Tag: Christmas

That Time of Year #5: A train called Barry – Pants Panto and Creative Mishears.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

One of the good things about having ears blocked enough to not quite hear things straight, is that some of the mishears are quite evocative. Getting out of a train the other day, the following, rather poignant message came over the speaker – “We have now reached our destination. When you leave the train, please take all of your longings with you…”

The C2C train that I got out of in Grays station had a name plate. Barry Flaxman. Not quite Thomas the Tank Engine, but quirky in its own way. C2C being owned by TrenItalia, you’d expect something zappier and well travelled, the Marco Polo perhaps, or the Amerigo Vespucci. But those would work better for high speed rail over continental distances. If the Belt and Road Initiative was a European enterprise heading East to Samarkand, Ulan Bator and Beijing, instead of vice versa, the locomotives might have names like that. For a short haul commute between Southend and Fenchurch Street, Barry it is.

An appropriate honour for a man from Southend who spent his life from 1949 onwards campaigning for passenger improvements, died of a heart attack on his way to view a new train in 1998 and whose “timetabling knowledge was the driving force behind the electrification scheme benefits of the early 1960s that brought such a step change in journey time and frequency.” The world is full of barely acknowledged contributions to life being a tiny bit better, made by people unknown outside their own field and tiny circle. Its a pity that the train just has the name, with no further information, leaving it to stand alone in almost anonymous obscurity.

All the same, perhaps Barry himself might have been a bit cross that the train with his name on it was having a problem with its connecting doors on the day I went down; making the carriage with the toilet in it innaccesible from the rear coach. Having indulged in a coffee from Fenchurch Street, which seemed like a good idea at the time, this was becoming more and more of a problem as the stations counted down.

Dagenham Dock,

Rainham,

Purfleet,

Grays.

The train glided into its final destination in what felt like mocking sloth and was in no hurry to let the doors bleep their escape signal. Limping at speed to the toilets in the Precinct and just about making it, or so I thought; there being an “Out of Order” sign improvised in cardboard across the Mens. Knowing that I would never make it back to the toilets in Morrisons before suffering leaks on a grand scale, I expressed my frustration at slightly “Broken Britain” with a satisfying fricative explosion

“F*$*£!!!!”

“No need to swear”, says a concerned woman passing by.

“There’s a disabled toilet. You can use that. Are you disabled?”

“I will be in a minute if I can’t use it”.

My nephew, who is a very talented musician, is now in the band for this year’s Aladdin Panto, with Gok Wan, a Loose Woman and the surviving Chuckle Brother. Most of the music in Panto is what they call “stings”; musical sound effects that punctuate the story and draw attention to jokes. Ba -boom – tisshhh – Ta – daaah! – Wa, Wa Waaaaa! That sort of thing. Not massively taxing, and not a lot of room for solo improvisation, but quite fun.

Meanwhile, at the Thameside Theatre, this year’s version of Snow White has just one named actor – Luke Coldham (who may, or may not, be a cold ham) – playing “Nurse Kelly” – a character I don’t recall either from Grimm or Disney – who looms very large and central in the poster. None of the other actors merits a mention, but they are all smiling happily, if anonymously, enough. Its possible that this is Panto’s answer to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, where he takes two minor but essential characters out of Hamlet and makes their offstage existential angst the centre of the play, posing the fundamental question of what Non Playable Characters think of when they are not being played, but probably not.

And SMILE! A broadside of dentistry to brighten the bleak midwinter – and not a dwarf in sight. What have they DONE with them? The other acts being advertised at the Thameside, and Civic Centre, have a definite nostaglic quality: The Upbeat Beatles, The Jersey Boys, The Roy Orbison story: appealing to people who remember 1963 and think the world has gone to pot since; partly because the Beatles did themselves and got a lot less upbeat and a lot more quirky as a result. I’m not knocking the concerts, I expect they are good fun, albeit in a safe retread sort of way, but its the sheer uniformity of the cultural offer – nothing for anyone under 60, no cultural influences other than an aging transatlantic mainstream: like Radio 2 forty years ago. And the only other piece of Theatre on offer is a stage version of “Allo! Allo!”, the 1980s situation comedy in which the situation is the Nazi occupation of France reimagined as farce. Always good for a laugh, if you don’t have much grasp of what that was actually like.

Luke probably gets a mention, not because he might have been on Eastenders once in 2013, but because he’s a Thameside Panto regular – having played Sarah the Cook in Dick Whittington (who?) Widow Twanky in a former Aladdin production, Dame Dolly Doughnut in Peter Pan, Stanley in One Man Two Guv’nors and must do it well enough to be a bit of a draw. He’s also played Maximilian Robespierre at the Royal Opera House, so he’s not a one trick pony (unless he’s playing him in drag). Like everyone in the Arts, you get the work where you can.

Meanwhile, the Guardian quotes Keira Knightly as saying that her latest Xmas set thriller will “ruin Christmas”. Many of us think that she and Richard Curtis did that already with Love Actually, which will probably be running on a loop on most channels for most of the holiday.

Omicronic Christmas

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Just outside Sainsbury’s a mask lies on the paving stones like a delicate blue lifeboat on a hard, flat sea.

The food bank boxes by the entrance are fuller that usual, and people have donated bottles of wine.

The elderly man who regularly begs outside Aldi sits holding a piece of bread, entranced by the pigeon that perches on his knee to peck it. The bird flies off as someone puts money in his cup. The old man looks up, nods, and touches his heart.

A teenage boy in an immaculate white kaftan just out of Islamic Saturday school zips along the pavement on an electric scooter.

Distracted and tired, I drop a saucepan of baked beans in the kitchen. Baked Bean shrapnel explodes everywhere. Over the floor. Up the fridge, Up the wall and blinds as far as the ceiling. All those CSI stories about “bloodsplatter patterns” come to mind. This morning I discover bean juice splatter on the windows that had got through the blinds. Forceful.

Reading a book about murder in Ancient Rome – A Fatal thing happened on the way to the Forum by Emma Southon. The author stresses that murder of slaves in Ancient Rome was not considered murder, but damage to property; and it occurs to me that the public school products that currently run our government, and most institutions in this country, received the benefit of a classical education. Which explains a lot.

At the bottom of Buck Lane, a family traipses home after Xmas shopping; Mum and two boys. The smaller boy is dragging along a black rubbish bag filled with supposed goodies with a very disgruntled air. It bumps along the pavement. A lot of the kids I see out and about look angry at the moment. Sometimes too much is too much.

An Ad by the side of the road appeals to people “Don’t be alone in the festive period” which is a haunting warning.

The horribly thin Santa that hangs from the side of one of the houses on Kingsbury Road is back. He looks more than ever like a prisoner hanging in a dungeon in a festive suit. Last year, he was left hanging there until March as a forgotten and forlorn reminder of Christmas just past.

In the flats opposite – Mountaire Court, Ernest Trownbridge’s last hurrah, all tall, late medieval, Tudor fantasy in apartment form – a couple of windows sport Christmas lights. One has soothing dark pastel greens, blues and reds that twinkle slowly and gently like a massage for the eyes and brain. The other rapidly flashes yellow in an intense alarm signal staccato that can only be described as a visual klaxon; and makes me seriously grateful not to have epilepsy.

At the end of Handel’s Messiah on Radio 3, I usually well up during the last bars of the Amen chorus -as the soaring fugue gets too much for my nerve endings to cope with. But this time it was the announcer that got to me. She talked about the audience standing and applauding, so grateful for this communal experience that they had missed for so long, and stating in a defiant sort of way that the choir was going to carry out a full programme of concerts over the Xmas period. That was last Tuesday. And now, the lights are going out in concert halls all over the world, and it won’t all be over by Christmas. Weeping felt like appropriate.

Of Small Santas and Parakeets.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

On the bus, two pairs of identical twin toddlers poke each other in the face and giggle. One is wearing a bright scarlet wooly hat with two pom-poms on the top that enrages her; and she angrily takes it off every time her mum jams it on – a lifetime battle of wills in the making. The girls are dressed identically in sugar and spice pink and scarlet; to underline their distinctive similarity. “Look. I’ve got two of the same one.” The boys are in a mustard sludge colour; making the same point in a more “puppy dog tail” way. And so, we are branded and colour coded before we can talk. I recall one of the six year olds I used to try to teach to read saying very indignantly to me “Boys can’t wear PINK!” I was wearing a pink sweater at the time. I think the word he meant was “daren’t.”

Out the bus window at the bottom of the hill waiting to turn onto the Edgware road, climbing up the wall of one of those painfully thin first generation council houses that seem to exist nowhere other than Barnet – “Honey! I shrunk the house” – homes fit for heroes who weren’t quite heroic enough – there is a very small Santa seemingly caught mid burglary. Perhaps its his size, that of a wiry goblin, or the lack of any visible support or props – no sleigh or reindeer or even a ladder – that makes him look so menacing.

In a sudden break with the norm, a huge chatter of Parakeets flashes across the milky sky above the Sainsbury store, glinting green in the pallid sunlight; still an exciting shock to see, like finding a bright shoal of tropical fish in a dull suburban pond.

In the store. a bloke wearing foam antlers looks miserably at the bananas.

In the evening, Christmas lights glow in windows – some elegantly soothing, in white or deep colours like a collection of gem stones in stained glass – some overloaded and crass, an embodiment of the principle that more is all too often less, and flashing manically like alarms – inducing just the thoughts of panic, migraine and epilepsy you need for a season of peace.