Secret Cinema

A couple of weeks ago we had our second Secret Cinema experience. This time, the dress code demanded we should be 1940s be-suited, trilby-topped males, ominously with long johns and white vests underneath. We had to report to the courtroom of the State of Oakhampton at a designated time, carrying our identity cards - mine was in the name of Campus Coy. There, we entered the all-encompassing Secret Cinema world. And boy, they do themselves proud. Such impressive organisation, spot-on actors and sets, right down to the last detail. Which in this case turned out to be sometimes pretty uncomfortable.

Image from Secret Cinema (www.secretcinema.org.uk)

This time, not one, but two venues. First, the courtroom, nicely set up in Bethnal Green Library. We were processed before the garrulous judge and sent down - I got 2 years for handling goods with intent; J got 2 years for counterfeiting, promptly raised to a 5 stretch when he tried to argue with the judge. Then we met our lawyer, bought our 'library cards' (aka beer & burger funds), were sent outside, lined up, shouted at by American prison guards (very much a theme for the night...), and marched out to the main road, stopping traffic as we followed the guards in single file, hand on the shoulder of the prisoner in front, across a zebra crossing & round the corner to an authentic 1940s London bus.

A ten minute mystery drive later, we were discharged into a prison yard, and marched past an intimidating crowd of prisoners, all in identical denim uniforms, catcalling at us. 'New fish, new fish!' In the prison - aka, we found out later, the former Cardinal Pole School in Hackney - we were lined up in the gym and made to collect a bag with our own prison uniforms, strip to our long underwear, and put our outer clothes in the bag. Then marched round the building, back outside - walking barefoot on freezing concrete - through the showers, where a naked prisoner covered in blood was being beaten up by a guard, and eventually to the cells. Putting on our uniforms, we learned a bit of what it might feel like to spend some time in a cell - well, OK, a cell where a fellow prisoner sold us beer. But with the guards patrolling outside, wearing our prisoner uniforms, and with the door locked the lights switched off, it was a weird experience.

A beautiful 1940s bus delivering new prisoners

 

For the next couple of hours, we got to explore the prison and the various entertainments put on for us inmates. There were burgers to buy in the canteen - and later a 3 piece band singing 40s and 50s covers (Folsom Prison Blues, of course). There was the laundry, where you could also buy beer and whisky; and the prison brewery, which sold the State of Oakhampton's very own ale (by Hackney Brewery). And hanging out in the prison yard playing basketball and catcalling at the next batch of new inmates coming through. There was the scary prison hospital, and the shouty prison guards (those actors must have had a great time). There was the escape attempt, when guns were fired, and we were all herded together in the cell block, lectured at by the governor, and made to sing an sobering hymn.

Checking out the prison laundry

Eventually, we were back in the gym, now with rows of uncomfortable chairs set up for what's nominally the main event - but which didn't seem that important after the immersive experience of the rest of the evening. And of course, it was the Shawshank Redemption. If I'd seen the film more than once, or in the last 10 years, I think I probably would have guessed.....honest! But not knowing probably made the evening more effective. I really enjoyed watching it again after the experience of being in our pretend prison - yes of course it was make-believe, but it was done in so much detail and was pretty close to the bone at times. We ended up leaving before the end of the film (and watching the rest in comfort at home the next night!), on the way finding the Parole Board's office, purloining discharge papers and stamping them 'Approved', and changing back into our suits. At the door, a prison guard shook our hands, wished us well in the outside world, and pointed us in the direction of the bus to Blackfriars. It was a full on, intense experience - you can see a bit more of what it was like here (note: no movie goers were hurt in the making of this clip!). Expensive, oh yes, but well worth trying if you get the chance. Just Tell No One! (until it's over...)

Parole Board office: acquiring discharge papers!

Lost socks, launderettes and Christmas

Here's a thing I've never done before: help decorate a launderette for Christmas. And not just any old decorations, either. This was conceptual art installation masquerading as festive bedecking. J's original concept: all the socks lost in the launderette in 2012, collected. Idea development: what have socks got to do with Christmas? Project implementation: put lots of crafty bits together, round up some willing helpers, send out for coffee and hot chocolate, and get stuck in!

Bare walls - getting started

Fixing the trees up

Lines and baubles...

Get the socks...they're all clean, honest!

Hanging socks

Hanging more socks....

Cutting out Santa

The lettering's tricky

Final touches

Finished!

Sleeping Beauty

A winter's night in Edinburgh. The full moon shines down from an open, frosty sky. Work deadlines are overwhelming. What better way to spend the evening than indulging in a little Gothic Romance at the Festival Theatre with Matthew Bourne? I admit I don't think I really get ballet. I do love watching talented people do things well, and I like the music, but otherwise to me it's really just a bunch of people flinging themselves round a stage. But I was truly entranced by the costumes,the set, the whole gorgeous design of Sleeping Beauty. It draws you into another world, time travelling through Victorian melodrama and Edwardian garden parties and glitzy modern nightclubs; a world of poisoned roses and dark forests and abandoned castles; vampire fairies and beautiful, nasty it-girls and boys; puppets and puppet masters; waxed chests and fairy wings. OK, it really isn't a feminist story. Aurora is the original victim, pushed from bad witch-godmother to strict Mummy and overbearing Daddy to evil witch's son-vampire to gangly husband to motherhood with only the teeniest bit of freedom and dancing along the way. But that aside, it was a wonderful evening. A little bit of pre-Christmas magic.

Milan

A weekend in Milan with the girls. We stayed at a cheap, clean and functional hostel made out of a monastery, and adjoining a church, which was a good introduction to one of the most important aspects of Italian life, religion. Others, at least in glitzy northern Milan, seem to be food, fashion and fags (Italian indoors clearly not yet being smoke-free).

The food was generally great and occasionally fabulous, as is the Italian eating experience. Breakfast was oddly expensive, considering it's just a capuccino, a croissant and a (freshly squeezed, though) orange juice. But excellent pizza was cheap as chips, and even plati secondi like risotto or polenta alla porcini, washed down with local Lombardian red wine, wasn't exactly bank breaking, and in the restaurant upstairs from the Jamaica bar was fantastic. Served by a smoke-breathing, bread-throwing dragon of a manager, but rescued by the lovely barmaid Julia, who was summoned upstairs to translate for us.

We touristed lightly, wandering the swish and beautiful streets of the centre and window shopping in the fashion quarter; checking out the inside and the roof of the fairytale Duomo cathedral; looking for trendy modern design in the Triennale museum (but finding more style than substance, which is possibly what you can say about the centre of Milan in general); enjoying the bustling foodhall in the main department store; hanging out in the Sempioni park on a sunny Sunday morning and watching a fashion shoot in action; spinning on the bull's balls in the grandly named shopping mall, Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II; and discovering the more rundown but arty & boho Navigli canal district, with its cheap & cheerful shops (they say canal, but they mean 'practically dry drainage ditch'). And partaking of aperitivo (free and often yummy buffet food that appears in the evening happy hour) with a Milanese cocktail or two, the Negroni Spagliato (bitter and delicious). Well, when in Rome....

View from the roof of the Duomo in the middle of Milan

Is this a political statement?

Disturbingly, the mummified hands of a bishop, laid out in
splendour in the cathedral

Even the chocolate is stylish

In a courtyard in the Navigli district

Spinning on the bull's balls

From the desk of Sister Michaela

Found in a drift of damp, frost-ridden autumn leaves on the cobbles of a street in the Grange, while walking home through the dark of a November evening. 

What does Sister Michaela look like? Where did she grow up? Why did she become a nun? Who are her children? How does she feel about her life and her mission when she prays before bedtime? 

How are nuns funded, anyway? How do convents fare during financial crises? 

Memory

It's a funny old thing. In some ways, isn't much of who and what we are "just" memory? The things we learn, the things that shape us. Not just what we actively remember, but also what's hidden, lurking beneath, steering us without us even realising.

Apparently the human brain's memory capacity is around 1 million gigabytes. It doesn't sound that much, does it? That would cost you about £60,000 if you bought extra storage drives from Amazon. Cheap at the price. What could you store on 1000 plug-in hard drives? Two hundred million songs. Or two hundred million photos. Or a million films. When you put it like that, it does sound like a lot. Does the sum total of all our memories add up to a million films worth? Adding in all the depth and complexity and subtlety and smells and tastes and breath and darkness, of course. I don't like to think so. But maybe it does. Computer memory even seems to work in a similar way: data are encoded, stored, then available for retrieval. And if the hardware or the software becomes obsolete, then recovering information from storage gets tricky...

Life recreated as film. Memory. What in your life would you like to remember forever? There's a lovely Japanese film from the 90s which touches on all these, After Life. I've got it on video somewhere but to see it again I'm going to have to go buy it again on DVD (cause it's not on iTunes). Now that doesn't happen with memories. 

American Idiot: great music, shame about the show...

I saw American Idiot with some friends last weekend. We had great food, drinks and a catch up beforehand in Pearces, but I was sadly underwhelmed by the show. Now this might be entirely down to me lacking a musical theatre appreciation gene, because lots of the audience appeared to have a great time & even gave the cast a standing ovation (although the place was almost half empty). But I completely missed whatever the point was. The cast looked like children's TV presenters unconvincingly grunged up for the part. The only person with any stage presence turned out to be an evil drug pusher who got artfully shot in a surge of morals well before the end. The singer playing the main character's druggy girlfriend wasn't too bad either but she was largely wasted in wandering around almost naked and/or simulating sex with the main character. There was altogether an excess of trashy MTV sexuality - not least the pretty distasteful shortie nurse uniforms, unbuttoned to give a flash of buttock, in the M*A*S*H - er, Iraq - field hospital scene. Mind you, the squaddie invalid's harem-porn, totally inexplicable flying-dance-with-belly-dancer fantasy from his hospital trolley was hilarious. The plot was largely unintelligible to me (or maybe I'd just stopped paying attention), but was apparently teen-mag simplistic: what's better, hard drugs, joining the army, teenage pregnancy, or an office job? And the last scene with the mass guitar lesson was just weird, was dragged out at least 10 minutes after it should have ended, and nearly ruined Green Day's brilliant 'Time of my Life' for me for ever. But not quite. My completely unqualified advice is, go listen to the album again, but if you want musicals, stick with Mary Poppins.

Launderette

I haven't felt much like posting lately. Here's an old photo I like instead. Not one of the launderettes I visit most - they're much nicer, of course ;-) I think this one is long gone. 

Friday in the Botanics

Last week we finally took Dad on a trip out. We've been meaning to do it for months, but either the weather wasn't right, or I wasn't free, or Mum was busy, or Ashgill's minibus had a puncture, or Joanne wasn't working. Of course, once we did it, we kicked ourselves about why we hadn't just gone ahead and done it before. It was easy in the end, because everyone helped out. Mark drove us over to the Botanics in the minibus; Joanne was so enthusiastic; and we had a great couple of hours pushing him round the gardens, getting him try and taste the herbs and smell the last of the sweetpeas; we wandered round Kibble Palace; and had a coffee sitting by the fish pond. I think he really did get something out of it. Different views, fresh air, a beautiful place, autumn colours. Maybe some residual memory of going there in the old days; maybe enjoying being with Mum & me. I was reminded not to take a change of scene for granted. I'm going to try and take him out more regularly from now on. 

Uncle Paddy

Not been posting regularly for a while - many new experiences but not enough time to reflect. But I want to pay tribute to my Uncle Paddy, who died a year ago this weekend just passed. He was without doubt one of life's special people, who should have been around for years to come to keep on enjoying himself and making the rest of us happier. He was funny, charming, a ladies' man and a bloke's bloke, religious but irreverent, genuine, interested and interesting, down to earth, kind; a big man with a huge heart who went out of his way to help other people. I miss him, but I was privileged to have him in my life. Rest in peace Paddy, and I hope you and Jill are together again somewhere.

Fieldwork

It's coming up to my third week of Iceland fieldwork. We've had mostly fantastic weather: though it's really chilled down this last week (ground frost this morning!), the sun is still warm, although the wind is chiiillly. Every day has been spent in the same few hundred square metres of flat, stony, open sandur - glacial outwash plain to you and me. With a view to the twin glaciers of Fjallsjokull and Virkisjokull one way, and the flat plain all the way to the sea the other. It's funny; you can spend hours involved in running a pump test on a borehole, dipping the water level, measuring the outflow, re-filling the pump with petrol, checking the groundwater chemistry, writing notes - then suddenly turn round and remember there's a huge FO glacier right behind you, looking amazing in the sunshine. We're very adaptable creatures, really. This is what fieldwork in Iceland has looked like.

Jokulsarlon

Jokulsarlon is 'glacier lake' in Icelandic. And it does what it says on the tin. Like most bits of the Icelandic landscape, it's both very young and constantly in flux. It only formed in the last hundred years as the huge Breidamerkurjokull glacier started retreating faster and faster, shedding meltwater and calving icebergs into the growing lagoon in front of it. Now the lagoon is huge, and swarms of icebergs float majestically around it, eventually massing in the short river that flows under the suspension bridge carrying Route 1 to Hofn, and collapsing spectacularly and flowing out to sea. Big chunks of ice wash up on the black volcanic sand beach beyond the bridge and are gradually worn away by the waves.

Last night we were lucky enough to see the annual fireworks display at the lake - the icebergs lit up by flickering flames, and rockets shooting for the stars, staged by reckless Icelanders who zipped round the lagoon in motorboats and clambered all over the bergs to set off the fireworks. It was heaving with excited locals and tourists, and we drove home at midnight in a wildly out of character miles-long queue of traffic on the normally deserted road.

Making holes in Iceland

Licenced to drill

I am off to work on a glacial research site in Iceland, to investigate relationships between meltwater from the Virkisjokull glacier - which has retreated nearly 500 m in the last 15 years - and groundwater stored in the over 100 m thick sand and gravel pro-glacial outwash plain. Could groundwater help to replace essential meltwater sources that will be lost as glaciers in places like the Himalayas disappear in the next few decades? OK, Iceland is very different from low-latitude mountain glacial environments, but it's a whole lot easier - and cheaper - to do research there, and many of the hydrological processes are likely to be the same. It seems that few people have so far looked at groundwater in any glacial areas, so this work is set to be kind of new and, hopefully, maybe, even a little bit useful...

I'll be working with BGS colleagues and an Icelandic drilling company, and the plan is to drill about 10 boreholes, mostly less than 15 m deep (I say drill; I mean stand around telling the driller what to do); use the boreholes to test the aquifer; and install monitoring equipment that will give me an excuse to go back in 6 months time to see what's been happening. Fingers crossed everything is organised: the pallet of heavy equipment arrived in Reykjavik by ship last week; the borehole screen and casing arrived by plane last Friday, only a month late (although is still stuck in customs...); and I deserve a gold medal for how much I've manage to squeeze into two check-in bags, packed full of smaller & lighter bits of essential equipment, bedding, ice crampons, Marmite, and knitting. I have our letter of permission from the Icelandic Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture. My out of office email reply is turned on. I'm ready to go!

Ride along the river

We went for a very nice bike ride in sunny Hertfordshire last Sunday, bowling along quiet roads with surprisingly open views - for some reason there weren't so many hedges, and so the golden fields of ripening wheat border straight onto the roads, and you can see for miles across them and the rolling countryside.

On the way back we took a short cut along what looked like a quiet track between fields, with a ford crossing the river about halfway along. I vaguely wondered why the map showed the word 'Ford' written lengthways down the road, and why the river was marked running along the same line as the road. That can't be right, I thought.

But the Ordnance Survey had - as they most often do - got it spot on. The River Ash does indeed run along exactly the same course as pretty, high-banked, tree-lined Violets Lane. Luckily it isn't a very big river, and is actually dry along some stretches, but in places it was quite definitely waterlogged, knee-deep and bedded in sticky soft sand. We splashed our way through by a combination of pedalling and falling in. It was brilliant. And then at the other end, feeling just like explorers making it alive out of a jungle, we found a wonderfully helpful notice to point out where the road finally went its separate way from the river, just in case by that point we'd forgotten what a proper road did.

Visit Dingle

I'm on a one-woman Kerry tourist board mission this week. If you want a trip away from it all in the great outdoors but with a buzz of good food and good culture, go to Dingle. You do have to drive to get there, but don't spend all the time in the car watching coaches do scary things on the Slea Head ring. Get a map, park up and go walking, along the steep cliffs and long, long sandy beaches, or up in the hills - but you'll have to be a bit gung ho, there aren't many footpaths and the roads are narrow and windy and fast. Hire bikes from Foxy John's (which triples as a bar and hardware shop) or from Paddy's on Dykegate Street - he'll even lend you a hi-vis top if the weather's dull and misty (ahem). If the Dutch dive guy in the harbour hasn't emigrated to South Africa yet, see if he's fixed his boat engine and thinks the wind's in the right direction for an introductory dive in the clear, clear waters of the bay (he hadn't, when we were there, but I wish he had). Go for a sunset sea kayak with Noel of Irish Adventures, explore amazing caves under the sheer cliffs and spot Fungi the dolphin having his dinner. Eat at some great restaurants and cafes, but search out the cheaper (and just as good ones) - like the Bull's Head, An Canteen and the Goat Street Cafe.  Check out the farmers' market on a Friday morning. Go to Film Club night at the Phoenix. Try Crean's lager, creation of the young Dingle Brewery Company. Find a mammoth and giant cave bears and wondrous eclectic paraphernalia at the Celtic & Prehistoric Museum. Buy nice pottery and knitwear and tatty dolphin souvenirs. Eat gorgeous icecream at Murphy's. Listen to music at just about any pub you wander into; it'll mostly be put on for the tourists but it'll still be quality. Just go. Enjoy.

The edge of Europe

Hill, history, myth and adventure

Mount Brandon. Standing 952 m high on the edge of Europe, from the top on a clear day you can see all the way to America. Well, almost. St Brendan the Navigator thought he could. Allegedly he climbed this hill before setting off in a leather coracle, sometime around 530 AD, for the Isles of the Blessed. Or Paradise. Or, as many people have believed since, possibly the North American continent. In the 1970s one believer, Tim Severin, a sequential re-creater of ancient voyages, built his own coracle out of wood and ox hides, sealed with grease from sheep's wool, and sailed the Brendan 7,250 km from Kerry to Newfoundland. Not proving that St Brendan and his merry band of monks were the first Europeans to set foot in the New World; just that they could have been. 


Mount Brandon. It's not just a hill keeping watch over the Atlantic from green and wild west Kerry. It's a whole story in itself. Now walkers follow a white-posted and crossed pilgrim's track, the Saint's Road, up to a crucifix on the summit, but the wondrous views probably aren't very different to what Brendan looked out over, a millennium and a half ago.  

Family wedding

I just got back from a week in county Kerry, Ireland. First for my cousin's wedding and then a few days tagged-on holiday. My extended family is quite small, but we don't meet up very often. This was, in fact, the first time my brothers, myself and my cousins had all been together in at least 20 years. Not to mention our other halfs, my Mum and aunt, and the four little ones in the next generation. So all in all it was a fantastic and happy few days. A beautiful wedding, smiling relaxed people, gorgeous location in the fabulous Parknasilla spa hotel on the shores of the Atlantic, and even some sunshine. Why don't people get married more often? Thank you, Paul & Wayne!