Redcoat and Last Seen Bensham Road

I managed to get to the theatre one more time before the hammer came down and everywhere closed. It was at the excellent Live Theatre’s Elevator Festival which offers a platform for new work. I was lucky enough to see solo shows Last Seen Bensham Road and Redcoat, which were presented as a double bill.

Last Seen Bensham Road, written and performed by Samantha Neale, tells Tanya's story of a struggling single mother who considers herself inadequate as a parent. She explores themes of being without money and unable to calm her screaming son. There are other mums at her son's school who are better off and Tanya wants to hide away from their stares and judgements. She wishes she could just disappear until one day, she literally does.

Then there was Redcoat a partially autobiographical piece, recounting writer and performer Lewis Jobson’s experiences working as a Redcoat entertainer in Bognor Regis "Once a Red, always a Red."

He bursts onto the stage and radiates kilowatts of energy and charm as he indulges the audience in a day in the life of a Redcoat.

Sparse staging gives Lewis more room to perform, and we get some real Redcoat crowd-pleasing mixed in with the life backstage. I thought it was a tour-de-force, blending physical comedy, sketches, singing, dancing and -er- balloon modelling, all performed with fun and a kind of cheeky craziness.

There's almost too many 'That bit's' in it...That bit where the audience fills in on the Karaoke...That bit where Pingu turns up at the night club...That bit where he has to describe and mimic each of his co-singers...and so on.

Lewis shows the other side of the life, too, with comments about having a smile permanently welded to his face, the hangovers from the nights out/days off and the gentler moments as he entertains the smaller guests.

Amazing.

influencer?

I know we're supposed to take the Covid-19 seriously. Wash our hands, drink hot salty water, be prepared to self-isolate. But I can't quite get my head around the latest Boris television broadcast. I know he wants to be the statesman and to keep calm in a crisis, but it all rings somewhat hollow with me. Like he's skim-read the text and is now reciting. it. with. long. pauses. for gravitas.

Yesterday the Stock market crash-landed and the day before Boris's chums shoved out a budget which was a U turn against the ones that George Osborne had been pushing for the last ten years. Austerity, no, strike that, Spend.

As for taking back control, the markets seem to be saying no to that. And now the 50,000 nurse vacancies illustrate the hole that the current regime's previous leadership have got us into.
Boris is slightly better at reading than tRump, but they both have the aura of spray-on golden autoprompter stunts, fed from a back-room somewhere.

The market may be blipping positive again today. Not the 2200 points positive that it needs to recover. The media quoted daily percentage loss is no true reflection of the 27% loss which has occurred over the last two weeks. That's more than a quarter off the valuations of everything. But at least the heatmap has turned positive again.

Well, despite the rumours, Dilyn the Dog manages to hang in there.

42 - don't panic

How cruel and cynical when people monetize COVID-19? We've seen the FTSE100 drop by 2000 points and wipe billions from share prices. It's supposed to be about virus uncertainty. Nope. It's about profit taking.

Fat cats have done okay out of this on the way down and can now buy cheap equities on the way back up again. Kerching.

Now the Russians, Saudi Arabia and Americans are squabbling over oil prices to mix in more uncertainty. The Americans can wash their hands in messy shale oil production $65, with Texan oil needing to be around $50, Russian around $42 and Saudi around $80 per barrel for break even. The sustained low prices ($35?) will crash smaller players out of the market as big players buy market share. tRump will say it's good for the motorist, of course.

I've been travelling recently and I noticed one UK hotel I was booked to stay had closed. It was preparatory work for a National Isolation Centre, where travellers could be booked into isolation. The men on the gate in yellow hats were very pleasant and handed me the three-page explanation.

Never a dull moment.

Þingvellir in Bláskógabyggð, site of the Althing Parliament

We travelled to Þingvellir, which is in Bláskógabyggð, southwestern Iceland, near the peninsula of Reykjanes and the Hengill volcanic area.

Þingvellir is a site of historical, cultural, and geological importance and is the site of a rift valley that marks the crest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

When the Icelandic Parliament (the Althing) formed, in AD930, where better to assemble the entire population of 60,000, than at this site?

blue lagoon

An essential visit during time in Iceland is to go to the Blue Lagoon. I was unprepared for the luxurious experience that greeted us. It is a myriad of intercoinnected lagoons, with their water heated from the nearby geothermal rocks, and utilising drill holes that go down 2000 metres.

But oh, it is so much more. Covering an area of 400,000 m² in the heart of the Reykjanes UNESCO Global Geopark, Blue Lagoon is a place where nature, science, design, and wellness converge, creating a world of 'warmth, wonder, and wellbeing'.

There are paths connecting all of its experience areas, although the best plan is to walk along blue waterways through landscapes rich with geothermal, geological, and floral phenomena.

It is pamper central, with fluffy bathrobes, and two or three skin creams to apply to help shed those years.

There's the bar in the pool, where one can partake of beverages, and the lagoons go on seemingly forever. Yes, it is vast and heated to a very warm temperature, which makes wandering around in the icy winds very enjoyable. Just remember where you've left the dressing gown for any short walks in the air!

Harpa

Strolling around Reykjavik, this time to Harpa, the grand concert hall opened in 2011. It has the name of a pagan season, voted for by the people of the city. There is a granduer about the architecture with sweeping internal vistas and views across to the glaciers.

And then, at night, it illuminates, with flickering lights running along the glass shape. And check out that long staircase.

our only goal will be the western shore

Yes, I've a video of this as well. Horizontal snow at the western shores of Garður, facing out towards the Greenland sea. It is cold enough when the snow blows like this, although in a single day we seem to get a change of weather every couple of hours.

Layers are good.

I come from the land of the ice and snow

From the midnight sun, where the hot springs flow
The hammer of the gods
We'll drive our ships to new lands
To fight the horde, and sing and cry
'Valhalla, I am coming!'

Okay, maybe not quite so dramatic, but a bracing trip to a home of the Norse gods seemed like a good idea.

So here we are in Reykjavik, where the snow blows horizontal and the shop signs are written in a undarleg elven tunga.

In practice, the Norse gods were phased out in AD 1000, when the Þjóðkirkjan (Lutheran Church) was imposed by an act of Parliament.

Indeed, the pagan idols were chucked into the Goðafoss waterfall, and most of the country was made Catholic for five centuries until the Lutherans came along.

There's still plenty of references to the pagan gods around the town too, and I couldn't help noticing the tee-shirts worn by locals with various Jimmy Page and Robert Plant lyrics. Led Zep visited Iceland on a cultural mission, encouraged by the Icelandic government and penned the hammer of the gods' line which became a model for all of heavy metal.

We are staying in the middle of town too, which is a surprisingly short walk to anywhere. More of that later.

Parasite at the movies

I know that the Parasite movies cleaned up at the Oscars, which automatically deems it a good movie. I was more circumspect. A great premise. Set in South Korea, a likeable-roguish family living in squalor get to trick their way into the home of a sleek super-rich family.

Light touch humour progressively darkening, blended with social commentary and cinematically shot.

The poor basement dwellers get free fumigation, when the man with the spray walks the street while they deliberately leave their windows open. They get free wifi too, from the adjoining businesses, so long as they sit on the loo to receive it. Then a lucky break to go tutoring at the rich house. A fake University certificate is all that is needed. 괜찮아요 - gwaenchanayo - no problem.

It makes a change from the family's routine of folding pizza-boxes for piece work rates. We see the whole family is able, through deception, to gain employment at the rich house, with its hissing sprinkler-fed lawn. Yes, the understated class struggle.

Ki-taek: Rich people are naive. No resentments. No creases on them.
Chung-sook: It all gets ironed out. Money is an iron. Those creases all get smoothed out.

The Micawber-like father of the subterranean poor house has an aroma, noticed by the rich family's child who innocently pairs it with the aroma of the replacement housekeeper. That's a portent to the unhinging of the plot. There are no rich monsters in the rich house, but a claustrophobic and twisted situation leads to a striking denouement.

The pace of the ending was at odds with the prowl of the first three-quarters of the movie. I can't say more, although I'm intrigued at the fashions of movie selection when this subtitled piece grabs so many of the main awards.

catching a cold in the markets.

There I was, walking around Chinatown in Soho. Meantime three miles further east, a euphemistically named correction was taking place to the stock market.

Correction makes it all sound scientific and numerate, doesn't it? Not just a load of algorithms and (mainly) lads with commission targets trying to get rich quick.' drunk on youth, fueled by greed, and higher than kites,' as Jordan Belfort's Wolf of Wall Street put it.


The market's record-breaking drop of 10% is the definition of a correction, and it means that for every £100k invested in a pension plan, there's now only £90k and someone has liquidised the gap.

A nice commission? Yes, and another one when the markets start to go up again.

It's all a bit panicky really, but no-one understands the impacts. A quick look at the CDC data from John Hopkins University in the USA shows that Coronavirus pales into insignificance compared with regular influenza in the USA, yet it has allegedly created the market mayhem.

Our part-time Prime Minister is hiding in the fridge in miscellaneous grace-and-favour mansions (Chevening & Chequers) until Monday when, after another ;-) announcement, he'll finally run a Cobra meeting about the Chinese flu, which is being used as the scapegoat for all of the market shenanigans.

just when you thought it was safe to go back in the library

After seeing this author's post about authoring a novel, it encouraged me to write my version.

There are several stages to getting the book to a publishable state, even before thinking about marketing and so-on. That can be for another day.

First of all, I should have an idea for the story. I tend to follow the three-act structure, with setup, challenges and resolution, but I use the 4 box storyboard, where, as each box boundary is crossed, another stake-raising event occurs.

There's another idea for a separate blog post.

Scrivener

I use Scrivener to write the story. It runs fine on the Mac and allows me to start with a template pre-configured with a story skeleton, plus binders to drop the characters and some research into.


It uses a cards on corkboard metaphor, which helps with the sequencing and resequencing of the various scenes. That's not to say I won't go analogue for the first part, using those index cards available in Tescos, although I find I'm increasingly digital nowadays - thinking of how much time it will take to re-transcribe the relevant information.

Scrivener uses an outliner structure, mixed with the card scenes, and should be good for re-sequencing parts of the narrative. I do find that the drag and drop associated with the outliner is a little clunky and occasionally the scenes wind up in the wrong places unless I'm being particularly vigilant.

A versatility of Scrivener is that it can tip out many formats from the assembled text. Occasionally compiling the work is easy and can generate anything from double spaced courier A4 to a finalised paperback format, which is useful when reviewing.

Dragon Dictate and Mac voice recognition

Then it is all down to the writing, with as much of the screen as possible used for the typing and all the distractions switched off. Sometimes I have tried dictation, both to Dragon and using the native facilities of the Mac. Mac's facilities are not as good as Dragon's, but sadly Nuance discontinued the Dragon Dictate for Mac a couple of years ago. I could run it on Windows, under parallels, but it would need another licence which is inexplicably expensive, so I've abandoned it.

I've also found that dictation software was quite good at getting down an idea, but it would often stumble on words such as character names and create almost as much re-typing as if I simply typed it in the first place. A character called Bigsy, for example, became BC; Bigsby, VC, big sea and so-on.

Additionally, the Mac dictation software will jump out of dictation mode unexpectedly and consequently leave large chunks untranscribed. Thre's a screenshot of how to fire up dictation mode, which is buried in the keyboard options of control panel on a Mac.

Review options. Microsoft Word
So far I haven't mentioned Microsoft Word. That's what I provide to reviewers of the document. Scrivener can output it and most people can use it, whether on a PC or a Mac. For reviewing the text, its a reasonable option.

Grammarly
I use two other tools, which also helps prevent me from going crazy when I need to review the finished (or interim) products. The first, inexpensive, option is Grammarly. On a Mac, until recently, it required the individual section to be pasted into a separate workspace. It does a pretty good job of tracking grammar and punctuation and will make a few suggestions for sentence re-work too. More recently, there's a Word option also available on Mac, where a Mac Word document can be reviewed directly. The checking is as thorough, but the user interface doesn't seem to highlight the passage being reviewed as clearly as the separate Mac App. I have mainly abandoned this form for longer reviews now.

ProwritingAid
My second review tool is ProwritingAid, which covers what Grammarly can do, but additionally has several other parses of the text and will provide a mind-blowingly good report of the writing quality. It includes vocabulary, unique words, word families, most used words, the dynamism of vocabulary, reading ease, readability by paragraph, sentence variety, passivity index, hidden verbs, adverbs, repeated sentence starts, style suggestions, grammar issues, sticky sentences, dialogue %, dialogue tags, pacing, use of transitions, cliches, redundancies, inconsistencies, vague, abstract and corporate words. Phew.

It also knows about and follows the structure of Scrivener, which is particularly useful when reviewing individual pages/chunks of a document. I like it because it provides a different perspective to look at the document also, which is useful after several run-throughs and the inevitable word-blindness which occurs.

Never Enough
I can safely say that in my case, with reviewers plus me, plus automated tools looking through the work, it is still not enough. It's amazing to me, but there's still commas, quote marks, and other mishaps that get through to the finalised product. I'm re-assured though, that even the big authors have this problem, and I see that several of my Kindle downloads of well-known novels by others are on multiple revisions as different bugs get swept away.

Cover design
There has to be a post about this too. Suffice to say, the cover is supposed to be genre-specific and use vanishing lines which lead the prospect 'into' the book. I use Photoshop for this part of the process and set the front cover dimensions to 2000 pixels at 300 dpi, which should generally be enough.

Blurb
Not forgetting the tag-line under the title and some back cover matter which describes the book.

Cover template
This needs to match the number of pages in the book, and I use the IngramSpark template generator to define this. In my case I want the template to be in Adobe InDesign format, and then it is a case of dragging the three elements to the template (Front Cover, Back Cover and Spine). It is important to have them each set to 300 dpi for this part of the process. I also save the document as a PDF with the pdf/x format, which is what the printers need.

Book text
I suppose this depends on where the book is targeted, but I will usually generate a PDF/x of the text, to match the cover image. The PDF/x format sorts out the flattening and removal of colour from the text, which is important to a monochrome print. I use Adobe Acrobat for this, but I guess there are dozens of alternatives.

Calibre
To make an ePub, or a mobi of the completed text, there's a variety of methods. I could use Scrivener, with its flexible front matter management for hardcopy vs e-book. Instead, I prefer to use calibre, which will give me multiple output options of a single consistent product, complete with some embedded keywords.

Keywords and Thema
This is a part of the great search engine puzzle. How to get a book listed anywhere near the top of the pile? I'm still tinkering with this, using Publisher Rocket to help identify search terms and genres. I've discovered that the LTV (life time value) of an author can be important too, by Amazon's algorithms. Simply put, more books and/or more series means more potential sales and a higher lifetime value.
Dashboard

And I suppose the fun with this is currently about getting readers, so I'll be worrying soon about landing pages, mailchimp mailing lists and give-aways. But that can wait for another day

use of ERTMS signalling to improve headrooms on high density train lines

That's twice I've been in the pub recently and Brexit has popped up again. I thought it was all supposed to be done and dusted now that the new gangsters have taken back control.

A few land grabs of the House of Lords, the Judiciary, the Media and the Treasury and the Mekon will have safely installed a few of his loopy loops.

The thing is, he's starting to look worried now like it's all about to unspool.

The train thing is an interesting case in point. To HS2 or not to HS2? By the time it has been kicked into 2040, who cares? Even the Chinese can see a better opportunity to build something faster.

There's chitter-chatter about re-nationalisation now, but most of the franchise operators are already government-controlled. Just not UK-government. We've Germany running several lines, France running a few, Italy running some and even the Japanese, and the Dutch have some pieces of the pie.

Above is a list, although with the re-nationalisation of a couple of lines recently, it will soon be out of date.

That's like the rolling stock we have on one of our local lines. Designed in 1985, with literally spare bus parts and refurbished diesel engines (note the bus windows or the seats) the Pacers trundle around this neck of the woods steering clear of the speedier bullet nosed HSTs that link us to London.

I'm intrigued by signals too. London's Tube can run trains at 2-3 minute intervals by having plenty of signals and short blocks on their tracks. Why doesn't Railtrack do some of that too? Adding double the rolling stock running to a shorter service interval must be a quicker way to deliver the benefits of HS2 than the current ditch digging? Bring in some ERTMS signalling management with reduced headrooms, maybe. Or is the reticence because E stands for European?