Our Lady of 4 a.m..
Posted on Thursday, June 10th, 2010 in: Glossary
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According to the shamans of London, the city is full of spirits. The dryads who live in the street lights, the Seven Sisters, Fat Rat and Blackout, being some classic examples. One of the most hallowed of these is a creature known sometimes as Greydawn, and more commonly as Our Lady of 4 a.m.. She is the guardian spirit who watches over the midnight workers of the city of London – the cleaners, the security guards, the late-night receptionists who sit up between the hours of 11 a.m. and 6.30 a.m. playing solitaire on computers in empty foyers of sleeping office blocks. She is almost never seen, unless a gust of wind catches the newspapers blowing through the streets and for a moment, their shape defines a physical form, but the lonely travellers heading home as dawn breaks through the empty streets of the city swear that she is with them, watching over them when nothing else moves. She is said to be a gate-keeper, separating out the nightmares of a lonely night from the calm moment at 4 a.m. when the entire city is silent and at peace.
Of course, the only problem being, that if you need someone to keep a gate, there’s usually something nasty waiting on the other side.
Derby Alt. Literature Festival
Posted on Monday, June 7th, 2010 in: Writing
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Just a note to say that the Derby Literature Festival is happening over the coming weeks, and, happily enough, there is an Alternative Literature Festival, honouring all things SF/Fantasy/Horror, and I will be there on Saturday along with the excellent Mike Carey and a crew from Orbit, doing the non-conventional authorial thing! Come join if you are around.
http://www.artsderbyshire.org.uk/whats_on/events/altfiction__derbys.html
Midsummer Nights Dream Pt.2
Posted on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 in: Misc.
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So, remember how a few months ago I lit a production of Midsummer Nights Dream? I got some photos now… full credit to Ian Latimer for taking them!
I feel I should mention our tech crew... as a lampie, it's after all my duty to do so! Thus, meet Louis, ASM, designer and to his surprise, sound op.
And meet our photographer, Ian, also an ASM and designer.
And somewhere in the shadows here, you'll find myself and my fellow LX nerd, Sam. Regrettably, I have no photos of our Production Manager, Pele, or our DSM, Sinead, for the simple reason that techies are just not the stars of the show...
In Praise of Cally Rd Tube
Posted on Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 in: London
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So, there’s not much to recommend Caledonian Rd underground station. It sits just north of half-way up the Cally Rd, more Holloway than it is Islington, opposite an uninteresting block of flats and a recycling/rubbish dump. The nearest attraction of any real note is the Tennis Centre, and even that isn’t renowned for its bringing in of the punters.
But! I love the Cally Rd tube station, for a number of reasons:
1. The continual playing of classical music. (I’m told that this is only ever really played at stations where it’s considered dangers of violence are high, in the theory that it’s hard to swagger tough when listening to Mozart.)
2. The fact that, for whatever technical blip as yet unknown, there is a tendency of Piccadilly Line trains pulling into the station to announce their arrivals on the little orange LED panels inside the carriages like so:
The Next Station Is!!
Caledonian Road!
Which if nothing else, adds a certain zinginess to the event.
3. The announcements at the station itself. At every London underground station there is a continual display of when the next train is coming, at the bottom of which roll little announcements of the kind like There are delays on the Northern Line. Please seek alternative routes.
However, at Cally Rd, someone has taken control of the system and now the messages read…
If you find an unattended bag, please report to the nearest member of staff. Ta.
Amazing the difference a ‘Ta’ can make to proceedings.
4. Art. I mean, you may not call it art… but on the other hand, have you ever, in your life ever, seen a service update board that looks anything like this…
From a Reasonable Height… Pt.2
Posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 in: London
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The speculation has come so close that I figure I may as well add the final photo that solves this particular mystery…
Looking East…
Looking North East….
Looking North North East!
Can you see where it is yet? Who’d have thought a Novotel would have such interesting views…
From a Reasonable Height
Posted on Friday, May 21st, 2010 in: London
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So, remember how every now and then I post up pictures and say ‘guess where these were taken from’?
It’s another one of those… ALTHOUGH… I’m actually holding back two pictures which would give you the immediate answer to your contemplations and there is already a stonking clue in one of them… so deep breath… are you sitting comfortably?
To Lincoln
Posted on Sunday, May 16th, 2010 in: Cities and Adventures, Writing
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So, I should start out by confessing… I have no idea where Lincoln is. My knowledge of the UK beyond the M25 is very much defined by mainline railway stations. I can just about muddle by in cities like Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bristol and Cardiff, have a vague understanding of where Exeter, Norwich, Dover, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds are, and can sorta wave you towards the Lake District if I really have to, give or take a few hundred miles. Then there are cities like Durham, York, Reading and Coventry, all which exist in my mind as train announcements indicating a place that I am passing through on the way to somewhere else.
Lincoln is none of these. For a start, imagine my shock to get my ticket and discover that I actually had to change trains at no less unlikely a place than a town called Newark North Gate in the middle of ??? in the vicinity of ???. Changing mainline trains – already this had me a little unnerved. And it’s no ordinary train you catch at Newark North Gate – oh no… it’s a one-carriage train, a sorta go-kart for Network Rail, a thing with probably the same standing capacity as your average double decker bus that clatters through a flat landscape of fields, level crossings and occasional industrial sprawl.
My trip to Lincoln was justified by going to the Lincoln Book Festival – where, I gotta admit, I had a very lovely time and ate more chocolate mini bites than the mind can comfortably conceive. It was also my first trip as Kate Griffin, which led to a certain amount of confusion at the hotel as I tried to work out and explain exactly who I was and why my signature seemed to bear no resemblance whatsoever to the name on my check-in card. (If anyone has any legal views on the thorny question of whether it is against the law to sign a hotel check-in card with a perfectly fine and honest signature, one that just happens not to be the same on your passport, then please let me know.)
I’d been advised to take a taxi from the station to the hotel, but looking at google maps I had one of those rash moments of confidence that goes ‘I know what to do! Find the cathedral and walk towards it and everything will be fine!’ And let me add, navigationally speaking, everything was perfectly fine… found the cathedral, found the hotel no problem… but I was a little let down by my history degree. I should perhaps have looked a little closer at the map and thought ‘hum… a medieval city… a cathedral… a castle… now what do I know about the building habits of medieval lords…?’ Alas, this reasoning failed me, and it was only as I slogged up the aptly named ‘Steep Hill’ that the recollection of just how much those pesky medieval architects liked being uphill of their enemies struck me. My survival of the Steep Hill experience owes more than a little to the magic of ventolin inhalers.
Lincoln (she says from her sagely 24 hour experience of the place) seems essentially to be divided in two. At the bottom of the hill is a fairly average reasonably-sized town, complete with shopping centre, clothes shops, more charity shops than the eye can perceive (and as a fan of charity shops, this pleased me) chippies and one-way traffic systems designed to send any driver into apoplexy. Arriving on a Friday evening at around 6 p.m. the lower part of the town was oddly silent – shut doors and closed shutters, empty pedestrianized curling streets inhabited only on the odd corner by the traditional feral youth that is quaintly more observable in someone else’s town than your own. Leaving the same way on Saturday afternoon it was all elbows go to push through crowds of shoppers, that seemed to have poured out of every crack in every brick to fill their bags with goodies.
As you head uphill a change begins to take over the streets, subtle at first and then growing more and more noticeable. Shopping chains give way to art galleries selling bowls of semi-precious stone and pictures of flowers caught in heavy cold winds. Second hand bookshops start peeking out with large sections on local folklore and history. There’s the obligatory not-quite-magic-shop selling brightly coloured dreamcatchers, incense and smelly candles; little shops built in straight on steep cobbled roads offering cream teas and home-made pots of chilli; shops offering home-made stationary and antique shops selling five different kinds of three hundred year old grandfather clock. Suddenly you look around at the top of the worst part of the incline and over your shoulder you’ve got a view above the buildings towards green countryside and there are cobbles beneath your feet and suddenly everything is a little bit Yea Olde and Traditionale Crafte, albeit for the most part with the sensible good taste not to proclaim itself that way. And of course, there’s a cathedral. What I think Eddie Izzard would probably describe as a huge sod-off cathedral. It’s a sneaky thing – from the station you could half believe that you weren’t going to bust an artery getting there, and from the rectangle where on Saturday there is a farmers market you might almost think that it’s actually quite a modest cathedral, and once you’re inside and looking down the length of it you realise that actually, this is a TARDIS in cathedral form and if you did pay your £5 entry fee there’d probably only be a 1/20 chance of you coming out alive. It’s a proper gothic monster, all vaulted roof and leering, tongue-waggling stone faces carved above every arch. Some cunning wag stuck an organ bang smack in the middle of it so as you stand at the entry point, you can’t actually see the back wall, even if there is one. And if you’re still feeling unconvinced as to Lincoln’s historical credibility, then there’s a castle not two hundred yards away, just to make the point, albeit with a lawn for playing croquet and having tea has grown. Around these two monuments is a street sprung up heavily with restaurants of every cuisine… although sad to say as I wandered towards the theatre where the Book Festival was happening, all I could really think of was fish and chips.
Anyhow, all things considered… an awesome 24hrs somewhere between ??? and ??? in the city of Lincoln!
Waterstones/SFX Event
Posted on Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 in: Writing
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This is just a heads up to say that this coming Monday, 10th of May, Waterstones and SFX are holding an event together at the Waterstones Piccadilly from 5.30 onwards, in honour of reading science fiction lots! Many authors are rumoured to be there, including one of my all-time favourite writers, China Mieville, as well of rumours of some other exciting people… and with my best nerdy face on, I’ll also be there from 5.30 angling for those little sausages on sticks and bits of pineapple and cheese…
Anyhow, details at this website…
http://www.sfx.co.uk/2010/05/05/compo-win-a-ticket-to-our-author-party-in-london/
Election 2010
Posted on Friday, April 30th, 2010 in: Misc.
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So, I’m not what you’d call big on politics. I mean, I care, and get very pissed off about the whole business, but I’m not what you’d call a believer. I’m a wishy-washy liberal, which by definition means someone who is prepared to sit down and consider the other guy’s point of view. (This naturally makes liberalism a rather difficult doctrine to sell, since when asked to say something charismatic and powerful about your rival’s political stance the best you can usually come up with is ‘well, that’s a very interesting view, would you care to have a rational and reasonable discussion about its implications sometime and perhaps provide me with your evidence and references for the same?’ Unlike, say, a less liberal political doctrine in which you can absolutely say ‘no, you’re wrong and I’m right hah!’ and thus if nothing else achieve a certain punchiness in presentation.) I guess if I believe anything at all it is that wealth does not equal entitlement, that poverty does not equal failure, that nuclear missiles started off a bad idea and haven’t changed much, that continual setting of educational targets does not create learning, that the NHS is a Good Thing, that Britishness is not a fixed absolute that should be imposed upon society, (and even if it were, it is again not another Good Thing) and of course, that power does not equal aptitude. (Witness the MP’s expenses scandal, sigh.) And of course, like a good sometime-history student, I believe that all ideals are tempered by viability – thus the sacred protest chant – ‘What Do We Want?’ ‘Reasonably Agreeable and Mutually Beneficial Change For The Overall Good!’ ‘When Do We Want It?’ ‘Within a Practicable Timeframe, Please!’
All of which largely leaves me without a party to support in the coming general election. I mean, my instinct is to vote Green, simply because when all other issues are stripped down, the continual survival of the planet really kinda tops them all. But in the first past the post system, I do find myself playing an amateur’s strategic voting game. I live in a marginal constituency, and the Greens don’t even seem to be trying to win here. What good are my ethics if they have no political consequence? (I ask myself.) I won’t beat about the bush – I find the idea of a Conservative government rather horrifying, as it seems that they either have no ideas, or their ideas are founded on a doctrine of get power first, get a plan last. Douglas Adams had it right when he suggested that those who wanted power should absolutely be the very very last people to get it. That said, Labour’s main intention seems to be the retention of power, and again, past that there doesn’t seem to be a plan, although I can at least sympathize with some of their basic principals, even if the past however many years seems to have twisted and corrupted the core ethics to squat. As for the Lib Dems… I couldn’t even recognize Clegg until two weeks ago and I still don’t know what they stand for. They have some sympathy from me in that they haven’t done anything that seems absolutely inane these last few years – their MPs were reasonably not-too-corrupt-overall compared to some of the obscene corruptions that have emerged from 2009, and they were opposed to the Iraq War which was quite clearly another obscenity that shall go down in the history books as one of the most politically stupid and morally reprehensible acts of the British government in the last 50 years. Then again, they were a 3rd party in a parliament of two parties united on the war and thus had very little to lose by opposing the war, not least when 2 million protesters were marching through the streets of London on this very theme – quite what they’d do in government when idealism met practicality who knows? Perhaps it is just an innate truth that power always corrupts, that the brightest of idealists when they decide to become MPs will soon find themselves so lost in the combat of politics that ethics gives way to survivor’s instinct. Democracy, as Winston Churchill put it – the least bad form of government.
It is also possible that I am basing my decision on seriously iffy information. The newspapers are hardly squeaky clean in their election reports – some are so blatantly pro one party or another that there’s no point even pretending that journalistic neutrality exists. When did we reach a point where a newspaper could ‘declare’ itself for one party or another? And the BBC, my usual source of all knowledge, is in such a hurry to deliver information that often the depth can be hard to find. It makes a murky contest even murkier, not fully knowing what information to trust.
Some things I can soundly declare myself to be opposed to. The British National Party causes me nothing but fear and offense; fear because they seem to be getting better at putting a slick mask on what is an inherently offensive operation. Even if the BNP denies that it’s a racist party, their core doctrine seems still to be the imposition of one culture – a fantastical ‘British culture’ – on everybody. I don’t recognise this Britishness that the BNP seems to describe; to me, there is nothing more British than having a lamb bhuna while watching American TV in the company of friends from across the world, knowing that tomorrow morning I can get baklava from across the road run by the man who watches epic Hindu drama on a tiny TV screen above the cigarette counter, before getting on a bus in which the common language of conversation is Arabic, Farsi, Russian, Polish, French, German, Cantonese and as well as English. What is London if not a city of everyone and everything; and is this not something that makes it great? To impose a culture on anyone or anything automatically implies the absolute superiority of any culture, and that I cannot accept. And yet to watch the BNP at work… it reminds me of student union debates, in which everyone had to come armed with a battery of statistics and examples and figures plucked from who knew where to prove god knew what, sounding incredibly impressive until you noticed the lack of footnotes.
It would be politically correct of me to say that I respect people who hold other political views from mine. And certainly, some I can; that which is supported by argument, by reason, that view which can hear the views of others, recognize the broader picture, base its views on evidence and understanding; that political view which has at its heart the needs of others, regardless of race, creed or colour, sure I can respect that – our political aims are the same, even if our methods for achieving all of the above are different. But I see no sure sign that the BNP fulfils even this ambition, let alone holds methods I can respect. So I guess that even if I can’t guarantee which party I’ll be voting for in the coming election, I can at least tick a few off the list.
London Borough of Hackney
Posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 in: London
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I was born and raised in Hackney.
Technically, if we’re going to wax literal about this, I was born in St.Bartholemew’s Hospital, Smithfields, the day after a nuclear disaster and a few months before the maternity ward shut down, and while this is not in Hackney, by dint of being within the sound of Bow Bells it does technically mean I’m supposed to be a cockney. I mention this only because, as you might have guessed, dear reader, my syntax isn’t very cockney. I am the product of my education, which was ridiculously academic, so don’t hold your breath if you’re looking for my blogger’s guide to rhyming slang; I’m just not your girl. All this being so, Hackney is the borough where you were traditionally supposed to stumble on your cockneys, although you’re more likely to stumble on dialects of Farsi these days, and you’d probably have an easier time understanding if you did.
I guess I should start off by explaining the title of this blog – London Borough of Hackney. I’m a dead proud Hackney girl, not least because there’s a snotty knee-jerk reaction that happens generally in London when you mention the borough’s name, a certain curling of the lower lip or, in some cases a cry of ‘but is that safe?’ The estate agents would probably tell me that I grew up on ‘Islington borders’ – in other words, I nearly practically grew up in a borough that is in every way considered brighter, better, cleaner, safer and basically nicer than Hackney. However, I mildly resent this accusation, since I can’t help but notice that the people on the other side of the borough line never describe themselves as being in ‘Hackney borders’ so why should I return the compliment?
Let’s not beat about the bush, there’s plenty about Hackney that’s wrong. The local council once had a reputation for being one of the most corrupt in Britain, although I think in recent years there’s been so many councils that they’ve been reluctantly forced to relent. The bureaucracy remains fiendish, but this may just be a common local borough trait. (Certainly none of the boroughs I’ve lived in since have exactly gone out of their way to make life easier.) There are plenty of grotty areas; Hackney possesses both a very large number of council estates of the kind that were built with an ideal in mind and not much sociological reasoning, and poverty remains a quiet under-note for much of its busy streets. It is not a place for Waitroses or Starbucks, but rather the streets of Hackney are ruled by pound shops and greasy spoons and I for one kinda cheer for this. Hackney has a reputation for gun and knife crime; whether this is earned I’m not in the best position to judge; with guns and knives there are also drugs. If you look, you can find all of the above; however my one weak comfort to those who cringe at this thought is that if you don’t go looking, it’s not going to seek you out either.
But! With all this doom and gloom out of the way, let me explain why I remain a proud Hackney girl. For a start, I challenge anyone to enter the borough and not be able to find something of anything. It’s a great big sprawling place, with its southern border stopping at Old Street, nudged right up next to the Corporation of London, the oldest part of the city where the bankers do their business behind extremely polished glass while wearing very expensive ties. Its northern border makes it to Tottenham, a place where inner city density and suburban sprawl fight tooth and claw for which will be the winner. (Currently 0-0.) At the eastern edge, Hackney meets Tower Hamlets, and at the bottom edge of Mare Street the lampposts are hung with banners proclaiming each borough to be superior to its neighbour, as if the daily inhabitants might somehow want to reconsider their place in life while jostling for the Central Line at Bethnal Green. It is a mixture of old and new; grand Victorian terraces, black and white houses with sashed windows, sit opposite 1960s orange brick council estates and all shop at the same local newsagent. Rather optimistic council initiatives, such as bright white offices and the perhaps ironically named ‘Ability Plaza’ sit bang smack next to the old-made-new, such as the Hackney Empire. The Empire was resurrected a few years ago from a run-down music hall with barely a lick of paint left on its walls to a brilliant, bright new theatre with all the extravagance of its past brightened and raised up. Throughout the year you can find panto, comedy shows, high drama, amateur dramatics and soap opera all being acted out in fairly even quantity at moderate prices. The Empire itself sits at the top of Mare Street, which is the nearest thing to a main thoroughfare that Central Hackney lays claim to, a mixture of grand terraces turned into shops selling mysterious unnamed root vegetables and hairdressers specialising in bright nails and the Afro style.
The ethnic diversity of Hackney is one of its most notable features. Halal butchers and telephone shops specializing in cheap calls and money transfers to Jamaica, Sudan and Pakistan are as common as parking fines, and in the bustling market at Dalston Kingsland you would have to be blind to not be able to find cassettes of the greatest hits of Trinidad, or love music from Bollywood on sale in between the fish and cheap clothes stalls. It is as easy to buy a sari as it is a pair of sandals, pide is as cheap as pizza and baklava is the dessert of choice. Council leaflets to all its residents come in a minimum of eight languages, and no self-respecting Hackney library would be without its foreign language and gay interest sections. There’s a large Orthodox Jewish community in Stamford Hill, noticeable a mile off for their uniform of black fur hats and black coats, smart suits and skullcaps, clustered to the edge of the railway lines that run out of Liverpool Street towards the north; around Green Lanes there is a Turkish community who, when Turkey came 3rd in the Football World Cup some years ago, drove round and round with the roofs of their cars open and flags waving, much to the chargrin of the Cypriot and Armenian communities that live up towards Wood Green. On Stoke Newington High Street, one Turkish supermarket has set up shop inside what was once a mosque, a building covered almost entirely in green and blue mosiac tiles, while towards Clissold Park you can find church sat opposite a synagogue with only a kebab shop and some rather over-enthusiastic traffic to keep them apart. Towards Whitechapel you will struggle to miss the minarets of the Suleyman Mosque, but it is far easier to not notice the Regents Canal as you cross it on your way heading south, running from Camden, through Islington, slicing across Hackney and finally moseying out towards the Lee River Valley. It is a place of transitory immigrants, people passing through on the way to somewhere more stable, as well as a borough where the newly settled plant their first solid roots; you don’t have to look hard in Dalston or Clapton to find a wedding dress, first or second hand.
The density of buildings can often disguise secret patches of calm in Hackney as well. Clissold Park, London Fields, Cambridge Heath, Bethnal Green and the sprawling marshy mass of Hackney Downs all seem to pop out between the buildings when you least expect them, a simple turn down a simple street like any other and bham, open grass and swings and people playing football badly. Buses are the traveler’s means of choice in Hackney, almost entirely because it has barely a half dozen underground stations to claim as its own. (Although all in the borough wait with baited breath to see what will happen to the East London and Crossrail projects, come the election…) There are a few unlikely travel options available though… with the underground so dominant in north London, few really considers the potential of the mainline trains that chug out of Liverpool Street station and up the side of London Fields on route to the edge of the city, but they can illustrate with immense ease how a train can in ten minutes cover a distance that on foot would take an hour. Likewise, there is the Overground railway, which has in its time been known by many names – ‘Silverlink Metro’, ‘North London Line’ or more often than not ‘you aren’t seriously thinking of taking that, are you’? Recent years have improved on the Overground and it is now possible to get from Hackney Central to Camden on one train in one journey in roughly fifteen minutes without having to beat little old ladies over the head to do so.
So you see, when I say that I come from the London Borough of Hackney, I’m only giving its full name to make sure you understand… it’s not just any old place I grew up in…