dom.blog

We’re going to China!

This has been at the top of our travel list for a long time, but we finally booked flights in January after iterating through upteen potential itineraries. At one point we’d put together a totally mad plan for our 2 week trip including (I kid you not) 6 separate destinations linked by 5 long-distance trains, but slowly we came back to sanity and now have a sane itinerary with time to actually enjoy where we’re going.

And there certainly is more planning required than a normal holiday. Not only are there visa forms to print and sign and take to the Chinese visa application centre – where, I must say, everyone was incredibly helpful – but also just figuring out questions like “wait, how will we pay for things?” or “is this really how booking trains works in China?!” and then working through the signups on WeChat and AliPay and hoping that these things really do work for us once we arrive. (Answers to follow in the next post, I suppose…) But I’m excited for the adventure!

Side-note: the reason I’m illustrating this planning with 368chickens.com is because I became very addicted to this game during this process. (Indeed, one of my best attempts was in the basement of the Chinese visa application centre, which is one of reasons for my fondness of it.) Randi was incredibly relieved when I finally completed it.

When not rescuing chickens or trying to reassure one of our tour guides over WeChat (Me: “if it’s possible, we would prefer to try and get a train/metro instead of a taxi” Him: “Ahh some tourists just cannot walk too much, and then they propose to grab a taxi half way 🤭🤭”) we’ve been continuing to edge slowly and cautiously into spring. One of my favourite weekend days was an afternoon with Josh, Anna and Cora walking around Fryent Country Park, where we met a family of friendly horses, jumped off logs and enjoyed a delicious picnic of samosas from Kingsbury Road.

Randi and I also really enjoyed our couple-date with Steven and Sadie. This originally came about because Steven recognised me as a fellow QPCS kid back in November, when we just so happened to be sitting at the next table over from him and some friends one night at the (very tasty) Miss Margherita pizza restaurant in Honor Oak. But since this turned out to be the night before his wedding, Randi wisely suggested we postpone our catch-up to a later date, which is how we all ended up together back at Miss Margherita (where the pizza is still very tasty) earlier this month. Anyway, it turns out we have a bunch of common interests (“wait… you like walking and theatres too?”) and a second date is already on the cards for May.

Talking of theatre: my mum was staying with us that weekend, and on Friday night she treated us to The Score in the West End. This is a play about the composer Bach and his clash with Frederick II of Prussia in 1747, and based on a real meeting between the two men. Bach, from Leipzig, is growing old but remains an undisputed musical genius with an incredible memory combined with fierce moral and religious convictions. King Frederick is about as moral as you’d expect the King of Prussia to be. So, the meeting doesn’t go well.

Of course, there’s no getting around that this play is really “the one with Brian Cox”, and he completely dominates the stage. The other performers aren’t bad at all – in fact, the actor playing Frederick II does a great turn from frivolous fop to steely militarist over the second act – but when Cox is performing, he’s the one you’re looking at. The play also has a bit of an odd structure, with nothing much happening in the first half, but it all works because of its star and I was really glad I got a chance to see him perform.

In other news: I dropped in on Lea’s birthday party on Saturday night, and had the unexpected bonus of seeing Troy, Bill and Katie there as well as Lea and Abi themselves! Apologies for any offence caused re. lino or flax. Randi and I got great enjoyment from the BBC’s two-part Thames Water: Inside the Crisis documentary – an excellent throwback to the golden era of the BBC inexplicably being allowed to film inside clearly dysfunctional workplaces. We also loved the season 2 finale of Severance, as well as being curiously smug that for once we’re actually up-to-date with an ongoing hit show. (And yes, if you’re wondering, I would rather work for Thames Water than Lumon.)

I also added a Twilio developer meetup for work purposes at a pub near London Bridge (despite not actually being a developer) which was fun, especially after the sessions were over and I persuaded someone at our table to show off his Farsi calligraphy. Randi and I also had drinks with our new downstairs neighbours, who are no longer locked inside their flat, and enjoyed a wonderful afternoon out with Alix, Austin, Tash and mum at the Museum of Childhood (apparently now the Young V&A) in Bethnal Green.

And finally: over the last few days we’ve had the pleasure of hosting Randi’s school friend Phoenix and her partner Marcos. Phoenix and Marcos are New Yorkers, and I’m always a little bit nervous of showing New Yorkers around London because, y’know, aren’t we rivals? What if they laugh at our transport and our parks?

But, thankfully, they didn’t – and we had a great time on Sunday roaming from Hampstead Heath (where I peppered Marcos with questions about his job at Air Traffic Control) to the Mayflower pub. Randi also threw in another Strangers’ Dining Room experience in Parliament – and you can’t do that in New York – and we all nerded out with a tense game of Dominion and, believe it or not, Jay Foreman’s history of the Tube Map after Phoenix had some serious concerns about its layout and design. (Spookily, the very next day New York announced that they were finally ditching their own long-standing messy and confusing map and returning an updated version of their 70s London-style classic design. Please file this under “some good news coming out of the States right now”.)

OK, I think that’s pretty much everything. Hopefully, I’ll be back in a few weeks with all of our China adventures. Including some Chinese subways which should put all of our transport maps to shame 😉

Some things I have seen recently, with increasing levels of Randi participation:

1. 12 Monkeys
   Randi Participation Level: 0/12 monkeys
   
   Terry Gilliam’s 1995 sci-fi film, starring Bruce Willis as Cole, plucked from Katie’s recommendation list while Randi was away in South Africa. It’s a nice twist on the “send someone back in time from the post-apocalyptic future” genre in that Cole is openly disdainful about the idea that he might actually change the past. His job is solely to do research; if he can uncover the true origins of the mysterious killer virus which exploded across the globe in 1996, it might speed up the research for a cure in his present. Of course, he gets distracted by being detained in a mental hospital, falling in love (albeit with a woman he kidnaps) and hearing voices in his head… and naturally we end up in a causality loop of sorts. A fun watch, but my god the mid-90s were a long time ago.
2. Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
   Randi Participation Level: 1/10 gnomes
   
   A holdover from Christmas time. I thought the latest outing from Wallace and Gromit, facing off against the devious Feathers McGraw and his hacked robotic gnomes, was clever and well-done! Randi did not. But then I have (a) fonder childhood associations, (b) infinitely more appetite for animation. Basically, deep down I would just enjoy having some of Wallace’s time-saving inventions and his Wensleydale cheese.
3. Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew
   Randi Participation Level: 2/2 tables (although we were both exhausted)
   
   Our latest play at the Bush Theatre, about a non-binary person’s struggle for self-expression getting all tangled up with their parents’ latent grief over a close friend’s death to AIDS in the 1990s. Also, a lot about flowers and gardening. This had definite pros and cons! The acting was generally excellent, and the script thankfully avoided the cliché of setting up the parents as reactionary foils. The main problem is that I’m old now, so whilst I agree the dad in particular could have dealt with his buried feelings better (and to be honest, a quick chat down the allotment might have done the trick) my instinct is that the parents are perfectly nice people, and don’t need so much eye-rolling.
   
   Unexpected bonus slapstick: the unplanned snapping of a table leg as it was being wheeled across the stage. Cue emergency hunt for a replacement table.

Oh, and we’re also deep into the second season of Severance. So much so that at one point we caught up, and were able to have a conversation with Katie and James without awkwardly filtering for spoilers on either side. Just like the old days!

This all sounds very passive so far, but actually we’ve been running around a lot in the last month. The more bloggable destinations include the Horniman Museum with Kirsty and Roger (but sadly no walrus), a wonderful (and incredibly helpful) Saturday lunch at Matt and Laura’s and – immediately afterwards – a Hidden London tour of Green Park station. This was Randi’s amazing Christmas present to me, and is sold as Dover Street as a nod to the station’s original name when it opened in 1906.

Today Green Park serves three lines, and the tour moves from the abandoned Piccadilly line lift entrance – later repurposed as an underground war office – to the construction of the Victoria line in the 60s and Jubilee line in the 70s. It’s probably just my bias in terms of the actual lines involved, but to me this was a progression from least to most interesting, culminating in us standing at the bottom of a giant ventilation tunnel just off the Jubilee line platform which really could be from a Terry Gilliam film. (I know “giant ventilation tunnel” is hard to make sound exciting, but trust me, it’s sorta awe-inspiring to actually stand in.)

Also in the last few weeks: Randi generously ran a 10k purely to acquire another medal we can use to cover up a hole in our wall, I saw my mum and grandma on a flying visit, and on the Otford Circular Walk I completely lost a shoe to the impressive suction power of mud.

Mud aside, it was incredibly uplifting to get a properly sunny day for a nice countryside walk, and Randi was especially delighted when we stepped off the train at Shoreham and she saw just what a small, picturesque village it is. All you have to do is tap on the Thameslink at Catford, and suddenly you’re in another world…

I’d never seen or read Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice before, but I did know about its central character: Shylock, the Jewish moneylender. And I had some notion in my head that the play was ‘ambiguous’ on where it really stood: anti-semitic tropes and prejudices, but somehow combined with Shylock’s famous insistence on our common humanity. If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?

Thanks to Alix’s generous gifting of tickets for us to see The Merchant of Venice 1936 last month (thank you!) I now have a much better handle on these questions, and such a good reminder that the past is a strange, distant place. The production itself was extraordinarily good – I’ll get to that in a moment. But the play itself is nothing like an ‘ambiguous’ play you might imagine today. That play would be full of characters voicing unacceptable things, and the ‘controversy’ would be: is the character channelling the playwright, or not? Does that matter? Are we being primed to agree or made to feel uncomfortable? What’s acceptable to give voice to?

The Merchant of Venice is nothing like that, because it’s unashamedly antisemitic. If William Shakespeare was on social media, he wouldn’t post a screenshot from the Notes app explaining that he was “very sorry for any offence caused” but “wanted to provoke a discussion about the discrimination faced by Jewish communities in urban Italy”. He would be baffled that you were baffled. His depiction of Jews is like his depiction of witches in Macbeth. It’s a common reference point shared with his audience, not a point of controversy.

So why is Shylock given such a humanising speech? How could someone write the words, and not be moved by them? Well – shocker -because Shakespeare was an amazing playwright! A world historical artist doesn’t write a whole script around a pantomime villain with no depth. And besides, antisemitism is not the point of the play any more than ‘witches are bad’ is the point of Macbeth. It’s much more about the hypocrisy of the Christian characters: how they fail to live up to the virtues and ethics which ‘should’ (not my framing) make them ‘better’ than the Jews.

This is obviously not a critique of William Shakespeare, the person. I’m not cancelling people from the 16th century. Yet it has unsettling conclusions. The Merchant of Venice is a great play, but I think it’s unarguable that it would have been ‘better’ for human history had it never been written. Shylock had a huge influence on depictions of Jewish people for centuries, and not in a good way. The turn towards a more sympathetic portrayal on stage only took place at the beginning of the 19th century. But now we’ve passed through the valley of time, and all the damage has already done, so what to do now?

I think the answer is exactly The Merchant of Venice 1936. Tracy Ann-Oberman is electrifying as a female Shylock, living amidst the rising tide of British fascism in London’s East End. The words are the same, but the production is a tour de force of acting and direction, and of how much power they have to cast the same words in a different light. There’s a famous scene where Shylock discovers his/her daughter Jessica has run off to elope with a Christian, stealing a load of coins and jewellery in the process. On the page, it seems very clear that he’s more upset about the money. On stage, Shylock’s despair is more of a mental breakdown, her words unmoored from the real grief underneath. And so on and so on.

I loved it, and I loved watching something with an audience struggling with an alien culture. (There was a literal gasp at Shylock’s forced conversion to Christianity, which makes me laugh because this provokes a much stronger and more visceral reaction today than the threat of death!) And what I’m not saying is “oh, what a timely reminder of the evils of prejudice”, as if somehow we were at 95% racism in 1596 and then maybe we dropped to 50% by 1996 but now we’re back up to 65% so it’s a good moment for an intervention. Of course, at some very reductionist level there are endemic human evils – like group hatred and dehumanisation – which always reoccur, and should always be resisted and fought. But at a less abstract level, in specific cultural norms, you can really feel the tectonic plates shift over time.

Also in January, Randi and I went to see Conclave at The Ritzy in Brixton, after my mum took pity on me for having managed 0 cinema outings last year and suggested this to start 2025 on a better footing. I have to say, it didn’t make me feel optimistic about the format: the cinema was nice, and our screen was surprisingly full, but I was shocked at how cheap and terrible the trailers have become. It felt like we were huddled together for a final communion before our church was shut down. Fortunately, Conclave itself was immensely enjoyable. It might not be very deep – and we’re unsure whether the filmmakers know that – but it’s a rollicking adaption of Robert Harris’s (presumably!) page-turning novel about the election of a new pope, and the performances are excellent.

A few days later I could thank my mum for her recommendation in person at Strangers’ Dining Room in Parliament, which Randi organised as a suitable august venue for a family dinner with Tash and Cormac. Outside we also had a quick catch-up with Tash’s friend Sarah, who – weirdly – is now an MP. (To be clear, it’s not weird that she’s an MP. It’s just weird that my younger sister’s friend from school is an MP.)

I’m also pleased to say that my mum and I are now laptop twinsies (RIP old laptop, lost too soon to water damage) so we had a quick handover session at the weekend with her new baby. Otherwise, Randi and I have been doing lots of planning for the year, interspersed with occasional games of Carcassonne – it’s been a while! – and trying out new expansions with various levels of success. (Capturing meeples via The Tower was not a hit.) We also finished the first season of Severance – what an amazing finale! – and saw Joshua Radin and Ellen Krauss perform one night in Camden. Joshua was very popular with teenage Randi and he does have an infectious American optimism. Plus Ellen Krauss was very good too!

I have a bit of a pre-Christmas blog backlog to clear before our upcoming holiday to the States, so for once I’m actually using my laptop as a laptop (!) and trying to make productive use of the 20.27 Lumo train to Edinburgh. [Editor’s note from the future: I failed, because I don’t have Randi’s superpower of being able to work from a train. But hello from Katie and James’s sofa the next day.]

To start, let’s hop back a few weeks to the outskirts of Regent’s Park, on another dark and wintery Friday night, as I made my way to join Randi outside the shuttered entrance of London Zoo for one of the most amazing and generous couple gifts we’ve received: a sleepover in the zoo itself!

“But wait…” you ask, “where in London Zoo can you sleep?” The answer is in one of a small cluster of little cabins just opposite the lion enclosure. After a brief pit stop here for welcome drinks, our group assembled for the first part of our exclusive nighttime tour of the zoo. Spoiler alert: this is absolutely the best way to see the zoo. Our guides were not only super friendly and knowledgeable but they were also happy to bounce around between biology, sociology, architecture (mostly in frustration at the absurd rules over listed buildings) and the philosophy and ethics of zoos and conservation in general.

It’s just quite wonderful to be led around by people who are so passionate about what they do, and could explain so much more about the animals we were looking at than a self-guided visit. We also took part in some of the ‘enrichment’ activities to keep the animals stimulated, such as stuffing nuts into logs for the porcupines to find. If you have the money, I couldn’t recommend this experience enough.

We broke for dinner served in the main zoo café but fancied-up with bonus mood lighting and music. Afterwards, our tour continued – including a peek into the backstage food kitchens – before settling down for the night in our cabin. Finally, after breakfast, we had a final hour to ourselves with one last daytime tour before the gates opened to the general public. Our favourite might have been the gibbons, Jimmy and Yoda, whose spot overlooks the Saturday morning football matches being played in the park. But here’s a short compilation of some of the others too, including the naked mole-rats which – Randi was entranced to learn – are led by a Queen who viciously smashes all of the other rats to prevent anyone from growing too big to challenge her. “Better to be the smasher than the smashee,” as I recall.

(Not included: the Komodo dragon, although she was awesome and we learnt amazing things about parthenogenesis, and the gorillas, because they are so close to humans in their mannerisms that it felt genuinely uncomfortable to film them.)

A massive thank you to Kirsty for such an amazing gift!

On the way home we also stopped by the Tube Map exhibition at The Map House, because of course we did, of which the coolest thing is probably this annotated proof of Harry Beck’s original diagram from 1932. (Note that almost every article I’ve read about this exhibition refers there being a note about ‘Willesden Green’ at the top, because this is what it says in the gallery notes, even though you can see with your eyes that it says ‘Willesden Junction’.) Sadly, the original costs £75,000 so we declined to purchase one, although in pure value for money terms that makes more sense than trying to flog a Tube map from a few years ago for £35.

Talking of Tube maps, the new Overground line names (which we started spotting in October) have now officially rolled out and we are loving life on the Windrush line. Seriously, for everyone who’s visited us in London over the last few years and has had the same criticism about confusing Overground line maps: your problems are solved.

Last month we also saw our final play at the Bush for 2024, Wolves on Road, about two enterprising crypto chancers whose wild rise and inevitable crash was predictable but fun to watch. This was a mostly light-hearted affair, of which the best part was the chemistry between main characters Manny and Abdul, although not all parts of the production met the same high standards.

In November we also braved stormy weather for the (very short) walk over to Angela’s for drinks one evening – which were lovely – while I very much enjoyed a work lunch at Granger & Co and am making a mental note here to go back.

Next time on dom.blog: An emergency flight to a Christmas Market…