UK Travel

Edinburgh Fringe 2023: A long overdue return to the best festival on the planet

The last time I experienced the sensory overload that is Edinburgh Fringe was in 2017 and while a lot has changed since then, the arrival in the city is still heralded by an avalanche of flyers for shows. Without fail, these shows are always on in five minutes and are always guaranteed to be absolutely hilarious. It was reassuring to see the Fringe in full flow and to realise that the chaos remains intact.

I battled my way to The Edinburgh Larder first for food and had a delicious Scottish breakfast, swerving the haggis and black pudding, much to the disappointment of the friendly chap serving. At that moment, I felt very much like an English tourist, but the ingredients. Oh my god, the ingredients. After food, I headed to Calton Hill, which I’d never been to before, despite visiting Edinburgh at least six times. From the hill, there are views of the city from every direction, including the quite awful poo emoji building, walnut whip or whatever it is. Happily, the poo is not visible from all angles and there’s enough beauty in Edinburgh to spare. Just visible in the distance are the bridges across the firth of forth, Arthur’s seat and the Old Town. Put all of this together, and Edinburgh surely has the most enviable views of any city in the UK. The weather was not exactly glorious but it was a real change from what the forecasts had been predicting. Within minutes, fluffy clouds turned what the Scottish might call a braw day into a dreich one. I fled the hill, taking shelter in The Advocate pub and almost immediately, the sun returned. Welcome to Edinburgh!

I had missed the fringe a great deal in my time away and had spent quite some time in advance booking shows and trying to work out what would be unmissable – harder said than done when I arrived just a few days after the festival started. The idea of turning up with nothing booked and over 3000 shows to choose from is too scary for words. Our first show was Reuben Solo, but as we had some time to kill, we thought we would see JD Shapiro with a show called If it ain’t woke, don’t fix it. With an edgy title like this, it was sure to be an incredible hour. The staff at the venue informed us that he’d simply not bothered to turn up for his shows. Maybe his non-arrival was an elaborate show in itself and I was inadvertently part of an art project? Reuben Solo did show up and this was a fun hour of a loud and often chaotic Aussie performing a show that had little in the way of flow. His easy rapport with the audience and his stunning abilities with a graph papered over any cracks for a strong start to the festival.

Our second show was Tamsyn Kelly – Crying at TK Maxx. The show was more on the personal side and Tamsyn is a good storyteller and has a good ability to form stories into a cohesive set, but the delivery lacked confidence to make the material shine. Tamsyn laughed a lot at her own material, which always confuses me; after months of writing and performing, it probably wouldn’t be that funny. But she’s a likeable presence and early in her career. She has daddy issues, which gives her something in common with Simon Amstell who was at the fringe to work on new content. For £18! His lines, even ones not fully formed, are so sharp and polished, you realise just how good he is at comedy. He would tell us that he’s a star, can sleep with whoever he likes and is very important, but he’d then remember that he needs us more than we need him. He needs the validation from an adoring audience, while he’s on a journey of healing and growing. His transition from bubbly but acerbic host on Channel 4 to a man on stage telling us he loves ‘bobbing up and down on a dick’ has been a remarkable one. While his current themes, of family, sex and drugs are familiar, his delivery is so controlled and charming that he remains intensely watchable.

On our second morning we were offered free tickets to ‘a show about pirates’ that was starting soon so we went along. The venue was a minimal affair inside a hotel conference room with a box that said Sand! on it, thus flawlessly transporting us to a desert island. Two pirates come on stage and perform something akin to a poem with occasional funny moments. The writing and performances were good but the story shied away from the theme that pirates are pretty gay – this could have been developed further but what was there was charming. Most remarkable was the American accents at the end; I totally bought the Scottish accent from one performer and the other accent, a sort of strangled cockney, was nothing if not intriguing.

In the afternoon, we watched Christopher Bliss, a novelist who is so busy writing books that he has no time to read other people’s novels. He’s a fan of the 3-page novel of the sort that gives the twist away in the title, such as ‘Karen turns out to be the ghost’ and through the show he reads us his novels, and gives remarkable advice to budding authors. It’s all silly fun that never takes itself seriously.

Straight after Christopher Bliss was Tom Ballard, who I saw a few years back. He also doesn’t take himself seriously, opening with stories of him having sex with a male witch. Ballard takes great joy in being open and explicit and I suspect he might not be familiar with having a filter, which I am grateful for. Ballard muses on the Queen’s death, where it could be said he wasn’t a fan but he also takes aim at Rupert Murdoch and other billionaires, to great effect. He’s very loud and even when he asked if he was too loud, the audience all agreed he wasn’t too loud because Ballard is a force of nature. There’s also an angry edge to his work and his material on why capitalism is a disaster is both funny and thought provoking. A raucous standout at the fringe.

The absolute standout of the fringe though, was Patti Harrison. Her show is called My Huge Tits Huge Because They Are Infected Not Fake! and I am sure I booked tickets for this show based on the title and ridiculous poster alone. I am glad I did because this is a strange beast of a show. Patti comes on with her phone by her side, advising us that the show is a work in progress and that we aren’t to look at her huge tits as there is a perfectly good reason for them being huge. She leads us down different ideas and ramblings, promising that the show will begin at some point. Throughout the show, she continues to say she will begin soon, while being in the middle of a story about her experiences with a therapist before wildly veering off to an aside about how she hates the British accent, or her love affair with a Hollywood star. It’s such a tightly controlled show that you are never able to work out where Patti will go next. She breaks into songs at a few points and unusually for a comedy show, they are funny and stick in your head. This is comedy of the highest order and I loved the experience of laughing uncontrollably at various points while the audience member next to me remained stony faced. The end of the show brings together what themes Patti has touched upon in a crescendo of chaos and screaming. As often happens to me when I enjoy a show, I have now become obsessed with Patti and will be telling everyone that will listen – and those that won’t – that this is a show that needs to be seen.

A walk to…East Dean

In the summer of 2021, in the wreckage of more postponed festivals, a friend and I decided to have an adventure to echo the insanity of the festival life. So, we went to Eastbourne. It’s famous for its old people, making up nearly a quarter of the population and it’s also really close to the Seven Sisters Country Park. I had wanted to visit the park for many years and so, I did. It was such a good walk from Eatsbourne to East Dean that I did it again in 2022.

Not long after the record breaking heatwave, where I spent a few days hiding from the heat, we headed off to the coast. The weather was incredible; a mix of fast rolling fog of the sort that seems to cancel out your ability to hear anything but the occasional squeal of a bird. It was even stranger that the day in London was all blue skies, yet we could only see tens of metres in front of us.

We started the walk in the centre of Eastbourne, which is a fairly standard south coast town with some great architecture and plenty of buildings that could do with a lick of paint. Along the front are lots of hotels that think they’re a bit grander than they are. The View hotel, has great views if you’re inside it. From the outside it’s a bleak blot on the landscape.

If you’re more interested in the walk, heading down the seafront towards Beachy Head gives you some excellent views of the hills you’ll soon start to climb. It’s a relatively gentle ascent to begin with but look behind you, as within minutes you will start to see panoramic views of Eastbourne, or as I think the tourist board should call it, EazyB. Beachy Head, famed mostly for being a suicide hotspot, offers gorgeous views and stands 162 metres above sea level. Nearby is The Beachy Head pub, which has views of the surrounding fields and on the foggy day this summer, you could watch the fog swiftly moving over the landscape. Just outside the pub is an RAF Bomber Command memorial. Beachy Head was the last patch of England the pilots would see before they headed over the channel.

Keep walking and Beachy Head lighthouse will come into view. I hold the lighthouse responsible for making me want to become a lighthouse keeper. As a structure, it adds so much to the views and the cheery white and red colours really make it stand out beautifully among the blue-green of the sea and the sparkling white of the cliffs. The company that owns the lighthouse, Trinity House, recently said they wouldn’t repaint it, leading to a crowdfunding campaign that raised the quite remarkable £27,000 needed to complete the task. Who knew that a few tins of Dulux could cost so much?

There’s another lighthouse a little further on that precariously stands on the edge of the cliffs. Belle Tout lighthouse was erected in 1832 and decommissioned in 1902 to make way for the Beachy Head lighthouse. It is now a BnB with some of the best views going. Being close to the cliffs, it had to be moved 17 metres inland in 1999 to stop it tumbling into the sea, but if I were advertising it as somewhere to stay, I’d capitalise on the fear factor that any night you stay there could be your last. A recent cliff fall in 2021 cut off part of the footpath very close to the lighthouse.

After all the lighthouse love, the walks continue and after a quick 15 minute walk, you’ll arrive at Birling gap. There’s a national trust café here as well as a staircase down to the beach. It’s at Birling gap where you make a turning to get to East Dean. Leaving the National Trust café, you’ll have three roads to follow, and taking the path to the left you will walk down a path lined with houses and at the end of the path, you take a right into farmland. Here you will most likely find yourself alone apart from plenty of sheep. Heading straight on, you will see a red shed to your right. Google Maps will suggest the way to East Dean is to veer left, but if you keep walking straight ahead, you will get there much quicker. There’s a break in the trees on your right, with a path that leads down towards the village, coming out onto Went Way.

Here’s my favourite bit of the walk. You will soon find yourself heading into the village and at the back of the village green. Laid out in front of you is The Tiger Inn, which is to my mind just a perfectly positioned pub. It’s a fairly low white building with a red roof which has a great outdoor section and is homely on the inside. Here you can treat yourself to a drink and some food after what is ultimately not a taxing walk but one full of glorious views. I can’t think of a much better way to spend the day.

After the beauty of the cliffs, lighthouse and the village green, there’s a bus just a few minutes outside the pub that will take you back into Eastbourne. Even the bus route has great views over the town.

Algeria: My favourite photos. Ghardaia, Beni Isguen and Bou Saada.

There are times that my trip to Algeria felt totally thrown together. Flights were booked there and back, the internal flight was pre-booked, but getting from place to place seemed to just happen because we ended up in the right place, people told us where to go and we had money to get around. To this day, I don’t feel I was ever ripped off in Algeria when travelling around the country, but I can’t say I was shown a price list in advance. Our exit from Timimoun to Ghardaia by coach was arranged by the hotel and they were 110% relaxed about sorting this out, to the extent that I wasn’t even 60% sure they knew if such a coach existed. The moment of truth arrived and a member of the hotel staff suddenly yells at us that our coach is outside and we have to leg it down the street to get on it. Relaxed.

I am struck that we twice needed a police escort in Timimoun but there was also no problem getting on a coach to another town. We settle in for lots of desert landscapes but the sand storm that had been turning the sky orange since the previous night reduced visibility. As we got further into the endless expanse of nothingness, I drifted in and out of sleep and got gently covered in sand from the open window. The road was not wide enough for the coach so we had a few hours of driving on rocks, which was even less comfortable than it sounds.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1280983-1024x576.jpg — Shades of orange

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1280989-1024x576.jpg — The road was not wide enough

We pulled into a sort of Algerian Moto services for a bit and looking around at the less than salubrious surroundings, I dreaded the loo situation but needed it regardless. In one of those strange circumstances I often find myself in when abroad, the people at the toilet entrance who clearly collected money waved me through, not wanting one dinar. The toilet was clean as a whistle, so I luxuriated in my visit. There was real poverty in the service station; people praying not prayer mats but flattened cardboard, flies buzzing around rancid looking meat, bins that looked like they needed to be put in a bin.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is IMG_0340-1024x768.jpg — There was no brochure, but if it existed, it wouldn’t include this image

We were headed for the town of Beni Isugen, in the M’Zab Valley. This part of Algeria interested us because it’s a UNESCO world heritage site due to the architecture of the towns, perfectly suited to the desert heat. I loved the buildings we saw as we got closer, which to me looked like little castles, with their crenellations and tiny windows to keep the searing heat out.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290023-1024x576.jpg — New Barratt homes, offering desert living

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290051-1-1024x576.jpg — Our castle/home in Beni Isguen

When we arrived in the town, we had to call our guide who would take us to his place. He arrived in an incredibly old car that had a plank of wood in it to stop something falling off and took us on a high-speed chase through town to a home that was equal parts castle and Tataouine dwelling. He told us to settle in and that he’d be back soon with food. My friend and I are pretty patient people but after two hours, we started to wonder a) where we were b) did we give our passports to the right guy and c) when is the food coming. But the castle was incredible, unlike anywhere I’d ever stayed before. Eventually our guide returned with the biggest amount of food I’d ever seen and later I slept fitfully as dogs howled outside while I lay on 10 mattresses.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290032-1-1024x576.jpg

The towns of the M’Zab valley are tourist destinations so when we visited the old town of Beni Isguen and Ghardaia, we needed guides to show us round and tell us the rules. A rule they were really keen on was not to photograph the women. They wear a white haik, which is a large cloth wrapped around the body and the women only have one eye visible at any one time. When I saw the women, their hand was clutching at the cloth so that they could see and keep everything in place. It’s such a fascinating set of towns, and incredibly picturesque.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290081-1024x576.jpg — Style guide

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290083-1024x576.jpg

Both Beni Isguen and Ghardaia were engrossing and it became clear that the structure of the towns followed a similar pattern. The buildings are tightly packed into a circular formation and at the centre is a mosque. The minaret is a watchtower. UNESCO estimate that these towns were built between 700 and 1000 years ago, with little changing in that time. I was so excited to be amongst all this history, but it all came crashing down when I first spotted some graffiti saying “hip-hop” and then heard a Samsung ringtone. So, it’s mostly an old way of living.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290149-1024x576.jpg — Ghardaia main market square

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290070-1024x576.jpg — Ghardaia from far away

In Beni Isguen, we walked through a square that was jaw-droppingly gorgeous. We arrived at the time of day where the light struck against the walls in such a way that everything glowed, with the sky a shade of blue that even photoshop couldn’t improve.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290274-1024x683.jpg — Beni Isguen square

In an unexpected turn of events, our guide told us we’d be popping by the celebrations of a wedding. It was split, so we never saw the bride or any women at all, but what struck me was the friendliness of everyone who acted as if two Brits turning up at the wedding was the most natural thing to occur. I loved seeing how the men fussed over kids and how efficient the serving of couscous, meat and veg was. Later, we went to a sort of after-party, where mint tea was served and I noticed that there was always enough for me and my friend – yet more friendliness from the hosts. They shot guns into the air and ground a couple of times, but I think I managed not to shriek and hurl my tea in the air.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290194-1-1024x576.jpg — Wedding

After a wonderful couple of days in Ghardaia, we made our way to Bou Saada, which is perhaps the least interesting town in existence. It could be that we didn’t arrange for a guide to show us the town or there was just nothing to do, but really, Bou Saada was a pitstop on the way back to Algiers. Our hotel was amazing, with beautiful gardens and a pool but there’s only so many circuits of the garden you can do before madness kicks in. An art gallery provided some relief for an hour or so, but there’s really not much to say.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290335-1024x576.jpg — The birds get a great view

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290347-1024x576.jpg — Child. Running.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290378-1024x683.jpg — Waterwheel of delights.

My friend told me recently that the reason we wanted to go to Algeria in the first place was because of Constantine, a city with incredible bridges going over a gorge. We never got to visit, but that only makes me more keen to go back to Algeria and explore even more of this fascinating country.

A little trip to… York

2020 really is the year that just keeps on giving. In the summer, those wild and carefree days where we could go out and see people without the fear that they would kill us, I planned an Autumn trip to Yorkshire. It would have been my first proper trip to Yorkshire as in the past I have only been to Keighley and Leeds for short trips. The trip I was to take would start in York, moving to Harrogate and Knaresborough. Walks along the River Ouse and Nidd Gorge were planned. But the start of October saw coronavirus rates rise rapidly in York at the same time that tiers were being introduced and I just didn’t feel too thrilled about everything unravelling like a rusty old slinky. So the trip was ditched and, stuck with some expensive tickets, we chose in the end to spend just a day in York. A day in York is still a day well spent.

When we arrive in York, it is raining and the forecast is for rain all day. The wise words of a friend ring in my ears. York will be wonderful whatever the weather. He was right. York announces itself as a gorgeous place a few minutes outside of the train station as you cross the river and the city walls come into view. While there are some modern bits, they pale into significance and grandeur next to many of the surrounding buildings. Even in the soggy weather, York looks like a place you want to explore.

We wanted to go to Betty’s tea room for lunch but despite the pandemic, there was a queue outside and there wasn’t anything to shelter us from the rain so we found an alternative in Mannion and Co, just up the road. Having the benefit of an awning, we briefly waited before being shown inside to a world of cosiness and the most wonderful accents. Honestly, just a few words from people from Yorkshire is a real treat to the ears. With Bettie’s oversized presence (not saying she’s fat, just that she’s everywhere) there must be a need to be a really good café to compete and Mannion and Co bring their game in eyesight of Bettie’s hard stare. The sausage roll was excellent as was the coffee. The cinnamon bun was somewhat dry, but I have had worse. Next door is the Yorkshire Soap Co, which smells gorgeous inside. Being not as overwhelming as heading into a Lush and getting a migraine, I could distinguish smells here so bought some early Christmas gifts. For my mum, a mojito bath bomb. She doesn’t like mojitos and doesn’t use any smelly gifts I get here because “then I will have used them!” But still, it looked nice so she’s getting it.

I had heard much about York Minster, most recently in the aftermath of the awful fire at Notre Dame. The fire at York was compared to the one in Paris, and at the time I read about how they managed to repair the damage using traditional techniques, which people still seem to think no longer exist. The Rose window at York had 40,000 cracks in it and they repaired that and they fixed the rather pressing issue of the missing roof. The incredible thing is that there is no sign whatsoever that a fire ravaged York Minster. It’s a real testament to the talent of the people involved in the work.

In 2019, over 700,00 people visited the minster, and so it would usually be busy during half term but of course there was no queue to enter and the whole site was really quite empty. The benefit was that we could really explore to our heart’s content and get a sense of just how impressive the minster is. The central tower is as tall as a 21 story building, it’s wider than a football pitch, and there are 2 million pieces of glass in the hundreds of stained glass windows. There is nowhere in the UK with more stained glass and the earliest pieces are from the 12^th century. I have to be honest and say this melts my brain just a little bit.

The nave naturally gives some grand views, showing off the sheer enormity of the place but it’s when you look a bit closer that you see the glitz of the minster. Having the space to really explore the whole place was wonderful. There are little details everywhere. Signs abound banging on about the size of their organ, which seems appropriate for the church. This organ has 5,403 pieces and it has been taken to Durham for a once-in-a-century renovation. When we were there people were hoovering the outside of the organ with a sort of dust buster, which is not something I ever thought I’d witness.

Perhaps the most beautiful part of the minster is the Chapter House, which was finished in 1290 and so is just a mere 730 years old. It was in this year where some crazy things happened, and in a way, things back then felt just as messy as they are now. Only they had much brighter people than Dominic Raab appearing on the telly, or whatever they watched the Brexit negotiations on in those days. The Chapter house is a wonder, with some architectural details that are seriously impressive. The building’s ceiling doesn’t have a column to support the ceiling, which shows off the abilities of the builders. There are gargoyles aplenty throughout the room, which have some bizarre sights, including all sorts of animals doing ghastly things. If you want to see demonic pigs, men having their eyes plucked out or a head dug into with claws, this is your one-shop stop.

After we sampled the glories of the minster, we walked across town via Shambles to the art gallery. Shambles used to have a lot of butchers, as many as 25 in 1875 but have now all gone, replaced mostly with Harry Potter shops and tourist tat emporiums. Anywhere remotely old trades on some sort of Harry Potter connection, and York has done its work convincing people that Shambles is the real Diagon Alley. JK Rowling says she’s never been, which would surprise me as she seemed to write her books in every café in the UK. Perhaps I am being deceived. It is a wonderful street, but even when we visited, it was still fairly full of people taking photographs and gaping at the oldness of it all. I obviously took photographs of the people and the buildings. It is a shame that all too quickly, my Shambles experience was over so we headed to the art gallery which though small, has plenty of diverting pieces in the collection, including some L.S. Lowry and pop art. Most interesting was a video by Laura Besancon called Alone, Together which was a wonderfully simple but effective idea. A letter was sent to residents of a series of high rise towers in London, asking them to play a song at a specific time and turn their lights on and off to the beats of the music. None of the people doing this could see one another, but the video captured what it looked like from the outside. I found it quite moving in the context of 2020 and how alone we’ve all felt at times. The art gallery also hosts the Centre of Ceramic Arts, which is the world’s largest collection of 20^th century British pottery. Some of the work on display is incredible. I have no idea how they make some of the protrusions and knobbly bits, so it all looked quite magical. The Anthony Shaw Space is a highlight, with his extensive collection housed in what looks like a living room and there are also works by Picasso, who shows that he can put funny faces on canvas as well as vases.

At the rear of the gallery is a gorgeous garden full of plants and herbs from all around the world and then, quite unexpectedly the ruins of St Mary’s Abbey Church come into view. York museum gardens is a wonderful spot in the city and the ruins really add history to the area. I can’t help but find it fascinating that the Abbey has been left to become ruins since the dissolution in 1539, without bulldozing what was left and turning the site into a car park. At the end of the walk, we find a bar and restaurant that oozes coziness. The Starr Inn the City might have a clumsy name, but we were sat right by the wood burning stove, watching the rain through the windows. In that moment, York felt like home.

After reluctantly leaving the pub, we went to walk around the city walls in the last gasps of daylight, only to find that much is changed due to covid. One way systems and plenty of locked gates later, we managed to walk a few hundred metres of the wall in the wrong direction before getting tangled in two sets of people, walking in opposite directions. The stretch of wall we got to walk along was a delight, but obviously this lack of real walk means I will need to visit again, which is no hardship. A final walk around the city centre before the train home showed York at its best, the streets mostly empty and looking enticing with their Christmas decorations up. It’s a beautiful place and whenever I go somewhere this beautiful, I always kick myself at having never been before. Yorkshire, I am coming back.

A little trip to…Ironbridge

The final destination of the West Midlands Odyssey was Ironbridge, a small town I have wanted to visit for a long time. Having been, I can say that this was a wise travel decision. Ironbridge is utterly bewitching. On my return to London, I started working out where I’d live in the town and if I could move somewhere that had a view of the gorge and ideally, the bridge. The journey from Ludlow to Ironbridge was in parts nice and a bit bleak. Arriving at Telford Central, we wait at the bus stop that will take us near to our hotel. Unfortunately, the first bus driver doesn’t know what Ironbridge is because he lives in Wolverhampton. I live in London but I know what Ironbridge is. The second bus driver seems equally confused and suggests a route that takes 50 minutes instead of 25. In the end I have to just take faith that Google knows the way better than the bus driver, so we settle in to a journey of a lifetime. We’re treated to the sounds of a thoroughly stressed out mum telling her kid to shut up the entire way before we get off at an unlovely stop that looks a million miles away from the pictures of Ironbridge I’d seen. We proceed to head down paths that get steeper and steeper until we’re not so much walking down a hill as sliding down. Thanks to the zig zag streets, we escape plummeting into a void by becoming human pinballs that stumble out into streets that look more appealing by the minute.

We stayed at The White Hart that is a delightful pub minutes away from the bridge that looks out onto the River Severn. The information pack to the hotel includes some outrageous sentences that belong in the 1970s, such as “Chinese restaurant, called something unpronounceable – pretty nice” which reminded me that Telford and the Wrekin voted for Brexit by a large margin. It all made sense. Casual xenophobia aside, The White Hart does great beers, even some foreign ones. It also has a covered terrace, ideal for the weather and the space it affords us from other people. I assume Ironbridge is overrun with tourists in a normal summer, but it was still busy with tourists queuing for ice creams and anything cold when we were there. We had lunch at the Malthouse pub which is about as hipster as Ironbridge gets, with bizarre toilets that look like they’re out of a western. Men don’t pee into urinals, but tin buckets. Inexplicable. Outside, music choices include The Libertines, Franz Ferdinand and Jamie T. When I say hipster, I am talking about 35 year olds and over who were cool once but now live in Ironbridge. But this was the music from my youth so I was more than happy.

After lunch, I entrusted my life and sanity with a walk from The Guardian, from 2009. Things have changed since this walk was written and it was a challenging, frustrating and at times, hateful walk. We start by walking along the river, but soon get stuck in brambles and spend time staring at partially capsized boats. We re-route and end up on a busy road, hoping that we won’t end up flung into a hedge by a truck. The landscape the walk suggests we walked through is a million miles away from the overgrown nightmare that takes up much of the route. Some parts have been vaguely maintained, which is the only thing that keeps us from not abandoning the whole thing. The walk through the meadows alongside the meandering Severn is very pleasant, with butterflies everywhere as well as dragonflies whizzing about. It is after the meadow that things become bleak. We cross the river by the bridge at Buildwas and walk down a path by a quarry, with dust swirling in the air. The guide says to walk down this grim road and head towards a caravan park. Eventually we find where we’re supposed to go and hack our way through fields that are chest high with brambles, nettles, weeds and probably snakes, too. The guide says to cut through a field. A tangle of barbed wire stops this. We alter our tracks again and somehow end up in the caravan park where, in a brief moment of joy, we see three deer eating grass. Then, we walk up a steep hill, following the soothing sounds of electricity pylons buzzing above us. By this point, I wanted to punch the entire walk, if only I could have found a way.

Once we get past the pylons and vertical climb, we broke free into some proper countryside, only an hour or so after we started the cursed walk. Soon, despair gives way to a sense of relief as we can relax into the views around us and we walked in the direction of Benthall Hall, which looks very nice indeed. Naturally, it’s closed. On Spout Lane we see people filling up large containers of spring water from the pipe on the side of the road. Not long after, Ironbridge comes back into view and the road leads us directly onto the iron bridge which looks gorgeous from every angle. It really is an incredible feat of engineering, the first bridge of its kind built in 1777 and opened three years later. The bridge recently went under a year of repair work where it was entirely covered up as they worked on it, turning the colour of the bridge from grey to a deep red, the colour of the bridge when it was first built. The red works so well that I can’t imagine it looking any better than it did when we visited.

In the evening we ate at The White Hart and it was excellent; the heritage tomato salad with dashi and red wine vinegar was outstanding as was my seafood main. We rounded the night off by walking back to the bridge to see it lit up beautifully, watching the insects have a party all around. Despite the partially hellish walk, Ironbridge was something of a revelation in its beauty.

The next morning was our last day and we wanted to make the most of it by going on a walk that didn’t involve a nervous breakdown so we walked from the hotel towards Bedlam Furnaces which to me sounded like an old asylum where the inmates smelted stuff, but I was wrong. It was just a large set of furnaces that is supposed to have cast much of the iron for the Ironbridge. When you look at the remains of the furnaces now, it is easy to lose track of history. Everything around you is beautiful and the gorge is luxurious with foliage. The reality would have been a vision of hell. The painting Coalbrookdale by Night by Philip James de Loutherbourg shows as much, with the skies filled with smoke and the furnaces glowing with flames. We have successfully romanticised heavy industry and I’m curious as to how the nearby Blists Hill Victorian village would have made the time feel. In my head, it’s full of chirpy kids in flat caps running amok but I bet they’d have been consumptive urchins with flat caps, robbing you. I think I just invented the plot of Oliver Twist.

After Bedlam Furnaces, we crossed the river and found more remains of a mining site on the side of the gorge and then we followed a path that took us to a viewing point up many steps. A family came down from the hill with one of the children counting how many steps they’d taken and they were up to nearly a thousand. Oh what larks! About a thousand steps later, we get to the top and are finally rewarded with a view that stretches out for what looks like miles of countryside, woods and village. The walk down is far less steep and arduous, but offers more sensational views of Ironbridge and beyond. It was truly wonderful.

I have always found the last day of a holiday to be my favourite. You get one last little trip and a chance to make the most of what time you have before you head home, in a high state of grief. The walk around Ironbridge and up in the hills is a great goodbye. And there we have it, the West Midlands Odyssey is over. The region is criminally underrated, the people have excellent accents and there is beauty in these towns that makes me want to go back for more.

A trip to…Ludlow. A West Midlands summer, part 2

Ludlow is the second location for our West Midlands holiday. It takes two trains to get from Ledbury to Ludlow, but it’s worth it as Ludlow is a wonderful town. We changed trains at Hereford which felt like an apocalyptic hellscape, with people patrolling the platforms for mask avoiders and a general feel of subdued terror. It felt very different to London. The Transport for Wales trains have big signs on almost every seat imploring you to not sit there and the announcements thanked all the key workers (my pleasure, guys) – it didn’t feel like August, but April. When we arrived in Ludlow, we head to The Feathers to check-in but are told to go far away until 2pm and that our bags cannot be handled because of covid. I get it, it’s fine. But the reception staff really seemed to take a little too much joy in flinging us out into the gutter.

Laden with bags, we trudge down the hill to Ludlow Brewery for a drink. The stuff they serve is excellent and all the staff are friendly, but the atmosphere is bleak. A baby is being fed milk in a windy, concrete garden. The old train shed that the brewery is in has no soundproofing so everything sounds eerie. Back at the hotel, the person behind reception manages to find us a room, but seems initially confused that we’re two men sharing a bed. She regains composure and asks if we want the standard queen room. Wink wink. I inform her we’ll take it, but we’re so much more than standard queens. The Feather is in a stunning building but beyond the façade of the building, most of the hotel is more recent and our room is nice, in a fairly generic way.

Beautiful streets full of charming buildings

Ludlow is a fine-looking town but suffers from what so many ancient towns do; by covering up the gorgeous medieval buildings with plate glass windows and plastic signs, the town loses some of its lustre. A giant Natwest sign definitely lacked the olde-worlde vibes I was after. When I become Prime Minister, this will be tackled in my manifesto, as will walking slowly and putting your feet up on train seats. I did wonder if towns like Ludlow take the gorgeous architecture they have for granted. Near the Buttermarket there is a row of what appear to be Tudor buildings, but the date 1871 carved into the wood suggests otherwise. One of the buildings has a charming overhanging first floor and it’s just a great view, but it could be so much more if it weren’t for the terrible embellishments of the now – massive posters for sales and such tawdry baubles.

After a stroll around Ludlow town centre, we go into Ludlow Castle for £8 and get to enjoy some expansive views over the town and beyond from one of the towers. Every tower has a queue snaking outside it, so only groups at the castle together can go up at any one time. The benefit of this is that you get to take in the view without a kid screaming at full tilt next to you, but you have to wait an age to get to the view, what with the kids screaming up in the tower. The parents exit the tower looking distraught.

The castle is, you know, a castle. I always leave a castle wondering why I entered in the first place. Usually, I am paying to see a few information boards that say “Lord Geoff lived here, and he loved curtains” as I look at a pile of old rocks in front of me. But it adds some heft to the town and the walk by the river is glorious. We follow a route called Whitcliffe and Breadwalk. It’s called the bread walk due to the builders being paid in bread so they didn’t just get drunk all the time. How very puritanical! As we approach Dinham bridge, the view becomes one that is a reminder of just how picturesque England can be. The bridge, dating from 1823, is a simple but elegant one that features stone arches. When you stand on the bridge, you can look right and admire the weir, the small islands in the river, the old buildings that line the riverfront and the castle high up above everything. The view is made all the better by the summertime explosion of nature. The opposite side of the river is composed of a wall of trees and wonderful paths to explore. If you follow the Breadwalk route from Dinham bridge to Ludford bridge, you will reach a point where you look across and see all of Ludlow from a vantage point that is picture perfect.

In the evening, we had a big meal planned for our anniversary. The biggest meal, in fact. We went to Mortimer’s for their tasting menu which is composed of about 610 courses of food. It’s a charming venue and when you’re inside you feel totally closed off from the world outside. The best restaurants feel to me like I imagine how a Casino is. You don’t know if it’s day or night and time disappears. Though, at a good restaurant, everyone is a winner.We eat in a room that appears to be built into rock, and it’s a small dining room so every utterance like “Oh my GODDDDD” is heard by all around. The staff are magnificent in their speed and efficiency. Proceedings kick off with olives and a cocktail before we’re bought some starters. Little bites of joy. The hand dived scallop is superb and is swiftly followed by duck in three ways. There’s pressed duck, pastrami and duck liver. I steer clear of the offal but the rest is a revelation of how different duck can taste. The part of the meal I had a bit of difficulty with was the sea trout which is served raw with crab and a smattering of fish eggs on top. The more I ate the more I enjoyed; and to put this in perspective, I can’t recall eating raw fish before. The trout was so delicate with a sharp citrus twist that I found myself enjoying it more with every bite. Following this was Hereford beef, baby leeks and roast shallot which had a delicious depth to it, showing that the chef can seemingly do anything in the kitchen. The variety of food was magnificent.

After all of this, two puddings came. The best pudding was this magnificent beast that featured a scoop of sorbet with a disc of meringue daintily balanced on top. We were entirely full and I considered if it would be necessary to call a cab to take us the 100 metres to the hotel when a small box of further treats was bought out of macarons, fudge and a chocolate. It felt a bit overwhelming and perhaps even masochistic of them to feed us more, but we ate them all. Everything was tip top and it easily slots into one of the most memorable meals I’ve experienced.

The next morning, still full of all the food from the night before, we met some friends from London who were also on a staycation. They drove us to Croft Castle and parkland, about half an hour from Ludlow. While the castle itself was closed for covid reasons, the 1500 acres of parkland more than made up for this. The walled gardens turned an overcast day into a kaleidoscope of colour and smells. Plants such as the spiky blue thing on a stick, the things you put under your chin to see if you like butter, daisies for making chains and the one that looks like a cool skyscraper (purple acanthus) are a delight to coo over. The gardens are expansive and really relaxing to stroll through.

We follow the purple route, the Highwood walk, and as soon as we walked past a recently deceased lamb, we enter a field full of ancient trees with great views over the countryside. I spot one particular tree, a Spanish Chestnut, that I want to photograph more closely and I notice a plaque at the base which says that the Queen herself thought this was an absolutely top tree and added it to the list of Great British Trees. This was all done for the Golden Jubilee in 2002 and it’s hard to imagine one of those Spanish trees, coming over here and stealing our soil, would be granted the same accolade today.

The scenery here is wonderful, and the National Trust have done some excellent work at opening up some views but also working towards planting more native trees to recreate a woodland that would have been recognisable to people with top hats and monocles. A great part of the walk is when you start to descend into a valley surrounded by conifers, cutting you off from the world before the fishpool comes into view. After some time walking by the side of the water, we see a grotto which is held together by forces of which I do not know and then the Gothic Pump House. The pump house is over 200 years old and from the outside, looks somewhat like a spooky church that once piped spring water up to the castle. The pump house no longer works and now if you want spring water, you’ll need to get yourselves to a shop.

After the castle, we have some time to kill so visit Leominster for a brief nose around. It’s a perfectly fine town with some delightful old buildings but the only life-changing thing I can recall was Roy’s Café which proudly advertised dairy burgers with an illustration of some burger version of Rainbow’s Zippy. Quite intriguing and terrifying. Needless to say, this being a small town outside London, there was bunting everywhere, which I always feel gives off a quasi-nationalist groove. I don’t know what it is, but bunting at a wedding is fine, yet when strung across a town it just feels a bit Farage for me. After the brief delights of Leominster, we drove for lunch at The Riverside at Aymestrey which was a beautiful pub in the middle of glorious countryside. It was the kind of pub that feels more like a special occasion venue than a local but the service, food and atmosphere were all great. There was a focus on local produce, with wild herbs from the Lugg valley, vegetables from local farms and lots of meat from the region. As an added bonus, there were plenty of good dogs, so it was essentially faultless.

Back in Ludlow, we took another stroll around the town. We had a look at the Broadgate which is the sole surviving medieval gate in the town, with the Wheatsheaf Inn growing out the side of the walls. The pub is cosy but they had some loopy covid restrictions. There was tape on the floor but no plastic screen around the bar so the lady behind the bar was relaxed until you stepped a millimetre over the red tape. People entered the pub one way and exited via the door at the far end of the bar. However, if there is an influx of customers, this system falls apart and causes a blockage of people trying to walk past all the people at the bar. Managing the situation looked like a bear trying to spin plates, which are on fire.

Ludlow is a gem of a town, even in covid-land. It has managed to maintain a lot of charm and character, thanks in part to the town being an economic backwater as the wool trade lost importance in the 19^th century. As a consequence, the town didn’t go through a period of demolition and reconstruction and today there are over 500 listed buildings in Ludlow. I would struggle to think of another English town that has quite such a density of historical buildings. I would also struggle to think of many other towns that left me feeling as content as Ludlow.

A trip to…Ledbury. A West Midlands summer, part 1.

Had 2020 been a normal year, I would have gone on a summer holiday to Germany for the third time. The trip would have been following the route of the Romantic Road, through places like Würzburg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber and Dinkelsbühl, places which sound wholesome and cute. As we all know, 2020 has been a little bit tricky, so instead the decision was made at Holiday HQ to travel through the West Midlands. You read that right, the West Midlands. I am from that part of the world but have never thought to spend time there for leisure.

Lonely Planet describes the region as having “green valleys, chocolate-box villages of wonky black-and-white timbered houses” and the promise was delivered and then some. The countryside we saw was soothing, verdant, with hints of a wilder edge in the Malvern Hills. We visited Ledbury, Leominster, Ludlow and Ironbridge and every destination had timber-framed buildings a plenty, inviting pubs, a local approach to food and usually a castle within spitting distance. “Please stop spitting at the castles” is the region’s catchphrase.

It was quite novel having a holiday 90 minutes from where my family live, so I took the opportunity to invite Mum to spend the day in Ledbury with us. We hadn’t seen each other since the very day the lockdown was announced back in March. In Ledbury, we stay at The Feathers. The building dates back to 1565 and is a perfect example of the architecture of the time. It creaks and crackles with most stairs lurching pleasingly to a slope that makes you feel drunk while sober and sober when drunk. In our room, the floor went down into a corner and I sort of found myself falling towards it no matter what I did. The bathroom looks fresh out of the 1980s and the framed pictures in the bedroom have seen better decades but for £45 a night, the hotel is far nicer than the price would suggest. The restaurant and coffee house all retain a lot of the features that make the building memorable, but the coffee house’s blue light around the ceiling is less than fitting.

It’s a pity to report that the Sunday roast at The Feathers is average because to me, a roast is a high stakes meal and should leave you in no fit state to do anything but rub your belly and groan in a happy way. Instead, I was merely quite full and while nothing was wrong with the food, it lacked character. For £18.50, I would have expected more. My Mum did say her crumble was excellent, and the iced coffees are good, so it’s not a disaster. In a welcome twist, breakfast the next morning was genuinely good.

Ledbury is all centred around the market house and up the set-piece medieval Church Lane which is marvellously photogenic from any angle. On the street you have Butcher’s Row House museum and at the top of the lane stands St Michael and All Angels church, which has existed there in some form since the 11^th century. After our stroll around the town and it being August, a Sunday and in the covid-era, we wandered what we could do, so we went to the riverside park. After all the beautiful buildings of Ledbury, it was a pleasure to get to the park via an industrial estate which featured some stunning tin roofs. It’s quite the historical tour of industrial buildings of the last 50 years and is not to be missed, unless you’ve anything else at all to do. The park is a thin sliver of land between the river Leadon and a main road but there are some reasonably diverting sights such as a tree that clings onto the river bank, showing you the roots spreading out alarmingly. Beyond the riverside park you can head out into open country that looks gorgeous with cows roaming about. We spotted Sixteen Ridges vineyard in the distance, but it was closed.

In the evening, we went for a second walk and headed out to Ledbury Park, but it turned out that this was private so we kept finding gates telling us to go elsewhere. It’s bit of a downer because there’s so much nice land in Ledbury but finding a path you can walk on takes longer than it should. So we trudge back to town, find another private path and eventually find a space we can wander around, which is an almost vertical climb so we abandon that as well. Finally, past the Police station we find a path that takes us through some fields abuzz with bees and we end up in Dog Hill Wood where we spot someone looking out over the town all alone. It always seems to me that anyone sitting alone on a viewpoint must be a murderer, but we didn’t see any legs sticking out of the undergrowth.

After this somewhat distorted walk we go to the highly atmospheric Prince of Wales pub on Church Street. They’d gone covid-mad and every single table had plastic screens that separated people apart from each other but not separating us from strangers. I had seen these sort of screens splitting people up in Italy but Italians quickly figured out that this was ridiculous and scrapped it. We, like everyone else in the pub, discreetly slipped the screen out of the way as talking through a plastic screen is rubbish and we supped our very nice German beer in a semi-anxious state. They didn’t bother with track and trace and had a system where you ordered your drink and signed your signature with a pen other people had used. I guess we’d spritzed our hands with hand gel but still, great pub, shame about the inconsistencies. And if a breakout happens there, I’ll never know.

Day two in Ledbury marked day one of Eat out To Help Out so we went for a taxpayer-subsidised breakfast at Cameron and Swan, which sounds like the setup to a political joke, but in Cameron’s case it was a pig. And the first thing to note is that this is a place that does track and trace very well. Perspex separates different groups of customers, with hand sanitiser on entry and someone to take your details. If you wanted to go to the loo, you had to put your hand up so you’re not confronted with the horror of bumping into another human. I had the full English, which is most of anyone’s daily calorific needs, but it was kept very healthy by the half tomato and beans. Why do cafes feel the need to only put half a tomato on a place? Would an entire tomato ruin appetites? When I was in a hotel in Warsaw, I noticed that room service breakfast charged the equivalent of 50p for half a tomato. The mind boggles. My partner had some sort of salmon concoction and was very pleased. Gold star!

After the meal we had a stroll in the walled garden by Church Street and it was blissfully calm and quiet. I could have sat there for days. I was excited to visit Hus and Hem, a Scandinavian design shop which for reasons unknown thought that Ledbury was the place to sell their delightful goods. I bought a friend some chocolate covered liquorice (Salmiaki) before we headed to the only museum open in the town. The painted room is a small, er, painted room and when renovating the building in the 1990s, a decorator stripped away some wallpaper to find some unexpected marks on the walls. It turns out that they had come across a 500 year old painting that was hidden under hundreds of years of renovations. The design was that of a knot garden and it is simply remarkable that the painting is still so bright today, with easily readable extracts from the bible. The guide was super, miming along to a covid-friendly audio recording of her talk, and she was dressed in suitable attire, hiding her face mask under a lacy veil. There was something very 2020 about this visit; usually, I wouldn’t find much of a thrill in somewhere like the painted room but being able to go back into a museum was still something to be savoured. And really, it is remarkable that people in the Tudor times were painting on a wall I was standing in 500 years later, taking photos on my digital devices.

After a good lunch at the Seven Stars, we set off on a walk to Eastnor, despite Eastnor Castle being closed. We head to Coneygree wood, on the edge of Ledbury and we experience that great moment of the traffic sounds being entirely muffled by the trees. Soon all we hear is our feet crunching on the ground and the birds gossiping about us in the trees. The woods felt ancient, with vines creeping up everything they could and before long we were walking through open fields ringed by the enchanting trees and great views of the Malvern hills. After about 45 minutes, we come across a settlement of pheasants rummaging about, making alarmed noises and having fun with their friends. When we arrive in Eastnor, we see the Church covered in scaffold and not much else. A look for another route back via the fields was essential as the fine folk at Google only suggest routes that would have us as flat as roadkill if we misjudge the traffic on the roads. Luckily, there’s another route that takes us in a loop back to Ledbury, via fields of sleeping sheep that brings us out near Dog Hill wood.

In the evening we have dinner at the Olive Tree restaurant. Our original plan of eating at a Thai/Chinese restaurant is scuppered by them only doing takeaway. The only person inside was a very stressed out looking woman wondering where everyone was. Luckily, the Olive Tree had one table left inside, where people usually wait for takeaway. On this table we were able to hear the presumed owner bemoan his full restaurant, saying Eat out to Help out was a disaster. I couldn’t sympathise. He was making money and we got to eat two mains with drinks for £20. While I thought my hake risotto was great, the menu was so absurdly long, it made me wonder why restaurants don’t just do a simpler range of things excellently. But I don’t run a restaurant, so what do I know.

My adventures in Ledbury end here. It’s a fine town, with much to commend it. I had moments of real pleasure and relaxation but the closures from coronavirus definitely made this a less compelling visit than it could have been. Had we hired a car, the Malvern hills would have been ours for the taking. Next time maybe, but my trip continues to beautiful Ludlow.

Edvard Munch at the British Museum

Once, in Oslo’s National Museum, I was one of four people in the world looking at their copy of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The painting was accompanied by a guard and was behind a case as it kept getting nicked, but other than that, my friends and I were blissfully alone with this masterpiece and free to admire it from as many angles as we pleased. Imagine being able to say the same of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers or Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, now eternally blocked not only by people but also their smartphones.

Fast forward some years, and the British Museum’s Edvard Munch exhibition is a hellscape of tourists and people craning their necks to see the works on display, but what works they are. The lithograph of The Scream (1895) is no less sensational when viewed up close, and I was able to see it in a brief moment when the hordes were elsewhere. The exhibition is a detailed exploration of his work and influences and starts with a self-portrait of Munch with a skeleton hand. It sets the tone of everything that follows, one of despair, morbidity and grief that haunted his work throughout his life. To say the exhibition shows a man obsessed with the fragility of life is an understatement.

His life seemed to be a series of miserable situations, from his mother dying when he was five to his sister dying when he was thirteen. When you add to this the mental health of another sister and his own mental collapse, fuelled by alcohol, you can appreciate that his exhibition is not one filled with joy and it makes sense that the images he made lack human warmth and joy.

On display were Head by Head (1095) where a couple appear to be embracing, but the print suggests they are in the act of consolation rather than love. Eye in Eye (1894) shows a couple not looking at each other, but through each other. The woman’s hair covers much of her face and the man is a pallid colour, with sockets for eyes.

Other images show mothers, stricken in grief or children, holding their head in their hands as their own mothers lay dead. On display are versions of Dead Mother and child (1900) where a child is looking at us, wide eyed in disbelief and covering her ears. It’s a potent image that stayed with me throughout the exhibition.

Next to images by Munch are are examples of works he was inspired by, including the incredible Acid Thrower (1894) by Eugène Samuel Grasset. This work, showing a woman on edge holding a cup full of sulphuric acid that would disfigure a love rival, looks so modern and violent. Her hair is a shock of deep red, with a red background that makes her slightly green skin feel all the more sinister.

Munch was also inspired by Odilon Redon, whose Obsession left me in a momentary daze. There was something about the painting that made me think about how my own worries and anxieties would appear, if painted. I felt it was something like this, so much so that images I’d never seen felt familiar. What was most impressive about the exhibition is the multitude of ways in which sadness is displayed and how relatable it all was; human frailty on display is a frightening and beautiful thing. This frailty was sometimes evident in the ways the pictures seemed too harshly rendered, but most obviously in the hollow faces of people. Munch was quoted as saying he wouldn’t alter his moods because he owed so much of his output to this, which suddenly gives a sense of humanity to everything he did and everything displayed in the room.

The best place to see Munch’s work is the Munch museum in Oslo, currently moving to a new waterfront building in the city centre. It will open in 2020.

Stanley Kubrick at the Design Museum

Being the adventures of a ~~young~~ man whose principal interests are films, hoarding and camera lenses.

Stanley Kubrick was a hoarder of the kind that gets you onto a TV show along the lines of Trapped under My Receipts is my initial impression when I walked into the Design Museum’s summer blockbuster exhibition of his work. And unlike people that shove the plastic-bag equivalent of a Russian doll under the sink, this is stuff that allows admirers to see how his mind worked and how he made his masterpieces. In 2007, the Kubrick estate gifted his archives to University of the Arts London, and much of the material on show comes from this collection, which has been on a world tour for years.

What this exhibitions shows is a level of detail to his work and an explosion of creativity that is remarkable to behold, from his early days of his career as a photographer up to the very end. The pieces on display tell a story of a man obsessed with research and a perfectionist of the highest order. This exhibition gives as much space as is possible to every film, but it’s such a rich archive and such a strong collection of film history that you’ll find bottlenecks wherever a particularly interesting artefact lies.

Kubrick’s passion for research is shown in the pre-production for Napoleon, a film that has never been made. There is a library of books that Kubrick collected on the man, index cards covering every day of his life as well as costumes and a draft script. Seeing the demanding shooting schedule would be enough to give anyone a migraine, but Kubrick had to go one further and arrange for 10,000 soldiers from the Romanian army to be on hand for the shoot. That’s a cluster headache right there.

There is brilliant pre-production on show for Eyes Wide Shut where Kubrick and his team scouted locations to make his own version of New York in London; photos of Commercial Road are stitched together to create a panorama of London to help Kubrick figure out what he could use. It’s fascinating enough as a snapshot of the capital over twenty years ago. Another item was a map of Manhattan with London street names written over the top. All of this, plus elaborate sets made in Pinewood, are the lengths Kubrick would go to so he could pop home at night after a long day’s shooting and to avoid getting on an aeroplane.

There is correspondence between Kubrick and colleagues which demonstrated his level of control over every aspect of his work. Seeing the designs that Saul Bass created for The Shining was exciting; Bass enthusiastically writing about the latest designs and how one in particular stood out and had the office abuzz. That design was the one we all know – the strange horrified baby inside a giant letter T. Other options were far less memorable and on one of them, a giant hand in the snow with Danny’s tricycle in it, Kubrick wrote “hand and bike are too irrelevant.”

Other gems of correspondence show that Kubrick upset Christians on a regular basis (one was upset with A Clockwork Orange but took no issue with Rosemary’s Baby) and good, honest Americans who were outraged by Dr Strangelove, not to mention Lolita. In some instances, we saw what Kubrick wrote back to them and he was courteous but also slightly bemused as to the concerns of these people. There was something delicious in his reply to an angry letter about Lolita, describing it as a film that had already been shot, as if they’d wasted a stamp on their outrage. A letter from Ireland announcing yet another ban argued that soon, in Dublin, a cinema may be able to screen his work and that it would be worth the wait to have it shown there. The only thing missing was a Father-Ted style “down with this sort of thing” photo with original placards.

Kubrick was interested in pushing technology wherever possible – for Barry Lyndon, he used a lens designed for space exploration to enable him to film using just candle light and had to use candles that burned rapidly but very brightly. They sucked oxygen out of the room, perhaps leaving the actors close to asphyxiation but the end result is a stunning film that merits having an ambulance at the ready. 2001: A Space Odyssey had some incredible tricks up its sleeve that would now be made digitally including front projection of the scenes set in Africa, the stargate scene which used slit scan technology and the gravity on the space station made using what looks like a hamster wheel. The technical complexities of this film is covered in enough detail to keep geeks happy but not so much that your mind explodes.

As I moved into the section of the display about The Shining, there were considerable shivers up my spine when I saw some of the props; Danny’s Apollo 11 jumper especially got to me. It’s so tiny, and such an apt thing for a vulnerable boy to be wearing while his Dad is on the rampage in a hellish hotel. Close by were the sheets of paper that Jack wrote his epic novel on with country-specific versions of “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” It’s “Never put off until tomorrow what can be done today” in German and in Italian it’s “The morning has gold in its mouth.” Yet again, this attention to detail marks Kubrick out as something different and other images even show his desire for the snow on the ground to look just the way he wanted, not too ploughed and not too wild. By the end of the exhibition, I realised that this is the first large-scale exhibition I have seen on a movie director and I hope there are more to come. But for now, this is as good a starting place as any other and it’s an exhibition in love with Kubrick’s film as well as his mind.

Waltham Forest Borough of Culture

From the 11th-13th January, Walthamstow hosted the opening event for the first London Borough of Culture and it was a feast of art, culture and fun for everyone. For one year, Waltham Forest will be the centre of the universe for people that get a kick out of culture. For us that live here, it already is the centre of the universe and we’re more than happy to share our home with you.

Seeing the light show at Lloyd Park being tested throughout the week got me excited for the event itself and after a queue that wasn’t as gruesome as I’d feared, we were in Lloyd Park and headed for Nest, a shimmering light installation by Marshmallow Laser Feast with music by Erland Cooper, using the voices of over 1000 local school children and choir members. The lights from Nest could be seen from afar but up close is where the magic happens; people were lying down in the centre of the space, looking up at the sky as the lights danced around the park and up into the clouds. It was a beautiful moment of peace and contemplation in the midst of the town.

After Nest, we travelled down Forest Road and encountered a carnivalesque atmosphere, with a man playing a mobile piano and another man riding a bike while playing a double bass. Das Brass, an 8-piece brass band blasted out Michael Jackson songs as well as other classics from Toto and The White Stripes. Further on, bright white figures march past while giant tree monsters give limb bumps to kids. Before joining the queue for the Town Hall installation, we get to admire the ever-brilliant neon from God’s Own Junkyard slung up in the trees. A fitting end to the Borough of Culture would be for these neon beauties to be distributed among residents of the borough in a raffle. We can but dream! One day, I’d love a giant neon pair of lips in my living room.

Kids in yellow vest – is Walthamstow ready for kiddy *gilets jaunes?*

The final piece of the launch event was video work projected onto the Town Hall, kicking off with Addictive TV’s Welcome to the Forest, where local musicians were sampled to create a song about, you guessed it, the Borough of Culture! Much rapping about the gems of the neighbourhood like Lea Bridge Road and Chingford ensued before Greenaway and Greenaway’s sensational multimedia story of the borough and music by Mercury-Prize winning musician Talvin Singh. In this, we are urged to close our minds to the realities of life for one day, to immerse ourselves in the art and to celebrate the place we call home. The story of the borough takes us from old men in pubs to the swaying trees of Epping Forest, through the war and everything since. We hear voices denounce austerity, gentrification, fear of crime and ever rising house prices making it hard for people from the borough to stay here. One man questions “how it’ll feel, when I’m on my knees” while another questions why people hate others because of the colour of their skin. The show’s impact lies not just in its technical brilliance but its aim to get people thinking about the place we live and the one we’d like to see. The projections end with a young schoolgirl reciting a line from William Morris “The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.”

Naturally, with an event like this, there are voices of dissent that the borough of culture exists at all when we see more and more homelessness or shocking crimes on our doorstep. With the bad, we have to revel in the good and celebrate what we can achieve, even if average house prices of £500,000 and child poverty sit uneasily side by side. Kudos to the team behind this for focusing on the inequalities in the borough as well as the groovy stuff. By the end of the show, I felt prouder than ever to see the faces behind the creativity and talent in the place I live and this was a well-deserved celebration of all things Waltham Forest. This was a great start to what I hope will be a brilliant year.

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