My Local Library
Posted on Friday, July 2nd, 2010 in: Writing
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Okay, so this is probably my most tragic blog entry ever, but I gotta say, since I’m passing through… I love my local library. Actually, that’s not strictly accurate. I love a wide range of local libraries, and currently hold membership cards for at least three boroughs in London, not including the University of London libraries where you will still sometimes find me with my alumni card trying to work out exactly what went on in the French Revolution. (Russian Revolution – walk in the park. French Revolution – not a clue.) So I’ll admit – I’m a member of many different local libraries on the basic principal that you can’t always get what you want, but if you’re willing to walk an extra ten minutes and look at the bottom of the trolley, you might just get what you need.
I guess the Barbican Library was where I first started turning into a fantasy writer. I had violin lessons in the Barbican every week (in answer to the inevitable violin question – many years, and badly) and so every week was to be found waiting for the lesson in the fantasy section. By grade 2 I’d done A-G, by grade 5 I’d made it from A-S, and by the time my violin teacher realised I might actually be more suited to the viola, I’d gone all the way down to the bottom of the shelf and met Roger Zelazny, on who much praise has already been heaped.
At university I got into the habit of borrowing as many books as I could carry, dragging them back to halls and renewing them on a daily basis before the other buggers could get their hands on my essay material. Everything I know about the Algerian War of Independence I learnt in the bath. (My hall of residence had wonderfully high water pressure combined with a fantastic boiler, and I was learning karate at the time and thus baths seemed the logical learning environment. On an entirely irrelevant note, I freely admit that for the first six weeks of learning karate, if someone had tried to mug me I probably would have been too physically shattered to even try and put up a fight…) Simultaneously, when being forced to take a subject that wasn’t history as an external option, I would go to my local library for ‘dummies guides to…’ Thus, my room ended up full of books on the Korean Civil War, Piracy in the 1500s and graphic novels. (All praise Neil Gaiman!)
In my final year at university, I found myself back in the Corporation of London, where my initial love of the Barbican Library developed, and discovered that box sets of shows like West Wing for £1 a week were really the only way to try and muddle through a dissertation and stay sane.
Now that I’m Domestic Woman, complete with my own (terminally ill) basil plant and council tax bill, my local library has become if anything even more important. How to books, computer and printer access, leaflets on recycling in the borough (tragic but useful) films, comics, hardbacks I can’t afford to buy, music galore, ads for free haircuts, cheap swims, local parties and classes in taekwondo, books in Farsi, kids learning how to sing ‘the wheels on the bus’ – popular history! Say what you will for studying history at LSE, there does come a point in the middle of every essay on the economic policy of Charles V that you dream of a book about sieges and adultery, and imagine the face of your historiography tutor crinkling up distressed at the two words… ‘popular history’…
So yes…
… I love my local library. And if we are indeed about to have, well, pretty much everything slashed in half during the economic recession, I really hope that my library isn’t one of them.
In Praise of… Dr Who
Posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 in: Misc.
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So, as anyone who’s been muddling along with this blog for a while will know, I love Dr Who. And it’s taken me an age to admit it, because, let’s face it, there was a very long while when loving Dr Who was sorta like saying that you kept a comic book about farting hidden inside your copy of War and Peace. I mean, it was tragic, it was sad, it was, all things considered, really nerdy without any hint of redemption to love Dr Who, particularly if you happened to be a woman born after 1980 (which I am). And then came along Russell T. Davis and suddenly I found myself in the same room as my Dad watching plastic monsters rampaging through London and, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, I wasn’t totally ashamed! And the more I watched, the more the sneaky suspicion dawned on me that actually, maybe Dr Who isn’t total rubbish and you know what, there are other people watching too…
By the time David Tennant took over as the Doctor, I’d discovered a whole corps of people at LSE who were quietly addicted. We were, admittedly, a group of people at the technical theatre crew/Dr Who lovers/Cluedo playing end of student society, but, and this is the bizarre thing, we weren’t ashamed of it… I mean, if nothing else, let the new series of Dr Who go down in history as making it practically acceptable, maybe, and this is a big maybe, but maybe even kinda cool to be a nerdy science fiction/techno-geek… which is a blessed relief to me, because, really, I was never really going to shape up to be anything else.
I have no quiver of cultural shame when people say ‘it’s a kid’s program’. Sure, it is, but it’s a kids program with jokes for adults, and huge ideas, and witty scripts, and great big rollicking story lines and, frankly, a lot more craft in its big toe than the average 9 p.m. weekday fare has in a whole fist of themes. I mean, at its most basic level, the setup of Dr Who allows you to do pretty much anything. Any place, any time, any situation, any species, any state of mind – anything. I’ve been meaning to write this blog entry for a while, but it was the fact that last weekend the plot of Dr Who included – and please avert your eyes if you haven’t seen this already – the entire universe going phut and then some – that really kinda nudged me into thinking that the time had come to mentioned how much I enjoyed this series. You gotta love the combination of tragically geeky and utterly cool, of ridiculously domestic and world-shatteringly big. Your average episode of Dr Who jumps in with forty something minutes of space to play with and an idea to dabble in and just charges. It’s funny, hugely entertaining, (huge in general) and I love it. More, please!
(And if anyone finds themselves reading this the day after I wake up to discover that any of my works, as either Kate Griffin or Catherine Webb have soared to huge international success… then yes please, do hire me as a writer. I mean, there’s being cool… and then sometimes there’s just plain, unashamed, unabashed being a nerd…)
Cross Country via Westfields
Posted on Sunday, June 13th, 2010 in: Cities and Adventures
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As I mentioned in a previous blog, I’ve been off to Derby this weekend for the Alt. Literature Festival, and very fun it was too. But this was the first time I’ve ever attempted to get to one of these events from a base that wasn’t London – in this case, my journey went from Stratford Upon Avon to Birmingham to Derby and back again.
I’ve always loved trains. As a kid we used to go on holiday as a family of about nine by train, taking the sleeper from Calais to places like Toulouse, Rome and Bologna. Toulouse was famous for the number of times my Mum was sick there – it seemed to be a habit – Rome was immortalised for the time my parents went second class and I went third – and of course Calais International was notorious for the institution known only as the Terminal Cafe, home of the worst food you have ever eaten in western Europe. It made the greasy spoons of Glasgow seem like lobster and garlic in comparison. In more recent years I’ve dabbled with the TGV from Paris to Montpellier, and the overnight train to Vienna and Berlin, changing at Cologne. No one does mad castles clinging to sheer cliff faces like the German princes did in the Rhine valley. It’s an ambition of mine to take the train to Istanbul one day, and perhaps one day even try taking the train across parts of the United States, where there is a train to take. Planes are cool; but oddly enough you don’t feel the speed like you do on a high speed express, nor is the view as much to write home about after the first eight thousand feet.
Back to the trip to Derby… as a Londoner I am naturally pre-disposed to assume that a) all roads lead to London and b) only a fool would take a road in the opposite direction. It’s therefore something of a treat for me to discover that it was surprisingly easy to get from Stratford to Derby and back; and what strange options it turns out are available for doing so! The departures board at Birmingham New Street is rich with routes to Edinburgh, London, Cardiff, Bristol, Plymouth, Sheffield, Nottingham and Coventry calling at Manchester, Leicester, Leeds, Durham, Luton, Exeter, Weymouth… once you’re through the ticket barrier it is more than possible to get pretty much anywhere anyhow, changing in bizarre and unexpected places to get there. I always bring a book to read on a train and invariably spend the journey looking out of the window instead for a glimpse of isolated farms and villages, power stations sat at the end of perfectly straight roads in the middle of empty fields, church towers peeking up through trees, motorways where the traffic seems to go backwards as we overtake it, city suburbs and cathedrals, rivers and estuaries. I love changing trains; during the volcanic ash business that shut down Europe’s airspace a few months back, I heard one story in particular that caught my imagination. It was told on the radio about a charity that deals in organ transplants – particularly, organising the transportation of donor organs to patients from Europe to the UK. When European airspace was shut down, there were obviously still patients in need of life-saving and urgent organ transplants, and one in particular who was just a few days from death and who needed an organ urgently. The charity had secured a matching organ, but needed to get it from Poland to the UK without flying in less than 48 hours otherwise the organ (and thus patient) would die. Needless to say, all the ports and stations of Europe were packed with people trying to get back on the already over-taxed services, so the charity put out a message on twitter and within an hour had all the offers of seats on trains that they needed. As a writer, put yourself inside the mind of whoever the poor sap was who had to make this journey – a non-stop rush from Poland to the UK by train – Eurostar and trans-continental express – not quite knowing where your next ticket was coming from, with the whole of Europe trying to nab your seat, and a box under your arm containing a slowly dying human organ upon which someone else’s life depends. Hopefully you’ll never look at the people changing trains quite the same way again…
On the subject of changing trains… my only beef with the Birmingham-Derby route was the fact that my changes seemed to perpetually involve going via a Westfield’s Shopping Centre. Between Birmingham Moor Street and Birmingham New Street you are cordially invited to walk through one of these anonymous white monoliths to shopping on your way to your connection, and knock me down with a feather if between Derby Station and the Lit Festival there wasn’t another one, looming up on the horizon like a monument to commercialism! As a kid I used to play in Dover Castle, where my uncle was a warden for a while, running up and down the corridors of King Henry II and all his probably rather chilly but very well exercised descendents. I got very good at knowing which identical stairwell of identical dark damp stone led to which precise room of white-washed arches and arrow-slit windows, and myself and my two playmates could run circles round our weary parents with no trouble at all. I wonder if in five hundred years time, future generations of kids will wander through the anonymous dark halls of historically preserved Westfields playing hide-and-seek among the remains of plastic mannequins and padded couches while sonorous tour guides pronounce on their themes of kings and castles long gone?
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!
