Crossness Engines (a.k.a. Cistern Chapel) @ Abbey Wood...

Last Sunday afternoon Stuart and I took a tour of one of the great engineering marvels of the 19th century, Joseph Bazalgette's pumping station at Crossness Sewage Works (now coyly rebranded as the Crossness Engines) near London's glitzy Abbey Wood.

Colourfully called the "Cistern Chapel" in its day the steam pumps emptied London's sewers of raw waste pumping it up to ground level and then into the river downstream of where most people lived at the time. This made the water somewhat cleaner upstream so helping to reduce the outbreaks of cholera in central London. It lessened the smell too. In reality it simply shifted the problem further downstream but it did save many lives at the time (with one huge, terrible exception - see 1878 in timeline below).

Fast forward 150 years and the now disused buildings and the pump engines have been lovingly restored and look spectacular. There is obviously still great pride in the feat of engineering to this day and the places was packed with people on Sunday to witness the running of the "Prince Consort" steam engine with its 47-ton beams and massive 52-ton flywheel.

If you get a chance to go, do. It doesn't smell (much!)

London's Sewage Timeline

Pre-1830 London's sewage runs into many local cesspits. They often overflow.

1831 First cholera outbreak in London. Over 6,500 die. Population of London approx. 1.5 million.

1948 Cholera strikes London again. This time over 14,000 die. The law then changed to say cesspits had to be connect to sewage drains rather than just overflow into the streets. The drains flowed straight into local rivers or directly into the Thames.

1953 3rd major cholera outbreak killed over 10,500.

1958 The Great Stink lead to Parliament giving Joseph Bazalgette the go ahead with his intercepting sewage system connecting all the London drains together. The network would then funnel the sewage using gravity underground down-river to Abbey Wood. There it was to be pumped up to the surface and sluiced into the river Thames as the tide went out.

1865 Work on the southern side of the Thames is completed, the site at Crossness consisting of the beam engine house, boiler house, workshops, 208ft chimney and 25 million gallon covered reservoir begin to work. The reservoir was designed to hold the sewage until the tide was going out.

1868 The North side of the Thames was completed at Abbey Mills.

1878 The ship Princess Alice sank near Abbey Mills just as 75 million gallons (340,000 m3) of London's raw sewage had just been released. The sewage in the water contributed to some of the 650 lives lost as many died not from drowning but from poisoning some days later by the sewage even after having been rescued from the river.

1888 Dumping of raw sewage directly into the river ceases and sludge vessels now take it out to sea. Population of London now approx. 3.8 million.

1999: The dumping of sewage at sea finally ends on 31st December 1999. It is instead filtered, dried and often burnt.

[BLANK] @ Donmar Warehouse...

Last Friday night Stuart and I went to see the compelling, provocative play [BLANK] at the Donmar Warehouse in London's glitzy West End.

An adult daughter breaks into her mother's home to steal money for drugs. A pair of children haughtily divide their shared foster home room in two. A sex worker stands in the snow, waiting until she's made enough money to call it a night. A prisoner goes into labour in her prison cell. A woman in prison calmly explains to her sister how she intends to commit suicide. Another woman screams at a hospice unable to house her and her children to escape a brutal partner.

These are a selection of scenes from the twenty or so that make up Maria Aberg's production of Alice Birch's [BLANK], which are in turn chosen from the hundred that comprise Birch's full script.

The director can choose any number of scenes to be performed, in any order, by actors who can play characters of any gender and name. Happily, Aberg's company nail each and every scene. The action, at first disjointed, soon unspools to create a well-paced, transfixing evening. Recurring themes and characters lend the narrative a sense of cohesion, despite the play's initial fragmentary quality.

The all-female production marks 40 years of the theatre company Clean Break, which works with women who've been affected by the criminal justice system. As expected, a lot of the subject matter is sad – but it's backlit by Birch's pitch black humour. There are laughs in the sadness. For example, one scallywag explains how to "barely" have sex with someone ("You just lean back a bit"). Later, a child loftily informs her new roommate that if she thinks her carrier-bagged possessions are depressing, "You must not be familiar with famine and war and the current situation in Syria."

Birch offers uncomfortably realistic snapshots of both personal and political tensions. One particularly close to the bone scene is a brilliant, 45-minute depiction of a middle-class dinner party. Guests snort cocaine - treating their dealer as one of the family, rave about the labneh, and pay scant lip-service to the Me Too movement. That's until an outsider lambasts their "bleeding heart bubble of hypocrisy" – surely in part a dig at liberal elite-heavy theatre audience.

We, as audience members, are made acutely aware of our own complicity.

Indeed, some of the play's finest moments come when it skewers how society is so dysfunctional in scrutinising its problems, it treats violence against women as entertainment – such as a scene where a film maker lusts after "a fucking sausage sandwich" while reporting on a woman being murdered by her partner.

Designer Rosie Elnile makes good use of the Donmar's space, with scenes playing out in cell-like boxes stacked on top of one another. Meanwhile, the 16-strong cast deftly switch from one role to the next, with Sophia Brown giving a moving portrayal of mental illness behind bars, Ashna Rabheru offering a funny, poignant turn as an ill-fated Deliveroo cyclist, Kate O'Flynn a stupendous drunk lawyer, and Jemima Rooper and Jackie Clune both pitch-perfect genius in every role.

Inevitably, some scenes are better than others, which means the play feels patchy in places, particularly at the start. Nevertheless, this is a rich, devastating production that offers both a fine-grained portrayal of human relationships and a timely reminder of the cruel impact of incarceration on women.

A few of the scenes had us in tears - tears of sadness and tears of admiration for the top-notch acting.

Recommended.

An Evening with Armistead Maupin @ Queen Elizabeth Hall...

Last night Stuart and I went to spend an evening in the company of the bestselling, much-loved author and LGBT activist, Armistead Maupin at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London's glitzy South Bank.

The author of San Francisco-based Tales of the City was in conversation with Neil Gaiman as part of London Literature Festival.

Maupin has been blazing a trail through popular culture since his iconic and ground-breaking series was first published as an 800-word daily column in the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1970s. The novel series has been taking the literary world by storm ever since. Tales of the City was followed by More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You, Michael Tolliver Lives, Mary Ann in Autumn and The Days of Anna Madrigal.

And then there were the TV mini-series too - the most recent of which was the much-anticipated Netflix one, starring Laura Linney, Olympia Dukakis and Ellen Page. That one got more mixed reviews than the others though - but Maupin said he loved it.

Now aged 75 and married to photographer Christopher Turner, he has left San Francisco and moved to Clapham: "My husband and I just wanted to experience London with a greater intensity and England as well. Both of us had spent time here before. I have some relatives and old friends here. It wasn't a rejection of San Francisco it was just embracing a new adventure."

In the first half of the evening America’s ultimate storyteller, recounted some of his favourite tales from the past four decades, offering his own engaging observations on society and the world we inhabit.

Anecdotes included his deep conservative past, his LGBT activities, meeting Richard Nixon (with the odd "cock-sucker" expression inserted "to made the auditorium's sub-title person work for their money"), his first sexual experience in Battery park, and how a very special member of his logical family (the aforementioned Laura Linney) named her daughter 'Armistead' "which was nice - it's usually a name only given to lesbians' dogs!"

A minor quibble might be that Neil Gaiman's questions were at times a little indistinct and he ended up answering them himself. But that aside - and especially in the second half of the evening - when Maupin read from his autobiography and answered questions tabled from the room - he shone.

Q: "Which of your characters would you have sex with?"
A: "The actor who played Ned Lockwood (Ted Whittall) in Further Tales of the City. Sorry cheat answer but he was hot and hung!"

Q: "Which of your characters are you most like?"
A: "I wanted to be like Michael. I say I'm most like DeDe. But people tell me it's Mary-Ann!"

Q: "What advice would you give upcoming artists?"
A: "Write your truth. Write because you have to. Don't think you'll make any money!"

Maupin also gave us the heads up on a new tenth volume 'Mona of the Manor' set in the 1980s coming soon. "I am starting on a new novel, which is actually a Tales of the City novel, that goes back in time to a period that I didn’t cover before when Mona Ramsey, Mrs Madrigal’s daughter, inherits a manor house in the Costwolds from her husband whom she married to get him a Green Card so he could go to the States and be gay.
"I left her there and I never told what happened and I thought ‘oh, I would love to write about that’. I have never told the story of Mona and her aboriginal teenage son and how she fits in that village and what it is alike to live in the era of Margaret Thatcher when you are a proud American lesbian. So there’s some stuff that I can chew on there."

If you can catch the tour. Do.

Vivaldi...

I can't believe they cancelled Vivaldi after just Four Seasons!

Bletchley Park...

A couple of months ago Stuart and I paid a visit to secret wartime, code-breaking powerhouse Bletchley Park near glitzy Milton Keynes.

Expecting to spend just an hour or two looking around the place, we ended up taking over 7 hours and still didn't see everything. We did a grand tour, had high tea in the house, and tried to watch and read everything there was to see. It was fascinating.

The place took us gently through the gathering, decrypting, analysis and cataloguing of the vast amount of military data they were collecting. They collected and deciphered German, Italian, Soviet and Japanese signals providing valuable insights into troop movements, air attacks, and the location of vessels and submarines at sea.

The highly encrypted enemy signals used Enigma and the even more complicated Lorentz SZ42, which the Bletchley Park boffins eventually managed to crack using brute force and cunning. The brute force part was helped by machines such as the bombe (pioneered by Alan Turing) and the Colossus - the world's first programmable digital electronic computer.

At one point, 9000 people worked there - 70% of who were single women between the ages of 22 and 23 years old. And at its peak Bletchley Park were reading 4000 messages a day.

The grounds consist of a number of "huts" - large wooden structures where the intelligence work went on - and "blocks" - larger brick structures. The name of the hut often followed the group even when they moved into the blocks.

Fun Fact: Olivier Newton-John's dad (Brinley Newton-John) worked there.

If you get a chance to go, do. It's fab.

Huts
Hut 1: The first hut, built in 1939 used to house the Wireless Station for a short time, later administrative functions such as transport, typing, and Bombe maintenance. The first Bombe, "Victory", was initially housed here.
Hut 2: A recreational hut for "beer, tea, and relaxation".
Hut 3: Intelligence: translation and analysis of Army and Air Force decrypts
Hut 4: Naval intelligence: analysis of Naval Enigma and Hagelin decrypts
Hut 5: Military intelligence including Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese ciphers and German police codes.
Hut 6: Cryptanalysis of Army and Air Force Enigma
Hut 7: Cryptanalysis of Japanese naval codes and intelligence.
Hut 8: Cryptanalysis of Naval Enigma.
Hut 9: ISOS (Intelligence Section Oliver Strachey).
Hut 10: Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) codes, Air and Meteorological sections.
Hut 11: Bombe building.
Hut 14: Communications centre.
Hut 15: SIXTA (Signals Intelligence and Traffic Analysis).
Hut 16: ISK (Intelligence Service Knox) Abwehr ciphers.
Hut 18: ISOS (Intelligence Section Oliver Strachey).
Hut 23: Primarily used to house the engineering department. After February 1943, Hut 3 was renamed Hut 23.

Blocks
Block A: Naval Intelligence.
Block B: Italian Air and Naval, and Japanese code breaking.
Block C: Stored the substantial punch-card index.
Block D: Enigma work, extending that in huts 3, 6, and 8.
Block E: Incoming and outgoing Radio Transmission and TypeX.
Block F: Included the Newmanry and Testery, and Japanese Military Air Section. It has since been demolished.
Block G: Traffic analysis and deception operations.
Block H: Tunny and Colossus (now The National Museum of Computing).

Lungs @ Old Vic...

Last night Stuart and I went to the first night of Duncan Macmillan's distinctive, off-kilter love story Lungs at the Old Vic in London's glitzy Waterloo.

Directed by Matthew Warchus, Claire Foy and Matt Smith play an environmentally woke couple wrestling with one of life’s biggest dilemmas. Should they have a child? The ice caps are melting, there’s overpopulation, political unrest; everything’s going to hell in a handcart – why on earth would someone bring a baby into this world?

"I could fly to New York and back every day for seven years and still not leave a carbon footprint as big as if I have a child. Ten thousand tonnes of CO2. That’s the weight of the Eiffel Tower. I’d be giving birth to the Eiffel Tower," they wail.

Thirtysomething, educated, thoughtful and a little neurotic – the play opens with our couple are queuing at Ikea when he suggests they have a baby. She's so caught off guard – "It's like you punched me in the face then asked me a maths question" – she can't breathe. They don't come out with any of the stuff they came in for. But they do come out with a full set of self-assembly dilemmas. If you really care about the planet, if you are a "good" person, is it right to have a child?

But maybe you can think about things too much. Maybe if you can sort out the stuff between you – the sexual politics, the ability to say what you really want and give the other person what they really need – you can sort out the other stuff, too. After all, the human race has been procreating without too much thought or debate for 7,500 generations.

The play is brutally honest, funny, edgy and current. It gives voice to a generation for whom uncertainty is a way of life through two flawed, but deeply human, people who you don't always like but start to feel you might love. It's bravely written, startlingly structured, and if it loses momentum in the final 30 minutes, the sharp 'in the round' staging and two outstanding performers, keep it buzzing to the end.

Highly recommended.

Vassa @ Almeida Theatre...

Last Friday night Stuart and I went to see Maxim Gorky's Vassa at Almeida Theatre in London's glitzy Islington.

Adapted as a black comedy by Mike Bartlett and directed by Tinuke Craig the play stars Siobhan Redmond (after lead actor Samantha Bond had to withdraw due to injury) as a vicious controlling Russian matriarch whose family are fighting over the family business as their father lies dying upstairs.

The year is 1913 and while the unsympathetic in-laws, sons, daughters, and staff scheme, so bigger revolutionary changes are afoot in the country.

The play is savage, cruel and at times very funny; kicking the dying embers of capitalism’s contagious corruption.

The Man in the White Suit @ Wyndham's Theatre...

Last night Stuart and I went to see the new stage production of The Man in the White Suit at the Wyndham's Theatre in London's glitzy West End.

The reviews of the show had been tepid therefore we were not expecting much. So, when it turned out to be a bit of turkey we weren't too surprised.

Based on the 1951 Ealing Comedy of the same name, The Man in the White Suit play tries (but fails) to capture some of the charm of the film. Along with Whisky Galore!, Passport to Pimlico and Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Man in the White Suit film was a gentle comedy with a mild satirical streak which brought a smile a post-war austerity Britain. The Man in the White Suit play is simply an ill-judged, bore-fest.

The main fault is that Sean Foley's adaptation can't make up its mind what it is - a farce, a social commentary, a pantomime, a satire, a period piece, a musical - so rather than pleasing everyone; rather like the piece's indestructible fabric that never needs washing, it pleases no-one.

Fart noises? Prorogation jokes? Dropped trousers? Feeble puns? Brexit jokes? Answering a telephone that's not plugged in? Oh, come on. The tone is all over the place. And just not funny enough.

Stephen Mangan is pleasant enough however as industrial chemist Stanley who invents that indestructible fabric - but even the chemistry he has with the mill owner's daughter Daphne (played by Kara Tointon) seemed nonreactive.

Scientific idealism... Gritty Northern textile mill reality... Union / Management conflict...  Consumerism... Sustainability...  all themes get washed away in the mess of poor slapstick. 

The excellent supporting cast were largely wasted too; Sue Johnston as Stanley's landlady, Richard Cordery as the gammon mill owner, and Rina Fatania as a trade union leader.

In fact, the only aspect of the production that was memorable was the lighting. Which was lovely. (Joke for you there Andy).

Uber...

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Uber driver:  “you have arrived”

Me: 5 Stars

Highbury Sloe Gin...

Last Saturday morning Stuart and I went sloe picking in a secret location near Mile End in London's glitzy Tower Hamlets.

When I say 'secret' I really mean it's just an overgrown cemetery park in Tower Hamlets - but we fruity, foraging-types like to keep our exact locations to ourselves; as there is stiff competition amongst us for the prize locations of the best ingredients for our fruit-based stiff drinks.

We used to go foraging for sloes in Highbury but Islington Council - in their infinite wisdom - decided to cut down all the Highbury Fields hawthorns; so we had to look further afield to make our annual batch of Highbury Sloe Gin.

First we carefully pick the sloes, try to get them home unsquashed, wash the yeast off, select the best, and then freeze them. We then pop them in a few bottles of gin to infuse for three months and then decant and sweeten to taste. Yummy.

Jo Whiley's 90's Anthems @ The Garage...

Kerry, Kerry, Angie, Dave, Kevin, Fergal, Stuart and I had a fab night out at The Garage on Saturday night at Jo Whiley's 90's Anthems in London's glitzy Highbury.

Lasers, big red balloons, ticker-tape canons, Blur vs Oasis, Fatboy Slim, Primal Scream, The Verve, The Chemical Brothers, Faithless, The Prodigy and a whole lot more.

We danced, we sang, we drank, we waved our hands in the air like we just didn't care.

Great night.

Noises Off @ Garrick Theatre...

Last Friday night Stuart and I went to see Michael Fryan's clever 1982 sex-farce Noises Off at the Garrick Theatre in London's glitzy West End.

Hailed as the funniest play about putting on a play every written the piece certainly delivers on laughs.

In this 'play that goes wrong' we see a broad trousers-down farce fall apart as it tours the provinces and the cast all fall out with each other.

Hamming up their roles with particular style are Meera Syal as the housekeeper, Lloyd Owen as the handsome director, Sarah Holland as one of the house-owners, Anjli Mohindra as the prompt, and Lisa McGrillis the sexy tax inspector.

In total we see the fictional play 'Nothing On' three times - first at the ill-prepared technical rehearsal in Weston-super-Mare, then at a matinee one month later in Aston-under-Lyne from back stage as things start to go very wrong, and finally much later into the 10-week run in Stockton-on-Tees when the cast are at full-pitched war with each other.

We laughed and laughed. Great night out.

Glastonbury 2020 Outfits Sorted..... #Glasto2020

This is me and my sister Joanna in the early 1970s. 

Are we on drugs? Possibly. Are those psychedelic clothes we are wearing typical of our wardrobe at the time? Definitely. But a more embarrassing question for me is... why am I even wearing a tie?!

Battersea Power Station...

Stuart and I found ourselves down by Battersea Power Station last Saturday afternoon in London's glitzy (and almost finished) Battersea Power Station Quarter.

It looks nice. And if by nice I mean 'generic.' The power station looks great of course but the surrounding area looks like a generic modern redevelopment - expensive restaurants, expensive bars, and thousands of stacked apartments akin to the sort of investment opportunity that overseas investment companies cream themselves over.

London Transport Museum Acton Depot...

Last Saturday Stuart and I went to an open day at the London Transport Museum Depot in London's glitzy Acton Town.

The place is packed full of trains, trams, buses, signs, tiles, and roundels. TFL porn basically.

We loved it.

"Master Harold" ...and the boys @ Lyttelton Theatre...

Last Friday night Stuart and I went to see "Master Harold" ...and the boys at the Lyttelton Theatre on London's glitzy South Bank.

Set in 1950s South Africa the action takes place in a single room, St George's Park Tea Room, Port Elizabeth.

It's a long rainy afternoon and black employees Sam (Lucian Msamati) and Willie (Hammed Animashaun) are practising their steps for the finals of the ballroom dancing championships. Young, white cafe owner's son Hally arrives home from school to hide out. The two men have been unlikely best friends to Hally his whole life but as this is apartheid era South Africa: he is "Master Harold" and they are just "the boys."

Playwright Athol Fugard's play is semi-autobiographical and explores the nature of friendships and how people can hurt the ones they love.

The three characters seem to get on well and laugh and share jokes and stories. But as the play moves to its conclusion things take a darker turn.

After Sam gently admonishes Hally for saying disrespectful things about his father, Hally lashes out. The moment is shocking, and heart-breaking, too. Hally has crossed a line. The moment illustrates, too, how it is often our inner demons that stoke our disrespect — or worse — for others.

With this dramatic outburst it seems that the kind but callow Hally has suddenly and inadvertently taken the first steps to becoming a man. But the question remains: Having grown up absorbing the racism that is endemic in his culture — its omnipresence is subtly symbolized by the rain we hear pelting down throughout the play — what kind of man can he become?