Urban Magic

Peregrine Falcons

Posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 in London | 1 Comment

So, there are peregrine falcons nesting on top of Tate Modern.  About six couples, the nice lady from the RNIB with the telescope said, waving me in the general direction of the tower of the Tate.  They like to nest, it turns out, somewhere high, with an excellent and reliable supply of food near by, and while I instinctively imagined that this meant a diet of discarded cheeseburgers, I am now prepared to no longer be surprised if, sitting one day by St. Pauls Catherdral watching the pigeons, one vanishes without a cluck into the out-stretched talons of a huge sod-off bird of prey.

I suppose upon retrospect that there’s no reason why falcons can’t flourish in London.  There was even a government scheme to introduce falcons into Trafalgar Square to curb the pigeon population, although perhaps upon second thought the great tourist banner – ‘come to Trafalgar Square and watch small grey birds get gutted in front of you and all your family by a bigger grey bird’ – didn’t wash with the London Tourist Board.

Anyway, just thought I’d share that peculiar, slightly surreal thought with anyone who likes their birds of prey big, fast and in London transport zone 1.

What I Did On My Holidays – Vienna

Posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 in Cities and Adventures | No Comments

One of the very few holidays that doesn’t come with the epithet ’so I went with my boyfriend…’ the Vienna expedition was a cunning plan formulated with me and my parents to take the train all the way from London to Vienna.  Which, as a surprise to us all, we did!  I guess my family has a sort of history of taking trains when going across Europe – with the opening of Eurostar and, even better, the plummeting of its prices, trains trips between London, Paris, Brussels, Cologne, Berlin, Rome, Montpellier,  Tolouse and, of course, Vienna, all became viable and exciting possibilities.  The TGV is cool, Thalys is comfortable, SNCF has its moments of wonder, Tren Italia is fun so long as you avoid the commuter trains, and Die Bahn in Germany is every part the pristine, compact symbol of German efficiency you, as a blinkered tourist, would hope it to be.  We took the Eurostar at a not-too-godforsaken hour from St.Pancras to Brussels, changed for the train to Cologne, ate dinner as the sun went down in front of Cologne Cathedral (ironically the only photo I have of the whole trip owing to circumstances too complicated to explain) and finally caught the NightLine to Vienna as the mist rose on the Rhine valley.  Oh boy did those mad German counts like their spiky castles on top of forested hill valleys… but that’s a story for another time…

Cologne Cathedral

Vienna is, by the by, all whipped cream.  For a start, 90% of the food comes with whipped cream either dolloped on the plate itself or cunningly integrated into the recipe and cake, particularly sachertorten, is the specialty.  Even leaving the food aside, the centre of town is a whole architectural dollop of whipped cream, from the paintings of chubby cherubs up every wall to the great Hapsburg Palaces dumped down left right and centre.  The Austro-Hungarian Empire is famous mostly for declining, but when not actively declining the aristocrats of the Empire were busy building every kind of baroque adornment that expensive taste could afford.  The exterior of the largely baroque buildings look almost austere, great big walls and big windows, but the interiors are packed so full of silver and the images of aristocratic warriors it’s a wonder there was room for people at all.  The cathedral at the heart of the city, St. Stephens, boasts one of the tallest spires in Europe, as well as regular gatherings of men and women dressed in mock-18th century dress trying to sell opera and Mozart concerts to the passers by, and if you look with a religious eye, there is Catholicism galore to be seen in gold crosses and saintly images scattered all over the place.  Culture, art, opera, and, of course, psychiatry, are all big things in Vienna, and it’s hard to turn a corner without encountering at least one of the above.  My family as a collective even decided that, since we were in Vienna, we should do the Viennese thing and go to the opera – my first ever opera trip – and paid a small fortune to sit in the highest, most distant seats I’ve ever experienced in my life, in an opera house of so much marble, real and otherwise, and such grandeur that really you didn’t need the show.  Opera remains not my thing.  The cake, however, was a major Viennese compensation…

Vienna gives the stranger the impression of a rather prissy city, in some senses.  My few attempts to speak German, the only language of which I have even a GCSE-grade grasp, were usually rebuffed by looks of, at best, curiosity, at worst, contempt, and I quickly fell back on letting my Dad doing the talking.  The streets are clean and orderly to the point of feeling slightly unnatural to my Londoner’s senses; the impression you couldn’t help but take away was that this was a society where the scorn you earned for littering was of a deeply penetrating, soulful kind, rather than the usual shrug of the city stranger.  The suburbs, where we were staying, and which are in truth little more than an extension of the inner city, hinted at some of the less imperial parts of Vienna’s past; endless matching courtyard-based blocks, samey shops and empty bars that could have been anywhere in Europe.  Vienna was, after all, the city of the Third Man, a Cold War spy shop almost up there with Berlin for its intrigue.

A canal runs through the heart of the city, built off from the Danube, and as a day-trip, and because we could, we took the boat up the Danube from Vienna to Bratislava.  The Danube is a Real River, at least as far as my imagination marks it.  It’s great, fat, rolling, churning, with a freezing wind on it even in high summer and all along its banks symptoms of its uncontrollable spillage; trees bent backwards, half-submerged shacks and lost wooden pillars for tying off your boat to a long-vanished bank.  This blog isn’t about Bratislava, but since I’m here, I’ll say two things; that is has a lovely small heart surrounded by a great deal of run-down sprawl, and that the Slovakian for ‘Winnie the Pooh’ is ‘Macho Puf’.  These were the two main impressions I took away from this experience.  That, and that on the Austrian-Slovakian border, you can farm ostriches.

One of the reasons why the Austro-Hungarian Empire had such a patchy time of it was that it was constantly being attacked from outside, and I can’t really walk away from this blog without mentioning my all-time favourite bit of history – the second siege of Vienna.  Oh yes, dear reader, the second one, because the first one was really a bit of a wash-out.  The second one, on the other hand, is celebrated in plaques and monuments across the city, since it was the nearest Vienna has ever come to being conquered in its history.  I’m not talking some wishy-washy nearest to being conquered – I’m talking a matter of hours between salvation and disaster.  I guess it’s fair to say that after three years of a history degree, my period, such as it is, are those nine weeks in autumn 1683 when Vienna was besieged by the Ottomans.  In other words, I know a lot about what happened in a two and a half mile radius in Central Europe for 9 weeks.  But make no mistake – it was an awesome, and arguably world changing 9 weeks.  Certainly, if Vienna had fallen, it’s likely the world as we know it would not be so today.

The Turkish Siege Camp

So, naturally, I was kinda excited by Vienna, and very much enjoyed my time there.  However, it was also rather alien to my usual cultural horizon, a fact I think best summed up by my trip with my parents to a modern art gallery.  We found ourselves, as is our way, seeking at the end of some half hour of wandering, the blissful relief of a bench, and after much searching, found what seemed to be the only bench in the gallery.  It was placed directly facing a huge black canvas, just black, plain black, whose title was ‘Untitled’.  We considered this for a while, trying to work out whether This Was Art, before finally noticing, to our left, another black canvas, slightly smaller than the first, but in every other way identical.  We craned in to see it, and this too was called ‘Untitled’.  Art or not art, I dunno, but it was, in its own quaint way, very Vienna….

Shakespeare’s Globe

Posted on Monday, September 7th, 2009 in London | 1 Comment

So, having done a very brief post on a play at Shakespeare’s Globe, I figured the next logical step was to do a post about the Globe itself.  First up, I really like this theatre.  I mean, speaking as someone who wants to spend the rest of my life doing lighting for the theatre, I doubt I’m ever going to go there as anything other than an audience member, but as an audience member, it’s a fantastic place to be.

The history as I vaguely remember it is something like this… theatre built in Elizabethan times, nabbed a reputation for a place to see Shakespeare (although I have a sneaky suspicion that there was a neighbouring theatre, the Rose, which has equal if not better claim to this reputation and academics are cringing… however, it’s not my period and all this stuff is pretty much postcard level history…) – burnt to the ground by cannons being fired as part of a performance of Henry VIII, owing to its straw roof and, as I’m sure many stage managers would smugly add, a certain disregard for the conventions of health and safety.  For a few hundred years nothing much happened, until some thirty-something years ago a gentleman by the name of Sam Wanamaker decided to try and ressurect the Globe in all its traditional Tudor glory.  Therein followed a fairly standard London Development cliche, involving bureaucracy, fiddling, back and forward local council bickering and finally some rather grudging building permission.  From that cliche came the next cliche of all London building projects, towit constant cash problems and the Great British Builder gag, this last probably not helped, but certainly made interesting, by the commitment to using traditional materials and techniques for as much of the construction as was possible.  Finally, after much angst, the Globe was opened, and stands now on the South Bank, as good a guessed mimic of its Elizabethan predecessor, from the straw roof (+ sprinklers) to the wooden balconies and ground level exposed to the sky.  I have a sneaky suspicion that I may have been there for one of the first plays ever shown at the Globe… suspicion only, because I was, I think, 10 years old at the time, and while I remember loving every second of Henry V, the extensive speeches and dinner that followed after are a bit of a blur.  Do not get the impression, by the by, that my family is exactly known for patronizing the arts; but we do know people who do and sometimes this leads to such bizarre occurrences as described above.

Anyhow, whether or not my suspicions are correct, the Globe first really entered my attention when I was at secondary school, courtesy of a highly cultured friend who, for the sake of anonymity, we’ll call Galadriel.  After an initial dubious encounter involving a jazz production of Macbeth, a thunderstorm and a stinking cold, my love for the Globe was sealed by spending a warm, cheap and surprisingly un-rainy summer watching Richard II and Twelfth Night.  While the Globe can be a bit hit and miss with some of its stuff, when it is good, it is absolutely wonderful, and being a groundling, inches away from the stage and in full cover of the same light that hits the actors is a theatre experience like none other.  I remember being absolutely absorbed by a production of Edward II, and laughing so hard that my face ached for hours after an all-female version of Much Ado About Nothing.  The Globe, by the by, while producing some brilliant stuff often, produces some absolutely brilliant comedy almost all the time.  I have never laughed so hard at Shakespeare’s comedies (which lets face it, are sometimes not as funny as his tragedies…) as I have at the Globe.  I’ve also stood through a lot of non-Shakespearean stuff; being bombarded by bread in the name of the French Revolution being my most recent experience.  There are some snags; being a groundling is undeniably tough on your kneecaps, so that by the 3rd  hour there is a growing urge to grab Hamlet by the throat and scream ‘just kill him already!’  But it is a small price to pay for some of the most exciting summer nights I have ever spent in front of a stage… rained on or otherwise…

In Praise of Terry Pratchett

Posted on Saturday, September 5th, 2009 in Writing | 3 Comments

Ready to have another literary god praised to the sky?  I hope so…

So, odds are that, if it wasn’t for Terry Pratchett, I wouldn’t have started reading fantasy books.  When I was 10 years old, my Dad, who at the time worked as a publisher, came home one day with a copy of The Colour of Magic, the first in the Discworld series of novels, tucked under his arm and a cry of, ‘give this a go [nickname that shall not be repeated] and see if you enjoy’!

And, having not much else to do, I did.

I devoured The Colour of Magic, and had to go the very next day to the library to get The Light Fantastic and joy of joys, discover when I did that there were more discworld novels just waiting to be read!  Since then I have read every single novel, discworld or other, that Terry Pratchett has produced, and loved every second.  And not only are they all brilliant reads on their own right or as part of a series, but if anything, he’s been getting better.  Everyone who’s ever read the discworld novels will have the conversation of ‘who’s your favourite character?’  Is it Rincewind, the cowardly wizard with about as much magical talent as a carrot, who somehow survives despite everything and is constantly frustrated in his attempts to not be saviour of civilization?  Is it Granny Weatherwax, the old witch who is always right despite everything and does what has to be done?  What about Death, who spends so much of his time attempting to understand the mysteries of humanity, eating fried breakfast and learning to play cards?  The Patrician of Ankh Morpork, a city of guilds, wizards, intrigues, speeding fines, dodgy street food, dodgier sanitation, tabloid journalism and a post office run by a man with unusual fashion sense?  Vimes, copper through and through who seems to find himself constantly being promoted despite his best efforts?  Are you interested in tales of gods and their schemes, in crime and thrillers, in vampires and why they always carry a dustpan and brush, in the legal rights of zombies or the trouble with going to the klickies?  The discworld contains all these things – over the years, this series of books really has become the embodiment of the phrase ‘he made a world on the page’.

And it’s funny.

It’s really really funny.  I mean, it’s a whole load of other stuff too; Pratchett tells the kind of story that makes you forget that you’re looking at words on a page and turning bits of brownish paper with black ink marks on them.  On a slightly more serious note, he has also been in the news recently, after being diagnosed with Alzheimers, which is, lets face it, a crappy trick for the universe to pull on any man, let alone one as brilliantly talented as Pratchett.  What this means for the future, I have no idea, but I for one will be first into the bookshop whenever he puts pen to paper, and even if that slows down, there is still a whole world of books – several worlds, in fact – sitting on pride of place on my bookshelf, ready to entertain and exhilarate whenever the technical rehearsals get long or the tube runs slow.