Somehow the lovely Autumn managed to land some of the very hard-to-come-by tickets for a very reasonable ten quid a pop. This might have accounted our seats at the very top of the balcony, where people with standing tickets peeped over our shoulders from the walkway.

The play begins just outside Nikolai Ivanov’s farm house. Kenneth Branagh plays the hero who’s trying to read a book when Borkin, the estate manager and a larky chancer, creeps up behind him and lets off his gun. Ha! Ivanov is not amused. This soon becomes the pattern for much of the play. He’s plagued by layabouts who slide through life on charm, while he cracks up.

The Count, Ivanov’s tall, louche uncle is another of these characters who doesn’t really understand or sympathize with all his moping. The uncle is poor, despite his title, and apparently whiles away the hours over tea and chitchat with Ivanov’s wife. Anna, played by a suitably consumptive and increasingly disillusioned Gina McKee, comes from a wealthy Jewish family who’ve disowned her for marrying a gentile.

These slightly lost characters are believable but also very amusing. The play incongruously balances tragedy with comedy. As this production is adapted by Tom Stoppard I wondered if it was being played for laughs. It turns out Chekhov wrote it as a comedy, but as the play progresses and we see the full horror of Ivanov’s state of mind it’s not much fun.

Kenneth Branagh conveys his character’s depression deftly, without swamping the stage. Shuffling around, you could almost miss him. Although Ivanov has a pile of debt and has fallen out of love with his wife, this don’t seem to lie at the root for this gloom. He’s simply depressed. The play is almost a study of mental illness rather than an examination of an iniquitous society that drives one to despair. Unlike Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Ivanov believes things could still turn out alright if only he could pull himself together.

This doesn’t sound very exciting, but the laughs don’t stop. In one later scene three or four characters are all crying, leaving the audience in hoots. Even as ideals are compromised, debts pile ever higher and hope vanishes it’s infected with absurdity, and that can be pretty funny.

I wonder how such horrors would have affected him, but all I’ve managed to get out of my mum is that he was a very nice man. He spent much of his life as a bachelor and everyone thought he’d never get married. Then quite suddenly he announced that he was engaged, and spent the rest of his life married to Aunt Viola. They were very happy together, apparently.

Over breakfast, I read a review of a new book The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste, a new looking at human waste and how we dispose of it. The review mentioned that “Eighty per cent of illness is caused by or linked to the presence of faeces in water. Diarrhoea kills more children than Aids or TB.” That’s something to consider: it sounds like a massacre.

According to the World Health Organisation diarrhoea “causes 4% of all deaths and 5% of health loss to disability. It is most commonly caused by gastrointestinal infections which kill around 2.2 million people globally each year, mostly children in developing countries.” These infections are commonly caused by contaminated water. I picture yet more piles of bodies.

It sounds like some sort of action must be in order. Perhaps there should be a world Poopy Day or even Ploppy Day to provide water and sanitation to those communities who lack it. I’m sure Uncle Eric wouldn’t mind.

If you’re facing the sack - make sure you do it in style. Last Thursday a mate was told that they might be made redundant. She works in magazines and the downturn in advertising meant either she or one of her colleagues would get the bad news the next day.

This magazine house is based in the centre of London. So, during her sombre lunch-break she popped into Urban Outfitters to see if there was something stylish to cheer her up. There she saw the perfect top. A t-shirt with a revolutionary slogan:

Je participe,
Tu participes,
Il participe,
Nous participons,
Vous participez,
Ils profitent.

The slogan comes from the May ‘68 student protests in France. It mimics the verb conjunction of ‘participate’ - I participate, you participate, he participates, we participate, you participate, they profit. Ideal for wearing to your potential sacking!

Friday morning she put on the t-shirt and riled attitude, but the announcement was postponed until Monday. No one noticed the slogan either. It did make a good anecdote and luckily today she was told she keeps the job. For now. Next time she’ll have to get a few more people to participate.

Someone had already sent me The Onion’s wry reflection: ‘Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress‘. This was soon followed by the more cynical slant of the British pretender to Onionyness, the Daily Mash: ‘America buys all that change bullshit’. Hmmm.

I confess I’m not familiar with the finer details of Mr Obama’s policy, nor the actual potential for change in a country in dire financial straits. I’ll also try not to think about the bright hopes when Blair was elected, or even the entrenched power structures. But surely Barack must be better than the maniac Bush. History has been made, and at least for now, black is the new black and I too am Obama Barmy.

Meanwhile in Gotham, the cheeky Mr Banksy opened up a pet store filled with curious animals. So strange were this creatures that the shop has already packed up and moved out. Luckily they were caught on video before being released into the wild.

Poem 42

n

OthI

n

g can

s

urPas

s

the m

y

SteR

y

of

s

tilLnes

s

– e. e. cummings
from 73 poems

See Psalm 46:10 and Dennis Wilson’s Be Still.

When America sneezes, the rest of the world wishes they’d used a hanky…

The US economy looks like it might have a nasty cold and the rest of us are coming down with bird flu. What’s particularly galling is that we just have to put up with the nutters that Americans vote into power. They then steer their country and us up that famous stinky creek. Now you can have a go at voting at www.iftheworldcouldvote.com, where more than 500,000 people have cast their fictional vote.

Unfortunately, there’s no cure for the common cold.

It was nothing more than a dream. I only made it to Scotland for the first time in May of this year, and that was only to Edinburgh. But Tom Woodbridge acted on his dream - he moved to live on Skye twenty years ago. To live in that most unusual of dwellings - a bothy.

I never quite figured out what I’d do to earn my keep in my tiny croft. Mr Woodbridge must have found that quite a difficult question too. In the end he plumped for getting 99% of his body tattooed with leopard spots, changing his name to Tom Leppard and earning cash by being photographed as Leppard Man. It wasn’t an option I’d considered.

Sleeping under a tin roof, in a tumbledown croft on only a polystyrene and foam bed wasn’t something I’d imagined either. Nor was having to canoe to get my weekly supplies part of my plan. I didn’t want to freeze necessarily, but just escape the disappointments of city life.

Mr Leppard’s life seemed to be a curious mix of Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s book about living the simple life in a small shed at Walden Pond, and the Jim Rose Circus. Thoreau says , that at one point he used to think that the boxes used to store tools by railway workmen would make an ideal sleeping spot. Each box, 6 foot by 3 foot, would not only be cheap shelter, but “you could sit up as late as you pleased”.  He must have meant that you could stay awake lying on one side as late as you pleased. Neither tattoos nor bothies are mentioned in Walden, but they fulfill our ‘coarser and simpler wants’ and you won’t keep banging your head on the lid.

One of my colleagues comes from the Isle of Lewis,  the most westerly of the Outer Hebrides. McEm says some of the locals can out do any incomer for spartan, solitary living. One of his former neighbours made it to 103 by living in a sparsely furnished cottage with his TV tuned to fuzz, and was digging his own peat and vaulting his garden gate well into his eighties. Although his longevity might have had something to do with the two decades he spent in bed as an invalid from the age of 20.

Leppard Man finally decided to come back because he felt he was getting too old for such hardship, especially the treacherous three mile weekly canoe trip. Now, he’s adapting to walls and a roof.  I never managed to figure out how I’d earn my crust up there, and somehow ruses involving body modification never entered my mind.

The other strange thing about this meltdown is that everyone seems to be getting in much more of a tizz over this than the Iraq or Afghan wars. Surely, the death of thousands of innocents is far worse than economic hardship, even if millions of us are left with no jobs, money and eating leaves to survive. Better alive than dead.

Our bare-headed Prime Minister, Mr Brown thinks he can spend his way out of our problems. Some say that’s what eventually lifted the Great Depression.

An example that the Prime Minister gave of this increased spending was to train people to lag the roofs of the elderly. Sounds like quite a good idea, although I’m not sure it’ll more than a scratch the surface.

The reason Brown thinks lagging is a good idea is because the building regulations have changed. The amount of insulation required by legislation used to be 100 mm, which is fits nicely between the joists in your loft. Now the regulations require 270 mm of insulation – a thick snowdrift of the stuff.

Earlier in the year a member of Lewisham Council’s Energy Effiency team came round  and told me how to make the flat more energy efficient. They left a leaflet for a company that provides a subsidised loft insulation service. ‘Subsidised’ set off money-saving alarm bells, so I arranged for the loft to be lagged.

It turns out that lagging lofts is pretty easy and I reckon I could have done it myself. Also the insulation itself is not too expensive (Wickes even have a ‘two for one’ offer), so there wasn’t much of a saving either. But at least the loft shouldn’t allow precious warmth to escape in the deep mid-winter.

The flat is T-shaped and Dawsetway, the insulation people, wouldn’t insulate the back loft over the bedroom. They’d only lag the one in the front of the house as the back loft is only about a foot and a half high and they (reasonably) thought they wouldn’t be able to get down there. I, however, unreasonably perhaps, thought I would.

Last weekend, with my head-torch strapped on, I opened the back hatch and crawled inside.  This involved flopping myself onto boards layed across the joists, dragging my torso inside as far as possible and then slowly folding my just-short-enough legs through the hole. A broomstick was useful to prod it down to the end of the 10 metre space. Finally I finished after numerous journeys out to cut off more lengths of insulation. I was filthy, itchy but very satisfied, and also looking forward to a ready brek glow of energy efficiency.

I am all for insulation, it makes sense in terms of finance, having a warmer house and reducing use of a finite natural resource – gas. It’s a win, win, win situation. We’d better not forget a fourth ‘win’ too – the glow of satisfaction… or possibly smugness. However there is a problem with deeper insulation. As you’re not meant to put anything on the insulation, all your lovely loft storage space disappears. In a box-sized flat like mine, that’s not good.

Necessity is the mother of invention (and the Mothers of Invention were Frank Zappa’s band), so a platform was called for. This would be a structure above the 20 odd centimetres of insulation where which I could store stuff.

I had an idea about how to build a platform, but I thought I’d ask someone with a bit more DIY experience. So, I tried one of the guys down at Wickes. He said I shouldn’t bother with the insulation, unless I was renting out the flat and it would be subject to inspections by the council. I explained that it was a bit too late for that, so he suggested laying secondary lengths of wood along the top of joists, and then put a board across the top. As the insulation was lying at right angles to the joists I couldn’t very easily follow that plan.

My new loft platform hovering above the thick layer of insulation

This meant I would follow my original plan. I screwed small legs into the joists (or into the boards already screwed into the joists, where I used to store stuff) and popped a board on top. Each leg was about 25 cm high and had a supporting prop sticking out of it at 45 degrees. I used five legs – there was one in the middle – then screwed the board into them. I wouldn’t have a disco on it, in fact probably might not walk on it, but it’s definitely strong enough to support a few hundred CD cases.

One of the legs used to support the platform

It turns out you can insulate your loft with something called Celotex, which are hard insulation boards, and you can store stuff on this if you screw wooden boards on top. As it’s more expensive I doubt that’s what the new cadres of government loft insulators will use - so there’s a business idea: an easy to assemble storage platform for the millions of houses who find their lofts have been over run by piles of scratchy yellow stuff.

Richard ‘I really don’t like this whole ‘God’ business’ Dawkins is supporting the enterprise financially and spiritually, sorry that should be morally. The idea is to provide an alternative message to these fire and brimstone ones that you often see on buses telling us to repent on pain of eternal hell fire. I reckon they should have written ‘There’s probably no afterlife’ or ‘There’s probably no divine judgement’, or ‘God is beyond all that’ or even ‘God is Godless’ but I like the second bit.

If you want to donate to another humourous take on fire and brimstone religion, you could give £25 to Chris Morris’s Jihadi Comedy and get to feature in it. I’m hoping it’s more Brass Eye than Nathan Barley - ie Funny (with a capital F). Mr Morris is quoted in Broadcast saying  that the comedy will seek to do for Islamic terrorism what Dad’s Army did for the Nazis by showing them as “scary but also ridiculous”. I only remember two Nazis in Dad’s Army, downed airmen who were a bit dull. But perhaps he meant the Nasties in ‘Allo ‘Allo - obsessing over the ‘Madonna with the Big Boobies’, or in this case the ‘Virgins with the Lovely Raisins.’

Push into a street-market and there’s no way you’re a passive observer. The traders yelling in your ear, the smell of the fishmongers’, dodging other shoppers. Women wandering through the throng councelling us to ‘Lift up our hearts’. Truthfully, I’m not sure you’ll find the latter in all markets, but you will in Deptford Market.

I made a second trip down there on Saturday and the God botherers were once again competing for my attention with the artists. Across the road at the south end of the High Street there’s some paved open space. It’s about the size of a basketball pitch, open to the road on two sides with an abstract mural on the far wall and shops on the other. A trail of earth crossed the space, ending near the mural. At the end of the mole-trail sat a table topped with a music system and a row of flowers in pots.

The music was playing for a woman dancer dressed entirely in black. She darted around her performance space, weaving through the air; then stopping dead consulted an A4 pad in her hand. Above her two men in paint-spattered white boilersuits retouched the mural. On the otherside of the square a man in a worn black overcoat and greying beard told us to ignore those performance artists. “Look at my eye landing pad”, he roared. On two boards screwed together by hinges was his eye landing pad, a painting of a  helicopter landing pad surrounded by the city. “Let your eyes land on my eye landing pad!”

Further into the market a Japanese woman encouraged to take things from her stall “all for free”…”all from the Thames.” She’d stretched out an old sheet and covered it with small  red and dun coloured bits of old brick and dark green glass, all rounded by the tides. A huge pile of furry, green rope sat to one side, next to the skeleton of an ancient roller hoover. It had definitely all come from the river. A female customer was crouched down putting pieces in her old Tescos bag. “All for free”.

You definitely don’t find this stuff in Tescos. Later, when passing the dancers in the afternoon, there was a new act: two slender, black stockinged legs danced a riverdance type jig - each covered by a large black dustbin.

Autumn and I made a trip down to Deptford High Street last Saturday to stock up the fridge and we found a different world. A huge anchor guards the south end of the street, and nearby a choir of about ten people were praising the lord. “Jesus is alive” the leader sang, “Jesus is alive” responded his choir before launching into a song. Further down the crowded street, market stalls sell Christian literature and music. At the railway bridge a crowd of West African men and women dressed in brightly coloured robes had just left church. The women have huge, starched turbans called gele and men wear smaller round hats with the one corner of the top folded over, a fila.

You Tell Me Again I’m Not Interested

Near the north end of the street a small shop front was filled with marketing signs and stickers – all without any writing. A luminous, but empty oval waited for a special offer, a copy-free credit card symbol avoided the crunch. “Must be Goldsmith’s students” Autumn mused. Another shop, painted white, had been turned into an ‘artists space’. Inside a short film called Studs, apparently a tribute to Jackie Collins’ 1969 novel The Stud, played synchronised swimming and muffled monologues on a nine-minute loop. The film’s minder explained this was all part of Deptford X, an art festival that has been running in the area for 10 years.

Turning back we went for a coffee in The Deptford Project, an old railway carriage that’s also been painted white now operating as a cafe. At the back they have an Elvis-themed loo in a garden shed, from where I could see a flea market in the yard next door and a man working with a sewing machine in the one behind the train.

The man using the sewing machine was making black arm bands to commemorate ‘the death of art’. His name was Ruben, and he wore a battered fedora and drove a battered 1972 Citroën, parked at the other side of the yard. He offered to turn us into art which involved putting on his tubular suit that makes you look like an Anthony Gormley sculpture, then he makes a pastel sketch. Of course, all the pictures look identical.

Suddenly, I’m art

The rest of the yard was filled with more artwork. A spoof police incident sign warning of ‘A Moment of Random Happiness’, a Tomb for the Unknown Shopper and some sheds. Each one was made by a different artist, there was a yellow shed that rocked, a shed with wallpaper and chandeliers, and a shed with a long periscope that allows you to see areas of Deptford that you probably had no idea existed.

I wondered what sort of a readership some the pages I’ve written have received. It turns out Alfred Sorensen was viewed 149 times in September, Bob Roberts (Folksinger) received 194 hits and my most popular page United States v Canada (1844) got 500. Wowzers, what popular topics! I’d be happy if these obscure topics could read the popularity of even the International Year of the Potato - 3569 hits.

Here’s the top ten, as of August, 2008:

1. Special:Search 432,012,353
2. Main Page 194,201,739
3. Special:Random 44,780,773
4. 2008 Summer Olympics 4,437,251
5. index.html 4,350,551
6. Wiki 4,030,068
7. Sarah Palin 4,004,853
8. Special:Watchlist 3,646,671
9. Michael Phelps 3,476,803
10. YouTube 2,685,316

Dark mountains loom over the centre of the island as you approach Corsica across the strait from Sardinia. Behind, the pink and yellow houses of Santa Theresa Gallura tumble down to the small beach. Ahead, high cliffs topped with the double-cream ramparts of Bonifacio and then the hills.

It was these mountains we’d come to walk. We’d taken the slow, but interesting, route to Corsica. Flying to Cagliari (Caggers) in the south of Sardinia, bussing it up to the north, then getting the hour-long ferry over the Strait of Bonifacio, before a final bus to Propriano on the western coast of Corsica.

We’d decided to walk the Maré a Maré Sud, which winds its way from the seaside town of Propriano in the west to the Porto Vechio on the east coast. Corsica is criss-crossed with hiking paths, including the hardest in Europe, the fearsome, 180 km GR20. Our five-day amble through the wooded hills sounded slightly more manageable than the other 15-day slog across the bare mountains tops.

To make things easy the path is marked with orange flashes painted on rocks and trees so walkers shouldn’t get lost. Even better, there’s no need to take a tent or cumbersome and heavy camping equipment, because there are Gîtes d’Etape, or lodges, after every days’ journey. The gîtes provide dinner and breakfast, as well as a bed, for a quite modest price.

The orange flashes are visible from either direction. Most French guidebooks seemed to prefer walking from the east to west, but we went in the other direction, following the path taken by a journalist in The Times last year.

It was nine years since I’d last my last trek, when I dragged my younger sister on a six-day walk up the precarious path to the Milam Glacier in the Himalayas. Before that I’d done a post-GCSE trek in North Wales. It was also a school trip when Autumn last did any trekking. So, neither of us were terribly experienced, but then how difficult can trekking be? After all, we could both spend the day wandering around London no problem.

I’ll admit that visiting Corsica was my idea; and Autumn would end up paying the price. I had my first inkling of the island’s natural splendour and it being a good place for a walking holiday when my dad was still alive. One night when visiting him down in Languedoc, a show came on the telly featuring a group of youngsters hiking through spectacular grey mountains. There was a murder, but as it was all in French so I couldn’t really follow it. Still, it looked like a great place for a summer holiday, as long as you could avoid being bumped off. Later, when the tumour felt its way around the inside of his skull and he became delirious, my dad would repeat his idea that we’d all go on holiday ‘en Corse’ when he got better. Unfortunately the tumour won out. Still, Corsica had lodged itself in my head. Plus, after last year’s trip to Rhodes, a cheapo bucket-shop package holiday, something more adventurous was called for.

Starting at Propriano gave us the chance to make some final preparations. I got out a final handful of Euros to pay for the Gîtes, and finally bought a map of the route, while Autumn picked up a bag of dried prunes. We soon came to realise why a prune company sponsors both a female cycling team and Le Club Alpin Français.

We started walking the seven kilometres to the first gîte around 5 pm. After 20 minutes down a busy road, you turn off onto a quieter road through yellow fields for the walk to the head of the valley. The long white gîte sits high on the valley side, and we heard voices spilling from the terrace long before we wind our way up to the front door. Dinner was about to be served by the time we arrive.

U Fracintu is a ‘Gîte - Hotel’ so has both rooms and a dormitory. We opted for a room, but as all guests share tables at dinner we couldn’t entirely cocoon ourselves in our own company. Sharing tables and dormitories, stories and advice soon became a habit. Food was served on the long terrace hanging above the valley side.

Our first new acquaintance was Nicholas, who at the age of 29 was working in a campsite on the east coast of the island. Brought up in Grenoble, he’d studied International Relations in Italy and was now unsure what to do with his life. Lucky for us, he spoke flawless English, mastered over a couple of summers in Australia and New Zealand.

Over wine, Autumn and I talked about life in London and Nicholas of the short comings of capitalism. On the one hand he didn’t want a meaningless corporate job, but he still hadn’t struck on anything that he felt he could devote himself to. I could sympathise. Finally we said goodnight and headed to bed, hoping for a good night’s sleep before our first day of real trekking.

Meanwhile the techies are fighting it out with a search engine freestyle battle.

“I saw the ‘best’ minds of my generation destroyed by marketing…”

Pizza Elena

Prepare the pizza base, cover with passata and mozarella and cook.
Once cooked, top with finely chopped celery and tomato.
Sprinkle liberally with rocket.

Turn the heating on and forget the chill winds blowing in from all quarters.

I think it’s a bit out of date and might be based on the last census in 2001 as it records members of my family living in Cheshire, and they’ve moved since then. I’m also not sure if all countries are covered equally, because if you look up a South Asian surname like Mian you’ll find most of them live in north eastern Italy. Still, it’s quite fun. You can put rude names in too: the Penis family seem to be concentrated in Spain, while the Bums hang out in Austria. Ah, the joy of demographics.

Dubya seems to fit the bill as an underground radical Islamist, like an ‘I grew Hemp’ stamp on a dollar note. The previously sleepy, slowly secularising Muslim world has seen furious extremism explode. The US army is stuck in two doomed, unpopular and expensive wars. And now his ‘piece de Islamist resistance’ the economy is racing down the tubes faster a turd from Usain Bolts toilet.

Last year the New York Police Department intelligence division drew up a study called Radicalisation in the West: The Homegrown Threat that looks at the development of ‘homegrown’ terrorist groups. Although, being called ‘Mr George W Bush’ isn’t one of the criteria that the study isolates as key in radicalisation, he does meet others.

Before choosing violence these radicals begin as “unremarkable” middle class individuals. Successful at university, initially they start as neither criminal, radical nor even particularly religious. Now, although Dubya wasn’t a bright student, unremarkable he was, is and ever shall be.

There are four stages of radicalisation: phase one is ‘pre-radicalisation’ where a frustrated individual looks for meaning in life. It’s common knowledge that Dubya was off the rails and drifting in his early adulthood. In phase two the literal Salafi-jihadist ideology is discovered which at last provides ‘self-identification’ and meaning for this lost soul. Again we know that Dubya found God – could it be that this was not the evangelical Christian one we have been lead to believe?

Possessing an all consuming, irrational desire to invade Iraq, and to remove all controls on the market fits nicely with characteristics of phase three. In this stage, of ‘indoctrination’, the subject’s views harden and dominate their life completely. Their personality is now ready to act.

Finally, they act – jihadisation – and “self-designate themselves as holy warriors”. This process is sped up by a type of ‘group-think’ involving hanging around with like minded types… going on outward bound courses and what not. Or playing golf with Dick Cheney while discussing dreams of crippling the US economy, and how they could start a religious (in this case, radical Islamist) revival. Voila.

Meanwhile in London a bin was set on fire by feminist Muslims. The bin and the apparently harmless fire inside it, was next to the house of publisher of a book that gives prominence to Aisha, one of the Prophet’s wives. The ruse was an apparently an attempt to attract publicity to the book and the importance of Aisha as both scholar and role model as well as the importance of women in the slightly male-centred Islamic narrative. These arsonists did a splendid job – millions have now ordered the novel from Amazon, and are aware of Aisha’s peculiar beauty.