6 weeks!! It was gorgeous!!

A long lingering Sunday lunch with Lindsay & Russell and Wanda & Az, that went on until about quarter to 8, which is how we like our Sunday lunches, and all the better for not having to go to work today...

And so to Easter Monday. We finally got a lie-in this morning - K shocked me into wakefulness by looking at the clock and saying it was 1.15!! Which fortunately it wasn't - the pillow was obscuring the first 1! A lazy breakfast - I am now reading the 3rd of the Neal Stephenson books, The System of the World, which K is jealous about because he hasn't read this one yet! - and then we took ourselves off to the Ritzy for some mindless entertainment in the form of Clash of the Titans, which was great! I love the original film and of course this was nothing like that, but there's nothing like a bit of Greek mythology to get you going!

It was shown in 3D, as everything seems to be these days - the Ritzy had obviously run out of 3s for the board out front where they still put up all the film titles of what's on that week in the traditional way, which I love, and so they were advertising Clash of the Titans in 4D! What would that be?? You are actually in the movie I suppose! But I like the idea of it because it always reminds me of Victorian stereoscope images - the 3D glasses you have to put on are literally the modern equivalent of the stereoscope glasses you used to have to use. Though the technology for creating these images in film-form has obviously greatly advanced, somehow this little bit of lo-fi kit is such a pleasing link to the past...

K is now sorting books, CDs and DVDs, trying to fit everything onto the new bookcases, which have smaller and narrower shelves, and integrating the not-very-restrained pile of books and CDs we brought from his grandfather's. If we end up moving to this new flat, chances are that none of this is going to fit...