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“…dusk is the time when men whisper of matters about which they remain silent in the full light of the sun.”
Simon Raven
Having been up to ‘town’ over the weekend for an entirely agreeable social occasion we found ourselves strolling back to Waterloo along the south bank of the Thames as dusk encroached. The quality of the light was such that I could not resist un-holstering the Fuji x10 and firing off a few shots…
As a teacher of drama I am aware that I perhaps view the world – on occasion – through slightly different eyes to those not so involved.
This thought came into my head recently as the result of my having to make a trip to Loughborough, which is – for those unfamiliar with the geography of the United Kingdom – in the Midlands, approximately 90 minutes north of London by train.
Which fact is germane – since I decided to eschew my normal practice and to take public transport rather than driving. I am still somewhat unsure as to exactly what made me do so: the weather had turned colder and I had been doing a considerable amount of driving of late, so I perhaps felt that what was needed was a relatively stress-free peregrination.
Why I thought that public transport would afford such I do not know!
Our end of Berkshire is not quite on the opposite side of the capital to the Midlands, but given the transport topology of the south of England it might as well be so. I paid my customary visit to the InterWebNet to ascertain the optimal route and discovered that I would needs journey into and across London before heading northwards out into the wilds of Leicestershire. This meant leaving in the frosty dark of the early morning, driving to the station, taking two trains to get to Paddington, taking the tube (underground or metro for those not of these parts!) across the metropolis to St Pancras and then finally boarding the intercity train to Loughborough.
The morning rush hour in the home counties is no fun at all, which has a great deal to do with why I routinely drive 35 miles in to School rather than relying on public transport (assuming that I could ever afford such!). For the second leg of my journey north – from Reading to Paddington – I had a reserved seat. Unfortunately I boarded the designated carriage at the wrong end. The train was non-stop to London and the coach so packed with standing passengers that I had to abandon any hope of pushing my way down the length of it to find my place. I do hope that somebody else enjoyed it!
“All very interesting” – I hear you cry – “but what has this to do with drama?”
Well – the portion of the first year drama curriculum that covers physicality includes an element concerning personal space – that private but invisible zone that we maintain around ourselves for our physical and emotional protection. In the course of this study we are – naturally – particularly interested in the dramatic possibilities of incursions into this space, which usually occur as a result of one character attempting to impose his or her status on another. Imagining an RSM lecturing an incompetent private at particularly close quarters, or a hoodlum intimidating his victim (to take just two obviously rather extreme examples) should give some idea as to what I refer.
Needless to say – we usually guard this space jealously, and when we do allow or invite others in it is normally a clear indication of the closeness of the relationship concerned.
On the commuter train – to the contrary – all of this goes out of the window! One finds oneself crushed in extreme close proximity with others, including those of the opposite sex for whom such intrusion would normally be a cause for raising the alarm! It seems that the modus operandi in such cases is simply to pretend that the incursion is not taking place at all – which is most strange.
I have always found the London commuter experience to be a puzzle. The wealthy banker may leave his luxury domicile in the home counties – given, perhaps, a lift to the station by his trophy wife in his top-end BMW. Once in the city he sits in his luxurious office on the upper floors with a panoramic view of the capital, his needs being serviced by PAs, underlings and secretaries. In between – however – he endures the commuter crush with tens of thousands of others in what is indubitably a pretty low-order experience… and for the ‘privilege’ of so doing he pays what can only be described as an eye-wateringly extortionate toll.
Bizarre!
Tags: Drama, England, Modern life
Nature – splendidly – works to its own rhythm, rhyme and reason. Here – in the last week of November – we are finally seeing the sort of autumnal display that I more normally associate with the end of October. The leaves have really only just begun to fall properly now and at this rate the trees will not be bare before we head across the water to Canada.
Some photos from the jolly old Fuji x10:
To the Stoop tonight for some more rugby – in this instance the international between England and Canada’s respective representative womens’ XVs!
See what I mean about trouble?!
The Stoop for those that don’t know – is the Harlequins ground – and is in Twickenham, just across the road from the ‘cabbage patch’ itself.
This promises to be a tough, physical encounter on both sides. The English women beat close rivals – France – at the weekend by a convincing 40 points to 20. They lost – however – the last two engagements against Canada over the summer and will definitely be seeking revenge on home turf, particularly since the two sides are drawn in the same pool for the Womens’ Rugby World Cup next year in France.
The Kickass Canada Girl has dug out her maple-leaf mitts and has lent me her England scarf (dual-nationality doubtless causing some internal conflict here) – but in reality we are probably both supporting both sides.
Well – I am, anyway!
Addendum: On this occasion the English girls were rather too strong for their Canadian cousins – beating them 32 points to 3! They had home advantage and a partisan crowd of course.
The Girl was a bit glum afterwards, but had no complaints.
Regular readers will doubtless not have missed within these postings the frequent references to those venerable institutions – the English public schools. Those without these shores – should they feel moved to investigate a little more closely – may find that any preconceptions that they hold concerning the nature of these august establishments and of the type of characters they attract – and indeed breed – are at best partial. Safe to say that the stereotype of the English public school boy – whilst indubitably having at least some basis in truth – paints a somewhat misleading picture.
Those wishing to know more would have done well to catch – on the BBC last weekend – a splendid documentary by Hannah Berryman entitled “A Very English Education”. The conceit behind the production was the revisiting of some of the subjects of a previous BBC documentary series – first shown in 1979 – which examined the daily lives of a group of young men then attending Radley College. The purported intent was to discover the effect that a public school education had on the lives of these privileged youths, and to that end the first part of the film took them back their younger days to observe and to comment – in the light of their later experiences – on these rarified schooldays spent in the bucolic Oxfordshire countryside.
The programme provided – as one might expect – a fascinating insight into the nature of such an education. As it progressed – however – it became apparent that the true heart of the piece lay elsewhere. Ms Berryman astutely withheld until the very last segment the revelation of what had become of these entitled scholars as they journeyed through life. When their fates were finally revealed – in what proved an unexpected and delicately moving series of sequences – it became apparent that the real subject of the piece was considerably broader than had first appeared – on childhood and growing up – on the nature of ambition (or lack thereof), success and failure – of family and of its echoes across the generations… In short, the stuff of life itself.
“A Very English Education” was beautifully judged and expertly made, proving far greater than its initial impression promised. You may – if you act quickly – be able to catch this excellent piece on the iPlayer. If that proves impossible this review by the Guardian’s Sam Wollaston catches the tone. Don’t read it if you have a chance to catch the programme though…
I missed the first showing and had to catch up on the iPlayer myself. That was enough to reduce me to tears, but then – I am a notorious softy!
Assorted images of the harvest season in Merrie England – as captured by the Fuji X10. The interminable drizzle and ashen skies give little in the way of encouragement to the casual photographer…
You must know that for those destined to dominate others the ordinary rules of life are turned upside down and duty acquires an entirely new meaning. Good and evil are carried off to a higher, different plane.
Pope Alexander VI to Lucrezia Borgia
I will be brief!
Chancellor Osbourne’s speech to the Tory party conference in the UK last week included one announcement that had not – contrary to what has somewhat sadly become widely accepted practice – been trailed to the media in advance. The gist of this statement was that – should the Tories be allowed another term in office – once the recovery had stabilised and the structural deficit been reduced the Tories would then focus on running a surplus on the nation’s budget.
This would appear at first glance to be a good thing. One should live within one’s means and it is – of course – good practice to put something aside during the ‘fat’ years to see us through the ‘lean’. What went unsaid was that this would of necessity be achieved by extending – apparently indefinitely – the current policy of austerity, with all that that implies as a brake on growth leading to the further erosion of living standards.
This bitter medicine – though difficult to swallow – might just be accepted as an essential part of the cure for our ills were it not for one glaring omission – one extremely large and utterly disregarded (by the Tories!) elephant in the room. This perpetual belt-tightening will clearly not apply to the Tories’ favoured sons – the one percent!
The bankers – the speculators – the masters of the universe… will all be free to carry on awarding themselves inflationary pay rises, exorbitant bonuses (apparently regardless of performance) and eye-watering severance packages. The stateless corporates will continue to play off nation against nation for their favours, effectively deciding for themselves what – if any – tax they will pay and to whom. Whilst the ‘ordinary’ man (and woman) must take in another notch in their belts and watch as their standard of living slowly dissolves – castles of sand washed away by the incoming tide – the rich aboard their hyper-yachts will simply sail off into the sunset, the income gap between us and them growing ever wider and wider as it has been doing since the 1970s.
I have never understood why it is that – whilst at one end of the spectrum workers are expected to ‘price’ themselves into a job – at the opposite extreme these ‘supermen’ – these Übermensch – are apparently incapable of carrying out the jobs (of which they have had their pick!) for which they are already extremely well paid unless they are further bribed so to do – for what are bonus and incentive schemes but bribery – plain and simple. I have nothing at all against those who enrich themselves through their honest toil and creativity – those who build something which is ultimately of the benefit to all. For far too many of the one percent – however – this is simply not the case.
These men must be truly exceptional to be rewarded as they are. They must indeed be exceptional to be feted so by those who represent us. They are also apparently exceptions to the rule by which the rest of us must live. I feel sure – however – that they will not give a fig that we take exception to them!
Which we do!
Flame off…
Tags: England, inequality, Politics
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Many of us in the UK breath a hearty sigh of relief at this point of the year – for the party conference season has finally shuddered to a close. Those of like vintage can probably just about recall when party conferences actually meant something – when policies were proposed, debated and then voted upon according to whichever greater or lesser degree of democratic process the party in question espoused. It wasn’t perfect. It was very rarely pretty – but at least there was a feeling that the entire farrago had some sort of purpose.
Nowadays these annual gatherings in corners of the kingdom seldom otherwise visited by many of those in or on the fringes of power, are merely tightly choreographed PR exercises, the prime function of which is to garner headlines in the media and to ‘get the message across’. It is a particular bugbear of mine (one of many, you may have noticed!) that ‘getting the message across’ is now considered to be of such import that it is apparently perfectly acceptable to patronise horribly those of us who make up the great unwashed – presumably on the basis that we possess between us no intelligence whatsoever!
We are unfortunate in the UK currently to suffer what is fundamentally a Tory administration. From the Kickass Canada Girl’s pithy epithets on perusing the news from home I deduce that Canada finds itself in a similar position. Now – for the Tories the ‘message’ that must be ‘got across’ is that the entire global financial meltdown – as well as the subsequent and ongoing international credit crisis – was caused solely by the profligacy of the last Labour administration. (Strangely the inverse now applies – any current woes being the fault of those beyond these shores).
Whereas I can just about understand the Tories holding this view – and indeed trying to make political capital therefrom – it is abundantly clear that every single member of the administration that has been given permission to communicate through the media has been briefed to ram this point home at every conceivable opportunity. As a result there is no question to which the answer is free from this mantra – the recitation of the same hackneyed dogma – an endless repetition of the same trite phrases, presumably in the belief that if a thing is said frequently and loudly enough the rest of us will eventually accept it as the truth.
COME ON!! – for pity’s sake… This is the way that a child ‘communicates’ when it wants something that it can’t have. Show us at least some respect!
Lest anyone – at this point – accuse me of getting ‘party political’ I should make it clear that I consider all parties and pretty well all politicians to be equally guilty in this regard. It comes as little surprise to me that the electorate is increasingly and justifiably disenchanted with those who purport to represent us. The Tories – being currently in power – must inevitably, however, be the prime recipients of our disapprobation.
Oh dear! What was intended to be a brief but pithy commentary on the Chancellor – George Osbourne’s – conference speech, has morphed instead into two less than temperate virtual diatribes. I really shouldn’t let these things get to me, but I do find these preening popinjays so very irritating…
Tags: England, inequality, Politics
The Bank Holiday spent with good friends – sun-drenched conversation and epicurean feasting in their drowsily gorgeous garden. All (for now at least!) well with the world…
It says a good deal as to the frenetic pace at which we have been living of late that Sunday last saw only my second appearance of the season in the whites (as opposed to the garish ‘pyjamas’ of the short-form game) that are still in the main the mark of the village cricketer.
I posted regarding my first outing of the season here. This fixture was played under rather different circumstances, taking place not on some bucolic countryside cricket green but rather in a council run park in one of the suburbs of south London. Nowhere near as pretty and – as is often the way with council squares – the pitch was – shall we say – erratic… to put it mildly. In other words – some balls kept low whilst others would shoot abruptly up to chest or even chin height and very few came on nicely to the bat – making the timing of shots difficult in the extreme.
No matter. A good game was had by all and the opposition – another side new to us – were good sports. The match was thus played in an appropriately Corinthian spirit.
One of the great beauties of cricket is that the game came be played in a wide variety of formats, from the full five day ‘tests’ so beloved of the purists (of which I count myself one) down to the frantic dash of the Twenty20 format, which is done and dusted – razzamatazz and all – in around three hours. Even at village level subtle variations can be agreed upon to enhance the occasion. For this fixture – for example – we had agreed on two additional rules:
These ‘house’ rules were adopted to ensure that all concerned would be as involved in the match as possible, and so that no particularly gifted individuals could hog the limelight.
As a result I got to bowl a couple of overs for the first time in ages and – to my surprise – I actually took a couple of wickets… although the second such – a stumping – came from such a rank bad ball that I felt embarrassed to have my name associated with it. I also hung around for a while with the bat and accumulated what is – for me – a respectable score.
Once I was out – however – we lost several more quick wickets and soon found ourselves at 120 for 8, chasing a target of 183 and with only 7 overs or so left in which to get them. A win looked the least likely outcome at this point. Fortunately – by another of the sort of quirks that features only in this type of game – we had held back a couple of our better batsmen until well down the order, and some judicious hitting out by them saw us home with a few balls to spare in a most exciting finish.
Jolly good stuff all round – and everyone went home happy.
As the title of this post suggests, I have made no attempt herein to elucidate any of the arcana of the game for those with little or no extant knowledge thereof. To make up for this ommission I am very happy so to do – individually – for anyone who might be interested.
I don’t think I will hold my breath though!
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