I’m in a weird limbo right now. The wedding and honeymoon is behind me and the move to San Francisco is ahead of me. My husband has already moved Stateside but I am stuck in London waiting for an appointment at the US Embassy to get my visa. We had already given notice on our flat in Whitechapel and I moved out at the end of May. I am now staying with friends in north London and I also plan to travel.
The last couple of weeks I have been hanging out with my friend Emme, her partner Jon and their lovely French sheepdog (Briard) Ivy. I celebrated my birthday by going walking in a nearby park with Emme and Ivy and taking photographs of all the lovely buttercups and puddle ducks. England is beautiful in summer! In the afternoon I made a orange and poppyseed birthday cake (which turned out a little soft in the middle but was still scrumptious). Then in the evening I did a fish cookery workshop at Food at 52 with my friend Dominique.
Otherwise, I have been doing a bit of freelance work and trying to reduce my belongings down to a sensible amount for the trans-Atlantic flight. (We shipped most of the household stuff and gave a bunch to charity but I still seem to have quite a lot left over). It’s been quite a chilled time for me, not entirely without its stresses, but I haven’t ventured into London or socialised overly much. I did go to an event on China 20 years after the Tiananmen massacre at the Frontline Club on 1 June with a couple of journalist friends. I also caught up with my friends Ben and Lyndsay who have been visiting from Australia last weekend – we had dinner at The Narrow Boat, a lovely pub on the canal in Angel-Islington. Last night Emme’s friend Jen came over for a games night, which was also lots of fun!
I’ve always lived in central London – Clapham, West Hampstead and Whitechapel. Three very different areas but all in zone 2. My friends live on the outskirts in a pretty little cottage, with rolling countryside out the back door. This definitely has its advantages – you can go for lovely walks or runs and the other day I saw a hedgehog on the footpath on the way home from the station. It’s not as easy to get out and about though and this week my own laziness has been compounded by a Tube strike.
I’m about to get moving again though. Next Monday, I am getting the sleeper train to Aberdeen and then the ferry to Orkney. It’s for a story – I can’t tell you much more than that right now but obviously I’ll share once I can. When I’m done in Orkney, I’m going to travel down the west coast of Scotland to see my relatives in Inveraray and Glasgow. I come back to London just in time for my visa appointment.
Before I leave the country, I also want to go to see my aunt Michele and her family in Cardiff, my friend Misty in Dublin and my friend Jann in Amsterdam. I’m also REALLY, REALLY looking forward to the San Francisco adventure and seeing my lovely husband again.
***
I know that I have been neglecting this blog. I am not sure that my friends and family are still reading it, except for those of you with RSS readers. But you can always follow me at my travel and food blog Roaming Tales, on Twitter or Facebook or Friend Feed (which you can customise if you don’t want to see all my tweets, for example).
`The heaviest snow since 1991 transforms the capital.
Snow in London is a rare occasion, to be greeted with wonderment and awe, even when we’re talking about less than 1cm of the white stuff sprinkling the ground for a few hours.
Pity my fiancé who had a 7am start this morning and had to walk into work because the trains and buses weren’t running. I’m sure the snow made commuting a misery for thousands of people.
But for many others it was an excuse for a Snow Day. Schools were closed, many businesses were closed, lots of people didn’t even attempt the commute. I was working from home today and I went out for a walk to admire the snow and take photographs this morning.
The park near my house was covered in a blanket of snow – close to a foot deep in places. If I’d had cross-country skis, it would’ve been perfect (I hear people were actually snowboarding on Primrose Hill!). The whole neighbourhood had come out to play – it seemed there was a snowman every 10 paces and there were some pretty serious snowball fights taking place.
I walked down to St Dunstans in Stepney – the Church of the High Seas. Everything was so pretty and sparkling white from the topsides of the twisted tree branches and Victorian-era iron lamp posts to the scattered tombs through the churchyard. The bark of the tree trunks was blushed with emerald green, wearing sheaths of snow like an ermine stole.
I took a lot of video as well as still photographs and hope to have something edited tomorrow – though I do need to get some work done too!
It’s really cold here in London right now – we’re apparently getting winds from the Arctic rather than the Gulf Stream. There’s often a dusting of snow on the trees and grass in the mornings, plus we’re getting heavy frosts. Apparently it got down to -12C this week. Today we’re expecting a maximum day temperature of zero celcius (32F) so it’s literally freezing. It’s meant to warm up a little next week though.
Freelance work has slowed right down in the past few months so I’m pitching furiously trying to drum up more work. I’m certainly open to any ideas or offers so please keep me in mind if you know anyone who needs writing or editing work done. I’m still doing regular posts for EcoSalon, which I’m really enjoying. I also had a piece on music copyright published recently in The Observer – it was lead media feature in the Media & Business section – and a piece on podcast fiction in The Bookseller.
The countdown to the wedding is on in earnest – the date is 4 April so it’s less than three months to the day. Yikes! We’ve booked the venues and the caterer and I’ve bought the dress. The dress fits now but I’m focusing really hard on healthy eating and exercise in the hope of shedding a few kilos and toning up so hopefully a few adjustments will be in order closer to the day. We’re hoping to get invitations out really soon.
On that note, we are still madly researching honeymoon destinations. We want to stay close to Australia to cut down on flights because my cousin Rhia’s wedding is 15 days after ours in Queensland. We were looking at New Zealand at one point until we decided we wanted a tropical island. The problem is that April is the tail end of the rainy season in places like the Great Barrier Reef, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji. We’re not really sure what that actually means – days of torrential rain and cyclones or just semi-regular showers to cool down an otherwise hot and sunny day?
We went to see Changeling last weekend and I was really impressed. We had resisted seeing it to a large extent because it looked suspiciously like an Angelina Jolie Oscar vehicle. I guess it is to an extent but it’s also a really good movie. I’m a fan of Clint Eastwood as a director and he does a really good job with this movie. It’s tightly plotted, emotional but not contrived, and it’s a real testament to his directing talent that there are so many strong performances particularly from the child actors. It’s based on a true story and was quite a pivotal point in the development and reform of the Los Angeles police force so that was interesting too. Plus, there are some fab hats – not only the Jolie character’s 1920s cloches and 1930s wide-brimmed hats but also for the men and the journalists (can I have a hat with a ticket that says ‘press’ for the next press event I attend, please?).
My blogs are in the running for a couple of awards and I would really love your help. Please consider nominating my travel site Roaming Tales for Best Travel Weblog in the 2009 Bloggies and the travelogue category of the Lonely Planet Travel Blogger Awards. Please also consider nominating The Gooseberry Fool for Best Food Weblog in the Bloggies. I would also be delighted if you would nominate either or both blogs for Best European Weblog or Best-Kept Secret Weblog or any other category that you think is appropriate. I think my chances are best with Roaming Tales so if you want to focus your fire on just one blog, that’s the one I would ask you to go for. It would mean a lot to me to have your support and if I have any degree of success, it could really boost my readership and help pay off my blogging efforts.
I haven’t actually nominated myself so I’m relying on friends, family and readers to do it for me – and apparently the more times I am nominated, the higher my chance of making the finals (it’s not based exclusively on votes – there is a panel of voters as well). The Bloggies have been running nine years and they’re quite well respected and prestigious but this is the first time they’ve had a travel category, so that’s quite exciting.
Please note, you can nominate as many times as you like in the Lonely Planet awards and you have until early February. However, you can only nominate once for the Bloggies and you only have until the end of Monday 12 January. Also with the Bloggies, you need to put at least three blogs in total forward so you can’t just nominate me.
What did you get up for New Year’s Eve? Painting the town red or just a quiet one at home?
The boy and I joined my mate Steven and some of his friends for a big night out. We went to the Promised Land club night at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. It’s been ages since I’ve been out dancing and I really enjoyed it. I’m feeling a bit tired today but not too badly at all.
We started the night at Steven’s flat in West London for nibbles and drinks. Steven and his girlfriend Jill and housemates had cooked up a storm with homemade Macaroni Cheese, lasagne and pizza. I cracked open a lovely bottle of Champagne that our friend Misty gave us for our engagement party. It was good to catch up with people I hadn’t seen in a while – literally over a decade, in the case of Billy and Fiona – and meet a few new people as well. I thought it was a really good crowd.
We left for the club about 10pm but by the time we actually made our way to the dance floor, it was already twenty minutes to midnight. The music was meant to be House from the summer of 1987/1988. I must be pretty out of the loop with the dance music scene as the music sounded current to me – though the big, yellow smiley faces on the big screen certainly dated it.
We had a very easy run home on the Tube (which was running through the night for New Year’s Eve) and even got a seat. Woo hoo!
Today I’m doing a little bit of housekeeping and planning for the new year, and maybe a bit of writing, and I’ll have an early night. Here’s to 2009! May it be a happy and prosperous year for all of us.
We had our production of The Tempest last Tuesday and we are now adjusting to life beyond the play. Hopefully we’ll have a cast reunion for pre-Christmas drinks very soon! There’s also talk of reviving the play in January, which I would absolutely love to do because I feel that we’ve only just begun to realise the potential of this production.
The lovely Zarina Holmes filmed the performance for us so I can’t wait to see the video. In the mean time, she has put some still photographs on Facebook. The photos are from a semi-dress rehearsal so a few of us, including myself, are not in full costume and no one has full make-up. It should give you a flavour though!
We were aiming to do The Tempest in the style of Artaud, which means we were trying to create an experience for the audience rather than emphasising the separation between player and audience. This was most evident in the first scene, the shipwreck, but we brought elements of it throughout the play. The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s most ‘magical’ plays so it lends itself well to this sort of thing.
It was very different performing with 35 people standing and sitting around me. (We had two performances with 35 people in each showing). It was theatre-in-the-round and though we encouraged people to move around so they could see, in reality they stayed pretty still so we had to angle ourselves accordingly.
It all went a lot better than I thought it might after the shambles of the dress rehearsal. The audience seemed really engaged and entertained, which was great. We hit some real high notes with the performance and no real low notes – everyone pretty much remembered their lines.
I was playing Miranda, the heroine. My only hairy moment was, in the second performance, after the scene where I confronted Caliban the monster, the strap of my dress popped open. Fortunately I was wearing a safety pin with a rose, so I mimed crying into Prospero’s shoulder (my fictional father) while I refixed it. I wonder if anyone noticed. My fellow thespian didn’t – he just thought it was an inspired heightening of the dramatic effect!
I’m proud to have worked with such a talented group of people and I hope we can do this again soon. It was the City Academy advanced class – but we’re calling ourselves the Kinky Fish Company, in honour of the blindfolds and anchovy paste used in the play. As we said on the night of the performance, we’re all really grateful for our wonderful teacher Cat Clancy and all the hard work she put in – she went way beyond the call of duty and gave up a lot of her own time unpaid to help us.
Afterwards, my wonderful real-life beloved and betrothed gave me a huge bunch of dark red roses. Aww.
***
Here’s the text from the programme so you can see who the actors are, refresh yourself on the plot of The Tempest, and read more about Artaud and his theories on theatre.
By William Shakespeare, abridged and directed by Cat Clancy
A Kinky Fish production in association with City Academy
Dramatis personae
Island dwellers
Prospero Adam Mattison-Ward, Ahmed Arif, Richard Kirkcaldy Magician and Rightful Duke of Milan
Miranda Caitlin Fitzsimmons Prospero’s daughter
Caliban Gregory Lecointe and Alberto Santangelo Monster and Prospero’s slave
Ariel Teagan Mann and Naomi Segal An airy sprite and Prospero’s servant
Goddess Ceres Larissa Moran
Goddess Juno Rosalind Stern
Ship crew and passengers
Alonsa Maria Annecca Queen of Naples
Antonia Michelle McKay Prospero’s sister and usurper Duchess of Milan
Ferdinand Tadhg O’Brien Prince of Naples, Alonsa’s son and Miranda’s love interest
Gonzalo Gregory Lecointe A nobleman
Sebastian Alberto Santangelo Alonsa’s brother
The Master Larissa Moran Ship captain
Boatswain Rosalind Stern
Trinculo Larissa Moran
A drunk shipwrecked mariner, a dull fool
Stephano Rosalind Stern
A drunk shipwrecked butler
Supporting cast Whole company Mariners, nymphs, huntsmen, sound effects etc
Synopsis
The magician Prospero, rightful Duke of Milan, and his daughter, Miranda, are stranded on an island. Twelve years ago Prospero’s jealous sister Antonia – helped by Alonsa, the Queen of Naples – deposed him and set him adrift with the five-year-old Miranda. The nobleman Gonzalo secretly helped Prospero, upgrading his small and shoddy boat, supplying him with food and water, and books from Prospero’s library.
Possessed of magic powers due to his great learning and prodigious library, Prospero is reluctantly served by a spirit, Ariel, whom he had rescued from imprisonment in a tree. Ariel had been trapped there by the witch Sycorax, who died prior to Prospero’s arrival. Prospero also keeps the witch’s son Caliban, a deformed monster, as his slave.
The play opens as Prospero, having divined that his sister Antonia, is on a ship passing close by the island has raised a storm (the tempest of the title) that causes the ship to run aground. Also on the ship are Queen Alonsa, Alonsa’s brother Sebastian, Alonsa’s royal advisor Gonzalo, Alonsa’s son, Ferdinand, plus crew members. Prospero, by his spells, separates the survivors of the wreck into several groups. Alonsa and her son Ferdinand believe one another dead.
Prospero works to establish a romantic relationship between Ferdinand and Miranda; the two fall immediately in love, but Prospero worries that “too light winning [may] make the prize light”, and puts Ferdinand through a series of tests. He also decides that after his plan to exact vengeance on his betrayers has come to fruition, he will break and bury his staff, and “drown” his book of magic.
In the first of two sub-plots, Caliban falls in with Stephano and Trinculo, two drunken crew members, and attempts to raise a rebellion against Prospero (which ultimately fails). In another sub-plot, Antonia and Sebastian conspire to kill Alonsa and Gonzalo, so that Sebastian can become King. They are thwarted by Ariel, at Prospero’s command.
In the conclusion, all the main characters are brought together before Prospero, who forgives Antonia and Alonsa, pardons Caliban and uses his magic to ensure that everyone returns to Italy. Ariel, as her final task for Prospero, is charged to prepare fair sailing weather and she is then set free to the elements.
Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty
In our production of The Tempest we have explored some of the ideas of French dramatist Antonin Artaud. He believed that the theatre should affect the audience as much as possible, so he used a mixture of strange and disturbing forms of lighting, sound and performance.
In his book The Theatre and Its Double, Artaud expressed his admiration for Eastern forms of theatre, particularly the Balinese. He admired Eastern theatre because of the codified, highly ritualised and precise physicality of Balinese dance performance, and advocated what he called a “Theatre of Cruelty”. At one point, he stated that by cruelty, he meant not exclusively sadism or causing pain, but just as often a violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality.
He believed that text had been a tyrant over meaning, and advocated, instead, for a theatre made up of a unique language, halfway between thought and gesture. Artaud described the spiritual in physical terms, and believed that all theatre is physical expression in space.
Imagination, to Artaud, is reality; dreams, thoughts and delusions are no less real than the “outside” world. Reality appears to be a consensus, the same consensus the audience accepts when they enter a theatre to see a play and, for a time, pretend that what they are seeing is real.
Today is the last day of NaBloPoMo – I’ve managed to blog every single day in November. It’s certainly not been as hard as NaNoWriMo last year!
Have you enjoyed the extra blogging? I can’t promise to keep it up at this rate but it’s been fun and has helped me recover my blogging mojo, so hopefully I’ll be around a bit more.
I have friends coming to lunch today and house guests arriving tonight. I’ll keep this brief as I need to get the lamb in the oven – not the Jamie Oliver version this time since it’s quite boozy and our friends are bringing their kids.
I have two other blog posts today as well:
A post on unusual vegetables featuring pics of Romanesco cauliflour on The Gooseberry Fool.
I’m playing Miranda in an amateur production of The Tempest on Tuesday night. Today was the first dress rehearsal and we have another run-through on Monday night.
We are performing at the Candid Arts Trust in Angel-Islington, which is an atmospheric room filled with ready-made props like red velvet thrones and melted candlesticks.
The play has been substantially cut – total running time is under an hour and a half and we will actually be doing two performances on Tuesday night since we can only accommodate an audience of 35 at one time. We are not doing a straight interpretation but in keeping with the magical essence of the play we are doing an Artaud-style interpretation where we are trying to give the audience more of an immersive experience. The main character Prospero, who is my father in the play, is played by three different people sharing a magical cloak and we also have the parts of the sprites and monsters – Ariel and Caliban – shared. Some of the scenes such as the opening shipwreck scene will be interactive – though we are trying not to go over the top because we don’t want to completely lose the audience!
I’m really looking forward to it. Don’t get me wrong – it’s amateur, we’ve officially only had two hours a week for 10 weeks to rehearse, and I’m not expecting the world of it. But I think it’s coming together really nicely and is something a bit different to the stodgy Shakespeare productions that are sadly all too common. I play a reasonably straight character but it’s fun reacting to the different characters and scenarios – I absolutely adore my fellow thespians’ creation of Caliban, not to mention my favourite scene of all where two of the shipwrecked mariners are drunk.
I’m not sure whether the 7pm or 9pm production will be better. The 9pm performance will be more rehearsed but then again, the opening night of a show is traditionally better than the second night. I have my fiancé and two other friends coming to the early performance and I have two spare tickets for the 9pm show if anyone is up for it. It’s a little experimental and interactive but in a fun way, not in a threatening, pretentious kind of way! Tickets are £8 each and I could probably get tickets to the early show instead if that’s preferred.
No turkey and pumpkin pie on this side of the Pond, but I’ll take the opportunity to give thanks all the same
Happy Thanksgiving to any American readers. And happy belated Thanksgiving for my Canadian friends (who celebrated it a month ago).
Being Australian and living in Britain, Thanksgiving does not form part of my cultural heritage. Halloween has crept in (and actually has its origins in Europe anyway) but Thanksgiving is out and out a North American phenomenon.
Despite some debate over whether celebrating Thanksgiving is respectful of the native American population, and despite the fact that I don’t literally believe in a God to give thanks to, I do like the idea of Thanksgiving.
I think we could all do with a little more gratitude in our lives – after all, it’s said to be the secret of happiness. So much unhappiness in the world is caused by people wanting more than they already have – not only does this breed discontentment, but also their greed can be enormously destructive the other people and the world.
I don’t want to preach – I’m no angel, after all. But I thought I would take this moment to share with you some of the things I’m grateful for, at this very moment in time.
The love of my very wonderful partner and the fact that we are committing to spending the rest of our lives together.
My wonderful family and the fact that I see them once or twice a year and can speak regularly on the phone relatively cheaply, despite living half a world away – something that would have been unthinkable in times past.
My friends, both at home in Australia, here in the UK, and around the world. I feel very connected and never lonely.
My warm leather gloves. Also my coat, hat, scarf and knee-high boots. Not to mention my warm bed.
The fact that I still have work despite the recession – from both old clients and a fewnew ones.
The fact that I’ve been able to travel and see so much of this beautiful planet, from the Arctic to Africa.
The pick-me-up from a good cup of coffee in the morning.
The opportunity to spend a few years living in such a big, exciting city as London.
My Australian passport and knowing that I can always go back home.
Having enough food to eat. Having good food to eat. My health.
Playing Miranda in The Tempest next Tuesday and the fun and creative fulfillment that comes from that.
My lovely writer’s circle and the great feedback I get on my attempts at fiction.
Once I start, it’s hard to stop – I keep thinking of more and more things. Maybe there’s something in this gratitude thing! I’ll sign off now.
The last couple of weeks I have been hanging out with my friend Emme, her partner Jon and their lovely French sheepdog (Briard) Ivy. I celebrated my birthday by going walking in a nearby park with Emme and Ivy and taking photographs of all the lovely buttercups and puddle ducks. England is beautiful in summer! In the afternoon I made a orange and poppyseed birthday cake (which turned out a little soft in the middle but was still scrumptious). Then in the evening I did a fish cookery workshop at Food at 52 with my friend Dominique.
Otherwise, I have been doing a bit of freelance work and trying to reduce my belongings down to a sensible amount for the trans-Atlantic flight. (We shipped most of the household stuff and gave a bunch to charity but I still seem to have quite a lot left over). It’s been quite a chilled time for me, not entirely without its stresses, but I haven’t ventured into London or socialised overly much. I did go to an event on China 20 years after the Tiananmen massacre at the Frontline Club on 1 June with a couple of journalist friends. I also caught up with my friends Ben and Lyndsay who have been visiting from Australia last weekend – we had dinner at The Narrow Boat, a lovely pub on the canal in Angel-Islington. Last night Emme’s friend Jen came over for a games night, which was also lots of fun! 
