Bits and bobs

Hello again. There's been a short break in blog service these past few weeks. I've not just been idle, though, honest. Here are a couple of blogs I've written for work, on a gorgeous production of Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen at Welsh National Opera, and a slightly disappointing performance of Bach's John Passion from La Nuova Musica at St George's Bristol.

I've also been busy writing a feature for the May issue of BBC Music Magazine inspired by a film coming out in the UK this week, A Late Quartet:

A beautiful image

A beautiful image, from 1874. Charles Albert Chomley was a passenger on the SS Great Britain, Brunel's iron ship which voyaged around the world 32 times. Variously an ocean liner, carrier of emigrants and cargo ship in its working life, she carried hundred upon hundred of sea-goers; she knew well the Atlantic, Cape Horn, San Francisco, Australia. Passengers spent day after day after day at sea. Perhaps it honed their poetic skills. Chomley wrote of the icebergs at Cape Horn that when the sun shone through them it was like 'a volcano of glass throwing out showers of diamonds'.

Wisdom from John Ruskin

Light Show

On a grey February morning, with summer a pale memory, the Hayward Gallery’s Light Show seemed like, well, a ray of sunshine. It’s an exhibition exploring light as art, in the hands of artists from the 1960s onwards. Sold out for that entire day, the concept clearly has wide appeal, even if, like me, many visitors might be unsure what to expect. It wasn't an exhibition that made me feel or moved me, but it played on a more instinctive, almost childlike reaction to light – 'Ooh, sparkly' was my kneejerk response to the first exhibit. This is a show that dazzles, beguiles and intrigues. And I've never seen so many young children at an art exhibition, flitting from bright light to bright light, drawn like moths to a flame, oblivious to the 'do not touch' signs, their parents running after them in a bid to stop them burning their fingers.

Cylinder II by Leo Villareal, that first exhibit, was a tall column of strands of LED lights flickering in ever-changing, never-repeating patterns. The brightness was mesmerising. Similarly, in the darkened room of Anthony McCal’s You and I, Horizontal, I was gripped by how this ‘solid-light’ creation, a projection through haze, gave the light a physical presence. Adults and children alike were trying to touch, feel, grasp the light, unable to believe it wasn't, in a tangible sense, real. 

A light splodge on the floor, like paint, and a glass spinning on a motorised cake stand were low points for me. But Katie Paterson’s recreation of moonlight with an artificial bulb was wonderfully imaginative, the light strangely soothing. And the tardis-like Reality Show (Silver) in which the gallery-goer steps into a phone booth to see an endlessly reflecting empty vortex below, but not their own reflection, cleverly played on the show's recurring theme of reality – are we even really here?

Perhaps, though, the best moment came at the end: Olafur Eliasson’s Model for a timeless garden. Stepping past a black curtain into a darkened room illuminated by strobe lighting, you could see 27 fountains along one wall. The constant flickering of the strobe seemed to freeze the individual droplets, as if the arches, spouts and curlicues of water were made out of the finest crystal. It was like stepping into some enchanted realm, where nothing is quite what it seems. Magical.

Little Hands Clapping

A few posts back I wrote about a book by the author Dan Rhodes, called This is Life. I've just finished his novel Little Hands Clapping, another first-rate read, and in some ways the yin to This is Life's yang. Stop reading now if you don't want plot spoilers: the way Rhodes deals his hand, revealing one carefully-chosen card at a time, means that it's not until a good way through the book that the nature of the game is revealed. If I don't give away some details, there'll be nothing to say.

Mesmerisingly macabre, the story centres around an unusual museum in a small German city. An old man is the caretaker, his life of silence and solitude punctuated only by clearing up the remains of the successful suicides that take place in the museum. Yes, suicides. For where This if Life was centred around a contemporary art project celebrating what it means to be alive, Little Hands Clapping takes as its theme what it means to die, what it means to choose to die. Of course, the museum isn't intended to encourage suicide, rather its good-hearted but deluded owner hopes it will offer a reason to live to those who have lost hope. It's a strange premise, but strangely not depressing thanks to the wonderfully bizarre characters, including two breathtakingly beautiful young lovers and a lovestruck baker's son, whose euphonium playing is ineffably moving. There's a fable-like quality to the stories that unfold, as if they had taken place in a realm removed from ours, as if they'd been told, repeated over the years until they were written down in Rhodes's simple, clear prose. Sometimes this lends an air of detachment to the gruesome events: as a reader I began to accept even the most unexpected, horrific twists and turns. It's certainly not a book for the squeamish. But, just as Rhodes deftly steers you to a happy ending in This is Life, Little Hands Clapping gathers pace towards a conclusion that seems to tell the truth about and celebrate the joy of being alive.

Wendy Cope

I went into Waterstone's at lunch today. Readers of my blog, be not alarmed. I did not break resolution one, I promise. Instead, I spent a few minutes dreaming away in the travel guidebook section, before heading over to poetry. There, I chanced upon a book of poems by Wendy Cope. And was soon chuckling away to myself. Now I know where to go for a lunch-break pick-me-up.

Here are two pithy poems by Cope that got my attention in the shop:

Loss

The day he moved out was terrible – 

That evening she went through hell.

His absence wasn’t a problem

But the corkscrew had gone as well.

Haiku

A perfect white wine


is sharp, sweet and cold as this:


birdsong in winter.

And another couple I found later, digging around on the internet. The simplicity of the analogy in 'Bloody Men' gives it its power, while the simple pleasure described in 'The Orange' made me smile in agreement, its final line an everyday thanksgiving: I love you. I'm glad I exist.

Bloody Men

Bloody men are like bloody buses —

You wait for about a year

And as soon as one approaches your stop

Two or three others appear.

You look at them flashing their indicators,

Offering you a ride.

You’re trying to read the destinations,

You haven’t much time to decide.

If you make a mistake, there is no turning back.

Jump off, and you’ll stand there and gaze

While the cars and the taxis and lorries go by

And the minutes, the hours, the days.

The Orange

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—


The size of it made us all laugh.


I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—


They got quarters and I got a half.



And that orange, it made me so happy,

As ordinary things often do


Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.


This is peace and contentment. It's new.



The rest of the day was quite easy.


I did all the jobs on my list


And enjoyed them and had some time over.


I love you. I'm glad I exist.

Paddington Station

There’s a certain slant to the light in Paddington Station. As the sun comes through the glass* roof, between the arches, it softly diffuses. It creates a haziness, a sense of mystery that seems in tune with the excitement of travel, of the anticipation of a journey. It’s my favourite of London’s stations. Growing up in West London, arriving at this station signaled home. Now, as I live in Bristol, it’s the capital city’s front door. 

There's one feature of this cathedral-like Victorian station, in particular, that I love. The delicate ironwork tracery over the end window. Look up – you can’t miss it. I’ve always wondered if the ambitious and visionary engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel was himself responsible for it – he was, after all, creating a ‘Station after my own fancy’. Based on the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851, his iron and glass construction was both the largest station of its era and part of a grander plan. Brunel envisaged it as the starting point of a seamless journey ending in New York: London, Neyland (South Wales), New York. Means of travel: train and Brunel’s boat, the Great Western.

But, as I discovered thanks to Professor Google**, apparently decorative design was where Brunel’s expertise and imagination ran out: ‘for detail of ornamentation I neither have time nor knowledge.’ So the engineer enlisted the services of Matthew Digby Wyatt, a British art historian and architect, who later became surveyor of the East India company and the first Slade professor of art at Cambridge University. His legacy includes the India Room at the Foreign and Commenwealth Office and parts of Temple Meads station. Wyatt’s striking Paddington design has gently curling fleur-de-lys-like scrolls  and interlacing arches, perhaps echoing the Moorish influences he used elsewhere in the station. Made of metal, it looks strong, part of the railway and modernity; on the other hand there's a softness and movement in the curves. That's what just my layman's eye has observed, anyhow. If anyone with more expertise has any observations to make about why this is so striking, I'd love to hear them.

*It’s actually now, so the web tells me, polycarbonate glazing. Accurate but not exactly evocative.

**Some kind of official Network Rail report I stumbled across also rather poetically described the darker platforms at Paddington as having ‘the essence of Birmingham New Street’.

Air and water

Here's a snap taken on New Year’s Day: blue sky, a little white. It makes me think of clarity, serenity and freedom.

It is also, suggested a friend, like the tiles at the Clifton Lido, a restored Victorian outdoor swimming pool in Bristol, tucked away from the hubbub of main-road traffic on a cobbled street. I’ll be writing more about this special place in another post. 

At the time, I wasn't entirely sure I agreed about the tiles, until I bought a pair of goggles last week. Now – call me fanciful – every time I swim I see sky below me: it's a darker, richer colour than the New Year's blue of the photo, mottled with grey, but similarly uplifting.

Living Italian

A photographic clue to what I might be doing in the month of May...

Some resolutions

New Year's Resolution time. Last year I only had one: get better at Scrabble. I'd say I'm a 'words' person, but I've always been abysmal at this game. After a particularly pitiful showing last Christmas when my brother beat me by about a million points to ten, I decided it was time to take action. Cue a year of playing Words with Friends on my mobile phone, and a few moments spent learning some of those two-letter words that the pros have handy ('Qi' anyone?). Did it work? Well, this year I came second. That'll do for me.

My resolutions list for 2013 is still at the compilation stage. It seems like a good idea to keep them concrete – I'd say that getting better at Scrabble was the only resolution I've ever kept; I've never managed vague ones like 'be more efficient/more positive/healthier'. And although meet my Mr Darcy/Ryan Gosling* is on the wish list for 2013 (I mention this just in case they're reading), is that something I can 'resolve' to do?

So, here's the first draft. In 2013 I will:

1. (a) Stop being a compulsive book buyer. I'm not going to buy any new books until I've read all of the unread books in my house (Oh, the piles of unread books! I've started hiding them under my bed: it's getting desperate.)

(b) Stop being a book flirt. As in, reading lots of books at the same time but never getting to the end of any of them. I never used to be like that. In 2013, all books will be read from beginning to end. (Although if it's dreadful, I'll allow myself a veto. But if it's a good book, well, what's the excuse, eh?)

2. Learn to do front crawl properly. I can do the front crawl stroke, but can only keep going by stopping every two lengths. I'd never escape the Loch Ness Monster swimming like that.)

3. Blog more often. Yes. Say twice a week.

4. Savour the outdoors. I've stolen this one from Simon Barnes in The Times. He suggests taking a moment each week to enjoy something outdoors, or to look at some wildlife. Anything from ladybirds to Loch Ness monsters.

5. Be more adventurous. This probably comes under the category of vague at the moment. The plan is to refine the concept which I want to cover everything from trying raw fish (sashimi) (can it really be tasty? Raw fish?) to something like climb a mountain. TBC.

*Not so much meet 'my' Ryan Gosling as meet Ryan Gosling.

Cheddar Gorge

Saturday. The sun was shining, the sky was clear. Five of us squidged into my little car and we were off, to Cheddar Gorge. We took the scenic route – and only with one minor detour. Plus a pause to admire the breathtaking view from Dundry Hill across Bristol. A road closed sign that all the drivers seemed to be ignoring didn't stop us either, as we meandered down the bottom of the gorge, past smashed-up bits of tarmac suggesting recent rockfalls, until we reached the outskirts of Cheddar itself.

The huge limestone slabs loomed above. There, at the bottom it felt quiet, ancient. And just a smidgen further down the road, it felt a bit like a ski resort. Tacky gift shops, and little tea shops lined the road. A huge Costa coffee sign dominated the scene, its only competition being an illuminated 'Merry Christmas Happy New Year' above it.

Our walking route took us straight up through scrubland, trees and coppiced woodland. Coats came off, scarves unwound as we climbed higher and higher, to the top of the near-400 foot gorge. Unspoilt views across the Somerset Levels were our reward, and a picnic lunch, eaten huddled in a shallow dip away from the chilly wind, which included morsels of Christmas cake and sugary dates. The West Mendip way led us back down, to where the valley bottom had been flooded by recent rains, adding a spice of adventure to the walk. Drystone walls edged the fields above and the rogue river below; it reminded me of the Yorkshire Dales.

Another steep climb took us to the top of the other side of the gorge. Walking along the top, this side's edges are uncovered by trees. But, looking over, you can't see the road at the bottom. It looks deep. Looking out, there's another great view, only marred by the impossibly round manmade Cheddar reservoir. Wild goats roamed, munching the grass.

At the end of the walk are Jacob's Tower - a lookout tower - and Jacob's Ladder, the steps back down into Cheddar. Information boards on the Ladder told us about the Gorge's formation: we have the meltwaters of the Mendip Ice Cap to thank for this natural wonder. Stand at the top of the 274 steps, one board instructed, and imagine a piece of paper being placed there. The paper would represent how long humankind had been alive, the 274 steps the 'immesurable chasm of time'. With such profound thoughts on our mind, we headed to Derrick's Tea Rooms for a cream tea.

A resolution...

Oh dear. Over the past few months I've had so many things that I wanted to write about, and I haven't posted a jot. It's particularly annoying that all of the plays, films, books and concerts have slipped by, as well as some of the places I've seen. So, I'm going to a leaf out my younger diarist's self and use the time between now and Christmas to catch up. According to my blog archive, I've only posted 23 times this year, compared to 53 last year, and 114 times in 2007, the first full year of blogging. That's not the best record, so time to pull my socks up, although I'm not sure I can manage 30 posts by 31st December! Oh, and I'm going to resolve to blog twice a week next year.