Fencing with the master
To Archway yesterday for a lesson with fencing master Prof. Erez Yardeni at his Salle d’Armes. Miki’s interest has been touched by fencing, and we went last week to observe a class at a local fencing club, Salle Paul. The Salle d’Armes is a quite different business. Yardeni teaches fencing as a martial art, claiming direct descent in a line of teaching from an 18th-century master, St George.
He reminds me somewhat of the army major who taught fencing and boxing at Canford School in the 60s, turning up in his sports car with a bag of blades in the back. There was no question there of it being a whit less martial than boxing, or the unarmed combat he was said to teach commandos, and we were drilled weaponless for what seemed like hours in the stance he wanted, thighs burning, our buttocks, it seemed, brushing the floor. The major told us to master the basics with speed and accuracy; we should defeat any number of opponents. My later experiences of sport fencing, with its electrical equipment and lamé jackets have all felt degraded from the simplicity of that first experience; and Prof. Yardeni’s salle a bracing return to it. Its dedication seems more than Miki’s interest will bear at this point, but perhaps I shall find my way back to it, with or without her.
The spirit of Dennis Severs’ house stays with us. Sat beside the fire last night with cheese, port and nuts, reading A Christmas Carol aloud.
To Spitalfields yesterday on the longest night of the year and 18 Folgate St, house of the late Dennis Severs. The house is kept as it was lived in through the 18th, 19th and early twentieth centuries. It is kept so not as a museum, but as a performance. Fires burn softly in their grates, a kitchen sideboard glitters by candlelight with jellies and cakes, an unfinished meal has yet to be cleared away. The deliberate effect is of stepping into a painting.
We were there an hour; the space, candle-lit and quiet, remains with me. Then home through the fog by bike.
» Wikipedia article
» Dennis Severs’ House
Virtual office party To Victoria last night for the I.P. Sharp Associates London office Christmas party. IPSA disappeared into Reuters twenty years ago, yet the office parties continue. A privilege to have worked in such company.
Last year’s party was a small affair, but this year people showed up from hither and yon. Gitte Christensen & Morten Kromberg were over from Denmark. Nicki Coyne, Mike Hughes, Hazel O’Hare and Karl Mabert turned up, the first time I had seen them since 1982. Suddenly it was time to leave to meet Miki for a movie. Congratulations and thanks to Graeme Robertson for organising this again.
Scenes of a Sexual Nature
Pastoral scenes at the Prince Charles Cinema. Scenes of a Sexual Nature was shot last summer quite near our home. It’s warm, funny, engaging and occasionally wise. But the real star of the film is Hampstead Heath in its summer glory. Go see.
Strålande jul
To Westminster Cathedral last night to meet Gil & Lauren and Kai Jäger at the Sankta Lucia ceremony organised by the Swedish Church in London. Wonderful singing from the choirs of the two churches and the Olaus Petri Choir from Örebro. The cathedral was packed out. The lights went out as the white-robed Lucia singers bore their candles to the sanctuary.
Christians arrived in these islands in the ninth century, with instructions from Rome to adopt and adapt local pagan feasts. Christmas was derived from the midwinter Yuletide feast; Sweden’s Lucia has similar roots. The midwinter pagan feasting always tended to outshine its Christian gloss, and Christmas was long deprecated by churchmen until Oliver Cromwell put his foot down and banned it outright, sending troops to make shopkeepers open on Christmas Day.
The Restoration restored the holiday but left its reputation unchanged, until Charles Dickens renewed it with A Christmas Carol and The Pickwick Papers, which is why the nostalgic imagery of Christmas is from the early nineteenth century.
Christmas had acquired a sentimental respectability, but by smuggling its pagan values back in. At the bleakest time of the year we burn the Yule log, decorate the evergreen fir tree, exchange gifts and feast. The planet’s frosted pole has swung as far away from the sun as it will get. With the starving spring still to get through, we warm and feed each other. In the harshest of times, we party.
In recent years I have thought of Yuletide shaking off its Christian disguise. But I don’t think that’s right. While Russian gas heats our homes, winter’s hardship remains a concept to most of us. Rather, the old feast has been rededicated to the new gods of consumption.
Still, it was good to see Westminster Cathedral sporting a fine fir tree in its sanctuary as the white-robed celebrants processed up its (for once) packed nave.
» Westminster Cathedral blog report
Swan Lake
Braving gathering ’flu signals, to Sadlers’s Wells last night to see Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. Music by Tchaikovsky, but a richer story, more fun — and the swans danced by men.
Swan dive We counted it a success to find our bikes safe and secure afterwards, but Miki fell off hers on the way home, felled by a sudden gust of wind aggravated by a heavy bag on her back. Mercifully she escaped with no more than bruises, but her bike needs attention today.
Accidental Death of a Farce
To Hackney tonight to see Dario Fo’s play Accidental Death of an Anarchist at the Acorn Theatre in the Hackney Empire. I saw this farce once before, from the gods in the Wyndham Theatre, where it was played by the Belt & Braces Theatre Company in 1971. I laughed my socks off and have seen everything of Fo’s that has come my way since.
This was clever and funny — it was Fo — but it was also the least funny production of any Fo play I’ve seen anywhere — I regretted dragging Miki half way across London on a winter night. How come? The cast was hugely energetic, and the tiny theatre, laid out as a stage area with two rows of seats on each of three sides, made it very in-yer-face. The production, I think, has two problems. The central figure of the madman, clearly originally written for Fo himself, is overplayed. Here he dominates the other characters too easily, rolling over their objections. We are left with no sense of him having anything at risk; he is a clever and cunning bully; we cannot sympathise with him.
Usually such intimate staging helps actors cross the boundary between stage and audience. Here the space, the violent action, and the stentorian central character combined to remove the barrier entirely. We were on stage with the actors, without a safe space in which to react. Had I laughed as I usually do at farces, I fear I would have been interrupting. Or the big guy would have come for me. Not the best.
Ladies who munch
To the West End last night to meet Anne Tupker, Jill Mervin, Stephen Brady & Susanne Capano for dinner at the Café Bohème and then hear Kit & The Widow’s cabaret at the Arts Theatre. Wonderfully fast, funny, lewd, literate, waspish and witty. Some of the material clearly only days old. A cross between Julian Clary and Flanders & Swann, as an earlier reviewer noted. Emerged clutching their CD Les Enfants Du Parody; close inspection reveals this notice:
Unauthorised copying of this material is frankly absurd. Don’t be so mean.
They had a weekly spot on Radio 3 a while back, which is where I found them when Barb Jungr appeared as their guest, and we heard they’ll shortly appear, as Barb does, at Joe’s Pub in New York. I’m looking forward to more chances to see them now they’re employing the normal celebrity wheeze of publicising their sexual preferences. They’ve come out as lesbians, the “ladies who munch”, as they so delicately put it.
Nuit Sans Lune
Radical Roots
Large men playing tiny lutes. To Cargo in Shoreditch last night for Luc Bongrand’s Nuit Sans Lune, a documentary on rebetiko, the Greek blues.
SOAS Rebetiko
After the movie, soaked in the pity of Greek modern history, a dozen members of the SOAS Rebetiko Group set chairs in a circle for a jam session.
DJ Seb Merrick picked up his fiddle to join Luca Gatti’s Dr Cat Experience while Elif Tarakçi belly danced hypnotically. (You can see her at Luca’s Myspace page.)
Jewish hip-hop klezmerbass group Emunah were still playing when pumpkin hour struck. I hadda headfa bed, but not before hearing their two men vocalists, one Jewish, one Palestinian, perform a magnificent unsentimental piece about reconciliation.
Goosed for charity
To Hammersmith Town Hall yesterday for the last night of Mother Goose Up The Amazon. West-End prices and all proceeds to charity—and what can one charitably say? We already covered the good news: yesterday was the last night. In five decades of pantomimes I must have seen worse, and will recall one presently.
It was, I thought, the most generous audience I’d known, roaring and cheering from the get-go. (Had we come in late and missed the first hour?) But no, the audience, who seemed all to have been at school with the cast (or several schools: there were more in the cast than could all stand on stage and be seen) were clearer about the event than I was. This was a party with pantomime turns in the background, and the actors struggled with diminishing success to be heard over the revellers. An honourable exception was the man who played the Golden Goose. When he came on stage he was all business, working hard to move the show on, and occasionally had me thinking I could follow.
Otherwise the producers did everything they could to make the evening the success it undoubtedly was, auctioning dates with cast members and with a pair of lads’ mags models. I was staring wildly around—where’s the Burberry? This was Back End Theatre’s ninth year and they’re looking forward to their tenth in 2007. Avoid, avoid, avoid.
Food for writers
Two recommendations from Anton Chekhov, that perhaps shed light on the difference between writers and journalists. While writing, Chekhov, according to Ivan Bunin in a memoir in The Paris Review, would take only coffee and broth.
Sleepless in Gloucestershire: I knew better than to drink coffee after dark. I’m typing after midnight in an overheated hotel room in Chipping Campden while wild wet weather off the Atlantic whips the trees on Sheep Street. I’m here courtesy of the Japanese magazine that has sent Miki to take photographs in the Cotswolds. I introduced her to zabaglione at dinner, and finished by introducing myself to Benedictine — and an espresso.
The Benedictine was a hit—Gammel Dansk drowned in honey—and it and I plan to meet again. How have we not met before? I’m reminded of the many other things I’ve neglected to try over the years, as if I’d been mustering a minimum set of pleasures to which to cling. Nurses talk about young infants ‘failing to thrive’; I’ve been failing to explore. Or suppressing a monastic vocation.
Left to ourselves, we Lake Wobegonians head straight for the small potatoes.
—Garrison Keillor
Music is one arena for this. We were burning along the M4 this morning to the sound of Robert Smith and The Cure. Miki’s 80s had been Cure-free, but then so had mine, apart from two or three hits such as “Love Cats”. How did I suppose I need not get and play the rest of their music?
So often one’s true life is the life one does not lead.
—Oscar Wilde
Playing it today having downloaded it—and other 80s music I missed— from iTunes a few weeks back. There’s not only so much to encounter, there’s so much to catch up on as well.
Another overdue is The Paris Review. Last week, decades after noticing that much poetry I liked in books had earlier appeared in this magazine, I took a copy from the LRB bookshop. Superb! The short story that begins the autumn issue hooked me on page one, and the first poem I saw made me laugh with pleasure with its opening stanza:
Just as Milton had to face
the problem of rain in paradise
I have to figure out what to do with you.
I’m remembering now Chip Delany and Marilyn Hacker explaining to me in 1974 how little contemporary American poetry crosses the Atlantic, and lending me an armful of it. I eventually returned it, most of it unopened.
It’s life Jim, but not as we know it.
Our first guests from couchsurfing.com arrived within days of my registering. It was pleasant having them visit and exercising my feeble French. But I must be getting old—they invited me to join them when they went dancing last night, and I declined.
Changing the world… one couch at a time.
Couch surfing reminds me of the IPSA email group ROOFS from the 70s and 80s, when IPSA staff trotted the globe staying on each other’s sofas. My mother still keeps up and visits with people I met through ROOFS.