Looking Out To Sea

Philip Pullman’s trilogy Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass adapted for the stage. Quite an undertaking. The story is huge, and covers many fantastical worlds. The adaptation for stage does some necessary cutting but still takes two performances, each about 3 hours in length, to tell the story.

We were due to watch it on Sunday (both shows in one day!) with other friends but ended up double-booked. So we passed our tickets on and got new tickets for the Thursday and Friday evening performances. These are my thoughts after each performance. Despite what you may think from reading them, I did enjoy it a lot!

Part 1, Thursday night

I’m quite enjoying it so far. It’s a long production but I haven’t ever felt bored. The story has quite a pace. I’m not convinced it translates very well to the stage though. You have to know the story to work out what’s going on, I think. And obviously there are so many elements that can’t be reasonably represented on stage — the armoured bear fight between Iorek and Iofur is an obvious example — and are better left to the imagination.

There’s quite a big cast of players but sadly the actor playing Lee Scoresby has the worst Texan accent ever concocted. It isn’t even an accent. It’s just a silly, shifting, intangible “voice”. The actor’s ham-fisted attempt at being Texan was getting a lot of laughs, and not in a good way. It was embarrassing, like a bad amateur production.

I’m also not sure about the daemon puppets. Some of them are good — Roger’s collie was particularly good, I thought, and Pantalaimon is generally excellent — but they still fall short of the descriptions. The children’s daemons never change shape, which is odd considering that’s a large part of the story.

Maybe I’m just spoiled by special effects, of course.

Part 2, Friday night

Yesterday was the first performance of part one in Edinburgh. There was another performance earlier today. So why is the first performance of part two so empty? There are two sets of audiences who you’d expect to be here. Maybe it’s just because it’s a Friday night, and people are more likely to have other plans. There are a couple more days after this to see it.

The atmosphere of the performance shifts quite a bit in this half. There is more slapstick, more laughs. The Gallivespians, for example, were extremely silly. I guess there is no way to depict 4-inch tall people with the necessary level of gravitas, so why bother.

The ending of The Amber Spyglass is one of those intensely emotional experiences that leaves a person listless and disconnected for an extraordinary length of time. I know it has that effect on me, which is why I haven’t re-read the book as much as I have the first two. It’s just not worth the emotional anguish. The ending of the play was similarly harrowing. I could hear restrained sniffing coming from all around me, as people just welled up uncontrollably.

I’m glad it’s over, but I’m still rather shocked at the power that ending has over me.

Within the last week we’ve seen Star Trek and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, two science fiction movies with a great deal of difference in the craftsmanship put into them.

Star Trek could also be called The Young James Kirk Chronicles, but in a good way. I’m not mocking Indiana Jones here, after all. This story creates an alternate history for James Kirk and the original crew of the Enterprise, and follows their story from Starfleet Academy. But don’t worry, it’s not the Hogwarts School of Exploration and Astrophysics. They quickly head out to war rather than staring into their own navels.

All the characters from the original set appear, with subtly altered stories to suit the new timeline and to make things a bit more interesting. Kirk’s a tearaway, Spock’s been suffering some playground abuse for being half-human, and Bones… we’ll he’s still a cantankerous pessimist so that’s okay.

It was a really great movie, neatly treading the line between the high camp silliness of the original Star Trek series and a modern action movie. At one or two points they veered into Galaxy Quest territory but they also balanced this with some heavy emotional stuff. Well worth seeing at the cinema.

The contrasting X-Men Origins: Wolverine was terrible on almost every level. The script was leakier than Rab C Nesbitt’s semmit, and you have to use a lot of brainpower not to think about all the ways these people with superhuman powers could have solved their problems earlier.

The story was long and lumpy, which only frenetic action scenes can disguise. The editing was woeful. If you care about spoilers, jump to the end of this paragraph. But there is no good reason why Victor is seen climbing up the outside of the building in Africa because he does nothing up there. There is no good reason why Gambit being elbowed in the face should leave him running across the rooftops. But those scenes still happened, completely without context or explanation.

Even the individual scenes were so terribly cliched it’s hard to remember them without cringing. Surely Hugh Jackman’s got bored of cradling people in his arms and screaming at the sky?

The big secret about this movie is the two separate teaser endings. We didn’t know about them and left the cinema early (very unusual for us, and doubly irritating because of it). The two different prints are distributed randomly between cinemas and the idea is that you see the film twice to catch both endings. Either that or it’s an attempt to create interest in the pirated films, which will probably be available with both endings. Cos really, who’s going to see this dreck twice for the thirty seconds of extra footage?

I am still attempting to catch up with everything that’s been happening lately. Last week we met a bunch of Helen’s relatives from the US (and her parents) for a meal and then went to the theatre.

We ate at Blue, the restaurant attached to the Traverse. I met Helen’s cousin, cousin’s husband and baby girl. Also Helen’s aunt, who I dimly recall meeting before, but that would be about eight years ago.

We saw Hoors at the Traverse Theatre, written by the same guy who did Black Watch. It’s a bit more low-key than the military play but still wickedly funny. The ending seemed a bit abrupt though. I’m still not sure what it was supposed to be. Helen thought that was a break for the interval because it was such a non-ending.

Last weekend I fulfilled my ambition (it was a brand new ambition only two months before) to learn some basket-making skills. So I booked a session at the Four Winds Inspiration Centre in Inverleith Park, to learn simple basket weaving.

The day started at 10.30 and officially finished at 5pm, though there were still people finishing up when I left at about 5.30. The centre does various classes of wood and stone craft. I really recommend the class I did, and I’m considering booking another session to try out the “random weave” course too, to learn a different technique and see what other things are possible.

The first half hour or so was an introduction to willow and to the style of basket we’d be making. Our tutor, Anthea, lead us through the different types of willow and how it was prepared for weaving. Then we got down to business! Things were a bit shaky at first but once you get into a rhythm you just lose yourself. It took me the full day to make a short basket about 35cm in diameter. Apparently a professional would expect to make at least 5 a day…

The class had 8 other people, only two of which had done any weaving before, and that was just in another class a year ago. No one was an expert, and no one was really bad either. It was also remarkable how everyone’s basket looked very different even though we were all basically using the same template.

My basket is a single buff colour with no frilly bits. I wanted to keep things simple for the first attempt. There are one or two things I would have done differently in hindsight, where there are obvious gaps which should have been tighter. But I’m very pleased and have been investigating where I can get some willow of my own to do things with. I wonder if I should use something else to practise with, so that I don’t forget everything?

If you’re at all interested in this kind of thing I recommend you look them up, or find someone close to you. It’s great fun and very satisfying to take home your own basket afterwards.

This post has been some time coming. But now it’s here — the tale of Aisha and Lanny’s wedding in Glasgow!

Wedding Day One: Registrar Ceremony

On Friday morning we took a train to Glasgow in the glorious sunshine. Helen constructed a fascinator on the train from wire and paper. By the time we arrived it was raining, of course. We’d intended to walk from Byres Road to the apartment we were staying in but the rain and the heavy luggage dissuaded us. Kilts are really heavy. Taxi!

The apartment was really nice, and in a beautiful area of town. It was also incredibly cheap compared to hotels, B&Bs etc. I don’t really understand why it was so cheap when the only difference is you have to organise your own breakfast. Is breakfast worth that much to people? Personally I thought it was much nicer to head into town and have our pick of places to breakfast on Byres Road.

Anyway, it had stopped raining by this point. We got changed and headed to the Glasgow registrar buildings in another very nice area of town. Helen finished constructing her earrings in the taxi. Never leave home without your wire cutters and needle-nosed pliers, ladies! We arrived as the tail end of another wedding party was milling around. I couldn’t tell if we were supposed to know these people or not…

Inside I was introduced to some of the friends that Helen had met on the hen weekend. The building was really impressive inside. (I somehow imagined a registrar wedding would be quite dowdy, but I don’t know why.) There was a lot of whispering about whether Aisha’s conservative father was likely to turn up, though in hindsight this was foolish, as 2pm on a Friday is also an important Muslim prayer time. He was never going to turn up.

I think everyone gave a little gasp as the bride came in. She looked significantly different from her usual self. Lanny and Aisha said some vows and we all cringed as the official consistently got both of their names wrong. Surely it’s the one thing you’d check, that you know what names the couple use, and how to say them?

After all the photographs at the registrar office and a nearby park we went for a meal at a restaurant, and at a large amount of fine Moroccan food. We went back to the apartments to sleep off the food and met everyone on Ashton Lane later on. I don’t think our bride and groom were the only couple still in their wedding clothes in the pub that evening!

Wedding Day Two: Day off

The newlyweds were staying in the same apartment complex as us. Helen got up early on Saturday morning and delivered them breakfast of yoghurt, figs and a drizzle of honey.

We tried to have breakfast ourselves at Kember and Jones (the place where I bought Dough in the distant past!) but were stalled and didn’t get out in time. It gets very busy very quickly. We found somewhere else — Café Cinnamon, I think? — and spent a few hours there. A number of the other guests joined us over that time.

After the protracted breakfast/lunch Helen and I went for a walk in the Botanic Gardens and along the Kelvin. It was a beautiful sunny day. The Botanic Gardens also had a hothouse with a carnivorous plant exhibition. I never knew Venus Fly Traps were so incredibly small. But hothouses really sap the strength, so we didn’t explore further rooms.

In the evening we picked up some pizza to eat while making our way to see the Òran Mór to see Duke Special. See my previous entry for more on that. After the gig we went back to Aisha and Lanny’s apartment, where they had a projector set up and a handful of the other guests were mutilating contemporary music playing Sing Star. I did not get involved because I didn’t hate anyone enough to submit them to my singing.

Wedding Day Three: Cake or Death?

On Sunday there was a more traditional wedding reception affair — a rented hall with guests distributed among the tables. The food was mostly of Pakistani origin, though Lanny’s family had their own pork-based starters and chopsticks. I wouldn’t have minded some of that myself, but honestly there was more than enough food anyway.

We finished off the meal with Kashmiri tea, which is quite pink in colour. Apparently it’s green tea boiled with milk and various flavourings, which turns pink in the process. It smells of rice pudding and tastes a bit like evaporated milk. A lot of people loaded the sugar into it but I didn’t think it needed sweetening: it was quite creamy enough to do without sugar too.

The wedding cake came from the Sicilian Pastry Shop just up the hill from our flat. They’d made two, one of which was to have no chocolate because one of the best men is allergic to chocolate. Unfortunately it turned out that this requirement meant they forgot about the other request not to put alcohol in the cakes. So, one cake was flavoured with chocolate and the other with alcohol, but from the outside they both looked the same so there was a bit of “excitement” at the cake-cutting point as to whether they were symbolically cutting into a boozy cake. I will let you draw your own conclusions from the photographs.

Also, Aisha pushed the cake in Lanny’s face, which was good for a laugh.

After the meal we all had to pretend to leave to get rid of the family. We went for a walk round the block, stood around in the cold at a playpark for a while to intimidate the locals, and then went back in for the best men’s speech, a ceilidh and more food. Part of the speech involved an invitation to the couple to do the first dance. But rather than do some ordinary couples dancing, two local hip-hop dance instructors did a demo and showed them through a few steps.

Also there was more food mid way through the ceilidh. I can’t imagine how much food I ate that day. Later on they also had a monkey-shaped piñata, because that’s what you can do if you’re getting married — anything you want!

We got home about 1am though I understand that other people went on from the wedding party to other places. I don’t know how they had the energy. I was drifting off to sleep on the way back to the apartment.

Wedding Day Four: Returning home

We were both a bit done on Monday morning, but luckily it was a public holiday and we didn’t have to hurry home. We got back to the flat and slept for a while. Then we went out to La Favorita and had a great evening with pasta and prosecco, toasting the happy union of Aisha and Lanny.

The Amazon wish list appears to be the least intelligent thing on the internet, and I’m including the comments on the BBC’s Have Your Say forums in that generalisation.

• If you buy something from your wishlist, it doesn’t disappear from your wishlist. In fact, the opposite happens — Amazon then advertises a whole bunch of related things which are totally redundant because of what you bought. There are only so many widescreen TVs a person can buy.
• If you pre-order something it doesn’t disappear from your wishlist either. In fact, it remains on your wishlist with a button to “pre-order this item”.

I find the wishlist really useful to remember stuff that I want to buy in future but it’s completely useless at updating when you’ve bought something without visiting the wish list page first and choosing to buy from there.

On Saturday night I was googling something and the Firefox search bar refused to co-operate when I hit return. Nothing happened. At about the same time the automated updates running in the background seemed to hang or become similarly inactive. I didn’t see a connection betwen them at the time.

For some reason I next remember shutting the computer down (I don’t remember why any longer). This produced what was probably a kernel panic (I couldn’t really see what was happening because the screen was also strobing in a most unpleasant fashion. I had the laptop lid 3/4 closed and Helen said it looked like there was a lightning storm inside the computer.)

After a restart the computer didn’t get back on its feet. GRUB produced a number of different errors after each reboot but didn’t get very far. Booting from an Ubuntu install disc got me to the stage where I could query the system. The hard disc was completely inaccessible and produced huge quantities of I/O errors when it was being interrogated at startup.

Fearing the worst, I had a look at the BIOS. It said:

Hard Disk: None

Ah. I guess that explains things. My hard disk or the controller had given up the ghost. It was probably the disk because the internal CD/DVD drive was still working, and they probably share controllers.

I took the computer to John Lewis on Sunday afternoon and demonstrated the problem to their After Sales staff. They offered to order a direct replacement because they had none in stock, or I could take a wander to see if they had something else that would replace it just as well. I ended up with an HP Pavilion G60 laptop. It’s got a slightly more compact feel to it than the Toshiba. I hope the drive lasts longer though!

We spent the weekend in Glasgow for a wedding — and more on that in a future blog post — but while there we took the opportunity to see Duke Special in concert at the Òran Mór on Saturday night.

I knew nothing of the music before arriving. Helen had played me some a few days before but I was busy doing other things and not concentrating fully. I wasn’t too worried about this. Helen had seen him once before, also without any foreknowledge or preparation (presumably as a support act?) and had really enjoyed it.

And so it was. He turned out to be immensely enjoyable: catchy, intelligent and slightly ramshackle. Just the way I like ‘em. He has a slight air of vaudeville and junkyard band to him, a little bit of Tom Waits’ dark twisted stories and obscure vignettes. Also, gotta love that Northern Irish accent. This is Sweet Sweet Kisses from his new album:

The show was quite early finishing — we were out of there by 10.30 — but the final encore was such a great ending that I really didn’t care. The whole band came off stage, carrying electric guitar (unplugged), double bass and tambourine, and stood in the centre of the hall, with the audience crowded around. Then they taught us Creaky Boat Blues, a sea shanty of sorts, which the whole audience was urged to sing.

Here’s another video from a gig a few days before the Glasgow one, where they did the same thing and someone caught it on video. Enjoy!