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Oh dear, I do struggle with, and side tracked by, technology.  With J and tnp I visited the Garden of Cosmic Speculation on Sunday.

I’ll try to write more about it but, though I’m not very pleased with my ‘phone ‘photos, it was a place that I thought told me emphatically: “now you really must sort out how to put up ‘photo galleries in your web pages!”  So I have tried.  It’s already gobbled several hours and I have only got less than a quarter of the ‘photos that I think might be worth putting up here, but because it’s taking so long, and stirring up so much frustration in various ways, I will pause here but with a link to the work in progress.  You can click through the ‘photos but this view seems not to show the labels I’d put on those ‘photos. Much still to learn.

[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”3″ gal_title=”Garden of cosmic speculation, May 2018″]

Oh dear, that gives a crazy picture of the gardens as those are the ‘photos I’m intending to have come up at the end of the gallery.  (It turns out to be much easier to build the gallery starting with the ‘photos on which you want to end and building forward: design error programmers!)  Anyway, that means they’re very much a niche sample of the speculations on offer there.  Ah well, onwards … later!

Hm.  I have been asked these questions rather a lot in the last few weeks.  I should stay in more!  No, that’s not the answer … and I doubt if a quick blog post on the topic will solve the problem either.

Why do I find it difficult to answer that question but also feel picqued and a bit irritated by follow up one (from people who know I helped create CORE: Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation)? I sometimes make evasive jokes about not yet watching day time TV or just say that I’m a lady of leisure now I’m clinically retired.  However, the reality is that I am, as I have been for much of the last three decades, probably working 60 to 70 hours a week.  You’d think that’d mean I could say what I do but I’ve been hopeless answering that.  I think I ought to do better.

Well it’s true that I continue to work on CORE.  I maintain the CORE System Trust web site (https://www.coresystemtrust.org.uk/) and answer questions that come to me/us through that.  Most weeks that’s not a lot of work though lately, through some very irritating and I think unforeseeable technical problems, the site has consumed a lot of time (and the problems still aren’t fixed) and some of the incoming questions have required several hours not just a matter of minutes to an hour to answer.

Though the site and the Emails are a job, my main work is undoubtedly still CORE or CORE related, and some weeks probably eats 60 hours or so. Most of that is around the fact that I decided nearly 20 years ago that getting our questionnaires translated into other languages fascinated me and was a worthy job of work.  Now I’ve coordinated 25 of the 26 translations of the CORE-OM and all the 9 to 10 translations of the YP-CORE (nearly there with the Arabic YP-CORE).  However, I’m guiltily, shamefully, persecuted by being overdue with much work related to many of those translations.  Those collaborations take me into challenges doing statistical and psychometric analyses if/when sufficient data are collected with the translations to make that possible and when my collaboration has me doing that work (I’m usually the one most qualified to do that).  They also involve a lot of Emails and coordination and sometimes a trip to the country involved to sit and listen to people discussing the differences between many independent forward translations. Another little challenge is making up nice PDFs for the measures.  If the language requires different male and female versions, and often a “M/F” version then there are 18 different PDFs to make up as we have five shortened forms of the CORE-OM for different purposes.  Doing that is challenging enough for languages that use the “latin” alphabet and no accents, but when you get into accents and letters that don’t exist in the English alphabet things get fun, and copying and pasting right to left languages into InDesign is a horror, at least at first, I’m just about on top of that now though.

That’s the top of CORE-OM in Icelandic with at least one letter that used to be in English but is long gone. This next is the top of the Arabic YP-CORE and it’s still draft as it’s now in qualitative field testing (huge thanks to Sulafa for that).  You wouldn’t believe how difficult Adobe have made it to achieve that right to left type.

I’m proud of CORE and the translations though I am guilty and ashamed to be behind by months to years with things and one embarrassment answering this question is about that historical mess and how slowly I am getting back on top of it.  The other frustration is that I do want to do more than CORE before I pop my clogs (for non-English speakers, that’s a typically British euphemism for dying!)  A post or two about those other developing bits of work and as yet unstarted aspirations in the next weeks.

I hope unpacking this helps me clarify things in my own head.  Ah well, enough for now: I must get back into the slag heaps of shame and pits of deadly despair and guilt and nudge some of the overdue stuff onwards and stop other little things starting to build into new backlogs.

I’m not doing very well with this blog am I?  No!  Ah well, let’s see if it improves.

You may be thinking “He hardly posts at all these days and now he can’t even spell ’emigrating’!”  But not so, as that sentence nicely proves, I can spell ’emigrating’. However, I’ve just invented the word “semigrating” to describe the process of going to live a little over half the year in another country.  I know the rich have been doing it for decades to avoid paying taxes but I’m doing it in hope of gaining French and EU residency (and probably to end up paying taxes in France not in the UK even if that’s more expensive, which we think it might be).

Yes, it’s all about this damn Brexit.  We have owned a ski apartment in the French Alps since 2004, we bought it then as a pension for J whose career hasn’t created a pension for her as well as my NHS one did.  It also meant we could afford to ski quite a bit more than we would have been able to which, as J is very good at it and loves it, and as I am very late coming to it but learning (still), was great.  It’s meant that both children learned to ski, and tnp (yes, that’s the name he chose to go by in this blog!) to snowboard and we all love it there, 2000m up with a view of Mont Blanc out of the window.

That’s that very view, back from 2004 and our first stay there.  Very unusually there’s not a wisp of cloud on Mont Blanc itself, usually it has a small hat or scarf of cloud all its own, rather as Gibralta often has.  Not so unusually, the valley is completely filled with low cloud.  It’s an odd feeling knowing that down there it may be a warm day but the sky will be completely cloud covered while up where we are the sun is blitzing down with no cloud at all.  (Though, as it was January, at 2000m it was probably well below zero … well, it needed to have been, it’s not going to be plausible as a ski area if it’s above zero much of the day at that time of year!)

I’m digressing because I love it there and love that view.  Anyway, the point of this blog post is tell anyone I haven’t yet told more personally, that I’m off to live at least half this pre-Brexit year, 30.iii.18 to 29.iii.19, up there, hoping to gain French and EU residency rights.

Nothing is certain given the madness of Brexit but, unless the negotiations savage this, it appears that if I own somewhere in France and spend more than half the year there, I should gain French and hence at least some EU residency rights and that they probably also extend to J and the children.  This seems particularly crucial for them as S had pretty much planned her future around developing her Spanish and French through working, and perhaps more studying, and tnp has skills that will find warmer and more opportunities within the EU than in the UK.

Above all, we all think Brexit is bonkers but fear that the Maybot and friends still cannot now bear to admit the folly of all this and plunge on.  It’s extraordinary watching all this with mounting evidence that the leave campaign’s manipulation of social media messages through what sounds to have been blatantly illegal use of personal data without consentmounts; equally suspicious evidence that they ruthlessly ignored the campaign funding law; and as official costings now put all the Brexit options on the table as losing the UK money.  Despite all this, they plunge on.  Never since the charge of the light brigade?  Into the contract of death rode the … wallies in charge.

Oops, it’s one thing to wander off theme with a glorious picture of Mont Blanc, that was just bile rising.  Down, down, back into the bowels bile, gall bladder do your work!  Back to the message.

Yes, I’m sorry if I’ve not managed to tell you personally and if it will make the slightest difference to your life but I’m semigrating.  From early June I will be off for three weeks, back via the SPR conference in Amsterdam and on to the EPCA conference in Edinburgh then back to the Alps until September.  Back then for a couple of weeks and back around Christmas but otherwise I shall be mostly up there or somewhere else in France (ironically, I can’t stay there in the ski season as we need to let the apartment and there are cheaper ways for me to be in France than foregoing that income!)

More on this in the next few weeks and I fondly imagine that I’ll blog much more while I’m up there, with more ‘photos of the views and my walks, as I will have few distractions at all while I’m there so I think blogging will be one way to stay in touch with the wider world.

Well, I’ve been hopeless at keeping the blog going despite my good intentions.  Maybe I can let myself put up a post whose real content is in the title/subject line?  Yes.  Bliss it was indeed Thursday morning to look out of the kitchen window whilst making coffee.  S/he flew off to our false acacia tree where my daughter could see her/him too, and hopped up it in a wonderful, pure woodpecker way, then flew off, but we had insufficient angle to see the unmistakable undulating flight.

Yes, and it bears repetition: bliss it was … and it’s good too to just to post this.

I had a wonderful experience last night.  “Don’t fence me in” is the title of a documentary film by Charles Maplestone, see page at Malachite Art Films. The British Library hosted a first public screening last night and early evening, in the hell of the London rush hours, I cycled across a drizzly and cold London from Roehampton to to the BL to get to the showing and was richly rewarded for my determination as the film is lovely.

The BL cinema isn’t huge but it was packed, I think there were probably 250 of us there but I was tired from my riding around and slumped near the front so perhaps I didn’t fully appreciate the size.  I was struck, the second time this week, by how old most of my peers at something were: I saw two late teenagers and a few 20ish folks but at 60 I think I was around the lower quartile of the age range!  I guess that makes sense as Fay Godwin was born in 1931 and died in 2005 and it felt as if many people who had come to the showing had known her and I guess she had an impact on many of us between about 1980 and her death 12 years ago.  I first bought one of her books (Islands with text by John Fowles) back in 1980 and I’m amused to see that the book was only two years old when I did.  Watching the film last night, so many of her photographs were immediately familiar to me and I’m intrigued, on searching my shelves quickly, to find that I don’t seem to own any more of her books (shame on me). Similarly, thinking through the exhibitions that were noted in the film and show up in internet references I can find, I don’t think I went to any of them (more shame).  So how is her work so familiar to me?

I think she has had a lot of publication in collected exhibitions perhaps but I’m a bit at a loss to answer my own question there and determined now never to miss any retrospective exhibitions that come up and to start collecting her books where I can afford them (apparently first editions of Remains of Elmet: A Pennine Sequence, which she did with Ted Hughes are now very costly collectors’ pieces so I can forget that!)  However, I think it may be that her work speaks so deeply to things I believe in that every image of hers I see, perhaps even when I may not have known it was hers, burns deep into my visual memory.

If you don’t know her work then I think the best way to get a sense of it is to go to the BL’s archive of her work That gives a sense of her genius with both people and places.  It doesn’t (yet) appear to make available her later colour prints which were almost absract (and which I hadn’t encountered before last night).  I wouldn’t bother clicking on the images there to enlarge them as they’re all stamped across the enlargements with three copies of a BL copyright statement.  I think she might have had very mixed feelings about that.

There are two layers to my deep, gut/bone pleasure in having seen the film (and having bought a couple of copies!)  One I think is that she was simply a genius with cameras and, unusually I think, both with portraits and with the landscapes. I think her landscapes are portraits too, portraits of land and the makeup artists who ever lived in/on it and impinged on it.  All that is dear to me and captures images that seem to me to be particularly important to capture.  However, watching last night I realised that the other issue is in the title: “Don’t fence me in”, and how much that imperative, let’s give it its proper punctuation: “Don’t fence me in!” matters increasingly to me.

Let’s start with the imagery and its genius.  One theme in the film, and coming across well in the interviews with her, and filming of her giving interviews and seminars, was that she came into photography from family snapshots.  There is that that simple intimacy in most of her work that is there in good family ‘photos: the photographer and subject are known to each other, there is trust and no worries about audience or property rights intrude on the recording.

I think that same intimacy is there in her portraiture but even in her most stark photos of the most barren bits of the UK: these places are family to her. Another aspect of what makes her special is that she was interested in how photos stood in relation to one another and in relation to words and to ideas. She was more a book and exhibition photographer than a single shot photo-reporter or all that her portraiture started in that single shot tradition.  As she gained confidence (I suspect) she created ways to work closely with writers and poets on the books she did, and she had the ability to wait and wait and wait to get the right image, with the right implicit stories for the viewers to take from it.  (She would wait for months as she describes for one glorious shot of a copper beech tree, completely naked in the depths of winter and reflected in the water below it, or again as she described for another photo of the white cliffs of Dover made completely white: utterly smothered in snow).

I feel she waited for the light and detail to be right as we might wait for the right tone, accent and staging for a really good Shakespeare play or any classic that can have multiple incarnations.  As we might wait for someone to read a poem in way that really does it justice.  There was a splendid short sequence in the film as the camera moves around a photo of hers (almost spuriously) where the sound track is someone, I am guessing Ted Hughes himself, someone with a glorious northern accent, reading the poem that goes with the photo in their book.  The poem is brilliant to start with, but spoken so well, in that voice, it sort of washes over you and hammers you in a way that I reading it, silently or aloud to myself, could simply never capture. The poem is short, one verse, a minute in the film, but I’m reminded of the experience of being part of a landscape as a storm batters over everything in sight. The storm, like that voice, hammers home an experiential moment into a sort of wedding: you now take each other, for ever, well, ’til death does wrench you off the globe; you will never exactly be the same again, and that setting won’t either, it will always remain enhanced in your memory by the whole experience.

So many of the places and people she took were intrinsically striking, “photogenic”, deserving memorialisation of each moment, but when Fay Godwin got the right moment, the right angle, the right focus, frame, contrast, they are celebrated, not just captured.  That’s genius and one particular theme in the film was that she recognised that the scenery of the UK that she caught is human scenery, as much shaped by from decades to millenia of human impacts and co-dependency, as her ‘photo is shaped by her particular choices with the camera (and the subsequent selection of the one negative to print, she took a very high number of negatives for any one print she used) and her choices in the dark room (or later on the digital image handling software and digital printer, even though she seems never to have given up starting from film).  There’s something there about the respect for our, sometimes puny, sometimes horrifically brutal, impacts on our countryside: even if there’s no animal more human than a sheep in her ‘photo, the shadows of humans in the walls, tracks, just the shaping of the land, are always there.

There’s a remarkable mix of the lonely and isolated aspects of human existence against the universal and ecological in all that.

So that’s my attempt to catch something of how the ‘photos move me and stay with me.  Now what about “Don’t fence me in!”  Fay Godwin became president of the Ramblers’ Association (1987-1990) and is clearly credited with having done much to help campaigns that led to “right to roam” legislation.  Another of her books I thought I had was Our Forbidden Land (1990) which is a superb invective against how much of the UK is in private hands, particularly in the hands of our military and our hereditarily wealthy.  Our “rights to roam” and any real equity of access have a long way still to go, nearly 40 years on the fight against excluding land ownership.  Take last year’s example: Donald Trump’s Scottish golf course destroying sites of special scientific interest. I think Fay Godwin’s passion, though focused on the land, was also about every attempt to fence in people’s thinking, she resonates with writers who don’t want to be told what to think and who invite their readers to roam with them (or to reject that invitation).

This burns with me though I guess cognitively rather than simply perceptually, expertientially.  Why do so many of us appear to want to be told what to think?  I think we need people like her, and so many of the brilliant writers she caught, to remind us that dry stone walls, even some fences, are certainly vital to live well with other animals and each other, but to remind us of the need for styles, gates, rights of way.  This was, and is, as true for the maps and places of the mind as it is for the those of the land.  We should all fight for is the right to think for ourselves.  I don’t believe in fighting for it to the point where we start killing each other, arguing lightly that our freedom to think gives us the right to kill others is to fundamentally abuse the real issue.  However, I’m damn sure we need to fight with words for our freedom for all our ideas to roam, to roam anywhere as long as it’s not simply in order to impinge on another’s thoughts. There’s a profound differences between the freedom of pacifist anarchism and equity from the “freedom” words of neo-liberals who really just want to fence others in and protect their own wealth and diktats.

Thank you Fay Godwin for so much beauty and passion, and thanks to the people who made the film, and made its showing last night happen.

One week gone of 2018’s 52.  One of my new year resolutions was to try to keep this blog going a bit less erratically than I have been doing. Shouldn’t be difficult: set the bar really low and I should be able to jump it!

Something that’s been swimming around in my mind this week has been how much I yearn to use maths, typically statistics, accurately and well in my research work. That’s not the whole of my approach to research. For years now I have been sure that most of the really important questions about psychotherapy and mental health will be most usefully explored by qualitative methods. I can see, with an almost mathematical logic and clarity that it’s only a small subset of issues and questions in this, my chosen research area, that are really usefully explored quantitatively.  As I’ve recognised this I’ve been slowly expanding my familiarity with qualitative methods and using them more and I’m loving that.  However, there remains this comfort, an almost tangible warmth, sometimes a huge buzz of excitement, that comes when I feel I’m using quantitative tools well, or even, all too rarely, extending our quantitative toolkit, honing its edges or tweaking some of its tools to give them new uses, wider application or sounder foundations.

I know this yearning and those feelings go very deep.  Too often my longing to be sure I’m getting things really right slows me up and sometimes it really paralyses me. That’s one cause of the backlog of work I’m hoping to shift as this year goes forward.  Having said that, I know that many of the things I will no longer do, things I will no longer accept, really are methodologically, logically, plain wrong. That means I can’t simply dismiss my getting stuck as obsessional or perfectionist.  However, I know there are roots here in insecurities.  Enter Frances Tustin.

One nice spin off of my obsessionality is that I have, erratically, accumulated my own “bibliographic database”. That’s transferred from one computer and software system to another over more than 30 years now and it tells me that it was nearly 27 years ago that I first encountered Frances Tustin.  From my notes it seems that was at a presentation she gave to the St. George’s Psychotherapy Department on or around the 15th of June 1990. That’s nearly half my life ago!

She was talking about her ideas about autism and some psychosomatic problems.  In my usual way, easier then when I was less overloaded than it is now, I went from her talk to read her books voraciously.  Thinking back I remember that she altered her ideas as she worked with more clients/patients.  She worked both with children with clearly very severe autistic problems but also with adults who on the face of it didn’t have autism and many of whom I suspect wouldn’t now get this increasingly widely applied label of “on the spectrum” (the autistic spectrum).  She picked out the need some people have to rock climb and though I think she was the last person to be found on a difficult pitch on K2, she clearly had a deep sympathy and understanding for the need despite losing a good friend who had died mountaineering.

She argued that some of this need is so deep the whole “neurotic” label, i.e. that there’s a vulnerability, a painful twist in the psyche that nevertheless doesn’t put someone seemingly outside most peoples’ understanding of perception and logic (the “psychotic” level), doesn’t cover what’s going on.  She argued that the need is a life-or-death one deep inside the psyche, embedded in the unconscious.  She believed that this was similar in the apparently not sick mountaineer the life-or-death need the autistic young boy felt who clutched a particular hard toy (a model steam engine or train as I remember it) so hard into the hand that it reshaped his hand so the bones were moulded to the corner of the toy.

She felt that the need to hold the rock of a cliff face, and to reduce life and death to one’s own skill and strength; to the solidity of the rock; and to the luck of not being knocked off by rock falls, was vital to some.  To resist that yearning, to be deprived of that opportunity, might leave them shells of themselves.  I think she made the link with numbers and maths. I’m not sure she was familiar enough with computers but it’s there too.  I have known ever since reading her that to me this makes sense of some of my yearning.  I’m 60 now, pushing 61 up soon and it’s still there, perhaps it’s even stronger than it once was, now I no longer have clinical work or teaching salving some of this insecurity.

So, this year I think the challenge is to enjoy the pleasure of it.  There’s a real parallel here with rock climbing.  I spent much of my childhood and early adolescence up trees when home in Warwickshire, or up cliffs when on holiday in Llantwit in South Wales, and I loved that.  I had a real shock as a clinical medical student, I would have been about 21, when a friend took me first rock wall climbing in London and then on a mountaineering club trip to the Peak District and I suddenly realised I was a truly third rate climber and had no stomach for being any better at it, nor for the risks and insecurities of the whole enterprise.  This must have come a year or so after a similar experience as a pre-clinical medical student when I realised that my double A “A-level” maths may have meant I was decently competent at maths by general population standards but that by university maths standards I was mediocre and would never discover anything mathematically new nor even follow what the top students could understand that comes down from the work of the truly gifted mathematicians.

Those were blows but I’ve continued to bumble along in the quantitative methodology realm and I churn out some good stuff from time to time.  Similarly, at 40ish my wife got me skiing and oh boy are mountains wonderful, even if you’ll never be a natural skier nor mountaineer.  Just enjoy what you can do eh?

Spanish hills/mountains in the early morning sun 7/9/16!

2017 was a funny old year from my point of view.  I didn’t redo a real cycling pilgrimage which was right; I gave up being an employed academic after only one academic year in which that had been my sole job, that too was right; I did clear a bit of the research backlog that has accumulated in some very slowly accelerating landslide, over the last decade or so, that was a start; I even got my head around some statistical theory and practice that I hadn’t known before, that was good; I did manage to kick out a few papers but not many; finally, I did manage to be moderately useful around the home and we have moved a number of overdue household things on which was very good.

Externally, globally, politically, I think 2017 was little short of a nightmare with the idiocy of Brexit grinding on almost unbelievably and Trump, Putin and, more lately, Kim Jong Un have made macho posturing and terrifying real oppression and shameless discrimination newly naked and dangerous.  There have been good countering swells and these remind us that no one dangerous person ever inflicted horror on the world without active and passive connivance from many others.  Colin Kaepernick and the Black Lives Matter more generally have given me some hope around discrimination by colour, and the pink hats and later in the year #metoo underlines that anger about, and resistance to, sexism is (re?) finding voice.

For all the good things, that felt like a pretty grim balance sheet and particularly because the basically statistics of rampant 21st Century capitalism, “free market”, neo-liberal ideas, and the grip they and their believers have on power and money seem hard to counter.

So coming back to the selfishly personal: I find myself making resolutions for 2018. That’s not something I do most years and as I cooked some up, I came to realise that it’s probably something I do only when these rather arbitrary date/year pivot points align with a yearning for more change in my own life.  Not one of my resolutions has been political I realise now, perhaps one should be tacked on: to get to the end of 2018 able to make some useful political ones for 2019.  For now … enough already!  Very best wishes for your own new year, and for any resolutions or hopes and aspirations anyone reading this has for 2018 (and for whenever you read this!)

By this time last year I was back home in London.  Yesterday was the first anniversary of my return and I spent most of it in a tiny B&B room here in Barcelona …

Yes, there really about 50cm between the foot of the bed and that thin chest of drawers and there’s about a metre between the bed and the other chest of drawers and 1.5m to the doorway, in which I’m standing to take that.  The staff here (http://barcino147.com/) are lovely and it’s very central in Barcelona.  I think I’d recommend it as a place to stay but it’s not cheap. Fortunately, I think my two host organisations here will pay.

It’s the Barcino staff’s fault that I finally succumbed to a horrible cold virus on the, equally horrible, flight out here on Tuesday.  Vueling airways somehow counted the wrong number of passengers onto the plane so we were held on the taxiway at Gatwick for over three hours, finally disembarked, the plane frisked, and we were all (minus one who gave up by then) re-embarked. The ‘photos below show the plane corralled by buses for the disembarkation and, hoping that no-one’s feet will complain at the breach of confidentiality, captures the resignation all our feet showed as we were herded into those buses…

… and a few minutes later, but not without one of those yellow men ranting at a poor woman who ill advisedly lit a cigarette in her desperation, … were herded back onto the plane again.

I think the quite extraodinary mix of utter, mind numbing boredom, and excitement, finally broke my immune system and the virii cried “yippee” and colonised my nasal mucosa like … well, like cold virii do I suppose.

That explains why spent the damn day here yesterday instead of walking around Barcelona in the glorious sun and commemorating the first anniversary of the end of the pelerinage2016.

So odd being back in Spain a year on.  Much, much to blog about, including the whole question of Catalan independence, but the virii really do have me on the ropes so I will stop as I must sleep and get up early to finish a talk for tomorrow.   I leave you with some images from walking the streets back to B&B to my first work hosts here this afternoon.  How’s this for a door handle?

 

A street animal:

 

Love the cool pose!

I ought to know what that building is, not least because it’s clearly quite an important Barcelona or Catalan service, but I confess I don’t.

This next I do know: Gaudí’s glorious Casa Milà, a.k.a. “la pedrera“, “the open quarry”.  This does it no justice at all but my heart lifts to see it, and I hadn’t realised that my route would take me right past it.

I walked up under rather overcast skies in really sweaty heat, probably not helped by the virii.  These were taken on the way back when the sun was breaking through and it created another truly terrible ‘photo when I rounded the corner of Casa Milà and looked back. It really does Gaudì no favours, but I still like the curves of the stonework and the amazing decorative ironwork contrasting with the trees.

More modernist glory, this time not Gaudí (as far as I know).

And a friendly feline on the floor below the B&B:

So, so much else has happened in the last few days, and in the last year since my return from the joys, and challenges, of the pilgrimage.  I’m still digesting it all psychologically, and trying to assimilate the new viewpoint on my life that doing a secular pilgrimage gave me.  All of that gives so much material for future, time dislocated, blog posts, as and when I can find the time and the energy.

OK virii, I’m done here, please let me sleep OK tonight!

Wow.  As today went on it sank in on me that this might have been the day that I finally arrived in Santiago de Compostella and it was.

That’s a silly little sketch of such an important day.  Actually, I find I have far less memory of it than I would have supposed, or than I’d like.  It’s interesting to try to cast my mind back without first reading any blog post I did back then.  I know it wasn’t a great day as the road switchbacked up and down.  Here, as I’ve finally succumbed and used Strava (www.strava.com), is a Strava profile of it.

I know it was all feeling a bit odd.  I was realising that Finisterra really wasn’t going to happen, at least not on Toto, and I was tired and perhaps there was a feeling almost of anticlimax and of having to get on with my life without the goal that had driven the ride.  It’s mostly nice countryside with some interesting sights but it’s not visually exciting in the way that many of the earlier days  had been.  As it’s now well to the West the countryside is pretty much as green as rural UK and very different from the parched country of many earlier days in Spain.

Perhaps looking back at it now is also a bit overshadowed by the last few days.  I’ve been away in South Wales Thursday to yesterday as I/we had real anxieties about my father’s health.  Thursday night brought a lot of relief to find out that the lesions are precancerous but absolutely not urgent, not life threatening and, though they do need curettage, that can be done at leisure some time in the next few months (perhaps on the 25th when I’ll be back down there to go with him for the next appointment).  Besides that stuff, even the camino has to take a back seat.

Well, well.  I have now re-read my posts from last year and see that, on the day, I hadn’t quite given up on Finisterra but I know I did pretty much that evening.  So odd reading the main post from last year: https://www.psyctc.org/pelerinage2016/a-bit-more-about-this-final-dayleg/  I think I really do have to stop now and let this all mull.  Old friend staying the night so I’ll switch from rather limp muttering/blogging to myself to talking with Rose.  Enough.  Much, much more to do and be blogged about last year so I will let the revisiting stretch out to Christmas I think and there are trips to Barcelona (next week), back to South Wales and to Italy (mostly Bologna and Modena) and a big family wedding all in the next three weeks so I think 2017 will be fighting 2016 for blog digestions.  Thanks for reading, anyone who has been!

I must learn how to write a blog one day.  Yes, something for the todo list.  Hm, put “Learn how to manage a WordPress web site” and “Sort out how to embed route tracks on interactive maps in WordPress web sites” too while we at it.  Ho, hum, yes, my todo list is a monster, it never actually seems to get smaller.

OK, this isn’t about todo lists and good intentions but it is a post about yesterday, despite having had a remarkable day today and despite having remarkable cycling days from a year ago all queuing up to be blogged here.  Perverse and foolish maybe just to turn back to last night, but it’ll have to do.

Yesterday evening J & I went to see “Much ado about nothing” at the Globe.  Strongly recommended and continues to the 15th of October so if you can: go and see it! If you can’t get to see it, have a look at the trailer on that link (or here).  However, I won’t say much more about the performance to avoid spoilers.  Hm,  note to self: “After 15.x.17, do a blog ramble about Much ado“.  Oops, I could see my todo list getting longer still if I put blog things onto it for future points when they are safely beyond the end of a play’s run.

Anyway, as is our wont, we were “groundlings”: standing in the flat space below the stage as the plebs did in Elizabethan times. Fantastic value for money in the 21st Century if you’re lucky enough to be able to stand for three hours without more than a few aches and some numbness.  Usually, there’s some warmth and camaraderie amongst the groundlings, or at least, we feel that.  Of course, sadly, there can be things ado there in the pit.  For example, there’s height:  there are often people who are taller than me.  Hm, that’s not statistically surprising really … and they don’t seem to realise that they should stand toward the back.  In front of us were a couple, I think father and daughter, not partners but maybe not.  Anyway, the male of the species was tallish, over six foot in old money and the female smaller, I could look over her head easily but not his.  Now this made me realise that J and I, being pretty much exactly the same height, are the right sort of pairing to be allowed to stand together as groundlings.  I fantasized that tall/short pairs, and mixed height groups, really shouldn’t be allowed in, or should be carefully marshalled apart …. OK, I really am joking.  I’d hate that.

In fact, one grumble I used to have about the Globe, which was that the volunteer ushers all used to seem very grumpy and prone to too much telling people what to do and what not to do, really seems to have improved.  I really, really don’t want them to tell people where to stand based on height.  I do wonder though if some tall people, who are maybe with other tall people, mightn’t move back.  J and I have compared notes and we have definitely swapped with shorter people in the past.

Anyway, that was all fine.   If I can’t crane to see around a tall person, I can find another spot and I was fine but amused by my rambling thoughts.  What wasn’t so good was that the lass behind J kept bumping J, leading to a pretty big dent in J’s enjoyment of the whole thing.  Why would someone do that?

But by now you’re thinking to yourself “Much ado …, Much ado about damn little …”, “I can see where he is with this rambling but where is the Tourette’s?  Bring on the dancing bears!   We want a bit more from this blog!!”

Well yes, I know, I know, I was coming to that.  You see just before the play started the actress (I am going to stick with the gendered terminology) who was to play Beatrice came on and read a short announcement to us all telling us that a group of people with Tourette’s were in the audience tonight and had asked that we be told.  She said that one feature of Tourette’s can be involuntary shouting, sometimes of rude words … and that this being the Globe, therefore we might not know that this was different … and that, this being the Globe, everyone was welcome.  I was quite moved by this as I love that approach.  What was interesting was that there was quite a lot of shouting.  Some clearly involuntary, some I’m not so sure.  This particular Much ado is a loud and lively staging of the play but it has some quieter moments and there were times when the contributions from the audience were significantly distracting.  Several of the actors, Benedict particularly, did a good job of working with the offerings, so good I wondered if some of the contributions weren’t Tourette ejaculations but planned interjections from one or more stooges in the audience.  I am still unsure about that.

However, what struck me was that the running background of vocalisations, the occasional whistle or noise, and certainly not a few rude contributions weren’t nothing for me.  They threw my concentration and I think they sucked others into offering verbal contributions.  That came to the point where I felt we were nearer to standup than to simple theatre.  That had me reflecting on the things that can niggle: someone bumping you for J, too much contribution in verbal form from the audience for me.

That also got me thinking about just how hard I suspect the change in the audience was probably making it for the performers.   The troupe on stage now seemed to me to be having to attend very differently to the audience from the normal input which is pretty much only of noises: “oohs”, sharp intakes of breath, sudden quietening of any noise at all, occasional clapping and lots of laughter (this being, of course, a comedy, though one with a grim line through it).  I guess that may have taken us closer to the Elizabethan Globe: was it more like standup, with contributions from the groundlings and ad libbing responses from the actors?  I suspect it may well have been.

My fantasy was that a huge part of good acting is a tremendous awareness of the sussurus (?sp?) of noises and quiet from the audience but that that can be treated as coming from a single entity: an audience.  Once you get to vocal contributions you are triangulated: you have an audience and a person within the audience.

Of course, unless it’s a solo play (Krapp’s last tape anyone?) there’s always triangulation, that’s an obssession of mine.  But normally it’s a triangulation on stage or between two people (at one moment) on stage and the mass of the audience.  I think even in Krapp there is a sense in which there are two Krapp’s in a triangular relationship with us in the audience: the only man listening to the tapes of his younger self.

Anyway, I’m going off on a bit of bit of a triangular tangent.  It was undoubtedly an interesting experience, distracting from time to time, and I think I would have enjoyed the evening more without all the vocalisations.  However, I agree with Beatrice that the Globe, the theatre generally, should be a place where everyone is welcome and not just a place for “nice” behaviour and reverent applause.  Not a place where the bard allowed to rule the show from 401 years on from his death.  (Oh dear, if I’m not careful I’ll be off on another tangent about the idiocy of the Globe’s board of directors terminating Emma Rice’s period as director early.)

If the next six weeks weren’t so damn busy I might almost go and queue up on an evening just to see the performance again and see just how different it might seem with just the usual audience.  I thought the staging and most of the performances are good enough to justify that without the addition (subtraction?) of the Tourette’s input, though I think I’ve seen better Much ado‘s.  However, the next six weeks are bonkers so that’s not going to happen.  But it’s been good unravelling a bit of this here.