We managed to get along to see James and the Giant Peach over the Christmas period, at Northern Stage. Whilst not strictly a pantomime, it still features a couple of tyrannical aunts and some crocodile tongues, and is suitably bonkers in the way of Roald Dahl.
One of the moves in child fiction is to give the young characters freedom to act and Dahl does this by killing off the parents during an unfortunate shopping expedition, when they are trampled by a rhinoceros.
This was a lavish and high energy production, delivered in the round, and we happened to have some front row seats by the stage which felt almost like being part of the action.
There were many children at the perforce, and they all seemed to know the various cues to participate in different parts of the action. suddenly, when the giant peach was floating in the sea, we were treated to about half the packed audience donning shark fin hats. I would have too, but I didn't get the memo.
Further along there were some immersive underwater scenes, with bubbles and puppetry. All of the staging worked very well. And then the cast themselves. Full of energy, encouraging the audience, most of them playing multiple instruments throughout the action packed show.
I was already about to pull from Lane 2 into Lane 1, ready for an upcoming junction.
Yes, a high speed blowout of a front tyre. I remembered that thing about not braking but instead letting the car slow down as I indicated my way onto the hard shoulder. Also about parking diagonally with the wheels facing away from the traffic, so that I could get out of the driver door onto the hard shoulder instead of towards oncoming 70 mph traffic.
Hazard lights and all other lights on. Check for a safe place to stand behind the barrier.
I looked at the dead tyre. Behind it was a piece of wood with some nails. It may have been coincidence. High speed blowouts are usually caused by under inflation, kerbing the tyre or some catastrophic damage. I suspect the last case.
The tyre was well and truly popped. Time to call the AA and the very nice rescuer was along speedily to fix everything. Space saver tyre from the boot, torque wrench, correct inflation. And then we were back on our way at a maximum speed of 50 mph.
Later I was along at the tyre place and they read out the treads from my tyres. All six and seven millimetre, so plenty left, well above the three millimetre that I usually consider minimum.
Did I want to see the old tyre? Not really, although I'm pleased it was premium and kept me in a straight line.
Up the Shard for a jolly celebration, before the start of the complicated logistics around the festive season.
It is always fun to look out across London, even if this occasion initially included some of the now seldom spotted London fog.
There's a fair amount of mileage involved over the next few days and I'm sure there will be plenty of twinkly lights.
I reckon it's safe to say that the mince pies will kick in now and I should declare my mileage target for 2016 cycling as a modest victory. 4,200 miles is respectable and hits my 'Gold' target for the year. I set 2000 miles as Bronze, 3000 Silver, 4000 Gold and *ahem* 5000 Platinum. Maybe next year?
Garmin says I've clocked 127,000 calories to achieve this.
Cakes all round before I hit reset and start all over again.
I managed to get one of the nowadays rare tickets for Nina Berry's 'The Terminal Velocity of Snowflakes', performed in the Studio at the ever groovy Live Theatre.
It's a two-hander, magically performed by Dean Bone and Heather Carroll, using Nina's crisp and sparkling dialogue.
The story starts simply enough, with a glancing snowy encounter in Heaton Park, and progresses through the lives of the two characters, both separately and intertwined.
There's an underpinning idea of time's arrow and the adventure laden descent of individual of snowflakes. No wonder they all look different. It creates a simple and memorable life-lesson as the story unfolds, as well as the idea of starts, hope and the different ways that things can turn out.
That's not to say it's all warm and cuddly, there's some hard edges and audience tears as the story progresses.
As a studio sized production it is also very strong, with a stylish clean looking set design able to evoke snow, sunshine as well as the trippier moments of the narrative. Similarly the choice of music and the soundscape helps create an altogether well-rounded production.
A trip to the mall on Sunday. The big stores don't open until midday, although the smaller ones are open from 10am. We drove through sleepy London streets and parked ahead of many other shoppers, although by the time we returned to the car the surrounding car park had filled.
I discovered a few of the reasons for a decline in walk-in shopping.
The malls have long taken a kind of Las Vegas approach to the internals of the individual stores. Walk around a casino in Vegas and it's impossible to see daylight or the exits. A deliberate design to keep you there longer. In general the mall stores adopt a similar approach, except they don't serve free beverages.
Keep em guessing about where the checkout is. A stupid idea, which this weekend cost D*******s some sales created by the frustration of having signage pointing to non-existent checkouts.
Don't put staff in areas where there might be questions. Another large store favourite. I did see a few personal shopper types being escorted around, but they would have had a somewhat grander budget.
Display goods in the windows which are out of stock. The objective is to get people inside, right?
For clothing, include long racks of clothes with a 'From' labelling on the head of the rack. Ensure one item remains on that rack at the stated price, but boost the price on all the other items.
The above methods are laughingly called retail science, but the ironically named Gruen Transfer and similar tricks don't seem that far removed from snake oil sales.
I could go on, but I think I'll have a coffee and then hit online shopping.
Anywhen* I look at twitter nowadays I start to see the first claimants of the '10 years and counting' tweeters. The early adopters with low serial number accounts.
And opinion is divided as we see their reminiscences of the altogether simpler times, 140 characters, no emojis, nothing fancy. A limited audience and maybe 50 followers apiece and that specially delayed refresh time in the early days.
I still follow some of those early day twitterers, before the days of the managed hashtag, mute, advertising, GIFs and the progressive incursion of noise to the feed.
I recently sat in the Turbine Hall and looked at the installed screens, which are part of Phillipe Parreno's current work. An initial simplicity as I tuned in. I could sense alien spaceships, jet aircraft landing, a clicking language, some kind of industrial mayhem, water and birdsong. The sound and light scape ebbed and flowed. You really do have to be there.
I'm told that the room at the far end of the hall contains the science that makes it all happen. Sound and vision driven from a series of microphones and probes around the building, plus a life force that filters what we see manipulated by a living container of yeast.
Like many, I dallied awhile, but didn't feel the need to break open a laptop or smartphone to distract me from the experience. Others had more complex life streams and would be tapping away on virtual keyboards in the midst of the experience, tweet-echoes diminishing their attention towards the installation.
I, like many others, was caught in the moment and wonder of this vast and curious installation. Anywhen is a South West of England expression. Perhaps I should move there?
I've been going through that tidying thing, with yet another skip about to depart from outside the house. Each one takes away another 6 cu meters of stuff and I'm now just around the point where something like the Kon-Mari method becomes practical.
I'm struck by the delightful Marie Kondo approach to tidying, which fundamentally involves only keeping things that spark joy. An obvious early part of the method is to discard things.
Yep. Hence the skip(s).
Then to work through various categories for tidying, in a specific order. That's about where I am now, although there's another part that says put all of a certain category together in one place. Okay. Could be difficult because of the sometimes haphazard nature of the prior 'filing system'.
My modest success so far has been to remove many items from indoors, hence the overflowing garage.
However, I could, with a little bit of re-arrangement, re-park a car in there now. I won't though, because I need the floorspace for 'sorting'.
Maybe I should get one of those hats?
Although, come to think of it, that'd only bring a short term spark of joy.
And that brings me to books. For some years now I've gone mainly digital with books. That's except for gifts or books requiring obvious pictures or diagrams. The Kindle works well for me and the ability to swap between devices like Kindle to iPhone to MacBook, creates a great flexibility, with the Kindle giving a pretty good reading experience as well as an ability to change typeface when the going gets tough.
So what to do with the thousands of real books? I decided that most can go. A few have a special history (spark joy), some are immensely practical and used, but many of the rest have already made their way to the local charity shops. I tried using a couple of those recycling points for books. One was completely full and the other only allowed books to be posted in about two at a time. Perhaps a sign of the times?
By the time I've stored, say, 1000 books, that's a lot of space consumed with paper.
I had several ex-indoor bookcases in the garage filled to the brim with stuff, but in the end decided it was better to also add the shelving to the skip.
Here we are mid-way into December and the external thermometer is showing 12 degrees Centigrade. No wonder there's people on the sand along the edges of the Thames. I took this picture looking right across to the middle of the City. Spot St Pauls, The Cheesegrater and Cannon Street Bridge.
It's a contrast to indoors at home, where the central heating pump has packed up and needs to be replaced. The local plumbers are all saying how their phones are 'ringing off the hook' at the moment, so it's time for fan heaters to make a short term come-back. Nevertheless, as I type this from a currently unheated part of the house I'm still getting a 20.6C degree readout from the digital thermometer on the smart meter.
Although, come to think of it, it's also showing 3.345 kW of power consumption, so there must be at least one heater running somewhere.
Part of the programmed endgame of Westworld's first series again reminds me of the conclusion of Punchdrunk's 'A Drowned Man'.
For the avoidance of direct Westworld spoilers, the above picture is from the Punchdrunk show and shows the couple outside the caravan, behind which is a forest where onlookers can walk across the trampled leaves towards the small hilltop where a conclusion plays out. Punchdrunk's world for the show was huge, set across all the floors of a defunct Paddington Post Office sorting office.
Of course, it's still tiny compared with Westworld, although the viewing construct is fairly similar.
Back to Westworld and I also see the overlaps with the second series of Humans. We have robots breaking through from their programmed mind to discover some form of a conscious state. That's in both shows. It takes slightly different paths, one of which is more routed in the inner voice being developed as the result of catastrophe (Westworld). In Humans there's some hidden programming code which can flip the robots up to a higher level.
Westworld positions the idea of a bicameral (two-chambered) mind where an outer reactive being is able to modify behaviour (think) based upon discovered consciousness. Julian Jaynes' bicameral consciousness theory supposes that great catastrophes were the catalyst for the discovery of inner self. Jayne's theory uses the non inward looking Illiad as a reference point. I'm considering the Odyssey-like quests in Westworld too: Homecoming, Wandering, Guest-Friendship, Testing and Omens, maybe?
A scratchy description of this inner self discovery appears in the Westworld story using the consultants' favourite triangle diagram depicting a simplified Maslow hierarchy followed by a magician's trick turning it into an onion diagram. A-maze-ing ;-)
What is also interesting is the idea of the language processing needed to express the feelings that emanate from inner self. The stuttering broken synth called Odi in Humans discovers consciousness but struggles with its extended vocabulary.
Both stories could develop the idea of the other structures needed to make a synth-world which doesn't simply end in all-out conflict.
Anyway, here's Laurie Anderson with Language is a Virus, from the William S Burroughs 'Ticket that exploded' cut-up/fold-in novel about creating insoluble conflicts for the life forms on Earth.
In Burroughs' story the conflicts were put there to destroy, but maybe Westworld ascribes to Nietzsche along the lines of that which does not kill us makes us stronger?
I was at a gig recently which had professional VR filming set up using a cluster of GoPro cameras. So far it hasn't been released, but some of the people attending are already looking into the necessary equipment to get that immersive feeling.
Something like the Oculus Rift costs about £550, needs a separate PC to run and probably requires the hand controller to be upgraded for the serious aficionado. It makes going to the original music gig seem like very good value for money.
Then there's the HTC Vive, at a cool £685. It is probably close to the benchmark, although some of the demos are a little bit sketchy.
I decided to start at the other end and see what could be done for almost no money, to get the effect until the technology properly matures. Roll on the Virtoba Reality Viewer V2, which cost me the princely sum of £5. Yes, five quid.
Admittedly there is some modest assembly of the cardboard structure required, but it does include all the velcro, elastic straps and even a rather basic control button. It took me about 2 minutes to get a fully functional unit, including setup of the VR environment via my phone.
The system works by putting a smartphone into the box, and effectively using it to provide the stereoscopic moving pictures, much like a Viewmaster from the olden days.
And it works rather well. I'm sure it's not as good as the expensive models, but at circa 100 times less, its not only 1/100th as good.
In fact, I booted up a 360 degree version of a Mr Robot episode and it was eerily realistic sitting in the room next to Elliot. As I turned my head I got the corresponding change to the view of the room. This example plays with the format too, with the start looking like someone has taken some video on a phone in portrait, before spilling into a 360 degree room (look behind to the open window, or spiral up in the air to look down on the action. Later the same storyline goes outside to Coney Island we are soon on the chairs in that big wheel that features in the TV show. And right in the middle of the conversation.
I've showed my cheap as chips VR to others and had various reactions from 'Yay' to 'I don't like the way it is moving about'. Most people comment on the pixels, which are more visible than, say, watching the same kind of thing on television. It's a factor of the iPhone's resolution, which, despite retina, still needs a further boost for full-on VR.
Here's the Mr Robot 360 unwrapped, but it's much better to watch it properly immersed on a headset viewer like with.in.
So here's a few more with.in viewable extracts: They do boot onto a regular browser and give 360 viewability, but the headset version with the stereoscopic sound is still much better. Even if it did cost £5. And even if it does look rather silly watching VR with a cardboard box.
It was time to plant some crocus, snowdrop, daffodil and tulip to boost the garden for the spring. I say that, but it was really time to plant the bulbs about a month ago.
General guidance is to plant between October and December. I know it's December now, but the challenge isn't so much that the bulbs won't grow (they were already sprouting) so much as the civil engineering required to get them into the ground.
I'd managed to pick a sub-zero day to attempt to plant them, knowing that over the next few days it will actually get colder. I tried the usual gardening implements, which just glanced off the ground. I think I only imagined sparks, but suffice to say it was all rock hard.
I've previously mocked a distant neighbour who sometimes drills into the ground to plant bulbs, but that would be one gadget too far.
Instead, I headed to the garden centre to get some compost. How difficult could it be to plant the bulbs in a lovely fresh covering?
I heard that 'neep' sound as I headed to the stacks piled in the open air in the garden centre. I could have worked out that this wasn't a great idea when the door to section had to be specially opened.
Sure, there were plenty of bags available, but rock solid frozen with the bags welded to one another with ice. I hopped between feet, fiddled with the trolley and I tried to look as if I was in the wrong aisle. I could see the man who runs the place looking at me but deciding not to intervene.
Undeterred, I found another type that seemed to be in a more sheltered spot and, yes, I could even lift the bags. Some felt squidgy in a not full of water or ice kind of way.
Then to drive back home with the bags stashed in the car. 24 hours of shelter before deployment and yes, the next day I was able to identify and plant the various bulb types. For my purposes the crocuses look like small electric transformers, snowdrops are tiny, daffodils are like little onions and tulips are thin skinned and white.
Either that or they'll all come up in the wrong place.
