jigsaw puzzles of stones

All over the countryside in England, Scotland and Wales there are these walls that divide field from field. They aren't high enough to do much more than stop a sheep leaping from one field to another. They aren't made from bricks or smooth rocks. They aren't held together by mud or mortar.
They are called 'dry stone walls'.
It is an art of laying stones one on top of the other and making these ribbons of the country landscape that last for hundreds of years.
And as you drive by mile after mile of these walls on single track roads it is easy to forget how hard it must be to find the right stone and to trap it in-between two other stones next to four other stones so that it will fit and stand tall so that only a wayward tractor might dislodge it's symmetry.

Heiden Bridge, Yorkshire

North Wales

And so it is with cobblestones.
Most of them in London have disappeared. There are a few streets in Covent Garden. In the East End. In The City. At the Docks.
You find them in odd streets of many market towns around the country.

Derbyshire

North Yorkshire

But in Edinburgh they triumph over the common or garden asphalt. Or Tarmacadam as it should be called.

Edinburgh

These roads were built for carriages. Pulled by horses.  A milk cart. The coal delivery. A coffin.
I know I sound a little like a travel brochure for the World of Dickens. But the reason I ramble on is because when I was in Edinburgh  there were sections of main roads closed off not for a broken sewage pipe or a new piece of electrical wire.
But for the laying of new cobblestones.

There are people whose job is to lay new cobblestones.
Like the stone wall men and women, they know how to make the pieces fit and hold together as if they were making a vast  grey jigsaw puzzle.

They laughed at me when I took photos. They live in a city where they are paid every year of their lives to go out and make good, roads that anywhere else would have been smoothed over with the shiny black asphalt and history would have been sucked a little further into the earth.

This is just a note of admiration.

edinburgh

What I love about lovely places is that you walk around for five minutes and say to yourself...I could live here. Now, that may be me. I have, as you may have gathered a very enthusiastic imagination.
So when I go to spend time with friends in places they have chosen to live...  I think, " I could live here."
I want to be very clear.
I went to Texas.  That's a No.
I went to Malaga.   That's a No.
I am not even going to Russia or China. Or Saudi Arabia. Or Korea.
I may be enthusiastic, but I'm not daft.

Abercromby Place. 

Edinburgh, where dear friends of mine have been planning to live for years, having been stuck in the hinterlands of Lincolnshire, have now bought a place in a Georgian terrace, is just glorious.

The Glenogle victorian swimming baths

Cafes, swimming pools,  streets, views, conversation, song, humour.

I could live here, I said.

Maybe next year I'll rent a flat somewhere in NewTown. ( that would be 1802 to anyone impressed by the 20th century)
I'll learn how to play the guitar/penny whistle...I'll work harder on the piano and I'll come to this musical town and walk on uneven streets and sing harmony and speak poetry from the soul.

The theatre festival

The book festival....oh yes.

Edinburgh is intact. I realized as I wandered it's streets, that I am used to cities in Europe that had acres decimated by bombs of the second world war. and over the decades following,  city planners with grey brains put up buildings that have not one..not one virtue. Office buildings. Blocks of flats.
All hideous and unrelated to the ground they stand on.
Edinburgh is pristine. The streets are cobbled. The squares and the terraces meander through the city.
There are young and old people.  The people who are born and bred. The people who're drawn.
The folk singers. The street performers. The University students. .....And then there is The Festival.

I went to Catholic mass with my friend. Lovely Father Nick. Father Patrick was away on a well deserved  holiday. Father Nick had support from three visiting priests. One American from the military and two Italians who spoke no English and wore hiking sandals under their robes, who wandered off with their " body and blood of Christ" to some part of the Cathedral and were not seen again until the Benediction.

in the cathedral cafe after mass. made me very happy

how can you walk past this one. I'm not. But some other wendy is.

I thought... I could live here.
My father's family was from Scotland. I could say "  I'm a Murray. My name is Murray" in a Scottish accent.

There's Fife. Across the river.

I won't be drinking beer anytime soon, and I certainly will never be eating a haggis. But I could sip a single malt and strum my fingers on the wooden table as 'Macrimmon's Lament" is being sung.
T'would be lovely, I thought.

I could. I could spend some proper time here.......

looking out of the window

I am not an "aisle seat" kind of girl.
Never have been.
On trains, or boats or planes...
I can get to the lavatory.  It isn't hard. I can get up and walk over. someone
" Excuse me...so sorry...Thank you so much...oh! are those your ear plugs I just stepped on?".....
I can bend my knees and point my toes for exercise.
But if you are sitting on the aisle so you can move in an emergency.....and we all know that the safety demonstrations are just a whole load of tosh and we had better have a good relationship with whatever God makes sense to you......... then al I can say is good luck.

I choose to always sit by the window and leave potential disaster to those who don't know the power that singing can bring to the soul.

A side note. I am famous at my dentist's office for singing. My mouth might be opened wide and the drill may be taking out a stubborn filling, but I will find a Musical number to sing wordlessly along to. My favorite is " My Boy Bill" from ' Carousel.' That, or a chant by Yogananda. The only way to harmoniously distract yourself from nerve pain, airplane turbulence or MRI's.

But it is of trains I speak.The East Coast Line. The West Coast Line. The Southern. The Great Western. I sit by the window and I stare at the clouds and the horses. The churches and the sheep.
And I know I have written about this before...
But it sticks with me.

I am not driving past the front of people's houses, where their cars are parked and their dustbins sit and their net curtains twitch.
I am in their back gardens where they are trying to grow vegetables and  they have their knickers and sheets pegged out on their washing lines.
I see the brand new garden furniture waiting for a lovely day to have tea outside.
I see the parent banished to the back garden to have a puff on their fags.
Bicycles lying on their side. Half finished potting sheds.
I see barges inching up the river.  Pints of beer being drunk outside the pub.
I see the farmhouses, isolated. The Churches, remote. I see allotments and village greens. Light houses and caravans broken down on the side of the roads.

I whip past.
But I want to stop.

And I think the wanting to stop is a good thing.

Hallo Sheep. I say.
Hallo Horse, I bet there is a saddle in your future, I say.
Hallo cows.










I can't see a hay bale without being tossed back into the Hardy world of Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

I can't see a light house without being in those two endings of the " French Lieutenant's Woman."
( There may not have been a light house, but there was a lot of sea spray.)

So these are views from my train windows on my train to up to Scotland and back.
Better than any kind of Disneyland for me.

remembered mud

I have had a bank account since I was seventeen. It was at the Midland in Henley on Thames.
The bank manager was a Mr Mountford.
He was a serious kind of bank manager. Waistcoat, pocket hanky, polished shoes.
He looked the programmes I brought him from my days in repertory theatre to go along with the checks for thirty pounds I would deposit in my account.
He asked me about my wig in Pygmalion and my tap shoes in The Boyfriend.
 He asked me if I could fly when I was in casting on Superman 1V.
He gave me a mortgage based on nothing really.
When I went to America, he wrote me letters about my life there. Funny nudges. The sort you would send a favourite niece.
I think now, that he was a man who would have joined the circus. Had he not be called Mr Mountford. With a Mrs Mountford. And a Badgemore Park Golf club membership.
I think now, that he would have eaten Thai Curries and learned to Samba.

I remember going into his office at 6 Market Place in Henley on Thames.
" Ah, Miss Murray." he would say. " What glorious excuses have you got for me today?"

He is long gone, I am sure.

But now I am back in England, I look at my account which still resides at 6 Market Place, Henley on Thames..and there is one standing payment that has gone out of my account every month for the last thirty or so years.
To CND. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

I went to Greenham Common...I didn't stay there. Oh no. I got a bus down. Held hands with women in muddy trousers and went back back to my flat in Clapham.
( Greenham Common was a woman only peace camp established to protest the nuclear missiles being sited at RAF Greenham Common Airbase in Berkshire.)







































I could cancel my standing order....but why?
I was there. No, I was. Not for long. But I was. No, really, I was.

Mr Mountford may have been quietly amused.

out in the art world

There is one museum I go to every time I come to London.
Not the Tate or the Tate Modern. Not the National or the V&A.
Not the Cortauld or the John Soane........
No....  not me. I go to the Imperial War Museum.
It is in Lambeth.  In the old nuthouse hospital.

I go and look at rowing boats that carried soldiers back from the failed landing at Dunkirk.
I walk round replicas of terraced houses from 1942 where there are black lines drawn in the bath tubs to stop people from wasting water.  I listen on head phones to stories of soldiers, or wardens, or land girls. I sit in the Blitz Experience and hear the bombs landing above the underground station I have chosen as a shelter.  I walk through the trenches of Flanders and smell the mustard gas. I walk round the holocaust exhibit with it's glass walls of leftover shoes.
I stare up at the tiny planes that flew for hours and hours in dark skies over the channel and hopefully back again.
I go to the war rooms. sitting below Downing Street. Where Churchill and his cabinet went underground. There is his bed with his reading tray. His wooden chair where you can feel the grooves his worried hand made in the wood with his signet ring. The war room itself where men and women moved pins in maps and pushed wooden boats and with chalk on blackboards kept tally of who was where and what damage could be expected.

The last shot of " Oh What a Lovely War."

I buy postcards.


I buy books.


I am now a member.













I have spread my wings further.

I went to the Royal Academy and saw the summer Exhibition.

my favorite really. two dogs , waiting

think it is a railway map ....

I went to the National Portrait and saw The William Eggleston

a William Eggleston. Missippi. 1969. His uncle and his driver jasper at a funeral

tad, by john Borowicz

Jean by Jean Paul Tibbles

and the BP Portrait Competition at the national Portrait Gallery.

tetras by laura Guoke

I went Buckingham Palace and saw the Queen's frocks and a few unremarkable rooms. No wonder she likes zipping off to Sandringham and Balmoral. Room after room of boring red and gold bits.

yes , the Queen. yes, Obama and Michele.yes, red and gold.

I went to Kew to see " the Hive.". a web of metal. Where you take an ice lolly stick between your teeth and put it in a lost and bite down to hear the sounds you would if you were a bee in a hive.
Oh yes....bring on the toast and honey....

The ceiling of he hive.

The Imperial War Museum aside...because I am now in the Inner Circle.

It is the people that go to these exhibits at the Academy that become as fascinating as the artwork.





Flamboyant elderly men in bright glasses and surprising socks, pairs of elderly women who come very year and have their lunch reservations in place. Families, where the unwilling children are under instruction.                                                                                                                                                               Young people, on their own...wandering through with pink hair and tattered tights.

friend and sculpture above his head of deer's head made out of wire coat hangers.

I can't do more than one a week. I don't process art the same way I do words.






But I am liking the idea of going back to see things twice.
Like a restaurant where you eat Spaghetti Arabiatta every time you go.
It's always good and each time you taste something else in the sauce.....

my spaghetti supper in the garden at battersea. 

theatre darling

I'm in London.... I like going to the theatre. I like the people who go to the theatre.

This week I went to a musical in the west End. On Shaftesbury Avenue. At The ApolloTheatre. 
The Apollo is one of a string of theatres that line that road that cuts diagonally through Soho from Piccadilly to  Cambridge Circus.

The Apollo Theatre, shaftesbury Avenue.

The West End Theatres are museum worthy buildings. Red carpets in the foyers. Staircases lifting either side to the Royal Circle and the Balconies. The auditorium is shaped like a horseshoe with the various circles curving around above you. The seats are various shades of velvet. The Haymarket is green. The Coliseum is Blue.  The Apollo is red. There are beautiful bars for your interval drinks, there are baroque painted ceilings. There are thick velvet curtains separating you from the stage as you sit and murmur before the start of a show. There is a safety curtain which has to be lowered once during the evening to show the audience they care about your safety.
From the Trafalgar to the Chocolate Factory, from the Apollo to the Almeida, from the Olivier to the Orange Tree; the audiences are an informed bunch. All ages. All types.
When I went on New Years Eve to Matthew Bourne's " Swan lake" at the Piccadilly some fifteen years ago, there were ballet teachers and favorite pupils and there were men in drag.
What I like about London theatre audiences is they don't wait for success to go and see a play. They just go.

The national

The Royal Court

The Hampstead theatre Club

The National again

They
come from
their offices to meet their wives from the Guildford train. They watch a racy bit of something that doesn't really work and they go back on the last train and have a cup of horlicks before bed.

My friends R & G, have a diary of the plays they have booked for. The National, the Donmar, the Old Vic. R Likes musicals so he will slip away on his own and watch Titanic under Charing Cross Arches. 
My friend, Angela has booked for an all day Chekov at the National.
" It'll be lovely. We'll see Ivanov at 11. have a spot of lunch. see the Seagull at 2.30. Have a light supper. see Platonov at 7.30."  

People went to eight hours of Nicholas Nickleby. I did.
I also went to five hours of Strange Interlude.by Eugene O'Neill
I lived in a city where a theatre performance started at 5.15 of an evening.
I lived in a country where at Stratford they put on the History Plays of Shakespeare. Where you would lurch through all of those complicated Henrys with just a cucumber sandwich to keep you going.

The book shop at the national Just plays upon plays upon plays.

The show at the Apollo was not good. Not the fault of the actors or the director or the script.
It was a musical adaptation of L.M. Hartley's novel about class, the same one that Joe Losey had made into a brilliant film decades before.

When we went into the stalls with our complimentary tickets you could tell the sound was wrong.  You could hear the handbags snap and the cough drops being sucked. There were not enough people. 
The show wasn't great. it shouldn't have been in one of these gloriously baroque theatre but in some odd modern space, where the man on the piano and the painted plastic chairs would have felt at home.
I laughed louder than I needed. I made appreciative sounds at the act changes, I nudged R to applaud at the end. Clap loud, I said. Clap Louder.. 
Those actors up there, they knew it wasn't working. They wanted on this Monday night to know that it had landed somewhere.
As we left, the people in the row in front of us who had paid a lot of money for their seats, turned to me... 
"What did you think?"
" I thought it was really good." I said. Of course I did.
"We've seen him do it all," they said." Phantom, Barnum and now this."
A lot of the people in the auditoriums are coming out on a Monday or a Thursday or a weekend to see what you do.
" We saw a nice play in Waterloo. At the Young Vic. " They might say over Shredded Wheat and the pot of Darjeeling." It was in a plastic box . And I think she had a baby, but then it disappeared. and it was a real baby, But it didn't seem to mind being in an box on a stage. And I really wanted the ending to be different.. But you don't get to do that in theatre, do you?"

Interval drinks

Life going on beside the theatre

I lived in London because of Theatre. 
I went to tap classes in-between matinee and evening performances. I cleaned houses so I could go to plays in the evening.  I worked in a pub in Blackfriars with my friend JJ.  And the both of us were wenches at this Shakespeare Tavern in Blackfriars. Where we would wear mob caps and low cut blouses and sing inane songs to earn a couple of pounds that would allow us to go to a matinee of Evita or whatever.....
I went to see my friends. Went to see friends of friends.  I went to see my friends sell programmes  and get slipped in for the second half. I got to see shows that lasted a couple of weeks,  where the theme tune of the Crusaders was   "Onward to Jerusalem..via Narbonne," I can't sing it for you, but , believe me, it was very bad.

Jonathan Miller, a director I respected immensely, said, " If football and opera were reversed, we would have a better society."

He meant that we had it turned upside down. 

row L. Seat 20. Second act. 

Theatre, in London, is part of the package. You shop at Waitrose  You have an Oyster Card. You catch the exhibition at the national Portrait Gallery in  your lunch-hour, you see 'Platonov' before you get the 10.30 home on the Northern Line.

Just slotting right in...that's all I want say....something in the waters... the genetics.... the theatre of the normal life . the life of toast and butter.  
And there is always marmite. But don't get me started.