Rowan Atkinson in something that wasn't Mr Bean

We saw Rowan Atkinson in a play the other week, we really only went to see the play because of him. It was called Quatermaine's Terms, and was written in the 1980's about a group of teachers at a foreign language school in the 1960's.  Basically it was about the loneliness of the British due to their inability to communicate anything like feelings or emotions to other people.  Rowan Atkinson played a character kind of similar to Mr Bean if you imagine Mr Bean being able to speak and having to hold down a job, with less of Mr Bean's exhuberance.  It was a pretty depressing play as this Rowan Atkinson character removed himself more and more from the surrounding teachers.

Rowan Atkinson was really good in it, his character was in nearly all of the scenes so he had to be pretty good, even though he was kind of peripheral to everything.  It's good to see him in something other than comedies, as he's pretty good.

Brussels

A war memorial - with surprisingly few wreaths for Armistice Day

A visit to Belgium was always going to contain a day in Brussels, that's pretty much a given.  I was hoping that after the lack of museums in Bruges that Brussels would more than make up for that, I mean it is the home of the European Union as well as the capital of the country.  Sadly I didn't plan for Armistice day, that day is huge in Belgium, well no, actually it's incredibly low-key, but everything is shut for it.  Not a single, solitary, scrap of a museum was open.

There did seem to be an awful lot of scouts around, all in shorts, even though it was freezing.  They seemed to be on some sort of treasure hunt, and were constantly forming circles and performing weird callisthenics in the middle of them.

The main square in Brussels, with some great, but closed, buildings

Another great building

I didn't realise this, but Belgium is a really young country, only forming in 1830.  Apparently when they formed they decided that they wanted a king, so they kind of just ended up asking some relative of Queen Victoria to be their monarch, which seems a strange way to chose a king.  They could have gone with straight democracy, but no, I guess they thought they couldn't be trusted with their own governance.  You do wonder if they made the right choice in starting this dynasty, since only their second king was responsible for the brutal repression of the Congolese.

I was hoping for massive wealth in the city, since it is home to one of seats of the European Parliament, Council of the EU, the European Commission and the European Council.  I'm not sure why there needs to be four different bodies, which superficially look like they would do the same thing.  The public servants who work for the EU also get paid really well, it's a bit of a bone of contention at the moment, what with the austerity going around, that the EU seems a bit immune from that.  Despite the public edifices, and the vast numbers of well paid EU public servants, Brussels still felt quite poor in parts.  Especially around the main train station, which is pretty much universally dodgy in cities, but it felt worse than most cities.  What is it about the main train station and dodgy people.  Sydney has it, Paris has it, Brussels, I could go on.  Though I don't think London has it.  I'm not sure which station I would classify as their main one, Kings Cross, Paddington, Euston?  None of those feel dodgy at all.

The most famous resident of Brussels

It seems in Brussels though that the EU public servants keep their money to themselves in the European Quarter, which we didn't really get into, only on the periphery, and it felt rich.  But on the other side of the road, it was a different story.  That's not to say it was all poor, there were some nice boulevards, and the roads were all pretty good.  In fact the zebra crossings were pretty impressive, being made from different coloured marble, rather than just lines painted.

It seems that the most famous resident of Brussels is a small, 60 cm statue of a boy peeing into a fountain.  He really is quite small, for something that causes such a fuss.  Apparently they dress him in costumes, and he has a wardrobe of 800 outfits.  Too bad when we visited his clothes were being dry cleaned.  I'm not even sure what the story behind the statue is, nobody seems to know.

Hampstead in Winter

The street up to the heath

We had a bit of snow in London this winter, it's hard to decide if there is more than last year, it seemed to melt faster than last year, but perhaps it was deeper.  It's always nice to have a snow weekend, it was just the perfect amount, not too much to cause complete shutdown in London, but enough that you could build snowmen and throw snowballs.

The day after it had snowed all night we headed up to the Heath.  I was excited because it meant we could try out our microspikes for the first time since I'd bought them at Christmas.  They are like mini-crampons that you put over your boots, very easy to get on and off, it's basically just a rubber band you stretch over the boots.

They were really good, I'm so glad I got them, we were walking all over the place, and it was as if there wasn't even any snow, like you were just walking on dry dirt.

A red-robin, posing for me

In fact they were so good that I had to take them off to check that the snow was in fact slippery, because it was impossible to tell with the spikes on.  They did get a bit clogged every now and again, which was a funny feeling as you were then walking on basically a big ice ball, so that reduced the stability, but a quick bang and you were right to go again.  I was impressed at the runners I saw out, since they didn't seem to be wearing any spikes, they were obviously a lot more sure footed then me.

Don't worry, this tree had already fallen over before the snow

A winter wonderland

One thing I really like about the British is that they are great hobbyists, and nobody looks twice at you for practising your hobby, so we were out with our spikes, other people were out skiing, some had their nordic walking poles out, and there was no agro to be seen.  Everyone was just enjoying the snow in their own way.

Even the ponds were frozen in the heath, and the birds were enjoying standing on the water.  I'm not sure how they manage it, as they would stand right on the edge with the water, and I really don't know how the ice was thick enough to support them.

I was hoping to see a few dogs swimming, but for once it was even too cold for them.

It was total chaos up on Parliament Hill, this is obviously the place to toboggan in London, it is a pretty perfect place for it.  So it seemed that the kids had come from far and wide to partake.

The snowy expanses of the heath

Living here I have wondered why it feels warmer when it snows, you would think it only snows when it's really cold.  But I have since learnt that warm air can hold more moisture than cold air, so when warm, moist air hits cold, dry air, the excess moisture has to be released, which it does through snowing.  So the snow doesn't cause the warm air, the warm air causes the snow.  I'm sure this is something school kids learn here in primary school, but growing up in the tropics, I never really needed to learn about what caused snow.

Pandemonium on Parliament Hill

In Bruges

The canals were so pretty

We took the Eurostar to Brussels one weekend, a bit different from the standard Parisian trip on the 'star, but no further time-wise.  I'd never been that excited to go to Belgium, in fact this was the first time I ever visited.  I'm not sure why, maybe it was the European parliament or the inability for the country to form government, it just never seemed that exciting.  And whilst the excitement levels were low on this trip, the beauty stakes were pretty high.  As were the friendli-ness stakes.  We spent a day in Bruges, I love how the Flemish (or Dutch or whatever it is) say Bruges, they call it Brug-GAH, with a really hard g, so different to the French pronunciation.  They are always going to have trouble forming stable government if they can't even decide on the proper pronunciation of their own cities.

Everywhere you looked you had to take another shot

There are going to be a lot of canal shots

But anyway, the only things you need to know about Bruges are the chocolate and the lace, both of which are sold in every second shop.  It must be some city-planning law, you cannot walk 50m without either a chocolate shop or a lace shop.  Sometimes even both.  Luckily the chocolate was delicious, if there's one thing I take with me from Belgium, it's the slightly sick feeling of too much sugar.  Within 10 minutes of getting of the train, we were already scoffing our first bag of handmade, Belgian chocolates, and we didn't let up much for the rest of the day.

I would put Bruges up there with Venice or Amsterdam, not as spectacular as Venice, but definitely as pretty as Amsterdam, and more compact too, with possibly fewer tourists.  And the people were so incredibly friendly, I couldn't get over that, they were like big friendly Vikings or something.  In that their exterior was a little bit intimidating, but then they opened their mouths.  Perhaps it's all the beer and chocolate that keeps everyone so happy.  Normally in such a tourist town you would expect almost universally surly service.  Everyone knows they don't rely on repeat customers, so why bother keeping anyone happy.  And yet not once did it feel like that, perhaps they were still screwing us over, but the important thing is that it didn't feel like they were.

The canals with the dozens of tour boats

The brick spire of the Church of Our Lady

There aren't a heap of museums or anything to see in the town, it is pretty, and almost around every corner is another photo opportunity.  But there isn't much in the way of historical or art museums.  Perhaps it's a factor of them always having been mainly a merchant city.  But so long as they keep serving their delicious moules-frites I don't care that they don't have any museums.  That's the other thing you've got to have if you go to Belgium, the fries, holy cow, I don't know what they do, but if there is a national dish (besides chocolate) it has to be the fry.  Unbelievable.  You would think there can't be that much difference in fries, but lets just say I don't think McDonald's is ever going to get a strong hold in Belgium.  There is a galaxy of difference between the standard Belgian fry and a Maccas one.  And the mussels, oh man, so juicy and tender, and I don't even normally like mussels, but after that weekend I am a total convert.

Canals from a boat

So really what the day was all about was walking around amazed at the beauty, stopping every now and again to eat some more or drink a beer (again awesome) whilst taking a few photos.  We did try for a few museums.  There was a chocolate one, which seems a bit of a given in Belgium.  That was slightly strange.  It went through the life-cycle of cocoa and had these weird paper-mache exhibits.  And then at the end they give you some chocolate.

The Madonna of Bruges

In one of the churches they have a statue by Michelangelo, the Madonna of Bruges, it is thought to be the only sculpture that left Italy during his lifetime.  Unfortunately ever since that crazy Hungarian-Australian geologist attacked the Pieta in St Peters all these Madonna sculptures are now behind bullet-proof glass and you have to stand 10 metres away.  Which is disappointing.  It is so obviously a class above all the other sculptures in Bruges, noticeably so. I guess you can't blame them for wanting to protect their star.

Other than the Michelangelo sculpture, there's not a lot else.  They have the second tallest brick tower in the world, at 122m it's a lot of brick.  They have the chocolate museum, a fries museum, a diamond museum, a lace museum, a museum on the history of artificial lighting and an archers museum.  But not a lot on the history of the town, or much in the way of art.  You kind of feel that the lighting museum is clutching at straws.

The main square

A boat cruise on the canals is quite good and about the only real tourist thing to do.  It would have been nice if the tour was a bit longer, and that you went a bit further afield, but you very much stay in the centre of the town, even though Bruges is actually on the coast, you wouldn't know it from the tour.

What can I say, go, but don't take too full a stomach with you, as you will be feasting all day.

New Forest

One of the many ponies - all fluffy in the cold weather

It wasn't just Stonehenge that we saw whilst we were visiting Salisbury.  We hired a car and drove through New Forest to the coast.  Salisbury is actually really close to the coast.  And this area is definitely worth a day in itself.  I didn't appreciate this before I visited but in the New Forest it seems all manner of normally domesticated animals roam free.  Mainly ponies, but there were also pigs, deer and donkeys as well.

This one really wanted food, all it got from me was a pat

And when I say mainly ponies there would be thousands of them.  Everywhere you go there are more ponies.  You aren't meant to feed them, but you can certainly tell that in the more popular spots in the forest they are used to serious amounts of human attention.  I wonder if they ever do some sort of pony round up, just to stop them completely decimating the vegetation, or invading the nearby villages and eating all the flowers.

A pony being shy

Even though it is called New Forest, it was created as a royal forest by William the Conqueror all the way back in 1079.  It was new at the time I suppose, because at that point the local peasants were allowed to hunt in it.  Once it became a royal forest, no more hunting allowed.  Like all national parks in England it has seen human intervention for hundreds of years, so isn't really as wild as you may imagine something with forest in it's title should be.  But I suppose for it's location, in that incredibly dense area of south-east England, it's doing pretty well.  It would be cool to head back here in summer sometime and try and head further into the forest, away from the roads, just to see how wild it really gets.  Apparently you are allowed to walk anywhere you want, sometimes there may be signs up asking you not to disturb rare birds, but that's about it.  It's also meant to be the largest area of unenclosed pasture in the country, but I'm not really sure what that means, since I definitely saw a number of fences on my day through there.

We even got a proper sunset for once

There is also a deer feeding area, that looked like the main tourist area, apparently the rangers feed the deer everyday there during summer.  Not so much in winter though, so there were very few deer to be seen.  I managed to get one blurry shot on massive telephoto zoom, but it wasn't up to this blog's standard so you don't get to see it :).  One other slightly morbid tourist site is that Alice Liddell, the Alice from Alice in Wonderland, is buried in the graveyard in Lyndhurst, the main gateway to the forest.  We didn't know this when we visited though, so were more taken by the tarot card reading going on in the carpark.

The sun setting over the sea - not something I see that often

Salisbury Cathedral - with added Magna Carta

Once we had our fill of big trees and ponies we left the forest for the sea.  We popped out near Lymington, which is actually incredibly close to the Isle of Wight.  I don't think I appreciated how close that island is to the mainland, but really it's just a good freeze away from still being connected.  So we got to sit there looking out over the Solent and for once the sun set over sea.  And since it was only about 4pm when it set, we could get back to Salisbury in plenty of time for our awesome meal of scallops and pork belly.

After our trip to the Stones the next day we had a little more time to check out the town before having to head back to London.  The most famous thing about Salisbury (apart from Stonehenge obviously) is the cathedral and the copy of the Magna Carta it contains.  This version is one of the four remaining ones written in 1215, and is the best preserved.  And it really is very well preserved, it looks like it was written yesterday, there's not even much of that tea staining effect you get in old documents.

I love me some cloisters

The cathedral is 750 years old and has the tallest spire in Britain, which is a little mind-blowing (the 750 years old thing).  On the tour to Stonehenge the guide gave us a bit of info when we drove back to town, pointing out Sting's house and where Madonna bought a house and then incited the wrath of the British rambler by trying to get a right-of-way moved.  Let's just say you don't want to take on the might of the British rambler, even if you are Madonna.

He also pointed out where the local "eccentric" lives.  She is a Dame or something and keeps camels.  In the nativity play one year, she decided she wanted to have her camel walk down the aisle as well, and since she is the local aristocracy she gets to do what she wants.  In the end the camel got to the font in the middle of the church and decided it was a bit thirsty.  It hasn't been invited back since.

Salisbury and Stonehenge

The stones in the dawn light

Recently we paid a visit to Salisbury, the main reason being to see Stonehenge (of course).  I had booked this tour back in July, and we weren't visiting until December.  The reason for the long delay  was that the tour we wanted to go on was actually this special access tour. This means we went before the henge was actually open to visitors.  But even better was that we weren't restricted to standing behind the barrier (about 30m from the stones), but instead could get right up inside the stones.  As you can imagine these sorts of tickets are pretty popular, and we were restricted to weekend trips, hence the incredibly long wait.

Just a few of the barrows around Stonehenge, the landscape is full of earthworks

They are really quite big

In fact the wait was so long that I actually booked a hotel in Salisbury for the weekend, forgot I had done so, booked another hotel, and then got random text messages from the original hotel which I ignored thinking they had been sent to me by mistake.  Have to try and not do that again!  But the place we ended up booking was really good, so I can't really complain.  It had some of the best food I have eaten whilst I have been in the UK, which is kind of surprising from a hotel in Salisbury.  But the scallops, I'm drooling just thinking about them, and the pork belly with fig, oh man!

But we weren't here to eat, we were here to walk in the footsteps of the neolithic man.  So rather early on the Sunday morning we were off through the gloom and the slight drizzle to the stones.  They are set in a slightly bizarre location, really close to a rather busy road, though to be fair, the road is probably busier than usual because of the stones.  Apparently they are planning on shifting the road and building a big visitor centre and things.  Which perhaps makes sense.  You would think Stonehenge is one of the most visited sites in the UK, and yet the visitor centre is a demountable, and the car park is tiny.

Obligatory cheesy photo

The slaughter-stone and the heel stone in the distance

So anyway this tour we took, the guide is involved in a lot of the archaeological digs around the area so he really had a lot of information for us.  As we were there we could see there were some other people who had also thought the out-of-hours tickets sounded good.  But the thing with out-of-hours is that not even the visitor centre is open, so you can't get an audio guide or anything, and there aren't any interpretive signs up.  So really it's just a bunch of rocks, if you aren't there with someone who knows their stuff.  We saw a couple of them go up to the security guards and ask them questions, and some only stayed for 15 minutes.

There was also a group of drummers whilst we were there, that was slightly weird, but I imagine they aren't all that uncommon.  So they stood around in a circle and sang for a while, then started taking photos of themselves with the stones.  But our guide, Pat Shelley, was amazing.  Seriously if you are ever going to visit the stones this is the guy to do it with.  Not only does he know so much about the stones themselves, he also knows how it all fits into the wider landscape.  Though don't go with him if you want to get all druid-y and start chanting.  It seems that a lot of people in this area don't really hold with that sort of behaviour.

From inside the circle - looks bigger from this angle

The big knobbly bit used to be in the ground

Surrounding you are hundreds of other neolithic sites, there are a few in the car park in fact, which are marked with just what looks like a manhole.  They were from around 8000BC and used to hold massive wooden posts.  They are actually the oldest monuments in the area, but they don't get so much as a sign.  But all around the henge are burial mounds, heaps of them, all over the place, once you know what to look for.  There are also random ditches and banks, but these are really hard to see since they are thousands of years old.

We also walked along the avenue, from the river to the henge there is a bank-ditch then a wide path followed by another ditch then bank.  And it appears to be the route of gentlest slope up to the stones from the river.  But what is more incredible is that for most of the time the stones are hidden behind a small rise, but then when you are quite close you come round a corner and suddenly the stones just appear.  It's really quite cool to walk up that way to the stones, it really feels like that is how people thousands of years ago would also have approached, but for them it would have been this real procession (not that anyone really knows).

Stone-Age dowel

It was funny, but as we approached the stones from the outside both Dave and I commented on how it looked a lot smaller than we thought it would, but then once we got inside the stones, it suddenly felt much bigger again.  And the stones are massive, there is no hiding that.  It was incredible to see the amount of work that must have gone into the creation.  The stones are all really quite smooth, and you can see from some of the ones which have fallen over that they came from much larger pieces and the amount that they chipped away.  And these people were stone age people, so just bashing stone against stone until you got what you wanted.  It was cool to see how old the concept of a dowel is, or whatever they call it when it is in stone, but they all locked together, as you can see evidence of in the photo to the left.  The bit sticking up would have stuck into a hole in the stone sitting on top of it.

There's also the slaughter stone, which unfortunately had nothing to do with human sacrifice, apparently there's no evidence of any sacrifices going on, which I was a bit disappointed about.  It's called the slaughter stone because of the iron oxide, which makes water pooling in it look like blood.  Which you can kind of see in the photo above.  The thought is that the slaughter stone used to be a bit of a gateway into the sacred site.  Which lines up with the Newgrange passage tomb we saw in Ireland, that definitely had a stone gate that you had to step over to get inside.

Approaching the stones from the Avenue, they suddenly appear from behind the crest of the hill

Woodhenge near Durrington Wells

Near the slaughter stone is the heel stone, this is standing off by itself, almost in the road.  From inside the circle the sun rises over this stone on the summer solstice, but it's also aligned to the winter solstice sunset, and some people think that Stonehenge was actually more important at the winter solstice, than the summer one.  Though tell that to the 10's of thousands of people who descend on the stones on the summer solstice.  The idea is that Stonehenge was the area of death, whilst around Durrington Wells was the living.  And they were connected by the river and then the avenue up to the stones.  Which is why people think there are a lot of burial mounds around the place, and cremated remains, but no evidence of life.  Whereas around Durrington Wells, which is only like 5 miles away, there is heaps of evidence of life.  The idea in vogue at the moment is that on the winter solstice you would make the journey from Durrington Wells up the avenue, to see the sun set, the death of that year, marking the rebirth of the next one, that sort of thing.

What can I say, the tour was really great, and I got such a feel for the area and how much stuff was around.  It was also pretty amazing to see what an effect humans can have on the landscape.  If you knew where to look you could still see the evidence of the earthworks from thousands of years ago, still there.  Which makes you wonder what effect all our industrialisation is having on the earth now, and how that's going to look in 6000 years time.

Master and Margarita

We were off to another play the other day, another one at the Barbican, which is where we saw Cate Blanchett in her really weird German play.  I gotta visit the Barbican more, seeing as how my work is just one block away.  For one they have this art installation there at the moment, which is a room with rain constantly falling (sounds like London really).  What is so cool though is that they have all these motion sensors and so while you walk around you are constantly surrounded by rain, but it never falls on you.  Sounds like my kind of rain.  They are also meant to have a pretty good library, full of travel guides, which means I don't have to buy one next city I visit, I only have to borrow one.  Now that's a good use of a public library.

But anyway this night we were there to see the Master and Margarita, it was an adaptation of the book by Bulgakov.  If you have read the book you might see that it is kind of a hard story to convert to the theatre, there is so much going on, and there's a lot of devilish action, a lot of flashbacks.  It was done by Complicite, which had actually already done a sell-out run of the same show earlier in the year.   When I saw they were doing another showing, I was straight on to the ticketing.  Which meant we ended up with seats 4 rows from the stages.  This actually turned against us, when halfway through it became a bit more like a really scary comedy show where it was almost like you were going to be forced on stage and sell your soul, either that or take off all your clothes and give them to one of the actors.

I was also interested to see how they treated the fact that in the book the Margarita of the title spends about a third of it completely naked.  I was sure they wouldn't really have her completely naked, surely they would have her in a skin suit, or underpants.  But no, completely nude, and I'm talking completely.  And there was quite a lot of action in the second half, so she was running around, jumping on chairs, flying through the air, all in just high heels.  It's very odd watching someone completely naked, whilst everyone else is fully clothed, and sitting in a theatre surrounded by a bunch of high brow types.  They did have some unnecessary naked old man action in the first half to balance out the female nudity in the second half.

Another thing I noticed about this theatre troupe is that they weren't uniformly pretty, in fact very few of them were even what you would call attractive, just everyday people, or really a little strange looking, everyday people.  Which I thought was kind of weird in the acting world, in that it seems that you have to be good looking to get ahead.  So points for that as well.

I think if you do get a chance to see one of Complicite's productions give it a go.  It really sticks with you.  I really liked the book too though, so perhaps that helped.  I don't think you needed to have read it to enjoy the show though, this wasn't a Harry Potter movie.  I would put it up there with Cate Blanchett's Big and Small play.  I think the acting was better with Cate Blanchett (no surprise there), but the ambition of this play was much greater.  And the things they did with video and sound was another notch up.

It's odd to compare the shows I have seen at the Barbican with those I've seen at the National Theatre.  So far at the Barbican we have seen a Japanese rendition of a Shakespeare play, Cate Blanchett, and now this.  Whereas at the National Theatre we have mainly seen Irish plays set in periods where the Irish were going through a bit of a rough time.  I'm not sure who decides the plays they show at the NT, but perhaps they should get out to the Barbican more?