Urban Magic

What I Did On My Holidays – Montreal Pt.1

Posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 in Cities and Adventures | 2 Comments

Alas, I went to Montreal before I owned a camera, so this is going to have to be done the ol’ fashioned way… are you sitting comfortably?

The gentleman in my life was invited to attend a conference in Montreal for a few days in 2006, the year of the World Cup, and quickly decided that this was an excellent way to have a holiday.  I leapt upon the bandwagon, swearing that for the days immediately preceding the conference I would eat nothing at all (a pledge I did not keep) so that for those few precious moments when all our needs were theoretically on institutional expenses, I could stuff myself like a barrage balloon.  We would stay in luxury, buy every travelcard and visit every cultural monument expenses could permit… as it turned out, this didn’t entirely happen, but I’ll try not to jump the gun on this story.

Since a writer’s income is, at best, unreliable, and at worst, a bit piss-piddly, I am a natural skinflint.  If my soul is ever captured in art, suspect that attached to the canvas will be a sign advertising a 2-for-1 offer.   But so it goes.  In order to fulfil my skinflint nature, we found the cheapest flights we could which involved the interesting and entirely horrific trick of changing planes at Detriot.  I have been informed that freedom of speech and freedom of thought are, despite the litigation laws of the day, still extant, so let me say two things: 1.  I have never in all my life been so uncomfortable as I was on a Northwestern Flight from London to Detriot and 2.  US border controls are utterly horrific and inane.

We weren’t planning on entering the US at all, since Canada was the final destination, but Detriot Airport didn’t have an international transit lounge and so, diligently, we filled out our green landing cards with questions like ‘were you involved in the Nazi genocide 1939-45?’ and ‘have you come to the USA to commit acts of terrorism’ (pick either box ‘yes’ or box ‘no’.)  We then arrived at customs where for 3 hours, 1000 people tried to shove and elbow there way through the chaos of custom control while one woman with a gun shouted and screamed and on occasion threatened the punters, a very large percentage of whom did not have English as a first language, to get their asses into line.  How I pined for Heathrow Airport and its lovely orderly cues laid out in lovely orderly lines.  How I pined for more than one copper and less than one gun on my side of international arrivals…

Arriving at customs we were subjected to the usual questions.  The answer ‘I’m going to Canada’ was met with appropriate snottiness, and once my fingerprints and retina were scanned, I was let through.  The first sign to greet me on arrival to the US of A was a poster proclaiming ‘US Customs and Immigration – We Are The Best.’  I should point out that on my return via the US back from Canada, my fingerprints and retina was scanned again, and I was met with the statement, ‘I see you’ve never entered the US before’ which leads me perhaps to think that this is bureaucracy too far… but who knows…

Because it had taken 3 hours to get into the US, it only took us 20 minutes to get out again, boarding a little, half-empty plane for Montreal.  We arrived at roughly 2 a.m. local time, and our taxi driver took us to our bed and breakfast where we were, according to both the sign and the man who greeted us, staying in the ‘Princess Charlotte Suite’.  Next to us were the ‘Queen Anne’ rooms and a room related somehow to a Duchess whose details temporarily evade me.  We all shared a bathroom, which alas did not go by the name ‘The Prince Regent Baths’.

Jet lag overcome, we set forth exploring Montreal.

First up, my French is lousy.  I can just about apologise for my inability to speak it, and there my abilities end.  I have, alas, acquired just about enough of a wide and eclectic range of languages that I am now incapable of speaking any at all.  Thankfully, the population of Montreal, while automatically speaking French, was willing to switch to English in the face of my incomprehension.  My boyfriend, having somewhat better French, would make the occasional stab at the language, and on resorting desperately to English, would at the very least be congratulated on the authentic quality of his ‘bonjour’.  Canadian French was, incidentally, not like French as we were taught it at school.  Breakfast was lunch, lunch was dinner, and in between floated a strange abuse of words that would have caused my French teacher’s nose to wrinkle with disdain.  Breakfast was, by the by, one of the great pleasures of Montreal, since it almost invariably consisted of eggy bread with maple syrup, one of god’s greatest gifts to man.

The city itself is…

… well…

… imagine a fairly standard American city laid out on a fairly standard grid pattern.  Stick one hell of a massive river down at its base, around which the streets become tighter and almost European in terms of tourist-trod time, throw in the remnants of major league docks out on the islands, put the menus in both English and French, serve up hamburgers and hot dogs on the same menu as duck casserole, make the buses new and the streets pock-holed and cracked, make the graffiti bright and angry and the department stores universal; stir in regional pride and the latest Hollywood blockbusters, stick a surprisingly steep hill bang smack in the middle, throw in a rusting ancient fun fair of crumbling joy rides and machinery turned into a thing not what it said on the cover, melt a lot of cheese over the chips and you have, in a strange, uneven, yet entirely familiar and recognizable form, Montreal.

Call me a decadent foreign whatsit, but cheese on the chips is a fashion that has yet to really win me over, yet I think it, along with eggy bread and maple syrup, is my dish of choice for defining Montreal.  Other key features that defined it for me was a great long jutt of land heading out to what my mental compass considered the west, surrounded at its tip on all sides by masses of rolling river water laden with heavy freight ships.  We cycled along it one day, and in the curiosity of the ride, encompassing sculpture parks, leafy suburbs, industrial waste grounds and leafy by-ways, I failed to notice that I was a) getting serious sun burnt for the only time in my life and b) had cycled 20 km.  The next day my knees refused to behave properly (cycling is not something I do that often) and I lay in bed experiencing Montreal TV while the boyfriend attended the conference.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer in French was, I thought, about as surreal as it was going to get.  Then Dr Who came on, and there were daleks, and i had to redefine my expectations.  The only bit of French I picked up from that experience came from watching the world cup.  ‘Penalty shoot out’ I worked out after a while, was ‘Le Barrage’, a trivial piece of information that made my linguistic holiday.  I was in a bar when England lost to Paraguay, and curiously enough, no one seemed very sad…

I also discovered the wonderful bonding powers of Neil Gaiman, when, sitting in a coffee shop reading Neverwhere (one of the greatest London fantasies I’ve ever read – although I feel I should point out for my honour’s sake that I read it about 2 months after finishing A Madness of Angels and was a little bit surprised…) – a man turned to me and spoke to me in French.  I mumbled that I didn’t speak French, and he switched easily to English (I have such envy of people who can speak many languages!) and announced that Gaiman was one of the greatest writers of all time.  (A valid point.)  We then fell to talking and, on discovering that I wasn’t Canadian, he cheerfully informed me that he was a surveillance expert who spent his time working for the police on bugging criminals.  Not really expecting to hear this in a coffee shop in Montreal, I blathered emptily and deeply regret now the opportunity to steal his life’s story.  If you’re out there – tell me all!  It was however a pleasant experience in a foreign land, and one which managed to cement in me, especially after the US Customs and Immigration fiasco, the idea that Canada really was better after all…

It turned out that we had chosen our dates for visiting Montreal at a curious time.  Formula 1 had come to the city, and at nearly 9 miles distance we could hear the buzz of the engines like a bee was trapped in the room with us.  Canada Day was also upon us, there was a jazz festival going down, and – joy of joys! – a firework competition had come to Montreal.  I love fireworks.  I mean, I really love fireworks, I’m the girl standing at the front going ‘whee’. In Quebec there also seemed to be Quebec Week happening, but as we discovered, part of Quebec nationalism was being very reluctant to explain itself in any language other than French.  However, our trip to Quebec City and beyond is a story for another time…

Inns of Court pt.2

Posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 in London | No Comments

It has been pointed out to me that there are actually 4 Inns of Court – Middle, Inner, Lincoln and Greys.  However, in my defence, I’d like to point out that Inner is inside Middle, or possibly Middle is inside Inner, or maybe they are both in Temple – oh yes, there’s a Temple, but is it a Court?  – (no being my preferred answer of choice) and so it goes.  There a surprisingly amount of mysticism related to the Inns of Court, particularly Middle/Inner, involving ancient ancient churches, burial sites and quite possibly a heady dose of paganism.  There’s also a lot of law happening, and it was, curiously enough, a lawyer who pointed out my mistake.  However, I do not yet know the secret handshake of revelation, so will have to get back to you on that one…

Inns of Court

Posted on Saturday, September 26th, 2009 in London | No Comments

… or, ‘guess which BBC Victorian drama was filmed here…?’

There’s a lot to say about the Inns of Court – for a start, there are three of them; Greys Inn, Lincolns Inn and Middle Temple Inn – and they’re extremely old and have a reasonably exciting history.  So I’m not going to really say much about them yet, and simply put in some of the photos I’ve acquired and say that bang smack in the middle of London are three dead sexy historical bits of the city inhabited almost entirely by lawyers and film crews, covering many, many acres, and almost entirely hidden from public sight, although, oddly enough, entirely free to public access.  And unless you’re seeking legal advice, I heartily recommend them as good places to sit and eat cake.  Although you’re not allowed on the grass, irritatingly enough, without having at the very least a wig to put on your head…

Vaclav Havel

Posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 in Writing | 2 Comments

I was asked, a few months ago, to say what name went with ‘Havel’ in a ‘guess that playwright’ game, and automatically said Vaclav.  It took me a while to figure out why I’d said this – was it some vague hangover from GCSE history, or a lingering half-memory of ‘The Cold War Endgame’, that fatal LSE exam where I got a mental block on how to spell ‘Gorbachev’ half way through the final paper…?  Whatever – we had no time to find out, since the context in which Mr Havel was named was a theatre history lecture on the absurdist movement of the 20th century, and no one seemed particularly interested in why the name was setting off alarm bells.  And so for a while I ignored it, until, wandering into the library, I found a copy of the works of Vaclav Havel 1969-83 and started reading.  And it all came flooding back…

Czechoslovakia (as was during the Cold War) was not a country, I vaguely recalled, that had taken particularly kindly to communism.  Sure, there was the whole post-Nazi reaction that swept most of Europe where, for a good 6 months, extreme leftist politics seemed a suitable response to extreme rightist politics and so long as the socialists/communists were willing to let themselves be voted out of government on a regular basis then that was all fair and above board.  But then oh whoops, the Warsaw Pact, the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall, the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, secret police, one-party states and the Cold War as we all know and love…

In 1968 the Czechs had their own uprising that was, in the tradition of the time, brutally suppressed, but a theme remained in Czechoslovakia of protest via art.  The central theatre in Prague was more often than not, a place of dissent, where pissed off people gathered together.  Charter 77 began there, as did numerous movements with such catchy names as ‘ The Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted’.  The actors and writers were ridiculously active – or as ridiculously active as safety permitted – in protesting loudly and fearlessly against the state.  One story tells the tale that in 1989 as communism seemed to crumble overnight, an orchestra set up in Prague and played the Moldau, a song more Czech than alcoholic cough medicine on a snow-shaken night, over and over and over again in celebration of a national identity that had been systematically crushed in the name of universal brotherhood.  And when the world stopped turning and the state looked up between the slits of its fingers, a playwright, dissident, sometime-prisoner-of-the-state by the name of Vaclav Havel was probably a little surprised to find himself the first prime minister of a post-communist state.

But this isn’t really about the politics of Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic.  The point is; I sat down and read some of the works of Vaclav Havel on the tube, and it was utterly fascinating.  The writing (of what I’ve read so far) ranges from the ridiculous to the surreal, the wonderful to the bizarre, but is never anything other than utterly absorbing.  With a history-loving hat on, it’s also absolutely fascinating – sort of George Orwell meets P.G.Wodehouse.  You can see why he got into trouble with the authorities of the time; the sheer ridiculousness of the communist system, which specialised in disguising fear as ideology, is shown in all its absurd glory.  A charge which can sometimes be leveled against the more didactic kinda playwriting is that, with writers like, say, Brecht, the story takes second place to the politics.  Havel’s writing is clearly political and opinionated, but has so much more going on as well.  I have no idea how you’d make it work on stage; with difficulty, I suspect; but if you could get it work, it could be well worth the ticket.

Urban Magic 3

Posted on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 in Writing | 7 Comments

So, I haven’t even really got going in talking about Urban Magic 2 – the Midnight Mayor – but feel that, since this is my blog and it is related to all things Urban Magicy, I would share the happy and joyous news that the contract to write Urban Magic 3, is currently sitting on the end of my bed!  I’m not entirely sure what the publication date would be – my publisher may or may not be thrilled to know that the writing is already well underway and they’ll probably receive the manuscript in the next few months… – but it’s there, it’s happening and, barring disaster, will hopefully, some day, somehow, be on a bookshelf near you!

However, despite the desire to say lots about it, I won’t yet, since as established, I ought to really say more about the Midnight Mayor.  Did you, for example, know that the thing that causes most problems in the London sewer system is not so much sewage in the traditional sense, but congealed cooking fat?  Imagine what could go wrong for your average sorcerer when the underground world of London decides to take a wander on the streets above…?

Henry Mayhew

Posted on Saturday, September 19th, 2009 in London, Writing | 2 Comments

So, when not writing the adventures of Matthew Swift as Kate Griffin, I write children’s books – the adventures of Horatio Lyle – as Catherine Webb.  (Which you may or may not enjoy, I dunno…?)  These are stories set in Victorian London about a part-time detective and his unlikely mates, but the real point of this entry, apart from to say all of the above, is to talk about Henry Mayhew.

With my historian’s nerdy hat on, I gotta say right now, I love primary sources.  It’s all very well being told by historians of today that in the dark old days the streets of London were knee-deep in horse manure, but when you read the actual documents written by the people of London who lived in London at the time, you get so much more.  You get a sense of the stink of it, the feel of it, the noise and the bustle, the casual attitude of the inhabitants towards filth and the outrage of the people towards the conditions they live in, all jumbled up together; you get street seller’s cries and verbatim stories of nasty things done by improbable characters – you get, in short, a fantastic story, that has the added benefit of being real.  And Henry Mayhew, praised be to historical fore-thought, left posterity one of the most comprehensive, most exciting accounts of Victorian London as he was living in it that I have ever read.

That said, the guy suffers from statistics, and in doing so arguably proves the point that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics – but he also spent years walking the streets of London and talking to everyone and everything from every class and every walk of society, going into places where even Charles Dickens (a man who prided himself on being indomitable) would hesitate to wander.  The London of Mayhew reads like another world, full of rookeries and slums, no-go areas and vast contrasts and, if you ever find yourself contemplating the history of London and wanting to get to know it a little bit more, I heartily recommend the works of Henry Mayhew as an entertaining and wonderfully enlightening read.

What Makes a Good…?

Posted on Friday, September 18th, 2009 in Writing | 2 Comments

I have been sat for the last few days in various team-building classes designed to make me and my colleagues better techies.  And while all have been fun, and some have been very productive, I have kinda left them feeling a tad ambivalent.  A good techie, we have been told, is patient, communicates calmly and clearly, is organised, is understanding, always says ‘yes’ and never ‘no’, seeks to find the best way to achieve a thing, and, when it can’t be achieved, to find a suitable alternative that will be acceptable to all parties, listens to their team, apologises for their mistakes, is always prepared, is always thinking of others, is always working to suitable deadlines is always…

… and so on and so forth until very promptly you have achieved a state of enlightenment that, I can’t help feel, you might just take some of the joy out of the business.  No one said the Buddha had fun on the way to paradise… but all these things are excellent aspirations, and things to try and work towards as the situation calls for, but life is, alas, far too complicated to apply good generalities easily to bad situations.

All of which leads to a more relevant question…

… what makes a good writer?

Answer is; buggered if anyone knows.  Everyone, as with everything in life, has a different answer.  My publisher would, without a doubt, inform you with a face only slightly twitching with a wry smile, that the ability to take editorial criticism is vital.  My agent would say that being over 45 is preferable, although experience is the key.  Some might say experience of the world; some might say experience of the soul, which is itself a very difficult and delicate subject to pick up on.  Is that man whose father died suddenly more experienced, is their soul cut deeper, are their eyes opened wider, than that woman whose mother passed away after a long battle?  Is that girl whose boyfriend dumped her somehow wiser than that boy whose best mate turned out to have been lying behind his back all that time?  Exactly how we define ‘experience’ in terms of how it shapes people, and therefore writers, is a thorny one.  Which may be why my agent hits ‘45 years old’ as a general definition and hopes it goes well from there…

My Dad used to inform me with a stern expression that writers were supposed to have suffered in order to be any good.  This statement usually was followed by ’so take the rubbish out or else’.  My Mum would add to that discipline and craft, a grasp of the English language and ability to shape a decent story from it.  Again, a thorny area – the excellent English of Jane Austen bears about as much resemblance to the excellent English of Raymond Chandler as a cup of tea to a kangaroo steak.   At primary school we were told ‘you must never start a sentence with ‘but’ or ‘and” (two of my favourite sentence-starters…) and a story must always have a beginning at the beginning, a middle in the middle, and an end at the end.  Rules like these, you might say, are meant to be broken…

A comic writer should be witty; a large number famously suffer from clinical depression.  Romantics should have passionate and wild relationships, see deep into the state of the human heart and know how best to wring its mysteries; crime writers should perceive the darkness in human souls; fantasy writers value sweeping imaginations and brilliant visions of things impossible.  Academic writers should be both factually on the ball and, preferably, not require three stabs at every sentence before it makes sense to read. Perhaps a good writer is defined by his sales figures?  Deeply questionable.  Is Dan Brown a superior writer to Iain M. Banks?  Kinda doubt it; yet Dan Brown has the queues of people stretching round the block at 2 a.m. to get his latest.  (Dan Brown is, incidentally, one of a proud number of writers who, in response to being told by their primary school teachers not to start a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’ went down the smart route of beginning sentences with ’suddenly’.  A habit my Mum would call bad English and my editor would call excellent narrative pace.  And they’re probably both right…)

Then the problem becomes even more personal.  Is Thomas Hardy a good writer?  (I personally loathe him; yet I know at least one person who in every other way is one of the coolest people I’ve ever met who swears he’s brilliant.)  Is Asterix of the same cultural value as the works of Ernest Hemmingway?  Or to put it another way – when the ice age comes and we’re locked up in the British Library about to freeze to death, do we burn George Orwell or Charles Dickens first?  (I know who I would vote for, but in order to prevent angry letters, I’ll just say (two-facedly) that it’d be a tragedy whichever way….)

Then there’s dudes like Shakespeare.  I personally think the guy rocks, but will freely admit that he has off-days.  (Although to say Shakespeare has an off-day is kinda like saying that the Creator could have tried a touch harder with Wales.)  But there’s plenty of people who can’t stand the guy, and throughout large swathes of the 1800s, the fashion was to nab the particularly nasty bits of Shakespeare (which are, lets face it, generally the best bits) and give them happy ending.  Hamlet gets to turn round in Act 5 and go ‘yo, Claudius!  You were like a total asshole, yeah, but now you and me, we’re blood, man!’  Macbeth gets to the murder of Duncan and goes ‘whoops the dagger was a fake well thank Christ for that, lucky escape all round really.’  In a hundred years time will there be a movement to take the collective adventures of Harry Potter and re-write them to suit a secondary comprehensive theme, and thus make it relevant to the kidz?  Not about to make any predictions on that particular future…

On the very few occasions I get asked what makes a good writer, I usually give the same two answers; imagination and empathy.  Technically speaking, they’re only one answer, since imagination is not just about being able to picture the end of the world and why it might happen, it’s the imagination to think your way into the head of a stranger and understand why they’re pissed off here, now.  But I like to throw in the empathy thing anyway, because I kinda figure it’s a nice human characteristic to have generally.  I’m tempted to throw it into the great ‘what makes a good techie’ debate too, since there are no easy rules on working as a team, or communicating with other people, since ‘yo dude how’s it hanging’ may be the only way to open a conversation with one stressed person, while it’ll result in summary sacking by another.  Empathy, and a willingness to see that sometimes the world is just a little bit more complicated than the rules on the page…

Production Electrician

Posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 in Misc. | 1 Comment

So, I’ve been given my next job at RADA for the glorious new term – Production Electrician, also known as Prod LX.  Which is, lets face it, kinda cool, because I really, really like lights.  I even have time for hazers when they’re not leaking.  (There is nothing quite as icky as a leaky hazer.  The stuff just gets everywhere and a small forest worth of kitchen roll has to die before you’re even close to cleaning it up.  The smelly pink slime that is badly mixed artex has nothing on hazer fluid for sheer urgh value.)

Technically, I’ve had this job before – in the same venue and for the same lighting designer, who is above all else a decent bloke and very easy to work with.  But I figure that it’s a nice warm up for another year of tougher things, and at least this time round, I vaguely know how to change the lamps on the SL profiles.  However, what it will probably mean, is that the rate of blogging decreases, and so, in order to kinda fill some gaps yet to come, I figured I’ll summarise right here, right now what it is that’s keeping me from the keyboard.

Production Electrician is basically the lighting designer’s minion, although her (usually his, lets be honest here) duties also extend to anything in the building that has a current going through it.  This can include hazers, scrollers, working lights, cue lights, practical lamps and, when called for, fridges, toasters and general electrical appliances.  However, the main theme are on the lights in the rig.  Most of a Prod LX’s time is spent doing maintenance; this can be an easy job of just a day spent cleaning lenses on some eighty or so newish lights, or it can be a hellish lifetime spent with hundreds and hundreds of ancient, creaking, warped and battered lamps, up to your armpits in that special thin grey dust that just loves to linger near electrical appliances.  The two great technical theatre buzzwords, ‘health and safety’ are also supposed to be regular partners from a Prod LX’s lips, to lesser or greater effect.

Once the lighting designer delivers on what they want where, it’s the Prod LX’s job to see that it is indeed, there, rigged and working.  Sometimes this is easy; a simple case of whacking up the right light in the right place and turning it on.  Sometimes this is a nightmare job, involving miles and miles of cabling, endless connections and plugs and runs of DMX; and when it’s all run and you hit the ‘on’ switch, something won’t work and that’s it, fifty yards of cabling left to explore with a fault at some point in some part of it, who knows where?  (Even as I write this I can hear the ghostly voice of our Head of Lighting explaining that this, children, is why maintenance is so important…)

If it all works then the Prod LX will help with the focusing of the lights, and occasionally with the plotting, if there isn’t a programmer on the board.  Then when the show is up, the Prod LX’s job becomes one largely of fixing the stuff that breaks, as stuff eventually does.  The cliche of the Prod LX is of a bloke, perhaps a tad overweight, perhaps not the most romantic type you’ve ever expected roses from, not always that beautifully shaved or fashionably dressed, who, when faced with a problem, talks back in a language almost incomprehensible to the human ear.  When faced with the statement ‘why’s this not working’ the Prod LX will usually give one of three replies based on his/her level of enthusiasm.

1.  ‘I don’t know, but I’ll have a look at it and find out.’  [A good answer that does what it says on the cover.]

2.  ‘It’s fucked, innit.’  [A bad answer which, while it may occasionally be true, can also be code for  'lets go down the pub'.]

3.  ‘Well, mate, well, it’s gotta be a PSU problem, innit, ‘cos if you ain’t getting power down there then I mean you’re gonna have the trouble in the 4-pin ‘cos I can see the little green light on the unit but it’s not just getting through from the 13-Amp to the scrollers is it so you know we can order parts or maybe try re-plugging it somewhere else but like if its your PSU that’s a Stage Electrics job unless some wanker hit the panic switch and knocked out the hard power or if those bastards in sound switched it off but yeah, yeah, you know, could go either way, see?’  [An answer which essentially boils down to the syllable 'um', while maintaining as macho and techno-savvy an exterior as possible.  This too usually lends itself to the follow-on statement of 'lets go down the pub'.]

All that said, I’m still kinda learning the ropes on this one, and my opinion of Prod LXs so far is based on a very small sample and may yet change.  I’ve met some very good people who are very good at what they do – then again, I’ve also met one or two people with such a physiological urge to drink tea at every available opportunity, its a miracle anything ever gets done.  At the LSE, back in the day when I was accidentally put in charge of anything lighting-based owing to the fact that no one else had fully mastered the trick of forcing the lock into the lighting cupboard, my experience of techying was a very enjoyable one of ‘well… let’s push it somewhere and see what happens….’ a principal which, I gotta admit, has kinda been carried over into my training at RADA.  After all, in this modern age of circuit breakers and PAT testing, what’s the worst that could really happen?  Really…?

Traffic Wardens

Posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 in London, Writing | 2 Comments

Is there any creature more universally loathed in the mythology of all big cities than a traffic warden?  I kinda doubt it.  On the moving-in and moving-out days at my first hall of residence, the traffic wardens of Islington seemed to have some magical power that led them to zoom in without fail, dozens at a time, to penalize every single car that dared to park in front of the hall to drop off their kids.  Families that had driven hundreds of miles to deliver their kids to their first day of university found themselves variously ticketed, clamped, and towed, all in the space of time it took to get a clean change of socks and a teddy bear up from the street outside the residence to a room on the 8th floor.  I have never seen such a mean, miserable, miserly sight as gaggles of traffic wardens swarming in to slap fines of over a hundred quid on a proud parent who’d been parked for less than ten minutes to deliver their kids, and not reason nor appeals to emotional sympathy could persuade them otherwise.

My Dad, as the driver in the family, has a bitter on-going battle with traffic wardens.  He has perfected the art of the polite-yet-steely middle class letter of complaint, which, without wanting to imply that legal action is necessary, nevertheless makes it very clear that hear is an eloquant Radio 4 listener who’s just going to be more trouble than he’s worth.  However, this hasn’t stopped a local council for slapping him with a £120 fine for the day his car parked illegally in their borough.  Curiously enough, this was the same day that Dad was at work with a local charity, and the car did not leave Hackney all day or all night.  The cry of ‘numberplate fraud!’ was duly raised and now an intricate battle of suspicion, reasonable doubt and alibi-affirmation rages between a council stoutly refusing to conceed that it may be trying to rob an innocent man, and an ex-publisher with a knack for letter writing.

(On an entirely different, yet curiously related note, I discovered recently in a battle with my local council the existence of a thing called the ‘Postal Rule’ whereby if a council computer claims a letter was dispatched to a certain address on a certain day, that is considered valid evidence in court that it was so.  The only way to argue against this is by proving that you didn’t receive a letter.  Now… answers on a postcard please… how exactly do you go about proving that you haven’t received something?  Do you hold up the empty air where it should have been?)

Whether this is true for all traffic wardens in all cities, I do not know, but the vast majority of traffic wardens that I see around the centre of London are middle aged black ladies who look perfectly cheerful and pleasant to talk to – until you violate that double yellow line, of course.  Since I find it hard to imagine that the people who recruit traffic wardens have a personality test to determine your level of sympathy (lowest score wins), I can only assume that the people who run the traffic warden system as a whole have laid down a policy of go-get-’em-tiger which leads to the kind of swarms that attacked the families trying to unload at my halls of residence.   I was once told that traffic wardens receive extra money based on the number of cars that they manage to ticket – if this is the case (and I have yet to get this confirmed from a viable secondary source) then no wonder these perfectly decent members of the human race undergo such a magical transformation in the presence of an over-run ticket!

In matters such as this, a literal adherence to the word of the law becomes kinda more problematic… yes, these parents come from Leeds and Cardiff and, in one case, the Isle of Skye, were in violating of London parking regulations by being pulled up for more than five minutes on a single yellow line outside the halls of residence.  But they were not posing a threat to the public order and, more to the point, they were dropping off Little Tiddles for day 1 of university, an event as emotional as it is demanding on the size of the suitcase.  The law has them by the throat, and would duly find them guilty of pissing around with traffic regulations.  But in this case, tragically, the law, as enforced by the traffic wardens, is nothing if not a cruel cow.

On the other hand… traffic wardens notoriously suffer more shit from members of the public than any other member of the emergency services.  Angry drivers will do anything from shout abuse to spit to, on occasion, resort to physical violence against people who are, at the end of the day, just doing their job.  And yeah, it’s not exactly a happy thing when cars park parallel across Oxford Street and my Dad, for all that he writes those steely letters, has been rejoicing these last few years to have a residential parking scheme operating in his area.  Rejoicing, that is, were it not for the hundred plus pounds he has to spend a year for the honour of parking anywhere within a 2 mile radius of his front door…

I am, lets be honest here, trying to find some redeeming features in traffic wardens, since I feel it’s unfair to just condemn an entire profession off-hand, and, far worse, to condemn the people that work in it.  (Have none of us cheered when the guy with the big hair and the fast sports car gets ticketed for parking like a prat?)  But let’s face it, when it gets to the stage that, parking for a few moments to buy a round of fish and chips from your local residential chippy, you have to leave someone in the car to keep an eye out for the traffic wardens and, if necessary, circle round the block 5 times until they’re gone, you can’t help but feel this is a system running mad.

And oh yes…

… did I mention?  Randomly enough, traffic wardens may just prove to have their role to play in the life of Matthew Swift and the Midnight Mayor too…

The Hurt Locker

Posted on Saturday, September 12th, 2009 in Misc. | No Comments

The Hurt Locker – a film that I did not see with my Dad!  Did not see with Dad because it’s neither science fiction nor appropriately silly, nor, in fact, to be perfectly honest, my cup of tea.  What it is is an utterly captivating, terrifying, gut-wrenching, violent, blood-soaked, testosterone-fuelled war movie that I only recommend to those who have a teddy bear and a cup of hot chocolate to go home to after.  But I do recommend it.  9/11 was a monumentally brutal act of murder that has inspired monumental brutal acts of retaliation that have inspired more murder and more murder and more murder and frankly, you’d kinda think that world political leaders hadn’t cottoned onto the great message of history in this regard.  As a society we probably don’t want to be reminded just what a dodgy start has been made to the beginning of the 21st century, but just in case, it’s nice to see that the film industry has noticed along with the rest of us.