A CHRISTMAS CAROL

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.


Well, not long ago actually. As Winnie the Pooh might have said - about last Tuesday - but the rest of the quotation is true enough. And if the wind outside the theatre wasn’t actually moaning at the time then there were plenty in the second and third rows of the audience to make up for it. ‘Moan!’ cried the Gentleman in the top hat and riding boots, and they moaned to chill even the thickest blood.

Rain or Shine Theatre - a company reputed for its happy and burlesque productions of the classics of English theatre in the fragrant softness of the British summer - had decided, ‘times being what they are,’ to attempt a winter and indoor tour. And what better classic to start what may be a run of such tours than ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens, the second best, or so the top-hatted gentleman said, Christmas story ever told.

And what better time and place to end such a tour than ‘The Market Theatre’ in Cowbridge, just before Christmas. Weather permitting that was.

The problem with the weather is that it always over acts. Never do you watch a film and see drizzle. It always rains stair rods, however inappropriate or inconvenient this may be. So the weather chose to join us for the final night with an array of snow, ice and plummeting temperatures. ‘Bah Humbug!’ it probably said, ‘to the prospect of theatrical productions!’

Indeed the punters who had booked the theatre the previous night had cried off en bloc, whispering down the telephone windy noises about the roads being ‘treacherous’ and the lanes ‘lethal.’ And this was before they set eyes on the car park!

So would we have an audience? We weren’t entirely sure that we were even going to have players. The radio had announced closures of both Severn Bridges during the day and we knew that the Rain or Shine Theatre Company hailed from snowy Gloucester on the other side of them.

But of course the show must go on. In the event both actors and audience (well, most of them) made it to the theatre, some even from as far afield as Yorkshire, thereby incurring financial and geographical inconvenience to add to the meteorological inconvenience that was our lot this Christmas-tide.

The players arrived in a Tardis-like van, crunching across the ice, and only slightly behind their time. But soon they were bustling: lights were hung, curtains draped, a set erected, furniture placed.

Gradually, drawn by promises of mulled wine and mince pies, the audience joined them. drifting out of the Dickensian weather and towards the Dickensian show. Both show and audience readied itself. The Gentleman in top hat and riding boots (born 1840, still going strong) strode about issuing instructions. A Cranford bonneted lady in bombazine black moved among the expectant throng selling programmes.

Eventually we were ready. The Cranford bonnet (Jane Lloyd) disappeared. An expectant hush began to descend. The last boozers struggled out of the bar and into their seats. The top-hatted figure whispered a mysterious message about disappearing and reappearing which ended obliquely: ‘when you see me the second time douse the lights!’ He then disappeared. Brows furrowed in a tangle of perplexity.

But all was well. The top-hatted gentleman, (James Reynard) effected his second coming; our lights went down, their lights came up and the magic of theatre began.

Well, sort of! You see there are many bricks to make and little straw. In the case of Christmas Carol there is not only the wind to make moan, but festive merriment to arrange, there are chains to rattle and ghostly wailing to effect, above all there is a clock that has to chime as an old Dickensian clock that has seen much wear is wont to chime - irregularly! More than this, members of the audience needed to speak at critical stages. Oh yes, we the audience were not just passive spectators: we were, or so it seemed, half the show! An equity card in every programme!

But, once briefed (and suitably mulled wined), we were away like an express ghost train, clanking chains, wailing furiously, festive merriment and all. Was there no stopping us?

Bah Humbug! Craig Roger’s Scrooge managed to look both mean and fierce, instantly recognisable as the man who knows the value of nothing but the price of everything. He soon put a stop to our mirth as he terrorised poor little Bob Cratchit, (Tom Jordan) shivering in his fingerless-glove corner.

One characteristic of Rain and Shine performances however is that no actor remains playing a single character for very long. Miniscule Bob became a towering whitened spirit. Indeed, one might say that never in the field of comic theatre have so many parts been played by so few actors. Flimsy barriers of age and gender are swept aside with just passing assistance from a wig, costume or hat.

Queen of this genre is Pippa Meekings who moves effortlessly between Fred, Scrooge’s nephew and every bit the young about town gentleman to the homely poor Mrs Cratchit all bosomy and flowing locks as she serves up a tennis ball sized Christmas Pudding to feed all the Cratchits including the waving Tiny Tim. Even the top hatted gentleman donned wigs and shawls to become this or that.

With the exception of the anchoring Scrooge himself, all the actors floated between characters and spirits to tell their tale. And it is an important tale. Not just about how Scrooge is redeemed. But of how people are reduced by unnecessary ignorance and undeserving want. How at Christmas there is the opportunity to see a bigger picture. Thus when Jane Lloyd, in one of her many guises as the Cranford bonneted charity collector to whom Scrooge finally yields a mountain of ‘back payments,’ rattles her tin, she rattles it at all of us.

Three curtain calls and the folk troop happily homewards into the night, well pleased with this slick, witty, inventive and superbly costumed show. We may know the tale, but there is much pleasure in a new and fizzingly acted telling. There is also much satisfaction in seeing so much delivered from a set that appears to be so insubstantial yet from which the mighty ghost of Christmas yet to come rose majestically towards the roof. ‘How on earth did they do that? The departing audience wondered as, arm in arm, they struggled out across the icy waste.

Photo shows Jane Lloyd as Jacob Marley and Craig Rogers as Scrooge

HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, ESPECIALLY MICE

A post this morning in the Purple Coo Common Room raised the awkward question of what to do about mice; whether they were really the pests they are made out to be and, if so, how to get rid of them.

I suppose the obvious answer is 'get a cat' which answer comes in much the same vein as that made to Queen Victoria who allegedly was bothered by the quantity of fractious sparrows nesting around the bedroom windows in one of her ivy covered palaces and sought advice from her equerry, or maybe it was the Prime Minister - Disraeli or Gladstone, perhaps. To which the answer came 'Try sparrow-hawks, Ma'am.'

We do not know whether this suggestion amused our late Queen or merely aggravated her. (She was always being aggravated by her Prime Ministers and in particular by Gladstone, who used to talk to her - she complained - as if she were a public meeting, instead of a tiny, intrepid old lady bothered by pestilent and quarrelsome beasties). It is a moot point, I suppose, whether sparrows come above mice in the pecking order of pestilent and quarrelsome beasties, but as the point is of absolutely no relevance either to bird or beast we may as well leave it there.

Now it is of course Christmas-tide. This being 'the weekend before' we are officially embarked on the fortnight of saturnalia. We have detached the painter and pushed the festival boat out into the river where we shall float downstream - definitely downstream - on a high tide of excess and ill-will, the season of goodwill seemingly forgotten in a haze of alcohol.

Which is why it is good, occasionally, to remember another side of Christmas, the magical and mysterious side, when strange happenings are afoot and to this end I would urge you all (if you are bothered by household invaders) to re-read one of the most magical of all Christmas books - The Tailor of Gloucester, which coincidentally and happily for the introduction to this piece (which would otherwise be left hanging without any article body to support it) is also about mice and what happens when you treat them nicely for once.

I am not going to rehearse the story here. You will either know it or if you don't then I suggest you acquire a copy of the book rapidly (Amazon can still deliver in time for Christmas) and read it at least three times before lunch.

For I do believe that everyone can be improved by this wonderfully redemptive tale and by Beatrix Potter's heart-warming illustrations from a century ago.

Personally, I have always been intrigued by the old legend - arising I suppose from the Nativity and the animals in the stable all grumbling furiously about having their sleep disrupted by the doleful cries of a mother giving inconvenient and painful birth - that in the hour before midnight on Christmas Eve, animals can talk to each other in a language that we cannot understand. The bigger animals look sadly at us, shaking their great heads and muttering things like 'after all it's not us that's destroying the earth' and 'God didn't have to send his Son to save us.'

Meanwhile, the little creatures - mice and sparrows - flitting about after the crumbs and too young for sober reflection, whisper cheekily to each other, 'I hope it's a stable relationship!'

Anyway Beatrix Potter's tale turns on this idea that inter-animal communication can be harnessed to achieve a great task - in this case to sew up an elaborate frock-coat and embroidered waistcoat - for the Mayor of Gloucester who is determined to marry on Christmas morning, thereby thoughtfully perhaps saving his future wife the labour of cooking at least one family Christmas lunch.

I have always been intrigued by this outfit - the elaborate tailoring details are described in detail in the book. Certainly it would have been a most excellently fine coat, a wonderful coat which makes me wonder why, when we have every labour saving device to make coats and waistcoats even more elaborate than in those days, we have given up on wearing such wonderful clothes. It all seems a waste of technology.

The Tailor of Gloucester, of course, had to sew by hand, half-blind, cross-legged, dawn to dusk or in the light of a few candles. No 250 stitch machines for him. But after cutting out the coat he falls ill and that's where the mice come in. Or rather out, for these are mice - evidently destined for the Gloucester Christmas Eve mouse ball for they are dressed to the nines, who have been captured and imprisoned under upturned tea-cups by the Tailor's hard-bitten cat, Simpkin. The Tailor finds them, 'this is passing extraordinary,' he says; and sets them free: and they repay him by sewing together the cut-out pieces of the Mayor's coat, so making his fortune.

And that is why I am forever hopeful that a mouse may one day do they same for me. Not perhaps sow up a coat, but leap on my laptop and write from my notes some short story or acute piece of analysis that will win me some grand literary prize.

I have not seen a mouse in the house recently but you never know. I am told they can smell the chocolate decorations on Christmas trees from 30 yards away. We do have mice in the theatre. They bring us luck, I like to think. And remind us that we have to share this planet we live on.

Happy Christmas to all then, human and animal, and especially to mice.

WATCH WHAT YOU BUY

There's a new shopping centre opened in Cardiff. St David's 2. (St David's 1 opened almost 25 years ago and so has eighties written all over it). This one is modern and futuristic; great wide malls and soaring ceilings. Influenced I guess by New York or Milan - somewhere continental anyway where space isn't at a premium.

The shops are correspondingly big - and not all are brash. Some are actually quite elegant. Like those selling jewellery and watches.

Despite this being the time of year when advertisements for expensive watches crowd the Christmas pages of every glossy magazine, I've never really paid them much attention before. Watches that is. But here I was outside some great emporium whose windows were filled with those brands beloved of the advertisers and counterfeiters - Rolex, Omega, Breitling, IWC, Tag Heuer, Patek Phillippe, Tissot, Rotary, Seiko and the rest. (If some of these brands rank themselves too exclusive to be sold in Cardiff emporia, then I apologise in advance. I really can't remember exactly what I saw except a numbing sameness).

But what really disturbed me were the prices! These are always carefully excluded from the full page glossy advertisements of John Travolta beside some racy aerobatic single-seat plane or the one of the proud father and his intimidated and gauche-looking son.

The little price tags in the window spoke of £2,000, £3,000. £4,000, £5,000! Five thousand pounds! For a watch?

You can buy a perfectly adequate watch these days for less than you'd pay for a half-good bottle of wine. Indeed you can buy timepieces in the market for less than the cost of a cup of coffee.

Now of course you get what you pay for. And I have no doubt that some of the expensive watches do a great many things with an accuracy hitherto unknown to science. But who really needs a chronometer?

There are of course occasions when people need to time things accurately. But isn't it easier to use a stopwatch? And who, apart perhaps from a round-the-world yachstman actually needs a chronometer when radio is there to give us a time check every hour, on the hour.

My electric £20 watch - gold plated, slim, tan strap - never needs winding and tells me the time to within 2 seconds each year. Who needs more?

So it isn't waterproof down to 60 metres or whatever - but then I have no plans to go scuba diving and even if I had would I really want to dive with a watch costing several thousand pounds?

So why do people buy these chunky, all singing, all dancing, ridiculously over-engineered slabs to put on their wrists? I mean it is not even as though they look attractive. The womens' versions are smaller, lighter, but even they fail to look anything but ugly, even with a coarse (and mightily expensive) facelift of diamond studding.

Where has elegance gone? Why don't Apple Macintosh make watches?

********

I've had a cold most of the week. It started at the weekend and by Tuesday evening I thought I was over the worst of it. I was due to attend a meeting in London on Wednesday; my ticket was bought - it seemed wimpish to cancel. And in fact although the day itself went quite well (apart from a delayed arrival due to a 'fatality on the line') my energy levels held up and without undue coughing and sneezing. Yet I felt infectious and wondered whether I should really have stayed at home? On the other hand, sandwiched on the tube I had at least three people coughing and spluttering over me. Other people spluttered when in a spare hour I looked in at the British Museum. Can one get two colds at once, I wanted to ask myself? And if not why not?

BUT WHY THEN LAPLAND?

Prompted by Rosie's post in the Purple Coo common room, I have wasted most of the morning trying to find out who this St Nicholas was.

It seems that he came from a wealthy family in southern Turkey (from which country, you will note, most European legends seem to arise. Perhaps the Turks manufacture them en masse in the same way as they do those ubiquitous Christmas wreaths, or packets of dried figs, for that matter or even Turkish Delight.

The legend of King Midas comes from Turkey, so too does that of Jason and the Argonauts; even the legend of Europa and the bull - the risqué story of Zeus having his wicked way which provides a warning to young innocent females everywhere to be wary of what they do with daisy chains - comes from Turkey. While, of course, dear old Noah and his gopher wood Ark, (or if you are a Julian Barnes fan) his remaining Ark, ended up in Turkey on Mount Arafat if you're entering a pub quiz.

So it is not surprising that St Nick hails from there, where it is hot and sunny and there are lots of interesting ruins to look at - even more interesting in his day (we are talking of the fourth century AD) because, of course, then they were not ruined but visible in all their ancient glory, Greek inscriptions included.

Well, as I was saying, St Nick (as he then wasn't) came - like the Buddha incidentally - you know it would really be very interesting indeed would be to examine the proportions of the saints that came from well-heeled families and those who had to live on their wits and make their way in the world.

I suppose you could argue that Jesus was one such, he being an apprentice carpenter - at least for a time. But his parents were at least respectable folk, why otherwise the fuss over the virgin birth? and able to afford a room in the inn, even if the inns of Bethlehem were full.

Besides Joseph came from the 'House of David' - something that I have never quite understood - but which the Bible suggests is something of a badge of honour. So not quite your downtrodden serf, then.

And besides again we haven't a clue what Jesus got up to in the twenty years or so between joining the family carpentry business and emerging on the scene as Prophet and Redeemer.

With half an ear on Radio 4 the other day I heard someone say that he could well have come to England - 'did those feet in ancient time' and all that. In fact, people connected with Glastonbury, seem to be putting it about that he almost had a second home here and that the Sermon on the Mount was first devised while wading through the weed beds of the Somerset levels and practiced as the Sermon on the Tor.

Not impossible, of course, but surely a little improbable. Far more likely that He ended up in Turkey, which was a lot nearer and didn't require transport by sea and which (unlike uncivilised Britain) was an already fully conquered part of the Roman Empire. Cives Romanus Sum and all that. A Roman not a Roaming Man - or at least not a Roaming all the way to Glastonbury Man.

I suppose the lesson from this is if you do roam, stay put and don't go back. Turkey seems to have been a tolerant enough sort of a spot in those times (whereas Britain was in an endless crisis - was it ever any different? - of competing kingdoms struggling with unwanted visits from Caesar) But then would we ever have known that'our Redeemer liveth?'

Again I suppose it all depends on whether you believe that blood sacrifice is necessary - but it always bothered me as a child the thought of God (and not just God, but Abraham for good measure, the secular father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, should have been up for sacrificing their only sons). Life is terrifying enough as a child without being pawns in parental schemes to save the world. At least the kids should be given an opt-out.

Anyway, we have drifted far from our friend Santa Claus, he of the wealthy family, who inherited a fortune - probably from the family dried fig or Turkish Delight business - and then gave at least some of it away and at least some of it anonymously, leaving pennies (or denarii) in people's shoes and under their pillows. A kind of petty larceny in reverse, if you ask me. Breaking and entering to leave things behind, your honour!

However, this did make him seem holy, especially as no one else could be found to embrace Christ's injunction about giving to the poor with quite the same enthusiasm. So they made him Bishop of Myra at 'quite a young age.' Though, sadly, we are not told whether he wore purple, or even gaiters.

But then came the Roman Emperor Diocletian who threw all the priests in jail, including Nick who nevertheless kept everyone spirits up and made a point of intervening in executions, sometimes successfully. Being a generous soul (no doubt he secretly put oranges and dried figs in the guards' hosiery in the middle of the night) he was let off with an exile and when Diocletian eventually went to meet his maker, Nicholas went back to being a bishop again and practicising facial hair growth.

He died - quite peacefully - in 343 AD and after a life really only very moderately inconvenienced compared with what other saints (and sinners) had to put up with - was beatified and has been with us ever since. We are all, I suppose in a manner of speaking his elves. A constantly and never ending army of children, parents and grandparents all putting out the dried figs and oranges and Turkish Delight, dressing up in a costume well suited I daresay to an unheated church in winter in the cold Turkish mountains, where it does snow unconscionably.

But why then Lapland? I mean of all places? Why not Arafat? I mean aren't the figs, the oranges, the Turkish Delight, the dried dates, the wreaths for our front doors a clue? If Father Christmas really did hail from Lapland we'd be lucky to get pine cones for Christmas.

OH TO BE ELEGANT AND CLUTTER FREE

As I grow older my life seems to become more cluttered. Not only my life, but my house as well. I live on clutter, am surrounded by clutter. I am perpetually tidying, slashing burning, recycling clutter. But it never does any good. The clutter simply grows as though it has a mind of its own. My clutter has Japanese Knotweed tendencies.

I suppose I could learn to say 'no,' but I'm not very good at turning away from something someone wants me to do. This week as we all met in our little UNESCO Committee for what was a rather important, indeed critical, meeting it emerged there was no-one to take a note. The Chairman's appeal was met by instant concentration upon either the floor or ceiling. So, of course, I volunteer as if I don't already have enough to do but take a detailed record of a three hour meeting.

It was ever thus. 'You do too much,' says my daughter kindly. And it is true and yet I have this feeling of impending doom that should I ever stop some kind of primeval cavern will open beneath my feet and I will no longer have a connection to the world.
That I will be unable to get out of bed, my teeth and hair will fall out and I will have to spend an entire morning opening a can of baked beans.

At least you can get rid of possessions, though these days the quantity of essential gadgets of one sort or another that one requires is enormous. And the more one does, I suppose, the more one is cluttered up with the detritus that comes with whatever role one happens to be playing.

Quite literally! I have boots, a fur coat, play scripts, envelopes of money, tickets, flyers (which I will be handing out in a few minutes under the Town Clock to advertise our next production) boxes of Treasurer's files, folders with receipts, other folders with statements, photographs - all cluttering me up - and that is from just from drama - one small part of my little life.

But by far the largest physical intrusion is the baby gear that comes with being a grandparent. When my children were little, we had one (small and collapsible) pram of which the body doubled as a carry cot. We had a tartan travelling cot - which served whether we travelled or not - one Maclaren single seat buggy. One child always had to walk or be carried. A few treasured soft toys. And that, so far as I remember, was that. My children were not noticeably deprived. One even took a first class degree.

Then we had two children, who lived with us. Now we have one grandchild who has spent no more than a three or four nights under our roof in the best part of the year.

And yet we have acquired (not purchased for these things seem simply to arrive by some mysterious and random process, like spiders): one stately home type pram, one high tech buggy, a high chair, a layette, another smaller pram, various blankets and babyclothes, a massive car seat that looks as though it is made for a baby elephant and an ottoman full of squeaky toys with mirrors and dangly bits, psychologist-designed games and other baby paraphrenalia.

Most of this is stored in our dining room - an otherwise elegant room - which has long since fallen from its dignified state since we needed a room in which to undertake the printing operations that are part of the business we run. The sideboard is pressed into service as a workbench, the table as a giant desk.

Behind wicker screens, tower stacks of label stocks all watched over by some interesting pictures, books (our walls seem to be plastered with book cases) and a stuffed grouse in a glass case acquired in some long forgotten antique shop and which I couldn't resist because the bird is the spitting image of the grouse on the famous bottle and I half expect to see him doing that little strutting walk at any moment.

Still whenever we have a party - as we did last Saturday when J had a birthday - all this - well not the grouse or the books - has to be moved and stowed into the main office and stockroom. It has to be stored in order and in layers until the space is filled from floor to ceiling. It may be good exercise, shuttling 10 kilogram rolls of labels and elephant sized car seats from one end of the house to the other, but it is exhausting.

And a bore! But it keeps us fit and in no time at all the dining room, complete with its Persian carpet (which came from my mother's Kensington flat 50 years ago and which has been trodden upon everyday often by many feet in heavy shoes and still shows not the slightest sign of wear, fading or staining despite being heavily peed on by the dogs, in the days when we had dogs, and therefore must rank as one of the more ecologically sound products of this or any other age) is back to its former elegant state.

But why, oh why do we need to be surrounded by such a draining whirlwind of possessions? Such myriad complexity? If I could get rid of everything in my house that wasn't designed at least fifty years ago I am not sure I wouldn't be happier and more elegant to boot, rather like the woman in the photograph.

But what about my darling little white Mac computer? That itself looks so elegant and functional, small enough to be tucked into a handbag, light enough to be carted wherever. On which I can watch all those television programmes that I missed when I was otherwise engaged in the clutter of my life? And speak to the wide, wide world? Ah well!

But then there has to be an exception to every rule. Doesn't there?

LET US BE GRATEFUL FOR SMALL MERCIES

A friend of mine has just had a knee replaced. She's only been out of hospital a few days and I called around to see her on Friday. Despite all the pain she remains smiling and optimistic, sitting on the sofa with an unusual piece of equipment under her operated-upon leg.

This is a surfboard and placing the bad leg upon it she rocks it back and forth, easing the joint.

She calls it her 'bad' leg because it is worse than the other. Though that knee too needs replacing and is very painful. She has been on painkillers for her knees for some time, though she is only in her mid-fifties.

I ask why she didn't have both knees done at the same time and she answers that the pain would have been too much. Which immediately made me ask 'Really?' Would it?

If you cut your finger, it hurts. But if you cut two fingers at the same time the quantum of pain isn't doubled. It is as if you get 'cut finger pain' regardless of how many fingers you cut. It just comes in different places.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore illustrated this once in a satirical sketch on acupuncture. Peter Cook imagines Dudley Moore as a man with a pain in his elbow. 'So they stick a needle in your leg,' says Peter. 'And then you forget about the pain in your elbow and worry about the pain in your leg. And then they stick another needle in your bum to take away the pain in the leg......'

I can't obviously speak from experience but I can't imagine there being very much extra pain from two simultaneous knee operations and, were it me, the thought of having to go through the pain and immobility a second time would be insupportable.

My cousin in Alberta, who was 75 at the time, had both his knees replaced at once and was riding a horse again in two weeks. But then he was a tough old frontiersman - or liked to think himself so - and a doctor to boot.

Still, in pain or not, this friend of mine is very good at drawing you out and so I found myself, before I realised it, moaning to her, quite shamefully, about some little irritation that the day had brought.

Most of my irritations resolve themselves into a vague feeling of not having achieved as much as I feel I ought to have achieved. I know this is nonsense and I equally know that it is a deep-rooted seed planted by my parents who were never satisfied with anything I did. It is a corrosive leit-motif to my life, but I fall for it every time Mr Black Dog comes calling. Even when I am with someone sitting smiling and joking who has just had a knee replaced.

When I got home I opened the newspaper to see the smiling face of Sue Townsend, the author of the best-selling Adrian Mole diaries - who is, as it turns out, exactly the same age as me.

She is now registered blind, having lost most of her sight. Her health has deteriorated in other ways too and she is now looking for a kidney transplant.

Of course I should have loved to receive the recognition that comes from penning an oeuvre as successful as Adrian Mole (though had I done so Mr Black Dog would have just told me that this wasn't a serious enough book to count).

I imagine Sue Townsend's success is not in any way correlated with her health. But if I had too choose between her life and mine I am quite sure that health would trump success every time.

Which is yet another illustration of why we should be grateful for small mercies and think positively. Success and failure, as Kipling wrote, are mere impostors.

LEARNING LINES

Somebody said to me the other day about how clever I must be to remember all those lines - what an incredible memory and so on. It’s true I have been in many plays and have memorised some big parts but I have never seen it as something that takes ‘cleverness.’

In fact in my experience actors seem to learn lines at much the same rate regardless of whether they are ‘clever’ (whatever that may mean exactly) or dull. Or, for that matter, what method they use for learning lines. I can only detect two broad trends - but would be most interested to know if my observations chime with those of others - one to do with age and one to do with accuracy.

Young people do seem to learn their lines faster than older people - or maybe they just find it easier to remember them for one can learn a line quite quickly - the real question is that once learned, how long will it be remembered? On the other hand older people have more experience, more memory ‘tricks’ at their disposal. So the actual difference in practice seems to me to be hardly noticeable.

The accuracy question - that is whether you remember a line exactly, down to the last jot and comma, or whether you learn what the line means and therefore find yourself inverting phrases or using synonyms - throws up more differences. Some people can learn lines and deliver them at first rehearsal with pin sharp accuracy. That is something that I personally find very hard to do. I start with something that approximates to the lines - it is all my memory will allow - and then these gradually becoming more accurate and more focused as first night approaches.

You might expect these two effects to be related to the method of learning lines. Some people record the play and then listen to the lines over and over. They then re-record it leaving spaces for themselves to deliver their lines. Indeed this is probably the commonest way of line-learning.

I have done this but in general I prefer simply to go through the text repeating a line over and over until it is remembered and then going through chunks of the play in my head, or while moving a card over the page so that the line I have to deliver is covered up.

For some reason I find walking helps while doing this - a long country walk - is fine to practise the lines out loud though it is not without the occasional embarrassment when someone creeps up on you unseen.

Speaking the lines also helps you to get an idea of how to play the character. I remember Peter O’Toole being interviewed once and being asked the question “What do you do to prepare for the character, apart from learning your lines?” Peter O’Toole rather implied that there wasn’t anything apart from learning the lines; that once the lines were learned well the character would be there. From my experience I would go along with that.

But I cannot detect that the recording method necessarily leads to more accurate learning. Not trying to mimic a recording does however leave you freer to explore how to deliver each speech.

Whatever way you choose, learning a big part is a lot of work, bashing away at the script day after day, even when you ‘know’ the lines, for you can be sure that lines you thought you knew will vanish under the pressure of a performance unless you know them so well that you could say them in your sleep.


Then it no longer seems on stage that you are speaking lines at all - you just slip into character and say things and respond to what others say, quite naturally, without thinking. The character suddenly becomes alive - you are not acting, rather you are being, and the situation on stage determines what you say and how you say it.

That’s when you experience the thrill of the stage, drifting out of your own personality and into someone else’s. Although in real life the play is a play and the action is fiction, on stage the words and actions are real, the only possible actions there can be.

How one remembers lines in a physical sense I haven’t a clue - which part of the brain, which traces. I suppose something somewhere must physically alter, some synapses must become weaker, others stronger. Yet there is redundancy too for sometimes even a well-known line can be forgotten completely, as if there has been a break in the track. But a moment’s pause and you can ‘think your way around’ the broken link establish a new pathway.

Anyway, none of this is ‘clever.’ Anyone, I maintain, can learn lines if they are prepared to work at it.

THE INTREPID EXPLORER LIVES AGAIN

I was always a bit of a tearaway as a child - an adventurer, an explorer. One of my first and favourite books was RM Ballantine’s ‘The Dog Crusoe’ - one of those three men and a dog stories that tells the tale of exploring on horseback the passage from the head waters of the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, in the days of the deep frontier. The star was the dog, of course, a great Newfoundland called Crusoe - ever faithful, sage beyond wisdom and trained to accomplish astonishing feats of great persistence and daring.

I was lucky in my tearaway fortunes: when I was still only seven years old we moved to a large ramshackle old house with seven acres of land deep in the Berkshire countryside. This was hardly the badlands of Montana, nor was the homely Thames like the head waters of the Mississippi; and nor did our untrained mongrel, Twiddles, remotely resemble the heroic canine Crusoe.

But, nevertheless, who cared? There was still exploring to be done. Trees to climb, houses to build from sticks and corrugated iron, the river in which to swim and fish, cellars and attics in which to hide or treasure hunt the discarded bric à brac of previous owners. There were even ponies in the great field - not ours - but still rideable if you didn’t, like the Red Indians in Ballantine’s book, worry too much about saddles and bridles. You learned fast to grip with your knees or be bucked off into a hideous clumps of painful nettles.

Such a spirit of adventure, of being an intrepid explorer, never really dies. It merely ages, smothered in a thousand practical worries about getting clothes dirty, twisting ankles and other wholly practical concerns about ‘safety.’ Even today when I see a horse in a field I long to lose half a century of age and to go quietly up to it, speak softly while stroking its neck and then, quick as a flash, to leap upon its back and, clinging for my life, go galloping headlong with the wind in my ears. Can ever such fun be had amongst computer games I wonder?

Of course, I doubt today that I could leap easily even upon a donkey, never mind a horse - but still, as I say, the exploring spirit never completely dies and thus it came about that I was idly listening to Rosie one day after lunch during our recent visit to her son’s Auvergne Mill. We were talking about walks, I think, when I heard her say ‘I want a Nature Trail.’

The tea was being made - a few minutes then to go outside in the sun. ‘Nature Trail?’ I found myself wandering up the unmetalled back road that leads up one side of the valley. Rosie’s remark had set me thinking.

Nature Trails should be circular, but the trouble with this is that the river Celé at this point forms a horse shoe, cutting through the high plateau, with the Mill at the end of it. This means that in order to do a circuit of the Mill you not only have to cross the river twice and the leat once but also climb up and climb down again the high valley sides.

I wondered. I had already crossed the river once, by the Mill’s own bridge. Now if I just climbed the first ridge.......? I looked above me. At this point the ridge is a jumbled landslip of grey rocks - big and square - almost as though a giant’s baby had overturned his tray of building bricks. It was covered with heather and moss, but didn’t look too difficult. Seizing an oak sapling I hauled myself up, block by block.

Once at the top I could see over into Cocotte’s field - named after the fat, sad and greedy pony who belongs to the neighbouring farm and who grazes the field occasionally. Having climbed up the ridge I had now to descend. I decided I would not go back the way I came. Onwards and downwards then, towards Cocotte’s field. The ground looked quite smooth, though steep. Fortunately plenty of saplings meant I keep my footing.

At the bottom ran a low retaining wall - about six feet in height. I would have to jump this. What was the ground like underneath? Uneven certainly and with stones. I leapt, hedging my bets, planning to land with one foot on a flat stone, and one on the ground. All well.

Now it was simple to cross the field to the river where I knew that a young oak had been washed down in last winter’s floods and was lying lodged in the tree roots on either side of the bank. The river is not very wide at this point: twelve or fifteen feet perhaps and the tree trunk was maybe six foot above the water. No matter there was little water in the river. If I slipped I should have a nasty fall.

I hesitated. Then I remembered one of the Hornblower stories in which he leads a party of men along a ship’s yard to invade the rigging of an enemy ship. This trunk lying across the stream must be about the thickness of a ship’s yard I thought. Yes, I can do it. In no time I was safely across.

So now I was into the Leat field - through which is dug the leat that carries water from the sluices at the weir to the millpond, running in a trench four metres above the river. No problem to cross this as there’s a concrete bridge so that tractors may pass from one field to the other.

From the weir I had what I thought would be a difficult climb - straight up through a grove of holly trees to the crag that marks the boundary of the Mill’s land on the main drive that leads down to the Mill from the village above. Though steep it was easy enough with plenty of handholds and footholds.

I was reliving my childhood, the pulse racing, grizzly bears about to emerge from the sweet chestnuts that line the roadway. Where was my racoon hat? My deerskin jacket? Had I had enough. I’d gone about three quarters of the way and from the roadway I could simply have walked down the drive to the Mill to collect my ever cooling tea. But I would not have completed the circle.

From a little below the crag, on the other side of the roadway, there leads a forest trail cut to bring timber out of the dense woodland. It climbs sharply up the hillside to meet a confluence of such trails directly above the Mill. That’s where I headed. Here is to be found also the well that provides the Mill with its water, a plastic hose snaking down the mountain.

The trails haven’t been used for a long time. The forest is overgrown and fallen trees make vehicle access, even with a tractor, impossible. To someone on two legs, however, fallen trees present no problem.

Then, high on the hill I heard a tinkling sound. Like something from Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ - He jangled and jangled and jangled his bell. Someone was ringing for me with the old hand bell kept to summon folk in from the fields just as in my growing-up days, my parents would jangle to summon me from the bowels of a hidden cellar or outhouse attic.

I shouted in reply, but the forest simply absorbed my sound. And still the bell rang. Maybe an emergency! No question then of searching out a convenient and happy way to descend the long steep and bramble-thicketed hillside to the walnut trees on the Mill’s lawn that I could see far beneath me. Straight down then.

At least it was impossible to fall for the brambles gripped me like thorned string. I tore and tumbled my way downwards, eventually running out on to the lawn out of breath and adrenalin pumping a few minutes later.

‘What’s the problem?’ I shouted.

‘Your tea’s cold,’ answered Rosie.

But at least I had completed the circuit.

The photograph shows the river Celé in spate; there was rather less water in it when I crossed it via the log bridge just downstream from here.

TILTING AT WINDMILLS AND OTHER THINGS

So would you? A windmill, I mean. Would you install a windmill in your garden? I was asking myself this yesterday as I pondered whether I should be making another short haul flight down to the Auverne.

So I Googled ‘windmills’ - or rather ‘small wind turbines’ and lo! it turns out that there are folk ready to sell me a dainty little model on a 10 metre stalk, set in a block of concrete and connected to my fuse box for the measly sum of £9,000.

With my thoughts still on the Auverne I calculate that once £9,000 would have been about €5,000 - now it’s about €10,000 euros - another illustration of how Britain will quickly have to learn how to become self-sufficient for it is rapidly becoming too expensive to buy anything from abroad - like oil, for instance, or gas.

Now £9,000 doesn’t seem unreasonable for a big concrete block in the windward corner of my garden with a windmill on top. I could even see it finally extinguishing the ever expanding Yucca plant with which I am due another skirmish shortly.

Quite indestructible are Yuccas, except perhaps by large amounts of concrete, though I’m told they are a useful plant if you’re about to become self-sufficient. You can weave the fibres into cloth and use the pointed leaves as skewers or needles. Allegedly.

Besides the demise of the Yucca, my windmill would bring me free energy and in addition £0.12 for every kilowatt hour I returned to the grid. Quite a bargain, except that the tables say I live in a spot less windy than the average and therefore that my windmill would supply only one third of the electricity that I use.

What! less that averagely windy? There are times when the wind howls and I fear for my fences. I have already lost half a fig tree. I see from my window that the trees are tossing merrily. On the other hand yesterday it was quite still and for some days before that. So it seems it would take 60 years to get my money back, by which time I shall be dead, if I haven't succumbed to global warming in the meantime.

Still I would have built a windmill if it had been practical. I don’t object to how they look. The turbines high on the northern hills above my town have a certain ghostly elegance. The I thought that perhaps it would be more sensible to let someone else build the windmill and to buy the electricity from them.

So I emailed my current supplier who tells me that if I cut my consumption by 10 per cent I can move to a green tariff. But I haven’t cut my consumption by 10 per cent! And nor am I likely to. Despite my criticisms of the ban on incandescent light bulbs, virtually all the serious lighting in the house is energy saving. I am not going to sit in the dark, nor give up using the oven. And we already turn off at the wall where we can.

True we could go out and buy a new cooker, fridge and dishwasher - but the energy involved in their new manufacture (all that steel to be smelted and rolled from iron ore brought half way round the world, the paint and plastic made from hydrocarbons, the packaging and the overheated showrooms) mean that I’d be starting with a substantial carbon deficit (let alone a bank account deficit) which would require as long to payback as my windmill.

Why is there no requirement to inform us of the carbon cost of new energy saving appliances? Your new car may have low emissions but the factories that made it and brought it to you certainly don’t.

But a post from kind Woozle tells me of another company - Ecotricity - offering to sell me green electricity. Fine - but then I lose the discounts that I get from being with my existing supplier from whom I buy gas as well.

Besides, if I (and fellow eco-warriors) buy up all the green energy everyone else is left with the brown (non-renewable) stuff. I am not actually helping the poor old planet, however virtuous I may feel to be 100 per cent green. Though in fairness to Ecotricity they do say that they invest only in renewable sources of power.

What about gas on which the central heating runs? I’ve a feeling that you should be able to buy green gas, produced from biomass, though I haven’t seen this advertised anywhere. Why not, I wonder? The technology is available to produce gas from digesters and we do discard a vast potential source of biogas every time we visit the bathroom.

Apparently we expend 80 calories in fuel and fertiliser to produce one calorie’s worth of edible food. As someone said once we spend all this money creating this waste and then we just throw it away.

But I am still scratching my head about how best to atone for my flight down to the Auverne next week. There we are greener than here. Our heat comes from great wood burning stoves, our power from French nuclear electricity.

I have never had much fear of nuclear energy. Indeed I see it as much the best short term solution to providing the large amounts of standby power that the world demands. Britain was once a world leader in this field; a place we have sadly long ceded.

Indeed I read only this week that Areva, the French nuclear giant, hopes to build 60 reactors across the world in the next few years, including some in Britain. Demand is fast picking up, they say.

Maybe I shall get my low-carbon electricity after all. Meanwhile, I comfort myself that even with the Auverne trips our carbon footprint is still respectable. Well, just.

TALES FROM AN ECO-VILLAGE

Monday 21 September: I’m having dinner in the BioMio restaurant in Copenhagen with about 90 other bloggers, mainly from Europe but some from further afield. I’m sitting next to a Brazilian called Charles, for instance, who has just flown in from Sao Paulo. Opposite me there’s Tasha, an editor from the United States, and Radka from the Czech Republic, while Jodi, though an Australian, joins me in representing the UK.

We are here at the invitation of the European Journalism Centre, an NGO based in Maastricht. Our job in the next three months or so will be to blog about climate change in the run-up to the UN summit which takes place in December. To help us we are being given two days of briefing.

Today we have been in the Bella Centre, a strange low rise complex on the outskirts of Copenhagen, that looks like an airport terminal without an airport. Much of it is still under construction but it is where the two week Climate Change Summit will be taking place.

No-one knows how many people will be coming: the Danes guess at about 15,000, made up of government leaders and officials from 192 countries, plus the world’s media, NGOs like Oxfam and WWF, and a whole tail of climate activists there to put pressure on the politicians. All have to be accommodated, fed, transported and most importantly, policed. That’s the unenviable job of the Danish government.

After a day of sitting listening to presentations it is stimulating to have the chance to meet and discuss matters with fellow bloggers. The international atmosphere is stimulating; I am lucky that the common and now universal language is English. Most speak and write it mesmerisingly well. I ask Radka where she learned such perfect idiomatic English. She replies that she worked for a British company for a year in the Yorkshire countryside and went fox-hunting on Saturdays.

The following day we are up early bound for the eco-village of Dyssekilde. This is both a social and environmental experiment - a village into which a dedicated group of ecologically minded folk moved about twenty years ago and generally succeeded in persuading the rest of the inhabitants to follow their environmentally friendly lead.



The two hundred odd people in the village own a wind turbine for electricity (though the grid is available as back-up). They process their own waste water, having created more than an acre of willow beds to absorb the waste. The trees grow rapidly on the nutrients in the waste providing wood for fuel and fencing. For eco-efficiency there’s a communal bakery and a laundry and the one supplies heat to the other. There’s also a car pool to save on car purchase.

Most of the houses are experimental, heated by solar panels or geo-thermal energy - again arranged on a group basis. Some are strange polygons, minimizing surface area; others are built of novel materials, like straw (though lined inside and outside with conventional materials).

Surprisingly, these communal living arrangements seem to work well. No one is forced to do anything. Residents pay a small tax to the village and opt in or out of the communal projects. I have to say that the place looked rather unkempt and generally rundown: a lick of paint, some communal grass cutting might not have gone amiss, but maybe ecologists have other priorities. Mowing grass probably does not help your carbon footprint.

Can we do anything worthwhile as climate change bloggers? Despite starting with a massive imbalance - the result of ninety return flights to Copenhagen - I'd like to think we possibly can. The word needs to be spread; people need to understand what is likely to be required and be prepared to adapt accordingly. Politicians need to understand that there is a willingness for change among the population. We can't do much by ourselves but it's worth remembering that a million ants can move a mountain.

The threat to our planet is both serious and imminent. That’s what the scientists are telling us. Their worst case scenarios made only a few years ago are already being exceeded. In 1990 they predicted the rate of fossil fuel burning would increase annually by 1.1 per cent. That figure looks now more like 3.5 per cent.

The consensus is that the situation could well become irretrievable unless we all act now. Clearly governments have the prime responsibility - the world is not going to be saved by eco-villages, though of course these can help. But ultimately only governments can provide the infrastructure to deliver large amounts of clean energy.

Getting 192 countries - all with different agendas - to agree will be difficult to put it mildly. There is so much disagreement on other matters, trade, development, finance, security and so on. Somehow the politicians will have to find compromises, if not in December, then shortly afterwards. As the Chinese say - we are living in interesting times.

The photos show: a house and turbine at Dyssekilde; the waste water willow groves; and a rooftop solar energy apparatus

LAST NIGHT

Saturday September 5th 7.45pm. It is the last night of ‘Art.’ I am in the dressing room, fiddling with make-up. Fifteen short minutes to curtain. K, a very beautiful eighteen year old who is helping with the props, thinks I use too much. You don’t need any, she chides. Still, I persist.

Beside me, L, an experienced actor who has appeared on the London stage produces an ultra-professional make-up kit, packaged in webbing. I just have to delve in the theatre’s plastic box whose contents are a hopeless jumble; most of this stuff is years old. I’m the only one who dares use it. Except the powder perhaps.

In the show L plays my friend, Serge. I fuss for something to darken my eyebrows. A pencil is nowhere to be found. I haven’t the courage to ask L. So I have to make do with some dark eye-shadow. I manage, just, to avoid looking like a pirate. K snorts her disgust.

I don a dark French blazer - this is a French play after all - Pierre Cardin - and found in a bric à brac shop in St Brieuc twenty-five years ago. I suspect it dates from the sixties. Anyway it has gilt buttons. I put a red spotted handkerchief in the top pocket. It reminds me for some reason of Peter Rabbit and therefore of luck. I straighten myself up, dust down the blazer and tuck my impossible hair behind my ears, all the while creeping slowly into my smug and supercilious character, who for some reason carries a raincoat.

The stage manager’s call comes. I take the raincoat from its peg. A last look in the mirror and then I am drawing the bolts on the back dressing room door, for I have to enter via the auditorium. They are stiff and I have a momentary panic that I shall still be there, unable to open the door, long after the show has started. But suddenly the door is open.

Outside all is deserted. I creep into the empty foyer, patiently watching through a chink for the house lights to go down. I can hear the Chairman’s voice making announcements - “unlike most theatres we encourage you to use your mobile phones during the performance, but please note we charge a £50 fee if you choose to do so.” A titter of laughter.

The laughter subsides, the opening music starts, the house lights dim. I slip into the darkness, looking towards the blackness of the vacant stage, repeating under my breath the word ‘brush,’ which is supposed to compose the features. Routine! Carrying my raincoat I begin to walk up the aisle.

The music fades, the stage lights go up. Now, I am climbing the steps to the stage. A curious feeling this arriving on stage - a private feeling. Of being completely in command. As of entering a railway carriage. All the time in the world.

I hang the raincoat over a chair and out of the corner of the eye catch the red spot stuck to the stage. Stand upon it and the 650w white spot fifteen feet away catches you right between the eyes. I stand just to the side, glancing at the audience. Even so, the spot bores into me, making everything I see black. I can just make out a few shapes, a few faces. Deep breath:

“My friend Serge has bought a painting....
It’s a canvas, about five foot by four, white.
The background is white and if you screw up your eyes you can make out some fine white diagonal lines.
Serge is one of my oldest friends.........”

I am conscious that, somewhere behind me, L has come on and is busy removing the cover from the white painting. I finish my speech and he looks at me in expectation. I look at him and at the painting - forward, backward, chin in hand, scratch the head, pull glasses out of blazer, examine something minutely, turn away, pause: ‘Expensive?’ I ask.

We are off. The lines flow and with them the action, the emotion. On the last night I am always conscious that this is really a ‘last’ - the last time I shall say these lines. I have a mental vision of tearing up the script as I go along. Like that sad, sad film of the Germans retreating from the Russian steppes in a train that draws behind it a great hook that tears up the sleepers in its wake.

One scene flows into another. On stage we are, in more ways than one, in another world. Gone is the normal flotsam and jetsam of the mind hovering around just above or below the level of consciousness; the day to day concerns of work, life, love, money, ageing; out go the infirmities, the pains, the tiredness, the stress of everyday living. On stage one is just a character without a background, uncrippled by age or guilt or a thousand of life’s problems. Play characters are like new born babes - sans baggage. Acting is like sleep, I suppose, or perhaps a dream.

I have the first speech in this play and also the last.

“My friend Serge has bought a painting
It’s a canvas about five feet by four
It represents a man who moves across a space
And disappears.”

The applause clatters away. We line up. Bow, once, twice, thrice and then peel off into the wings and into the dressing room. And soon I am quite alone there. For reasons quite unknown to medical science I am pathologically unable to get changed or unchanged in the same sort of time as anyone else. If they take four minutes I will take eight or even ten. I cannot begin to understand why. The result is I am always being called and have to decant to meet my public with laces still undone and clothing never quite adjusted.

A glass of champagne awaits and armed with this I venture into the bar, where the traditional CADS Saturday night supper is in full swing. Bread, paté and cheese. And wine of course. Never was something quite so simple, quite so tasty. Or made to go so far. If the good Lord ever were to run out of loaves and fishes then paté and cheese would be an acceptable substitute to feed the five thousand.

I am congratulated by different people. The best adulation is both gross and faked. You know it is faked and they know it is faked - but nevertheless it makes you both feel good about yourselves. “Darling you were wonderful, quite wonderful. However, do you do it? All those lines? Entirely believable! Better than the performance at the New Theatre. Just fabulous.”

But something understated, a reserved smile, a pat on the back, a kiss, a ‘well-done’ also charms the soul. It’s when the adulation is not faked that you know you have problems.

Some more champagne, the Chairman congratulates everyone. The Director receives a bunch of white flowers that mimic the painting and then we pack up. The guests go, the lights turn off and I am out again in the darkness of the muddy car park. Both literally and metaphorically my feet turn to clay. Come on K, let’s get you home!

Leprechauns, Mermaids and Copenhagen

We’re gearing up for the Climate Change blogging competition: the Copenhagen programme has arrived and I’m looking forward to it immensely. It seems excellently planned with an interesting mix between technical and information sessions and then there’s the EcoVisit - namely to the Dyssekilde Ecovillage in Torup, North Sealand with, on the way, a photo-opportunity at Middelgrunden Wind park. Can you park wind, I ask? (Note to self: Don’t be facetious): the ecological village has a population of 130 adults and 50 children who share a vision of a socially, economically and ecologically sustainable community.

The village has its own school and kindergarten, and it is divided into five housing areas with very interesting architecture. (I wonder what that means?) We are enjoined to wear sensible shoes as Dyssekilde only has dirt roads, and there will be coffee, tea, fresh fruit and vegetable snacks waiting for us upon arrival.

More prosaically, I am looking forward to seeing the city of Copenhagen and the little Mermaid - though I have in my possession a miniature statue of it sent to me by someone in Finland called Tea Maria with whom, very many years ago, I used to have long and rather sad discussions about Leprechauns, examples of whose enchanting presence have never quite made it, apparently, across the North and Baltic Seas.

Finland, we concluded, would suit Leprechauns very well as the folk there are always in need of mended shoes and, moreover, have a penchant for gold which Leprechauns would surely have no trouble at all in filing away. It is one of the wonders of nature that in all the history of the Scandinavian invasions of Ireland not one of the little green men ever managed to secrete himself and his whiskers aboard a Viking longship and return to the land of Thor. (Or maybe he did - cue for a story here perhaps).

Anyway, I have had little to do with Copenhagen in the past. It’s somewhere I have never managed to see much of, though I do have early morning memories of a crossing to Malmo once and seeing Hamlet’s castle - Elsinore - through the mist.

Shakespeare’s full play by lasts for four hours. I have seen a ‘lite’ version done in two, which was fast moving and pacy. Also great fun. But now I have come across a version of Hamlet reduced to a single act of fifteen scenes. Hamlet in 45 minutes! Maybe we shall have some fun with that at Christmas here in our little drama society.

But enough, I must turn my thoughts to climate change. Reading up background material to prepare for the next three months I am becoming ever more depressed. What with glaciers crumbling, deserts growing, forests disappearing, dead zones in the ocean; one group of scientists saying ‘we must,’ while another, equally eminent, says ‘no - that’s too dangerous!’ Just say ‘nuclear power’ and you see what I mean.

And last night I watched a television programme about trawlermen fishing in the North Sea. Scooping up at great expense - or so it seemed to me - quantities of immature fish. Is it any wonder that we find we have problems with the climate when the oceans - representing two thirds of our planet’s surface - are dying?

Still, depressing though it is, I am finding it hard to find coherent explanations of what is happening and what we should do about it. I hope for enlightenment in Copenhagen - though whether from the Mermaid, the non-existent Leprechauns or even Hamlet is unclear.
The earth is shrouded not in mist but in a blanket of excess carbon. Even if all man-made emissions stopped tomorrow I read that this excess blanket of some 250 gigatonnes (Gt) worth of CO2 would take a long time to go away. And in the meantime the earth will continue to heat up - won’t it?

Yet the major part of our effort and the focus of our politicians seems to be in saving relatively small amounts of emissions - and in this context 20 or 30 per cent is small. The blanket will still be getting thicker, the earth hotter.

Something else I find hard to understand is why, when the total annual natural carbon flux between the atmosphere and the land and sea is of the order of 200 Gt in each direction, why the relatively small amount (in proportion) of man-made emissions (say around 6-8 Gt currently) should be causing such a problem.

This is not in any way to deny the realities of climate change or the role of carbon dioxide in exacerbating it - simply to pose the question: is the problem more to do with the environment’s failing capacity to absorb carbon than with our fossil fuel burning habits in particular?

Because you see - and this is what I do find truly depressing - we have been busy despoiling the environment for as long as we have been burning fossil fuels. We have even reached the absurd situation where we engage in deforestation practices to plant oil crops to turn into fossil fuel replacements.

What if the environment becomes so damaged that it cannot even cope with natural emissions of CO2? What then? The atoms of the carbon blanket in the sky are not labelled with where they came from. The carbon dioxide from the compost in my garden, from my breath and your breath and the respiration of cells generally, from evaporation out of the sea, is exactly the same carbon dioxide that comes from a coal-fired power station.

That seems to me the really depressing thought and a compelling reason to lighten, drastically, the environmental load we impose on our fragile planet and to plant trees and grow shellfish (whose shells lock carbon away for a million years) wherever we can.

So for these reasons I am doubly looking forward to my visit to Dyssekilde Ecovillage (not forgetting the coffee, tea, fresh fruit and vegetable snacks will be there upon arrival! And should any Leprechaun be reading this and wishes to hitch a ride then he will be welcome to join me so long as he doesn’t mind travelling as hand luggage.

THE OLD WOMAN OF HVALSEY

I think some of you know I was selected as a blogger to write about climate change for the THINKABOUTIT competition run by the European Journalism Centre. The Competition hasn't started yet and we haven't had our trip to Copenhagen which is later this month, but I wrote this preliminary piece below and as I was quite pleased with it I thought I would crave your indulgence and post it here. It is basically true in all its grander particulars, though I may have elided one or two bits here and there in the interests of the plot. Artistic licence you can call it. Hvalsey is in South-Eastern Greenland. Google maps finds it quite well. (And for Rosie - or rather for Joni if she sees this - this is a story about Norwegians - well Norsemen anyway - that
I hope you will find every bit as compelling as recycling things).


THE STORY

Here is a story about climate change - although not about global warming. And if it’s not a story about Danes and Copenhagen, then it’s still a story about Scandinavians. It’s a story that I first heard about long ago, in a bout of childish illness, on the radio. The words climate change were unknown then - at least to the general public, but I remember this tale of an old woman, whose voice seemed to fill my sickroom with a chill.

She spoke of a little colony by the sea, somewhere where once there had been trees, great birches six metres tall and abundant grass with which the farmers made hay to feed their wintering animals in great turf-roofed byres. Indeed, so green was this land that Erik the Red, the Norseman who founded the colony, called it Greenland. Ships came from Iceland and further east and the colony thrived for several hundred years.

The settlers built houses with the flat stones that lay close to the surface and at Hvalsey, one of the biggest settlements, they built a high and wide church and plastered the outside with pulverised mussel shells whose nacre glowed in the low rays of the sun, making the church appear white and sparkling and fluorescent.

The colony thrived until some time around the beginning of the fourteenth century the farmers began to notice how little soil there now seemed to be. The rich loam that had lain under the birch trees had been eroded by the rain and the wind and washed into the sea. The trees had been cut for building and for firewood and to make fields but now the summers seemed to be shorter, the winters longer. The settlers had to go further for timber, the fields were less productive, everyone was poorer.

The church elders sought a dispensation from the Pope; from 1345 and on account of their poverty the settlement was absolved from the payment of tithes. Some settlers began to leave. But the Norse folk are hardy and tenacious. Most clung on. But the old woman, whose words had chilled me, said that the colony was doomed. The colony was doomed because it would be extinguished by the cold and the snow.

She said that on the low hills that rose above the sea, where once the beech trees had grown, snow now lay. Of course the hills had always been snow-covered in winter but the summer sunshine would melt the snow and the cattle would graze on the summer pasture and the wildflowers. But now there were patches of snow that didn’t melt all summer long, even on those hills beside the sea.

So snow began to fall on snow. Each summer the size of the permanent snowfield grew. The farmers marked it out with sticks. Sometimes the snow retreated. Then the farmers were happy for a year, or perhaps two. But the old woman foretold that decade by decade the summer snowfield would grow and keep on growing, faster and faster, until at last it came down the hillside and overwhelmed their crops.

And so it came to pass together with a sad succession of ‘lasts.’ In the year 1408 came the last marriage to be performed in the church with its nacre plaster. We even have the names of the bride and groom. For love flourishes even in the harshest conditions. She was Sigridur Björnsdóttir, high born and originally from Iceland, who had sailed to Greenland as a young woman to marry a man who had many farmsteads at Hvalsey. He died and she was left a widow.

Her groom in this last marriage was Thorsteinn Ólafsson, a sailor, captain of his ship in fact. He had been blown off course and by a happy accident had put in at Hvalsey in 1406. While making repairs he met and fell in love with the grieving Sigridur. And so occurred the last marriage in Hvalsey. The final recorded Norse document to come out of the settlement.

Sigridur and Thorsteinn didn’t stay long. The conditions had become too harsh. The colony was breaking up. His ship seaworthy again, Thorsteinn Ólafsson sailed out of the fjord and turned south before rounding the cape and running before the west wind up to Iceland and home.

That wasn’t the last of the colony, though; ships continued, very occasionally, to call. But the few families left who clung to their homes and to life itself through those chilling, snow-enveloping winters when all was dark, were famine struck and riddled with disease. All were desperately poor.

And in their poverty and misery and the bleakness of their environment they turned upon each other. The colony died a slow and lingering death, killed by the snow.

But before it did those that were left turned upon the old woman, who, years ago now, had foretold what would happen when snow began to fall on snow unmelted from the winter before. They accused her of witchcraft, of poisoning the colony, of bringing insanity and death to its people. She was bundled into the church and there she was condemned to death.

And in a last act, to propitiate the gods of weather, as if fire itself could drive away the snow and the white glow of the earth, the settlers tied her to a stake and used what little firewood remained to burn her to death.

It is said that those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad. Today, little remains at Hvalsey, though the church, now without its turf roof and fluorescent plaster of ground mussel shells, is well known. Yet the more things change the more they stay the same. The old woman who prayed that the ice would retreat has had her prayer granted. Six hundred years later we would do well to listen to her story.

Picture is courtesy of Wikipedia

ROMAN BATHING

Virum lepidum quaero qui Dick, Jock et Snowy meminisse potest, atque cum hilara femina per litteras colloqui. Anglice respondere licet. Imago? *

Apologies for the Latin, but it seems appropriate somehow seeing as I have just been to ‘Thermae’ Bath Spa, the hot springs of the eponymous city, recently renovated as a Millennium project at some vague and improbable cost.

Elder Daughter has been threatening to take me there for ages. She takes all her friends there and I am at least an honorary friend as well as a parent. So there I was, clad in a white towelling robe, wandering about and hopping in and out of the spa waters, crystal clear and the temperature of tepid soup. Two hours of this costs all of £22, including the use of hairdryers.

And very pleasant it is too. Except that when you have nothing to do for a couple of hours you can’t help your mind wandering, and indeed wondering as it wanders. So my immediate thought on seeing my fellow incumbents dressed identically in white towelling robes and drifting about earnestly in pairs or threesomes, was that I had travelled back in time some 2000 years.

Give or take a bare shoulder or two, a towelling robe is, after all, much the same as a toga, a garment that contrives to be elegant and serious at the same time. You can’t really be silly or facetious in a robe and sandals, can you? Which is why perhaps the Romans were rather better known for their baths than their jokes.

Now it seems to me that rather than evolving bathhouse design in the last 2,000 years, we have actually gone backwards. Gone are the great decorations, the floor mosaics, gone is the social intercourse, the gaming tables, the erotic nymphs of both sexes wafting to and fro. Gone are the intricate arrays of hot pools and cold pools of washes and plunges and hot rooms and steam rooms. Gone is the rubbing down and the rubbing up, the oils and the perfumes; the food and drink of every description. Gone is actually the civilisation that was the Roman bathhouse.

Had this been two thousand years ago whoever wrote the personal advertisement with which I started this piece, and placed it with surely more hope than expectation in the London Review of Books, might have scrawled the same words on a clay tablet and left it here. For a denarius or two there may well have been attendants ready to sketch one’s ‘Imago.’

The spa waters, though, haven’t changed. Literally! Apparently ten thousand years elapses between summer rain ruining the local harvest and the same waters bubbling up out of the ground again, having been on a tour of the earth’s hot nether regions in the interim. Floating in these waters is truly therefore an authentically Roman experience.

Indeed pre-Roman for the first baths built around these springs were constructed by the father of King Lear, a figure I have never before associated with the West Country. Was it the cider, perhaps, I wanted to ask as I lay in the warm basement pool, while my bottom was massaged softly by its integral jacuzzi.

Great concrete roof supports rise like mushrooms from the floor of this pool making it more suited to an aquatic game of hide and seek than swimming. Here all is white, curved, clean and light; the chlorine-free water a turquoise blue reflection of the pool tiles.

We climb the spiral stair to the steam room. Here four giant circular cubicles steam the incumbents like suet puddings. The waft of hot essential oils in the steam room would have even have struck a chord with the Romans.

You sit and you sweat and then shower under a cascade from the centre of the ceiling. Elder Daughter, who is impervious to cold finds the steam a bit hot. I, on the other hand, who am very pervious to cold indeed, find it just the right temperature. The sort of place where one could stay all day without needing a pullover.

We climb the stairs again, this time with cold air cascading down the passageway. On the roof we descend gently into the warm waters of the rooftop pool, five stories up above the roof tops of Bath. Here you can lie in the evenings, immersed in warm water, looking up at the stars. Today I look up at the blue sky and the scudding clouds and watch people of all shapes and sizes, wondering who they are and whence they come.

I overhear a number speaking in a Birmingham accent. This is most interesting for we know accents can survive a change of language; moreover, that they endure generation after generation. Which makes me wonder whether those folk of Roman West Mercia spoke in these selfsame nasal tones; were there British centurions who sounded like Jasper Carrot?

On my wrist I wear something like a child’s watch, except that it doesn’t tell the time - at least it doesn’t tell me the time - though it will tell the earnest Australian at reception if I outstay my welcome. It is made of plastic and it opens, and locks, my locker. If I wander into the restaurant I can charge food and drink to it. I think this is a very good idea.

I go to sit in the sun on a lounger on another roof terrace, hoping that a waiter may hove in view willing to charge a glass of Pinot Grigio (Roman, you see, from Italy) to my magic wristband. Elder Daughter does her best to manage my expectations. Though various people drift in and out, they are not waiters. This is self-service says Elder Daughter.

Deprived of my ‘tonic’ I think about writing out a ‘curse’ tablet and dropping it into the pool. (The Romans apparently did a great deal of cursing and scratched their maledictions on lead tablets dropped into the hot spring). Elder Daughter dissuades me - but I am wondering if cursing couldn’t prove as good a source of revenue as glasses of Pinot served on the terrace. There is so much to curse these days.

*(I think this means something like: I am seeking a charming man who is able to remember Dick, Jock and Snowy, to share literary discussions with a funny woman. Please reply in English. Picture?)

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS...

Our latest play ‘Art’ is ‘coming along.’ It is grinding its way along the bumpy road that leads from the first play reading to the congratulatory theatre supper on the Saturday night after the last performance. In between everyone puts in a lot of work. Frustrations abound, we take a step back or sideways for every two that we go forward, in short we ‘come along.’ The Director (Rosie) has the hard job of keeping sufficient momentum to afford steerage way. Feathers through treacle!

But slowly it is taking shape, as plays always do. The approach of opening night concentrates the mind wonderfully. Lines are learnt (or almost so); the set is built (or almost so); the props and dressing in place (or almost so). We even have a brand new grey sofa from IKEA, very comfortable. It plays its part perfectly; it is the only presence on stage that doesn’t overact.

'Art' is a play that demands strong emotion: not a lot of shouting or anger necessarily, though there is that, but simply emotion. Therein lies my problem. I am finding that, at the moment, I can’t easily successfully act and remember my lines.

I remember Alan Bennett talking once about how much good actors ‘emote.’ He was talking after doing a piece with Maggie Smith, who I suppose emotes more than most: those flashing eyes, the gracious sweeps of the limbs, the whooping voice, that crystal delivery in which you can hear every letter, let alone every syllable.

Emoting on stage is not hard - for me anyway - it seems to flow naturally from the words, but it is easy to get so caught up in the feverish intensity of the moment that suddenly - at the end of a passage - you find yourself like a flushed and stranded fish with mouth open and nothing coming out. The mind mechanisms have crashed and like awaking from a deep sleep in a panic in some strange bed you can’t remember where you are.

Of course this sort of thing is worse if you are tired or stressed or if you feel, as I did earlier this week, that I was incubating swine flu. (I’m not as it happens, but thanks for asking) Mistake followed mistake. I was conflating lines and missing cues with abandon. A toy train coming off the rails, but still bouncing valiantly along the track.

As it happened, the previous night Welsh television had re-transmitted a film about Richard Burton, who grew up not a great many miles from where I live now, the twelfth Welsh-speaking child in a family of thirteen. His father was a coal miner in the Welsh pit village of Pontrhydyfen; his mother, who died when he was two, a teacher.

‘Adopted’ by his English master in the grammar school in English-speaking Port Talbot, Philip Burton set about training him as an actor, transforming his high and strongly accented Welsh voice into the deep growl that became so famous.

I loved that voice, so strong, sonorous, resonating. Burton developed it by reciting large chunks of Shakespeare to the sheep high on the windy mountainsides of South Wales. Once this ability to speak in the open air was common among actors and politicians - Lloyd George, once addressed 10,000 people on a Caernarvon mountainside while Queen Victoria used to complain that Prime Minister William Gladstone addressed her as though she were a public meeting, so penetrating was his voice. But that’s all something of the past, diction today is a forgotten art.

Back to my own sad performance. Stumbling in the middle of yet another passage I found myself thinking of the Burton film. And suddenly to the blackness of the ether I transmitted a silent cry for help: “I’m in the s***t down here, Richard, what can I do?”

In an instant I had an answer. Like a text message to the head; a text that growled and burnt into my brain.

“Concentrate on the delivery of the words.”

I knew instantly what that meant. Instead of trying to focus on a line or on an emotion, I should instead concentrate on the delivery of each word, rolling the key ones around and spitting them out with particular stress, enjoying the tone of a word and the pattern of its syllables and making the audience appreciate it too. Not line by line, but word by word.

Did it work? Well, yes, strangely, it did. I became calmer, the lines more focused. But like much of such advice it is easier said than done. It is not simple to concentrate on the delivery of the words in a fast moving dialogue when you have to take in and react to the facial expressions of others.

But, as a technique for projecting Shakespeare to startled sheep on a mountainside it is, I am sure, infallible. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends..........”

BEANS

Well - for the moment at least - here comes summer. Or, perhaps more accurately, here comes summer again. For I seem to remember the first month of summer being quite respectable. Indeed the enamelled reproduction of a French nineteenth century thermometre recorded about 30 degrees against the cool shady wall of our front door - as high as that late summer of a few years ago when the good people in Gravesend found themselves privileged to melt, in a record temperature of over 100ºF.

At any rate I was watering the garden then virtually everyday so the last month of almost continuous rain has provided some relief, if only to my water bill.

Now with the re-arrival of the sunshine I shall have to start watering again! Not that I completely ever stopped watering, even in the rain, for I have a tub full of runner beans growing against a wooden fence and close to the north-east facing gable wall of the house. Hardly a propitious position, I thought, when I decided this was the only spot I had left to put them, but then you never really know until you try.

This peculiar location is sheltered from the south-westerly rains by the house and from anything else by an enormous flowering currant bush. Nevertheless the bean tendrils have crept skywards, first up poles and then up odd pieces of string and are now busy cropping furiously all over the roof of the shed. They lie though in a rain shadow so the leaves are perpetually curling up and sagging and I have to go out incongruously in the pouring rain to water them.

You can, according to the 1970s self-sufficiency guru John Seymour, feed a family of four for a year on an acre of beans. I always find this a useful thing to know and regularly retail the information at parties when the conversation turns yet again to house prices or the prospects for the next football season. Nor do I imagine that were you an inventive cook your family would ever be bored, so many and varied are the different types of the family leguminosae.

But, seriously, a pea, eaten fresh from its pod, ripe and succulent, is one of the great tastes of nature; then there’s houmous and dahl, made from wonderful lentils and chick peas. These are at least honorary beans. Soy beans, of course, keep you young, containing as they do all sorts of phyto-hormones to keep you healthy and stop your hair and teeth falling out.

And even without their accompaniment of white sauce young broad beans are so tender and tasty as to make you feel you could live on them forever. But why deprive yourself of white sauce when beans will give you both flour and an acceptable range of dairy substitutes if you speak to them nicely?

Although I have had the fortune to be a quarter of a fine family of four I have never, fortunately or unfortunately, possessed an acre of land and so have never been able to put the John Seymour theory to the test. For the last 18 years I have indeed possessed only something the size of a large pocket handkerchief and therefore my bean production has been accordingly curtailed.

I do though produce sufficient beans to provide for a dish that has become a semi-signature; one that I first learned to cook one French summer in a rather bohemian establishment (the police where always turning up in Inspector Clouseau-like wagons with corrugated sides; while on the hall table stood a handy bowl of condoms in the sort of position where other residential establishments might have offered Imperial mints). It tastes particularly good outdoors on a summer evening, the cooked beans now appropriately watered by a light crisp or sparkling wine.

Once I cooked this dish for 80 students at another bohemian establishment this time in Norway, where Younger Daughter was undertaking some species of charitable training prior to being sent to build latrines in darkest Mozambique, where she caught but thankfully survived malaria. She came home safely, though minus her hair, sacrificed to the mosquitoes presumably.

Indeed so bohemian was this establishment that I ended up playing competitive hockey for Denmark (against the United Kingdom), something that I don’t think I ever did before, or since. I blame it on a £5 Ryanair ticket to Aarhus.

But you have, I know, even less interest than I do in hockey. You are waiting for the recipe. So here we go! The dish is called ‘Madame Martin’s Beans’, she being the eponymous patronne of the establishment the police were so interested in. When she was not catering for her visitors her métier was that of a family planning counsellor so her bowl of condoms were merely a sign of her stock-in trade.

The dish should be a big dish, big as you like. Imagine a heaped and steaming bowl, like a paella but without the mussels and crayfish entrails. It's mainly potatoes - par-boiled and then cut small and sautéed in butter. You can use any old potatoes, you don’t have to use your best quality, waxy Charlottes. It doesn’t matter if they crumble. Anyway you sauté the potatoes in a big hot pan with a lot of garlic (the key word is lot) and other herbs like rosemary and majoram. Add plenty of sea salt, of course, and black pepper. Don’t add the herbs or garlic too early or they will just burn up.

Now add your beans, about a quarter or a third by weight compared with the potatoes. They should be green beans - runners, or sliced haricots verts. These cook quickly and can be cooked by stirring them into the sauté-ing potatoes. Don’t over cook them. Al-dente is excellent, but this is a most forgiving dish that absolutely anyone can cook.

And then serve. That’s all! Hot filling and tasty - what more could you want. And you still don’t want to live for a year on an acre of beans?