London Lives

This weekend, I’ve broken two important barriers:

1.  Been back to the Coliseum: when we went there before Christmas I fainted in my seat (they were high up and I hadn’t been well a few days beforehand). When my pal booked tickets for The Mikado I was apprehensive, but needed to get back in the saddle. And, from the same very high seats last Friday, all was well. Great show, too.

It sounds a silly thing to need to get over. When I was a child I was always fainting. “It’s her metabolism. She’ll need to eat little and often,” my mother was told. She was forever putting a couple of barley sugars in my coat pocket to eat at school. But, as an adult, the sensation of feeling faint in a darkened packed theatre was terrifying when you’re not quite sure how you’re going to get out afterwards. Thankfully my lovely pal negotiated all this for me.

So Friday was important. It also taught me something else: even if I faint in a darkened theatre, nothing truly terrible can happen. Let’s hope I have no further need for this wisdom.

2.  Read something out in front of a group of strangers at a writing course: I was at a weekend course at the fabulous CityLit where I met lots of lovely and talented people. Brilliant tutor too. The aim was for us to have a draft of a short story by the end of the weekend and the tutors was asking for volunteers to read their ‘beginnings’. I had set myself the task beforehand of standing up and reading something out if possible and I managed it (I was standing metaphorically if not literally).

Great feedback, too. Very encouraging. It’s easy to think you’ve written something unimportant or tedious that takes too long to hit any moment of resonance. Feedback is important and so welcome. And I have my first draft! I can see this as a completed piece. Brilliant.

It’s unexpected to feel full full of energy on a Monday evening. So far I’ve put out the recycling, had a bath, put fresh sheets on the bed, sent my CV off somewhere and am now eating dinner.

While watching lovely Professor Brian Cox talking about stars and planets on the TV.

Next: tinkering with a short piece I’m writing for another blog. Must harness this energy when it appears!

We’ve started frequenting some new pubs, having discovered them on a blustery sunny day after Christmas.  I say ‘discovered’, but they were always there, waiting and unknown until the day you decide to step inside.

We found them after a jaunt around Regent’s Park, lunch in Marylebone High Street and a potentially dangerous visit to the marvellous Daunt bookshop.  And last week we made a return visit. These ‘new’ places are in a long-favourite area, Marylebone, and attract the rag trade, media and publishing crowd.

The Yorkshire Grey is long and narrow with the beautiful features and stained glass windows of a Sam Smith’s pub (known to us as a G&T pub as the wines in them aren’t great. We stick to gin and tonic). There’s something decadent about a mid-week day off work, sipping G&T by a roaring fire, with BBC radio sound engineers chatting around us. Then on to the Crown and Sceptre (with a special wine offer on Wednesdays! Just the thing when a nice glass of Rioja is often six quid.) A nice buzzy bustle in this larger pub.

And I’m thinking about new places too: dipping a toe in, taking a leap into something new work-wise. It feels like standing on the precipice and attempting to make focussed choices.

Today is the loveliest day for ages; possibly more than a month. Brilliant sky and soft chilly breeze. Even though the snow looked lovely (and was here for seemingly ages), there were very few brilliant blue days.

Walking to the supermarket. Domestic stuff, not very exciting really. Coffee, rosemary, goat’s cheese and so on. It’s about 25 minutes or so away and there are others that are nearer. I could get the bus, but sometimes it’s good to trundle through the streets. Particularly today.

Today I take a different route on the way there, zig-zagging along the quiet afternoon streets. The bare trees are starkly outlined against the brilliant blue above, while the streets below lay in shadow. Planes slip idly across the horizon.

On the way home, I move along streets I’ve never walked along before. There are whole sets of lovely roads with sleek rows of old houses with white paintwork, glistening in the lowering sun.  Barely a soul around. A beautiful black Scottish Terrier passes, looking like a brush carefully sniffing its way along the path.

And home now, where a soft yellow glow is beginning to meet the brilliant blue. All over my flat, I find shards of sunlight in unexpected corners. Even at this hour, there is a sharp sliver of moon high in the winter sky.

Saturday was frustrating. It didn’t start out being frustrating. After listening to Saturday Live I managed to have a lovely bath and breakfast and be out of the door by 10.45. Early indeed.

The problem is the transport at weekends. Victoria line completely closed. Circle, Metropolitan, Hammersmith and City closed at random points. All these connecting arteries not really connecting. I hope the Olympics will be worth it.

And then the buses were diverted around the Square Mile because of the Lord Mayor’s Show. So, a combination of tradition and modernity conspired to snarl up a simple journey to the library to write.

When I got to the library to write, a power cut had snarled up the computers.

So, writing today was not to be and I was feeling philosophical about it by this stage. I chatted with an officer from the City of London police and established that yes, the buses were still diverted and what a bloody nuisance it all was. At 1.30 I gave up the ghost to go home.

There was relative sanity on the Piccadilly line.  Opposite sat a beautiful man asleep with his book open. And above him, part of the Poems on the Underground series, was this newly-discovered gem by Katharine Towers entitled The Way We Go:

the way we go about our lives
trying out each empty room
like houses we might own
eavesdropping for clues in corridors until

standing at a gate or attic window
seeing beauty in a flag of sky
we’re gone, leaving the doors open
all the lights burning

(copyright Katharine Towers)

Simple and beautiful.

Stephen Berkoff spoke at one of the National Theatre’s Platform events on Friday night. A superb event where he spoke with warmth and vigour about his upbringing in Stepney, his tailor father and his acting and directing career.

He spoke of wanting a Zoot Suit (and of looking ridiculous in it when he tried it on); of the trials posed by directors; of his parents cursing in their native Yiddish.

The Cottesloe, the theatre where the event was held, is a rather odd place. We discovered that you need to leave the National Theatre, wander along through something akin to a car park and enter another mysterious (and hitherto never-seen) doorway. Once there, you have to navigate the strange seating system, only to be sharply told that you’re on the other side of the auditorium. More seating navigation required. Inevitably, our seats were at the end of the row and required us to squeeze past a pillar and clamber over from the row behind to avoid disturbing the seated patrons.

Did I mention that all of these fresh discoveries were made while we carried plastic beakers full of red wine? But of course they were… Naturally, we were the only ones ambling along to find the theatre with beakers in hand. When squeezing into our seats, one friend clambered over the row, then held the wine and the coats while the other friend followed suit. All attempts to be ladylike vanished (vanquished?)

Stephen was still the business, though.

For it was written that There Must Be Hares at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. It’s the law. These are by the late Barry Flanagan RA and are wonderful.

Lots of splendid stuff as usual (the Weston Rooms are my favourite; packed with smaller pictures of all kinds). Familiar favourites were there too (Bill Jacklin and Ken Howard), along with loads of new people to look up. In one of the main rooms, David Mach RA exhibited a piece called Silver Streak: a fabulous gorilla made of wire coat hangers. Stunning and clever.

Afterwards I wandered through Shepherd Market, a smart little enclave of restaurants in Mayfair. The area was still waking up at 12.30. These shabby old buildings (below) are nearby. An amazing contrast.

Later, I walked from Maida Vale to Paddington. Not in a very ordered or direct way, but along streets of mansion blocks overlooking Paddington Recreation Ground and others with semi-detached houses and smart cars outside. There was almost no one about. I’ve said this before, but sometimes London’s silence is astounding. It was like a silent suburban street from another time.

Back in Paddington, I ambled around some streets getting background for my novel. It’s not enough to look at maps on the internet or wade through archives (useful those these are). It’s important to walk it and to feel it. My brother said recently that I was having a big love affair with London. He’s right.

Maps are rarely just about geography…

So says the pamphlet for this is free exhibition at the British Library and – even sweeter – I had the afternoon off work to have lunch with a pal and to see it.

There are plenty of early maps of the world with beautifully-inscribed  names and others which were displayed to convey their owners’ power. There were re-imagined maps of London as well as UK county and parish maps and a lovely Victorian schoolroom map of Europe with the names of countries and places carefully picked out in clear font. Some of those names and places shifted in early 20th Century Europe and then shifted right back again as the century closed. There were great propaganda maps, too.

The BL has a splendid philatelic collection too, displayed in pull-out glass cases. I could do with some of those at home to put things in.

On the way home I see  a woman on the bench outside Tesco’s clutching a can of Special Brew and carefully writing inside a birthday card.  In the next street to mine, the kids from the flats rush out into the road (no checking for traffic – they rush fearlessly out). Chasing and chasing one another, bikes flung down in the road as they rush along the pavements with sticks. I’m listening to The Smiths’ How Soon is Now.

I was very pleased to see this earlier today about Nathaniel Bryceson:
http://wcclibraries.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/nathaniel-bryceson-lives-on/

I wrote about his diary in my Research in Westminster post (7 Feb 2010)

The man who lives opposite took his dog out for a walk yesterday evening. It was not yet dark but the day was still blustery. The Springer Spaniel strained at the leash, pulling him along, then stopped suddenly to sniff at something on the pavement. I haven’t seen the man very often; he is thin with glasses, perhaps in his seventies. He waited patiently until the dog finished its explorations. Then the pair moved on. Seconds later, the dog stopped to sniff at something on a wall. Again the man waited patiently, the strong breeze blustering around him. And on they walked, stopping along the road as far as I could see.

I wondered what he was like as a young man and whether he’d always had such patience or if it had arrived with age.

This man is all our fathers.