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.

The joys of being an independent traveller

In a reflective mood, it occurred to me that some of my favourite travel moments are defined by having an open mind on where to go and then somehow getting there, even if turns out to be a right pain in the arse. I was first bitten by the travel bug in 2005 when I convinced a friend to visit Stockholm with me. In the winter. Ridiculous. But the flights were about £12, so, why the hell not?Evidently, this isn’t the definition of flinging myself off the beaten track, but being a third year uni student, it’s the polar opposite to a ladz holiday to some island full of babes and booze, and since then I’ve never looked back.  And at the age of 36, I don’t see any lads holidays in the future.

Stockholm archipelago in 2005, taken on a charmingly crap camera

Despite my fear of crashing and burning into the ground because, in my mind, all aircraft are just flying tubes of petrol, I loved the moment the plane went above the clouds and I saw a beautiful sea of rippling sky-pillows beneath me. We explored Stockholm, visited the island full of art galleries and even took a boat out to Vaxholm island where it absolutely pelted it down with incessant rain. To be contrary, I acted like this was exactly what I wanted, but my friend remained glum and didn’t believe my tricks. Luckily, we found a cafe that sold cake with vanilla custard and hid from the deluge.

Other holidays followed, including an exciting trip where we went from Brussels (hugely underrated city!) to Cologne (bland) as a spontaneous day trip and then more standard trips to Madrid and Barcelona. A visit to Tallinn and Helsinki confirmed my adoration of all that northern Europe can offer and in 2009, a trip to Georgia, near Russia, really lit a fire about the sorts of holidays I wanted to have.

I fell for Georgia almost immediately, struck by wooden scaffolding, cleaners harassing rubbish on the streets with brushes that looked fairly similar to broomsticks and, not being unkind, genuine hags. Tbilisi was a magical eye-opener and part of the thrill and annoyance that comes with travelling off your own steam was experienced at the train station. We needed to get a train from Tbilisi, across the country to Batumi, now some sort of cut-price Vegas by the sea. We queued patiently to get train tickets, so locals would push in front to argue with the person giving out tickets and leave with tickets. I couldn’t argue in Georgian, and I’m not terribly keen on doing it in English, so when we got to the counter, we were denied tickets because of a power cut. I had wondered why things were gloomy. We did eventually get tickets when a tour guide we spent two days with, argued with the ticket seller on our behalf.

In Georgia, we arranged to go on a cycling tour, and the package was to part ride, part drive to a village called Tianeti. We spent a night with a host family who cooked us a feast of the most spectacular Georgian food, food I still cook to this day and rate as amongst the tastiest on the planet. I was in traveller heaven. I’ll always remember the woman picking out wild garlic and coriander from her garden. The flavours were spectacular. We all got drunk.

I have a book of soviet bus stops, so seeing one was well exciting

A year later, a friend and I went on an ambitious tour of Sweden, starting in Stockholm and taking in the archipelago, as well as Umeå, Luleå and Arjeplog all by planes, trains, boats and automobiles. The island of Finnhamn was intensely relaxing and in terms of amenities, it had a little store open ’til 5pm and then a fantastic restaurant, open late. Once again, we were caught out by taking matters in our own hands and not booking in advance, finding that the restaurant was fully booked until at least 10pm. With no other options for food open to us, we sat on the terrace, looking at the view in front of us and adding secret glugs of Finnish Koskenkorva vodka to glasses of coke.

Finnhamn

We visited Arjeplog for the midnight sun and when recently discussing that evening in Arjeplog, our memories were specific to the point of words we spoke. It is burned into my memories as something so mind-blowing it’ll be there in that photo montage bit you get before you die. As we took a night train over 1000km back to Stockholm, a woman in the train cafeteria asked us what we had been doing in Arjeplog and the answer that we’d done almost nothing but look at the scenery, walk and stare open-mouthed at the midnight sun. This didn’t seem to move her to tears as it had me. But that’s the Swedes for you, they are rather reserved.

In 2011, I went on a trip to Jordan and Syria, where I got to enjoy see Amman, Petra, Jerash and Wadi Rum in Jordan. Our hotel in Amman had been bombed by Al-Queda in 2005, so every time we entered our bags were X-Rayed and we were vaguely patted down, but I still felt very safe in the country and refused to let the actions of some pathetic terrorists stop me exploring the world.

In Wadi Rum we stayed in a tent made out of goat hair and spoke to people who were on an organised trip, which had cost one couple thousands of dollars and included things like hot air balloon rides – I will never entrust my life in wicker baskets powered by flames – and camel rides, where the camels growl, spit and walk at a slow pace. They believed that the Goat Hair Inn was some sort of exclusive place; I did a Google search after seeing how incredible Wadi Rum looked and $120 dollars later, my friend and I were staying in the exact same conditions as them. We all ate food that was cooked in a pit below the sand and afterwards, my friend and I stood in the desert, transfixed by the silence and stillness of the emptiness all around. Later that night, I got paranoid that we’d be stung by lobsters, until my friend told me I was actually afraid of scorpions. Great, that’s two animals that wanted me dead. I slept like a log in the end.

Wadi Rum

After this we headed to Syria, where things were slowly unravelling, the Friday we were in Aleppo was the deadliest in the unrest so far, with reports that up to 100 people were killed. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary for us, but it was clear that tourism was way below what would be expected. After a trip to some ruins outside Aleppo, we encountered a small protest where people waving olive branches were briefly around our car. Knowing that the government was shooting live ammunition and tear gas at people, my body froze with fear that something would go wrong, but we passed on. Later that evening, we found ourselves in a gay sauna, suggested to us by locals who clearly thought we’d appreciate the experience. It was bizarre when I had to ask the masseuse to give me a half-hearted rub; he seemed taken aback that someone wanted to do anything other than flirting. I’m fairly certain that hammam was partially destroyed by fighting. It always feels exciting to find a guide on the street and use their services to explore a place, and in Syria we found a driver who suggested we take a day to visit the Dead cities in-between Aleppo and Idlib and to the magnificent remains of Krak des Chevaliers, near Hama. Why trust a random bloke in the middle of the street, you say? He showed us lots of leaflets in the boot of his car and he had a lanyard, so we felt pretty sure he was the real deal. Luckily, we were right.

I couldn’t recreate this holiday now, but I am forever thankful that I got to do it at all. Had it been just a few weeks later and I am sure I’d have backed out, especially as the Foreign Office at this point had make Syria entirely red on their travel advice map, a colour if remains to this day.

Aleppo Souq

My 2012 jaunt to Cuba was thrilling for many reasons, but what stood out to me was the informality of the country. You really could hang out looking like a confused tourist wearing a straw hat and someone would come along to offer you accommodation or tell you your accommodation was on fire/full of rats and voila, you’d have a place to sleep. I recall how we dropped by a place we’d previously stayed at in Havana, needing to find somewhere to stay and the owner flipped through a rolodex and called some friends. Twenty minutes later we were in someone else’s home and they were frantically making swans out of towels for us. In my notebook, I had written that there was a woman in Viñales who made heart-breakingly good food and somehow, without GPS and wifi, we found her house, knocked on her door and asked if we could eat there. Sure, she said, in her pyjamas. There’s a certain sense of adventure in just turning up at a stranger’s home and hoping for the best, but generally, Cuba didn’t let us down. I recall being in the stunning city of Trinidad, heading to a beach near our fantastic accommodation, Casa Munoz and after our beach excursion, where real life Cubans were downing neat Havana Club in the sea, we had no transport back. A man with a truck sensed we were tourists – the straw hats, the pale skin and union jack tracksuits probably gave us away – so he let us jump into the back and took us to Trinidad. What a dude.

Friends that have been in the past few years have come back with mixed feelings; wifi seems to be everywhere, which for me takes away from the magic of escaping the news cycles and restaurants either need reservations or have queues going out the door. Places are fully booked, you need to reserve. Americans are everywhere. Where’s the magic in that?

Havana

Bosnia was the next up in 2014, and I feel a certain affinity with this place as my Dad was there during the Balkans war. Mostar was our first stop and my friends seemed somewhat uncomfortable with the sheer number of bullet holes in the walls, if a wall still stood. As the city grew closer, our taxi driver tried to sell us some “top quality sunglasses” which we reluctantly passed on, what with us all wearing our own sunglasses. While a bit shocked that some twenty years after the bloodshed, the town still looked broken, I also fell in love with the human spirit and the country. Seeing the Mostar bridge was both awe-inspiring and heart-breaking; watching videos of the bridge being shelled was a horrific reminder of how wars kill people, history and cultures and very often achieve nothing at all. Sitting at a table with a view of the river one evening, a lone firework explodes, telling Muslims observing ramadan that it’s time to eat. Soon around us are families chatting and eating and the city feels beautifully peaceful. The next morning, we stroll around the town looking for Muslibegovic House. Naturally, the only person around to help us spoke no English so we peek behind every door and fence to find the beautiful Ottoman-era house that my map tells me is definitely, probably, just there. Eventually, we find it and it is worth the wait. Unblemished by war, it’s a stunning building with a peaceful courtyard. I particularly liked the mannequins that are re-living the lives of the Ottoman-era. One looks just like David Bowie. You can stay in the house and it’s just €90 a night. Now to convince my boyfriend that he wants to visit Mostar…

Mostar

Sarajevo is an easy sell for a tourist; it’s a great city, full of energy, optimism as well as reminders of the war. I loved the Baščaršija, the old town where you get a sense of east meeting west. Many cities really do like to claim this but here you get to see Austro-Hungarian Europe one moment and a Turkish market the next. It’s a perfect warren of merchants to explore. At the time, I wrote that the city marketed itself as the place where we witnessed the “start of the 20th century” and where the “20th century ended”. At the beginning, Franz Ferdinand was shot and World War 1 began. At the end, words like ethnic cleansing become necessary and museums like the War Tunnels remind us of the three year blockade of Sarajevo. the History museum of Sarajevo showed fascinating images of the city during the war and now. The reconstructed Sarajevo City Hall, shelled in 1992, looks spectacular and the stained glass ceiling is a thing of wonder.

Sarajevo City Hall

So many of my travelling adventures have been helped no end by drunken conversations, searches on Google maps, happy coincidences and curiosity. So, my advice to everyone is pretty simple. The world is a great place and people are wonderful. Go and see it! Holiday resorts can wait.

A trip to… Liverpool

The first thing I saw after leaving the train at Liverpool Lime Street was a man, perhaps on his way to a wedding, or perhaps just dressed like an unexploded bomb. Any sudden move and that jacket was going to blow. The trousers were held in place only by a belt and, I presume, a judicious application of glue. It was a fascinating outfit that worked hard to re-introduce me to Liverpool, one of the finest cities in Britain. We were staying at Hatter’s hostel, and immediately my hopes of being able to freshen up after being trapped in a Virgin train, where a light whiff of sewage permeates everything, were dashed by the receptionists. Check in was 2pm, said the desk bureaucrats. With our luggage stowed, we left to explore the city, with that sweet smell of toilets clinging to us.  

Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral

In my mind the first port of call for someone who’s never been to Liverpool before is the Metropolitan Cathedral; it’s the sort of place where I could be turned into someone vaguely religious, given enough time and if the services weren’t dreary, long or religious. As cathedrals go, it’s a modern masterpiece on top of a lost masterpiece. The original design was by Edwin Lutyens, with a dome rising to 90 metres. It was planned to be open 24 hours a day, with heated floors so that homeless people would have a place to sleep. Naturally, after World War 2, making enormous cathedrals didn’t fit in with the general vibe of having no money, so the building work ground to a halt. The only part of Lutyens building to be completed was the crypt, which you can visit today. It is a real surprise to go from the technicolour glory of the modern cathedral into the vast space of the crypt. Millions of bricks line the walls and the ceilings curve up into entrancing swirling shapes. Within the crypt was a history of the cathedral, including letters from church bosses to the architects about the need to stick to a miniscule budget of £1,000,000. They chose Frederick Gibberd’s bold design, and it’s a discount version of Oscar Niemeyer’s Metropolitan Cathedral of Brasilia. The result of the penny-pinching was that Gibberd’s building started falling apart almost immediately and fixing it took some ingenuity. The crypt gallery shows a bizarre image of an archer shooting down parts of the rotting ceiling with an arrow. Now it’s all repaired, it is a joy to look at from every angle. The interiors use the space and light to such good effect, I wish every city could have a building so perfect for its purpose. I love how the cathedral was designed to bring the altar into the round, making the congregation a central part of all that happens there. I couldn’t help thinking it’d make a brilliant venue for gigs.

Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral Interior

After the cathedral, we headed to the Philharmonic pub, which is only a short walk away. It’s a wonderful place to spend some time in a degree of elegance, with the men’s toilets being a revered stop on a bog-based tour. Thirty men shuffle into the opulent pee palace, without buying anything from the pub, looking confused and embarrassed by it all, while some chap exclaimed that the taps were from the 1920s. The Phil is so well-regarded that Paul McCartney himself said the thing he misses most about being not being famous is being able to pop in for a pint. But Macca, the toilets still smell bad. I had a coke in the pub, as I was doing Sober October. Everyone looked like a pint of cool, crisp lager. Being near Halloween, it could have been fancy dress."The taps are from the 1920s"

The Philharmonic Pub

Next we found, alongside everyone else, the Cavern Club. There are entry fees at certain times of the week and we didn’t want to be charged, but when you’re inside, the magic of The Beatles hits hard. There’s no overstating the importance of the band, and seeing the tiny stage where they played 275 times feels quite special. The club is decked out with some incredible Beatles memorabilia including cabinets full of signed guitars, setlists, a flyer signed by iconic legend Jessie J about the Cavern’s printer being shit. Yes, you can tell the glory days are over when you read that China Crisis are performing there for a festive show, but it’s always going to be one of the most important places in music history.

The stage where The Beatles played

Dinner was served by the lovely folk at Oktopus, which is hidden away down an alleyway you’d not venture towards if you didn’t know delicious food was at the other end. The space is as cosy as can be, with standard regulation stripped-back walls and open-plan kitchen. The sourdough bread and beer butter was a major success, and sharing plates make tasty and inventive use of carrots. With firm bites and explosions of flavour, these were special. Topped with pesto, ricotta and walnuts, this was one of the best bits of the meal. The chickpea panisse came with a fabulously rich black olive caramel and the whole fish arrived in foil with fantastic roasted tomatoes and potatoes all cooked to perfection.

Our postprandial stroll took us down to Pier Head and to the three graces, which Liverpool is rightly famous for. The Royal Liver building is the most recognisable, soaring up to just shy of 100 metres, with clock towers at the peak. It is an example of concrete construction done with flair and it has a feeling of a New York skyscraper about it. The Cunard Building is a rectangular beauty, just six storeys high, and The Port of Liverpool Building is full of classical touches, such as the dome, and the building itself is said to be taken from an unused design of Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral. As a trio, they create an instantly recognisable waterfront skyline, making sure you realise that Liverpool, at one time at least, was very important. But god knows, the city doesn’t look after it as much as it ought to. There’s the Mann Island development, which hides the three Graces away with angular glass and metal shards poking about. It’s not pretty, and while no city should be preserved in aspic, it’s always worth caring for your heritage. There are further plans for trashing the area with outsized residential towers, letting affordable housing pledges die on the vine. Just beyond is the rubbish ocean-liner stylings of the Mercure Hotel and another couple of hideous monstrosities lurking behind it like unwelcome party guests. At certain angles, these carbuncles are thankfully out of sight and only then does the sheer glory of the three graces hits you like a gust of wind off the Mersey.

The next morning, sunlight streamed through the crack in the curtain and we were set for a perfect autumn day. I’d had a surprisingly excellent night’s sleep on the Hatter’s Hostel mattress, made of springs with some loo roll strung between them. Refreshed, we had a traditional hostel breakfast. This is usually non-brand name cereal and toast that goes through the bread conveyor belt in a very specific order. First time through = crunchy bread and second time through = ash. I spread some non-brand chocolate derivative onto crunchy bread and sighed. I shouldn’t have been such a cheapskate. After this depressing breakfast, we headed to Bold Street coffee to have breakfast again, but this time in style. After breakfast two, we boarded the train to Formby, just 30 minutes outside Liverpool. In Formby, you can venture into the woods to find red squirrels, making this just the second time I’d seen them, so it was very exciting to walk down the pathway and almost immediately see a family of the critters playing. In the UK, just 140,000 remain, mostly in Scotland. Red squirrels are pocket-sized bundles of cuteness, and their scampering about is very pleasing to watch, knowing that they are so rare in the UK.

The National Trust has red squirrel paths and many other routes around the woods, some signposts leading to a route called the Asparagus trail, which takes you through farmland used to grow delicious asparagus for a short season every year. The history of the area is also apparent in fields labelled Tobacco waste and Nicotine fields. Between the 1950s and 1970s, tobacco leaf waste was dumped by the beach. As you proceed to the sea, you come across sand dunes that seem so incongruous with the surrounding area, but this is what makes the landscape so surprising and wonderful to explore. The dunes are dramatic around Formby Point and this is part of the largest area of sand dunes in England, which is rapidly receding up to as much as four metres a year.

Formby Point

Back to Liverpool and dinner at Maray. I was wise and reserved ahead, but for some reason I did so for the night after. Maray was already busy and looked to be fully booked for the evening, but after some table magic was completed, we were seated for a wonderful meal inspired by the middle east. We had dishes including half a cauliflower slathered with tahini, harissa and yoghurt which was far better than my description would suggest. The scallops in a parsnip puree flew off my plate, as did the buttermilk fried chicken with a red cabbage ketchup. I had a mocktail and loved it, whereas my friend was knocking back a gin cocktail like a monster. Sober for October will turn you against friends and loved ones. The meal, which was too enormous for us to eat didn’t even hit £40 for the both of us. Wonderful service and excellent value for money, Maray is a gem.

Our final exploration of the city was the following day where we wisely ditched the crunchy bread and ersatz coffee, and had breakfast at a local café. We went to the Albert Docks to see what was on at Tate Liverpool. An exhibition of Roy Lichtenstein Pop Art was there and as much as I enjoy his work, I couldn’t help but feel the novelty wore thin after a while. And yet, there’s not much more iconic than this, and it was free. Their main collection holds some fantastic pieces, including photographs by Gillian Wearing and Cindy Sherman. Next door is a museum devoted to Liverpool’s maritime history and, attached to it, a slavery museum. It’s hard to come to terms with how the plight of slaves made Liverpool so important, not to mention so prosperous. One and a half million African slaves were transported from Liverpool to America so a visit to Liverpool, with its fine civic architecture, is loaded with a hideous past.

As our sewage-tainted train pulled out of Liverpool Lime Street back to London, I knew that I’d be coming back to Liverpool. It’s a fantastic city where Conservatives and The Sun newspaper aren’t welcome. These are my sort of people.

Walthamstow Wetlands

“It’s a pleasant day, I’m 35, what else am I supposed to do?”

Inaccessible to all but fisherfolk for 150 years, Walthamstow Wetlands has finally opened to some fanfare and much quacking after £8m of improvements. My first view of this enormous new open space, spanning 211 hectares, is via the Maynard Entrance on Forest Road, a ten-minute walk from Blackhorse Road tube station. This entrance gives you access to the northern reservoirs which are some of the largest and least picturesque on the site. Lockwood Reservoir is a great expanse of water, which you climb an embankment to get to. Up top, you can see clear views for miles and walking around the perimeter of this would take at least twenty minutes or so. To the south you can spot the clusters of skyscrapers at Canary Wharf as well as the city, giving a perspective on the landscape of London as much more than just urban sprawl. As an internationally important site for birds, I expected to see more but in attendance were swans, coots and moorhens in abundance as well as ubiquitous gulls and a few herons.

The landscape undergoes something of a transformation once you cross Forest road and into the sites’ main entrance. Here you can walk to the renovated Engine House which just a few years back was a partially derelict building. Now it’s a stunning visitor centre with a brand new 24-metre tower housing 54 swift nest boxes as well as space for bats and a café serving your standard “how much?!” cups of coffee and snacks. That said, the Wetlands is free to visit and is open 7 days a week so I’ve no business complaining and they don’t have security strip-searching for contraband snacks.

The Engine House

The central reservoirs really show off the beauty of the site, with two hectares of new reedbeds planted which helps encourage lots of wildlife playing hide and seek. In making the site accessible to visitors, many tiny jetties have been installed to sit on, stand on and fish from. It’s easy to get lost amongst the foliage and listen out for the bird song alongside the occasional whine of a police siren. If you are after genuine serenity, you’ll need reminding that the site is close to Tottenham, on the edges of Walthamstow and still very much in an industrial area of London. Richmond Park it ain’t, but there’s something enchanting in the Wetlands where nature abounds amid pylons and chimneys puffing out the pollution that is making our air toxic. This is a surprisingly peaceful patch of London though, especially when you experience the full size of the site.

Pylons and birds

Aside from the obvious birds I can recognise, don’t ask me what specific brand of bird you’ll spot because that’s where I fall down. When I was at uni in Exeter, I regularly went to areas laden with fowl and lived with a naturalist who knew her birds. All that knowledge is now lost to time but the Wetlands may yet bring some of it back. When I thought “bird over there with long beak” was a cormorant, I was entirely wrong. As a 35 year-old, it’s entirely appropriate to learn about birds, especially when a nationally recognised reserve has just opened on my doorstep. It’s not like I’m going to go clubbing.

So, the wetlands. It lives up to its name, being extravagantly wet. And it being east London, there’s an Andrea Arnold-esque beauty in how industrial lands combine with nature to create something surprisingly peaceful. Another win for Walthamstow and a marvellous new amenity for the people.

 

Open House London 2017

Open House is the best weekend in the year for the nosey among us and for the curious, it’s a great opportunity to see places you’d normally pay to get in or only get in by evading men with guns. As I didn’t to see Number 10 or the BT tower via the ballots, I plumped for Banqueting House on Whitehall. It is the last remnant of the Palace of Whitehall and has some interesting history behind it. The ceiling of Banqueting Hall was painted by Ruebens, dating back to 1636 and it’s a spectacular sight. Installing the canvasses wasn’t easy – though Belgium and England both used feet as a measurement, there was a difference in how long a foot was. If only there was an Olde EU, we’d have had equal measurements, and the canvass wouldn’t have needed some chopping up to make it fit.

The Great Hall was James I’s main venue for great parties, right in the middle of town. Ideal for showing off, it is said he was well into that and according to some information boards in the hall, he also loved the company of men. Suddenly, the Royal Family seems pretty cool.

Afterwards, sensing there would be queues for many things, if the queues for the Foreign Office were anything to go by, we went to Shakeshack where we got to experience modern architecture and a building too full of people eating quite average burgers. Then, onto Belgrave Square, where we visited the Romanian and Italian cultural institutes and the Argentinian ambassador’s house. The Romanian cultural institute had little in the way of diversions. The interior was grand enough, but when you’ve seen one grand old house, in a way, you’ve seen them all. There was an exhibition of blouses.

The Italian institute’s interior was more interesting, with classrooms full of old desks that reek of the repression of left-handers. There was a library stocked with books about Italy, which you can pop into any time! The library is in a lovely extension with a mezzanine floor.

The highlight was the ambassador’s house. In fact, in terms of what their offer was, they really made the others seem lazy. First of all, there was a doormat saying “beware of the pug”, with attendant pug looking gorgeous in a basket by a table groaning with beautiful flowers. Moving on, every room was full of art from Argentina, colours leaping out at you. It was as if all the excitement, noise and colour of the country was shipped over in diplomatic bags and installed in a London townhouse. Upstairs a band played Argentine jazz. Perhaps it was just jazz. A child danced to the beats, all beneath elaborate chandeliers. The last room was the office of the ambassador, which was a lovely treat; the room was filled with books on all the subjects you’d ever want to know about and a grand desk. As I left, I spotted a picture of the ambassador with the Queen. No Ferrero Rocher was visible.

Top 3 of Edinburgh Festival 2017

Writing about Edinburgh is making me wistful, knowing it’s going on right now makes me both happy and sad. The festival really is the most wonderful bug and it’s a given that i’ll be heading back to Scotland next year for more. Here are my top three shows I saw, in order of totally subjective feelings.

Joseph Morpurgo – Hammerhead. (Pleasance Courtyard, 8pm)

Multimedia comedy is something Jospeh Morpurgo has turned into an art form, and this is the third show I’ve seen from him. Hammerhead is an unhinged masterpiece of stage craft and audience participation. His first show, Odessa, saw him weave a story about a Texan town out of a few minutes of old video footage. His second, Soothing Sounds for Baby, was his take on Desert Island Discs, with an increasingly drunk Kirsty Young. It didn’t win the Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2015, which is either a terrible oversight or an indication of how good the competition was. Hammerhead is something of a change in direction as we are invited to a post-show Q&A where Morpurgo plays a monstrous, flailing actor who has just played all the parts in a 9 hour version of Frankenstein, including “the concept of wet”. As audience members are picked out to read questions, the actor’s ego grows at first as adoring fans congratulate him, then rapidly collapses when the questions turn nasty. His fictional Frankenstein production is an unmitigated disaster, and Morpurgo demonstrates this with some painfully funny projections and video pieces, questions from sources as varied as the dark web and defunct messaging services. His explanation of why his flyers were made on Microsoft Excel pushed me over the edge and, having failed to hear some jokes through laughing too much at the previous one, Hammerhead is something I will be seeing again.

In short, Morpurgo is one of the funniest and freshest performers around. Hammerhead is an exquisitely crafted hour of brilliance, where he toys with comedic conventions as easily as a cat would play with a ball of string.

Adam Hess – Cactus. (Heroes at the Hive, 6pm)

Sara Pascoe and John Robins dated, then broke up. This year their shows delve deeply into their breakups, making the most of their misery for all to see. Adam Hess wrote a show loosely about his own breakup, but doesn’t come close to the level of intimacy, choosing to focus the comedy around his own reactions to breaking up. It’s a brilliant hour of one-liners one after the other and a reminder that comics draw energy from the darker edges of life. There’s a tinge of tragedy in how Hess drinks to forget from a “world’s best nephew” mug when we discover the mug was from a charity shop. In this show, he turns every situation into something funny, with a greatly likeable stage presence.

Jon Pointing – Act Natural. (Pleasance Courtyard, 7.15pm)

Another comic monster is born! Pointing plays an hour as the ghastly Kayden Hunter in a drama workshop where his ego is the main star. It’s a brilliant take down of those self-satisfied presenters we’ve surely all seen, reminding me of an inspirational speaker I once saw reduce two woman to tears and piss off an entire room with his bizarre declarations like “I’m an outstanding teacher but none of you here seem to see it” and the like. Excellent stuff.

Edinburgh Festival 2017 part 3

Being at the festival from Sunday through to Friday can be full on, so we split the time by taking a day trip to somewhere where I’m less likely to be covered in flyers. In the first year I went to Leith, via the gorgeous Dean Village. Last year we took a train to Berwick-upon-Tweed and endured a storm and rain shower that reminded us of the glories of British summer holidays. This year we went to North Berwick, a 40 minute train journey away. It’s home to the Scottish Sealife Centre as well as the chance to take boats out to Bass Rock, a volcanic rock home to a large flock of gannets. The beach at North Berwick is wonderful, a soothing counterpoint to the relentless nature of the festival. Photos of the day are at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbutler

Back in the city, we went to see Annie McGrath’s Ambivert. I had previously seen McGrath as part of sketch comedy duo Twins, who performed a great show in 2015 and a luke-warm show in 2016. In 2017, McGrath is not quite firing on all cylinders, perhaps because the audience is just twelve strong; to put this in context, it’s the smallest fringe audience I’ve ever been part of. Her show has a fundamental flaw to it, which is that she feels her generation has it all really good and the best they can complain about is a lack of wifi. If she’s on about the generation who suffer zero hours contracts, student debt, insecure housing and high levels of anxiety and depression, and who will have to go through the nonsense that is Brexit… if she’s on about those, then she’s way out of touch with reality. She plays the posh girl well, but when she plays ignorant, too, the show just can’t work. Another theme is that she is an ambivert , which is neither an extrovert or an introvert. In a sense, she’s right down the middle, which is exactly where this show lies.

Later on, we go from an empty attic to a bustling basement to see Mae Martin’s Dope, which is a superb hour of deeply intimate and hilarious insights into Mae’s life, all going back to a childhood that sounds both loving and unconventional. Martin delivers a show rich in visual imagery, we learn that she was obsessed by Bette Midler as a kid and discover that not only did Martin wear an outfit that makes her sound like a weird Victorian child – all waistcoats and stiff shirts – but she also spent much of her youth sneaking into stand up shows and slowly developing obsessions about the comedians she’s watching. When told she was a “groupie”, she wonders if groupie means peer. Martin’s delivery is so joyful and positive that it’s a surprise when the show starts to venture into the territory of addiction. Addiction comes in many forms, from being addicted to an idea, to people, to substances. Martin confronts all of this brilliantly, and in the process I’m sure she will have reminded many of the audience of their own childhood obsessions. It’s remarkable this show is on as part of the free fringe, but I would expect those days are soon to be over.

North Berwick

Edinburgh Festival 2017 part 2

As you slowly sink into the rhythm of the Fringe, you’ll realise that you can’t do everything, but it’s still worth a try. For me, I can manage about four shows a day as the maximum. I like to give myself time to check out the listings, see what’s getting good reviews and importantly, make time to visit Brew Lab for the best coffee in town.

On our third day, we kicked off with Javaad Alipoor’s Believers are but Brothers (Northern Stage at Summerhall, 12.45pm) a play that tackles the online radicalisation of men, which Alipoor argues, is the only perspective he can truthfully try and explore. The show starts with the audience being asked to join a Whatsapp group so we can communicate via an encrypted message service. At points in the show, we are asked questions by message about the number of Muslims in Britain and then the number that have joined ISIS; we are called out for being a liberal arts audience when we underestimate the number that have been radicalised, yet we’re still way out. Out of three million Muslims in Britain around 300 have gone to explore what ISIS can offer them. Online and in real life, it’s a vile world of men thinking they should have more money, more sex, more influence. We are shown examples of the ISIS media machinery, showing themselves to be constant victors in a war against the West. These lonely men are able to use the web to talk in a way they would never dare to in real life and those that join ISIS are quickly swept up into their world of hyper-violence.

What Alipoor is trying to get across here is the depth of hate and confusion these men have and how easy it can be to fall down the rabbit hole, though it’s also somehow reassuring that when he tried to connect with these people, they could tell he wasn’t one of them straight away and rebuffed his attempts to talk, sometimes using crude Sunni v Shia imagery to make him back off. If the storytelling is at times a bit frantic, it’s understandable when the show is trying to cover so much ground, but at its core, this is a show that is trying to make sense of something we see in the news often, but rarely try to understand and for that it must be applauded. Islamic extremist and the alt-right – fast becoming a cover phrase for Neo-Nazism, are threats of our era that are compared in this show as being very similar. Alipoor is a gifted storyteller, with a sly sense of humour that comes out when things look bleak.

In the afternoon, my friend and I went to a Free Fringe show, Bitchelors (Voodoo Rooms, 3.10pm) by Anna Morris. A good idea that feels spread thin by the hour’s end, Morris plays a former bride of the year and four women competing to be woman of the year. While the ideas are strong and the jokes keep coming, aided by some slick video, the show never quite moved past enjoyable and into memorable, perhaps because Morris failed to make these women as hideous as they could be. Naturally, every one of them had a fatal flaw which unravelled as their presentation wore on, but that feels so obvious as to be fully expected. Despite this, Morris is a skilled performer and can engage with the room well, but at the Fringe, almost everyone can do this. As my friend noted, filling an hour with consistently funny material must be extraordinarily hard and the characters in this show would be a great match for comedy nights across the UK where each act gets 15 minutes to do their sketch, but an hour seems a tad too much.

Adam Hess (Heroes at the Hive, 6pm) on the other hand crams two hours of funny material into one by talking at a speed just short of sound. His performance style is perfectly crafted, allowing each joke to crash into the next, keeping the audience laughing from start to go in a Mexican wave of haha’s. In-between jokes will come lines like “It’s sad that we’ll never know how many chameleons snuck onto the Ark” and stories that push the limits of plausibility but always have enough in them to sound real. His family sound brilliantly twisted and Hess manages to not only keep us laughing but shows us his passion for taking notes, writing jokes always and keeping the burning restlessness of his youth alive. A marvellous comedian.

Staying on at the stinky Hive, we saw Paul Currie (Heroes at the Hive, 6.30PM) for the first time and while he described as it Monty Pythonesque when handing out flyers, I was still left a little dumbstruck by his show. He has the audience in the palm of his hand throughout and drew from the energy and good atmosphere, making us pretend to be horses, ride the dragon from Never Ending Story, act out a song as cats… that’s the sort of thing he does to get us warmed up. Audience participation is a big part of this show and Currie doesn’t just drag people from the front row but actively roams the room looking for participants. As with the best comics, he might put people through ridiculous tasks, but he’s willing to put himself through just as much. Go along with the ride, in short.

Edinburgh Festival 2017 Part 1

Edinburgh in August can easily pass for the centre of the world, and no other city comes close to giving itself up in the way Edinburgh does. Only a World cup or Olympic host city can match the intensity of tourists and events, and to those cities, that generally happens just once. So, Edinburgh in August is where aliens would naturally head if they needed to find the main boss of the earth. More likely than not, they’d be flyered by an improv group who label themselves “witsters” (Oxford Imps, I’m glaring at you), asked if they want to watch “a chat show where a dinosaur is just one of the hilarious guests”, a suggestion which would push any self-respecting alien invader over the edge, or get invited to a show starting in “five minutes” – always, always five minutes – where Peter Pan meets Fatal Attraction. In Penge.

Welcome to the Edinburgh Fringe! It’s just one of the festivals taking place in August. Others include the Edinburgh Art Festival, the Royal Military Tattoo, the International Festival and the Free Fringe. Tickets sold last year for the Fringe reached 2,500,000 and as it’s the 70th anniversary of the first fringe this year, it’ll surely be even bigger. Cast your mind back to 1947, where a war-ravaged Britain was just recovering from years of hell, under the miserable spell of austerity and still having food rationed and reflect on what a fantastic idea it was to create a festival to give people some excitement. The first festival had its own fringe, where small acts not invited to the main party found venues around the city to perform in. 70 years later, it’s the biggest arts festival in the world and such an enjoyable and enriching experience, I imagine it’ll remain a central part of my summer plans.

This was my third Edinburgh Festival and over six days, I saw fourteen shows and took a day trip to North Berwick. On our first day, sort of fresh from a 4-and-a-half-hour train journey from London, we headed to our first show, Sarah Kendall’s One-Seventeen. Used to shouting, lots of swearing and the standard tricks of comics, Kendall’s work was a gentle introduction to proceedings and it is soon clear that Kendall is a skilled storyteller rather than a comedian and even though the main thread of her story is about divorce, everything in the show is quite low-key. From hamsters on their death beds to her son’s behaviour, this is a well written and at times poetic show, but one that lacks any defining passion.

Tapes! On sale!

Later in the evening, we trekked to the beautiful Assembly Halls, all Harry Potter on the outside and a bit crumbly on the inside to see Mark Steel. His show sets out the template that so many comics seem to do > come on with a massive grin > proceed to tell everyone how shit your life is > go pretty personal about your ex > slap hand against head and go “oh, you know what it’s like” > do some observational comedy. Steel added lots of sharp one-liners and plenty of surreal ideas into the mix but his delivery style showed he was out of touch when talking about transgender people but when he was on topics like politics or unsolicited calls from PPI companies, he really shone. As the show centred on his recent gruesome breakup, some distance from that would probably make the show more funny and less bitter.

The view from the Mound

Our second day included one play and two stand up shows. We started with The Dreamer, by Gecko Theatre Company. Having seen their beautiful show Institute, I was very excited to see what they would do when teamed up with a Chinese theatre company. The results are little less than breathtaking; the show opens with Chinese screen dividers being used to project a visually stunning backstory to the audience. Images come and go, stories are guessed at and the screens are whipped away. We’re suddenly in an office and somehow the performers have tricked us into thinking we know what we’re seeing. The level of precision on display is a constant surprise; the performers are always two steps ahead of the audience in making movements that delight and move everyone in the room. You may not get a chance to see Gecko at Edinburgh, but they perform regularly and are sensational.

Back to comedy for the rest of the day, with Jon Pointing’s debut solo show. Pointing plays Cayden Hunter, a drama coach/guru/mentor who likes to touch himself and demands adoration from the audience, giving irritated glances to us if we aren’t thrilled enough by his work. The show’s format is a drama workshop and he takes us through ways to be better actors, walking us through his life so far as a devised piece of physical theatre that is both cringe-worthy and hilarious. As with all ghastly comic creations, seeing Cayden fall apart is hugely enjoyable and Pointing doesn’t disappoint as the ego comes crashing back down to the room. His ending, another devised theatre piece of his death, leaves the audience wanting more.

Edinburgh is both a great festival city and a beautiful city

In the evening we see Adam Riches, Winner of the Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2011. This is his first stand-up show since 2014’s Adam of the Riches and there’s an intensity to Riches’ work that places him in a league of his own, especially when it comes to audience participation. In the past, audience members have been made to play swingball, have fed him food “like starlings do” (for avoidance of doubt, yes, he wanted audience members to feed him food from their mouths) and shower him on stage. Riches pulls up a man onto the stage, to take part in a sketch about sniping, but the audience member is visibly uncomfortable, at one point saying to Riches “I’m not your fucking friend”. But through his charm and command of the room, Riches stops this from becoming a disaster before grabbing another audience member to take over. Audience participation is usually something people hate and while Riches makes the audience do silly things, he is constantly laughing along with them before doing stupid things himself; there’s a generosity and warmth to his show that makes him one of the finest comedians on the circuit. It is wonderful to have him back.

A trip to… Porto

When I told friends I was going to Portugal for a holiday, I was met with nods of approval from those in the know and a slight tilt of the head for those yet to sample the delights of Spain’s neighbour. Perhaps the problem is that Portugal is the little sibling to Spain, a cultural juggernaut with everything a tourist could ever want. Yet, Portugal is an easy sell, it’s home to two hilly and sensuous cities in Lisbon and Porto, it has attractions from Roman ruins to Sintra’s fairytale castle and a long coastline, cooled by the ocean to stop it getting too hot, most of the time. For every hour of sunshine in London, Portugal has two. And, there are the custard tarts.

My second visit to Portugal took in Porto, the beautiful city of Coimbra and the seaside town of Matosinhos, but it all starts off at the airport. On arrival, we proceeded to follow the signs for the metro, only to be confronted by blank walls, escalators going the wrong way and smokers huddling in a corner. Retracing our steps, we did the same activities in a different order. As if by magic, an escalator appeared behind a shed which took us down to a car park. It seems that when you follow a sign for the metro, and finally see a ticket machine, it could either get you a few hours parking or into the city. It’s a crap shoot. Eventually, we made it to the train station ticket hall, only to find that the €15, 3-day travel passes we wanted, had to be bought in the tourist centre back in the airport. So far, so horrible.

A trip later on the weird, two-car metro trains that grind along the tracks, we checked ourselves in at White Box apartments, a minimalist hotel on a pedestrianised shopping street. For lunch, we went to try out the Porto “delicacy” Francesinha, at Bufeta Fasa. This most indelicate meal consists of bread, ham, some smoked sausage, chorizo, steak and melted cheese covered in a beer and tomato sauce. With fries. And a beer. It was enormous, and for those on a diet, contains over half of your daily food allowance. By eating it, you are destined to pile on the pounds but on the bright side, it’s so cheap that you’ll also save the pounds. Now I’ve eaten one, I am never tempted to again, but rumour has it that Bufeta Fasa is the best in town. The waitress seemed to be in a mild state of hysteria whenever we interacted. Was she trying to tell me this meal would give me a heart attack after I headed into the city with its infinite number of steep alleys?

1) Tiles are everywhere

In Porto, as in Lisbon, if something can be tiled, it will be tiled. Some of the earliest examples are Azulejo tiles, bringing an Islamic taste to the streets. These tiles do not feature images of people, so will be geometric or floral in style. The main train station, São Bento, has the history of Portugal tiled on the walls. In a nutshell, Portugal has had many fights. Horses feature heavily. Visiting here will ensure an epic start to any journey, though most people were taking photos of the twenty thousand tiles, rather than travelling. Other landmarks clad with intricate tiling include the Chapel of Souls, with the facade almost entirely covered in blue tiles, dating back to 1929, representing the life of Saint Francis of Assisi. The nearby Church of Saint Ildefonso and Igreja do Carmo complete this triptych of tiling, all close by each other.

Chapel of Souls

2) Museums

Porto has plenty of museums to nose around, including the Photography museum, housed in a former prison, which when we visited included a selection of photos of the Royal Family hanging out in various sunny climes. I longed to be back in time where everything seemed so glamorous. On closer inspection, everybody was dripping in sweaty woolen suits and it took an age to travel everywhere. The museum featured an exhibition of photography by homeless people and this was both powerful and touching as the photographers had such a different perspective on the city – benches and doorways took on a new meaning and their was some real talent on display. The best part of the museum was the collection of old photographic equivalent, from ancient Zeiss lenses to Kodak Brownies and a gallery of spy cameras. The exhibition made the past, with cameras hidden in cigarette cases and wallets, seem highly paranoid and anxious.

Old camera equipment

The Serralves museum is a fair trek out of town, but it’s world-class and utterly transfixing when you arrive. Don’t do what we did which was to take a tram to the Casa de Musica stop and then walk for half an hour to the gallery down a dreary main road. Plenty of better options are available, such as buses from Bolhao to the museum. Set in beautiful gardens with over 200 varieties of plants and trees including pine, chestnut, oak, Lebanese cedar and even Giant sequoias from the US, the museum occupies a space that is ideal for a lazy afternoon’s wander around the gardens and some art.

Serralves

Across the Duoro river from Porto’s old town is Gaia, which is itself a city. Here is where all the Port is stored in huge warehouses that stretch on and on with big names like Sandeman, Churchill’s, Taylor’s and Graham’s all offering wine cellar tours which will take you through the history of port. We stopped off for a port cocktail outside Sandeman, taking in the views over to Ribeira and being entranced by the beauty of the river, the bridge and the Rabelo boats, unique to this part of the world.

Livraria Lello isn’t a museum, but may as well be. The bookshop with a staircase that apparently influenced JK Rowling when writing Harry Potter, is unlike any other I’ve been to. Like Ernest Hemingway, Rowling seems to have visited anywhere and everywhere, but the interior does have a Potteresque flavour to it. You have to buy a ticket to get in, which you will have refunded if you buy a book. Nobody was really looking at the books, instead, we were all snapping away at the elaborate staircase, the vaulted ceiling and the stunning hand-carved decorations. It is a clever idea to charge, because the interior is too beautiful to lose and if nobody is purchasing anything, its future would be uncertain.

Livraria Lello

3) Food and drink

One of my favourite spots in Porto was near Praca de Lisboa. Here, the deceptively simple idea was to place a gorgeous garden with green spaces for people to enjoy, on top of a shopping centre in the middle of the city. We enjoyed a mojito from the bar in the garden and spent ages sitting in the sunshine, looking out at the city and wondering why this doesn’t happen everywhere. I was particularly pleased that you don’t have to buy anything at the bar to enjoy the space, and a bit delighted that the bar sells generous glasses of wine for €3 a glass and cocktails at €6 a pop.

Just moments away from Placa de Lisboa is the exceptional tapas restaurant Caldeireiros; when we went, we managed to bag the last table going and had one hour to be in and out, so my advice would be to book in advance. Even though every dish came with a mine’s worth of salt in it, the flavours were exquisite and this was the culinary highlight of our trip. While slightly more expensive than elsewhere, there’s nothing to fault.

A view of the old town

In comparison, the Majestic Cafe on the city’s main shopping street, is a disgraceful rip-off. The cafe has a Belle-Epoque interior that rivals anything in Brussels or Paris and it is genuinely beautiful to look at, but like an attractive person, it knows it and treats you accordingly. €12.50 will get you a distinctly average espresso, a latte and two stodgy nata. Serves me right for idealising beauty, when any less beautiful cafe on the street will treat me like the prettiest boy in the room.

4) The Old Town

I’ve written about beauty in abundance all around Porto and I’ve yet to mention what for many will be the highlight of the city, the old town, Ribeira. Strung out along the riverside by the Luis I bridge, a hotchpotch of ancient buildings tumbles down from high terraces, creating a picturesque delight. On the ground, most of the buildings are tourist trap bars and restaurants but the atmosphere is fizzing with life and more than a fair share of buskers. Taking a step into the old town is to take a step back in time, into a warren of tightly packed apartment blocks, plazas, churches that appear at sharp angles and views that demand to be explored. Porto is a wonderer’s dream and a photographer’s nightmare. Bring a spare memory card, or lots and lots of film.

The old town

As a city break, Porto is hard to beat. I find it hard to switch off, but on this trip I was so relaxed, I could have melted into the floor. Just walking around, stopping off for a drink and a snack is pleasure enough. One mystery remains, though. British phone boxes are scattered through the city, but I’ve no idea why. It was reassuring at least to see that none of them worked, just like at home.