Acts Of Protest

After parting ways with the good Mr Green yesterday I found myself with enough time on my hands to pop into the HMV shop opposite Centrepoint, there to purchase a couple of CDs. These were, in no particular order, a collection of the early Kinks's singles, the ones that came out on Pye, and the recording of Havergal Brian's Gothic Symphony made at the 2011 Proms.

Not much in common between the two CDs, you may be thinking, but I see both writers involved as guys who were very much out of step with their times, and whose strengths issued from their lack of any real connection with those times. Listening to Davies's magical Autumn Almanac is a powerful reminder of just how much of a musical outsider the great Kink was.

After crossing back over to Centrepoint I finished my afternoon sojourn in the city by proceeding to read a couple of chapters of Trollope's The Prime Minister whilst standing on the steps outside, trying not to pay too much attention to all the many aspects of the scene ahead of me that seemed to be demanding that I look at it. Again I was aware of being wonderfully out of time in my tastes. And, in a slightly glorious way, I didn't care.

Lost

Found myself down town this afternoon in one of its larger shopping centres. I was there to share a cuppa and confab with old chum Tony Green, and very jolly it all was. But I felt completely lost with regard to the building we were in and equally lost, later, when wandering down Orchard Road which bears little resemblance to the thoroughfare I first encountered on arrival in this Far Place.

At that time it was a lively sort of spot with lots of rather inviting shops almost on a human scale. Now it's even livelier and the shops are entirely uninviting. There always seems to be some sort of demolition and rebuilding going on down its length which makes no sense as all the buildings are pretty much brand new. Oh, and the shops are always the same shops selling the same expensive things that nobody really needs.

Tony and I spent quite a bit of our meandering conversation mourning lost worlds, now I come to think of it. Just sad old men, I suppose, but none the worse for that.

Nodding Off

As I expected, now the pressure is off in terms of having no rehearsing to do, reinforced by the fact that today has been a public holiday here, I've been feeling overwhelmingly tired. The weariness has manifested itself in my having managed to nod off numerous times in the course of the day. In fact, the line between waking and sleep seems to have been eliminated. At several points I haven't really known how my state of consciousness might be classified. The closest analogy for all this might be severe jet  lag.

This state is by no means an unpleasant one. But I'm hoping for respite by the time work begins on Monday.

What Does It All Mean?

One of the wonderful things about doing a production is that there are quite unexpected, delightful spin-offs that could never be planned for, yet come to seem almost inevitable aspects of the whole process. A little conversation I overheard the other day between a younger and older student reminded me of this. They were amusing themselves asking each other what exactly the plays they were involved in actually meant, neither of them being too sure. The situation was summed up in the plaintive question from one: But how do you perform in something when you don't understand what it means?

It wasn't the only conversation of this nature I heard, and I noted some fascinating ideas of what certain aspects of each play were supposed to mean which sounded to me wonderfully inventive and occasionally quite wrong-headed (though none the worse for that.) In some quarters I'd imagine there was a fair amount of exasperation over the obscurities of what we were doing, though I must say I have a bit of a problem genuinely relating to those feelings since I'm the kind who actually enjoys not 'getting' something and struggling to come to terms with it.

My answer to the question at the end of the first paragraph above, by the way, is to pretend you understand it, perform it, and see what happens. It's surprising how often just trusting the material leads you to some kind of resolution. And it's also interesting just how often you end up feeling you know what it means without being able to explain adequately what it means.

Sometimes there's a disturbing strangeness to all this. The young people I work with now are all intelligent, in many cases highly intelligent, and so there's a natural expectation that they will bring some understanding to even the most seemingly recalcitrant material. But I've also worked with youngsters in the past who were not in any sense academically able yet could bring a subtle sophistication to performance that would have been quite beyond most of the adults teaching them.

I never quite resolved the puzzle: where did their 'knowing' come from, and how were they so effortlessly able to elicit meaning from stuff that in terms of any form of assessment of which I know lay beyond their comprehension? Don't you just love impossible questions?

In A Sweat

It's been a physically demanding day. The evidence: my shirt got uncomfortably soaked in sweat on four separate occasions in the course of the day before drying out under the air-conditioning of the area in which we were rehearsing.

At one point I found myself thinking of the younger me, working as a factory labourer before going to university, recalling just how physically tough those days were (and the huge lunches I ate in the course of them to re-fuel.) It occurred to me as I was thinking about those times that I rather despised middle class people who'd never spent a day loading and unloading lorries.

It occurs to me now that in a sense I still do. You live and sometimes don't learn.

The Only Things

News of the grave illness of a friend has inevitably darkened the day. Sometimes prayer is the only thing left. And hope.

The Heat Is On

With the UK having some foul weather lately it would be tactless of me to complain about the hot spell we're undergoing in this Far Place - and I wouldn't complain anyway as my reptilian blood enjoys being warmed up. It was with the idea of basking in the heat that I set off earlier in the day for Holland Village, that and to imbibe the cup that cheers at the rather jolly Coffeebean there. Sitting outside with my somewhat over-sized cup (they do make them big these days, don't they?), enjoying a couple of chapters of Trollope, was just the thing to make me feel reasonably tickety-boo. And I managed to pick up a copy of the January/February Philosophy Now, confirming the fact that the magazine stall on the corner regularly stocks it. I added an issue of The New York Review of Books, the one reviewing Oliver Sacks's Hallucinations, just to feel complete. (By the way, my policy now is to buy literary and other worthy mags only when I've finished reading whatever's on the shelves and delivered that, in its turn, to my desk at work where other folk can borrow them.)

After that I walked back to the Hall, having caught the bus to actually get there, timing the journey at about half an hour. This resulted in damp clothing but a sense of refreshment to off-set the mild discomfort. I really should do more walking than I do, having been a great walker back in England, but this is one way in which the climate here can defeat me.

Fed Up

The Missus has gone up to Melaka over the weekend to join in various birthday celebrations, leaving me to get on with doing the necessary to keep my head above the water line (just.) Fortunately she, as always, has seen fit to provide me with a range of comestibles to ease the ache of her absence.

My consumption earlier in the evening of the other half of the shepherd's pie I had manfully made in-roads into yesterday evening almost made up for her not being around. But I'm afraid these things don't ultimately balance out. Having said which, there's much to be said for knowing she's having a good time and keeping up the commitment to family that the world of work threatens to erode.

And now I'm going to finish the muffins she left. So there.

Silences

Some three and a half decades ago I took lessons in silence. I learnt to listen to its special qualities, one of which is, of course, never quite being real silence. I leant to hold back when bubbles of noise surfaced, understanding the wisdom of sometimes letting those bubbles burst themselves. And I learnt how to know when they would not burst of their own accord and how to ensure they would not grow beyond reasonable dimensions.

It's fascinating the degree to which silence upsets people, often without them realising that this is the case.

I could listen to it all day.

As Others See

Noi and I have spent a goodly highly enjoyable portion of the last couple of days entertaining old friends from England. It's been fascinating seeing this Far Place through their eyes - a reminder that there's much to praise here. They crossed paths with a few of our students on Wednesday and were highly impressed, noting how lovely the kids are. And that's a truth it's easy to lose sight of encountering them on a day-to-day basis, but a truth is what it is.

It was also enlightening to get David's take on his many years of teaching in England. (He's been retired for some twenty years now after a very full career.) I suppose his views might be characterised as resolutely old-fashioned, being based on a firm grip of human behaviour inter-laced with a lot of common sense. Somewhere along the line these virtues have been misplaced. That's the world I see myself belonging to, I suppose. I don't think there's too much of it left.