Come From Away

Birthday Season

For my birthday last year, I chose a retro activity: the widescreen Sound of Music on the big screen at the National Media Museum in Bradford. The cinema treat followed a delicious meal at the Alhambra Theatre overlooking the stunning City Hall with its bell tower based on the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy. And, as usual, in the week before my birthday I went with Sally and a picnic up to the Haworth Moors to visit the Brontë falls and Top Withins.

Restaurant 1914 at Bradford Alhambra, treat breakfast and buffet lunch and widescreen Sound of Music

From Bradford to London....

Big Smoke

As part of my birthday treats, we’d booked a November trip to London to treat ourselves to some “date time” in local pubs and at fancy restaurants including the Francophile Brasserie Zédel.

Infinity in the palm of your hand

One of our stops was to see an exhibition focused on one of my heroes: poet, painter, engraver, visionary, environmentalist and prophet – William Blake (1757 – 1827.) Many of his poems are in my top 100 poems of all time and his life was an inspiring mix of graft, grief, creativity and mysticism. I’ve written plays about his life and staged concerts containing his words, so it was a huge privilege and pleasure to see many of his artistic works represented so sympathetically at The Tate. “The imagination is not a state; it is the human existence itself.”

We’ve all had the spooky hell dream, people

What surprised me me about the first of our two London theatre treats, The Book of Mormon, was how essentially good-natured it is (despite some fruity language.) I came away admiring Mormons for more than their shiny, white teeth. The fun to be had at the expense of (all) manufactured religion is loving and reverent and the slickness of the production was at times breathtaking. The score is a wonder – switching between ballads, peppy narratives, swing, jive, faux-African, disco and tap; and I couldn’t for the life of me tell you the plot, but the time passed by in a white-shirted flash

Suddenly there’s something in between me and the sky

More profound was a musical that was more than the sum of its parts. Did you know there was a musical about 9/11, the attack on the twin towers? Neither did I, until word of mouth from London friends suggested this “chamber musical” was well worth watching. Come from away was created using interviews and transcripts from the people of the Canadian town of Gander and the crew and passengers of the 38 planes that descended into their lives when planes were diverted to Gander on that fateful morning in 2001. Luggage was stuck in holds so, apart from beds, the citizens of Gander rallied to provide toiletries, medicines, sustenance and shelter to all kinds of people from all parts of the world. If this sounds to be an improbable subject for a musical, believe it! And yet, from the small to the huge, from the quirky detail to the epic tragedy, from the minor irritation to the life-changing encounter, the writers manage to concoct a whole society in a Greek-chorus style celebration of Every Human Emotion. A life-affirming experience, and a good way to end this “birthday season.” (As Mr Rogers said: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”)

The Brie, The Bullet and The Black Cat

As Time Goes By
The year is 1942, the town is Casablanca. The final few days of Vichy France. Of all the joints in all the world, Monsieur Huges Le Grandbutte, the Deputy Mayor of Casablanca invites his guests to the Official Residence to meet France’s greatest living mime artist.

Fundamental Things Apply
Mon Dieu! Bonne Douleur! France’s greatest living mime artist, The Black Cat, cannot attend. He is dead, he is no more, he is deceased. Il est mort. Qui a tué Le Chat Noir? (Who killed The Black Cat?)

Bienvenue aux femmes

• EDITH LE GRANDBUTTE - the mayor's wife, a former dancer
• NICOLE LE GRANDBUTTE - Edith and Hughes' daughter, an idealist
• COUNTESS BOGOV - an exiled, glamorous Russian aristocrat
• CHERIE BOOT - a husky-voiced French cabaret singer
• INGRID PITH - a flirtatious Danish art dealer

Bienvenue aux hommes

• HUGHES LE GRANDBUTTE - Deputy Mayor of Casablanca, a bureaucrat
• KIRK RANSOM III - an American who runs Kirk's Cafe in downtown Casablanca, a doomed romantic
• MONSIEUR OU MADAME OILY-CARTE – an ambiguous booking agent for the Moulin Bleu in Paris
• PIERRE PAYANSKI - a 24 year old half-Russian rather-leftish poet, Nicole’s lover

Suspect suspicious suspects
Is Huges as respectable as he seems? Does Edith yearn for her earlier days as a dancer? Will Nicole finally lose patience with her German-appeasing father? Why is Kirk nursing a broken heart? What happened in Countess Bogov’s past? What plans did Monsieur (ou Madame) Oily-Cart have for The (late) Black Cat. How did Pierre get his wooden leg? Does Cherie always sing for her supper or does she have another source of income? What priceless paintings are being pursued by Ingrid across wartorn Europe and Northern Africa. Which of them knew The Black Cat personally? Who has the strongest motive for wanting him dead?

Previous Murder Mystery Game Nights:
Murder on a Train
The Champagne Murders
Monte Carlo Murders
Death by Chocolate
Stiffed at the Speakeasy
The Red Rose Murders

4% African (where birds fly, so can I)

Spot the Finn, the Italian, the Nigerian, the North African, the Englander, the Celt....

Temba Dance Company
At some point in the mid-1980s, in my first teaching job, in the middle of a sweaty, hectic, inspiring dance workshop at Leek’s Westwood High School, an African performer spoke prophetically to me. She was an older, hefty, charismatic woman who was a senior figure in Temba Dance Company (now sadly disbanded I believe). We’d just run through some energetic routine and she had been a circling observer, wandering around the room, encouraging, cajoling, cheering, whooping at the staff and teenagers – all age groups, all abilities – who were being put through their paces. She clasped my hands and, publically and loudly declared as the room felt silent – “My God, My God, Mr Johnson, I swear you have African blood in you.” People laughed. I laughed. We carried on. But it lodged as a significant moment in my life and, yes, I’ve told it as a story many times since, especially at times when my moves on a dance floor have been on the agenda…. and usually as a story to amuse. But I hardly dared tell people that I believed her at the time in a weird supernatural way.

She was telling the true truth
And so to our DNA tests. (I have the right to believe what I want to believe!) I expected to have Scandinavian DNA because of my Viking surname. I thought there might be Celtic in me from an instinctive set of feelings. I romantically hoped there’d be Italian because of my love for that country’s history, food and drink. And what came up? (See above.) 4% African (3.2% North African and 0.9% Nigerian.) The wise Temba dancer was right all along…. I always thought Sally and I were drawn together by our love of Yorkshire, shared political values, sense of humour, instincts for generosity and open-mindedness and desire to build a nest…. but looking at our DNA results, could it have been my ancestral 0.9% Nigerian DNA calling to Sally’s 1.2% Nigerian DNA?

Endeavour and Hadrian’s Wall
There was a great moment in a recent Endeavour on TV at an imagined Oxford Union debate where a black student invited the racist person who was arguing that all people who were not originally in England should be repatriated to their country of origin and the black student delivered the punchline “after you!” Humans are migratory animals. History, archaeology and anthropology have all proved this long ago. Accents and language demonstrate it. Customs and religion colour it. If President Trump were to send all the immigrants in the United States back to their own countries, then only Native Americans would remain. In the UK the earliest people we know about definitively were the Celts and we know they bred with Belgians, Germans and French before the Romans arrived. But Hadrian’s Wall had a massive impact. For over 400 years, troops from all round the Roman Empire manned the Wall (and womaned the settlements around the Wall.) Many bred. Many never left when the Romans retreated. We’ve been a mongrel, immigrant nation from the very earliest times. (Any alt-right readers who want to argue this point should read this hyperlinked article first which has its own links to supporting evidence.) So I’m proud of my African ancestry. It shows I belong. Here on planet Earth. Where boundaries and borders are imaginary human constructs. Where birds fly, so can I.

Celtic/English woods (at Bolton Abbey), candles imported from Scandinavia, vinegar and oil and wine from various parts of Europe and textiles and table mats from Africa....?

Time will tell

The tree of life, the tables of plenty and the pleasures of friendship

The epoch of incredulity
I’ve quoted this before, and I’m going to quote it again, surely one of the best openings of any novels from any age – from Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way….

Emily and Harriet in 2016

The best of times
On a personal level, 2016 has been a very happy year with some great reading, memorable theatre, excellent TV, terrific cinema. I’ve started to write an epic dystopian saga (yes, I have) and my first reader, daughter Emily, has given me astute feedback; Nick Shelton has turned pictures in my head for Rhenium Tales into some wonderful illustrations. Sally and I had a lovely time at our 30th wedding anniversary party in July and we’ve had relaxing holidays in Scotland, France, Barcelona and London and gorgeous weekends in Badby.

Will the world in The Rhenium Wars become as vivid in my imagination as Middle Earth or Westeros....?

Unbelievable times
But then two unbelievable political outcomes were, for me, very unsettling: the UK voted to leave the European Union and Donald Trump won the US election to become the next President of the United States. Time will tell. Will the people who voted for Brexit and the people who voted for Trump get what they hoped for when they cast their ballot? We’ll look back in ten years and better understand the answer to that question. Time will tell.

More progress was made on LGBTQIA rights in 2016 which, according to the New Testament, would please Jesus

2016 in History
Will 2016 be known historically as the year in which more celebrities died than in any other year?

• Writers: Richard Adams, Edward Albee, Sally Brampton, Anita Brookner, Umberto Eco, Dario Fo, AA Gill, Barry Hines, Carla Lane, Harper Lee, Peter Shaffer, William Trevor, Arnold Wesker
• TV Performers: Caroline Aherne, Sylvia Anderson, Ronnie Corbett, Paul Daniels, Cliff Michelmore, Garry Shandling, Tony Warren, Sir Terry Wogan, Victoria Wood, Sir Jimmy Young
• Musicians: David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, Sir Neville Marriner, Sir George Martin, Peter Maxwell Davies, George Michael, Rick Parfitt, Prince, Guy Woolfenden
• Actors: Jean Alexander, Alexis Arquette, Kenny Baker, Patty Duke, Frank Finlay, Carrie Fisher, Zsa Zsa Gabor, George Kennedy, Burt Kwouk, Debbie Reynolds, Alan Rickman, Lord Brian Rix, Andrew Sachs, Sheila Sim, Liz Smith, Peter Vaughan, Robert Vaughn, Gene Wilder, Anton Yelchin
• Cinema giants: Sir Ken Adam, Michael Cimino, Garry Marshall, Douglas Slocombe, Robert Stigwood, Michael White, Vilmos Zsigmond, 
• Sports figures: Muhammad Ali, Johan Cruyff, Arnold Palmer
• World stage, politicians and faith figures: Rabbi Lionel Blue, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Lord Asa Briggs, Fidel Castro, Jo Cox, Zaha Hadid, Nancy Regan, Janet Reno, Margaret Rhodes, Duke of Westminster, Elie Wiesel

Triumphs in spite of Disasters
The competitors who flew to Brazil will no doubt remember 2016 as the Rio Olympics Summer. The people of Cuba may see the year as one in which their country changed its outlook on the world. Barack Obama became the first US President to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Japan. Mission Juno resulted in a spacecraft being placed in a twenty month orbit around Jupiter. Solar power, virtual reality, nanotechnology in surgery and electric cars all made significant technological progress. Ebola was almost eradicated from West Africa and combating the Zika virus saw impressive international cooperation. 70,000 Muslim clerics declared a fatwa against ISIS. Strides were made in cancer treatments, Alzheimer’s research and animal conservation.

What will 2017 bring to the table?

Disasters in spite of Triumphs
Terrorists continue to attempt to disrupt civilisations across Europe, the Middle and Far Easts, Africa and America. The UK lost face (and is continuing to lose face) internationally as a result of the Brexit referendum and the inability of the government to project clarity and consistency in how to “take back control,” as if it ever could in a world of globalization and the internet. Post-truth news became a “thing” (ie making up facts and statistics and promoting lies seems now to be an acceptable strategy for political leaders, fully supported by the majority of the Media.) The Syrian crisis deepened, as did crises in Yemen, the South China Seas and the Korean peninsula. Natural disasters resulted in major death tolls in Ecuador, Italy, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, southeastern USA and Indonesia.

What is now remembered about the 16th year of each century in the past millennium? Can history help us predict which events of 2016 will be remembered in 2116? Time will tell.

1916 

• First World War ongoing: Conscription in Britain, Paris bombings, Battle of Verdun (1 million casualties), the Great Arab Revolt, Battle of the Somme (first use of British tanks, over 1 million casualties) 
• The Easter Rising in Ireland - republican rebellion against British rule in Ireland
• Einstein's Theory of Relativity
• Tristan Tzar's Dada-manifest published in Zurich leading the way to surrealism and absurdity

1816

• Mount Tambora erupts in Indonesia – the Year without a Summer 
• The wreck of The Medusa (French frigate)
  

1716

• First slaves arrive in Louisiana 
• Decree orders all Jews to be expelled from Brussels
  

1616

• Ben Jonson becomes poet laureate and in November his Collected Works are printed 
• Spanish Inquisition delivers an injunction to Galileo 
• Shakespeare and Cervantes both die on 23rd April 
• Pocahontas arrives in England

1516

• Venice creates First Jewish ghetto 
• Ottoman-Malmuk War
  

1416

• Alfonso V (the Magnanimous) becomes King of Aragon 
• Jerome of Prague burned alive as a heretic by Roman Catholic church
  

1316

• The Peace of Fexhe established power sharing between many sectors of society (crown, clergy, nobility and local city governments) 
• French king, Jan the First, rules for only four days before he inconveniently dies
  

1216

• French crown prince Louis enters England at invitation of rebellious barons 
• King John loses the crown jewels in The Wash and dies in October
• Henry III succeeds John and reigns for 56 years, the 4th longest English reign after Elizabeth II, Victoria and George III ("English reign" by counting from 1000 to present time since "British" or "UK" didn't exist for all that time)
  

1116

• China invents the modern stitched-together book

1016

• The Danes defeat the Saxons at the Battle of Ashingdon 
• Canute (Cnut) claims the English throne after the death of Edmund Ironside
  

So how will 2016 be remembered?

Only Time will tell....

If you prick us, do we not bleed?

Shakespeare’s humanity
We are all the same under the sun. Britons, Europeans, Asians, Americans, Africans. We have all arrived by meandering means in the countries of our birth through migration, intermarriage and emigration. The descendants of “true Brits” are now largely in Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The rest of us in England are the mixed-race children of Celts, Romans, Frisians, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, Normans, Flemings, Africans, Jews, Huguenots, Poles and Indians – all in significant groups of invaders or immigrants before 1960. Barabas in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, Donald Trump-like, rejects compassion, love and hope. Shylock in The Merchant of Venice reminds us, Eddie Izzard-like, that we are all “healed by the same means.” I’ll be Voting Remain because that’s what Shakespeare would have voted and because I’m persuaded by History, Culture and my Hope for the Future of Mankind, never mind Europe.

The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe

Be moved at nothing

Christopher Marlowe’s main character in The Jew of Malta is Barabas. What actions does Barabas take during the play, that make him such a villain?:

• he murders his own daughter, Abigail, along with a whole convent of nuns
• he engineers the deaths of two young friends in a duel
• he murders two friars, two prostitutes and his own servant
• he burns alive a Turkish troop of soldiers and galley-slaves
• and he delights in his evil plots and is unambiguously hateful.

The only thing you can say in Barabas’s defence is that everyone around him is equally corrupt. (Maybe not the poisoned nuns or the incinerated galley-slaves….) His overall message is pitiless:

First, be thou void of these affections,
Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear;
Be moved at nothing, see thou pity none,
But to thyself smile when the Christians moan.

Shylock, the sympathetic villain in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice

If you tickle us, do we not laugh?

Comparing Shakespeare’s dramatic treatment of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice with Marlowe’s treatment of Barabas in The Jew of Malta seems to me one of best illustrations of why Shakespeare has risen so far beyond his contemporary writers. Marlowe has created a character whose villainy would directly feed into the prejudices of the Elizabethan audience against Jewish people. Shylock, though villainous in some of his behaviours, elicits genuine sympathy both from the story, the structure and the language of The Merchant of Venice. On the one hand he pursues a bloody revenge course by insisting on cutting away a pound of a man’s flesh and he treats his daughter like a possession equating her to his gold; but on the other hand he provokes audience sympathy because he is spat upon, is insulted openly and, in the famous “merciful” trial scene he is brutally forced to renounce his faith and lose all his possessions in a verdict far more punitive than he deserves. Shakespeare gives him the most powerful speech about how all humans are the same under the sun:

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

Probably the brainiest man in Europe Votes Remain! - good enough for me!

Vote Remain!

There And Back Again

One Ring To Rule Them All

It would be hard to resist visiting some of the film locations of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit if a dream visit to New Zealand ever happened…. My understanding is that New Zealanders have embraced the tourist, creative and employment opportunities resulting from Peter Jackson’s films of Tolkien’s works. Weta workshops are now firmly established as an international leader in 3d modeling, costuming, armour, weaponry and special effects of all kinds.

From Hobbiton to the Dead Marshes….

I imagine that travelling is a key aim for most retirees. “All we have to do is to decide what to do with the time that is given us.” (I imagine Ian McKellen’s voice as Gandalf intoning those words….) I have been lucky over the years to travel to some unusual places: Kenya, China, Finland, Milledgeville (in Georgia, USA.) I hope that retirement will feature some further memorable experiences, before Shakespeare’s seventh age of man kicks in.

Seventh Age: "second childishness and mere oblivion."

There and back again.

It can feel uncomfortable being adrift, as Bilbo Baggins tells his nephew: “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

I blogged earlier about my idea of home being where your loved ones are. I’ve always taken the subtitle of The Hobbit to heart - There And Back Again; after a journey, it’s always satisfying to return to hearth and home. Going out, coming back. Ebbing and flowing. In the middle of a holiday, it’s good to know that your slippers are waiting at home (unless you took them with you, of course.) Would New Zealand feel just too far away? Perhaps I should stick to walking along the local canal?

Into the Wild

Journeys into the wild are good for putting personal concerns into perspective. When I lived in Helsinki for a year, I undertook a road trip with two Japanese men and a son of one of them; and en route to Nordkapp we called at Hammerfest, the most northern civilian settlement with over 5,000 inhabitants.

Hammerfest in northern Norway

I’ll blog about my year in Scandanavia in the future, but what I’m remembering now is the sense of being on the edge of the world at the mercy of nature. When faced with the spread of cosmic existence, evident in the sight of the galaxy of stars in remote places like Hammerfest (or, I expect, New Zealand), human anxieties can seem insignificant. Worries can gain perspective. “All we have to do is to decide what to do with the time that is given us.”

Cate Blanchett as Galadriel and Elijah Wood as Frodo, image created by vanderstelt-studio

The Smallest Person

Galadriel tells Frodo “Even the smallest person can change the course of history” to reassure him that he has the strength to endure on his quest. The quest goes on. Excelsior!