Dark we were and golden eyed

The first event that I went to in this year's Comica Festival was a panel talk on the arrival of American comics to the UK via fanzines, conventions and iconic shops like Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed.

I recall that my first visit to Dark They Were was on a trip up to London from Southampton University in '77 for a march against cuts in student grants (anybody else remember student grants?!) when I managed to do some quick shopping before the protesting began.

The shop blew me over with a ground floor packed with science fiction books many of which, like the comics on the floor below, were only available in the UK through a few specialist shops, none of which were in Southampton or Weymouth.

The basement was like Aladdin's Cave for me, except that you can read comics and gold is pretty useless of itself.

The sense of awe must have been blatant and soon I was talking to a helpful member of staff. Back in Southampton just getting comics regularly (from WH Smith) was a challenge and there was no way to get any news about comics. Suddenly I was surrounded by more comics than I could imagine and was talking to somebody who knew what happened in Marvel Two-in-One Annual #2 (featuring one of my favourites, Adam Warlock). I still have a Dark They Were shopping bag somewhere.

But back to present day and the talk. The panel consisted of five people who were heavily involved in the start of teen/adult comics in the UK, as retailers, distributors, fanzine producers and artists. And they were all clearly fans too.

The hyper-active Paul Gravett (the organiser of Comica) sat in the front row and nudged things along when the reminisces threatened to take the talk away from the rather loose script that it was attempting to follow. A little like herding cats but when cats are as cute as this, who cares?

The talk was aided by some period photographs and art work which really helped to recall those days. I was particularly impressed that legendary artist Brian Bolland showed us the cover of his first ever comic, drawn just for fun as a child, in which there was absolutely no sign of the talent or distinctive style that would emerge later.

The panellists were all informative and entertaining, which is always a winning combination, and so I had a rewarding afternoon. This was betrayed by the large grin that I wore throughout.

Talking about comics

I have contented myself so far by just reading comics (and a few books about comics) and have generally avoided fandom activities like conventions and signings, but that is starting to change.

Having dipped a cautious toe into the Comica waters over the weekend I was back for more on Monday night at Islington Central Library where Kevin O'Nell and Paul Gravett talked for two hours about Kevin's life and work.

It seemed that most of the audience were attracted by Kevin's recent, and current, work on the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but my interest dates back to the first Nemesis the Warlock story published in 2000AD way back in 1980. His distinctive angular style has been attracting deserved attention and praise ever since.

The talk wandered through various themes and we learnt, among other things, that Kevin's first job in comics was removing artists' signatures from pages of the Buster, that League moved from Warner Bros. to a smaller publisher to reduce the threat of being sued for copyright infringements and Marshall Law may yet be a film.

The Great Hall on the second floor of the library was grand but also vast and echoing which made listening to the conversation difficult at times. Fortunately the conversation was easily engaging enough to make the extra effort worthwhile and the two hours flew by and suddenly it was 8pm and we were being evicted sympathetically by the library staff.

Learning about comics

I've been reading comics for the best part of fifty years and been a serious collector for over thirty but I still learnt a great deal about the art from a talk at ComICA by Bryan Talbot.

ComICA is a festival celebrating the best of comics today and it is to my shame that I have not managed to get to one of their events before.

ComICA is organised by Paul Gravett who probably knows more about comics than anybody else around today. His knowledge and enthusiasm drive the festival.

In his excellent talk, Bryan explained some of the approach to and influences in his latest book, Grandville, a detective story with animals!

Without the talk I would have got the cultural references in Grandville to Rupert the Bear and Mucha etc. but Bryan explained so much more about the history of anthropomorphism in the graphic media and the other subtle references he has made to famous paintings and drawings.

Almost as a bonus, Bryan also explained the way that he crafts a page through layouts, the use of colours and action lines that guide the flow between panels.

Bryan demonstrated his storytelling skills in the way that he told the story behind Grandville, he even managed to make PowerPoint look interesting!

The presentation showed us pictures that helped to shape Grandville while Bryan narrated the story.

His knowledge of, well everything, was phenomenal and even reached as far as Racey Helps' Happy Families playing cards - I am sure we used to have a set of these.

I went in to the talk thinking that I knew quite a bit about comics but I learned a great deal in the hour or so and was thoroughly entertained in the process too.

I'll definitely be going to more ComICA events.

Many thanks to Bryan for the talk, to Paul Gravett for arranging it all and to Bryan (again) for patiently autographing every copy of Grandville with a drawing as well as a signature. Why did I agree to have my copy as a Christmas present?!

Alison's House at the Orange Tree

Alison's House, previously unknown to me, apparently won Susan Glaspell the 1931 Pulitzer Prize which gives it some pedigree.

However, I do know of other Glaspell plays staged at the Orange Tree, such as Chains of Dew, and that was incentive enough for me.

I am not sure what the incentive was for everybody else but I was pleased to see that the house was packed for the performance.

Alison was a poetess who died eighteen years ago and now the family are preparing to move out of the house for good. This stirs up memories for the various family members and the nature of these memories becomes more obvious and darker as the story unfolds.

Alison, though absent, provides an anchor for the rest of the family as their frailties unfold and we learn of several love-less marriages and the reactions to these (some stayed, some ran).

The story concerns Alison's reputation as a poetess as the centuries tick-over from the 19th to the 20th but the meat of the play, for me at least, is the view we get of fractured relationships and fractured characters.

The staging of the Orange Tree allows you to experience these fractures up close like no other theatre can; I was less than 1/2m away from the old lady when she died in her chair. That was a rather intense moment!

It almost goes without saying, but I will say it anyway, is that the acting was superb and the direction made the most of the Orange Tree's unique arrangement.

Another excellent night out at the Orange Tree. I am so very lucky to have such a reliable treat so close to home.

What sort of consultant am I?

Our CEO’s all-staff call this week covered the usual wide range of topics, one of which was the switch of terminology from "management consulting" to "business consulting", an issue that Logica and I have both been entwined in for some years.

I started my career in IT as a lowly programmer (I probably would have been asked to make the tea in those days if it was not for the fact that a tea trolley came around twice a day) and the first big step up was to analyst/programmer, which recognised that the understanding of customers’ needs is a rather useful skill. Along with this elevation came some formal training in Business Analysis where I learned lots of diagrammatic tools, such as Entity Relationship Diagrams and Functional Decomposition Diagrams. Tools I still use today.

For the next several years the roles that I had were either labelled Business Analyst or Team/Project Leader but the work always contained a mixture of both and I was happy with either title. Both terms are generally well understood within the industry. This is not true among the regulars down my local pub where I used to say (and still do) that I work in IT, which people interpret as either I write software or I fix PCs. It is too hard, and too boring, to try to correct them so I let these misconceptions lie.

Business Analysts work within projects where you know what it is that you need to analyse but before you can start a project you need to understand the business needs (e.g. the drivers of competition or regulatory changes) and the potential of IT to address them. This is where the Business Consultant comes in and I first called myself this around twelve years ago, when at IBM, and I have used this title on-and-off ever since then.

I think that “Business Consultant” describes what I do well but then I would think that having been in the industry for over thirty years and using the title for a large chunk of that time, but I find that it means next to nothing to anybody else that I speak to; particularly the business people in client organisations who are the main people that Business Consultants need to speak to!

The temptation, therefore, is to use the more generally recognised term “Management Consultant”. Logica did this in 2007 when Logica Management Consulting was introduced as a sub-brand. Ironically, those of us using the brand (it is on my business card) were on the Business Consulting career path.

Using the term Management Consulting gets you around the “what does that mean?” problem that Business Consulting gives but, sadly, the term is recognised mostly for things that I do not do, such as advising on mergers and acquisitions and developing corporate strategy, i.e. the stuff that the “Big Four” consultancies do.

So now we are back to being Business Consultants again, which I think is much the lesser of the two evils and it is now up to us to make that work for us with our clients.

I will also continue to sidestep the issue personally by not including my job title on my business card or in my email signature, both just say who I am and who I work for. What I actually do is something for the client and I to explore.

Remembering The Wall

Two of my favourite things are the music of Pink Floyd and the culture of Prague so I was not going to turn down the opportunity of spending a long weekend in Prague during which I could see a performance of The Wall.

Some brave Czech musicians had chosen to stage a spectacular version of The Wall to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

The venue for this extravaganza was the O2 arena in Ceskomoravska, just two stops on the metro from where I was blagging free accommodation in some friends' apartment.

They know the venue very well as it is also the home to HC Slavia Prague ice hockey team. This familiarity enabled them to buy me a decent ticket even though I was not able to confirm my attendance until just a few days beforehand. A lot of other people must also have made late decisions as the place was all but packed on the night with only some of the more remote seats left unsold.


I know the music of The Wall well but had not seen it in concert so I was not too sure what to expect.

The first thing that was obvious was that there were a lot of musicians involved. Most of these, I am told, are well know Czechs but the name Harry Waters (keyboards) was rather more familiar and gave a semi-official stamp to the occasion.

I was amused to see that The Wall was sung in English with Czech sur titles, a reversal of what I am used to at operas in this country, and I wondered what the translators made of phrases like "toys in the attic" and "somebody must have taken my marbles away".

The show was a real performance as the story was told through acting and film montages, as well as the words of the songs. The wall itself was gradually added to through the performance until it completely covered the front of the stage and hid the musicians from us.


But it came down soon after to the ringing chants of "Tear down the wall." I was not alone in joining in heartily.

As originally conceived, The Wall is about one person's struggle against their own daemons but has been slightly modified over the years to accommodate the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Roger Waters solo song, The tide is turning, from Radio K.A.O.S., has been adopted as the new ending.

The enthusiastic standing ovation after this was long, well deserved and rewarded with an encore.

First up was the unexpected, but relevant, Who needs information, also from Radio K.A.O.S. then the quadraphonic jingling announced the arrival of Money. This rock anthem featured three guitar solos, two keyboard solos, a saxophone solo and a scat piece from the three backing singers.

The Wall was played and presented brilliantly and was made the more meaningful by the anniversary of that other wall. Without any doubt it was one of the very best concerts that I have been to. Simply wonderful.

Sparks on The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman

The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman is an unusual album, even for Sparks. Originally designed as a radio programme for Sweden (and hence written in Swedish) it is now being released in English and Sparks are in the UK to promote it.

One of these promotional appearances was on the Stuart Maconie Radio 6 programme, Freak Zone, and this was recorded in front of an enthusiastic audience, myself included. This was at the BBC Radio Theatre, a familiar venue for me which made getting middle seats in the front row hardly a challenge.

The show started with the album played in its entirety. It narrates the fictional but allegorical story of Ingmar Bergman's attempted seduction by Hollywood.

Ingmar Bergman plays the role of narrator of his own story and he provides the link between the songs.

Musically the album is something of a new direction for Sparks (not that they are unused to taking new directions) and there is only one song that sounds as though it could have come off one of the recent albums.

From one hearing it is hard to define a theme or a mood to the music but I do recall a lot of heavier rock-like tunes. There was also a lot of what I thought was Steve Reich influenced.

The hour of music was followed by an hour of interviewing though I suspect it will be greatly edited down when broadcast on 8 November as Stuart Maconie looked and sounded rather lost at times and the interviewed drifted poorly between subjects and (mostly) failed to reach any meaningful depths.

It was not all gloss though and when Sparks were asked specific questions about music (most of these were audience questions) then we did learn some new things, such as Ron's appreciation of the music of Bernard Hermann (most famous for the soundtracks to several Hitchcock films) and of John Adams.

But I do not want to focus on the negatives because it was a very good evening; we got to hear the exciting new Sparks album before its official release and got to spend an hour in their easy company. It's nights like this that make living in London such fun.

Thames walk

An irregular pleasure of mine is catching the train from Richmond to Queenstown Road (the quietest station on the line to London) and then walking home following the Thames' meandering route.

The walk starts in earnest in Battersea Park which is a wonderful mix of the Victorian and the Modern.

There are rose gardens, a bandstand and a natural looking lake but head North towards the Thames and you find some Art Deco treasures that shock and amuse in equal measure.

The large water features are the first to catch the eye but it is the detail that gives the most pleasure, such as the design of the seats and the decorations in the water.

Battersea Park was designed for promenading so there are many routes through it, each of which reveal different aspects of the park. What is meant as a long walk starts out as an exploration.


The Thames was my companion for the day and rewarded me with exquisite views of London.

The Thames is also a playful animal and it chose this morning to be at its lowest exposing large areas of the river bed and trapping boats on the new shore.

London has been an uneven friend to the Thames over the years and this is reflected in the mixed use of the river bank.

There are some large sections of derelict looking industrial areas, some still active industrial areas and, forcing there way on to the scene, new blocks of flats that attempt to defy the logic of living in areas designed for industry.


The invasion of flats is most obvious in Wandsworth where there is a baffling choice of modern residences offering river views and modern cafe society living.

The river views are there as promised but the cafe society has not yet made the transition from promotional panels to reality.

The ground floor properties where Starbucks and Pret a Manger were meant to be are instead still empty or occupied by bland offices.

This picture shows a complete lack of people and without people you do not have a cafe society.

The other problem with the Wandsworth section of the walk is the way that the river walk is interrupted by new flats and old industries that force you away from the river far too often.

And also far too often the river walk reaches a dead-end without any warning forcing you to retrace your steps to look for a route around the unexpected obstruction.


Towards the end of Wandsworth the river walk comes in to its own as the industry and the flats lose out to trees and bushes.

There are formal tree-lined avenues of trees in places like Wandsworth Park and more natural paths the rest of the way.

I'm not too sure where I took this picture, it could have been Barnes, Mortlake or Kew, but it does not really matter.

The point is you can walk for miles and miles surrounded by trees and with the river by your side and so can almost forget that you are in the middle of a large city.

Only the frequent planes overhead remind you that this wilderness is a thin veneer and that at any moment you can step to one side and rejoin the city. But the call of the city is weak and is deafened by the gentle murmur of the trees so I stayed with the river all the way home.

Enjoying House 5 on DVD

The Evil Murdoch Empire got their greasy mitts on House Season 5 so it has not made it to terrestrial TV and I've been forced to shell out and buy it on DVD. It was worth it.

I'm getting my hit in doses of three or four episodes at a time and these doses are being repeated regularly and I should be able to get through all 24 episodes in just a couple of weeks.

The best bit about the show is the dialogue. It's unnatural for everybody to be able to come up with an immediate witty response or insightful comment but I am happy to suspend disbelief and pretend that these are real people playing out a complex game with us as shameless voyeurs.

And the best bit about the DVD is no adverts! This reduces each episode down to around 40 minutes so when watching it in real time that's a third of the time spent watching something other than the programme that you think you are watching.

House Season 6 is now being broadcast in the USA and my pirate friend tell me that it is very good too. That's a DVD I will have to buy next year.

October's Kingston upon Thames Society meeting gave a local property developer, John Miles of Canadian and Portal Estates, the opportunity to explain his company's plans for a complex of properties that they own on the riverside next to Kingston Bridge.

The current building is constructed from relentless red brick and includes a car park just metres from the river so change is welcome.

The proposal is to make much more of the property's location and to provide views across the river to Home Park from restaurants and bars on each floor, and with a roof terrace. All good stuff.

However, most of the audience had some doubts about the plan, particularly the impact it had on the glimpses of the parish church that you get from a few places on Kingston Bridge if you happen to walking over it on the North side. Not many people do and fewer look for the church.

I was pleased, and a little surprised, that when a straw poll was taken at the end that there were a few others who voted with me that the scheme was a good one.

Welcoming the Cambridge Primary Review

Having a keen interest in Primary Education (I have been a school governor for more than a decade) I was naturally interested in the most comprehensive review of the area for forty years and so jumped at the chance to go to the public launch of the debate at the RSA.

The Cambridge Primary Review is broad in scope (hence the report's title), thoroughly researched, well presented and makes some specific actionable recommendations.

On the evening, the report's author, Professor Robin Alexander, introduced the report eloquently and convincingly and justified the enthusiastic round of applause from the packed audience.

The other panellists brought different perspectives to the debate that stressed the scope of the review and the quality of the evidence behind it.

It is a long report, the full version is around 500 pages, and so we were only presented with some headlines and this is my summary of that summary.

Teaching, not testing, raises standards.

The curriculum needs to be extended well beyond the current narrow focus on English and Maths. Arising from this is the need to change the method of assessment (i.e. get rid of SATS) and the way we deploy and train teachers, including the need to have some specialist teachers in the Primary Sector just as there are in the Secondary.

Every Child Matters is still important.

There is a need to focus more on speaking, communication, chatting, debating and dialogue. Children need to learn how to talk more.

The debate on the report has started but well intentioned and well argued though it is I suspect that the powers that be (i.e. politicians) will continue their recent trend of ignoring authoritative research when it is not completely in-line with their own thinking.

I am also concerned, as a Change Management Consultant, that the review has not made a compelling case for change and so it is easier to ignore.

I hope that I am wrong on both counts and I will be doing what I can to promote the report and it's findings, starting with this blog.

Danny Baker back on Radio 5

It is great to see Danny Baker back where he belongs on the Radio 5 live Saturday morning show with his unique mix of football and comedy. Where else could you learn about a football fan who had two season tickets, one for himself and one for his flask?!

The BBC has also had the good sense to podcast the show, minus the news and weather spots, to give us an hour and a half of good entertainment which is perfect for the Monday morning commute.

This restores the natural justice since the lamented demise of the All Day Breakfast Show, Danny's podcast only programme from a couple of years ago where I was a proud member of the Elite Premium Guard, or some other such nonsense.

All I need to do now is get Danny to publicly demolish Kingsmeadow and his show will be perfect.