Come On Pilgrim

(source)   

 

 "It's basically a pilgrimage," said Gemma, "There were a couple behind me from York. They asked me what else I was going to see while in London." They'd been down for Diana as well apparently. Gemma Brockis of course lives in London, like me. Having decided it would be crazy to miss probably the biggest act of local political theatre since the beheading of Charles the First, she had joined the queue on Saturday at 4am and was out of Westminster Hall fourteen hours later to come over and help me with a self tape, buzzing. It was great to hear her.

  Because in spite of my decades working in tourist attractions, I tend to forget when I talk about London's "community" or public spaces how much of destination this city is, how much of a venue it is. And the night I walked from Victoria to Hyde Park Corner a week earlier seeing nothing but an occupying army of fences and police, I had known nothing about The Queue to come. It hadn't occured to me that my back yard might have to present itself as the centre of the world for a spell, again.

 

  I also forgot – or it never occured to me – watching and rewatching King Prince Charles lose his temper over a pen in Nothern Ireland, that not only had his mother just died, he was there to reaffirm the legitimacy of – and shake hands once again with – the killers of his favourite uncle. If the biggest story from that visit was a leaky pen I guess he was doing his job, poor sod. It's easy to associate the idea of kings and queens with fantasy, and conclude that their inclusion in a political system is a sign of immaturity, but a far more crucial ingredient of fantasy is heroism and, like Yoda in the good films, the Queen was never heroic. It wasn't her job to make history, just to exist in it, and her speeches weren't meant to rouse. "It is at times such as these..." was her catchphrase.

 

 "She was a little old lady," Gemma said. "Immortal crown. Mortal wearer. The Queen is dead. Long live the King. That's the power of it." 

 That it might be safer for a nation – particularly a nation as historically in love with the idea of empire as ours – to concentrate its hero worship upon someone whose job is simply to receive that worship without seeking it, was an idea that the Queen exemplified for seventy years. "Seventy years. She met Eisenhower. In the fifties. A female head of state!" And this was something else Gemma said that really chimed, particularly in a week which has seen Lindsey Graham attempt a nationwide abortion ban in the US and the murder of Mahsa Amini by morality police in Iran. Without – perhaps uniquely – ever having to be sexualised, masculinised or martyred – from the moment she was on the throne – "here," said Gemma, "was a woman people listened to."

 

Gracious

 Who says a circle has no end? Phil Davis' twitter account put it well: "She did what she was supposed to do." I always thought it would be David Attenborough who went first, but no, Churchill's boss has finally left us. Not all the bus shelters in Notting Hill bear the news yet. "Postpone" is probably the wrong word to use here in retrospect, and "rest":

 

 And maybe noboby was looking at their phone more than normal as I walked home through Soho, maybe I was just noticing it more. I learnt of the news myself from the definitive "1926 - 2022" instagram post on my phone at about seven in the evening just outside Forbidden Planet, but people had been spending all day reminiscing about her already online, so I felt more of an "Oh, right." than an "Oh no!" And the drinks I walked past felt like drinks-after-a-show kind of drinks. Friday kind of drinks. Life definitely goes on. Today's proven that, at least.

 I didn't hear anyone say "God Save the King" outside the Crown. The mood outside all the pubs, and in the pub above which I write this – have I mentioned, I live above a pub now? – seems more one of "Fair play, who can blame her?" But it's been raining a lot, of course, after the drought, of course, and she'd just appointed a new Worst Prime Minister, of course, so maybe everyone's had their fill of the unthinkable and just wants to kick a ball around. Or maybe that's just me.

 Susy and I went to visit our Aunty June yesterday, in her new care home in Henley. Susy visits her a lot. I love Susy. June's dealing with her sudden dementia incredibly well I think, without distress, finding her way around it like a new phone that doesn't do what the old one did. There's nothing doddery about her condition. Some very specific information simply doesn't take. Every ten minutes or so I just had to reintroduce myself, and explain I wasn't married to my sister. Not "remind" June. That information had gone. Meet her, I suppose. And I like meeting people. "And what do you do?" She can get through a book perfectly well too, she told me, whoever I was. June's not bored. 

 So there's that. The giant illuminated strawberries on the Coronet fly at half mast. And Mum and Dad arrive from France tonight, to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary back here in the United Kingdom. I hope they're okay. "Kingdom". I've never had a king before. I wonder if that will take. I wonder what money will look like. Oh! I was going to send her a link to my youtube Shakespeares, I think she might have enjoyed them. The Queen, I mean. What made me think of that? I wonder what she listened to. I wonder if she ever heard me. 

 

A brilliantly unfortunate front page from the Mirror.

I Saw "Soul" and Realised Where You Can Find Straight Lines in Nature.

  Sort of spoilers ahead for Soul.

 "I-stroke-we have been given many names..." Twitter's just reminded me, it was four years ago today that the first of Time Spanner's two episodes were broadcast (still hearable here, shush). I've already written a little about the fug I got into trying to decide exactly what to call Belinda Stewart-Wilson's pan-dimensional inhabitant of the Fons et Origo, or "Heaven". Producer Gareth decided upon "Angel", which made a lot of sense, but did risk ruling out the possibility she might be God. I was tickled therefore, and probably a little jealous, when I came to watch Soul, and saw that its own dimensionally difficult inhabitants of an Afterlife-cum-Source-of-all-Inspiration had managed to cut through all this theological faff by just calling each other "Jerry". I also liked that the Jerrys were composed of a single line. If you're going to try to visualise a non-religious Heaven, mathematics seems a pleasing place to start, and I spent quite a bit of the film trying to work out why (beyond the cuteness of bureaucracy).

 

In 1887, B. W. Betts tried to model the evolution of human psychology through pure geometry, although he maybe didn't try that hard. (More here).

 

 Paradise is another word for Garden... I'd also just been rewatching The Crown*, and remembered how Prince Charles, nosing around his new estate in Highgrove, had said "there are no straight lines in Nature." But if that's the case, I suddenly thought, how do you know where something will land when you drop it?  Thanks to gravity, if we could perceive the world in four dimensions, we'd see that Nature is actually full of straight lines. And ellipses, and perfect geometric figures, and maybe that's what's so pleasing about these images: not their simplicity, but their powers of prophecy. And maybe, then, that's the kind of thing we'd hope to see in Heaven, especially if we weren't waiting to see God. 

 

 

* (Olivia Colman speaks quickly. Elizabeth II speaks slowly. It's taken me two series to realise my one problem with it.)

THE YEAR IN REHASH: AUGUST -"I'm Enjoying This! I'm Enjoying This!" A Final Banging On About the Formal Run of Richard II

 Continuing the review of my favourite or at least more conspicuous posts from the last twelve months, August by contrast was both too hot and too cold, but I still managed to produce not one but TWO "Richard the Second"s, because the first one had been too boring. As Gillian Anderson above would prove a few months later, you've got to do the voice! So it felt good to get that sorted, but then my laptop would begin to shut down every time I opened iMovie and the later I left it to find a workaround to continue making Simon Goes Full Shakespeare the closer I came to risking Henry V going out just as we left the EU, not something I had a taste for. Maybe I'll try edidting on my phone. This is from Sunday, August the 16th...

 

  Firstly, I admit that contrary to the date given above this post is actually going out on Monday evening. So I'm glad to be getting back into Full Shakespeare, but I'm also going to blame it for how late I'm now getting everything else done, including it.

 

At least the weather's broken. (Does pinterest count as a source?)

 Secondly, I recently received some typically clarifying thoughts from Gemma Brockis about the "Formal Run" of Richard the Second (viewable HERE) which I hope she won't mind me sharing: "He's normally played as a bit of an odd ball or outsider," she wrote "But if he's powerful then his descent feels weirder. Which it should... In making it glamorous, and epic, you kind of don't care so much about liking people," which is a relief. She also uses the word "majestic", which eluded me and is spot on; really I should rename these the "Oddball" and "Majestic" runs. But what exactly is Majesty? How does one picture it?

  It's not really seen as a heterosexual, cis male quality these days, and I wonder if that's a Post-Revolutionary thing, not just because capital-R, poets-on-crags-with-pamphlets Romanticism promoted a more egalitarian, no-frills idea of masculinity but because – and this is something I only realised yesterday – for the majority of its history since the French Revolution, Britain hasn't actually had a king.1800-1837, a couple of Georges. 1837-1901, sixty-three years of Queen Victoria. 1901-1952, an Edward and a George and an Edward and a George. 1952-2020, sixty-eight years of Queen Elizabeth. Another friend wondered whether if Britain had actually had more kings we'd still have a royal family at all, or would the men have blown it. Playing the "Majesty" of Richard feels apt then but also, at least initially, inescapably female, which reads as camp, which is presumably why noone does it. Even Fiona Shaw played Richard as an "odd ball".

 Another problem – and perhaps the source of a lot of my initial impatience with this play – came from unfavourably comparing it to Marlowe's Edward the Second, in which a King's misplaced love for his favourite, and his subjects' hatred of that love, drive the whole story. There it doesn't matter what you think of the Crown; a man is imprisoned for an unrequited love, his tragedy is clear, and in the shadow of that tragedy Richard's own fall feels squeamishly underwritten. But Richard's sexuality or lack of it isn't actually a contributing factor to his tragedy, it just provides Bolingbroke with slurs whose utterance make him as despicable as everyone else. Rather this is a tragedy about a God-appointed show off. When Richard's understanding of himself as a king is contradicted, he reinvents himself as a saint, and in prison we see him discover this is even more naive an ambition, and that he might as well pretend to be a clock. He's entirely ready for death, until it comes, and good for him. This is a play about a failing artist. Audiences like those and so do actors..

 And there's something genuinely fun about the old-school use of an actor's voice to do everything but imitate natural human speech, a fun that transmits even though its power is ungenerous and of no use to anyone else on stage. Nowadays it's something we see women use more than men. Men just shout. It's an isolated voice, and Gemma's right, it doesn't matter if we actually like the owner. Here's another way of looking at the Formal Run then: Richard nailed the performative aspect of Majesty to the bitter end, but botched the policy. He may or may not have been Elizabeth the First but – and again this is something that only occurred to me yesterday – bloody hell does he remind me of Margaret Thatcher.

Arsing Lupin (includes subliminal hazelnuts)

 

So, what's the show called again? 

 

 Conicidentally, I'd just watched The Castle of Cagliostro on Netflix the Thursday before my Crown binge – or not that coincidentally maybe, you be the judge – but Hayao Miyazaki's feature debut definitely reminded me how much I enjoy a good castle break-in. Checking IMDB to confirm this was indeed his first film, I discovered it was a spin-off from a TV show Miyazaki had directed in 1972 called "Lupin the 3rd", and I had a look for some of that, and this compilation of the openings credits is as far as I got. What do you think? I think the second season may feature one of the coolest sequences ever to appear at the beginning of a cartoon: a samurai on the roof a plane in flight, briefly unsheathing his sword, before showing he's sliced another plane deftly in half. It also features Lupin kicking a window in to get to a naked woman in bed, and literally jumping out of his own clothes before being fended off by a boxing glove on a spring, so it also features one of the not-coolest sequences. 

 Subsequent, possibly Miyazaji-less series would clearly encounter problems trying to top all this: having your samurai slice a whole skyscraper in half,  from the roof,  doesn't ring quite as true, but it's preferable to how cluttered and bloody and brooding and boring the series would later look. The very first series – whose opening lyrics are not great, be warned – employs subliminal imagery of which I've taken screen shots so we can better enjoy the taste of that 1970's' high life being flashed behind the heroine/nameless dancing girl/no idea, at our leisure...

 

 and also maybe identify who the hell those two guys are.

Climbing the Walls 2: Faganism

Thanks to David Cairns' blog for this "Castle of Cagliostro" still.

 I had forgotten how much I was hoping to one day see the story of "Michael Fagan (intruder)" dramatised, until I found out in the opening minutes of The Crown that a whole episode would be dedicated to it, and my excitement only built as I watched. Fagan was everything I'd forgotten I wanted. As a Time Traveling Professor from the year 2121 on the old Time Tours, I used to claim that this was the most famous story we twenty-second-century folk had about the current monarch, and happily Peter Morgan's adaptation might yet prove me right. It goes like this: Turning south at Hyde Park Corner after a circuit of the Wellington Arch, and looking left from the top deck to see over the garden wall of Buckingham Palace the Queen's Own Compost Heap, punters would hear how, in 1982, a man called Michael Fagan had made it over this wall more than once, how he'd managed to find his way into the Palace and neck a bottle of wine, how the Queen had woken up to find him sitting on her bed, and how he meant her no harm, and how used she was to meeting strangers, how they'd engaged in coversation for a quarter of an hour, how he'd asked her if she had anything to smoke, and how she'd rung for a maid to bring some ciggies, and finally how Fagan was taken away, and tried for the theft of the wine. (Ken Campbell went to his trial, but I can't remember in which show he talks about it). Fagan was sentenced to three months in a psychiatric institute. And in all that time he only ever had one visitor. It was Prince Philip. He wanted to know where the Queen's bedroom was. I think that joke was nicked from a Duck Tours but the point is that although it's the Royal Wedding episode that bears the title "Fairy Tale", albeit ironically, Michael Fagan's meeting with the Queen really was a fairy tale. Anyone who's grown up with Ben Kenobi nipping behind a space pillar while the Stormtroopers pass probably carries with them a similar dream of sneaking into the echoing places of power and pulling a few levers. I walk at night myself of course, sometimes past the Palace, and fantasise about climbing the walls of this city, and even yell "fuck off" at the radio occassionally. I love that this was the episode of Thatcher's Falklands Victory as well, and hadn't realised, again until I saw it, how much I needed to see the first British Prime Minister ever to suggest that a government has no responsibility to look after its people appear in at least one story that wasn't entirely about her.