Muswell Hill at the Orange Tree

Muswell Hill is so funny at times that at one point the action had to pause momentarily to allow a member of the audience to recover from a particularly violent and loud fit of laughter.

But lets go back to the beginning.

I got their early enough to get my preferred position on the front bench opposite the entrance. For some reason all the other occupants appeared to be doctors, including one I know.

From my usual seat I took my usual photo of the stage taken at a jaunty angle. I was looking in to the jaws of a kitchen and that is where all the action takes place.

What we witness is a dinner party, and it's something of a car crash.

The guests arrive one at a time allowing us to be introduced to each of them in turn. They are all odd, if not quite weird, in some way and the cause for this is often buried in their histories.

And that's how the story progresses.

We meet more people (I will not give any games away by saying how many they are or why they are there) and we learn more about them.

Some of this is genuinely surprising and shocking, both in a funny way and a dramatic way.

The characters move in and out of the kitchen and we have a series of short interplays between two or three of them.

A lot of this is seriously funny and, again, I do not want to give anything away but the singing scene and the Shakespearean quotes scene are two of the many gems.

There are darker moments too. These are usually dug up from the past but there are present day tensions too, mostly of a kind that tends to be called relationship problems. Some of the old scars are much worse than that.

In the background to these personal dramas we get newsflashes about the earthquake in Haiti. Little is made of this by the party guests but it sits there as a constant reminder that things could be worse.

The actors are excellent, but you knew that as they always are.

If I had to pick fault with the play it would be with the production that makes little of the Orange Trees unique layout and with the cumbersome set that may be a little too big for the stage.

All that does though is knock a five star performance down to four and three quarters.

Muswell Hill is a violently funny play that also manages to shock you with some black moments and that makes for a hugely satisfying evening.

X In Search of Space

Hoaxwind certainly have some good ideas for concerts.

In December they audaciously played either side of the Hawkwind Christmas Concert in the pub next door to the venue and now they may have even topped that by playing with Hawkwind Legend Nik Turner (currently very active with Space Ritual) and including Hawkwind's second album, In Search of Space, in its entirety.

Hoaxwind also find some unusual venues to play in and so I found myself in Tufnell Park for the first time ever. This sits just above Kentish Town so I should not have been surprised to find that The Boston Arms is an Irish Pub.

Luckily I had swapped my Welsh Rugby shirt that I wore earlier in the day for something traditionally black.

The venue was actually the Boston Arms Music Room which has its own entrance and bar so I headed there as soon as my pint of Guinness was finished and did not wait to see the conclusion of the Gaelic Football match that was on the big screen in the public bar.

Next door the music had started with the opening set from Scud Penguin followed by one from The Strange Agency. Both were acceptable appetisers for the main course.

Hoaxwind started much as usual, and that is a good.

The stage was a mixed blessing. There seemed to be plenty of space for everybody (and don't forget that there are seven Hoaxwindians) but the odd shape meant that some of them were hidden in dark corners.

I was too busy enjoying the music to make any attempt at a set list so I'll assume that the opening part of their set was mostly the four-minute songs they favour like Urban Guerrilla, Damnation Alley and Kerb Crawler.

Nik joined them early on, squeezing in to a busy front row next to Eugene where they played a game of swap-the-instrument all night. Eugene won that one by bringing out an acoustic guitar.

As the set progressed the quality of the sound became more obvious. I don't know if it was the sound system, the large hall or a combination of the two but something was working very well.

The main beneficiary of this was the spacey electronics that were more audible than ever before and added a lot of richness to the wall of sound.

Somewhere in the set In Search of Space started with the Turner/Brock composition You Shouldn't Do That, which lasts a long time but not long enough. The pretty full crowd was dancing seriously by then and most were joining in with the many repeats of "Shouldn't Do That" in the chorus.

Of course we also had Master of the Universe from the same album as well as other long-play favourites like Brainstorm and Orgone Accumulator (pretty much established as my favourite Hoaxwind/Space Ritual track).

It was a sociable evening too with several familiar faces there. It was good to meet Dennis Brunskill IRL for the first time and disappointing not to link-up with John Keogh (who looks nothing like his profile pictures on facebook or foursquare).

The party lasted until after Midnight when the many happy revellers then had to face the twin challengers of heavy snow on the roads and no trains underground.

Luckily I had been offered a lift back to Kingston (thanks Margaret!) and our path home was passable with caution.

I still have my reservations about Tufnell Park but none about Hoaxwind. This was another excellent concert and probably their best ever. Wherever they go from here I'll be going with them.

Another pub quiz

Having been lured back in to the Willoughby Arms Pub Quiz in December I was soon called in to action again. I suspect that this had more to do with my willingness to set another quiz rather than any great enthusiasm for the way that I set them.

This time I did rounds on: Parks, Gardens and Recreation Grounds in Kingston upon Thames; TV Spin-offs, e.g. Holby City comes from Casualty; Top Scorers, e.g. Monty Panesar took 69 wickets for Sussex; EU Leaders; No. 1 singles on 27 January starting with 1957 and Frankie Vaughan's "The Garden of Eden"; and Advertising Slogans, e.g. "Finger lickin' good" was used by KFC.

As usual some of the rounds proved to be harder than others. I expect people to do better on the round on Kingston than they did but I knew that the round on EU leaders would be low-scoring. The TV and Advertising Slogan rounds proved to be the easiest and I think we even got some 10/10s.

I followed up my picture round from the last time on cartoon cats with an equally easy one on cartoon dogs.

This is the one round where I did not have to write the answers down as all of these dogs are very familiar to me. How many can you name?

Big Ideas on Social Justice

Recent meetings of Big Ideas have been busy and an early arrival is advised so when the star turn was Newsnight's Paul Mason I got there around 6:30pm for an 8pm start. It was a good move.

There were other early birds and I was soon juggling conversations with beer and cheesy chips. By the time we got to the bewitching hour they were standing in the aisles ready to hear Paul Mason espouse on his chosen subject, What Would Be A Socially Just Solution To The Current Economic Crisis?

Paul told a history of Social Justice starting with the interesting claim that Social Justice was invented by the Catholic Church centuries ago to keep their followers away from Socialism and, in the modern day, has been refined by the likes of Rawls to remove the original concepts of power and hierarchy.

An early sound-bite was that neo-liberalism had converted the rural poor to the urban poor.

This stalled a decade or more ago and since then growth has been maintained by borrowing rather than increases in pay. This form of capitalism has run its course and the question now is what will replace it?

The current approach to debt bankrupts countries not banks and this impacts most on the young who need governments to provide the services and pensions etc. that earlier generations have enjoyed.

An example of what this means is cutting the minimum wage in Greece and threatening to do so here.

As times become harder the call for protectionism grows. There will be a trade war with China.

There is also a growth in the appeal of marginal parties, both left and right, as the mainstream central parties are seen to have no answers. Or, more worryingly, are too myopic to see the real problem that they face.

Opening the debate up to the floor we got our first mention of Marx, no Big Ideas meeting is complete until he gets mentioned.

I made the point that the young have been loosing out for some time but they have not noticed. For example, I was paid to go to university whereas today they have to pay $9,000 a year. Similarly Legal Aid has withered away.

The People: Planet: Profit: mantra is just a disguise and copies the factory acts of a century ago. The real aim is not to be nice to people but to make sure that there are still markets and employees in the future. It is the system that is being protected.

It is no longer clear what the working class believe in or are prepared to fight for, which makes it difficult to engage with them politically. We do not have a modern equivalent of a Land fit for Heroes.

The debate was wide-reaching and absorbing. Paul answered eloquently and at length pulling stories from history to make his points. I was seriously impressed.

Less impressive, but sadly not uncommon for Big Ideas, was some of the intellectual snobbery on display where people were criticised for not having read something or other, e.g. Rawls, or for having, done so, come to a different conclusion from the questioner.

But I can let intellectual snobbery pass me by and the overwhelming impressions of the evening were Paul Mason's authority and the conversations with friends. Another excellent evening at Big Ideas.

LIKE 32: The Future of History

Having missed LIKE 31, on information literacy, a topic I am very interested in, (due to working away) I was keen to get back in the groove and go to LIKE 32 on digital archives, a topic I am not that interested in. Or so I thought.

Our guides for the evening were LIKE stalwart Lena Roland and Adrian Brown from the Parliament Archives.

Lena opened with a general description of the problems relating to the retention of digital materials and some of the approaches than can be used to address these. Adrian then explained the specific issues that Parliament has and the work that they are now doing.

In the past most information was stored on physical media (paper, film, etc.) and while these have their own preservation problems they are generally understood. Whereas now most is created and stored digitally. This creates new problems that we need to solve.

Compounding the problem is the sheer volume of information. Once we just had a few newspapers and TV channels to worry about, now we have to add the likes of blogs, twitter, Google+, Facebook, etc. etc.

This means that a "save everything" solution is difficult to create and even harder to search. The alternative "save the important stuff" solution relies on good judgement on what is worth saving and that judgement often only comes with hindsight. For example, all my old family photos may become useful if one of my sons becomes famous but otherwise they have little external value.

This is not just a problem for historians and archivists, we are all creators of digital content and need to come up with our own solutions for our documents, photos, blogs and tweets.

Some organisations are wise to the problem with initiatives to, for example, archive Twitter.

Searching will become more of a problem. Books have ISBNs to identify and classify them but there are no equivalents for blogs, tweets, etc.

Customisation of web sites to individual users, e.g. the Amazon home page, complicates matters further. How do you archive Amazon if every person's view of it is different?

The Parliamentary Archives in some ways have a simpler problem to solve in that it is just concerned with a relatively small and discrete set of records but this is made harder by the historical records, some of which are on parchment, and the need to have a precise and accurate record.

The approach they are taking is to separate the content (the words) from the media (a PDF file on a CD-ROM). Adrian gave the example of an old movie that requires the preservation of both the acetate film and a projector to display it. Separating content from media allows the preservation of both to be addressed separately.

Approaches to be considered include Preservation (keep everything as it is today), Migration (move it periodically to new media, e.g. from WordStar to Word) and Emulation (a new machine pretending to be an old one).

There are some decisions to make about what constitutes "content". Clearly it is the words but it may matter how the pages are laid out, which font was used, etc.

Links are an increasing problem. For example, a debate may refer to a policy document that is held on a Departmental website that is not under the Archives' control, i.e. it could move or be deleted. Archives are working with the Departments on this and one approach is to get them to keep everything in its original place even if it is no longer directly addressable from the Department's website.

Archives are considering whether the only way that they can be sure of keeping an accurate record is to keep a copy of all the things that they link to, with the implications that has for storage.

My notes from this session broke my golden rule and went on to a second page, which only goes to show that I am more interested in this topic than I thought.

Overall the debate was encouraging in that bright minds are aware of and understand the problem. What was less convincing was whether anybody has yet got the answers.

Between the Tower and the Bridge

It is quite a short walk from Tower Bridge to London Bridge along the south side of the Thames but there is much to see along the way.

Getting off the bus that arrives north-bound along Tower Bridge Road the eye is immediately drawn to nearly complete Shard.

This is visible from most of London but usually the lower sections are hidden by building that were once thought of as tall but here there is only Old London between you and the Shard which makes most of it visible.

Sadly all this extra visibility does is confirm just how bland the Shard is and its impressive height does little to overcome the disappointment of this.

Tower Bridge could hardly be more different.

It gets none of its immense charm from its height. Instead it relies almost completely on Victorian Neo-Gothic decoration.

You have to zoom in to the picture to see it in all its glory with extravagant decoration everywhere as if the building is scared of leaving any part unadorned.

A blank wall calls for a small window, a curvaceous lintel, a balcony, a pillar or an alcove.

Either side of the tower its function is revealed in the metal that keeps the road from the water.

And just to make sure that you notice the wires somebody has kindly painted them Manchester City blue.

I think that I would have gone for black myself but at least the light blue has the advantage of being distinctive. Maybe yellow would work.

For most of Central London the river this is a sleeping giant, even crossing it on the nearby Millennium Bridge has no hint of menace, but the Thames grows wider and more violent passing the bridge as it tries to scare away the frail wooden boats that used to gather in the busy docks there.

The swell is noticeable and suddenly the boat that looked so big when moored upstream looks frail and hopelessly outclassed. Surprisingly it calls the river's bluff and survives.

The modernisation, gentrification and yuppification, of much of the south bank has produced a profusion of individualistic mixed-use buildings housing open-plan offices, trendy shops, trendier restaurants and expensive flats.

Among these is the Hays Galleria which has a large inner courtyard with two distinctive features.

One is the moving scrap-metal statue in the centre that always reminds me of Sir Killalot from Robot Wars.

The other is the roof. I like roofs, especially ones like this so it gets the nod here ahead of the statue.

The building bends slightly to the left as it approaches the river and the roof flows with it.

As you would expect, the galleria has a collection of cafes to feed the office workers and tourists giving you plenty of opportunity to sit under the shelter of the roof to enjoy it the more and to try and work out just what the status is meant to be.

Braver people can try one of the open-air courtyards.

Admiral's Court has a very (mainland) European feel to it. The buildings that surround the square are of a human scale and there is a work of art in the middle.

The water provides movement and vitality that sharpens the sense of calmness and peace in the figures.

Of course there are cafes and seats too making this a place to pause rather than rush through.

And the best feature is the total lack of cars that blight so much of Britain.

Returning to the Thames Path and looking across the river the history of London is there before you.

On the left is the Tower of London, which for almost a thousand year has been the reluctant home for would-be kings and princes.

On the right is the Gherkin which displaced the Nat West Tower as the City's iconic building in 2004.

In-between the buildings are a mixture of shapes, sizes and ages.

The newer ones look the more shocking but I suspect that is just because of their newness and that this will soon pass and they will become as familiar and as accepted as their neighbours.

Another part of old London lies all but hidden near to London Bridge Station.

Southwark Cathedral can also claim a history of a thousand years though the current building is much more recent having been completed only six hundred years ago.

The city has grown closer to the Cathedral over the years and it is now closely surrounded by buildings, roads and railways. Whatever peace it once brought to the community is long gone.

One of the culprits for the surrounding bustle is Borough Market which is busy bringing artisan food to trendy twenty-somethings.

But the food is of little interest me (OK, so the cheeses were tempting, and some of the pies) and my eyes turn away from the stalls and look naturally upward towards the splendid Vict5orian roof. 

The stretch between the two bridges is only around 500m, which you can walk in 5 minutes if you are mindful to do so, yet it manages to encapsulate the history and variety that makes London such a great city to walk through.