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.

His Dark Immaterials

The two hours spent watching the first installment of His Dark Materials, on screen as The Golden Compass, weren't a complete waste of time. The movie was not unpleasant: fluffy bears, snowy scenes, and a world where everyone has pets; and, like every action adventure filmed in the last few years, features Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee. The Sunday Times gave it four stars. The Economist's Intelligent Life placed Pullman in a succession with the Bible and Milton, and wrote that the author expected just a handful of people to 'get' the story, but found it a pleasant surprise when it achieved the cult status that it did.

I think I am one of those few, we unhappy few, we band of heathens, who don't get it. I have to admit to not having read the books, though not for want of trying; if it is as representative of the novels as Disney's The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was, then perhaps I am doing Pullman a great disservice. I both agree and disagree with Pullman when he says that literature should be a 'theatre of morality'; I think that some literature is, and has great value as such; and then some literature isn't, and that's okay too. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, which he disparages, isn't; but it is firmly rooted in another tradition, that of the epic, with clearly defined forces of good and evil; and there is tremendous popular appeal in this because you don't have to think about what makes them good or bad.

What makes The Golden Compass confusing is its resemblance to Lord of the Rings (not just in casting Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee) but in the trilogy format, and the strange resemblance to a Bond film in having a secret laboratory with white curvy walls in the middle of nowhere. Now in a Bond film this would be inhabited by an arch-villain with clearly evil intentions (e.g., blowing up the world), but here the great revelation is a machine that separates kids from their pets; okay, daimons. Which doesn't really seem like enough provocation for the 'war that is coming'. Without the ramifications of allegory, The Golden Compass, as a film, fails to satisfy.

This doesn't mean I'm giving up on Pullman, though; I just might spend the winter holidays curled up with the trilogy. And there was a brief moment of nostalgia for Oxford, and the airship 'ferry' that took Lyra away to the great city is certainly an improvement on the Oxford Tube or the First Great Western service to London.

Hwet!, For I Shall Disrobe

The trailer of 'Beowulf' had already put me in a Freudian state of mind when I headed across London to the BFI Imax theatre to see it in glorious 3D. 'Give me a son,' Angelina Jolie says in a Transylvanian accent, stroking him with the tip of her braided ponytail. 'I will make you strong.' She seemed to be reading off a list of things that guys like to hear when you take them to bed, so I wasn't at all surprised when the crowd at the sold-out showing was largely male. Besides, if there's one person with breasts that seem to be in 3D even on the television, it's her.

'Beowulf' is far from being the first film to be shot and released in 3D, but it's the first complete film in the recent revival of the format, when technology has allowed it to be actually convincing and not leave you in a nauseated state. It's an excellent choice for the attempt, with a strong, driving plot and universal themes, and there's a nice circularity to the first work of the English Literature canon being used as the basis for a new level of reality in; and the epic was, after all, oral in its first inception. Hwet! And look! It's movie experiences like this that keep us going to the cinema.

The film was a romp from beginning to end, a wall-to-wall Freudian playground. Beowulf, the hero, fights Grendel completely naked, with his genitals obscured behind a jug or a screen of smoke; Grendel is, naturally covered in a translucent viscous liquid, and as he advances over the cowering girl, he drips huge gobs of pre-cum like an overenthusiastic teenager off-camera from above. Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother struts in on sixth-century demonoid stiletto heels, and seduces him while, quite literally, stroking his sword. She takes from him both the male sword and female cup; she keeps the phallus but spits the vagina back at him when she terminates her protection.

The lack of dialogue synchronisation, quite jarring on certain occasions, was reminiscent of budget films made without timecode or pilot tone, and was a reminder of how rudimentary the technology is, and to what degree this new format of storytelling is in its infancy. The most difficult recreations for any visual effects teams are human beings in natural surroundings, so while it's easy to make convincing monsters, getting people to look right and getting the audience to have a sense of where they are in the 3D setting is always challenging. With the opening shot of Robin Wright Penn I mentally groaned to myself and thought that everyone was going to look like cardboard cutouts, but as the film progressed I realised that in general close-ups and far shots were convincing, and it was just that Robin Wright Penn simply has a very flat face.

Each age, I suppose, gets the retelling of Beowulf (the tale, as well as the hero) that it deserves, and both technologically and thematically, this was definitely a 'Beowulf' for our time.

The Summit in the Alleyway

Every city has its own pact between it and those who live there; each one, individually. Oxford, but for a few, those who stay become part of it, is haughty and peremptory: it opens its gates, its college courtyards, its libraries, to those who give to it their intellect and consent to carry its standard. The place is pompous and full of it but if you believe in the myth you won't fail to be moved, rather like enjoying the company of a likable braggart. As I rode my bicycle into town for some much-needed repairs I sailed down Broad Street (or rather, wobbled; my front wheel had come loose) past the Sheldonian in the late-afternoon sun and wondered how I could desert this place that had been so good to me; it had, quite honestly, offered me little in the way of learning, but much in the way of redemption.

London is another beast altogether. Whether or not you drink the Kool-Aid, Oxford advertises what it's all about quite openly: welcome to the seat of learning; this way up the ivory tower, mind your step and wipe your feet please. I'm sure London can pull up and boast of a Higher Purpose just as quickly; in fact, it can pull up just about anything. Former hub of empire, centre of government, hub of trade and finance; the city is multitudinous, and there are no gates. You enter through an alleyway and emerge into a row of Georgian mews and wait for a definition to present itself to you, the way information packets are handed out to freshers. What is this city about?

At first glance it appears to be centred entirely around money: making it, spending it; it whirls as it is flushed away like the crowd that disappears into the bowels of the underground at half past five. If you walk down King's Road on a Saturday afternoon it's gorgeous and lush, as beautiful as it is inaccessible, like the impeccably dressed woman who looks me up and down with that imperceptible smile on her face: I'm from another world than yours. I imagine it to be a world devoid of those wire-frame racks which lurk like an out-of-season Christmas tree in hundreds of thousands of flats across the country, festooned with knickers and dishtowels. But just as I've found that window-shopping in Chelsea is a perfectly pleasurable pursuit in itself, I think there's a third response to looking at the convertibles whizzing past and the terraced apartments in Kensington, which is neither that of feeling like the little match girl or setting one's jaw with grim determination that all this, too, shall be mine, mine! one day: the simple, quiet realisation of the fact that this is not my world. But I am looking forward to the London that will become mine, by discovery, by creation, in the way that though I will never be a member of All Souls, I do have my favourite seat at the Bodleian.

There is a pleasure in performing something perfectly, like playing a piano piece one knows by heart or executing a well-loved recipe; but there is another pleasure in discovery, in learning, in mastering what one does not know. London was, among other things, the starting-point for geographical expeditions during the age of exploration. There is a certain irony in the fact that perhaps the best way to get to know London is to approach it as would an adventurer, turning the corner into an alleyway that yields unexpected delights, and then to plant a flag, marking it as part of one's own private empire within the city.

Wadham Gardens On a Summer's Day

'Take with you a ground rug or folding chairs,' we were instructed the day before the performance of Romeo and Juliet in the gardens of Wadham College, which I have to admit (intercollegiate rivalry notwithstanding) is one of the prettiest colleges in Oxford, and its lawn were bright and green and shimmery in the afternoon sun. The performance did not take place in the hallowed space of the centre college quad, of course, but in the garden to the right of the main buildings; against the backdrop of a wall, a 70s Volkswagen van and a tent had been parked, to emphasize the idea of Shakespeare being 'on tour', and which served as the backstage for the square of wooden planks that had been laid down. The idea that the six actors simply piled into the rickety old VW camper and meandered away down the motorway to their next touring gig was somewhat mitigated by a gleaming, comfortable modern bus parked nearby.

It was a small, intimate crowd of theatregoers in a lazy summer mood, and sweet alcoholic drinks were being served; thankfully, they opted for a play everyone knew by heart, it was difficult to imagine mustering the focus to get through, say, Henry VI Part III while semi-drunk on sugary Pimms. As the play moved into the second act the audience, especially those sitting on the ground, were perceptibly more and more horizontal, and the actors glistened in the summer heat. Or perhaps Juliet was really feeling the potion.

Despite the obvious professionalism of the performance, there was something very local (not amateurish; local, more so than if it had been on the stage of a West End theatre) about the fact that Shakespeare was born just a few miles to the north and it was first performed fifty miles to the east; and the garden setting, taking away not just the dimmed, fan-shaped theatre and the proscenium, but the very structure of a theatre in the form of a building, was a wonderful reminder of how 'theatre' is about an agreement between the players and the audience: we say entertain us, and they do; they say, this is Verona, and we believe them. Oh, and the play, of course. For a summer afternoon in Oxford, this play was just the thing.

Out from above the boiler room

It's easy to romanticize (or sentimentalize) the process of moving house. I'm presently packing up the dormitory room where I've been ensconced for the last two years; I imagined myself lovingly going through the bits and pieces of two years' worth of life as a student at Oxford, doing a triage of thing to keep and things to throw away, and things to gaze at for a while before closing my eyes and dropping it into the dustbin. In the end it was about nothing so much as shoving stuff into boxes as quickly as I could, and noting how unimposing and dusty the things looked as I threw them into storage: flurry, then; and an underlying sadness at leaving a tiny space in which I had been comfortable. The bed where I had read my way to a Master's degree looked uncommonly ugly in the way that only college dormitory beds can look without their covers. Tossing out readings should have been a cathartic process but the main sensation was physical, of paper cuts and grime and sneezing out dustballs. The room, as I look around it, seems unbelievably small: a burnt-out, shrunken shell, papered over in college-issue paisley prints. No, no sentimentality here; just sadness and an eagerness to move on.

Satyagraha ha ha ha

Seeing 'Satyagraha' performed by the ENO at the London Coliseum has resparked my love for Philip Glass's work, and I have been revisiting old friends. I'll be taking a break from revision to watch Naqoyqatsi, his cinematic masterpiece which is the closest experience to being stoned that doesn't involve being stoned. Fortunately, with a DVD the wonderful thing is that you can wander off while it plays; this you cannot do while watching an opera. Fortunately the staging by the ENO was engaging even as it unfolded, to put it politely, at a stately pace. They made good use of technology as well, including flashing the lyrics (which are in Sanskrit), on monitors mounted on the balcony of the dress circle for the chorus members. Comments overheard as we were walking out ranged from 'brilliant' to 'crushingly boring', which it can be if you were waiting for something to actually happen. But if you allow the hypnotic repetitions of the music to lull you into a trance, then a single moment of Gandhi's life, that of his politicization, is transformed into lush, symbol-laden spectacle, and three acts of beautiful, crystalline music.

Catch it early

Timesinks from Amazon arrived this afternoon, bringing CDs of instrumental music (which in theory I should be able to play while studying, so as not to distract me with lyrics), and a few DVDs for the weekend. Of the music, standouts are the soundtrack from Miss Potter, with Renee Zellwegger looking rather rabbity herself on the cover, which is light, airy, and evokes wonderfully the English countryside of imagination (as opposed to the English countryside as seen from the window of a First Great Western train); Pan's Labyrinth is also a beautiful plunge into a fairytale world, the only problem being that the soundtrack was conceived as an extended lullaby, which of course meant that I promptly fell fast asleep.

The DVDs I bought were a lucky choice. I had meant to get another season of 24, but the political bias was beginning to show itself to a distasteful degree, like having a conversation with a man with an increasingly tumescent erection. I decided to take a chance on Criminal Minds, and found it refresingly intelligent. It isn't so tightly written to the point of being fatiguing, like the hour-long BBC dramas; it's predictable enough to be fodder for a Saturday night off. It falls into one of the sub-categories of crime dramas about the different investigation procedures, in this case the profilers. Mandy Patinkin, oddly convincing as a paternal/avuncular veteran of the field, heads a team who, in the episodes I've watched so far, gallop through the various criminal psychoses.

Perhaps I've been wondering since my nightmares of the other night whether I'm of a criminal disposition, but with each profile I found myself nervously examining myself for signs of criminal behaviour. Loner disposition and antisocial qualities? Check. Obsessive compulsive disorder? Yes, until my mid-teens. Interest in Criminology? Yes, I just finished the exams. Paranoid personality? Check. Does paranoia that one is of a criminal disposition count for or against likelihood of criminal behaviour? Okay, now I'm going around in circles. A sign of self-obsession...

Dream Sequence

It's only been my second night without downers, but I've spent the last two nights in the throes of a dream which I wish I could say was recurrent, but has been actually rather like a television serial. Perhaps I've been exalting the format of the television novel a little too much, but my dreaming has taken on the likeness of an art-house version of 24. Night 1. Interior. Night. I hang out with some new friends, popping a few pills and smoking up. At the end of it all, I feel a flirtatious camaraderie with one of the boys, R. As the sun comes up, they all stumble out of my house, sobering up in the cold dawn. I'm suddenly conscious of the maid standing shivering in the doorway; she informs me that my terrier, who was pregnant with four puppies, is dead. R had come upon her and for no apparent reason kicked her across the lawn. She had spent last few hours haemorrhaging to death at the vet's. I wake up and attend my Sociology of Ethnicity class.

Second night. I have a presentation to prepare, so I took out my notes, my handouts, and my readings, and soon fall asleep with pencil in hand. Interior. Night. I have found my father's .38 in a desk drawer, and am trying to remember how to use it, and the few shooting lessons we had had together before I grew up and into libertarian politics. My dog's corpse is brought home in a cardboard box, and I thank the maid who had fetched it for me. As soon as the door closed, I found the reason why I had been unable to work the gun. I unlatched the safety, braced my arm, and fired. The recoil was more manageable than it had been for a nine year old, and I managed to leave a nick in the door three feet left of the peephole I had been aiming at. Armed, literally, with this new confidence, I mustered the courage to open the box, and stroked the stone cold body. The next shot went into the wall somewhere. I wiped away the tears and kept firing until the gun was empty.

At this point I had to wake up to go to the bathroom. I knew that if I went back to sleep I would soon head out to see if I could actually find R and pull the trigger. Did I want to find that out? It wasn't even six in the morning yet, but I decided instead to check my email and see if any friends across the globe were awake and logged onto their instant messaging service. Tonight I'm cranky and antisocial, and have decided I'm going to pop a Valium. I also called my maid and was reassured by the sound of barking in the background. I told her to take her to the vet's; she's overdue for her shots anyway.

Notes on a Few Recent Films on Sex

After the phenomenal worldwide success of 'The History Boys', you might be led to thinking that the British take a somewhat relaxed moral attitude about things like middle-aged schoolteachers sexually harassing young boys. This is far from the truth. In Venus, about a decrepit actor's relationship with a young girl, and Notes On A Scandal, about a female schoolteacher's relationship with a young boy, and that of an older schoolteacher's sapphic lust for her in turn, yet more permutations of inappropriate desire are explored, sometimes more throughly than one would like to really see.

Of the two new films, Notes On A Scandal is the 'bigger' release, featuring as it does Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett; Patrick Marber (Closer) wrote the screenplay, and Philip Glass (The Hours, among other depressing hits) the music. All the ingredients are in place for a throughly gut-wrenching movie, and anyone with any sense would wait for the DVD and watch it with either a very large tub of ice-cream or a warm body into whose clothing one can sink one's tears. I am not a sensible person, so I watched it at the Phoenix Picturehouse, where I had, incidentally, recently seen The Queen. I only mention this because Notes on a Scandal features two former Queen Elizabeths, and I felt that Helen Mirren should have at least been given a bit role in this movie, if only because she has more Elizabeths under her belt than either of them. The movie was indeed bursting at the seams with emotion and high drama, and Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett turned in excellent performances: full marks. But even while Elizabeth I and Elizabeth I were thrashing it out, there was a part of me that was tapping my foot: 'And then?'

Perhaps it was because I had not quite recovered from the sparse, insidious realism of the previous night's Venus, directed by Roger Michell, of Notting Hill fame, but in a style far removed from the gloss, as well as romanticism, of that film. The lighting in Venus is harsh and unforgiving, especially when the most of the cast is carunculated and tousled. Even Jessie (aka Venus) isn't fantastically pretty; she's young and has the attractiveness of youth, but that's about it. Now when you have a situation in which there is an old (i.e., not merely elderly, or older, but old) man and a teenager (presumably of consensual age), one expects certain cliched storylines to emerge: the intellectualized desire of Nabokov's Lolita, a heartwarming tale of breathing life into a dying man's last days; a tale of sexual frustration, perhaps. Hanef Kureshi, who did the screenplay, and Michell did nothing so prosaic. Or rather, they took all these for granted (the scene in which she insouciantly swabs her twat and offers her finger to Peter O' Toole as a 'reward' is unforgettable) and went far beyond any such conventionalities, ironically by making it a film, quite simply, about a relationship. The film is as insouciant in its portrayal of this unfolding relationship as Jessie is in it, and this lack of deliberate intensity makes it hit all the harder.

I highly recommend watching these films back to back with The History Boys; perhaps they should offer them as a box setof some sort, with a warning that any thoughts of sex after watching all three in a row will, for a while at least, be accompanied by a shudder.

Pirates of the North Sea

They say that in an experiment two groups, watching the same movie on a smiliarly-sized screen, but with tinny TV speaker sound on one hand and surround sound on the other, not only experienced the movie more intensely, but actually had the impression that the screen was larger than it was. I don't watch many movies at home (I see them in the theatres), but I do watch a lot of television. I have yet to buy my dream LCD flatscreen, but it might actually be larger than the floor area of my dorm room. Hanging it on the wall with blu-tack is against the regulations.

Back home for the holidays, my television is as outdated as the magazines on the couch; and just as I cringe when I look at the fashion that was the cutting edge before I packed my bags for London, my television is a 4:3 CRT that has never heard of terms such us HD or 1080i. So I've made up for the tiny screen with a plethora of speakers, thanks to an AV receiver with a manual as complex as a statistics textbook, though marginally more interesting. My brother, under the influence of Christmas bonhomie, said he'd set it up for me, a slip of the tongue that he cursed me for remembering after a few hours crouched behind the the entertainment console with a flashlight, draped in cables, while I delivered the scripture according to Yamaha, pacing back and forth.

But it was worth it. Of all the new shows, Heroes shows the most promise; it has a JJ Abrams cliffhanger style, though it isn't as fast-paced as Alias but, unlike Lost, seems to know where it's going. I've only watched up to Episode 11 of the opening season; and my main complaint is the annoying expository voice-over ("Evolution is a complex process...") that frames each episode: you really want to shoot the guy. Another point that may soon be cleared up is the lack of a single, identifiable (in both senes of the word) character through which the viewer enters the world (Josh for the West Wing, Xander for Buffy, George for Grey's Anatomy); at the moment it's a toss up between Hiro and Peter Petrelli. Ali Larter's character seems to have been thrown in as eye-candy for the boys; her superpower appears to be that she can get mad and become violent. I can do that. Of the old shows, Bones and Boston Legal seemed to be chugging along nicely, each episode well made, but easy to snap off. The television equivalent of cocaine is Grey's Anatomy; it leaves you sleepless, your eyes dilated, sniffling into a hanky, yet hungry for more. Season Three promises to be even stronger than the first and second.

Movie studios seem to have taken the hint that people will go to the cinema to watch a movie if they aren't made to wait too long for it, so release dates are now almost simultaneous with the States. Whether they are making more positives from the release internegatives or enough theatres in America have switched to digital, I have no idea, but all I can say is, good for them. Television is another matter. My newlywed friends tell me that their cosy moments at night are spent cuddling together with a laptop, watching TheLatest.s3e5.xvid.lol.avi. Or they might start off the night with two laptops, one watching Prison Break and the other Desperate Housewives, and then watch Grey's Anatomy together. Meanwhile, the 5.1 surround system lies dormant all around them.

There are some things that take priority over shoes, clothes, and Lladro figurines: I have never regretted prioritising spending on books or music; and since I believe that screen narratives are the art form of our time, I'd put DVDs on that list. But one can't buy what isn't being sold, so if I can't get it in the form of a silver disk, then thankfullly there's the Bittorrent underground network. At the moment The Pirate Bay is trying to start its own country off the coast of the UK, and though I am sceptical of their success, I applaud it as an appropriately ridiculous symbolic gesture for the mule-headedness of the distributors.

The Sophomore's Desserts

One of the more enjoyable things about being in Oxford for one's second year is the smug satisfaction of watching the new people arriving at Oxford for their first year go through everything that you went through yourself the previous year, comfortably distanced and ensconced in one's own little world. It's amazing the difference that a year can make, and I've no doubt that those who have been here for even longer, especially those who have already achieved their degrees, are watching my second year travails with a similar, and far more acutely defined, sense of superiority.

I would say, however, that the most difficult thing to come to terms with when one first is at Oxford is being in Oxford in the first place. This sounds tautological, I realise, but I rewrote that sentence several times and could find no better way of expressing the sentiment. After the glamour of ancient stone, pretty lawns, and fabled names in whose footsteps you tread all dulls with repetition and familiarity, you're left with what, on its worst days, can seem nothing more than a creaky old university held together with twine from discarded teabags and a drab little town with some very bad fashion, full of people who are intelligent enough to be earnest but not intelligent or unintelligent enough to be amusing.

But it was here, too, that I found myself in the company of cooks and scholars whose obsession with food surpasses mine to the point of unreason at the Oxford Symposium for Food and Cookery; it was almost by chance that I had the privilege of working with the brilliant, eccentric, aristocratic ethnographic filmmaker Michael Yorke, at a documentary filmmaking workshop. The fodder for the intellect that Oxford metes out it does so grudgingly, over time, and sometimes must be chased and pinned down.

Yet I have begun to find that the best moments that Oxford affords one are the ones in which nothing happens: those long winter nights that I spend in the company of my records (a continually growing collection that is threatening to take over my room; but that's another story) and losing oneself in the music of previously unknown composers, dipping into books for work and books for pleasure, with which I am surrounded, along with sheets of paper on which I scribble my notes (my time-honoured way of working, despite my predilection for leather-bound notebooks), photocopied journal articles, and library books (which I sneakily annotate with a UV pen, which I thought was a rather clever idea until I used the black light and found other users' notes on several of the books). And, somewhat to my embarrassment, I have succumbed to the cliche of working fuelled by mugs of milky tea, though the day when you find me using teabags is one that will, one hopes, never come to pass.

The mind goes down its own secret alleyways, personal labyrinths of ideas, or obsessions that take possession of one's imagination and which one worries as a dog does gristle on a bone while sitting out in the cold and waiting for the bus to trundle along. This mental clearing, the space for ideas to 'do their thing' within one's head, is, I find infinitely rewarding and infinitely fragile, and perhaps it is born only of this particular short-lived time in my own Oxford trajectory. But as I cast my eye around at the first year students milling about with their quest to get their Bodleian cards activated or computers connected, clutching their Argos catalogues while forming an orderly queue at the HSBC on Cornmarket, I find this infinite place for the mind to wander an unexpected, probably short-lived, but just reward for my travails a year ago. Except that no one had told me about Argos.

Rolling with the Punches

"The problem with Tom Stoppard," someone was saying in the foyer before the show started, "is that he demands so much of his audience." I didn't catch the interlocutor's response, but I mentally seconded the opinion. After sitting through his latest play, the three-hour long Rock'N'Roll at the Duke of York Theatre, I'm inclinced to agree even more, especially since the demands include £48.00 for a ticket in the stalls. Apparently, the mere name of Tom Stoppard is enough to warrant a West End opening without an initial subsidised run at the National; and on a Tuesday night the theatre was packed. The names involved in the production were not unknowns, either: Trevor Nunn directed, while Rufus Sewell played the lead.

But while Tom Stoppard has never written plays that are in any way easy, from the play that first made his name, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, to his most accessible and enjoyable play, The Real Thing, the demands he makes on his actors and audience don't go unrewarded. Arcadia, a beautiful and elegant play on every level, has you struggling in your seat, like attending a complicated lecture; but at the end of it comes a moment of intellectual and emotional illumination that makes it all worthwhile. Arcadia is also the play which I would say marked a turning-point to what future critics will probably lump into a different phase of his career as a playwright, one which, as a theatre-goer, I rather wish he would snap out of. The linguistic pyrotechnics are no longer flashes of brilliant wit, but set-pieces, oftentimes with a soapbox slant. The dullness reached its height in his trilogy The Coast of Utopia, a wagnerian three-part cycle of words that I couldn't get through as a reader; I wondered if it had to be seen as theatre, but I'm beginning to doubt if it would have been any less unbearable.

Critics tend to be deferential to Mr Stoppard, and though no one seemed to have the temerity to say anything really bad about The Coast of Utopia, I think they were fairly hard-pressed to try and like it. Rock'N'Roll has been hailed as a return to the old Stoppard, and though I felt it was a fairly gruelling evening, there were a few good laughs; more importantly, there was a strong attempt to engage the audience on more than an intellectual level. The characters were real, even if they did occasionally launch into diatribes; but that's the great danger of a political play. Rock'n'Roll is, despite its name, about communism. I'm not a highly politicised individual, nor did I live through the most important period of the play (the decade or so after 1968); my grasp of modern Czech history is fairly weak; and I'm not even into rock'n'roll. But not being into landscaping didn't stop me from enjoying Arcadia, and the metaphor of the survivial of a rock band as the tribulations of freedom was an inspired one. Walking out of the theatre one doesn't get the immense satisfaction that I got after seeing Jonathan Pryce in The Real Thing; in fact, I wasn't sure whether I actually liked the play or not. It wasn't until a day and a half later (always a bit slow, this girl is) that it all came together. Going two rounds with Stoppard's brain isn't exactly what most would call a rock and rollicking night out at the thee-atre, but I'm up for a rematch.