A Mike Leigh experience

I saw Mr Turner on Friday and enjoyed it very much. As ever, Mike Leigh gives you something to chew on. It's partly an examination of genius and how a fat grunting man could be one of the few world class painters that Britain ever produced and partly a celebration of the beauty and power of the natural world. I particularly enjoyed Turner's amusement at seeing work by the pre-Raphaelites for the first time.

The whole trip felt like an improvisation exercise with a film in the middle. Waiting on the stairs to go into the busy cinema, I got caught in the crossfire of some braying middle class people and their too-loud talk of holidays, retirement and what terrific culture vultures they were.  At the end of the film, one of the womem sitting along from me told everybody how overlong, tedious and pointless she thought the film was. I thought I had let the crowd clear before leaving, but again got stuck on the stairs. And who was behind me but my mouthy friends? I managed to shut out the matter of their discussion.

Re-reading

Warning: may contain hobbits.

I first read The Hobbit when I was about 10. A while back it occured to me (probably while watching the last slice of Peter Jackson CGI) that I had never reread it. Finding an nice Allen and Unwin edition (see above) in a charity shop a few weeks ago pushed me over the edge.

The first thing I noticed was how good Tolkien is at landscapes. This is a story with many changes of scene, and in a way the landscape of Middle Earth is the subject. There is a sense of real observation in his descriptions: they are not generic. The approach to Rivendell made little sense to me as a child:

They were growing anxious, for they saw now that the house might be hidden almost anywhere between them and the mountains.

How can you lose a valley? But after walking in the Alps I can believe the sudden transition:

They came to the edge of a steep fall in the ground so suddenly that Gandalf's horse nearly slipped down the slope.

Likewise, where our heroes are trying to get away from the Misty Mountains they slide down a steep slope of loose rock debris and are saved by the pines on the fringes of a wood. This reminds me irresistably of parts of the Cairngorms.
 
If the journey struck me strongly, the supposed excuse for it (lost treasure, the Lonely Mountain etc.) takes a long time to arrive and is dealt with rather speedily when it does. However if the climactic battle is briefly described, ex-Lieutenant Tolkien knows what he is talking about.

The book is also the journey of Bilbo from timidity to responsibility. I notice that a key scene where he takes charge of a difficult river crossing is at the exact midpoint of the book. I've no idea if this is deliberate or not.

I'm sure I will end up watching the third part of Peter Jackson's film version. Given what I've said, it may be no error for him to take so long over the journey. But the meaning for me is in the reality of the landscape and not in a lot of fantasy violence made with an eye for a video-game spin-off.

Still here

I know. It's been ages.

I could give a long and rambling attempt to justify my absence, but it comes down to not really feeling like it.

What a gloomy day to start communicating with people again.

RIP: Iain (M) Banks

I was very saddened to learn that Iain Banks died yesterday. I came to his books late, as I often seem to, not wanting to trust received opinion and waiting until other snuck him under my radar: a climbing friend told me the surprise ending of The Wasp Factory in the Partick Tavern one evening; a fellow PhD student talked of a gambler in a book he'd read who had his face removed and replaced with a metal plate so that he kept a good poker face (from Consider Phlebas); another climbing acquaintance keeping to himself in the Smiddy in Dundonnell, with just a copy of Use of Weapons projecting from his sleeping bag.

Sneak in he did, and reading a new Banksie novel became a special treat reserved for holidays. I still associate certain passages with where I first read them. The Bridge was read in Peanmeanach bothy and Against a Dark Background on Crete.

I am very grateful to him for starting me to read Science Fiction again. I had been a keen reader in my teens, but lapsed for years until I found his tales of the Culture. This may be his lasting monument: a wonderful counterblast to all those dystopias that I read in the 70s. In it, you can live (almost) forever, enhance your body, safely alter your mind as you think fit, change sex and generally have a lot of fun. He makes this all sound plausible and consistent, but none of it is taken too seriously. One thing that turned me away from a lot of Sci-fi was the po-faced bland seriousness of it. No fear of that with Banksie. One favourite moment has the protagonist (probably one of his very convincing female ones) entering a Ship when they are having a bit of a knees-up. The Ship's avatar advances in the form of a Teddy bear and announces "I need a hug!".

Margaret Thatcher

I've been staying out of the whole what-was-the-Thatcher-legacy? discussions, but it occurs to me that I have an anecdote to add if anybody is interested.

It's 1988 and my parents and I are visiting the Glasgow Garden Festival. We are all quite keen on this bit of urban regeneration and have bought season tickets. One day (I think it was a Sunday) we form a resolution to go up the Clydesdale Bank tower. We've noticed that it tends to have long queues and so decide to go immediately after the site opens in the morning. We are therefore in Anderston ready for the opening, but something seems to be wrong, as gates are not being opened.  Clearly, something is happening. The something seems to involve a helicopter that appears and lands on the site. We are let in (a bit later than advertised) and hurry to the tower, along with quite a few others with the same idea. However there is a discrete yet determined security presence, and we are held back. Something has not finished happening. Then, yes, there she was. Our Prime Minister appeared, only a few meters away. I think Denis was with her, though I may have added that fact. As I remember, she waved, or at least acknowledged us somehow. The reply was stony to say the least. After a silence you could have cut with a knife, she got her wee trip up the tower. I hope she liked the view.

After the famous people had gone, there was a squabble among the various people who had been held back by security over who was now first. I did get my trip to the viewing platform just after, about which I remember nothing.

I wasn't jubilant at her death, because I'm not like that. Despite being brought up in Glasgow in the 70s and early 80s and my dad losing his job as the market for textile machinery collapsed, and the family having a generally shitty time for much of the 80s, I find that I can still find things to approve of in Margaret Thatcher. (And if I told my 12-year-old self that, I wouldn't believe me.) There was something very wrong, not in trade unionism generally, but in British trade unionism. And, in that rather scary single-minded way of hers, she took it out. She probably did us all a massive favour there.

Her other main legacy was, ironically, on the Labour party, which had to pull itself apart and reinvent itself as New Labour (with a hefty dose of her policies thrown in) before it could be elected again.

PS: Google suggests to me that this took place on Saturday, May 14th 1988. So not a Sunday.
PPS: According to this blog (which I find fairly persuasive because of its nice use of statistics), Thatcher had less to do with the decline of unions than you might think.

Robot & Frank

Recently, Wednesdays have become film night for me. Last week it was Lore and before that Lincoln, but tonight I went to see Robot & Frank after being intrigued by the trailers. Tricky things to judge, trailers. Sometimes you can react with an instant yes or no. Sometimes, as here, almost anything is possible. In this case, I really enjoyed the film. It's a very skillful combination of buddy movie, science fiction piece and meditation about memory and ageing. If like me you spent a lot of your teens reading Asimov's robot stories, then you will instantly recognise the good doctor's rules being applied. As far I remember, there isn't an Asimov story about a robot being persuaded to assist in a jewel heist on the grounds that it is good for its owner's health, but I bet he'd have used it if he thought of it. The film does rather run out of steam towards the end. Having posed lots of questions it doesn't really resolve anything and ends on a slightly false note. I can't help thinking how well Stanley Kubrick would have made it (yes, that's true of a lot of films, but you know what I mean).

A nice print job

I've just got a new passport and can't get over how pretty it is. Those pages for official stamps are no longer blank but have elaborate scenes from the British landscape overlaid with weather symbols. It's actually not a bad primer of Britishness. This is how we see ourselves, but let's not make a fuss.  All this does make up for my terrible picture. They are so insistent now in the instructions about not smiling that I end up looking worried and miserable. But in the passport I have an irridescent compass rose over my face and some birds are flapping past so I just look a bit pensive.

I do think they could have a wider range of scenes. Maybe an urban centre late at night with a merry band of binge-drinkers.

Doors Open Day

I've meant to go to see the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland for some time. That mouthful of a name makes it sound so dull, does it not? Much Edwardian earnestness is expected: it's actually brilliant. I saw a display of photos of vanished industries, heard their photgrapher talk about his work, and listened to a talk by John Hume about his work in recording industry in Glasgow and elsewhere. In the questions after, somebody trotted out some cliches about the decline of shipbuilding in that city and was treated to a two minute course in economic history.

They were also selling some publications cheap and I bought a book that I had browsed through before, of photos by Erskine Beveridge. I'd never heard of him before either. They are wonderful pictures with that time-machine quality of good photography. That man is standing in front of his black house now.

This all turned into the main event of the day, but I did also get to see behind the scenes at the Queens Hall (quirly fact: they have a electrical substation inside the building), saw how my former next door neighbours in the old vet school building are getting on, and caught up with the highly specific and splendid Causey project.

So it was doors open in Newington rather than Edinburgh really, but I suppose I've lived here long enough for it to feel like home and to care what the neighbours are up to.

My evening so far

I know, it's been ages.

When I came home tonight, a somewhat drunk couple were smoking on my doorstep (I live in a tenement, so that's the street door). That's OK. They let me past and the woman explained their presence as being because they were giving their rabbit some exercise. And sure enough, they had a white rabbit on a lead.  It seemed content. I told them that was fine and went in.

They've gone now, and I'm wondering if it was a dream. I feel I have to pass this on. There was a bit of shouting for a while. The rabbit was just an excuse, surely?

Kye

Not much posting recently, but I have been out and about and taking pictures, which I ought to share.

Here are some Highland cows tucking in near Crieff on a cold but sunny day. Quite an appropriate image, as Crieff used to be a major centre for droving.

Dory Previn

I'm sad to hear that Dory Previn has died, but quite impressed that somebody as non-mainstream should be featured on the Radio 4 news. I do wonder if one of the editors is a fan and swung things a little? It was odd to hear clips of songs that I thought so personal and confessional (and so directed at me) on national radio.

Get the letters right

I'm still enjoying my Kindle, (and Quantum is very good by the way), but I do wish they had taken more trouble over converting the text. All Greek letters seem to have been scanned as images and come out the wrong size. In a book concerning wavelengths (λ) and wave functions (ψ) this is annoying.

In which I join the electronic age

I bought a Kindle (model 4) a bit before Christmas, and I'd like to record some impressions before it becomes too normal.

The size and weight are very good. I find it fits in the hand nicely and is comfortable to hold (and how do they get that slightly matt texture on the back?). Getting started was very easy once I got the key for my WiFi hub sorted out. In doing this, I found the on-screen keyboard to be quite hard going, but then you don't buy this to do a lot of typing, do you?

The famous e-ink screen delivers pretty well. I found it easy to read and the font is crisper than I expected. The screen is 800x600, which isn't much these days, but given its scale that is plenty. Since the power consumption of displaying a page is zero (changing page takes some tiny amount of energy) the battery life is really long between charges. I've only just recharged after its initial tankful, and I could have waited for longer.

I do find a tiny awkwardness about using the buttons to change page. Hard to say what is wrong, but I have had a few misfires and the page jumping when I didn't expect it. But a very minor point.

So what have I been reading? Well a couple of free ebooks to start with. My first was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (and what would he have made of it?). I have now stumped up for some modest purchases and am, for example, 59% through Salt by Mark Kurlansky. It's an interesting read, which I'd recommend. It is also longer than I thought - it's a minor flaw that you can't really tell the length of an ebook, though you do form a rough idea from how quickly the percentage on the progress bar changes. So far, that's the only place that I think I miss the physicality of a book. The other area where the paper version might score is in illustrations. Salt has some, so I've been able to test this out. The Kindle allows you to zoom in on pictures, and flips the picture round if necessary to make the best use of the screen. The results are fair, I'd say. Some pictures have not been scanned at a very high resolution, and any that include a lot of mid-tone look a bit murky, as the screen only runs from light grey to dark grey. But then you don't buy this to look at pictures either.

I also have Quantum still to read, as it was dead cheap on Amazon a few days ago. The pricing does puzzle me somewhat. I reckon publishers are still a bit wary and in some cases seem to be discouraging buyers of e-books by making them a bit more expensive than paper. I think if the pricing is right, they can sell more books (i.e. it's not a zero sum game).

New Year bothy trip

Up to about 15 years ago, most of my New Years were spent in a bothy somewhere in the Highlands. This fell away rather recently, what with people having children, moving away to jobs and suchlike. But myself and some friends decided to revisit the bothy experience this year.

We walked in to Cadderlie on Hogmanay. This is a faintly odd walk-in, starting as it does in a quarry, but soon the view looks more like Argyll, with dripping birch and alder woods. We needed the headtorches by the time we arrived to find an empty bothy. Later, two other parties arrived, also from Edinburgh, and took up residence in the other room. We joined them for the bells and some refreshment was had.

On the 1st, we mostly gathered wood for the fire. This was possibly the best day and I took some photos.

Just after taking this I walked down to the shore and saw an otter run into the loch (too fast for the camera, unfortunately). It surfaced some way out and watched me for a while. In other wildlife action, the bothy mice had chewed up a pair of Crocs.

The morning of the 2nd must have been one of the grimmest I have experienced. Mid-morning it started getting darker again, then there was a peal of thunder and it sleeted for a while. The green-grey scene outside was like a definition of the word "bleak". Later, things improved a little and we went for a walk along the loch a bit.

This looks like being the winter of the high winds, after two winters of snow and ice. On the way back, we had snow from Tyndrum to Glen Ogle, then an increasing number of fallen trees, a field full of water at Callander that was emptying over the road, and two lorries on their sides on the road just outside Stirling. This all felt very ominous, but although there had been high winds in Edinburgh too, my flat seemed to be in one piece.

New genre

I've just discovered what a supercut is. Try out this quirky history of the line "What are you doing here?" in Dr Who. All sorts of possibilities come to mind. What about all the Doctor's excuses for the Tardis not working? Or all of Servalan's rather scary smiles from Blake's 7?

Non-smart phone

I've just done something I rarely do: buy a mobile phone. I decided that the easiest way to do this given that I have zero interest in which one to get was to go into the first shop I found and ask for their cheapest pay-as-you-go model. Which seems to have worked. Ironically, the shop had terrible reception for Vodaphone and so making the test call (or whatever it is) was really difficult.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

I've still not been to the pictures much recently, but I did make an effort to see this, as I have a long and happy relationship with John Le Carre's work.

Basically: it's not at all bad, but falls down in some important ways. Firstly, I like the general look of the film: it's all a bit seedy and understated and the colours are unsaturated browns and greens. This does sometimes veer into a 70s pastiche perhaps (it looks more of its decade than the Alec Guinness version which was made in 1979). I also liked the portrayal of the Circus itself. Not sure where that huge building is that they filmed in but it has a great sense of place, of claustrophobia, and suspicion. It's a lot less cosy and more industrial than the cream-painted corridors in the old BBC version. There is more made of people listening in to phone calls, which sets the right atmosphere. The scene where Guillam has to steal a file from the library, and then gets hauled in front of the senior guys and roasted is very good. There are many other nice details, including the decision to make Percy Alleline Scottish (as he should be).

I feel one big error is the character of Ricky Tarr, who kicks the whole plot off. Ricky is a cocky little bastard who you wouldn't turn your back on, and was brilliantly played by Hywel Bennett in the 1979 version. The version here is all dewy-eyed sensitive boy who seems to have actually fallen for Irina the Russian trade delegate. As if Ricky would care, with all his other conquests.

A brief scene suggests to us that Peter Guillam is gay, which seems a pointless change to the book, in which we learn a bit about the nice female flautist he is currently seeing.

Many of Le Carre's lovely minor characters are gone: there is no Fawn, no Sam Collins (though Jerry Westerby seems to have inexplicably taken on some bits of his role), no Max ("I drive for you, shoot for you, what the hell?"). It must be hard compressing a complex novel like this into two hours of screen time, so maybe some loss is inevitable, but you can't help mourning your favourites.

And it's another film which doesn't know how to end: I was looking forward to the moment of unmasking, which is not actually shown, and to Colin Firth doing his big final number about why he did it, which is skated over very rapidly. And the end follows almost immediately. I think one of the last bits is meant to show Ann coming back to George, but I'm not sure.

Basically still worthy of your time, I think.

All change at Haymarket

The news that the council have voted for Edinburgh's trams to stop at Haymarket, rather than going to St Andrew's Square is incredible, even by the fucked-up standards of this project. Can you imagine having to change there to a bus to complete your journey? More likely, nobody would use it for the journey from the airport. I certainly wouldn't. I do wonder if it's not an attempt to goad Alex Salmond into paying more for it. But he's too smart for that I think.

The concealment of information

In our age of instant and easy communication it's interesting to see how terrible some organisations are at it. I renewed my house insurance recently. The company didn't send me the policy documents; they sent me an email with a link to a web site where I can log in and view the documents. This is annoying. Why should I create an account that I'll use about once a year, and will forget the password to? Well, after some grumbling, I eventually did. There was a link to my policy, which was in the form of an ASPX file. Some surfing turned up a few ideas about how to view this, but none of them worked. Why do they make it this hard? Why not use a PDF or an Office document like the rest of the planet? In the end I phoned them up and asked for a paper copy by post.

It's not just the technical fails that are annoying here. If you are buying a service, there is something reasuring about a printed document that you can hold in your hand. I feel they've just got this wrong.

Alas for the Clyde Room

I went to Glasgow yesterday, mainly to see the new Transport Museum. I had a nice day out, but found the museum itself a bit disappointing. Firstly the good bits. I like the look of the building and they have secured an eye-catching contemporary look. The redevelopment of that section of the waterfront means that they had a blank canvas, and we've got something quite fresh-looking as a result. The Glen Lee has been moved downriver a little to sit outside and looks rather splendid reflected in the dark glass front. Its masts stick up over the top too, like branches of a metal tree. The Govan ferry now lands just outside and there are interesting connections with other developments along the river.

But inside, it's too small. I know I went on a busy day with lots of kids running about, but my first thought was: "How have they managed to fit everything in here?" The answer seems to be that they haven't. Like a number of other modern galleries that I've visited, the building has exciting bulges and angles, which look cool but lose a lot of space. If your main reason for having the space is to display bulky things like cars and trains, this is not good news. They have come up with some clever ideas to get round this, like the much-talked-about "wall of cars", but I am not impressed. You can only see the nearest and lowest cars clearly. The ones furthest away are poorly seen, and from below, so you can examine under the mudguards, but not on top of the bonnet. If there was viewing gallery parallel to the wall the gimmick might work--but there isn't.

Now we come to the real crusher: where is the Clyde Room? This was my favourite part of the old museum. It was a largish room where the museum's superb collection of ship models was laid out in a huge grid of glass cases. Here was the history of Clyde ship building, from pioneering steam craft and large warships to big Cunarders and container ships. And don't think that I mean some crappy amateur attempts: these were the models by professional model builders made when the ships were ordered, huge and resplendent with every plank, railing and porthole. So what have they got now? HMS Hood sits on its own. A tall display case has ship models hung at different heights. Why would you want to look at the underside of the hull? And they're not even labelled. Another display promises to be a ship "conveyor" (or something) but doesn't seem to be working. All of these break up the collection and lose all context, turning the displays into meaningless fragments. A grid of well-labelled glass cases, with perhaps a chronological order, is an excellent way of presenting information that allows you to find your own connections between things. As a piece of information design, the old Clyde Room was actually rather fine. I think Edward Tufte would have approved. I'm just getting grumpy now, so I'll stop.