It begins ...

I've found that it's a good idea to go to the preview shows at the Fringe. There's the chance of seeing shows go a bit wrong, which can relieve the boredom of a dire offering, and make you feel for the good stuff struggling against rubbish venues and bad tech.

But most of all, there aren't very many folk around, and most of them are well behaved Edinburgh pensioners. They are the ones with the time and interest to start before the mobs arrive.

I've now convinced D and M to take a day with me annually to be spontaneous, go with the flow, chill out and so on.  D, for example is amazed that we got off the bus in George Square, where it all seems to be happening this year, and immediately people handed me free tickets.  We accepted.

Show one
Bette and Joan The Final Curtain
Suffered greatly from being held in a run down lecture theatre. A very iffy start that went on far too long. Boiled down to projections of Louela Parsons and Hedda Hopper muttering that Bette Davis was taking too long to die. Solution? Send Joan Crawford's ghost to help her on her way. Enter ghost of Crawford and the action really began.

Sharp lines, well delivered and the pace increased until the last 20 minutes which were snappy and brought it to a satisfying ending. Bette and Joan suddenly wondered why, since they had so much in common (four husbands, ungrateful daughters) they had not been friends in real life. Bette agreed to die.

‘You should only say good of the dead. Joan Crawford is dead. Good’ (Bette Davis). ‘She's slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie’ (Bette Davis), ‘Take away those pop eyes, the cigarette and those funny clipped words and what have you got?’ (Joan Crawford)

A promising start to my fringing for the next month.

Left that building and more tickets immediately thrust into my hands.

Show Two
Penny Dreaful's Etherdome
19th Century America, 3 dentists vie to invent anaesthesia for dentistry and surgery.  Much slapstick comedy, singing and audience harassment, er, participation. This show started really well, but lost its way towards the end. The staging and props were great.

We escaped the George Square mayhem (nothing compared to what it is now) and had lunch at the Mosque Kitchen. Cheap, fast, nutritious and tasty.

Show Three
Midnight Your Time
Nothing like a world premier to keep you going through the late afternoon slump in the fringe energy levels.  Diana Quick was magnificent as the controlling mother whose daughter took up a post in Palestine and neglected to keep in touch.

Every Thursday at 3am, Judy talks to her daughter via webcam. Judy calls from Islington, her daughter, Palestine. A retired lawyer, Judy is looking for ways to occupy herself: with a women's peace league, with Mr and Mrs Prabhakar, with her daughter's life

Although I often enjoy most of what I see at the Fringe, sometimes there is a gem and this was it. I'm now worrying that my fringe experience has peaked too early and all else will be a disappointment.

Show Four
Anil Desai
The man himself handed out tickets to his impressionist show. He kept a fairly consistent level of comedy and pretty good impressions throughout the hour on stage. I've been recommending him to friends. Abiding image of him with orange wig, pink PVC mini dress and white thong.

I retired to fringe another day.

Warming up the old blog

In a repeat of last year, I intend to reactivate the blog while it is Edinburgh festivals time. Anything and everything I go to will be written up and judgement made on the enjoyment or offensiveness factor. Sometimes things are simply not fun without the frisson of a good feeling of righteous offence.

Just to get in the mood, I've included a report on a recent day out in Liverpool where I played tourist on one of the infrequent summer days.

The highlights were a visit to the International Museum of Slavery and the Tate Liverpool. 

John Lennon peace monument, by artist Lauren Voiers

I spent a long time in the International Slavery Museum learning things I should have known already. Liverpool's history is that of prospering because of the slave trade over hundreds of years. I'd not realised how early on Europeans had been enslaving people from West Africa, although I knew about the fight for abolition.

I could not manage to see round the whole museum because it was so horrifying in laying bare the conditions slavers transported people in. I realise that is a bit wimpish, but I do intend to go back sometime and see the rest. More uplifting were displays honouring the many slave uprisings across the Caribbean and America. Often these were instigated or led by women such as Carlotta in Cuba (1843), Solitude in Guadalupe (1802) and Rebecca in Curacao (1795). Of course, the woman we are most aware of is Harriet Tubman.

Slavery is still with us as was outlined in the campaign section of the museum where the display showed the plight of child domestic workers who've been trafficked to work in slave-like conditions in many parts of the world.

However, I'd particularly wanted to see '42', an exhibition by Lee Karen Stow, who photographed women in Sierra Leone. 42 is the average life expectancy of women there and one in 8 dies because of childbirth and complications.  It seems to me quite extraordinary that women in Scotland take it almost for granted they will live through childbirth, while for many women elsewhere in the world, pregnancy is a death sentence.

There is no need to have this rate of maternal mortality anywhere on earth. Those with the power to do something about it, should do it and stop financing wars and other toxic activities. We should all be blazing mad at this female carnage.

Emotionally zonked by the International Slavery Museum, I had lunch before visiting the Tate Liverpool. I wanted to see the gallery curated by Carol Ann Duffy and this did not disappoint. I spent ages there looking at her choice of exhibits from the whole Tate collection.

Gillian Wearing, Signs that Say at Tate Liverpool.

Duffy has written a sonnet specially for the exhibition

Poem

I couldn't see Guinness and not envisage a nun;

a gun, a finger and thumb;

midges, blether, scribble, scrum.

A crescent moon, boomerang, smirk, bone;

or full, a shield a stalker,

or stone. I couldn't see woods

for the names of the trees - sycamore,

yew, birch, beech -

or bees

without imagining music scored

on the air - nor pass a nun

without calling to mind a pint of one

stout, untouched, seen on a bar

at the Angelus.

What I think...

If this is global warming I really don't want it.  I'm fed up and ready to moan my wee heid aff with all the disruption that the snow has caused for the past many days. I'm equally fed up whether trudging out in it or stuck in the house looking out at it.

My (and everyone else's life) has been cancelled, or that's how it feels.  All this time on my hands means I'm spending a lot of it reading trivia online. Or looking out at the deserted street where no one is moving apart from the wildlife. But I've passed the point of interest in tracks left in the snow by the local fox population, or the antics of the penguins on Edinburgh Zoo's Penguin Cam.

Yesterday, there were some interesting cloud formations to photograph while hanging out the window. The sun came out at times and lit up the clouds with brilliant colours. Today has been uniformly grey as the cloud has closed in and the flakes of snow are getting larger.

Some news does get through.  A friend went into labour yesterday and had to go to hospital by ambulance as her street was impassible by car. What a bloody nightmare, except that my friend is resourceful and practical and just got on with getting herself safe and giving birth to a delightful baby boy.

I've spent several days anxious about how my daughter is getting to her work in all this. She lives at the bottom of a very steep hill and works many miles away in an establishment built in an exposed part of West Lothian that gets snow before and after anywhere else. This week she has been night shift which means at the end of a long shift she has to get home after a night of heavy snow while tired out. The boyfriend has had to resort to borrowing his dad's 4x4 to get her to and fro a couple of times. Even then, it's been touch and go on the roads.

Much praise is being heaped on the efforts by essential staff to get to work in all this, and it's nice that government and community are appreciative of staff who manage somehow to get to work.  Here in Edinburgh, I'm thankful that I've been able to get buses to wherever I've been going so far this week.

Infuriatingly, snow hasn't prevented three lads going to wherever it is to promote their World Cup losing team's bid to host the damn thing later this century. Their frolics in the field of pointless tribal games serve only to  alienate non sports fans even further. Collectively, the one who looks good in knickers on bill boards, the one who hates poor people and lies about respecting the Scots and the dim aristo who failed to keep his hair, will no doubt be given uncalled for publicity regardless of the outcome of the vote.

Much more of this and I'm going to be driven to seek out house bound pensioners and forcibly buy them milk and bread. Assuming there is still food in the shops.

Winterval

it's all very well having celebrations in winter, but it can be downright perishing standing around outside waiting for things to happen. Last night, for instance...

I had a terrific time; I got off the bus and walked up the Mound till I could get a good view standing on the wall overlooking Princes Street Gardens. Radio Forth were playing musak of a vaguely xmassy flavour and some big(ish) wigs were spouting. The Norwegian bigwig mentioned that the 25th November was International Day of Protest Against VAW, so heaps of blessings on him.

Then a troop of drummers wended their way through the throngs. They were dressed how I imagine French soldiers were around at the time of Napoleon, or perhaps they merely looked like a Carry On version of French soldiers. Most likely I'd missed an announcement of who/what they were.

   

They drummed all the way to the top of the Mound and round the corner to were someone had (I assumed) carelessly left a muckle crane lying around.

Mais Non! They got on what turned out to be a death defying and bonemarrow freezing human mobile. Drumming somewhat relentlessly as they were suspended over the hill and swung about the place. The person at the top appeared to shed her hat and clothes, to reveal a trapeze outfit and then gyrate in the sub zero temperature many feet above the tree, the crowd and the sharp pointy railings.

They finished by sprinkling fairy dust over the tree and voila! It was lit. Winterval officially commenced.

Then came a goodly quantity of fireworks.

My feet were nearly numb with cold, but the rest of me was warm, so I hirpled up to que outside St Giles Cathedral for a while, then got trampled in a peculiarly fast moving glacier of christians(?) mobbing the Royal Norwegian Carol concert therein.

It was warm enough inside to thaw my feet but I was too cold to unlock rigid muscles even during the hour and a bit of Norwegian carolling. The concert was excellent, especially the Edinburgh University Chamber Choir. I happily rose to the challenge of trying to sing unfamiliar carols in Norwegian as well as one or two carols I sort of remembered from long ago.

The Norwegian connection needs an explanation.  In thanks for the help and support given to Norway by Scotland during WW2, the Norwegians have gifted the city of Edinburgh a Christmas tree for the past 25 years, hence the Norwegian presence and their Advent Concert.

Costume Exhibition

The Heroes and Heroines exhibition at Leeds City Museum was a diverting way to spend about 45 minutes looking at a variety of costumes from TV and film. There were also some examples of clothes from earlier periods too.

I took a few pictures of the costumes which I found particularly beautiful. The way in which the work involved creating the clothes was well explained on the cards beside the exhibits and this added to my enjoyment. 

Not being any kind of seamstress, I learned a fair amount just reading through the descriptions of techniques for ageing some of the outfits and the level of quality that differs depending on whether the costume is for TV or film.  I wondered if the advent of HD TV will mean everything that is produced will need to be of a higher standard to cope with the detail HD TV can pick up.

Miss Matty's costume from Cranford.

My favourite of the 'real' clothes, a 1950's coral pink cocktail dress.

I didn't take note of where all of the outfits were used, but I've chosen those which seemed most sumptuous, and those photographs which turned out best.

The exhibition is on till the new year, but I doubt I'll return to find out who wore what and in what context.

Day in Leeds

I went on my first visit to Leeds recently. What a lovely place, full of varied architecture and interesting arty things to go see. Not to mention very nice cafes and restaurants; but why so many shops?

Taking the bus tour around and about helped make sense of the layout before I set off again on foot. I also learned a lot of the history and development of the area.


I've been on a few of these city tours and this was probably the most comprehensive commentary so far, although the ancient gossip about some football team and some referee decision was irrelevant.

 

I took lots of pictures on foot and on the bus.

A curious structure, at the edge of Millennium Square.

The Royal Armories museum.

Statue at City Square.

There is still a lot of Leeds I'd like to see more of, so I hope to return sometime. And while I was there, I went to see a couple of exhibitions and the Henry Moore Institute, but I'll cover those in another post.