Pain thresholds

If you have not already read it, then may I urge you to read Marie's awesome post about the Dr Denis Walsh story.

Whilst I appreciate that as a non-mother (and one not seeking to give birth in this lifetime) even I can recognise bullshit when I hear it.

"Pain in labour is a purposeful, useful thing, which has quite a number of benefits, such as preparing a mother for the responsibility of nurturing a newborn baby."

That line really better be a misquote or frankly I'm going to be taking a short walk with the largest watermelon I can find and putting it where the sun don't shine. Purposeful? Useful? Well, perhaps in terms of timing and responding to contractions - but that seems to be mistaking cause and effect. A number of benefits? For whom exactly? (and surely it depends on the birthing situation of the individual mother/baby --- I had the cord around my neck....) And do not get me started on that part of the sentence to which I added emphasis. Fathers presumably then have no part to play, and certainly not responsibility, in nuturing a new born baby?

Give me strength.

Post-Torchwood blues

With commentators at Behind the Sofa watching the Red Riding Trilogy to cheer themselves up, you can probably guess that post-Torchwood: Children of Earth there's a general air of 'blimey: exhausted grimness alert'.

Needless to say I've made a lentil loaf and we're watching The Blues Brothers.

I need some small pleasures.

George's munros

I felt the need for some nature so I went and had a look at my bloglines for the George's recent munro reports - the photos on the posts are so spectacular that they fair take your breath away.

I think I would be giddy being so high up!

Reactions for Rosby: watching Torchwood - Children of Earth

Fairly spoiler-free comment on Day Four of Torchwood's Third Series ("Children of Earth").


Quite frankly, I'm all over the place emotionally about this.

I know some have remained unimpressed, and there have been moments of high silliness, but I think the testament that has most reached me is that Cloud has been utterly addicted (and not in a 'let's laugh at Rullsenberg biting her nails' kinda way).

So far we've had tension and half-seen monsters, politics in the way that we've come to expect, grand acting from the likes of Peter Capaldi and Paul Copley and... and ...

... and...

Death.


I am now utterly torn. I can't help but feel that if (and by lordy its a big IF*) that RTD person holds his nerve and actually leaves the urge to make everything all right again, the end of S3 of Torchwood couldn't be a bigger, a more symbolic ending for Rosby growing up and going to University.


Yeah, I know, I'm personalising it: but it was my first thought last night on watching Day Four.


But part of me can't help but NOT want it to end this way, and I hate myself for that. I can't help but have the hope for a better ending, but I know that what I need - what should remain - is the bleakness.

That these deaths, THAT death, should mean something.


And yeah, in case you didn't guess: I did cry.

Guess what we'll be watching at 9pm tonight...

* RTD couldn't leave alone his dramatic finale of Doomsday and though I've been seriously sticking my fingers in my ears all year I can't help but dread that he's not been able to leave alone other endings he's given us. PLEASE DO NOT SPOILER ME. But... GAH. I just wish he would actually leave us with the grief, as traumatic as it is.

Theatre Review: 'As You Like It' RSC Courtyard Theatre, Stratford Saturday 4 July 2009

As with my visit to see Love's Labour's Lost, I have to confess that As You Like It wasn't a play I had previous seen or read (though I did know a tad more about this play than I had LLL).

I found this actually helped since I was placed in a similar position to many of my fellow friends. Especially with plays that lay outside the big exceptionally well known texts - most especially Dickie 3, Romeo and Juliet, Henry 5, and Hamlet - it can be incredibly demanding to be launched into the prose style of Shakespeare. But despite the initially spare setting of this production forcing focus on the early 'bequeath-ed' and 'sayest' speech patterns, we quickly and comfortably slipped into its rhythms.

Although not all productions have kept to Elizabethan period dress, it certainly worked here, not least because of the way in which gender identities are played with so freely (though I am reliably informed of many good productions with a modern setting). Rosalind's turn as boyish Ganymede, playing 'Rosalind' to Orlando, has to present a mastery/mistressy of layered identity - and this in a role we must not forget would have been played by a boy until the 18th century.

The language of the play includes a healthy range of Shakespeare's best known neologisms and familiar passages - not least the 'all the world's a stage' speech, but I was also pleased that I spotted some echoes of the earlier comedy of Love's Labours Lost (noted, as I read on the journey home, by scholar Juliet Dusinberre in the Arden edition of the play). As You Like It certainly has a playfulness that belies its references to the poverty that rural/forest-based life could present.

As mentioned in my post about meeting friends for this wonderful experience, the leading lady - Katy Stephens - was sadly indisposed. But this did not sadden me for one, since it meant we saw lovely Mariah Gale as Rosalind (Ophelia in last year's production opposite first Tennant and Bennett).

The setting for the play is beautifully simple: an almost white boarded background which opens up in a variety of ways. The music and choreography are, as befits the breadth of skills at the RSC, as exquisite and witty as befits the play. And although the costumes reflect the naturalistic palette of the setting, it never feels dull.

As with any ensemble production, it feels harsh to pick out particular performances for individual credit. But I have to praise Forbes Masson as Jacques who resembled Tim Minchin's wild haired appearance to such a degree that I almost had to check that it wasn't he! Richard Katz too as Touchstone was hysterically good, with suitably bawdy demeanor (it is telling these roles are the two added by Shakespeare's revision of Thomas Lodge's earlier telling of the tale).

There was also a nice touch in the final speech, wherein Rosalind usually declares that 'it is not the fashion to see the lady the Epilogue', the line was amended to 'see the understudy' in acknowledgement of Gale's substituting Stephens. Very nice I thought.

Overall, heartily recommended and on until 3 October.

Stratford-upon-Avon visit: what friends are for

It wasn't as planned in terms of my weekend as a whole: weather predictions meant my 2 night stay in Stratford was abandoned for on-the-day return train journeys (and even that was oh-so-nearly replaced by a last minute 1 night away, thwarted by ill health). There were minor hiccups on the day: three of our number were temporarily separated into a pair and a wrongly boarded train single, with an unusual lack of mobiles making reassurance impossible (thankfully, the three were reunited and progressed to our meeting). And then the leading lady was indisposed, creating a shuffle-up effect on the cast similar to that imposed by Tennant's back injury last winter.

But it mattered not a jot because we managed it. Nine of us made it to Stratford, as planned for not just an annual reunion but also a significant cultural activity. We came from across England: the north-west, the south coast, the entire sweep of the west midlands and beyond, and from the east midlands.

The sun shone - not too unbearably. And we were all happy.

When I was at Wolverhampton Uni, first as an undergraduate and then as a temporary lecturer, I felt incredibly lucky to meet and befriend such wonderful people on the teaching staff. The class that I first ran on my own, Romanticism, in the 1994/1995 academic year, included a delightful cohort of youngish to older mature students. In subsequent years we kept in touch and my former tutors, now colleagues, saw them through to graduation and subsequently on to further studies, other qualifications and lives. And we still meet each year for conversation and culture.

This year we planned and plotted a trip to Stratford for a play and I have to say it feels like a resounding success with even skeptical RSC visitors delighted by the production of As You Like It. Full review in next post, but thank you everyone for making it so wonderful.

UK viewers: new 4oD service

Happy clapping.

Psychos. 4oD. Very heaven.

Butterley trains: a visit to the Midland Railway Centre Sunday 28 June 2009

Neil's post on our trip to Butterley on Sunday nicely captures a flavour of the day.

We've been planning to head out to the place for quite some time: we had liked the idea of attending Indie Tracks in 2008, but it just isn't practical to attend a wedding in the West Midlands one day and hike back across the mids to a music festival for the Sunday (I'm too tired these days!)

Still, we'd already booked ourselves for a day at the music festival this year, so we thought we best check out the location.

What a delight! Staffed by enthusiastic people doing everything from manning the shop and buffet tills to sprucing up engine parts that could look irretrievably lost, from stoking up the coal-powered miniature railway (I felt like I was in Wallace and Gromit!) to pruning the verges, everyone gets stuck in. The gricers may be out in number when the big trains are preparing to move between stations, but there is something undeniably attractive about the heavy engineering of pre-WWII trains that is sorrily lacking in modern machinery. The compartments call to mind Agatha Christie mysteries and the sight of steam must thrill even the hardest heart (even if this was an English Electric Weekend, the Duchess of Sutherland was still on show to pump out some good old-fashioned smoke into a brilliant blue summer sky).

We also rode the narrow-gauge Golden Valley Light Railway (the 60SD364 "Campbells" Simplex).

Delightful! Some photographs to follow.

In Praise of Upshares Downshares with Nils Blythe on Radio 4's PM

I'm rather fond of Radio 4's PM programme with Eddie Mair, but I have a special love of the money slot around 5.30pm (when I'm now quite likely to have reached the car to head home). Nils Blythe and Mair put out a call some time ago for a more catchy name for the slot than 'the markets', and in response the option they went for was the delightfully punning 'Upshares Downshares' (in honour of the late lamented Upstairs Downstairs series of the 1970s).

It was probably inevitable, but once the seeds were set, people were no longer satisfied with just a brief snippet of the programme's original theme music (there are MP3s of the various music from the show at the show site). So now, each week, we are treated to a variant on the original with this week's adopting a 'I do like to be beside the seaside' pier-organ version.

It's incredibly silly in many ways, but the inventiveness of the radio audience is somehow charming and I do feel as if I have missed something if I fail to catch this bit of the PM broadcast.

Weekend interlude - I think there was a festival going on somewhere?

We may not have been able to attend, but we caught a few bits of Glasto on the telly, including staying up late for Bruce Springsteen's gloriously uplifting performance.

Some may have been disappointed he didn't include Born in the USA (a song that I now feel is probably better interpreted by Ballboy), but the misappropriation of the song by politicians always disturbs me and I wasn't too sad to not hear it.

Besides: I got The River followed by Born to Run. And frankly that did for me from the first haunting harmonica sounds of the first track to the uplifting vrroooom of the latter.

Worth staying up late to watch.

There were bands and artistes I wish had gotten greater attention, but it was gratifying to see footage of Regina Spektor on the main stage on the Friday afternoon strutting her fingers across the piano keys and charming the audience despite the rain. Adorable.

Book review: Karen Maitland - The Owl Killers (plus Lowdham Book Festival event)

Last year at Lowdham I foolishly foreswore myself from purchasing Karen Maitland's intriguing looking novel Company of Liars: a novel of the plague - I had already spent my book allowance and was carrying more books than I could justify adding towards so I let it go. But the book haunted me with its exquisite cover and its intriguing premise and its even more intriguing opening line:

"So that's settled then, we bury her alive in the iron bridle. That'll keep her tongue still."

By autumn I was itching to obtain it but the details had escaped me and it was only thanks to judicious searching of the Lowdham book festival website that Neil untangled the details sufficient to order me the book. I loved Company of Liars and I have since recommended it widely - not just here but In Real Life. I was therefore keen to not mess up a second time and catch her talk at Lowdham this year about her new book, The Owl Killers.

But there was a minor panic: the hardback had sold out and the paperback wasn't due until the autumn. A sign, with no presence of any books beneath it, declared this on the main festival book display table. NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

Thankfully, Lowdham's own independent book shop has staff that are made of sterner stuff, unprepared to admit defeat. They kept on at publishers Penguin until it was probably easier for them to capitulate. Trade paperbacks were provided, as big and fat and juicy as the hardback that CoL had been with a comparable whopping great 560 pages of delightful reading on offer. I was much relieved to see them for sale at her speaking event in the Lowdham Primitive Methodist Hall.

With that relief, we could get onto the business of hearing Maitland discuss her new work. Like her previous text, it remains in the middle ages but whereas CoL had a single narrator, The Owl Killers has multiple narrators and - to my mind - works all the better for that because the narrative thrust is so different. Maitland patiently led her audience through the development of the novel: CoL's narrator has originally been intended as merely the opening and closing commentator for The Owl Killers. Indeed, there is a brief trace remaining in the epilogue of TOK of our/a camelot and it is fascinating to think that that wonderful character from CoL could ever have been contained to the outskirts of another text. But TOK is very much its own work, if still full of the same detail for history and story-telling.

I confess I knew relatively little of the history of beguinages, in Europe or in England. But Maitland spoke with gentle authority of the fascinating history she had discovered in the outlands of historical writings - and I certainly will be on the lookout for further texts on their fragmented history and presence in England. Centred on a collective of women who have moved to the outskirts of the village of Ulewic, the narrative combines religious history - both within and outside the Catholic church, the lives of women, rural poverty, and manorial power with tales of ancient beliefs and fraught attitudes towards sexuality. It is a heady mix and one that kept me turning the pages frantically through the weekend (I started it yesterday - Sunday - and had to force myself to pause with a 1/5th still to complete before concluding it this evening after work).

Heartily recommended. It may be a different style of narrative structure to the single viewpoint narration of CoL but The Owl Killers is a worthy successor to its skillful story-telling.

Book Review: Maureen Carter 'Blood Money'

Since first acquiring her works back in 2007, I've been galloping through Maureen Carter's Bev Morriss novels with furious delight.

(see links for reviews of Working Girls with an aside to the second novel Dead Old, plus the review for Baby Love, Hard Time and Bad Press.)

This year I was delighted to find another Bev Morriss book available. Where once Morriss was merely brittle and acerbic, she's now frequently out of control, spiting herself more than anyone who tries to reach her. She's finding it increasingly impossible to retrieve her humour, a sense of self or her once-famed intuitive insight into human behaviour. I don't think it's a surprise to find she has no Frankie to offer ballast and she's scarcely connected to her once vital family. The isolation has seen her cut off from those she cares about, though even she longs for something, some connection, some reinvigoration of the desire - even love and affection - she once felt. She can see all the signs of destruction but she just can't quite manage to stop her acid tongue and semi-functional lifestyle forcing people away from her either. Indeed, it is this carelessness that creates a sub-plot to the novel whose threat looms into the final pages once the main narrative has passed.

As with her previous works, Carter's spare prose captures locations, temperaments, character and manners with elegant ease. Though it's a trait of her narratives to find that nothing is quite as it seems in terms of victims, Carter always manages to keep an extra twist up her sleeve until late in the day. She cunningly lets you in on things that the characters do not yet know but always holds sufficient information back to throw you a late curve-ball.

In the earliest books, the appropriation of some of Carter's own passions and wit for Morriss were fairly clear cut - and certainly the long-term passion for Mr J Depp remains. But it is telling that he, like most of the other anchors of Morriss's life, is mentioned only in passing in Blood Money. The divergence has been taking place for a long time, but as a long-term reader you hope that the dark places to which Morriss descends, those places of violence and destruction that seem to pull in those around her, reflect only Carter's talent for insightful writing and that a brighter light shines on her own experience of Birmingham life (thankfully I'm pretty damn sure it does!).

Overall a thrilling read. Started it on returning from Lowdham and it was neatly devoured before the day was out. As ever, recommended reading.

Lowdham Book Festival 2009 - a general review

For the fourth year in a row, Neil and I have headed out to the ancestral village (well, my ancestral village) for the Lowdham book festival - celebrating its tenth anniversary.

(see links for Lowdham 2006, 2007 and 2008)

This year we ran into friends of Neil's (Nick, Wendy, Freddie plus inherited dog Ben) and were briefly able to touch base with new-ish Nottingham arrivals Kris and Dan. It may be a small village, but come festival time it's easy to lose track of people. There is the church (cruelly cut away from the village), some typical old village buildings (some I recognise from photographs from my great grandmother's time), the lovely walk from the cricket field to the village hall along the 'river' (hard to believe the tiny stream that we saw on Saturday had drowned the cricket field and left the village requiring piles of sandbags in 2007), the sweet little independent bookshop PLUS all the festival events and stalls, and a cricket match to boot.

Anyway, I had two key things I wanted to accomplish at the festival this year: one was to do my usual catch up with Creme de la Crime for my annual fix of crime fiction (and yay - a new Maureen Carter book!) and the other was to hear Karen Maitland speaking about her new novel The Owl Killers.

You can guess that a couple of bags jammed full of books followed me and Neil home can't you...?!

The following is just my list (Neil bought up another 11 items, including a rather gorgeous 1889 leather bound volume on Cricket by Steel and Lyttleton)

• These are the times: a life of Thomas Paine - screenplay by Trevor Griffiths (due to be staged at the Globe later this summer)
  
• Candlestick Press - Ten Poems About Love (an anniversary gift for two friends who will celebrate their 1st wedding anniversary soon)
  
• Six Creme de la Crime books

Maureen Carter - Blood Money 


Roz Southey - Secret Lament 


Criminal Tendencies - Great Stories from Great Crime Writers (a Creme de la Crime collection raising money in aid of breast cancer helplines)

These purchases got me some bargain bonuses from the back catalogue: David Harrison (Sins of the Fathers); Gordon Ferris (Truth Dare Kill); and Penny Deacon (A Kind of Puritan)

• Karen Maitland - The Owl Killers (there was a moment of panic when I thought I may not be able to buy this!)
  
• John Russell - Shakespeare's Country (a very nice Batsford Press 2nd edition with a beautiful cover)
  

Creme de la Crime were as ever delighted to see me and I was happy to do my bit advising passers-by of the delights of their products (that passing older lady may not like crime fiction, but she'd be crazy to pass over the works of Roz Southey if she likes historical fiction).

In addition to the Karen Maitland event (of which more separately with a review of the book), we also popped along to hear Matthew Beresford talk about vampires in connection with his book From Demons to Dracula.  This was really a quite indulgent item to take in, since I suspect I've read most of the sources he cited and discussed.  Still, it acted as a nice reassurance to ascertain my own knowledge and I may well get the book and check out the website further with my completist hat on (I felt I had to call time on purchases once we hit his session anyway!)

All in all, as ever, Lowdham was thoroughly enjoyable and whatever form it takes in future we hope to stay in touch with its activities.

Busy weekend - posts to follow

Well, as we now hit heatwave and muggy days and nights I feel compelled to provide you with some blog updates:

• Lowdham Book Festival 2009 review
  
• Books reviews of item purchased at Lowdham
  
• A trip to Butterley and the Midland Railway Centre (plus preview for Indietracks)
  
• In praise of 'Upshares' (the money slot with Nils Blythe)

There could be more if I can manage to breathe in this heat!

My very own Black Country Boy

Oh dear. This post by Neil is tooo funny - that video is hilarious. Reminds me of Winders for Black Country Folk.

I just hope that its okay to describe it as 'funny'.