Your Christmas Viewing or a better title to be decided later

 

 Let's catch up. 

 On Monday I joined friends to catch The Wind in the Willows Wiltons at Wilton's Music Hall, chiefly to see Darrell Brockis as Toad; it's amazing what a really high-waisted pair of trousers can do to a man's shape. The weasels were sort of bankers now, as was the book's original author Kenneth Grahame, who resigned as Secretary of the Bank of England in 1908 after either being nearly shot in the face during an anarchist raid, or – depending on which motive you ascribe to the enforced retirement – accusing the Bank's future Governor of being "no gentleman", so I've no idea whose side he'd be on here.

 

 (I have only my parents word for it that, many Christmases ago, "Toad of Toad Hall" was the first show they ever took me to. It was the biggest room I'd ever been in. They tell me the sheer scale of the room made me whimper, then the lights lowered, and I didn't like that at all, and then old man dressed as a mole stuck his head out of a trap door and shouted "Hang white-washing!" and I howled and we left and that was it.)

 

 Pleasingly concurrent with the fortunes of Toad Hall in this production were that of the baby otter puppet, Portly: It's always nice to see the inclusion of Pan, and "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" made a lot more sense as subplot here rather than just interlude. A lovely, lively, warm evening, and Wilton's Music Hall is an exciting space to explore during an interval. Do these photographs convey that? I don't know. Badphone finally expired on Sunday, alas, but I appear to have found a replacement with just as MySpace-era a camera, which was not my intention. I'll have to start hanging around more light.

 

 On Tuesday I caught up for drinks with an old friend who told me that she can get married in Saint Paul's Cathedral, a thrilling possible future theatre project. I also found the following extraordinary performace on youtube while searching for video essays on "Brimstone and Treacle". I'd never made the connection before between Dennis Potter's fable of Satanic Home Invasion, and Mary Poppins (OR HAD I?) 

 

 

 I just wanted to write a good part for Olivia Colman.

 

 And the TKA Smith Family Conservatory of the Art's family production of Poppins sheds little light on the banned seventies teleplay. But it does throw up a blisteringly confident turn from an uncredited singer in a role I don't remember as a rival nanny with a bun of grey hair fastened inexplicably to the top of her head, which the Conservatory has liked so much they've posted twice. In case you didn't manage to catch a Christmas show yourself this year I share both versions here, not for comparison, but to be played simultaneously to see if the resulting reason-shredding resonances open a portal to anywhere.

 On Wednesday evening we performed the ante-penultimate Love Goddess at the Cockpit Theatre. The weather was milder now. The snow had gone. I didn't walk home directly. Badphone's replacement took what it could.

 

On Thursday, well, I wrote last Sunday's post, but I also learnt that that ante-penultimate show had actually been our penultimate as one of the cast had fallen ill, although testing negative for Covid. We'd planned our cast drinks for that evening however as some people had to rush off on Friday, including myself, who would have to be up early to catch a flight from Gatwick on a day of border control and train strikes. Our producer Laura had booked a table at a pub called the Pereseverance, and I hadn't left the flat all day.

 As with the long walk home on Wednesday I found a refreshing solitude in that place. The barman gave me a Guiness in a weird glass, free nuts and sample of an unnamed Christmas cocktail he'd worked on. A lot was ending. Enjoying the uniterrupted ambience, it occured to me I could just try and go straight to Gatwick after the final show though and not worry about sleeping Friday night.

 

 

 I woke at midday, feeling finally Christmassy. The last night went ahead and everything felt new, which may not be unusual for a last night. As I said from the start, everyone's lovely, and while I may not have tried so much towards the end not to be too weird, it's only because that's what happens when you get to know people.

 

 Then that stops, and there's no getting used to it. The show's over. Almog's on another continent now, and I took the Thameslink to Gatwick however many hours ago it was and found a nice, small copy of "Pinocchio" at the airport bookshop. Its tone is very Vic and Bob. In fact Bob Mortimer would make a brilliant Pinocchio. I woke on the plane surprised to see the land up at the top. 

 

 Mum met me at Montpellier just as I received the message that the cast member had now tested positive for covid after all, but that was okay because Susy's tested positive for Covid too. We made it down. That's the main thing. Dad showed us "Creature Comforts" in the cinema (because it's important to be reminded just how perfect Aardman can be...)

 

 

 Tom put on the "Bottom" Christmas special. I'm about to put the presents out. I was meant to be cacting up on sleep but appear to haev written this instead. I hope you get everything you want this Christmas, ole unatendees. 

 Here, one more time, is Orson Welles. 

 

 Big ball to stick your head in by Arthur Handy.

PinonononoNO!

 Just as Autumn was beginning, sitting in a festoon-lit beer garden on the South Bank, I got to thinking about Pinocchio, and about how much of my adulthood seemed to have been devoted to exactly the life choices he'd been told to avoid. To showbiz and hokum. I didn't know the original book very well though, so I decided to text Gemma Brockis who'd once made a touring adaptation with Silvia Mercuriali in a car, and ask her what she thought Pinocchio was actually originally about?

 Gemma answered that originally, actually, the story had ended with Pinocchio hanged. Carlo Collodi only added the blue fairy and whale-based redemption arc after the success of the initial serial prompted its expansion into a whole book. She also said it was all tied into the Risorgimento. What was that? The unification of Italy: Collodi was apparently deeply concerned with the path his new country would take, and was convinced education was the key to its prosperity. So, wait, was Pinocchio Italy, I asked? Totally, Gemma answered. 

 I dimly remembered a live action television adaptation from my childhood, and decided to see if it was online when I got home. It was. Here's a taste:

 

 Nightmarish. As most live action adaptations of Pinocchio seem to be. That fox at the top of this post is in it too. Want the whole thing? Both episodes? 

 Here!

 

  "What a horrible thing, Simon, why would you share this?" 

 Well I don't know, look, sorry. But last night I saw Netflix's new "Pinocchio" – a film Guillermo Del Toro apparently says he has wanted to make for "as long as he can remember" –  and I think it might be worse. At least the old BBC adaptation was nightmarishly bad. Despite its many nods to Frankenstein and the inclusion of Mussolini, the Del Toro version isn't even that. One of the problems might be that Del Toro said he "wanted to deviate from the original book’s themes of obeying authority by making his Pinocchio virtuous for questioning the rules and forging his own set of morals." But he doesn't, and when Pinocchio finds Gepetto in the stomach of a whale, it's not because he spent the last act of the story searching for him, but because he inexplicably and fortuitously was sent flying out of a fascist military academy by a dropped bomb. This maybe makes the film sound more fun than it is. I promise it's not fun.

 

 I'd also suggest that, if you don't like the story of Pinocchio – whatever that is – don't adapt it. I don't care Mark Kermode gave this film five stars. That's a lie, obviously I care. If anything, I care more about this film's reception than the film itself. It almost made me want to watch the Zemeckis version, to see how that could possibly be worse, although as summarised by the excellent Ryan George below it seems to share quite a few of the Netflix version's narrative malfunctions. Don't watch the Del Toro adaptation, is really all I've come on here to say, quite spitefully, or I don't know, you might love it. 

 But if you really want to watch a terrible Pinocchio adaptation this holiday, dim the lights, press "play" above, and let the screaming start.

 

February in the Black

 For the past couple of years, every time I've finished a book I've taken a photograph of it, maybe hoping that this will make me read more. I took six photographs of books in January I see, and one in February. And none in March. Here's Holland Park. I'd get wheeled around here when I was one, so I've been told. I don't remember. Now it's just up the road.

 

 Photographing Kensington was one thing I managed to keep up in February. Was I doing it hoping to feel more like a resident, or like a tourist? Did I want to feel more at home or the opposite? I still stayed sociable, although I stopped going to the BFI as much, another fad of January. But I still had spending money from my first two commercials shot at the end of 2021. I still met friends, and if I was twenty years younger maybe there'd be photogaphs of that too. Here's a concert I was invited to in February. I couldn't remember why I'd photographed it, until I looked closer and saw everyone's masks. Click to enlarge.

 

 I met Gemma Brockis a lot. I could afford to go out for coffee. We'd knock ideas about, her teaching and seeking meetings, me working a couple of days a week at the Crystal Maze and meandering. She told me how as an immersive theatre veteran she'd also occasionally get approached by Virtual Reality Engines to participate in Research and Development. Intimacy was what they were after now. "Virtual Intimacy" was VR's philopospher's stone.

 

 What does "intimacy" actually literally mean though, I asked? We talked about that a bit – Chris Goode used to ask it back when he still did the blog, and was alive – then I decided to just look it up on my phone. We all have an idea. What do you think it means? As far as I could work out, "intimacy" just means the opposite of loneliness. That doesn't seem to have much to do with Virtual Reality. I didn't think they were going to find it, and I made a note of that on my phone. That phone broke, but I remembered.

 

? Fast ? Furious

Still in space, The ? Motorist (as I knew it back in the nineties when I was making my rounds of the Museum Of the Moving Image, where it used to play on a loop) is a film about a car made when both inventions were in their infancy, and has the narrative pace and logic of a toddler playing with a new toy, but one can still enjoy with clarity over a century later the surprising precision and ingenuity gone into realising something this stupid on film: Sixty seconds in and we've already run over a policeman, driven up the side of a building, and landed on a cloud. It's only when we reach Handover Court that the pace starts to drag. It's an odd lacuna, that court scene. You start trying to read lips. Who's on trial? Why are their eyebrows so big? I pondered these questions so intently I completely missed the transformation into a horse-and-carriage. 

 

 

 I met Gemma this evening, who's currently having to teach the Theatre of the Absurd. I realised she's one of the best teachers I know and among other things we talked about how, when playing someone simply doing a job, questions about motivation and even audibility don't actually have to apply. I suggested silent movies probably did us a favour by freeing drama from text, and showing how great an actor you could still be without an audience necessarily understanding what you were saying. The Handover Court scene in The ? Motorist is not a great an example of that. 

 Otherwise the film's a little masterpiece, and thanks to David Cairns for reminding me of it, and also for alerting me to its sequel which has a robot in it.

Words we sometimes said in the basement of the Ned

 Notes designed by Susanne Dietz

 

 Yesterday was fun, and crammed, and with Serena and Tom on the chocolate coin exchange and Hannah checking bags (but not opening them –"Very nice, Italian?") a slight shunt reunion, happily. Thank you to Coney for organising The Golden Key, and to Gemma for having me, and to you if you came, and sorry if we were full. When we were trying to find a mood for the bar outside our snug and kennels, I don't think we anticipated how much time would be spent simply queueing, but that's the thing about unknowns. Choas inside the kennels was a lot more welcome, and I was very lucky to be teamed with clowns as kind as my fellow accountants Sachi Kimura and Julia Masli (the word "accountant" has a nicely ecclesiastical ring to it, once you don a robe). It couldn't all be unknowns though, so I wrote a little text for us to say and here it is.

Counting the grains of rice:

This is a new idea.

Each of these is a promise. Not a big promise. Not a particularly important promise. Still, probably more promises than it’s fair to expect any single person to be able to keep. Which is why they’re kept here.

 

Originally, a promise was much bigger, and most people would be unlikely to keep even one. They were about the size of this table, and made of something dangerous like limestone or cows. But one night, there was a storm. And a promise sank to the bottom of the sea – so it wasn’t lost, as the joke goes, it was at the bottom of the sea – and all the islanders had to decide whether or not to still count that as a promise kept. Which they did.

Maybe that’s why we’re underground.

 

Eating a grain:

This won’t be missed. Something will be missed. But no-one will know it was this.

Taking another grain:

And what’s the smallest thing you can promise? What’s worth this?

 

 

 Proving I'd licked a duck by sticking a grain of rice to it was a lot more fun though.

Bigcoin

 "Wow!" indeed, thumbnail. Vic Stefanu takes us on a brief tour of the Micronesian Bankvaults of Yap, whose ancient limestone currency  – (is "ancient currency" an oxyoron?) –gets referenced in Extra Credits' history of paper money, which we've all watched in preparation for The City of London's Golden Key which takes place tomorrow, Saturday.

 

 

 Come along during the day if you can. Its all free, and I've finally found out which route we're at the end of: "Share Mile", details here. I'll be in kennels with the brilliant Julia "Legs" Masli and Sachi "Bums" Kimura, so I'll definitely be having fun and yes, apparently the counting rooms were called kennels. 

 Speaking of fun...

 

 

 I don't know, I didn't want to let his passing go unremarked on here, but can any clip truly contain Robbie Coltrane? I barely had a moment to enjoy Kwasi Kwarteng getting fired before I heard the news. Every time I see him closing that plane door as an unpseaking extra in Flash Gordon I think, and then you go on to do everything. A giant Yappian coin of the acting world. Bye bye, big man.

 

 

one more clip

But Who's Counting

 

 Further facelessness. 

 In the temple-like vault of a former bank stand six-hundred-and-fifty defaced and numbered photographs of the artist Sarah Maple and her child, one defacing for every breastfeed given over a three month period. A lot more than I expected. It's called "Labour Of Love". I don't know if it will still be up on Saturday.

 

 I was down there today to scout the marble counting house I'll be in this weekend as part of Gemma Brockis' contribution to The Golden Key, a massive City of London commission from Coney and Friends, which will see the normally dead-at-weekends Square Mile come alive with activity and riff raff like me, and perhaps you! 

 

   

 

 Specifically, we'll be part of The Maze of Adventures: "Choose wisely, friend," insists the blurb  – a voice from a simpler time perhaps, before the pound found itself battling gravity like Indiana Jones – "as you will not able to see them all..." That isn't much help, sorry, but we'll be there somewhere. I'm not sure if I can give away the vault's exact location, but when I used to do the Ghost Bus Tours we'd get stuck in traffic outside of it for anything up to half an hour and have to vamp about plague pits – Oh, I hadn't thought about them! The City's full of subterranean material, but I think we'll be sticking to counting.

 

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."

 

Not A Good Look

 Another big scary face. Gemma Brockis sent me this: it's Mussolini's Italian Fascist Party headquarters in 1934. There's a lot going on, isn't there – the face may be saying "No", but the walls... It's got my name written all over it! Anyway, it's a lot more ghost-trainy an aesthetic than I normally associate with fascism. When I think of fascist architecture, I think of Albert Speer's slave-built "cathedrals of light" at the Nuremberg Ralleys, and those huge, bare rectangles and domes reminiscent of and maybe even inspired by John Martin's extraordinary designs for the Hellish city of Pandaemonium in his illustrations for "Paradise Lost" made a hundred years earlier...

 

All of which I guess means there never really was a "fascist aesthetic", beyond Big and Dumb. It's just a numbers game. Changing the subject completely, walking home last night I noticed – it was hard not to – more police on the route from Victoria to Hyde Park Corner than there were non-police. I asked one of them what was going on, and she explained that the Qeeen had died – thanks – and that they were here for the funeral. "Isn't that a week away?" I asked. "It's just, this is quite intimidating." "Don't worry," her partner replied, "We're here to keep people safe." I didn't ask from what. 

 Hey, remember when that Russian guy got arrested for holding up a blank piece of paper? Can you imagine if that happened here LOLZ!

From the Slipped Sniff to the Sun's Fingers – The Kiss Continues...

"How did yesterday's exercise go? Did you fall into your own reflection?" 

 from Lesson Twelve

 It's Gemma Brockis' birthday today, which is an excellent reason to continue sharing her latest click-and-scroll adventures from The Kiss, Certificate II. Possible spoilers ahead...

  The Ninth Lesson emerges from immersiveness to recall, at a respectful second hand, the discovery in India three or four thousand years ago of smelling with the mouth via a misplaced sniff – literature's first recorded kiss. Alexander the Great, it is said, knew nothing of kissing until he came to India.

 

 The Tenth Lesson throws immediate doubt on this claim however, noting the introduction of the kiss to what would later call itself "The West" over a hundred years before Alexander's campaign, by Aspasia of Miletus, the Persian girlfriend of Pericles of Athens, as an a-romantic symbol of that couple's parity. There was also a kiss in Homer's Iliad – just the one though – a symbol of submission from the Trojan King Priam to Achilles as he begged the Greeks for the return of his son's corpse, even less romantically.

 

 The Eleventh and Twelfth Lessons travel with Aeneas from Troy to Rome, where the kissing of doorposts was instituted as encouragement to protect one's threshold. Other kisses would eventually be available: the Persian-style, aromantic but still unhygienic and consequently outlawed Oculum; the Indian-style taste sensation, the Savium; and the still unsourced but by now irrefutably romantic Basium, of which the poet Catullus begged loads, and then another load. Ovid's myth of Narcissus meanwhile provides the homework. (I didn't know when I first read this lesson that Narcissus had faded away and turned into a daffodil. I wonder if Marie Curie knew this. I'm not sure it would shed new light on their "Day of Reflection" either way.)

 Finally, the Thirteenth Lesson presents the first ever recorded image of a kiss: a kiss of life, passing from the hands of the sun, to the nose of the revoultionarily monotheistic Pharoah Akhenaten, and to his wife Nefertiti, and from them to the mouths of their children; a short-lived, city-founding tenderness inextricably tied to – and ultimately doomed by – the religious repression orchestrated by the man archeologist James Henry Breasted would later dub "the first individual in human history". (Well, look at him.)

 

IMAGES

Metamorphosis of Narcissus : Salvador Dali 1937

Representation of Cow and Family : Artist Unknown

Priam Asking Achilles for the Body of Hector : Théobald Chartran 1876

Narcissus : Caravaggio 1597-99

Akhenaten, Nefertiti and three daughters : the Armana Period c. 1345 BCE

And thanks to Extra Credits for being the only source I could find attributing Breasted's quote.

Wet And Forget

 Here's a little film I really love, originally made for Door Number 5 of Gemma Brockis' now absent Oddvent Calendar. Like all contributions to the calendar, Shamira's behindery is a study and pause – breath-restoring, rather than breath-taking. It features the voice of our friend Tom Lyall, and just enough special effects to help one lose one's footing in reality. I've put it up because the film I put off putting up on Friday was its opposite: bloated and failing and disengaging. I'll probably put that up next, because it's still of interest; but I wanted to present something I liked first. 

 By the way, my youtube algorithms uncouthly autofollow Reindeer Lichen with this; I wonder where yours will take you. It's still winter in the corner of some gardens. Apologies again for the delay in posting. I have been meeting for walks this week, and it's possible I am exhausted. 

 

The Wisdom of Patrick Koluuunahmeheheh Tajnaahme

 According to at least one source, Patrick Koluuunahmeheheh Tajnaahme is the fictional novelist referenced by Captain Kirk in the Star Trek episode "The City On The Edge of Forever". The reason for the ruins you see littering the City here is another interesting – and dumb – piece of trivia...

 

    Apparently, Harlan Ellison's original script stipulated it should be covered in runes...

 

 And the set designer didn't know what runes were.

 Still, it's a hell of an episode, and well worth the quoting... Gemma Brockis has hinted she might, at some point, invite visiting lecturers to her online university to teach something other than the History of the Kiss. In case this happens, I've been considering a Cultural History of Kindness: Bill and Ted's two precepts will go in there, obviously, and maybe Michael Scott's mutant variant, and almost certainly the recommendation of Patrick Koluuunahmeheheh Tajnaahme.

 

 

"Let me help – A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He'll recommend those three words even over I love you."

The Last Time I Thought About Sharing Space in a Comedy

 It was this time last year. I was talking to Gemma Brockis about Home, whose second series had just aired, and we were basically firing off superlatives at each other. We both knew Rufus Jones, who created the show and plays the "lukewarm xenophobe" Peter, whose family attempt to accomodate a Syrian refugee, Sami, played by the excellent Youssef Kerkour as as unmoveable, vulnerable and intimately honest as a handprint. That's Peter above, in his new car, which he has to share with strangers on account of his new job, as an Uber driver. His previous job had disappeared in anticipation of Brexit, for which, naturally, Peter voted. Everything Rufus took on in choosing to write this requires the guts of a fire-breathing goat – as he says, "writing never feels easy, so you may as well write about something that matters" – but nowhere are those guts more gloriously on display than when Peter receives news of this redundancy, but I don't want to spoil it. Home is here. If you haven't seen it, absolutely do. Rufus is amazing, everyone in it is amazing, Carrie Quinlan's in it too, and it is directed with unwavering subtlety by one of the funniest clowns I've ever seen, Peepolykus' David Sant.

Free Access to Saturnalia and Birdsong

 "Today, in London, your gift begins at 8.04 and ends at 15.53" says door 21 of Gemma Brockis' Oddvent Calendar, the shortest day of the year. This being the peak of Saturnalia, rules are for fools, and so today the door is free to all. Through it you'll find a radio helmed by Oddvent's staunchest contributors, who are taking requests. 

 It's just through here. Click on "IT IS OPEN".

 The calendar's other doors (including mine) are still available here of course.

 And tangentially you can watch me play Saturn really horribly here.

Door Number 3. (This is going to be a drum.)

 A nice plug in the Guardian yesterday for Gemma Brockis' Oddvent calendar, and thanks to Gemma for allowing me to grant all of you ole unattendees Very Important Person access, as we say in the threshold business, through today's door. Click here to open it and witness my contribution – possibly inspired by the Cosmic Shambles' many show-and-tells – there's more information about the calendar here, and if you need one the password for today is "help". (My first idea was to giftwrap an egg, but I'm not doing that now, so giftwrapping an egg is still going.) Enjoy! 

 

 UPDATE: Now the Calendar has vanished, my contribution's up on youtube.

I Want To Be In That Number...

 

 News: Gemma Brockis has made another website! The tiny moments of contemplation afforded by the December tradition of looking for a door, wondering what might be behind it, then opening and finding out, have inspired her to curate her own advent calendar, and I've signed up to be one of the doors. The brief she sent out says "this is not for children. Though I imagine there might be some things they enjoy. That's not to say it's marketed as an ADULT ADVENT CALENDAR but it's particularly for people living alone. So. Hopefully not children." Gemma explains more here.

Further Caressing, Further Kissing, Further Farahi

  The video on Behnaz Farahi below goes into a little more detail about "The Caress of the Gaze" mentioned in the previous post, and also touches on her work as an architect. This is what reminded me how easily I can be fooled into misdiagnosing intelligent life. The Mummenschanzy juddering of "Aurora"'s reactive ceiling panels may not remind me of anything alive specifically, but they do remind me of puppets, and my brain still expects puppets to have a puppeteer. In the introduction to the second term of Gemma Brockis' online university's History of the Kiss (which now has its own site), snogging's origin is traced back 540 million years, to the deuterostome Saccorhytus Coronarius who let its spittle drift from tiny mouth to tiny mouth in the ocean. Even if there never had been such a thing as puppets, seeing any object react to you would probably still read as a sign of Life, regardless of how little Life actually reacts to you.

 

 

Isn't it great what you can do with a 3-D printer?

More Espionage For Kids!

 Further to the spy kids' induction held over the weekend at the Imperial War Museum, here's a bold and beautiful set of Rainy Day activities from shunt's Nigel and Louise. I've not seen enough of their work since the shunt lounge closed, but these photos of the first "Spy Day" seem indicative of the kind of thing they've been up to: in this case, filling a warehouse in Weston Super Mare with children intent on defeating a man dressed as a raven.

 

 Thanks to the pandemic, the sequel to this show is now an adventure we can all go on. As with their more adult Party Skills For The End of the World, there's an embarrassment of exercises here that could easily fill the whole day, including passport forgery, and learning how to distinguish between a rook and a jackdaw. I personally have not yet tested the softness of my tread by laying a trip of toilet paper on the floor, nor built my own laser maze, but if you have time and children, and a bit of courage - it's recommended "for Dr Who aged kids (7-12ish)" - the whole thing is wonderful and free and waiting for you HERE.

 

 And speaking of the virtual work of shunt associates, you still have until Saturday the 31st to enjoy Silvia Mercuriali's Swimming Home in which I played a small part, and which I also enjoyed hugely as an audience, though some water did go up my nose, while Gemma Brockis' Winchester Mystery House of an online course, The Kiss, gets similarly immersive here.

 And finally, continuing the Frankenstein Hallowe'en countdown, here's what I wrote about 1939's Son of Frankenstein.

Kiss Revision

 I caught up with Gemma Brockis this evening on Islington Green, both of us wrapped up against the sudden cold but with an ice cube in each of our picpouls blancs - she'd asked for one and I copied her. Gemma was enthusing about the university as a tested theatrical model for lockdown, because students can still be part of something without having to leave their rooms. 

 

 Her own online university has embarked upon its Autumn Term, still teaching just the one (excellent) module, "The History Of The Kiss", but like Sarah Winchester before her, Gemma has now restlessly added extensions and secret passages. So, even if you aren't new to the course, I would still recommend revision. You will get lost. Here.