Whitby Gazette and Jon Stokoe

The Whitby Gazette is the city paper of the Goth capital. It was also the first paper to publish the work of Lewis Carroll, a regular visitor from 1850-70.  Encouraged by the public reception - although self-critical about his early efforts -  the Reverend Dodgson went on to write the books which dominate children's literature upon which millions of pounds and thousands of jobs have depended.

Then in 1885 The Gazette recorded on 24 October:

"The Russian schooner Dmitri of Navra, with silver sand, came in suddenly, in heavy weather, but going ashore in Collier’s Hope because a total wreck"

The event camd to the notice of a visitor to Whitby, Bram Stoker, who also happened to find a name in a geography book in the local library which fired his imagination.  That wreck became the Demeter out of Varna, carrying the potent fictional character Dracula, which is why his landfall became the Goth capital.

Who knows, but if the editor of the Whitby Gazette had not carried that report perhaps Stoker might have had him come ashore somewhere else, thus depriving Whitby of millions of pounds of tourism income over a century later. 

Since 1854 the paper has maintained its place in the town and travels all over the world.   There is an online version but the interesting thing about the Whitby Gazette is that it is still growing in its paper distribution.  The online version is searchable but there is really no substitute for the discerning Goth or Steam punk or explorer; one simply must have a paper copy to read over tea no matter where that tea is taken.  The object itself, not just the data, is part of the experience with its nautical masthead and distinctive typeface.

Strange then that the owners, Johnston Press, are proposing to dispose of the editor.  Jon Stokoe bucks the trend in local papers.  While others are struggling,The Gazette is growing.  What ever he is doing, it is working.  Even asking the question makes only about as much sense as sacking Rumplestiltskin because it costs money to provide him with beer and sandwiches.  He's spinning straw in to gold, for goodness' sake.  Keep him at it.

A petition to save the editor has been set up to plead with Johnston to show economic sense. Jon Stokoe is worth the money and should be kept on.




Go here to sign the petition. 

Summer Solstice 2012

A garden at Sunset, solstice evening 2012, around 9pm (sunset at Stonehenge at 9.26pm)

 Was that a face at the window?

That way

 Soft footsteps vanish down the mown path

 To visit a pet from long ago.

Let's hope the rain holds off in the morning for the sunrise at Stonehenge as the visitors will be camped out all night to see it on Thursday 21st June 2012  at 0452 hrs (4.52am)

Epping and Ongar - All Aboard!

It is with great pleasure the volunteers of the Epping Ongar Railway announce that they are rolling them waggons and are hoping for a summer of steamy fun. 

They have a timetable running right through to the Santa Specials and they are within easy reach of East London so grab the bookings (tickets available on line) now if you want to take the tots on a day out without having to travel too far.  

Moonrakers

The illustrator Karen Davis has been out and about in Wiltshire taking weather pictures to show how they are up to their knees in drought.   She has a new painting out, Moonrakers, so the first part of the blog is about that, then she moves on to the local news. 


If you like whimsical paintings and a touch of hippiedom then you'll enjoy the graphics.  If not, scroll down and compare weather notes with where you are. 


N.B. She has romantic music playing in the background automatically.

Equus

(c) London Classic Theatre

The London Classic Theatre production of Equus  is part way through its national tour; there is still time to catch it.

But has the nearly 40-year old play has escaped its age? Not every play travels through time, the hallmark of a classic.

The horrifying premise is simple: a teenage boy has blinded six horses to which he was devoted and refuses to say why he inflicted this appalling cruelty. The child psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Malcolm James) has to find out why.

Optimistically - or perhaps arrogantly - both he and the referring magistrate think that the psychiatrist can fix whatever has gone wrong in young Alan Strang's head (Matthew Pattimore).

 
The first sign of age is that in 1973 people apparently had faith in psychiatrists, or at least Sir Peter Shaffer wrote it that way.  I doubt if psychiatrists now would see themselves as quite so confident that they could fix behaviour just by unravelling motives and talking about them, if they ever did.  However, in 1973 such theories were achingly fashionable so an audience would not necessarily have spotted this as a theatrical effect rather than an accurate representation of what a psychiatrist does for a living.

The second difficulty is that one of the formative moments in Alan Strang's life hinges on a chance meeting. Spoilers sweetie - you need to see it because the staging is wonderful - but it is a victim of time.  An event which might plausibly have happened to Alan around 1960 could not happen to the infant Alan in 2000.  If it had, the parents would be shouting about something other than class war.  Our reality has shifted  too much in specific aspects to accommodate the assumptions underpinning the play in 1973.

These, however, are minor quibbles which could be got round by simply setting the play in the past, which as we all know, was another country.  It wouldn't take all that much; Alan Strang would wear flares and a hideous acrylic jumper,  Martin Dysart needs a kipper tie and the lady magistrate should wear a skirt rather than trousers.

Everything else works as it stands because the designer Kerry Bradley has done a bang-up job of  producing a flexible but monumental set which allows the meetings to happen with simple movements and careful lighting and not the slightest delay between scenes, whilst still clearly indicating where changes have happened.   These open sets carry a risk that the audience will miss the signal that a location or times has changed; never once does the set, the lighting or the direction trip over itself leaving the audience behind and thinking "Eh, where are we up to now?"  Moreover, the set is in units which allow it to fill various stage sizes, creating the illusion of a classical amphitheater even in a small space.

For the most difficult query I had to seek an opinion from a Yout of Today.  As Philip Larkin pointed out, sexual intercourse began in 1963 so there had been barely a decade of it by 1973.  A play about myths and sex had great power in those days.  Plays about myths still might, but sex? Can it really still be a credible dramatic motive in an age when you can't open an email account without immediately being offered dodgy products?

Da Yout of Today informs me that it can be, and moreover it has to within this play or else Strang won't play-off properly against Dysart who spends much of the time bemoaning his own arid personal life.

Dysart is the heart of the piece. Ultimately it isn't  the psychoanalysis of young Alan Strang which matters; that's only solving the headline puzzle.  The driving complexity is the aging, raging Dysart, chasing himself about the stage, able to see his own difficulties but unable to do anything about them. Malcolm Jones carries the demanding role with honour, never letting it tip over in to a cartoon shrink but depicting a man standing on the edge of insanity for a living.

Equus is already on the list of the 100 plays of the 20th Century as too are Peter Shaffer's "Royal Hunt of the Sun" and "Amadeus".  Both of those are in historical settings in which the audience automatically colludes with creating another time and place. Equus uniquely challenges the director to keep the play current, not let it slip in to a being a period piece.  This production manages that - it was only me who noticed that the audience had changed - and therefore grab the chance to see it in case we have to wait another 40 years for it to be staged competently.

Here is a surviving dubbed fragment of  The White Horses  (1965, aired in Britain in 1968) which the young Alan Strang was not allowed to watch. It gives a flavour of the aspirations of the time the character was formed in.  

Sammy Davis Jr.

During the week the name of Sammy Davis Jr. was mentioned and someone said they hadn't realized he was more than a somewhat mannered singer.   This is an easy mistake to make; Britain did not receive the quantity of shows which demonstrated his ability.  Let's put that right now that by thanking the uploaders and his estate who have made  material available so that we can glimpse how this major talent worked and begin to appreciate that he was one of the very best popular entertainers which America has ever produced.

Those who knew him insist that he was in fact the greatest; talented in  an over-arching way that was difficult to see it all at once.

Exhibit one is a section of a 1963 show he did with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.  Despite the natural competition between them, they knew who was the talent on that stage.  Sinatra pleads  "What do you waaaant of us?" They go through their joshing and party pieces in the time honoured "Hollywood Party" mode, then at 6:14 Davis produces Marlon Brando.

He doesn't just impersonate a character; he acts it for both good and ill, showing the power but also the incoherence in that style of theatre. Impersonations, my foot. Right there in a tiny link you have a profound critique of the method school of acting; Davis was never incoherent in his life and he's not convinced that it is of any value.  Dammit, this is supposed to be performing for an audience, not modelling.

The Copa Room, Sands Hotel, 1963 part 3



Item 2.  This interview ought to be compulsory viewing for every grunting youth in the land. Pay attention boy, this is how articulacy makes people forget about the looks of the person in front of them. Although Davis regularly joked about race - it was, and is, a major political consideration which can get in the way of a performance - it is known that what he was particularly sensitive about was the glass eye he was obliged to wear after a car accident.  Although he walked in rhythm, it's observably the case that he was no raving beauty. Perversely, that was lucky. A prettier face might have found it impossible to cope with the disfigurement.  As it turned out, people were not all that bothered; they wanted him to joke, to dance and to sing. Luckily, so did he.

Wogan interview with Sammy Davis Jr. 1989 (part 1 of 4)



His signature song, Mr Bojangles, has many versions available. This one is from 1985 and is remarkable for its simple orchestration which never overpowers the poetry. When lesser performers attempt it they misunderstand it to be a schmaltzy tum-ti-tum.  Davis shows that it is in fact an intimate monologue delivered to you, personally.

Mr Bojangles 1985



A Youtube search now shows the major performances of his life and The Estate of Sammy Davis Jr. has archive photography and further material.   In 1964 Ed Sullivan knew he had created a special moment when Davis and Ella Fitzgerald appeared together for him.  He says that when the audience grows up, it will tell its children they saw them perform.  What Sullivan could not foresee is that the recording survived and is here.

StageFright

To the Theatre Royal at Bury St Edmunds for the first production of StageFright by Michael Punter, directed by Colin Blumenau.

Set 1894 during the run of Sir Henry Irving's  "Faust", the action takes place on a night with winter weather so foul that it traps Sir Henry and his theatre manager, Bram Stoker, in an attic dressing room in the eaves of the Lyceum theatre in London.

By coincidence, the temperature on Saturday in Suffolk was -7C during the day and -12C at night, so the audience came in having just experienced the sucking cold of an icy grave.

Bram Stoker was writing Dracula in those days, summoning him up from the influences of theatre, religion, secular philosophy and his own Irish talent - under-estimated by Iriving - so that there seems to be another character, one who never appears, threaded through the work.

It is believed that Irving disapproved of Dracula - he is said to have walked out of a reading and never played the part, although it would have been natural to offer it to him. It is also possible that Conan Doyle saw the pair working and fed that in to his own creations, Holmes and Watson, recognizing it to be much more than a case of an employer and a technical manager.

Irving  was a self-made man and he knew exactly what he was doing; creating effects on the stage. Even his name was partly an illusion, re-fashioned because it sounds so much better than John Henry Brodribb.   Michael Punter gives Irving all the doubt and superstition which goes with the job of acting no matter how hard Irving tries to stick to rational responses.  If you spend your working life summoning up illusory characters, isn't there a risk of calling up something real, Irving wonders, of speaking the Devil's name and having him answer. Perhaps he is always listening for the invitation, like an actor waiting for his stage-call on the other end of a speaking-tube?

Stuck for that freezing night in an attic, the pair of them begin to discourse on this - or rather, Irving declaims and Stoker sets up the lines for him, because that is how their relationship works. They think they are alone but an empty theatre is never completely empty; you have to be careful what you do, what you say because you never know who may be listening. Could a building record the events which happen in it, Irving muses.  If you ask the staff of Marks and Spencer just a few yards away in the modern shopping centre in Bury St Edmunds they will tell you yes, and the building doesn't even have to exist any more. They still get half-ghosts of monks wading through their sales floor and sinking down staircases which have not existed for centuries.

The snow falls outside and soon Irving and Stoker begin to suspect they are not alone.

The Theatre Royal is an 1819 building, beautifully refurbished for a modern audience, so that this is the perfect intimate place to watch a play which aims to recreate the conventions of Victorian stage and parlour magic.   The set has been constructed to nudge out in to the auditorium, dissolving the line between stage and seats so that we are invited to float in the dingy cluttered room, a spectral presence, as if hovering at a seance table.  This is the world where lighting is by gas; that is the product of science and an advanced economy but gas light is still soft and variable and is delivered in fittings which resemble the old oil lamps.  We are looking in to a dusty jewel-box of enchantment and treasure.

The director and author were adamant; to capture the rich flavour of  High Victoriana it had to include stage illusions which the Victorians would have expected in a theatre they would have recognized. Drama had not yet reached the naturalistic psychological approach which is most common today.  Stoker and Irving squabble about this;  Stoker has all the best technical arguments but Irving's case is made in the play itself; there's no mistaking the jump of the audience when .... spoilers, sweetie.

The premier run of Stagefright is at the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds
From Tuesday 14 February until Saturday 25 February
Tickets cost between £8 and £20 depending on seat and performance, bookable online (scroll down and select date).

For some locations in Suffolk, the theatrebus deal is available which includes transport, the ticket, a drink and the programme.  All tickets: £23  For under 26’s: £11.50

Concessions are available including the £5 on-the-day for under 26 year olds, but must be booked via the box office: 01284 769505

The performance is suitable for anyone over 8 years old but is genuinely frightening.

Happy New Year 2012

Mr Raft is the most long-suffering of men and since I wanted a fire to celebrate the New Year, he went out in the middle of the night to built me one.   I enjoyed it with a shot of the sloe gin I bottled last year.

Happy New Year

Fiery Monster

Kicking about on a delayed train at sunrise were a group of young passengers making urgent phone calls, trying to set up a rendezvous, unsure of where they were supposed to be working that day. What kind of a job is it where you don't even know where you are supposed to be?

As we drew in to a station there was a rip in time and we went past a steam train, its throat glowing like a waking dragon and the steam and smoke blowing out of its lungs, a glittering tail of dining coaches decked out in tinsel and sparkling glass.



The young people jumped up, calling "Hurrah, there she is" and "Everybody ready to work, let's go". Then they rushed across the platform to their train which had been held for them as they are the waiting staff on a time machine.

Forget being an air hostess - is there any more glamorous or romantic work than crewing on a time-warp?

A Golden Age of Live Theatre

Hat tip: The Jolly Lion

We are living in a golden age of live theatre. For the price of a dvd you can see an entire company produce magic in front of your very eyes. They are doing it in village halls, school halls, regional theatres , stately homes, cricket pavilions and pub courtyards. The Internet has helped enormously; the tiniest venues still rely on local papers and selling tickets through local shops, but any theatre which has an on-line booking system is immediately in a better position to fill the seats.

One of the reasons I don't bother with TV soaps is that it is painfully obvious that many of our so-called professionals are nothing of the sort. They could no more deliver a line than I can sing opera and the clunky direction gives them the fluidity of a call centre slave in India trying to scam you. Pause....click...Good evening Mam, am I speakin' to Mrs Raft? No, sorry, you are not.

You will experience more in a single evening spent watching a local company, which will show performances ranging from the competent to the breath-taking, than you will in a month of Shouty Cockerneys. There's something for everyone; companies are refusing to stick to the tried-and-tested popular productions and tackling new works written by company members. Obviously, that's going to be a mixed bag; there is always an element of lucky dip about a new work but who knows, one might see a little slice of theatre history being made. You hadda be there.

Beloved of all is a farce: these work best where the audience can see the actors sweating to bring the staging to the correct point to make the joke. Farce is the theatre magic where you have to see most of what the conjurer is doing because the audience is in cahoots with the company. The ignorant character, the one who is going to get the surprise, is on the stage, which reverses the traditional expectation that it is the audience who will receive the revelation when a secret escapes. Doing it on telly is cheating; we all know they can cut away and come back tomorrow - where's the panic in that?

Down in Paignton the Bijou Theatre Company is performing a pre-Christmas farce of impeccable pedigree "The Happiest Days of your Life" by John Dighton, which hinges around school inspections, disapproving parents and people's careers hanging by a thread. That should bring a groan of recognition to the throats of teachers everywhere, but it is still very funny (unlike real life).

Previewed by The Jolly Lion - who is in it - the production is at the Palace Theatre, Paignton and runs from
Wednesday 30th November - Saturday 3rd December 2011 - 7.30pm
Tickets cost £11 but concessions are available
Telephone Palace Theatre Box Office on
01803 665800

Apple Day 2011

There are events all over the country this month for Apple Day. The festival is a modern marketing creation but it has been well-attended as there are few things more beautiful than orchards. The loveliest tree of all is the golden pear, the quince, which reigns like a queen over the other trees, decked in magnificence.

Magic quince tree, Corpus Christi, Oxford

A little quince is good for flavouring but they take a lot of processing. It is much easier to eat apples and you can make many more things with them. Plus, you get cider from apples and that's what I'm hoping to be testing on Saturday. If I'm lucky with the weather I'll be wandering around in an absurd haze of bonhomie with a pie in one hand and a beaker of hot spiced cider punch in the other, laughing at the wolf winter which is loping towards us. If I'm not lucky with the weather I shall do just the same but pull the hood of my mac over the cider punch so the rain doesn't get in it.

Toffee Apple Cake.


Heat the oven to medium-hot, about gas mark 5
Have 2 x 1lb loaf tins or your choice of bakeware handy. I use the paper liners but I understand that silicon bakeware is very popular these days.

Fruit compote:
4 smallish apples, cored and sliced and cubed
A lemon, squeezed, to stop them oxidising
About 2 good tablespoons of honey
Cinnamon - some, how much you like, if you like like it. I'm having at least two good teaspoonsful.
Cook briefly together to soften them, leave to cool. The cubes of apple should now be covered in a syrup like toffee so don't burn them or they'll taste bitter. The need to cool down or they'll coagulate the cake mixture when they go in.

Cake batter of:
8oz self-raising flour
4oz unsalted butter or margarine
2 eggs
2 oz sugar, brown if you have it but any is fine.
A little milk if the batter is too stiff, but it probably won't be when you add the fruit.

Mix up the batter using any protocol you like, including the one where you separate the eggs, whip up the whites, then fold them in to the rest of the mixture later. This is a lot of mucking about but it does give puffier results. However, I'm doing sugar and butter, then eggs, then flour. The batter is stiff, more like a scone, but it will soften as you put the apple in. It is easier to do this by pouring the cool syrup in first.

Stir the apples in to the cake mixture which will be like rich cream - not hard but not runny - and cook in a medium-hot oven, around gas mark 5. If you are using two loaf tins this will take about 50 mins, longer if you use a deep tin, less if you are wise and spread the mixture in a wider tin. At any rate, cook until a knife-blade slides out cleanly and not covered in raw cake mix. The oven needs to be hot to get the reaction going and puff up the cake, but it can burn the top. Turn the oven down and leave it longer if it is a problem getting the centres to set. This happens with cakes using fresh fruit.

Cool on wire rack. The cake should not be over-sweet. Fresh fruit cakes count as health food if the council sends a spy round to 'test' your buns. You need to eat them quicker than other cakes because they only have a limited shelf life of a few days. This should not be a problem.

Aha! Found some spare cream. Yes, this all works.

If you enjoyed the apples, save the pips from the cores and shove them in the ground somewhere. Who knows, but one day there may be tree. All the instructions are in there.

A note on honey: this cake used rapeflower honey. Be aware that rapeflower honey is bland which makes it adaptable for cooking but that - in my opinion - it lacks the depth of flavour you might like in a table honey.

Bronte Burghers

To Haworth in West Yorkshire, now known as Bronte Country. The village has done well out of the brilliant but unlucky Bronte babes, selling cream teas and souvenirs to hundreds of thousands of dutiful pilgrims who trudge up and down the viciously cobbled hill on which they lived.

Mobility of the old folk in Haworth is kept up by a death penalty for anybody who can't manage the incline; it's no place for hip replacements and a wheelchair released at the top would hit the bottom doing 120 mph. Most places would put in a funicular railway and be done with it, but in Howarth every inch is a potential gold mine and so it is lined with gastropubs, holiday cottages, cheesemongers, toyshops and galleries. The tourist centre coyly gives the views at the top of the hill which flattens out in to a charming space fronting the church; it doesn't mention the ski-slope just beyond the Post Office. Photos are misleading; it is steeper than it looks.

The Brontes would always have been awkward, clever girls, following the footsteps of their impoverished but cultured Oirish father, but if that was not enough trouble, Haworth brought the strangeness out in them as even they struggled to portray themselves as ordinary genteel women.

It cannot help but do that; Haworth is a place which hums with Gothick presentments, where the everyday objects are caught in slanting light and for a moment look suspicious, as if they have been caught out having secret conversations with each other just beyond the range of human hearing.

A large hat with flowers will suddenly seem to have faces nestling in the petals, a cat walking along a wall seems stripey, then when you look again, it is plain. The Fleece pub has beer garden, but that is at the top of the fire escape above the roof and is built out over a precipitous drop, or what would be a drop if it wasn't filled with lean-to sheds snuggling against a cliff-face. If you could slip through the treads - which you can't, it is perfectly safe - you would crash through umpteen layers of glass in to the hidden crevasse.



Loitering by Spooks at 22 Main Street - Specialist Bookshop for Psychic Phenomena supplies - a vortex of strangeness is there, right on the stone slab by the side window. There is nothing whatever strange about a shop selling psychic accoutrements, books on Dowsing, Clairvoyance, Healing, Reincarnation, Alternative Medicine, Astrology, Local History, Tarot Cards, Crystals, Essential Oils, Incenses, Runes, Pendulums, Celtic and Mythical Pendants. Those are everywhere

What is strange is the planning application. There is a plan to change the ground floor in to an adult entertainment shop and the basement in to booths for private lap dancing. Maybe it's nominative determinism seeping through the stone. The sign on the wall says Purvs Corner and the shop stands on the junction with Butt Lane.



This is West Yorkshire, no more than a longish bus ride outside Bradford. It is moorland. It's not the fleshpots of York or the Dales with their undulating hips and ice cream parlours. It's not even Whitby with its unique approach to diversity. It's Haworth, dammit, where a lady changes her sheepskin mittens for crochet fingerless gloves indoors. The one place where going about in a burkha is considered foolhardy exposure to the weather, unless you can get it on over a hat and coat.

Who exactly is going to patronize this place? The stag party organizers Red Seven may have a point if sloping up and down the street, visiting good pubs and having great food is your thing. No shortage of those. However, as they say:

Boat party, Bobsleigh, Bungee jumping, City break, Clay pigeon shooting, Coasteering, Day at the races, Drive a supercar, Fishing, Fly a MiG jet fighter in Moscow, Football trip, Go-karting, Golf, Horse riding , Horse racing, Indoor skydiving, Kayaking or canoeing, Off roading, Paintballing, Powerboating, Quad bikes, Rally driving, Rock climbing, Skiing or snowboarding, Skydiving, Surfing, Tank driving, White water rafting and Zorbing (or Sphering). Not all of these are available in Haworth so you may want to consider other locations

The plan seems to be that stag parties will drift about the pubs before their booking in to the club. Are there enough stag parties to warrant this optimism? Despite the international visitors and the good value which Haworth offers them, you won't find "raunchy" on a list of the ten qualities people commonly associate with the town. If you are looking for raunch it's best to start in Leeds.

Haworth does a fair line in repressed passion, though. If unattached it is a good place to look for a certain kind of woman i.e. an available one, but a stag party is unlikely to want to settle down for a night of passionate readings no matter how much significant eye contact is involved.

The planning application closed on 20th March and we shall see what happens. The vortex by the paranormal bookshop giggled and determined that the Clerk to the Council be called Gordon Bashami-Ghoulis.

Update: A controversial Radio 3 dramatisation of Wuthering Heights is being aired. It has gone all DH Lawrence and has Cathy and Heathcliff swearing at each other.

Gate

One autumn the wind blew so hard that it pushed the garden gate, which opens in to the back lane, over its rebate, sticking it fast. We were trapped.

Aieee! Trapped!

I checked the chocolate biscuit supply and reckoned that so long as you didn't mind a walk, we could manage with just the front door and go along the main road.

The back gate was dodgy all winter, a constant menace as to whether, having let us out, it would let us back in.


Eventually, the weather turned and it was possible to take the gate off and repair it. While Mr Raft sawed and sanded and chamfered and drilled and glued and screwed, I made the tea.

Standing with a mug of tea and admiring his exemplary handiwork, I looked at the other end of the garden where the bushes grow.


That gate, the other gate, the secret gate, was working the whole time.

Solstice

The solstice will be on Tuesday 21 December at 23:38.

If the sky remains clear it may be possible to see an eclipse of the moon from Britain. Just in case it clouds over, I took the picture on the early hours of the 21st.

"The eclipse runs for three and a half hours, from 0633 GMT to 1001 GMT, although the stage of total eclipse -- when the Moon heads into the "umbra" cast by the Earth -- lasts from 0741 to 0853 GMT."

Normally sounds wash around here; water, planes, distant traffic, trains, the wind tells a tale it has carried for a while. Once I heard it singing in Russian.

Tonight there were no flights, no cars or lorries moving, no sounds from the rails and the wind is holding its breath. The moonlight was so bright everything was casting sharp moon shadows and the silver trees were full of fairytale forms.

It is about minus 12 degrees Celsius and even sound is frozen.

Climate of Fear

Kitchen Cabinet review of threats

1) The climate is going to collapse if I drive over to see my mum, so I'd better stay indoors and eat turnips for the rest of my life, except when going out to pay tax.

2) Terrorism. We'd better not say by whom, or how this particular source is a competitor ideology got up in the garments of a religion. Even though it has been documented for the last thirty years at least.

3) Banking Crisis. There's no money and there won't be for at least the next 150 years. That's not a threat - it has already happened.

4) Health scares. Did you know fat is contagious?

So pfft to any measly threat of invasion. Don't I realize that eco-famine, unpredictable violence and the Dreaded Lurgi, plus the country being flat-broke, are going to get me long before the police can suicide me for being insufficiently obsequious or out after curfew without offering them a blow-job?



I was going to suggest knitting something for comfort, but having looked at my last attempt, another suggestion might be better.

One thing restores a sense of control over the immediate threatening chaos. Soup. That is why witches make it in a cauldron. The cauldron represents the world so if you've got control over the cauldron, that's one tiny model of the world back in working order.

However, a freezing river fog has descended and if anybody thinks I'm mucking about trying to light twigs in air as wet as a haddock's handbag, they are very much mistaken. Soup will be indoors and a level of abstraction will be used to liken ordinary pans to ritual vessels.

Vegetable soup is the simplest, according to what you have laying around. I happened to have a butternut squash, four small onions and a lonely cooking apple.

The easiest way is to roast everything before it goes in the soup as this intensifies the flavour. Cut the squash in half, scoop out the seeds, then lay it flat-side down in a little oil on a roasting tray. Surround with roughly-chopped onions. Roast for about 15 minutes on a high heat; remove the onions to the soup cauldron before they frazzle. Check how cooked the squash is. The chances are it will need another ten minutes, turned over on to its round side. Add the peeled apple slices at his point. Apple roasts very quickly.

When the squash and the apple are done, scoop out the soft flesh and add them to the onions, along with any oil which might be hanging around in the roasting pan. To turn them in to soup all that is needed is water, seasonings and spices to your satisfaction. You might want to add vegetable stock, depending on your tastes. (I like it).

Now, as squash can be fibrous it is preferable to liquidize the soup with a stick blender. This matters less with starchy vegetables such as carrots and potatoes which will settle for being mashed. If you use a stick blender it is important to add cold water to the veg because hot soup .... well, I'm sure some clever-clogs already worked out how hot liquid affects plastic-sleeve blenders.

You now also have a pile of squash seeds. You can have a go at planting them next spring or roast them as a snack. Wash them and pat them dry, turn them in oil and roast on a high heat for 15 minutes until about half have popped. They aren't too bad, but I can't see them challenging other snack foods. Too husky.



The purpose of the soup ritual is to provide a breathing space against the onslaught of the times. Perhaps it is an illusion, but often it seems that something, or somebody, is trying to scare us out of our wits in order to gain our acquiescence to any number of repressive measures.

Marriage a la mode - gay

Veteran gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has been chasing the government impishly on the issue of gay marriage.

Tatchell is not stupid; when he claims that there is a ban on gay civil marriage he must know he is talking bunk to make a political splash. First though, a recap of the legal and philosophical situation because to hear Tatchell - and a lot of other people - talk, you'd think it was banned. It isn't. The state doesn't have that power.

The state doesn't 'grant' marriages because that is wizarding, that is, and the state doesn't have a magic wand. All it can do is register them after the fact - and refuse to do so if it believes there is an impediment, such as one party being already married.

Marriage has its metaphysical underpinning in a consenting pledge between individuals, usually two but it can be more. Until recently it didn't make a lot of sense for people of the same sex to do it, but if Jack and John went off and pledged allegiance to each other, then there was nothing anyone could do to prevent that. If they came back and said they were married, then in their eyes, they were.

Of course, everyone would have laughed at them and told they they were not married, but that's a matter of opinion on a philosophical level. Jack and John believe they are cross-vowed, whereas other people believe a condition for the vow to be valid is that they have to be different sexes.

If Jack and John wanted to put some legal stiffening behind that to prevent bossy family and the intestacy law from frustrating their wishes, they had only to go down to the solicitor's and make a number of witnessed declarations, such as a pair of wills, clearly delineated property contracts, and make sure that they named each other as next-of-kin on health records, contacts on each other's passport, power of attorney, attitude to organ donation etc. The blood family may or may not have default rights but these collapse where there is a clear legal document telling administrators that default settings do not apply.

However several things could have been denied to Jack and John. They had no way of entering the relationship on a state-recognized register, short of forming a partnership under commercial law. They did not, until several test cases were brought, have a way of securing benefits from employers which were contingent on marriage which other married employees received. They could not rely on the default laws which normally govern marriage, nor the transfer of assets between the pair without tax. They could not force people in legal terms to recognize their binary relationship, but for all that, in their own eyes they were still married.

Various test cases and subsequent legislation dealt with the issue of partners being eligible for benefits on a non-discriminatory basis. A way to register a partnership and the remaining legal benefits was made, and called civil partnership. The naming was tactful; it was so that legislation could be got through without arguing about the label on the outside of the box for the next squillion years.

Inside the box, it is a civil marriage. Inside the box, all civil marriage is, is a publicly witnessed and registered mutual recognition of wishing to be accorded a particular status which then attracts certain legal rights, such as transfer of assets between partners without taxation.

Thus the benefits of same-sex marriage were secured for the people who wanted it. The paltry price for this was the name. Bargain. Register the civil partnership in the office, then, afterwards, hold what ever kind of celebration you damn well like. Get someone dressed up as Gandalf to muck about with a staff, a book and a ring. You either believe in magic, or you don't.

If you go down to the register office and comply with the requirements such as residency and capacity to consent, not being legally contracted to anyone already, not being within the degrees of family between which marriage or civil partnership are prohibited, etc, then you can have your civil marriage or civil partnership "solemnized" which means it will be contracted in front of witnesses and the presiding official will make sure as far as possible everyone is who they say they are, that they know what they are saying, and that the consent to what they are saying.

Your religious friends may pull faces and say you aren't married in the eyes of God, to which the answer is either "We'll just have to manage " or "She was there, She saw, and She approves".

There is one thing which was prohibited in civil weddings and civil partnerships. Religious symbolism and language. A church is a church and a state office is a state office. The state doesn't have the authority to do God, any god, and for once in the history of state arrogance it refused to be drawn in to this one.

So keen was the state not to blur this distinction that when in 1994 it allowed registration of civil marriages to happen in licenced locations which were not register offices, it maintained the prohibition on religious ceremonies. Section 46B(4)

"No religious service shall be used at a marriage on approved premises in pursuance of section 26(1)(bb) of this Act.”

Unfortunately, this sensible distinction was eroded in 2005 by people who were ignorant of the basis of religion and who cared nothing for constitutional arrangements, and who have been squaring up for a long time to try to force religious people to perform ceremonies they are simply not going to do.

As the Telegraph put it:

"readings such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's How do I Love Thee and popular love songs such as Robbie Williams' Angels and Aretha Franklin's I Say a Little Prayer can be used during civil marriages. Readings from sacred texts, including the Bible, the Koran and the Torah, hymns or religious chants will still be barred."

(Note to the Telegraph: "Angels" is for funerals.)

The point here is was demarcation, an exquisite balance whereby the church accepted that the state could register marriages, while the secular state didn't step on its religious toes by claiming to have any priestly authority. "Blow that" said people who failed to grasp that this opens the door to a return to theocracy.

Technically, the use of self-chosen quasi-religious texts is more like the pagan practice of the contracting parties invoking divine blessings, so the official isn't really claiming to be a priest or shaman or rabbi, but it will have added to the confusion in some people's minds.

The Islington registrar Ms Ladele thought she was doing something religious and 'making' a marriage, like a vicar does, which was bunk from the beginning and the clue was in her job title: "registrar". Her role was to check the details and write down what she was told, and ensure they made the declaration with the approved wording. The case was legally about employment discrimination against her (she is thinking about taking the case to the ECHR), but most of the commentariat got to the nub of it; if your job is registering things for the state, such as civil partnerships and mixed-race babies, it isn't up to you to refuse to do the job just because you disapprove of either. What discrimination? Get on with your job.

As for the civil partners, if the name bothers you, the just describe yourself as 'married'. You can't be prevented from doing so.

In some people's eyes you aren't married but they probably won't accept that you are civilly partnered anyway. The law simply has no traction over that. So What? Nothing follows from this, except if they try to deny you rights to which you are legally entitled, in which case you can take legal action.