The Knowledge

Taxi drivers in London are famous for possessing 'The Knowledge', the product of a two-to-three-year course of intensive study and practice during which they memorize streets, places, restaurants, embassies, and the quickest way to get from Point A to Point B. The information they ingest during this period is supposed to be at least equal to that of a degree course at a university (it depends on the university, one would presume). I've wondered for some time whether or not The Knowledge is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the age of GPS devices, or whether the traditional black London cab is being threatened in any way by the proliferation of 'radio taxis', or licenced minicab services which are booked by telephone and who charge by distance. You can't hail them off the street, which is a great joy of the black London cab; the sight of the lit sign above the windshield is one of the happiest images one can lay eyes on when it's freezing and the rain is coming down and you're dead tired (subliminally recalled in the opening titles of the new Doctor Who; the Tardis, after all, is the little box that will take you anywhere). I still swear by the London black cab, even if they're heavy and environmentally unfriendly, especially the old Fairways; and I still think there's a place for The Knowledge, even as I support the licenced minicabs as a more welcoming entrance route for migrants who don't want to invest in several years and the price of a real London cab.

Over the years, though, 'The Knowledge' has come to be a mystical thing, an idea of knowing every nook and cranny of London; even lifelong Londoners are in awe of it, because even they will admit they know a few neighbourhoods very well, but certainly not all of London. Not even the editor of Time Out, I'm sure, knows everything about London, and keeps the knowledge up to date. There's grungy London, glitzy London, historical London; the city as seen by foot, on bicycle, above ground, the Underground; there's New London, the areas recently colonised by immigrants from a particular region and where others would rather not go. I used to think I knew London well enough until a few friends from out of town dropped in and I was showing them around; I realised that outside of the comfort zone of my own borough, I was reaching for the same tools that every tourist uses: the A-Z, the Tube Map, the Transport for London website, and the latest Time Out or the Sunday Times Culture section. I wonder though if there's anyone who doesn't reach for these at some point. The Knowledge, at least in that sense of mastering the city, will always be just out of reach. As for taxi drivers, they just know how to drive. They do it really well, but they don't know London. Nobody does.

All about the music

'And so I said to her,' the woman went on, leaning back in her chair and waving her flute of champagne, 'it's absolutely dreadful, you know. How some people have no consideration for their loved ones, no consideration at all.' The voice was low and mannish, the sort you associated with country homes and horses and another gin and tonic, Muriel, if you please; it seemed to float out at us not just from the other side of the tree under which we had spread out picnic, but from another era. She continued: 'I myself think, personally, that the best thing you can do for a loved one is make your own preparations for your funeral. In fact I myself have already picked out all my hymns.'

Glyndebourne is one of the most magical places one can visit during the summer in Britain. It was a wonderful excuse to buy a new dress, something which I am always up for; and Kate Royal was singing the soprano role in Carmen. It's an easy opera in the sense that one knows it well and doesn't really need to watch the surtitles intently and can enjoy the music. And while one cannot fault the standard of artistry at Glyndebourne, the music really does take second priority to finding a good picnic spot and lounging about in its transcendentally beautiful gardens. It was a bit like being back in college: one did have to go to class, which could be enjoyable in its own right, but the real learning that happens at university occurs while lounging about in the quads with friends. Glyndebourne is like Glastonbury for the fat cats of the land, the well-heeled, the men with protuberant tummies who have feasted well on the fruits of the world, the women, coiffed and manicured, who have also feasted well but dieted even better. 'For instance,' she continued, 'I am sixty-seven. My sister was sixty-nine when she died and her affairs were completely in order.'

We tuned out from the conversation and set about unpacking our picnic. We felt we knew something about picnicking from our outings at Oxford, but we were surrounded by professionals, who arrived with coolers, giant hampers clinking with bone china, crystal glasses, salt shakers and pepper mills, and tables that magically erected themselves like Transformers, folding chairs, and I swear I saw one family of picnickers who brought a little houseplant that they ceremoniously installed as the centrepiece of their table. We had ordered a picnic from the in-house provider, and had unwisely declined the offer to rent us folding tables and chairs. The ground-rug they had provided was generously spacious in its tartan splendour, but the dinner in the cooler, when unpacked, was more resplendent than the mat could handle: potted lobster, cold roast beef with horseradish, and a summer pudding the way it should be, puckeringly tart yet sweet and lusciously fruity at the same time. I also learned that there is a subtle art to sprawling in the ground while dressed in formal clothes and eating a picnic while making it all seem casual and summery.

As for Carmen itself, it was not bad. Kate Royal's eagerly anticipated aria at the beginning of the third act was articulate and moving, while the rest of the cast was more than competent. But like the Proms, which we had attended the previous evening (Julia Fischer playing Brahms's violin concerto), there was less of a sense of engagement with the music than at an average evening during the concert season, or, in this case, the opera season. The venue, perhaps? The festival setting? The general atmosphere of summer and of being on holiday? Whatever it is, I'm looking forward to the start of the concert and opera season and my favourite row at the Festival Hall stalls. And I really do wonder if there is any festival that can bridge the gap between Glastonbury and Glyndebourne: I still think there's a lot I can do for my loved ones besides picking out the hymns for my funeral. How terribly inconsiderate of me.

Dinner at the Connaught

The restaurant at the Connaught, like the hotel itself, used to be a stuffy clubby little place, a bit little like eating dinner in a library, with a heavy air of masculine pulchritude hanging over everything. The food, though, was excellent, under the hotel's in-house chef, a French-British melange of choices printed on a confusing, overstuffed menu. Their signature was the second tablecloth, unrolled ceremoniously just before dessert.

Now all that has changed. I haven't stayed at the Connaught since its renovation, but the rooms are supposedly larger and brighter. The lack of a lobby is made up for by a new gallery that runs along the outside, facing Carlos Place: nothing like the see and be seen drama of Claridge's, its sister hotel, but cosy and intimate. And the restaurant is now Helene Darroze at the Connaught. Was it coincidence that they chose one of the very few female Michelin chefs to take over the most masculine of dining-rooms in London?

The room itself, incidentally, has been lightened a little, with brighter lights, softer furnishings, and less of a sense of enclosure, but the wood-panelling is still there. We went there on the evening after it opened so we expected some faults in the service but attentiveness in the kitchen; and, most of all, the assurance that the chef would be present, as, indeed, she was. She prowled about the restaurant dominated by a long table on which were piled two huge wedding cake-sized mounds of butter, and various cheeses. A bright red ham slicer glided around the restaurant, dispensing paper-thin slices of Bayonne ham.

It seemed a shame not to have anything but the degustation menu, which comes out to about £100 per person, without wine and incidentals. There is a point at which haute cuisine goes beyond a line of competence, and enters a sacred realm of expected excellence where you're not supposed to worry if the scallops are overcooked or the oysters are slightly off. All that is taken for granted: cuisine becomes a language, the meal a kind of poetry, and like poems or paintings or music, something is being said. Helen Darroze, if she were a writer, would be post-modernist masquerading as a classicist, with a wry sense of humour under a facade of po-faced seriousness. Her flavours are bold, but measured; the combinations of textures unexpected and occasionally transcendental. The standout memory of the meal was the tartare of oysters on which was poured an unctuous sauce of pureed haricots blancs: you have the wildness of the sea and the grit of the earth in a single mouthful. Other combinations jarred like a bad couplet: the ballotine of foie gras was encrusted with nutmeg and cloves, which was completely unnecessary and just wrong; it made you feel as though you were having very good food while having your teeth drilled at the dentist. Even the finale of the second dessert, 100 per cent chocolate, went one step too far with a chalky, bitter cacao base, clogging the smoothness of the other perfumes. An impressive tea menu that even good Chinese restaurants in London fail to offer was presented alongside tisanes made from fresh stalks snipped off a few plants in pots that had miraculously appeared at the centre table.

The service, which we expected to be spotty, was absolutely flawless, in that telepathic French way that kicks Mr Ramsay's out of the game. The food was intelligent and thoughtful, but when one pays that much for a meal sometimes you just want it to be damn good, and there was only a single moment (two for my date) when you close your eyes and experience an explosion of pleasure in the mouth; of the sexual kind, almost. I was wondering as we waited for our taxi in the blossom-scented lobby (we had begun at seven and it was now almost midnight) whether we had set the bar too high for Ms Darroze. I believe now that it is she who has set the bar high for herself, and in the ocean of mediocrity that is the French restaurant scene in London, this can only be a good thing.

On Facebook

How difficult it is, really, to say anything truly original about Facebook. No one really expected it to take over our internet lives the way it has; no one really understand why, out of all the social networking sites, it emerged as dominant; no one can really predict what is going to become of it, whether it will die by the wayside like so many other internet phenomena, or whether it will become an internet-within-the-internet: a safe sandbox in the wild wild west of all the rest of the internet, with its fictitious personae, its masquerading identities, its child molesters, its identity thieves, its hackers with malicious code ready to jump into your computer and turn your life upside down. And, as icing on the cake, it has Scrabulous.

What makes Facebook different is that people are, generally, who they say they are. It's easy to spot a charlatan because he or she will be lacking in friends who vouch for this person's identity; even a group who conspire to create a fictitious persona will eventually run out of numbers. And if the conspiracy grows too large; then, well, it isn't much of a conspiracy, is it? Identity on Facebook has one foot planted in 'real', i.e., non-online life; you meet someone, and then keep in touch via Facebook; you find an old classmate, and then meet up in person. Anthropologists and historians from the future who are researching the current period in wester civilisation will suffer not from paucity, but from plethora, of information. All of everyday life is archived on public and private servers, somewhere, from personal websites to darker side of humanity, in chatrooms where individuals with names such as alz36697_tg trade pictures of children or information on which public urinals are the sites of anonymous sexual activity. Facebook is, literally, the face of the internet, as opposed to its groin. It's a happy, shiny, beaming face, where all acquaintances are friends, messages are polite, and everyone gives cutesy virtual gifts and plays little games and quizzes.

It's also wonderful for studying the dynamics of social networks, as a social networking site is likely to be. Like Google's ranking system, the processing of finding and making friends operates on the basis of eigenvector centrality. It isn't so much how many friends you have, but how important your friends are. So you can be very outgoing, but your five hundred friends who have less than a hundred friends will not matter as much as the few dozen friends you have who are immensely popular. Inbound popularity (people like you and want to be friends with you) counts differently than outbound gregariousness (wanting to be friends with everyone). These people are like the Van der Luydens in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, whose scarcity makes them sought after, and whose friendship becomes a societal badge of approval. Not, of course, that I'm doing anything like counting the number of friends that I have.

The feature that I love most about Facebook is the newsfeed. For someone who has moved around a lot and left groups of friends in various cities, some as near as Oxford, some on the other side of the world, receiving a terse report that so-and-so is getting married, has broken up, has just had sex (isn't that what 'has changed from "single" to "it's complicated"' means?), etc., makes me feel connected and still part of their lives; even as, at the same time, it can drive home the reality that one is very far away.

Chasing Times

Summer is upon us without it having passed through spring; and though May is only halfway done I'll dare to throw a clout, as well as a jugful of cold water over myself to ease the heat. The foreign students have arrived in London; you can hear the nasal accents of the Americans from the other end of the tube carriage. It is blindingly, stiflingly, insufferably hot. I perched myself above the frozen food section in the supermarket and rolled myself over the open top of the deep freeze as though I were on a spit. But everyone looks good in the afternoon light as they soak in the sun at the outdoor tables of the pubs, the city is bathed in a wonderful glow with dark blacks in the shadows and subtle gradients running up the domes and rooftops, and music is in the air. I suddenly remembered Snow Patrol's hit, 'Chasing Cars', from two summers ago. Record companies who are pushing a song by having it played on the radio incessantly want this sort of association; because the song is everywhere, you don't associate it with a place, but with a time: what you were doing in your life, whom you were dating, how you were feeling. I'm currently listening to A Fine Frenzy on my player, but I opened the window and let Snow Patrol blare out into the street as I was preparing dinner, for old time's sake.

When everything is glowing in the late afternoon light I mourn the passing of Kodachrome, of Technical Pan, and of Polaroid, all of which I would have turned to on a day like this. I miss my home darkroom, also known as the kitchen, where I would have chemicals and developing trays beside the chopping boards and food. It had the advantage of being my own place, where I knew the equipment by heart, and things would be where I left them; but frankly, I'm surprised I'm alive. I'm surprised the dog survived, even after lapping at a dish filled with selenium toner. I've found darkroom space in London, albeit at the other end of the city, and for the first time I have a properly-ventilated space with automatic multigrade heads which switch contrast at the press of a switch, huge developing trays with chemicals mixed and ready for you, and several archival print washers. The main drawback is that now I don't have an excuse for my crappy prints, which look especially bad when I'm working beside professional printers, creating gloriously perfect images with efficiency and precision. I was testing out the darkroom space in the ambition of going on to do some alternative process work, so I wanted to get my head back in the game by making a few prints just to see if I still could; apparently, I can't. So I'll be roaming the city with ordinary HP5+, because that's what I know best, and doing standard 8x10's until I'm up to making interpositives for contact negatives.

As I thumbed through my archive of negatives to try my hand at the enlarger again, I realized that they were arranged more or less chronologically from the time I bought my Leica and started taking photographs, through some of the best and worst years of my life. They weren't many years; they just felt that way. I stopped long before I came to England. The summer of 2006 was a decisive one for me; it was when I started being happy again. I stopped experimenting with exotic emulsions; I ditched the heavy 75mm and learned to shoot wide, and have stayed with the 35/2.0 since then. I shot two rolls in 2006 and then went trigger happy in 2007. This summer, maybe I'll actually make a few images worth keeping.

Turning to Tibet

It's not often that I find myself compelled to write about political subjects, given that most of the time it's hard to get me to try and wrap my head around political topics and current events; but the latest wave of Tibet-related protests in London in Paris is beginning to verge into the realm of the ridiculous, with people leaping off parapets wielding fire-extinguishers or trying to smother the torch with a blanket or, presumably, just blowing really hard and hoping the flame will go out like a birthday candle. The slogan they are chanting is, for the most part, 'Free Tibet'.

How can one question the moral rectitude of the Free Tibet movement without sounding like an imperialist apologist? It should fit neatly on my ideological shelf as a self-proclaimed left-leaning liberal. In writing this I don't in any way claim to know much beyond the first thing of what the Tibet issue is all about. The problem is, I don't think most of the protesters do, either. 'Free Tibet' is a nice slogan with a nice ring to it, but as a directive it has absolutely no political reality: China is not going to partition off the Tibetan plateau and give them independence. The Chinese belief in a single unified state that must be maintained at all costs, even of violence, is an idea that dates back to the (perhaps mythological) unification in 221 BC. So what are the protesters realistically demanding of Beijing? 'Free Tibet from human right violations' makes more sense. But then why stop at Tibet? China has to reform on all sorts of human rights issues in all areas; and this is a process that will take time. Now is a good time to start; but it's not going to get done in time for the Olympics.

Beijing is giving the Tibetans what they are trying to provide to the whole country: infrastructure in the form of roads, electricity, telecommunications, and transport links to the rest of China; Tibetans don't seem to be as grateful as Beijing thinks they should be. The natural result of better connections is an influx of outsiders, internal migrant of (largely) Han Chinese from other regions. They are the owners of the homes that are being burned and shops that are being looted. The riots are thus a domestic conflict that are (very broadly) analogous to the sort of civil strife that erupted in Northern Cyprus; and the Chinese government did what all governments are supposed to do in situations such as these: try and keep the peace. The Chinese army's methods of keeping the peace are undoubtedly worth questioning, but it is easy to lose sight of the fact that this is their responsibility.

There is a great deal that can be put right in Tibet; the hold of the monasteries over the people and their faith is still strong, and this faith, both in itself and because it gives the exiled Dalai Lama hold over the region's people, make it a threat to unity and government. The problem is that an entire way of life and culture and enmeshed in this faith, and the efforts of the government in Beijing to respect and preserve this culture are clumsy at best, and ruthless at worst. Monasteries lie half-deserted; ancient scrolls are crumbling in the damp. Tibet is the problem child of the Chinese government, and the truth is probably that Beijing has a weak hold on the region, and more importantly, an even weaker understanding of what the Tibetans are unhappy about. They don't know what to do, and they don't know what's going on. Neither do the majority of the protesters.

This photo is of the interior of a temple in Tibet, taken less than two years ago.

Out and About

A old friend in town is good enough excuse to splash out on dinner and a show, welcome relief from the piousness of staying in, cooking one's own meals, and watching DVD box sets. I have discovered a hitherto dormant aspect of my brain that goes aghast at miniscule discrepancies in expenses, while the other part of the brain tries to console it by going shopping on eBay. I've had an extended attack to trying to be pious of late, partly out of guilt from the excesses of the winter holidays, and was beginning to be mired in the stygian gloom of the Exercise of Moderation.

To add to the drudgery was the prospect of spending the day sitting atop a sightseeing bus or in a capsule of the London Eye, so it was a great relief to find that my friend, whom I hadn't seen for almost seven years, had worked out in advance what she wanted to see and do in London, and we simply met up for an impromptu dinner at Bibendum, chosen on the basis of the fact that she would be coming from Sloane Square. After recent forays to Moro and the Wolseley that had left me profoundly unimpressed, my expectations weren't too high. We managed to get a table, a good one at that, without a reservation, on a Friday night, which I have to compare to the Wolseley, who stuck my date and I the previous week at half past six and ejected us onto the pavement two hours later. The food at Bibendum was excellent: not mind-blowing, but consistent across starters, mains, and dessert, which is more than I can say for the Wolseley.

The play we watched, also organised at the last minute, was Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage, Christopher Hampton's translation of her Le Dieu du Carnage, which is also playing in Paris at the moment. It hadn't opened when I booked it but it was being heavily promoted on Radio Four; I managed to avoid reading any reviews until Saturday. It is thoroughly enjoyable, and almost impossible to believe that it was not written by an Englishman about the English bourgeoisie. It was played as a comedy, which I understand from the reviews is not what Ms Reza would have wanted; but the fact that we laughed did not make the lacerations and the tragedy of the piece any less acute. Do audiences in Paris sit solemnly with furrowed brow through Le Dieu du Carnage? More intelligent people whose job it is to do so have written many reviews and analyses of this play, but I must point out that the telephone, the intrusion of the outside in the dynamics of the two middle-aged couples, defined them as adults and as children: one character's mother constantly calling reduced him to infantile rage; whereas their son, calling at the end of the play, forced them to become grown-ups once again, to adopt the authority of one who knows what one is doing.

After the play was done my friend wanted to go clubbing, which was a perfectly reasonable idea since it was ten o' clock on a Saturday night, and she was leaving the next day. It was with great relief that I was able to indulge in my Exercise of Moderation and go home to my torrents of the last few episodes of House, which should have downloaded by this time.

Playing catchup on television

The holidays went by in a catchup blitz of staying current with what's showing on television these days. Most of the year I do try to spend my time outside of work reading, listening to music, and thinking noble thoughts, in addition, of course, to surfing and clicking much too often on the 1-click purchase button on Amazon Prime. But during the holidays my brain goes on vacation as well, and I allow myself to slide into the guilty pleasure of hours with the medium I grew up with and still love the most.

Heroes picked up its pace, finally, though creator Tim Kring should stop apologising to his viewers; it's his show and he can take it in any direction he wants. If we don't like it, we'll stop watching. Season One ended with a bang and the eleven episodes of Season Two that have been aired continue to be the most interesting programming on the small screen. Battlestar Galactica is wisely wrapping up with its main cast largely intact, a graceful and well-timed exit. Grey's Anatomy, on the other hand, should have ended with the third season: it would have been right on so many levels. Meredith gets her man, Christina has an unhappy ending, and they move forward from their internships. The attempt to try and squeeze more storylines from these characters is making a travesty of them, and Ellen Pompeo is looking even more haggard than ever. Brothers and Sisters chugs along gracefully in Mexican soap-opera fashion, with good-looking characters and fuzzy feel-good family scenes: it feels great while you're watching it, but if you blink for a moment then you cease to care.

Of the new series that started this autumn, I found Journeyman incomprehensible; Bionic Woman showed promise but unravelled all to quickly to be Alias's idiot ugly sister; Damages was sharp and tightly-written but seemed to wrap itself up after thirteen episodes. If the second part is at least as good as the first it will be a pleasant surprise. But the future doesn't look bright for any of the shows: the writers' strike means that the hiatus will begun soon; and even if the strike were to end today, the weekly momentum of production will have been lost.

And I still mourn the cancellation of the best series that appeared last year and ended after a one season's worth of great writing: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was to the West Wing what Firefly was to Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer: a one season coda to a seven-year opus. Studio 60 was intelligent, sexy, and involving, but couldn't get out of the shadow of the Wing. It was with a sinking feeling that I picked up the remote and powered down the television. With great reluctance, I decided that it might actually be time to get a life.