Urban Magic

Minarets

Posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 in Misc. | 2 Comments

Alright, so another post that veers towards the political, despite my pledge not to do so…

In Switzerland, a law has been passed prohibiting the construction of any more minarets.  As I understand it (being very much not Swiss) mosques may still be built, but the minaret, the more visible symbol of the faith, will not be.  There are currently 4 minarets in Switzerland, and a Muslim population of 400,000.

I’m an atheist and should declare this at once – not only does the idea of a god offend what few scientific instincts I have, for blimey the proof is lacking, but the idea of a god as embodied by man’s theology terrifies me.  As expressed in the holy books of practically every faith, god, in any size shape or form, varies from the hugely self-contradictory to the downright bloody-minded.  I cheer entirely for those passages of text which promote charity, compassion, understanding, mercy, brotherly love etc., but man’s capacity to find in those self same passages justification for expressing all of the above to everyone except the guy who doesn’t conform to whatever the current social fashion of the time is, has led to atrocity throughout history.  Politics may inspire nations to go to war and kill and murder and do all the stuff we know humanity is more than up to, but more often than not religion – or perhaps more specifically, dogma and interpreted theology – make it that much harder to put out the fires once they blaze.  The separation of church and state was written partially for this reason, since the law of the state may be written to the nth comma of exactness whereby all men and all women are bound by the same term, whereas church law is a constantly shifting battle ground based upon texts thousands of years old, within whose conflicting words may be found justification for pretty much anything.  And worse – within religious law what battles have raged and rage still, of Orthodox versus Reform, Protestant versus Catholic, Sunni versus Shia – whereby each may find in the self-same text of the self-same page of the self-same book, justification for entirely different policies.

If there is a god, and as established, I wait with baited breath for that bush to burn on the side of the road, I can only hope he/she/it is much, much more than man’s current understanding, otherwise eternity is a very very long stick with a very sharp point.

Faith in god I can have plenty of time for; generally in my experience people who express faith in god tend to do it followed by offers of cups of tea and a chat, no strings attached.  Faith in theology I have a much harder time with, since that is usually followed by the inevitable philosophical slide into the ‘yeah but how do you know?’ argument which must inevitably fall back upon the ultimate statement ‘because it is written in the holy book which is the word of god’ and there an end to any sort of scientific reason.  Faith without dogma has always been more tolerant, since the predominating feature or aspiration of god in mankind’s history has been one of mercy, a characteristic that has been heavily tempered by politics and economics looking for religious justifications for its less than merciful deeds throughout the course of time, and boy have they found them.

Back to Switzerland…

… it’s none of my business (since when did that stop a nosy blogger?) but I, like, I suspect, most wishy-washy liberals muddling quietly by the EU as a whole, was more than a little nervous to discover a country I have always considered open-minded and tolerant, to not only pass a referendum in which not only one religion, but perhaps even more absurdly, the symbols of one religion is penalized.  It is not a bill which forbids the practice of Islam, but it is a bill which prohibits any visual demonstration of that faith, and its campaign has been fought on the basis that Muslims in Switzerland are not merely Muslim first and Swiss second, but that their belief in Islam is a violent evangelist one, in which the contradictions of a religious text are resolved only by taking the most extreme interpretation possible.  It is the same logic which in Istanbul in the 1500s forbid the ringing of Christian church bells or the construction of synagogues; it is a statement that in this land, one faith is dominant, and the rest is second-class.

I apologise now if anyone feels offended by my opinions here; yet they are mine and it is a blessing of being a wishy-washy liberal in a (mostly) wishy-washy liberal state that I can freely express them.  I have as little faith in the doctrines of Judiasm, Christianity, Islam as I do in Zoroastrianism, Shinto and Confucianism; but freedom of expression, and the freedom to express belief even if I don’t happen to believe in it, are two things I will cheerfully fight for.  I am sure that there are arguments against all I have said and I welcome them, and will be convinced by them if they can manage to be convincing, but in the mean time I am worried that in the 21st century, in the heart of Europe, a bill has been passed in which it would appear, religion and politics are not as separate as I thought.

Broadgate

Posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 in London | 2 Comments

My camera is broken.

I am deeply upset by this fact for a number of reasons, but thankfully, I discover I’ve built up a silly archive of pics from the last few months, and since I dislike blogs without at least the odd splash of colour here or there, I figured the time had come to write a bit more about favourite topic 1; London.

To be exact…

Broadgate.

I think the best thing to ask about Broadgate, is why.  I mean, not why write about it – I write about it because it’s a not-particularly well-known, rather-obscure-unless-you’re-looking, yet-up-in-your-face-if-you’ve-found-it bit of London that’s worthy of some mention.  No – the question is… why, Broadgate?

First up, Broadgate is sharing a common name, sitting as it is between Moorgate and Aldersgate, above the a road pointedly called London Wall, and none too far from Barbican and Aldgate.  Sensing the pattern here?  There also used to be a Broad Street Station on the site, which was demolished in order that Broadgate as we know and love it, a purpose-built commercial district designed for the financiers of the city could be plonked down next to Liverpool Street Station in the 1980s to general fiscally glamorous rejoicing.  Traffic does not get inside Broadgate, the entire area is pedestrianised and to a large part, raised away from street level by its walls of black-grey and pink-bronze office blocks within which can be found floor after floor of computers, suits and the occasional tax-deductible shrubbery.

It is not what you’d call a discrete, subtle bit of design and yet, rather like the Inns of Court, has pulled off that trick of managing to occupy a considerable splash of land bang smack in the heart of the city without ever really inviting general members of the public to come inside and mull.  At the age of 14 I considered myself to have stumbled on a big secret when, instead of just walking straight out of Liverpool Street Station to catch the bus at Moorgate, I tried climbing those unlabelled silver stairs to one side of the exit, and found myself next to an ice rink, in a wide circle of towering buildings within which lives thronged and passed.  At the age of 21, living in a halls of residence near Brick Lane, I wandered into Broadgate again, and discovered that my initial discoveries had barely scratched the surface of this maze, but whole lost lakes and waterfalls, bars and cafes, tiled passages with glass roofs and carefully tended trees sprouting besides concrete works of art where the skaterboarders liked to learn their trade.  In winter there is indeed an ice rink in Broadgate which is perhaps one of its few public claims to fame; in summer, that same arena can be used for pretty much anything – I think last year it was a site of basketball competitions between well-paid and surprisingly still employed financiers of the city.  An unmarked glass box dropping down through leopard-skin furnishings to a bunker below a courtyard criss-crossed with underfoot LED lights turns out to be a bar where gentlemen of a certain income may flirt with their secretaries.  When the sun comes out, awnings go up by a crystal-clear perpetually flowing shallow waterfall, at the end of which another glass-clad cafe looks down – a long way down – onto the platforms of Liverpool Street station and the freshly painted rolling stock heading to Norfolk.  (Freshly painted, dear reader, because the Norfolk line seems to change ownership every 2 minutes, and heaven forfend a company should keep its predecessor’s colours, if perhaps their inefficiencies.)

For the suited gentleman of Broadgate, Liverpool Street Station itself is an architectural wonder, a reinvented Victorian station whose every bit of iron has been painted and every walkway crammed with shops selling shampoo, soap, ready meals, designer reading glasses and ties.  Do not try to buy a tin of beans on Liverpool Street Station, but if you’re looking for fashion accessories, there’s no where handier within the EC2 postcode.

At the age of maybe 9, I would visit a friend’s house every Friday, and we go swimming and play games for hours on end.  One game I vaguely remember playing (and which I only ever got the demo for, sigh) was called Sim Tower, in which you built, as it suggests on the package, a tower, and populated it with little tiny people who you could see going about their daily lives.  You’d watch great queues forming for the lift, and couples eating in little restaurants on the 7th floor, and security guards with radios on their rounds, and men working late at work, and meetings happening in specially tailored board rooms, and slackers slacking in the rooms next door.  Walking through Broadgate on a winter evening, when the lights are on in the offices and the workers still at work, reminds me of that – a whole little bustling world busy with whatever it is it’s doing, lit up behind glass for me to watch and wonder at.

The Protection of Children Act 1999

Posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 in Misc., Writing | 7 Comments

I have always tried to be as non-political as I can when writing this blog, and on this matter in particular, will try and step as carefully as possible, since this is one of those cases where not only can I see both sides of the argument, but I don’t yet know enough about it, and the subject matter is entirely emotive.

I’ve been invited back to give a talk at my old school, which I left about 5 years ago, to a group of children attending as an arts festival thingy.  I’ve given talks at dozens – possibly verging towards the hundreds – of schools in the UK and elsewhere, and naturally agreed because, you know, it’s my old school.  The talk is scheduled to last 45 minutes on a day like any other in February, and my plan, as it stands, is to arrive, go in, say hello to the art teacher who taught me AS-Level Drama, and the mathematics teacher who I drew with when playing chess every Wednesday for 7 years.  (Except for those rare and largely wiped-from-memory Wednesdays when he utterly trounced me.)  I will then, under the beady eye of my old English teacher and, I suspect, a few others, give my talk to the children, and leave.

Now…

… for the first time in my life, I have been sent documentation to fill out under the Protection of Children Act 1999.  I must go into my school and under the beady watchful eye of an employee, give over my passport, birth certificate (which is in my parent’s possession, not mine, owing to a domestic bureaucractic hiccup), P60 from my present employer (I have none) and a recent utility bill showing my current address.  Furthermore, in the form I am requested to supply marital status, bank details, employment status, occupancy status, mother’s maiden name, and a referee to testify to my character.  The school will then pay £31 to a company called Capita who will, on behalf of the criminal records bureau, do a background check on me to ensure that I don’t have any criminal convictions, and after 4 weeks, I will be cleared to give my 45 minute lecture.  This disclosure, according to the government websites I’ve been skim-reading (and I apologise if I have any details wrong here, it has been one of those browsing-the-internet-while-burning-disks weeks) will only apply once, to this one event, on the basis that the next time I’m invited to talk at a school, I may have acquired new convictions.  (I have none, I hasten to add.)

Now…

… I have to step so carefully here, because in principal, I am all in favour of this law.  It is the ultimate, ultimate horror, one so horrifying that we hardly dare speak or write or think of it, the thought that children can be put at risk by the adults that surround them.  No parent would hesitate to take any measures necessary to protect their children, no one with a whit of humanity would expect anything less.

But if I am to deliver my passport, birth certificate etc. in person to every single school I visit, is this not the end of my ever visiting any school outside zones 1-4 in London?  Is this not the end of trips to Dundee and Wrexham, of Bristol and Reading?  How does this affect the Edinburgh Children’s Book Festival, or the festival in Bath?  I have been lecturing at and visiting schools since I was 15 years old; had this law come into force five years earlier, would I have been bound by it when still legally a child and yet also a visiting author?  For 45 minutes of supervised attendance at the school where I studied for 7 years, I must slog to the other side of town with documents I don’t even have to be vetted and cleared of crimes I have not committed and yes, I applaud the protection of children, but I also applaud reason in the execution of law, and I begin to wonder whether we are not teetering on that fine line of a law that could shut down through its sheer complexity and red tape a whole culture of bringing the world the school, as well as the school to the world.

Let me repeat; I lack sufficient information on this subject to make a final judgment, an absolute statement of too-much, too-little.  The protection of children is an unspoken law, the ultimate unspoken law – that children must not be harmed and it is the duty of the old to protect those too young to protect themselves – but I question whether this particular law may not do some damage, in its effort to do good.

I welcome all comments and debate on the subject!

Up

Posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 in Misc. | 1 Comment

There are only two things on TV that make me cry – the Lion King (and who doesn’t?) and footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The first… well… like I said… who doesn’t… and the second… I guess something about studying the Cold War from beginning to end gives the end a certain climactic resonance.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  A lot of TV can induce in me other severe reactions; Elizabeth: the Golden Age gave me an asthma attack within the first ten minutes it was so historically and dramatically bad.  Most Saturday night TV between the hours of 6.30 and 8.30 p.m. induces violent verbal abuse at my long-suffering remote control.  I think possibly my least honourable moment was in that moment in Superman Returns, that moment with that waterfall and that precarious take off and that rising island and that long silence in that excruciating moment of tension as that plane vanishes off the bottom of that screen, when the entire cinema was sat in horrified silence, every bum teetering on the edge of the seat, do-they, don’t-they… that was naturally, the moment, in that peak of horror, when I felt the need to shout ‘hah!’ at the top of my lungs in the agonised silence, earning me a punch from my neighbour and piss-taking for many years yet to come.

Anyway…

All this being so, I was more than a bit surprised and a tad embarrassed to find myself sat in the cinema watching Up, crying (very quietly!) within the first ten minutes.  I had no idea what to expect of Up, and still can’t tell you what it was, or how it happened, or what came to pass, only that it was utterly delightful, funny, moving, engaging and well worth the silly money that my local cinema seems to ask for a Sunday night viewing.  Without wanting to really say more… go see… or if it’s too late to go see… borrow the DVD… it is well worth it…

District 9 – South Africa

Posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 in Cities and Adventures, Misc. | 4 Comments

So, we (myself and a gentleman who’ll go by the name of TLC from hereon in…) went to see District 9.  I sort of did and sort of didn’t know what to expect; whether we were dealing with a pure blood n’ guts fest, or whether this was a different sort of science fiction movie along the lines of Moon or Cypher where 90% of the tension is in things not entirely seen or known.  As it turns out…

… something in between.

When we left the cinema at the end of the movie, we were silent.  We were silent because our ears were ringing, our heads were pounding and a lot of people had, in the last 15 minutes, been spontaneously reduced by a blast of electromagnetism to a puddle of blood and fairly explicit dribbling bits.  Finally TLC, said; ‘You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a South African film before.’

We walked a little further, contemplating mechanical killing machines, self mutilation, angry socio-cultural forces, loss of identity, aliens with a thing for cat food, potential things yet to come and really big space ships.  Now, I have seen a few South African films – not nearly enough to pretend to be an expert, but since when did that stop a graduate in a social sciences subject from having an opinion?  And District 9 fell into a fairly strong picture I had of South African films, in that it was, essentially, about apartheid.  It was about more, of course, much, much more, and credit goes to it for many things, up to and including have the brass which very few science fiction movies do of making its aliens both truly alien, yet clearly sympathetic.  (Although yeah, I can see why the Nigerian government has issues with it – but that’s another story.)  But at the end of the day, it was about apartheid, segregation, prejudice and fear, and as such was a noble, blood-drenched, limb-splattered, cringe-making addition to the genre that left a wobble in my stomach by the end of it.

To my shame, I know very little about apartheid, despite 3 years studying history.  I know all the things that everyone knows; of arrests and riots, beatings and murders, prisons, sanctions, the ANC, Mandela – I have a distant memory of Mandela being released from prison on my birthday back when I was too young to really know or care, and being annoyed that my teacher was more excited about this fact than she was about my birthday cake.  I have visited South Africa, and in that sense, I suppose, I know a tiny, tiny shard more about the legacy of apartheid than I do about the history itself, and even then, barely a sliver.

I went to South Africa a few years ago courtesy of the Oneword reading prize, and spent a week moving between Jo’burg, Cape Town and Durban, talking mostly to schools, for the very noble cause of promoting childrens’ literacy, and for the much less noble cause of promoting the Horatio Lyle series that I write as Catherine Webb.  Arriving at the airport in Jo’burg I was stopped at customs and received the look of all young single females traveling alone that you always receive at customs, a look which was only exacerbated by my explaining all of the above.  I remember the smell of Jo’burg when I first stepped outside, green and verdant, as were all the cities I visited, a curious fact considering that you could stand in the bathroom in front of a sign saying ‘there is a major water shortage; please consider your use of water’ while outside the sprinklers watered the rhododendrons.  I was exceedingly well looked after, cared for all the time, the recipient of more hospitality than I’ve ever experienced in my life.  A lot of it was a bit of a blur, since the day would begin quite early (by my student standards!) and invariably end with a collapse face-first into a bed, but some impressions stand out and will stay with me I think, for the rest of my life.

I remember, for example, arriving late at night in Durban and collapsing straight into bed with the gratitude of someone who’s talked far too long and fast throughout the day.  No sooner was the light out than there was a scratching at the walls; then on the roof.  Thumping and banging that went on through the night and, having no idea what it was, my heart raced every time, since it sounded almost inside the room.  I fell asleep eventually, dreaming of all the usual monsters that an over-active fantasy writer’s imagination can conjure up in a strange land, and woke the next morning to find it was still going on.  Getting up, I went outside and found a ginger cat sat on the path outside by room, looking nothing short of terrified.  Beyond it, sat with a mango in one hand and a slice of half-eaten toast in the other, was a monkey, about knee-high, wearing the smug expression of a creature that knows size has nothing on big teeth.  The hotel was next to a monkey sanctuary, a fact greeted with wonder by me (I had never seen a monkey so close before) and irritation by the hotel managers who reported that they couldn’t stop the creatures getting into the kitchen and stealing everything they could lay their hands on.

The same day, in one of the few breaks between schools, the ladies I was with took me down to the beach, and I remember drinking a milkshake and being allowed 30 seconds to run up and down the sand in front of the ocean whooping like an idiot, just so I could say that I had.  The next trip was to a school on the other side of an area of the city called the Durban Triangle, a mess of big, busy roads, in which all travellers hide their bags.  The driving in South Africa is utterly terrifying.  Red lights are very rarely obeyed, partially out of concern for crime, but mostly, I suspect, out of habit.  The ring roads of Paris, the mopeds of northern Italy and the winding mountain roads of Southern Spain, with sheer drops on either side, hold nothing on the terror of South African roads.  I think it’s an experienced best summarised by the attitude that the rules of the road… are more sort of guidelines…

Outside every city, between the airport and the centre of Jo’burg, Cape Town and Durban, there are of course, the townships.  I hadn’t imagined how big they were, how far they stretched along the side of the roads.  From the motorway they look like cardboard cut outs made by children for a Blue Peter project, blu-tacked together out of old toilet rolls and cardboard boxes, crooked shades of beige and brown.  The fences that divide them from the motorways serve as rubbish traps, and stray too close to the townships in the car of a self-respecting middle class citizen and you get a call from a security company enquiring as to your well being.  I saw no crime in South Africa; but I saw the symptoms of it everywhere, from the parking attendants charging five rand to pace up and down a street at night to watch out for your car, from the ladies hiding their bags under their seats whenever a busy junction approached.  Asking about this, a kindly man in a book shop in Cape Town who gave me a discount in his store told me that the two most commonly stolen items from his shop were, firstly, the Bible, and secondly, Tarot cards.  There was no sense of fear; merely of a thing that was lived with, because it was there.

The organiser of the trip was intensely proud of her country, and especially her city, Johannesburg.  She took me up onto a hill between talks, and I have never seen a city so green, moisture in the leaves.  Yet from air, on the flight between Jo’burg and Durban, the land was dull red-brown all the way to the foresty hills above Durban, aptly named after dragons.  She also took me into Alexandra, one of the many townships around Jo’burg.  To this day I’ve never been sure how to describe the experience.  I freely admit that I was afraid of the townships, courtesy of the foreign and commonwealth office website, which can induce anyone to a puddle of terror just by its stern font.  And yes, by every standard that I was raised by, growing up in London, they were wretched, crooked tumbles of bricks and iron, dry mud and dirt, faces by the roadside watching as if, and perhaps because, there was nothing else left for them to do, huddles of men and woman just sat on empty plastic water barrels, watching.  But there was also something more, a sense of heat, of activity, like the calm side of an ants nest and just the tiniest pressure will break through the sand and out will come a whole, busy, bursting world of which there is no end.  Then there was the township school in Alexandra, in which I received the warmest reception of my life.  Approximately thirty students, some older than me, studying in tiny little white rooms, some of whom walked ten miles a day to get to their classes, gave me the heartiest, kindest, biggest welcome I have ever had in any corner of the earth.  I distrust people who proclaim themselves to be humbled by an experience, since it’s usually something said by politicians who’ve been caught doing something shifty, but I think in that little room in Alexandra, it’s possibly the nearest handy word I can find.

I can’t make a judgment based on what I saw; I don’t know enough, I was a stranger, and this is nothing more than a medley of pictures and feelings that I still haven’t really properly filed in my own mind.  On the way to the airport in Jo’burg, the two women I was with fell to talking about their work.  One in particular worked for charities, raising money from the sales of books to redistribute, and told the story of an orphanage catering to children whose parents had died of HIV.  They had started out using the iron freight containers that are shipped round the world on the back of ships, and which in their retirement serve as temporary libraries, moving advice centres and, occasionally even, the foundations of an orphanage in South Africa.  They talked about politics, the government, disappointment with both; my limited reading on the subject of HIV in Africa is enough to scare and disappoint me too.

What else sticks in my mind?  Fruit.  I remember someone would ask me if I wanted something to drink, and I would say yes thank you, and every time, without fail, a glass would appear containing more fruit of different varieties than I’d ever seen in my life.  Salads of lettuce and tomatoes with pomegranate seeds on top.  I remember being disappointed to discover that very beautiful birds make absolutely terrible noises, and that Irish pubs the world over are a disgrace including in Temple Bar, Dublin.

My very last memory of South Africa, before catching the plane home (where I succeeded in spilling coffee on a stranger in the middle of the night… not my finest hour) was this – sitting on top of Table Mountain, watching the sun go down over the ocean, drinking hot chocolate and listening to not very much at all.  I have no doubt that a week of exhausting work contributed to my state of mind at the time, but it is a picture that has stuck with me ever since, an absolute romantic painter’s dream of a crimson sky, black rocks in shadows, a city turning on the lights below, and a sea stretching to the horizon.  It was the furthest I had ever been from home, let alone the furthest I had ever been from home by myself, and to this day I have no pat way to describe it, no easy one-liner that captures the sense of what I saw, just a mix of pictures and feelings tangled up.

Which is probably, even now, no bad thing at all.

Busy Busy Busy…

Posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 in Misc. | 1 Comment

It has, once again, been an age since I blogged and so, once again, I will do my thing of blogging about why I haven’t blogged…

For the last 6 weeks, as all here know, I have been Production Electrician for a RADA student production of Crimes in Hot Countries, by Howard Barker – a play that is either utterly, utterly brilliant or a total disaster (writing wise) with very little middle ground in between, and I must admit, the jury is still out for me.

What this has meant in practical terms is four weeks of maintenance and two weeks of rigging.  Now… let’s not beat about the bush here… LX maintenance is dull dull dull.  Occassionally, if you’re lucky, you might find a profile missing a shutter or a fresnel with a broken earth wire, but that’s pretty much the highlight of maintenance and, for my sins, I wasn’t even doing anything that interesting.  I did cable maintenance.  Oh boy yes.  Four weeks of checking the continuity on 15 Amp cable and sorting out Lee colour from our colour stocks.  At the end of these four weeks, I even acquired a crew, who achieved in three days what had taken me the best part of fifteen to do, and to whom I will always be grateful for their speedy use of multimetres.  The work has to be done, as the only thing worse than four weeks of maintenance is two weeks of equipment not working, as the stress acquired in those two weeks will be beyond anything your cardiac system has ever endured.  But let’s not beat about the bush, this is one of those theatre jobs that falls into the category of Very Boring and Extremely Important, and so it goes.

Towards the end of this adventure, my lighting designer delivered a plan for the show, and it was my job to work out how to get it to work.  The theatre in which the show was running, the GBS theatre, is essentially a very reliable workhorse, with only one or two quirks which leave you spitting.  The chief job of the Production Electrician is to work out how every single lamp is going to get power from a dimmer, and, if we don’t have enough dimmers for the amount of kit (which we never do) where we’re going to get that extra power from.  It sounds like it should be harder than it is; and sometimes it can be!  I remember two less than blissful days as assistant electrician in a converted warehouse that had not one in-built dimmer for its kit and over fifty by thirty yards of ceiling space over which hundreds of cables had to be run.  If there is one thing that can frustrate your humble-hearted Prod LX, it’s huge sod-off cable runs.  However, my task was relatively easy, and with a very lovely and hard working crew of 8 people, only half of whom were mildly hung over, we managed to get the entire theatre rigged in about five and a half hours on a cool Saturday morning.

The lighting designer, who was and is an absolute pleasure to work for, then returned to focus each individual lamp, while I pottered around getting the theatre ready with all the other things a Prod LX must care about; cue lights, working lamps in the backstage area, hazers etc..  This done, I waited.

And kept on waiting.

The trouble, it turns out, with having a fully functional venue that does what it says on the cover, is that your poor Prod LX, once you actually get to a technical rehearsal, has nothing to do but sit around and wait for something to break.  How I longed for a moving light with a sticky engine, or for someone to drop something, or even maybe a little flood somewhere exciting… well, maybe not a flood… but alas, no.   Those weeks of maintenance had paid off, and all things considered, everything went as well as it should and better than it could, and the show, when it finally went up, had excellent lighting courtesy of the extremely talented designer and a crew armed with quad spanners.

It’s not much of a reason to have not blogged, but the thing with RADA is that the work is, if not time-consuming, then relentless in other ways.  My new show role is sound designer, and you quickly find yourself waking up in the middle of the night with the sound of ambient sheep, spot cue slamming doors and script-specified music tracks going off in the back of your brain.  When I worked in construction I would wake myself up with my right hand jerking in an attempt to pull nails from the floor; when I was a programmer I would dream of the sound of my designer’s voice in my ear giving ambient lighting levels; when an ASM I would start awake in the night like a guilty thing with a cry of ‘oh god where did I put the dagger?’ and only the neurotic writing of lists would calm me down.  So the work, it turns out, gobbles you up, whether you meant it to or not.  Not that this is an excuse for my non-blogging lately… although it is… but it is a simple truth and honest fact about the new year of working at RADA…