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.