Mmmmmm, an early Friday evening bath with a pint of stout. It’s the winter equivalent of a flute of champagne in an outdoor pool in summer. Marvellous. Burton Bramble Stout, I recommend it. Right, I’ve got to get dressed for Steve and Andy’s birthdays now.
Maffs and I went to the lovely Genesis Cinema on Mile End Road to see Hamlet 2, a very funny spoof inspirational high school musical film starring Steve Coogan on marvellous form as a tragic failed actor turned high school drama teacher. Coogan’s embarassing and pathetic, but also believable and likeable, character decides to write an awful musical drama called Hamlet 2 for his students, based on his question: why does everyone have to die in Hamlet, why not have a time machine and go back and save everyone’s life? The whole production is incredibly fun and exuberant and gets increasingly hilarious.
By the time the drama teacher and his students are all gyrating round the stage on their opening night singing “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus” as crazy right wing Tucson parents storm the venue with burning torches, it is very funny indeed. Strongly recommended. I’ve rarely laughed this much at a film.
I went on a marvellous butchery course last night that Brother Josh got for me for my birthday. It’s at the Ginger Pig in Marylebone and was really interesting. Very sharp knives! And a saw for the bones.
What’s fascinating about butchery is the way the animal carcass has all these seams you can work along. It’s all about slicing and separating it up along the paths of least resistance.
Went with Charles and Miranda to see Three Monkeys, a seriously intense and stately Turkish film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, centered on a family getting bogged down in a mess of lies, lust and bitterness. It looks magnificent, all bleached out colours and beautiful compositions, though with litter strewn beaches and tired inner city apartments.
We joined Charles and Miranda for a collection of shorts, themed around the concept of shock. An interesting London Film Festival offering, with a couple of horror shorts, I’ve never seen horror on the menu before.
The first short was probably my favourite, “There Are Monsters”. It was genuinely quite unpredictable, you didn’t know how the horror was going to manifest from one scene to the next. Was that shopkeeper smiling too broadly, eeek, is her face going to split open? No, it’s fine it’s fine.
“Advantage Satan” had lots of terrifying little Midwich Cuckoo tennis whites children brutally torturing and killing a couple who wander on to a tennis court. Why not?
“September” featured Marvin, a motorway service station kitchen worker who encounters an enchanting witch who floats dreamily above the grass verges of the motorway.
We all really enjoyed “My Rabbit Hoppy”, told in the style of a kid’s home video about his enormous growing rabbit. A crazy twisted world is hinted at in the background, but never really confronted directly.
The only other one I was particularly in to was “Konvex-T”, a great portrayal of a grey industrial dystopian underground world in which a man gives birth to some sort of living tumour. It’s so exactly like a gory Cronenberg movie it’s quite distracting though. Or is the case that once you start having strange silent protagonists digging bits of living tumour out of their own flesh, it just ends up feeling like a Cronenberg movie.
I signed up at a new dentist’s today. It’s been about two and a half years since I last went to one, very bad. It was good fun though. My dentist is very lovely. He has an urgent stammer, making you feel that he’s always more nervous than you are, which stops you feeling so nervous yourself. He checked over my teeth, identified that I need a filling and a trip to the hygienist, and x-rayed them too. Two of my wisdom teeth are on the way out, one of them has actually broken cover. The others are all pointed sideways, wedged down in the recesses of my jaw and unlikely to ever get very far, poor things.
At the end he asked me if I had any questions.
“No,” I said.
“You can always get in touch later if you do have any questions.”
“Well, actually, I do have one question.”
“Yes?”
“I was wondering, do you ever dream of teeth in the sixteenth century? Like, bad dreams.”
He stared at me, presumably hoping I’d say something a bit less random.
“It’s just I was thinking about how people like Queen Elizabeth had these terrible black rotting teeth back then. What must it have been like?”
His face broke out in a relieved smile: “Yes, well actually people often used to die of dental problems. Even wisdom teeth could cause awful problems back then. You were very lucky to be born in the t-t-t-t-t-t, t-t-t-t-t-t-, t-twentieth century!”
To the Royal Opera House last night for Puccini’s utterly classic romance La Bohème.
I was feeling quite swept away with it all, the great tunes, the soaring romance, the swelling crescendos of glorious song, helped along by a few bottles of white wine which we all ploughed through in the intervals. This is proper romantic poverty: bohemian artists and poets, freezing in their Parisian rooftop garrets, living and loving with flair and passion. Watching La Bohème you actually quite fancy being really poor.
When Mimi sings, you want to live in the garret with her…
There is a little white room
I look upon the roofs and the sky.
But when the thaw comes
The first sunshine is mine
The first kiss of April is mine!
Apart from the cold and consumption, material poverty in La Bohème doesn’t seem too bad!
I think this reflects one of the interesting things about poverty, which is that we get very hung up on the material side, defining it as a lack of money, food, shelter, time. But surely its roots lie deeper: poverty is a lack of status relative to others in your society, created fundamentally by inequality. It’s a feeling of powerlessness, a lack of aspiration, pride and confidence.
This is important because in the UK, where most houses can be kept warm and most families can own a television, and no one’s in danger of starving, though many are eating very very unhealthily, there is still poverty. There’s still the persistent 20% at the bottom, an underclass who are completely marginalised from the political process, blighted by long term unemployment and a tragic poverty of ambition.
Two Indian community workers who visited poor areas of the UK in the 1990s observed that although people appeared to be generally much wealthier than in India, poor people seemed much more stigmatised and demoralised, they often seemed to have “a complete lack of hope”.
A WHO report earlier this year got into the news when it showed that a boy born in the deprived Glasgow suburb of Calton is actually likely to have a lower life expectancy than a boy born in India as well as living on average for 28 years less than a boy born in the village of Lenzie six miles from Glasgow city centre.
We often assume that these differences in health outcomes can be put down to the unhealthy lifestyles associated with poverty in the UK, yet there’s more to it than booze, fags and deep fried junk food. There’s a powerful body of evidence proving that inequality itself is bad for you. The lower status of poverty actually translates into measurable health outcomes and lifestyle choices account for only a modest of them. As the WHO report says: “Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale.”
Bad health is caused by the unequal distribution of power, income, goods, and services. In the US, black people are materially rich compared to most other countries, but are very poor by US standards, living in conditions of sharp inequality. People from Lebanon, Cuba, Libya, Tunisia and Jamaica all have greater life expectancies than the US black population, despite being materially poorer. Apparently if black mortality rates were the same as those for white people in the US, nearly 900,000 deaths would have been averted during the 1990s, a period when 170,000 deaths were saved by medical advances.
The inequality that is the root of poverty is the result of “unfair economic arrangements, and bad politics”, in the words of the WHO report. Once again it’s the cult of neoliberalism and economic growth at all costs that shackles minds and wastes lives: cast it off, baby!
I was in a workshop in Kensington yesterday evening for Chocolate Week grinding up cocoa beans and making an Aztec recipe for hot chocolate with a load of five year olds! In fact the youngest was three years old.
Very good fun, but I still can’t control children. They were setting their hair on fire with the gas hob, pouring boiling molten chocolate on themselves. Hopefully in between the third degree burns they learnt something about the Fairtrade message though.
Afterwards went to Brockley with Matt to see Anna and Glyn. We ate in a cute little Thai restaurant called Me Love You Long Time, and then checked out the very badly put together wardrobe in their new flat. It was put together by a guy on crutches, which partly explains why it’s been done so badly, but this also means they don’t feel like they can complain about it!
Chas and Rachel have been up in Ally Pally selling alpaca yarn the last few days. They joined me, Matt, Josh and Alex for a nice pub dinner last night in the upmarket but very welcoming Prince Albert pub in Camden. I think this place has got the gastro and pub combo well judged, partly by making sure it’s all pub downstairs, and the restaurant element is upstairs. It’s a really nice light venue anyway, as it has these magnificent windows that go all the way around, and it never seems to be too loud or crowded.
We had a great time, and Rachel and Chas had their car, so dropped us all off home afterwards. It’s funny as now all three of us brothers are in London, Josh is living at the bottom of Camden Road, I’m in the middle, and Al is living up the top. Very handy for Camden dinners anyway.
Matt and I went for an afternoon walk on Hampstead Heath today, it’s so lovely and sunny this weekend. We shunned our usual eastern hunting grounds and headed west, through the more magnificent areas where you can just about imagine how the mighty old forest of Middlesex must have felt before the humans conquered it, over to the West Heath. We admired the mushrooms growing round the Pergola, wishing Martin was there to tell us whether they were edible, and then plunged quite accidently into the cruising zone.
It was quite eerie, as it was a sunny Saturday afternoon and suddenly there was a man just standing by the side of the path, quite still, grim and stern. We passed by and then there were four or five men, some in denim or leather, all wandering through the woods in different directions, silent, it was like a low budget zombie movie. It was much less friendly than I always imagined it might be, everyone seemed to be on their guard.