Thirty Things, Number 1: Visit Stonehenge and Salisbury

Now, people told me things like, don’t pay to go in, you can see it from the highway, and you’ll be done in ten minutes anyway, so its not worth it, and there was also quite a bit of, its not as good now that they put up a fence. But, hey, I’m Australian, and I’m on the other side of the world so I want to be a tourist and see stuff I can’t see in Sydney, like, ancient rocks in the English country side. And I’m glad I did. Not that I learnt much more about them than I knew already, because most of what there is to say about Stonehenge is speculation, but it was great to experience something that is new to me, and to see something that had intrigued me for years. There I was, looking at that famous ring of stones which previously had only existed for me on postcards or in history textbooks. Yes, you can see it from the highway – which is truly bizarre, one minute I’m driving along, reading road signs to places I’ve not heard of, negotiating a strange new clutch and remembering why I don’t like two lane roundabouts, next thing, you turn a corner and – what do you know – there is Stonehenge rising up to meet you.  

Yes, there is a fence, but it meant there was a sense of order and you could stand back and observe the structure without having your view always obscured by the other tourists. And as it turns out, I actually took about forty minutes slowly circling the structure, taking lots of pictures, listening to my audio guide and enjoying the sunshine, being out of the city, seeing something that had been part of the landscape for so many hundreds of years, and wondering again how on earth the little ancient Celts manoeuvred those great pieces of stone, which really did seem much more impressive when you were standing beside them, rather than reading about it in a text book



Leaving Stonehenge behind us, we journeyed into Salisbury, stopping off at Old Sarum to admire some ruins, (again, being Australian instantly makes these things very cool),  were invited to taste some amazing local wines and produce – I bought an amazing raspberry curd, and am still regretting not purchasing a bottle of rather the rather stunning gin I sampled – and then continued on our way, had lunch and took a look around Salisbury Cathedral. It had been a while since I’ve done the touristy thing which I think was good, as I was ready to once again be excited by the creativity, skill, dedication and vision of the people who left us the buildings like Salisbury Cathedral. 


There is some amazingly intricate masonry, beautiful design in the windows and ceiling artwork, and some wonderfully contrasting, yet complementary, modern additions, such as the beautiful dark green baptismal font, with its bold mix of curved and angular lines, which made it a very dramatic feature of the Cathedral. I also stood in awe of a very old piece of paper covered in tiny lines of Latin print, and thought myself very cultured and lucky to be seeing the Magna Carta, though I can’t read it and didn’t have the concentration required to even read the full English translation. But you know, history, meaning, worth. It was there, and I was observing it.

Then I bought some post cards and overly royalist tea towel, and then we drove home. I’m reminded that I like travelling, I like getting out and seeing things; new bits of road; old bits of stone; the sunset from a different location. And I like knowing that I’ve done something I’d set out to do.

 It was also really fun to drive a car for the first time in eleven months. It even made me miss Australia a little bit. 

Thirty Things, number 11: visit Jördis and Tineke in Switzerland.

I can’t recall ever sleeping through an alarm, yet whenever I set an alarm for a time earlier than 6:30am, especially if its imperative I wake up on time in order to make a train or some such thing, I instantly lose the ability to sleep. Consequently, when I went to bed on the 8^th of March, with my alarm set for 4am, I didn’t expect much. And I wasn’t proved wrong. I Drifted and dosed in out of sleep and wakefulness was almost relieved to see 4am approach and to bound out of bed with bundles of insane, sleep deprived energy, splash water on my face, get dressed and walk from my friend’s place in Sloane Square to Victoria station in order to get the 4:30 Gatwick express and begin my adventure to Switzerland to visit Jördis and Tineke, number 11 on my list of things to do this year.

And what a wonderful, if somewhat sleepless, adventure I had. I flew into Zurich and was met by Jördis – who I’d not seen since I visited her in Düsseldorf in 2009 – and her young son Emil. We had a lovely wander through the morning sunshine in Zurich. I spent my money on amazing macaroons in The Sprüngli café rather than in the Bodum shop – tempting as all those teapots were, and went into the Fraumünster to check out the windows designed by Chagall, which I though lovely with great splashes of colour, his disrespect for colouring within the lines or suggesting the presence of gravity, a thing which I usually quite like in his paintings, I found somewhat out of place on a church window, where the colours and figures seemed to sprawl all over the glass and fight to be freed from the restriction of the narrow panes of glass. But hey, who am I but a pleb without an art degree.

In the afternoon I headed to the railway station to embark on my next three hours of travelling. Now, perhaps its living in London and being squished on the tube all the time, where if I stand against the door I’m too tall to stand up straight, or memories of being squished into those horrid green seats on a country train to the blue mountains or central coast, or just being in an unknown city, but my goodness, those European intercity two storey trains are absolutely giant, and I’m a bit ashamed of how much I became like my memory of brother circa 1993, pressed against the window of our parents’ bedroom, staring transfixed at the trains in the distance, and how I stood on the platform and looking up my train, simply thought, ‘wow’. The train ride itself was equally stunning, with three hours of amazing scenery as we chugged through Berne and Fribourg and along lake Geneva.

Once in Geneva, I met up with Tineke, tried to work out how long it was since we had last seen each other (we think it was at Zac and Jayans’ baptisms in Sydney in July 2010) and consumed a lot of cheese and wine. An hour or so in a tapas bar and I’m a total convert to manchego – how had I never eaten this cheese before? The next day we caught the boat to Yvoire (so I’ve now been to France too!), ate ice cream and chocolate for lunch and witnessed the playing of alp horns. We delighted in the signs that winter was over and spring was upon us. Flowers, sunshine, no need for gloves (except when holding said lunch ice cream), sitting outside at a café in the afternoon with no need for our coats, daylight after 5pm.

In the evening I enjoyed a lovely interactive raclette dinner party with Tineke’s uni friends, because there is no such thing as too much cheese.[1] After much cheese and wine and girl chats it was finally sleep time with the alarm set for another early morning as my time in Switzerland was almost done and it was back to London in the morning.

Sunday 10^th March, I’m back in London by 10:30am, sleepy, and desperate for a coffee even from Nero to make up for the terrible one I bought for an exorbitant price at the airport in Geneva, and very pleased with my super quick visit to my friends in Switzerland, happy it was on my list, because it was about time I saw them both and it was great to get out of the UK and hear other languages (I’m reinspired to learn a language now), see new places, and eat new cheeses.

Huzzah.

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[1] Actually, there is such a thing as too much cheese. I experienced this at a café in Wales when I ordered a butternut squash risotto with some local cheese, that turned out to be essentially a very yellow cheesy soup with some risotto rice in it, that was amazing for the first three mouthfuls, but less and less so each mouthful after that.

Thirty Things: Number 13, watch an opera at the ROH

In 2009 I wrote a piece of fiction called Encountering Don Giovanni. Here are the opening words:

Jessica Woodson is going to see her mate Toby sing in Don Giovanni tonight. Toi Toi Buddy!

Updated a few moments ago…

It was time to be getting ready. So after a hurried status update Jessica clicked logout, turned off her computer and got dressed slowly. She did the full make-up routine, starting properly with moisturiser then foundation, powder and even some contouring on her cheeks. By the time she was applying her eyeliner she realised she was thinking about the last time she’d watched an opera, and watched only to see Lochlann, mesmerized by his every movement.

*

I assured myself tonight’s opera experience would be different. I would not be distracted with thoughts of Lochlann. After all, I was going to see Toby make his debut. This was special. I’d been anticipating this day for years.

I put on pretty stockings, shifted my weight around, checked myself out from every possibly angle then glanced over my shoulder and looked down. The back seam made these stockings more than pretty, they were killers. I wondered if Lochlann would consider the effect as irresistible as I did. I stepped into my new amazing skirt that he’d never seen, pointed my toes and slid into purple heels bought on a total whim. Well done Jess, I told myself, this outfit is your best yet. Everyone will want a piece of this. And then I berated myself. When had I become so coarse? And anyway, lets be perfectly honest here, I didn’t care what everyone thought, just one person. Just one person who –and hadn’t I promised myself this a moment ago – I wasn’t going to think about.

All the same, I hadn’t got dressed up for quite some time, and while opera openings aren’t necessarily the ball gowns and glitz they once were, it wouldn’t be right to give up an opportunity to look as fabulous as possible.

Now listen Jessica, I reminded my reflection, you are not dressing for Lochlann and you are not going to this show for him, and even if you see him, Miss Jess, he certainly won’t be looking at you.

So, in some ways, when on the 26^th of February I raced home from lunch, updated my facebook status to ‘Don Giovanni time at the Royal Opera House’, put on my prettiest dress and back seamed stockings and caught the tube to Covent Garden to watch the opera with my ex, I couldn’t help feeling like I’d some how already lived this night, the desire to be super attractive, just to prove that you can be; the awkwardness of watching Giovanni’s dealings with women and hearing the women sing of their broken hearts, years before, through a character I had invented. I didn’t mean to channel myself into Jess when I wrote the story, even though it did, as ever, turn out to be thinly veiled autobiography, and I certainly didn’t mean to channel her when I went to the opera it just kind of happened. Perhaps this is why when Matthew and I were still together he once accused me of having an outrageous ability to see literary irony in my own life. It just happens. Because when I like a story I immerse myself in it. And though I have a lot of love for old texts, I’m also a product of the now, the post modern and contemporary and I want the art I consume to be relevant and speak to me of my life. And I want no less from opera.

So lets return to my the opera, and my actual lived experience. I sat myself down in my much less than premium seat high up in the gods and watched Don Giovanni at the Royal Opera House, thus achieving the thirteenth thing on my list of things to do. Now, although this was the first show I had seen there, its not the first time I’d been in the theatre. Through my astounding industry connections (they’re not, but whatever), I’d been taken on a tour of the theatre, and been struck down with a severe case of opera house envy – the stage space is replicated three times on a kind of rotating grid, whats not to love, especially if you’re involved in changing the set each night! – and couldn’t quite get over the sheer size of the place. Being back a second time was no less awe inspiring, just being in the building, before anything had actually happened on stage. When the opera did begin, I rather superfluously turned to Matthew and said “Did I mention I like Mozart?” Seriously, that man’s music makes me so content. And that theatre made it sound so clear and striking, and really puts the acoustics of a smaller opera house on the other side of the world to shame.

I was a little worried that having heard a lot about the Royal Opera, and having wanted to see something there since I was first in London at the end of 2009, that I might be a little underwhelmed by the experience. Not so. Sitting as far back as we did, I really was impressed by how engaged I was by the operatic action of those toy like figures a million miles away, and of course the clarity of their voices, which I’m sure has as much to do with the afore mentioned acoustics of the place as with the ability of the singers. I continued to be amused and intrigued by the curious gender politics and sexual power plays of this opera, sympathetic towards Donna Anna even though I know the story, and of course, I still saw something in myself in the humorously pathetic, rejected Elvira. There is something truly satisfying about pointing out to your companion that someone is about to sing your favourite aria, then have her beautifully and powerfully, musically yell at him all the angst you’ve felt in the last while and perhaps a bit more thrown in on top for good measure.

In short, if you’ve not been to The Royal Opera House, do it. Because, although I did feel like a bit of a pleb when during the interval I ate my home made sandwich, it was wonderful to have an excuse to pretty myself up, feel glamorous and pretend I live a life of luxurious nights at the opera, but more than that, I was entertained, engaged, interested and (just a little bit) reflected in the performance, which is reason enough to watch any piece of theatre, to put it on your list of things to do, and be glad that you've done it.

Thirty things, number 26: Make Fudge

A month ago now, Amelia and I made fudge. And it was awesome. That is pretty much all I have to say about this.

The Making of Salted Caramel Fudge, 10/2/2012.

Here are all out ingredients, bought from Waitrose, Gloucester Rd, because we're classy like that.

This is Amelia, being very excited about using her measuring cups and me, being very glamorous, melting and mixing butter, sugar, condensed milk and golden syrup.

Here is the said contents of the saucepan, mid melting and mixing. This was a very long process. It required great strength and patience. True

story.

Now, the addition of white chocolate, once the sugar and butter etc have been stirred for a million years.

Since we made this fudge, Amelia has made a second batch, which was even more amazing, and we have come to the conclusion that we over cooked the first lot and didn't transfer it to the tray quick enough. However, we weren't to know this at the time. Oh well. Here is Amelia pressing salt into our slightly over cooked fudge.

And here I am, once again being glamorous, displaying our finished fudge, just before we popped it in the fridge to set.

This fudge was amazingly sweet, and somehow both soft and crumbly - due probably to the over cooking. Amelia's fudge version 2.0 was much softer and gooey-er.

I'm certainly looking forward to making - and eating - it again sometime.

Thirty Things, Number 19: Read 'Daniel Deronda'

… Do not think of me sorrowfully on your wedding-day. I have remembered your words – that I may live to be one of the best women, who make others glad that they were born. I do not yet see how that can be, but you know better than I. If it ever comes true, it will be because you helped me…

(Eliot, G, 1876: Daniel Deronda, Penguin Books, 810)

I admire George Eliot. Sometimes I think I want to be her. She writes awesome sentences like this one:

The fact was, notwithstanding all his sense of poetry in common things, Deronda, where a keen personal interest was aroused, could not, more than the rest of us, continuously escape suffering from the pressure of that hard unaccommodating Actual which has never consulted our taste and is entirely unselect. (380)

However, I also like the way she refuses to submit to the standard conventions of a fairytale romance. I like that it takes her 800 pages to tell a story, and that in those 800 pages she can talk about love, literature, religion and politics and I don’t get bored, rather I slowly fall in love with her quiet, soft spoken parentless hero myself. And yet, at the end of 800 pages I couldn’t really tell you that much about Daniel Deronda or why, were he real, I’d be leaning on him just as Gwendolen was. He isn’t an obvious heir to a huge amount of money, he isn’t a dashing navy captain, he isn’t a classics reading Cotton Mill owner he doesn’t own Donwell Abbey or even Pemberley, he is just a well educated, considerate and thoughtful guy. Turns out that’s much more attractive than those other things.

And because he is well educated, considerate and thoughtful he becomes something of a saviour to two women, rather than a suitor or lover, and I kind of like that about him too. Deronda saves two drowning women, and encourages them to live full and meaningful lives. The first rescue is from a quite literal drowning. Daniel rescues Mirah when she despairing of ever find happiness again, prepares to meet her fate in the cold wet embrace of the Thames. He then brings her into the hospitality of good, gentle and caring women, who help Mirah find her place in London society through music, as Mirah is able to teach singing to earn her living. The second woman, Gwendolen, he saves from drowning in her own sorrow caused by the strangling grasp of her marriage and her narrow view point which has not prepared her to think of any life beyond herself, or to find any joy past her immediate disappointments.

Poor Gwendolen. In the hands of any other novelist this young, attractive and energetic heroine would have made a brilliant marriage. But, shaped by Eliot she looses her fortune, marries a bastard and then quietly falls in love with a man who does not love her. I say quietly falls in love, because I don’t even know if Gwendolen herself knows she is in love with Deronda, but I get the clear impression that she was. Even before her bastard of a husband conveniently drowns. If she’d been alive today and not been a Victorian wife she would have been stalking that boy on twitter big time, and pouring out her soul on that soulless medium that makes deep emotional confessions with even relative strangers possible; facebook chat.

Instead Gwendolen and Deronda steal snatches of conversation in the ballroom and at soirees. At first I found Gwendolen somewhat insipid. She’s selfish and she moans and she’s a little bit emo, and she’s fairly certain life is “all like a dance set beforehand” (451) and she is every bit a Gen Y lass. And then I realised she was a bit of me, or maybe I was a bit like her, and that perhaps was the brilliance of Eliot in creating a woman who when I first met her I didn’t really like. She was a brat and she was selfish and served her right marrying Grandcourt, and being cut up with guilt and jealousy over his lover and their kids. Then as she poured out her soul to Deronda I realised that like Gwendolen I had opportunity before me, but I was afraid of disappointment or getting my hands dirty and so I didn’t really know what to do. That sometimes I found life to be so pointless that I was frozen into inaction because did it really matter what I did, I was never going to change anything. I was just a woman in love with the wrong man, cut up with jealousy over his ex-girlfriend and their kid.

So when Deronda took Gwendolen under his care and did his best to lift her from the muddy waters of self doubt and self pity, I heard him saying to me that I needed education, passion and purpose. That then:

life would be worth more to you: some real knowledge would give you an interest in the world beyond the small drama of personal desires. It is the curse of your life – forgive me – of so many lives, that all passion is spent in that narrow round, for want of ideas and sympathies to make a larger home for it. Is there any single occupation of mind that you care about with passionate delight or even independent interest?” (451)

And though Deronda is a piece of fiction, the point that Eliot makes in him is a good one. Life is bigger than the “small drama of personal desires”. And there are things that I care about that are beyond my own needs and wants. And its high time I got back to being a generous, other-centred person, to looking out for people like Mirah who need practical love and people like Gwendolen who sometimes need a hug and sometimes need to be kicked off their backsides, and to realise that at any given point I myself might be bit of a Mirah or a Gwendolen. For while Eliot refuses to submit to the narrative of pretty lady heroine falls in love with dashing hero and lives happily ever after, that is the story we can hope will be fulfilled in Mirah once the novel closes. So maybe the possibility of a fairytale is always there, it just depends whose eyes you look through. Mirah’s life though riddled with pain and disillusionment when we meet her is actually full of fairytale coincedences. She is rescued by Deronda who just happens to be rowing by as she contemplates suicide. He searches for her family and just happens to find her brother, in London, without even really trying. Then to top it all off, he meets his own mother, discovers he is a Jew and therefore much more appealing to Mirah and Mordecai than when everyone thought he was the son of an English Baron. And so the downtrodden but virtuous Mirah gets the hero. If that isn’t a fairytale, I don’t know what it is.

So Mirah gets a fairytale, but Gwendolen gets reality. She marries the wrong man, then falls in love with the best man in the world of the novel, and has to watch as he marries someone else. But, she has learnt to see life beyond herself. To see that Deronda had a life beyond her own, and that other people deserve fairytales too, because the world is bigger than her own suffocatingly narrow desires.

Thirty Things, Number 17: Watch Les Miserables

This is not a review. I’m not stupid enough to contemplate writing a review of a show that I work on. This is just a quick little note to record the fact that I have done yet another of the things on my list. And if it’s a review of anything, it is of my watching experience, because I was apprehensive and feared that maybe I’d seen and heard Les Mis too many times, and concerned that rather than like or not like it, I just might not be interested.

So, on Tuesday 31^st January, I went to the Queens theatre and watched the longest running musical in London[1] and I felt like a tourist, even though I spend most evenings in the building, knew everyone on stage and was mentally aware of where I would be backstage at any given point in time depending on which plot I was doing. It’s a strange way to view theatre. To be thinking things like can I see the onstage wig change (no) and so that is what the make-up looks like under lights (much more subtle than I imagined) while at the same time being involved in a narrative and the (forgive me) journey of a character or two, and every now and then thinking something like oh, that’s who sings that bit! because previously you’ve only heard something from side stage and didn’t recognise the voice, is, well, a different experience to just watching a show.

All that in mind, I was actually positively surprised about how excited I was to be watching the show, and how much I did enjoy it – the music and the narrative. Because I confess I had doubts. Its been over ten years since I saw a professional production of Les Mis. That was in Sydney. I went with school. I more remember things like being shocked that lovely ladies drew their cleavage on (to think the painting of ‘gulls’ would become quite a regular part of my job!), and not having anyone to talk to at interval because I went with my drama class and I was that popular to somehow managed not to have a single friend with me. Since then I’ve seen a schools production and an Am-dram youth theatre version, both of which were good, but slow, and left me thinking that perhaps I’d seen Les Mis enough. So although I lived in London in 2009, was here on holiday over Christmas 2010, and have now been back since May, I was never in a hurry to watch the show.

Then, when I began to put together my list of things to do, I realised that here I was working on a show that claims a space in music theatre history, is a major tourist attraction, and that if I left London without seeing it except from the wings, I’d probably feel a bit silly. So I put it on the list. I have to thank Tim Southgate for including a line from Stars in his status update a few weeks ago which prompted me to ask him to come watch it with me and actually buy tickets. And I did get excited. The day before it hit me. I realised, not only was I looking forward to hanging out with Tim before he flew back to Sydney, I was also really quite looking forward to seeing the show, even though I hear it every night.

So I can happily tick number 17 off the list. Watch Les Miserables. Done. Added bonus: I surprised myself by how much I enjoyed it, and by the nerdy little bit of me that was filled with a rush of excitement as the curtain (screen) went up at the start, simply because I was there. Not be interested? What a silly fear. Ok, so I love opera, we all know that. But sometimes I think I forget how much I like going to the theatre.

Did I mention I like theatre? I like theatre.

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[1] I’m slightly unsure about this fact. I even checked the website, but that made me confused as it claims that is “now the world’s longest running musical”, but further down the page says, “In Broadway history it is the third longest running show after Cats and Phantom of the Opera”. So, yes. That is all.

Thirty Things, Number 15: Go to Lates at the Science Museum.

A while ago, I was roped into handing out leaflets outside the Science Museum as apparently a lot of people gather there for the late opening session. It turned out to be true. On the last Wednesday of the month a lot of twenty and thirty somethings gather at the museum and form a very long and orderly line - it stretches back to the Natural History Museum, but there is no pushing in happening. It was odd to see a bunch of adults queuing to get into a museum. So I thought to myself I’d come back some time and check it out. I even put it on my list of things to do.

Last night, in the company of two wonderful ladies, Cathryn and Amelia, I went back to check out the museum. I arrived at South Kensington station a few minutes before 6:30, alighted there for the museums, as the cheery voice over on the tube suggests, then walked down the pedestrian tunnel underneath exhibition road, past the familiar doors of the V&A, all the way to the end, and came out at the Science Museum. I then walked back down Exhibition Road to the back on the line. The grown-ups only session begins at 6:45 and by the time we were there people must have been queuing for some time. I stood with my gloved hands in my pockets, wondering what I would actually do or see in the museum. Amelia grabbed a brochure which suggested going to the Launchpad, as we might remember it from when we were nine, and now we could go back and experience it again. Given that when I was nine I was in Sydney, I didn’t remember the hands on gallery of this museum, but I knew the concept. Amelia was excited. She remembered it. So once we progressed through the line, we headed inside, bought ourselves a glass or two of wine and made our way up through the museum to the Launchpad looking at various exhibits on the way.

We had a look at iron lungs, and skin cells, and strange mathematical polyhedra things from the 18^th century that we couldn’t find out anything about. There was a stunning display of old microscopes, telescopes and other bits and piece of scientific paraphernalia. We read about open lectures during the Victorian Era and looked at models of DNA. I was struck by just how much information we humans are gathering and by how much we, as a general population, know now, or have access to, yet how little I am aware of. There is an awful lot of learning, researching and experimenting going on.

And then we got to the Launchpad and I got to pretend I was a kid and it was pretty awesome. We had way too much fun. Truly. I haven’t felt like such a child in a long time, and it was ridiculously fun.

We teamed up with strangers to move bits of grain around in the creatively named Big Machine, we got outrageously dizzy spinning round at the Rotation Station, were suitable impressed and excited when we generated some electricity and were enchanted by the patterns formed by dry ice.

The interesting fact of the evening was provided by the one actual science student/professional amongst us, Cathryn, who informed us that if you are in a room where the level of oxygen drops to 6% you will pass out in 2 breaths and be dead in 8 minutes. That was a cheery thought.

I’m glad I put a visit to the Science Museum on my list. I don’t know if I really learnt that much about science, but I had an absolutely fantastic evening, drinking wine in a plastic cup in a museum, getting ridiculously excited by simple things, and declaring I loved science.

I love science!