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.