James Kay's blog

James and Caroline's wedding album

2009-06-01T10:01:00.002+01:00

Link to my new wedding album on Picasa by clicking below.

http://picasaweb.google.com/JamesLKay/WeddingOfJamesAndCarolineKay#

There are 133 photos - about half of them captioned. All of these are in a cut down web format - about 60 to 70 k for each one. I do have all of these in high quality - upto 4 megs each. If you want a copy of any of these let me know at jameslkay@ntlworld.com and I will send them to you.

All of these photos were taken by our wedding photographers hi-impact who can be found at www.hiphoto.co.uk They can also produce high quality prints for you of any of these or of the 470 or so photos that they took on the day.

Video link for country dancing at our wedding

2009-06-01T08:33:00.004+01:00

Here is a link to a brilliant little video of about four and a half minutes length, shot by Michelle's friend Woody. It shows how many got involved - the chaos and gradually the way we all got to grips with each quite complex dance. Best of all you get a real sense of the huge fun we all had.

This is a link to a YouTube video site - just click to go.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-oDNZ30XB8

Cal and I get Married!!!

2009-05-21T16:28:00.002+01:00

On the 17th of May 2009 Caroline and I were married at the Leasowe Castle in front of our friends and family. I will be posting a lot of links and some photographs over the next few weeks but here are a few to get you started.

Barcelona and the Alps

2008-04-30T16:13:00.013+01:00

Here is the latest update on Cal’s long leave and my ‘gap year’.

During the last two weeks of April we visited my daughter Michelle who lives near Barcelona and my friend Pat O’Hare who lives in the French Alps close to Geneva. As with my recent postings there is an online album in Picasa with about 50 photos – some captioned – to see this go to http://picasaweb.google.com/JamesLKay/BarcelonaGenevaChamonixAndAosta

Remember to use the back button to get back to this blog after you have viewed the pictures and that you can adjust the slide show settings in Picasa if you like to slow down the rate at which the pictures renew themselves.

I suggest changing it to about 10 seconds from the default of 4 seconds.

Our first fun event was arriving at Liverpool ‘John Lennon Airport’ to see that the statue of the eponymous Beatle had been adorned by a fan, who like us had been to the United match the day before - when we sank Arsenal without trace in our battle to win the Premiership - yippee!

Our first stop in Spain was with my daughter Michelle who lives near Barcelona.

This is a picture of Michelle with Caroline and three of her five dogs here as we prepared a BBQ at her home in the sticks about 20 miles from Barca.

We stayed at a hotel in a Barca suburb/urban village - called (in Catalan) Sant Joan Despi. Michelle insisted that we go along to a Correfoc (more Catalan) which by luck was held in SJ Despi whilst we were there.

A Correfoc is a sort of festival of fireworks which in this case celebrated the national saint’s day – Sant Jordi – or in English – St George, who as we know fought and killed the dragon.

In this typical Catalonian celebration all the neighbouring villages prepare their own dragons and demons and parade these around the streets.

As everyone knows dragons breathe fire so this is a great opportunity to play with fireworks. The health and safety apparatchiki in the UK would have a dicky fit at this pretty wild event.

To be honest even I was a bit taken aback by the way they sprayed fireworks over everyone but particularly the children.

Michelle explained that it is a sort of prove you're tough sort of coming-of-age thing which in other places might be manifest in a bull run.

Have a look at the pictures in Picasa (above link) but especially at the link to the YouTube video of the Correfoc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCFyv2yrmvM

You will get some idea of what happened if I tell you that shortly after this picture was taken the parents wrapped up their kids with hats and headscarves and some of them brought along water sprays to spray the head and shoulders of their children so that the sparks wouldn't set fire to their clothes.

Unfortunately Cal and I didn't do this and have the burn holes in our coats to show as a result.

Whilst in Barcelona we got all Gaudi’d out visiting again the Sagrada Familia – his wonderful and still unfinished Cathedral masterwork, the Parc Guell, Casa Batllo and La Padrera his great apartment buildings and private homes. Each of these was more wonderful than the last and I took quite a few pictures and shot loads of videos – see Picasa link (above) and YouTube in a week or so.

We also found time to go up to Figueres to see the Dali museum. When I went to the Dali retrospective which came to Liverpool two years ago I came away distressed that I had participated in a viewing that felt not quite right. Dali was so self-evidently barking mad that I felt like I was intruding into a private grief as his psyche so visibly fractured and this breakdown was demonstrated in his art. I commented here in this blog that it felt unpleasantly voyeuristic – a bit like wandering around ‘bedlam to watch all the lunatics’ as the Victorians used to do.

I couldn’t tell you why – in view of that experience – that I drove for three hours to see this home based museum of Dali’s but I can say that it was an entirely different feeling this time being close to and re-introduced to his work. This time I saw more of Dali the genius who introduced us to entirely different ways of seeing things. This was more of a celebration of the man and his talent than a poking around inside his therapeutic expression as he struggled with his distress. I learned that he expressed himself through many more art forms than I had expected. His jewellery designs were particularly startling. If you get a chance go. Again there is lots of video material to go on YouTube.

After spending a great week with Michelle we jumped an Easyjet flight from Barcelona to Geneva whose airport lies partly in France and partly in Switzerland.

We were collected at the airport by my friend Pat O’Hare and we spent the next week with him.

The first couple of days we had a look at Geneva itself and at Nyon a lovely lake side town where Pat, who has rediscovered his passion for jazz, has a saxophone teacher.

Whilst in Geneva we saw some of the prices that push into living in France most of the international civil servants who come to Geneva to work in the WHO, ILO, FIFA etc. The photo here of a rather ordinary pair of shoes retailing at over £1,000 a pair makes the point rather well.

We had a great meal with Pat in downtown Geneva – see Picasa.

We couldn’t miss out on the chance that staying with Pat provided to us to check out the Alps – at least the area around Mont Blanc which is just about in Pat’s backyard.

We went one day to Chamonix and rubbed shoulders with the (not very pleasant) ex pat skiing set at the end of their season.

We also took another day out with Pat to go over (actually under) the border to Italy. We went through the Mont Blanc tunnel to Aosta where we had lunch at a Michelin starred restaurant hidden away in the backstreets of this lovely little northern Italian village.

It was typical of Pat that he should know how to find probably the best restaurant within a few hundred miles. It was certainly one of - if not - the best that I have ever eaten in.

When Pat lived and worked in Liverpool, after we had both set up our own companies together, we used to go out regularly to eat well and pick each other’s brains over a good meal. We would take turns to find ever better restaurants within Merseyside and its surrounds.

We had some good meals then but I don’t think I can easily find a better one for him than Aosta the next time he comes over to the UK.

On the way out to Italy we stopped for a photo opportunity and Pat took this shot.

I think it captures both the beautiful surroundings we were in but also the great fun Caroline and I were having being there together - and of course with Pat.

Keep watching the blog. I will insert links to the videos from here as they go into YouTube.

Venice is next week – looking forward to that!

March 2008 – California, Arizona and Nevada

2008-04-12T16:41:00.004+01:00

Caroline and James' second trip of Cal's long leave

There is an itinerary below which links to a series of videos hosted on YouTube which I shot in the US and edited this last week back in the UK. There is also a new album on my Picasa site which has about 60 photos shot whilst we moved around the SW USA. This is at http://picasaweb.google.com/JamesLKay/SouthWestUSAMarch2008

In Picasa you can click the SLIDESHOW button and all the pictures will run as a show every 4 seconds although you can override this by using the PAUSE facility. In YouTube you can use the small expand icon to go to full screen view at any time. After using this the ESC key reverts to normal size windows.

If you view either the Picasa site or the YouTube videos you will need to use the BACK button on your web browser to come back to this blog. With Picasa you might need to hit it a lot if you have viewed many pictures or you could use the HISTORY button on your browser.

DAY 1 LONDON • SAN DIEGO
We were picked up at home on the 17th of March and taken for an overnight stay at a hotel near Heathrow Airport. This hotel had the longest corridors that we have ever seen. To see just how long - click on the picture to get a bigger view - use the back button to get back to the main blog.

The following day – at a very civilised 11 am - we went by a scheduled Virgin Atlantic flight to Los Angeles.

We were delayed for departure by a couple of hours at Heathrow which was irritating but when we eventually took off it was a very good flight (I would definitely recommend Virgin).

When we arrived at LA a coach took us south to San Diego and to the Crowne Plaza. We crashed out for the next 10 hours or so.

DAY 2 SAN DIEGO
In the morning we had a guided tour of the city including the well worth visiting Balboa Park – which has 1,400 acres of landscaped grounds in the centre of the city and many museums dedicated to art, music, theatre, sports and science. Our tour ended at the Mexican old town with lunch. Later we took the harbour boat tour – see the first of the videos on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcyrO_uairE

DAY 3 SAN DIEGO • PHOENIX
On the third day we travelled towards Phoenix, driving through southern California and entering Arizona by way of Yuma and the desert.

The desert landscape reminded us of cowboy films with red sandstone outcrops and varieties of cacti. Again you can expand the picture if you want.

We stayed in the Hilton Garden Inn in Phoenix overnight.

We tried to avoid eating in the tour hotels and not for the last time set out to find a local diner.

In the end we settled for an upmarket steakhouse. The Filet Mignon was terrific although expensive by local standards but given the silly exchange rate - $2 to £1 – the meal cost less (under £60) than a similar quality meal would have done in Liverpool.

DAY 4 GRAND CANYON • FLAGSTAFF
The next morning we travelled through Navajo country for a visit to the artist colony of Sedona. This town is surrounded by spires of red sandstone. Again see (above link) the first of the videos.
After visiting Sedona for our mid morning break we went to the Grand Canyon - at 277 miles long, 18 miles wide and nearly 1 mile deep this is one of the ‘must see once in your life’ sites. We took the helicopter flight over the Canyon – which was also expensive but we wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Have a look at the separate video and see what you think. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VEKJu8FDOY

After landing we went to the south rim for a lunch break and later left by coach to descend into Flagstaff and the Hilton Garden Inn hotel.

DAY 5 FLAGSTAFF • WILLIAMS • LAS VEGAS
The following morning we made a short visit to the 1908 Williams rail depot with its re-enactment of a shoot out between the Marshal and three of the local ‘scallies’. I made a separate short video of this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGKkjKoU_4w

We then set off for Las Vegas and stayed at the somewhat down at heel Flamingo hotel. You can never forget in Vegas that they want your money – this was the only one of our hotel rooms on the tour in which we did not have tea and coffee making facilities. They had flamingos in the swimming pool - but couldn’t run to a single tea bag in the bedroom. The reason, of course, is that they don’t want you sitting in your bedroom sipping tea and watching TV. They want you in the casino and will happily give you free drinks all night from the bar as long as you keep sitting at the gaming tables and (presumably) losing.

We had an evening ‘orientation’ coach tour of the sights of downtown Vegas before crashing out again – still a little jet lagged.

DAY 6 LAS VEGAS
We got up early and had breakfast in Starbucks – fresh fruits and scones – before spending a great day gongoozlin’ up and down the strip.

This picture is outside the Venetian (but see below)

I made a video of the experience inside the Venetian and inside and outside of the Bellagio – which were the two best casino hotels in our opinion.

If you see none other of my videos have a look at this one and particularly at the amazing fountain light show outside the Bellagio. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdjJAPoAM0g

DAY 7 and 8 LAS VEGAS • VISALIA
Crossing the Mojave Desert we come to the ghost town of Calico, once a thriving centre of silver mining, now a tourist attraction. After lunch we went on to stay at the Holiday Inn at Visalia.

DAY 8 YOSEMITE • SONORA
The following morning we travelled to Yosemite National Park, in the heart of the Sierra Nevada. The park gave us the chance to see the giant Redwoods of California and the USA’s highest waterfall. For more see the following video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldtui4iZ-MQ That evening we stayed at the Best Western Hotel at Sonora.

DAY 9 SONORA • SAN FRANCISCO
We travelled on west to San Francisco and on arrival had a sightseeing tour to the Golden Gate Bridge, Nob Hill, Chinatown, Haight-Ashbury and the Italian Quarter. Our hotel was the Holiday Inn Golden Gateway.

DAY 10 SAN FRANCISCO
A day in San Francisco. We took a boat trip from Fisherman’s Wharf to the bay’s two islands – the second of which was the famous prison Alcatraz. The Alcatraz Island audio tour was great and well worth a morning.

DAY 11 SAN FRANCISCO • CAMBRIA
We travelled south to Monterey, the old Spanish and Mexican capital of upper California and after a coffee stop took the famous 17 Mile Drive, one of the loveliest coastal routes in the world. We then stopped for lunch in Carmel (but didn’t see its ex Mayor Clint Eastwood). We continued south after lunch to join the curving 90 mile Big Sur coastline with the breakers of the Pacific being very quiet although our journey was supported by BeachBoys hits courtesy of our surfer driver Ron. We stayed overnight at the Cambria Pines Lodge.

DAY 12 CAMBRIA • ANAHEIM
In the morning we drove down to Santa Barbara, a town allegedly favoured by artists tho’ we couldn’t find any. Here we had a fishy lunch stop before heading on south to Anaheim and the Clarion Hotel whose main claim to fame is its proximity to Disneyland.

DAY 13 DISNEYLAND
A visit to Disneyland was included in the tour price so we rather grudgingly decided to go, being sure that it was not really our sort of thing. As many before us have done we ended up having a great time. We woke up early and by 7.45 were outside Disneyland waiting for the doors to open. Once we got inside we found a café for some breakfast and then mooched along to the first ride – after which you couldn’t hold us back. The only ride we didn’t do was the Space Mountain but overall we had a great time staying just over 11 hours. Have a look at the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMzvPa0X75I

DAY 14 Universal Studios

Having had a great time at Disneyland we also booked the Universal Studio tour which promotes itself as the world’s largest movie studio and theme park.

We took the ‘Backlot Tour’ (see the video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbEkMO-jhS0) and saw behind the scenes of the movie industry including backdrops of many famous motion pictures.

DAY 15 LOS ANGELES • LONDON
By now we were getting a little over faced by constant travelling (2500 miles on a coach) and the endless succession of themed attractions. On the last morning we boarded our coach for the last brief tour of Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard and the fashionable Wilshire district. We had an audio guide – see the main video – and did all the obvious sites before setting off back to LAX for the flight to Heathrow.

Once back in the UK we had a minibus waiting to take us back home. By now we were exhausted after being awake for about 25 hours so we were glad to just flop in the minibus and go straight home for a 12 hour sleepathon.

And finally
This was one of those once in a lifetime holidays. We saw some wonderful places and had a great if tiring time. It was the first time that we have been on a guided coach tour. The guide and driver were great as was all the pre-planning and accommodation. We saw more than we ever could have done under our own steam. We were pleased that we went this way this time but I am not sure if we would ever do this again. In the past I have always done more self-catering, trying to get off the beaten track and that is where I am happiest I think. We are going back to San Francisco in August for my son Robert’s wedding and we are looking forward to picking up where we left off in our very short trip to the city this time.

James and Caroline

Our Egypt trip

2008-03-09T10:37:00.005Z

Sunday 9th March

Back from Egypt on Tuesday last after a great time.

and a link to my new on-line gallery at Picasa which has about 60 photos from Egypt and a neat little slide show feature which will run them for you with brief comments on each.

Alternatively you can just check out each in turn. Click on this link to go to Picasa for the 60 photos http://picasaweb.google.com/JamesLKay/EgyptHolidayJamesAndCaroline

Also three short videos I have compiled (average duration is less than 2 minutes) from some of the brief clips that I took on Cal's brilliant little camera. I have been playing with Windows Moviemaker to compile these. How can you tell that I am not working at the University at the moment?

I started to embed these movies in the blog but it was taking a lifetime to load them so in the end I have made them links into Youtube which is much faster to load. The first video shows Ahmed our main courier who I thought looked surprisingly like my youngest son Robert. He was a great enthusiast for his work - also like Robert - and here is shown introducing us to Philae and inside the temple. There are lots of pictures on the album - see links above - which also show scenes from the same sites in this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6lfvozq9X4

The second video is a compilation of shots taken on board our Nile cruiser and also a smaller motor boat that we used to reach some of the less accessible temples. This is here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6mu6vwPUnY

The last video contains clips of include our trip to Karnak and later a trip to Cairo to see the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the Sphinx and Cairo's market. Again this is presented as a link to my Youtube space.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx8-KJ1KR8U

Final thoughts on our Egypt trip - if you get this far

We went by African Safari who were generally quite good but got definite bad marks for using Monarch Airlines whose seats must be the most uncomfortable in the travel business. I found that at just over 6' I had a very uncomfortable flight and could barely squeeze in with my knees jammed against the back of the seat in front. If you are my height or taller don't ever use Monarch - I certainly won't ever again. I found a listing of seat legroom which confirmed my personal experiences. It seems that Monarch give only 28"legroom. By comparison Easyjet give 29", Ryanair give 30" and Thomas Cook easily the best at 33". To see more just Google "airline legroom" and there are plenty of sites with this information. You will also find as I did numerous sites with complaints about Monarch.

Highlights of our trip were - Karnak - huge temple - wonderful, Abu Simbel - an astonishing achievement to dig this out of Lake Nasser and relocate it a few hundred feet higher and 300 metres inland from the rising waters of the Nile. The Sphinx and Great Pyramid also scored highly on the 'see these before you die' list. The services of Ahmed our courier also a great plus together with the towel art in the cabin which we greatly enjoyed - see picture gallery.

Lowpoints were - lousy legroom - see above also many very early starts - e.g. 3.15am for the trip to Abu Simbel and 4.15am for the Cairo trip - made the whole thing hugely tiring. Less is more African Safari!

Overall - wouldn't have missed it for the world. Highlights far outweighed the low points.

Grown up Gap Year

2008-02-23T13:57:00.002Z

And now it begins – the long leave of Caroline’s and my grown-up-gap-year. A good few friends have asked me to maintain this blog whilst we are on our travels. Just in case any naughty person is reading this we are back at unpredictable intervals and in any case we have someone house sitting while we are away.

So where next? Our first trip is down the Nile, then off to California and Nevada to bask on the beaches and then gaze up (at Sequoia in Yosemite) and wander down (the strip in Vegas) before blowing a few bob on the tables. Side trips are planned to Hollywood and assorted small towns like SF and LA on the way from San Diego to the Grand Canyon.

Back from the US we are off to pay homage to Catalonia (and my daughter Michelle who lives just outside Barcelona) and then after a while Ryanair’ing it over to Geneva to spend a few days in the French Alps with Pat and Annette.

A quick pit stop to watch United and do some serious theatre in the Capital of Culture (no really it’s actually going very well) before slipping back to Europe to check out Venice. Cal has been there before and loved it. She wants to show me the place – so why not?

After Venice its back to the US - but this time the South East from Florida up through the Appalachians as far north as Washington before coming back down through the Carolinas. Back from the US after a lovely long trip with very few plans – just get a car and go – we have a villa booked on Crete near Chania - … and … well, you get the general idea how the summer looks. Oh, and of course in August my son Robert gets married to the lovely Ryn - so its back to San Francisco with Stuart (and Angela) and Michelle and all of Rob and Ryn's friends and family for the 'Wedding of the Century'.

I don’t know quite what I have done to deserve such a great time but Cal has worked her socks off for John Lewis over the last 27 years and deserves the break. When she gets back it will be to hunker down for another twenty years to keep me in the manner to which I am becoming accustomed. Well, someone has to keep earning.

I will try to blog from abroad but it might have to wait until I am back in the UK. It all depends on the technology. Watch this space.

James

Liverpool 08 Launch

2008-01-13T12:46:00.000Z

Cal and I went to the big launch event of the Liverpool 08 year. This was outside on 'St George's Plateau' at 2008 pm on the 11th of January. There were ariel skydancers on cables suspended from cranes in the 'big dig', rock musicians in hard hats and high viz jackets on top of all the buildings around the Plateau.

There was a row of guitarists and drummers on the top of the Lime Street Arch, on top of St Geoge's Hall and the nearby car parks as well as on top of the Radio City Tower and the column.

I have attached here a couple of photos and a video clip which I hope works OK. You should see first a row of guitarists across the top of the car park over the shopping centre and then on the big screen see Ringo Star singing his new release 'Liverpool 08' which then pans to Caroline and back to the crowd singing along. It was a very successful launch with estimates ranging from 20,000 to 50,000 present. We had a great time.

Boxing Day walk in the park

2007-12-27T10:58:00.000Z

Keeping up with my new commitment to blog more often - here is a piccie from Cal and my walk in in Birkenhead Park on Boxing Day. We managed an hour or so walking round the local park to walk off some of our stodge from Christmas Day.

The local authority has spent £10 million on doing up this up-till-recently shabby park. It has a refurbished boathouse and bridegs across the lakes - lots of ducks and pigeons and on Boxing Day - lots of small kids trying out their new Christmas bikes.

The original model for Central Park in New York this was built as an employment project in the late Victorian era.

This is a view of the cleaned up boathouse.

ManU v Everton 23rd December

2007-12-27T10:44:00.000Z

Back to blog! This is my first video blog attempt and is a short clip of that boy Ronaldo scoring the penalty in the final minutes of our game against Everton.

How old is this blog!

2007-12-20T16:49:00.000Z

It looks like I have forgotten about the blog. However don't despair. 2008 is to be the year of the blog because it is Caroline's 'long leave'. As a loyal John Lewis employee for the last 26 years she has now been granted a six month sabbatical on pay and we are going to do some serious travelling. I will blog this as we go.

But just before the old year ends - I cannot let pass my most fun time as a United supporter. This last week we went to Anfield to see United whup Liverpool asses. It is a totally different experience being in the crowd at the away end in 'foreign territory'. 3,000 committed fans on their feet for the whole match and our tribe never stopped singing.

My favourite songs?
* Self pity city - you're just a self pity city " - repeat - lots!
* There's only one Boris Johnson, one Boris Johnson, there's only one Boris Johnson - repeat - lots!
* "Feed the Scousers - let them know its Christmas time"
* "Broke in six times - you even rob yer own team - broke in six times - and nobody caught " - this to the Liverpool tune of "We've won it six times' . Just in case you missed the story this was in response to the media story all last week that Steve Gerrard ("Chelsea Rent Boy - woah - Chelsea Rent Boy") had his house broken into by local thugs who threatened his wife and got away with various trinkets' This on the night that Gerrard was playing abroad for England. Later media reports revealed that this is the 6th break in of homes of Liverpool players who were playing away games for club and country at the time. How despicable is that?
* "Calm down, calm down, calm down, calm down" - complete with hands outstretched sideways and palms down - dancing a little jig with wobbly heads as the scousers bay for the blood of Wes Brown for firmly but legally (honest) tackling (with malice and forethought) one of their wuss players.

Not an occasion for the politically correct or fainthearted - but great fun.

Kept back in the ground for 30 minutes or so at the end to allow the Liverpool fans to disperse - we amused ourselves by singing hymns to the Lord God Eric Cantona of blessed memory. What a wonderful afternoon!

Oh yes - we won - yeahhhhhhhhhhh !!!

Robert does it again!

2007-04-03T12:27:00.000+01:00

Look away Robert now - this could be embarassing.

My Boston-based, computer game designer (youngest) son has just lifted the covers on a game that he has been working on for the last 12 months. It is going to be stellar! Have a look at the coverage on the USA Today site
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/2007-04-01-rock-band_N.htm

The game is called Rock Band and follows on from the awesome Guitar Hero project that he last worked on. If you doubt that a game could be that good - check out these review snippets from the computer game industry media.

And remember that Rock Band begins where Guitar Hero left off. It should be out just before Christmas - can't wait.

"The greatest game in the history of video games." - NY Post
"Unless you hate rock, you need this game." (Score: 10/10) - Games Radar
"Guitar Hero is always going to be a ten, but Guitar Hero II takes it to eleven." (Score: 10/10) - Deeko
"This is an absolutely stellar release, with too much variety, originality, rewards, and pure fun to even think about missing out on." (Score: 5/5) - Yahoo! Games
"Lightning does strike twice and Guitar Hero II is 1.21 gigawatts of blazing electric guitar gameplay with a perfect track selection, perfect gameplay, perfect multiplayer, and perfect fun that will start the day you open the game and last until the day you, your PS2, or your guitar dies." (Score: 11/10!) - Game Chronicles
"Guitar Hero II takes everything that made the original game great and cranks it up to 11, maybe even 12... This is the nearly-perfect sequel to one of our favorite games in basically forever, and it's an absolute must-buy." (Score: 95/100) - IGN
"This is, by far, one of the best games on any platform - ever." - Gaming Trend
"This game will literally crack open the world and spew out huge chunks of molten awesome." - ArsTechnica
"Guitar Hero II might appear to be a game, but it's actually composed of cleverly packaged pockets of productivity-sucking awesomeness created by Satan." - Total PlayStation

Guess they liked it huh?

New York - so good they named it twice

2007-03-26T17:23:00.000+01:00

Cal and I have just come back from 4 days in wonderful New York.

We did all the usual tourist things as well as catching up with our good friends Sue and Jerry - shown shivering below on the boardwalk at Coney Island. You will notice the snow on the beach - not too unusual there but a first for Cal and me.

Next morning we were up bright and early looking for the famous New York breakfast which we eventually found at a place called Ditch Plains in Greenwich Village. This gets a bit of a slapping from a foodie critic http://edlevineeats.seriouseats.com/2006/05/ditch-plains-is-not-there-yet.html but we voted it the best breakfast in New York on our short visit.

We went back the day after to repeat the experience and discovered that the "server hasn't come in yet - so I can't cook you breakfast " - this from the chef. Never mind - we went round the corner and spotted the Grey Dog which did a nice line in dreads and reggae over the hash browns - and was later voted number 2 in the New York breakfast nosh stakes.

Across the road from this was a leftie bookshop with a hilarious name - see for yourself. If you can't read it just click on the picture and hit the back key later.

I tried explaining to Cal why a marxist bookshop cannot simultaneously claim to be unoppressive and to sell bargain books but I think she thought I had lost the plot. (For the non or ex-marxists its all down to the Marxian 'Labour Theory of Value" If all value comes from labour - and Marx says that it does - then paying the labourer less than the full value of that labour is exploitation and therein lies the inherent oppressive nature of capitalism.

Now, given that a bargain is something that you buy for less than its value - then to sell 'bargain' books is to act in an oppressive way.

zzzzz zzzzz zzzzz (said Cal)

I thought that it was particularly funny that they had the word 'Bargain' in bigger letters than those of either unoppressive or non-imperialist. Capitalism and its values will, out it seems.

zzzz zzzz zzzz zzzz zzzz (said Cal)

We stayed in the Holiday Inn on Lafayette and Canal (don't you just love those New York addresses?) It also got a spanking on the internet for having rooms too small and being located in Chinatown (and this was a problem for why?)

Actually our room was enormous and almost the biggest room hotel room I have ever stayed in. It was a King Size Executive room but given that this only cost about £10 a night more than the standard room rate - this seemed a great bargain. (and not the least oppressive to us)

The bed was also huge - see piccie. I tried to get Cal to do the more saucy version of this picture but she wasn't having any!

Of course it is not just rooms and beds that are big in America.

Portion control seems an alien concept at least in Brooklyn where we had our first meal in New York with Sue and Jerry at a local diner. Cal ordered one of her favourites as a starter - fried courgettes - or zuchino fritto as it was known in this Brooklyn Italian nosherie.

Look at what arrived. Everone in this places gets doggy bags to take home because they specialise in monster portions. This was supposed to be a starter!

Again if you want to see this zuchinni in all its glory - go to click on it. and hit the back key later.

And then on the way up to Greenwich Village on the third day, Cal spotted another interesting eaterie just off the Avenue of the Americas. This was the Jekyll and Hide Restaurant and Social Club for Adventurers, Explorers and Mad Scientists.

Sadly we did not brave its doors given that we were after breakfast at the time and thought we knew exactly where we going to get the best in town (see above).

Next visit to New York - and lets hope its is soon - we will have to check this out - or maybe you have been?

Later we moved on to the real touristy stuff and our favourite trips were the walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and the trip to see the Statue of Liberty up close. We discovered that her little finger is eight feet in length and that the book she holds is the size of a two storey house.

Even from up close it doesn't look that big but they assured us that this was correct.

Caroline's latest play

2007-03-13T22:17:00.000Z

Cal has just finished her latest play for Riverside Players - John Godber's autobiographical play Happy Families'

To see these images larger - just click on them and then use the back button on your browser to get back to this view.

Madness of George the Third in performance

2007-03-08T10:40:00.000Z

Here are a couple of images from my latest play - the Madness of George the Third by Alan Bennett. It was done at the Gladstone Theatre by the Bebington Dramatic Society in the first week of March 2007. The first of these images shows me telling the Prince of Wales " in confidence" that "Mr Pitt is so despondent that he is preparing to return to private practice as a Barrister."

In this second image I am having my pulse taken by Dr Baker whilst two other Doctors look on. There are many more images now at the BDS web site.

Go to the URL below ... http://www.bebingtondramaticsociety.co.uk/

Final stage George 3rd

2007-02-22T14:50:00.000Z

We've finally got to the final stages of rehearsing the Madness of George 3rd. I took my new posh all singing, all dancing, phone, pda, windows, mp3, web browser 3g, wap, bluetooth, wi-fi, infra red, thingy to the rehearsal last night and clicked a few snaps.

The costumes were being tried out - generally very well received although mine hadn't arrived.

You will have to waitr to see what comes later but meanwhile - here is ..

The Prince of Wales - "Big, fat cuckoo in the nest" as described by his Dad George the 3rd.

"I tell you Lord Thurlow, being Prince of Wales simply aint becoming to a gentleman. It is not a position - its a predicament. I want to be doin' not danglin'."

And next comes his personal physician - great fan of the application of blisters "to draw the violent humours out of his legs and head."

And then of course we have the Queen and Lady Elizabeth the younger one with whom the King became infatuated. In this scene - found not acted - there seems to be a difference of opinion about who has the best posh frock!

Caroline's latest triumph

2006-11-09T14:36:00.000Z

Caroline has been starring in a production of Accrington Pals at the Gladstone theatre in Port Sunlight. I have included a few photos of the production which is going down very well. You can go to the Accrington Pals production website
http://www.bebingtondramaticsociety.co.uk/Accrington%20pals%202006.htm

Here are a couple of Cal but there are others at the above URL

The play is on till Saturday the 11th Novemver at the Gladstone Theatre.

2006-10-01T21:36:00.000+01:00

What a time we've been having recently.

Some great theatre in Liverpool and in Stratford. In Liverpool we went to see the National Theatre on Tour's production of the Overwhelming - directed by Max Stafford Clarke. See the reviews of this at http://www.outofjoint.co.uk/prods/reviews_overwhelming.html which is anything understate the greatness of what was a shattering theatrical experience. This sort of performance is the reason why I love theatre so much. There is no other way that you can get so deep, so quickly into such a complex issue. It was a snapshot of the events leading upto the genocide in Rwanda. It avoided sentimentality or glib rationalisation after the event "If only so and so had done x it wouldn't have happened" yet still kept the audience utterly captured. When it finished I just sat there stunned for a few minutes. It is on tour still for a while - if you get the chance - see it.

At Stratford we saw Patrick Stewart as Prospero in the Tempest - excellent - and Knee High Theatre's Cymbeline - so quirky that it had purists harrumphing in the aisles and one person even stormed out after five minutes. We had heard that it was more Knee High than Shakespeare but we loved it. There was standing ovation at the end so obviously we weren't the only ones to find it fun.

Summer jollies in Crete

2006-09-08T19:25:00.000+01:00

Last 10 days in August saw us in seriously sunny Crete. Over 90 most days and over 80 most nights. Thank god for air conditioning!

We booked a self catering apartment in Platanais which is about 15 k outside Chania on the Western end of Crete.

I bought myself a video DVD handycam to play with and that means that there are very few pictures that I can post because its all video.

I am still learning how to turn them into stills or maybe I can post a short video to this blog. How tacky would that be!

The real reason I bought the camcorder is for a show I working on in November called Accrington Pals. We hope to film some video in rehearsal and use it in the live performance alongside some archive footage of the first world war.

The big, bald-lookin old geezer in the blue shirt here with eye welded to the viewfinder is me.

I stood on the edge of a 200 foot drop from the 'Eagle's Nest' restaurant overlooking Platanias. We went there a couple of times. Food typically fresh and cheap - less than £20 for the two us to have a three course meal with drinks.

And below is the beach besides the apartment that we stayed at. On the last day when this picture was taken the wind had got up and with it came the waves - so not much swimming possible in the sea but the pool was warm.

By this time we had acclimatised and anything less than 85 degrees felt cold so we wimped out a bit.

On our jollies in Paris in Spring

2006-09-08T17:39:00.000+01:00

We went to Paris in Spring but it was a bit cold. This is the first chance that I have had to upload a few of the piccies. Well actually it isn't the first chance - juyst the first one that I have taken. Been a bit busy!

The first couple are from the inside of the Palace of Versailles built by Louis XIVth and then added to I think by the next two Louis XV and XVI before the rising middle classes called a halt to the monarchy for quite a while.

On the left here is the famous Hall of Mirrors which was under restoration when we went but still an awesome sight.

Then comes room after room decorated in the most breathtaking sumptuousness - gold on silver and elaborate wall paintings and chandeliers - all astonishingly luxiurious.

No wonder they got pissed off at the royalty spending all this when the poor were dying of hunger.

This picture of a chandelier against an amazing ceiling with the paintings continuing down the walls. All the furniture was plush and velvet and even the doors were painted in gilt.

After a while you stopped seeing the splendour of it all and it was only when we got back and looked at the guidebooks and the photos we had taken that you begin to appreciate just how relentless was the portrayal conspicuous consumption.

Talk about Bling!

How tacky were the pre-revolutionary monarchy in France.

Back on the streets of Paris we chilled for a while - yes it was actually really cold. But this was jes me, leanin an loafin and takin my ease as Walt Whitman might have said

Lebanon, Israel and Hezbollah – what is going on?

2006-08-01T10:05:00.000+01:00

I don’t know about you - but I have been left frustrated and bewildered by the media coverage of recent events in Lebanon. The suffering seems appalling but the explanations offered by our media for why things are happening seem to be at least – not persuasive.

I am not prepared to join the glib bandwagon of US/Zionist conspiracy theorists because they rest ultimately on the belief that there are two sides – one downtrodden and the other wicked. We would also have to assume that New Labour has joined the ranks of the wicked. Whilst such a worldview may be comforting in its simplicity I don’t think it can be right. There are no explanations of motive. Why are these things happening right now?

Why do the Israelis think it necessary to go back into Lebanon so soon after they pulled out of Gaza and not that long after they pulled back from Lebanon itself? They must know how unpopular it makes them internationally and it costs them the lives of young Israeli soldiers not to mention loads of money.

I can easily understand how most European leaders and the UN can call for an immediate ceasefire but why do the Americans and also Blair and his cabinet not support such a call?

Why did Hezbollah launch their initial cross border incursions – killing eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two others? Why do they continue to taunt their belligerent neighbour when they must have know what would be the consequences of launching of over a 100 rockets a day into Israel?

How can Hezbollah afford the thousands of rockets that they have launched over the last fortnight (which must be at least a few millions of pounds worth of ordnance) - and how did they get them into place without anyone spotting convoys of rockets heading south through Lebanon? These rockets seem to be coming originally from Iran but they can’t have been ferried down into southern Lebanon over the last couple of weeks without anyone noticing. That seems to imply planning and forethought. So when was this planned and what is Iran’s interest in this?

There really must be a better explanation than the downtrodden versus the wicked.
And so I went looking for different viewpoints. I found the enclosed article, which I don’t find completely convincing - but there is a logical thread running through this and that alone makes it stand out from the facile offerings of other media pundits including our own dear BBC.

If you see anything else which you think offers a better set of explanations and solutions let me know.

James

This from from
http://zope06.v.servelocity.net/hjs/sections/middleeast/aboutgme/editorials/israel-hezbollah_ed

Israel and Hezbollah: Back to Where We Started?
Cambridge, 26th July 2006
At first sight, we seem to back where we started. In 1978 Israel launched its first major ground operation into southern Lebanon, followed by a full-scale invasion in 1982. This was intended to dislodge Palestinian guerrillas, who had moved there after being ejected from Jordan in 1970 and were using southern Lebanon as a base for further attacks into northern Israel. After much bloodshed, the Israelis succeeded in driving out the Palestinians, but their occupation of Southern Lebanon fuelled the emergence of Hezbollah, which aspires not only to create an Iranian-style theocracy in the region but also to eliminate Israel from the map. Worn down by Hezbollah's resistance, and hopeful that a withdrawal would lessen tensions, Israeli forces evacuated southern Lebanon in 2000.

Since then, Hezbollah has consolidated its hold there and launched regular attacks on Israeli targets across the border. Now many fear that the Israeli incursion, 'disproportionate' use of force and the associated civilian deaths will s imply start a new cycle of violence, which only a 'solution' to the Palestinian issue can prevent.

This is to miss the point. If the Israeli action were merely intended to be punitive, then there would indeed be an absurd mismatch between ends and means. In fact, the operation is intended to be coercive: not merely to deter, but to end Hezbollah attacks on northern Israel, to weaken the movement's position in the Lebanon, to force the Beirut government to confront the presence of a terrorist state within a state on its soil, and to weaken its sponsors in Tehran and Damascus. Unfortunately, the Lebanese state has entered a Faustian bargain with Hezbollah, not unlike that which many other countries in the region - particularly Saudi Arabia - have concluded with domestic extremists. In return for Hezbollah's continued good behaviour at home, the movement has been allowed to export terror across its borders.

For this reason, most western states do not see the Israeli action as a violation of international law per se. The disarmament of local militias was a stipulation, after all, of a recent Security Council resolution. Besides, the toppling of the Taliban in 2001, which had hosted the perpetrators of the 11th September attacks, set a clear precedent that states which do not act against major terrorist forces on their territory forfeit their sovereignty, at least temporarily.

Admittedly, this doctrine is intended to empower the great democracies such as the United States and United Kingdom to work towards a rational global order, and not to justify a 'free-for-all'. Yet a democratic regional power must be permitted - with the sanction of the great democracies - to prevent attacks from illegitimate groups operating within a neighbouring state's territory. And although it is an unpleasant fact that the interventions in Afghanistan and Kosovo cost many thousands more civilian lives than that in Lebanon has so fa r, Israel must uphold the same reasonably high standards as NATO did while conducting aerial strikes in the former Yugoslavia.

Moreover, the Hezbollah threat is greatly aggravated by its avowed link to Iran. It supplied the hundreds of rockets which now rain down on Israel, and the supply of weapons of mass destruction at some point cannot be ruled out. It is no coincidence surely that the original Hezbollah incursion took place shortly before the international community was due to discuss Tehran's nuclear ambitions, and was designed to distract attention from that issue. Likewise, recent reports from the Palestinian authority suggest that Damascus has signalled a willingness to put pressure on Hezbollah to release the soldiers in return for a let-up in the UN investigation into the murder of Rafik Hariri. The crisis is thus being driven by interests which have little to do with the rights of the Palestinian and Lebanese democracies, and everything to do with the ambitions of Syria and Iran.

Israel's aim is therefore entirely legitimate. Insofar as its operations on the southern border are concerned, its methods seem largely appropriate: there is no other way of dealing with a resourceful, well-equipped enemy who has had six years to fortify the hill-sides. However, the second plank of the strategy, which is to coerce the Lebanese government into taking on the Hezbollah militia, cannot succeed, and the means employed are therefore by definition disproportionate.

The government lacks the will but also the capacity to disarm Hezbollah; it deserves to be punished for allowing Hezbollah to import arms to attack its neighbour, but there is no point in doing so. Put bluntly, the Lebanese government would rather be bombed by Israel than risk another civil war. It cannot force Hezbollah to release the soldiers, and is unlikely that Israel itself can do that. Instead, Israel must refuse to negotiate over prisoners, indicating that - in the manner of the Good Friday agreement - a full release of all detainees should follow a final settlement.

The key thing now is to expand the attack on Hezbollah into a broader strategy for a Democratic Geopolitics in the Middle East. First, Israel should stop all attacks on the Lebanese national infrastructure north of the Litani river, on military targets in built up areas of Beirut and in all areas where there no Hezbollah presence; these cause political damage to the Lebanese state out of all proportion to the military gain. Instead, while condemning their failure to rein in Hezbollah, we should show more solidarity with the Christian, Sunni and Druze coalition which mounted the spectacular Cedar Revolution of last year.

Secondly, Israel should be encouraged to complete the suppression of Hezbollah forces in the south; it should be permitted to establish a limited security buffer zone designed to stop infiltration on the ground. Thirdly, a strong multi-national force should be deployed in the south under a UN mandate at the request of the Lebanese government in order to prevent Hezbollah from launching further rockets. This should be led by the French, perhaps under a European Union mandate, who command the only capable western military apart from the British and Americans - who are overstretched elsewhere. If under a European mandate, Britain could assist wherever needed. If Hezbollah resumes attacks from other areas of the Lebanon, and some of their missiles have the requisite range, the remit of the force should be widened, if necessary to include the Bekaa Valley. A further aim would be to hem in Syria, support the UN investigation into the Hariri murder and generally deter interference of Damascus in the internal affairs of the Lebanon.

Let us be under no illusion. If this force is ineffective, as all UN forces in the region have been from the Sinai through to UNIFIL, and does not restrain Hezbollah, then we shall be back to where we started and nobody can object if Israel shoves it aside in the course of self-defence. But if the force is effective it will be not only stabilising Lebanon but also protecting Israel, and will immediately become a target for Hezbollah. Because the local population is largely Shiite, this means that the troops will be a force of occupation; the fact that Hezbollah was responsible for the blowing up of some forty French soldiers in Beirut in the early 1980s will add to the tension. But the international community will have to bite this bullet. Either the Lebanese government secures its own sovereignty by restraining Hezbollah, or the international force should do so, or the Israelis will. There is no fourth way.

Finally, all this should be combined with a new initiative regarding the West Bank and the Palestinian authority. Mahmoud Abbas's brokering of a deal with the various Palestinian factions on the return of the kidnapped soldier and a ceasefire should be applauded. His prior suggestion of a plebiscite on the recognition of Israel within the 1967 boundaries, which Hamas tried to frustrate through the original kidnapping, should now be seized upon. It should also be made clear to any Palestinian group tempted to disrupt the holding of such a vote by provoking Israel during the referendum period that such action would put them beyond the pale of recognition as a legitimate political participant in any future Palestinian state.

If the referendum goes against Abbas, then the Palestinian people effectively vote for a continuation of the occupation, and we should respect their democratic will. If the proposal is carried, Israel would have a clear partner for peace with whom to negotiate a withdrawal from the West Bank, including the settlements, forthwith and then move to final status discussions on Jerusalem. Another multinational force - subject to the same mandate as that in Lebanon - should be deployed to the West Bank and Gaza to monitor militia disarmament following an Israeli withdrawal. If the result is simply to provide another platform for terrorist attacks, then Israel should resume the occupation, but not the illegal settlement programme. Events in Lebanon have shown that Israel can take risks for peace, but will not hesitate to respond if its concessions are mistaken for weakness. Now this strategy should be tried in the occupied territories: it will then be up to the Palestinians to decide whether they want to seize t his opportunity or to squander it like the Shiites of southern Lebanon.

Created 2006 - The Henry Jackson Society

Another 12th Night Review - from Wirral Champion

2006-07-14T09:59:00.000+01:00

The Wirral Champion is a local free lifestyle magazine. The review below comes from 'Dowager's Diary' like its author a venerable institution on Wirral. June Lancelyn Green - a lovely septuagenarian who is also President of Merseyside's English speaking Union - is to be found at just about every theatre event on Merseyside. June - who can trace her family tree back to the Norman Conquest - writes her diary in the Champion and every month all the theatre buff's avidly scan the columns to see if they get a mention. Although she is never cruel she is a very perceptive critic and what she says about us matters more to us I suspect than she realises. Here is what she said ...

"Bebington Dramatic Society excelled itself in its production of Shakespeare's 12th Night. A delightful set opening out the stage to include the sides of the apron and impressive pillars and tapestries. A good height at the back to levels and different areas for the Duke and Olivia.

What was wonderful was the understanding and delivery of the text. Everyone knew exactly what they were talking about. James Kay was a most physical Sir Toby, drunken and obviously anathema to the Malvolio with his centre parting, lugubrious face and puritan disapproval. The sea captains were credible and there was no phoniness in them. The likeness of Viola and Sebastian was uncanny and the amazed delight when they recognised each other was most moving. In fact the young man playing Sebastian is one of the best I have ever seen, particularly when he can hardly believe that this wealthy young lady has fallen for him!

I don't think the 'Black Comedy' reversal of of light and darkness worked for the prison scene and I would have liked Olivia better groomed about the hair and the hands but those are taradiddles. I LOVED having a real SINGER as Feste. He didn't look like an impoverished hanger-on clown, but sounded ravishing."

12th Night Review - from Wirral Stages

2006-07-14T09:40:00.000+01:00

Wirral Stages is a theatre magazine for Wirral - which to to the uninitiated is the thumb shaped peninsular opposite Liverpool. It is part of Merseyside - although the posher residents would have you say that it is part of Cheshire really. It has a population of over 300,000 - which is more than Liverpool itself. It is joined to Liverpool by the famous Mersey Ferry and by the less famous but more important Mersey tunnels - two of them.

There are at least 38 theatre groups on Wirral providing theatre to its population - most of whom will go more frequently to local theatres and venues than to the theatres in Liverpool - only a couple of miles across the Mersey.

The review said ... (April 5th)

"An evening with Shakespeare after a long week in the office could be viewed as a bit heavy going. However this was not the case at the Gladstone Theatre Port Sunlight. Bebington Dramatic Society's production of 12th Night made highly entertaining theatre. A slick and pacey production, directed by Nick Sample made this convoluted, potentially confusing comedy flow with ease.

The production had a strong cast, many of them seasoned performers with Hillbark open-air Shakespeare. All the cast are worthy of a mention but in particular Jonathan McGrath was excellent as the love-struck Malvolio and David Oliver and James Kay (Andrew Aguecheek and Toby Belch) were a treat to watch as they fed off each other and worked together well. Anthony Andrews also shone as Sebastian, his debut Shakespeare role.

It wasn't just the storyline which involved mistaken identity - a clever selection of scene change music using modern hits disguised as a 16th century harpsichord arrangement added to the light hearted comedy. James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" was a particularly nice touch."

12th Night Review

2006-07-13T16:29:00.000+01:00

Sorry its been a while. Here is a review of 12th Night. It is a good one - of course! - but there were others also good. We did well with the show and had great fun. I will try a post a few photies as well.

12th Night Review from NODA North West News April 2007

By Gordon Hall

Snow and ice outside but inside a set with a warm glow of Illyria. Enter a drunken Sir Toby and from then on, one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays was a constant pleasure. The great strength of this production lay in the humour and here James Kay as Sir Toby gave one of the best performances of the role I have seen in many a year. He was more than ably assisted by the Aguecheek of Chairman David Oliver, avoiding the often effeminate interpretation so that their knockabout fun was sheer delight.

Michael Hetherington was an impressive Feste, not as cynical and world weary as some but an ever ready and perceptive wit with his Northern Ireland accent. A particular bonus was his excellent singing throughout. Caroline Sawley completed the quartet of plotters with another of her finely judged performances as Maria. As their puritan prey, Jonathan McGrath was a nicely odious and supercilious Malvolio though I would have preferred a little more obvious pomposity at times.

The malice of the Sir Topaz scene was particularly well done with the ‘Black Comedy’ light is dark approach. )I often wonder if this is strictly necessary though – we should never feel sympathy for Malvolio).

It was good to see so many younger players on stage and for once a Viola and Sebastian who could pass for twins. Beth Lucena carried her male impersonation well as Viola and Anthony Andrews also came over well as her brother. Sarah Corke was an attractive Olivia, managing the change from grief to impetuous love well. As the spurned suitor Duke Orsino, there was another strong performance from Les Ebrell. The smaller roles of Fabian (Mathew King) and Antonio (Alan Lear) upheld the high standard. Scenery lighting and costumes all combined to give support to an excellent evening. Samuel Pepys might have thought it is a ‘silly play’ but the appreciative audience at the Gladstone Theatre would not have agreed.

12th Night rehearsals

2006-02-28T15:29:00.000Z

12th Night posts - Gladstone Theatre
Port Sunlight March 2006

Sorry its been a while but I have finally got round to adding a few more piccies to the site.

First here is Caroline and yours truly at a recent rehearsal for 12th Night on at Gladstone theatre in the first week of March 2006

Next comes a couple of shots of Caroline looking as lovely as ever and then one of Anthony and Beth who are playing the twins - Sebastian and Viola/Cesario.

Anthony and I have a furious sword fight in which he draws blood from me - lots of stage gore in the final scene I am in.

Toby Belch as the Shakespeare buffs will know is 12th Night's drunken 'Lord of Misrule' - great fun.

More from Mallorca - start below this and work up

2005-10-13T11:41:00.000+01:00

Holidays in Mallorca

2005-10-13T11:09:00.000+01:00

Cal and I had a couple of glorious lazy weeks in much maligned Mallorca in September - sorry for the delay in posting these.

As many regular travellers to this lovely island already know, it is a great place to relax as long as you stay away from the drunken British slobs who gather like gadarene swine, around a handful of resorts which are easy to avoid. The rest of this large island is classy and very easy on the eye.

We stayed in the far south - in Colonia Sant Jordi. This is a small mid twentieth century resort village based a lovely harbour and 3 good beaches. The harbour beach although a little busy is clean and gentle - very easy to be on and covered in middle aged Germans. This gave me the chance to practice mein Deutch - which is sehr wenig (I think means 'very little').

The Germans we met were middle aged, middle class and very polite. They were on average even bigger than me which meant I felt OK about exposing my pasty white belly to a few healing rays. Here I am below - thankfully before the kit came off.

After a few good sunny days on the beach - and a few others round the pool in our very spacious apartment (booked direct on't t'internet for a very reasonable 700 euros for the fortnight) we headed inland.

First stop outside Colonia Sant Jordi was Palma which is surprisingly like Barcelona. Actually I should not have been surprised as the culture - Catalonian - and the language are the same. The Guadi influences although not as pervasive, are to be found as you can see below.

Also here is a shot of me looking like the man from Dell Monte - outside the cathedral.

Language can be fun and the translations don't always quite capture the meaning expected. Here is a sign in Palma which we couldn't resist - and which I think means "Fire Hydrant" although it may not!

Our next stop was on a wooden train train to Soller in the mountains. More to follow

More debates on the Great Satan!

2005-09-08T12:48:00.000+01:00

My daughter Michelle has lobbed back another ideological handgrenade in response to my piece from yesterday about the hurricane in the US and their response to it. She said

"I'm sorry dad but you're gonna have difficulty convincing me that it's a good place to be, even though I'm white. And I know that every country has it's problems and that the UN isn't perfect as we saw yesterday with the oil for food scandal, but... (and she enclosed an article titled...)
UN hits back at US in report saying parts of America are as poor as Third World

I have copied this article below for those with the energy to read it - and responded as follows ...

Hi love

I will read this more carefully and get back to you on it - I will add a couple of comments just now. I will also paste this into my blog for Robert and a couple of others that I know log on from time to time including my friends in the US.

First - who do you think funds large dollops of the UN budget? Yes that's right - its the great Satan itself. Try to imagine if you can, the UN kleptocrats allowing any of the money they control, to go into the coffers of their opponents.

Secondly - I haven't done anything more than just skim over the top of this article but one thing jumps out at me. It is a confusion between absolute and relative poverty. Absolute poverty is what kills people. It is what has some people starving to death for lack of food, freezing in winter for lack of fuel, dying of dehydration and intestinal disease for want of access to clean water. I think - and so does Dubya and his advisors, that continued expansion of global capitalism and in particular of free trade - is the best way of reducing absolute poverty. The evidence is strong to back up this contention and if you like I will dig some out for you. The desperately poorest places are those with the least engagement with the rest of the world economy - they also tend to have the most corrupt regimes and the least free trade.

Relative poverty (doing comparisons of the rich and poor peoples within and between societies and extrapolating these into public health debates) is in my view a really difficult concept and at its worst can be a cynical rhetorical device to manipulate public understanding. There is a good example of this sort of statistical sleight of hand in this document.

"Amongst the world's poor" it says "infant mortality is falling at less than half of the world average". This is good rhetoric which manipulates our understanding towards outrage on what seems to be a great example of unfairness. But it is manipulative when it is set out in this way. First it (almost) masks the fact that infant mortality is falling even amongst the world's poor. It does this by highlighting the relative poverty concept above that of the continued fall in this measure of absolute poverty (infant death).

And the statistical differences between the rate of decline in infant death between the poorest countries and the average rate of that decline is not meaningful of itself. Of course in any distribution you will find some above and some below the average. That is what an average is. Do you realise for example that almost half of the population of Spain (or anywhere else for that matter) have :

worse health or
shorter lives
or more infant deaths
or a lower reading age
or bigger feet
or redder hair
or longer noses
or (insert your own variable)

than the average for your area? Of course they do. That is what an average means. I can make this assertion without any knowledge at all about the actual demographics because it is a statistical artefact I am presenting - not a piece of evidence.

And moreover I can assert that those with the "worst health" or "reddest hair" or "longest/shortest noses" (insert your own variable) of all - will have almost twice as much/half as much of (your variable) than is the average across the geographical area concerned.

This is a function of what is called a normal distribution curve. Any population that is normally distributed (and most are when it comes to these types of variables) - will have 75% of that population distributed within one standard deviation (SD) either side of the mean average. This means that upto 1 SD around the mean there will probably be not that much difference between the individuals within the population in terms of their experience or possession (of the variable). Although there will always be some small differences.

The further you get into the margins (2 SDs is into the last 5% ; 3SDs into the last 1% etc.) of any population - the more you find extreme differences between that rich/poor tall/short ... whatever distribution. This is entirely unremarkable and in itself entirely meaningless. This is function of normal distribution of population statistics in all societies and under all regimes. This is the problem with public health politics based on the concept of relative rather than absolute poverty. Public health apparatchiks fire off statistical analysis at each other to "prove" their point. As one epidemiologist friend of mine said of this sort of analysis. "If you torture the data for long enough - it will confess to anything".

Now of course all people of goodwill want to reduce infant mortality in all societies as much as is possible. That is an absolute measure which we ought to be able to track over time. And if infant mortality is rising anywhere - that is something that needs urgent attention - but the UN's role in this regard is not impressive. Whenever the UN gets involved there is a tendency for a lot of the funds they channel to get stuck to their greasy little fingers on its way through their systems. That is why the US is currently looking for ways to cut them out of the loop. And I think they are right to do so.

The article that Michelle sent is below ...

By Paul Vallely
Published: 08 September 2005
Parts of the United States are as poor as the Third World, according to a shocking United Nations report on global inequality.
Claims that the New Orleans floods have laid bare a growing racial and economic divide in the US have, until now, been rejected by the American political establishment as emotional rhetoric. But yesterday's UN report provides statistical proof that for many - well beyond those affected by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina - the great American Dream is an ongoing nightmare.
The document constitutes a stinging attack on US policies at home and abroad in a fightback against moves by Washington to undermine next week's UN 60th anniversary conference which will be the biggest gathering of world leaders in history.

The annual Human Development Report normally concerns itself with the Third World, but the 2005 edition scrutinises inequalities in health provision inside the US as part of a survey of how inequality worldwide is retarding the eradication of poverty.

It reveals that the infant mortality rate has been rising in the US for the past five years - and is now the same as Malaysia. America's black children are twice as likely as whites to die before their first birthday.

The report is bound to incense the Bush administration as it provides ammunition for critics who have claimed that the fiasco following Hurricane Katrina shows that Washington does not care about poor black Americans. But the 370-page document is critical of American policies towards poverty abroad as well as at home. And, in unusually outspoken language, it accuses the US of having "an overdeveloped military strategy and an under-developed strategy for human security".

"There is an urgent need to develop a collective security framework that goes beyond military responses to terrorism," it continues. " Poverty and social breakdown are core components of the global security threat."

The document, which was written by Kevin Watkins, the former head of research at Oxfam, will be seen as round two in the battle between the UN and the US, which regards the world body as an unnecessary constraint on its strategic interests and actions.

Last month John Bolton, the new US ambassador to the UN, submitted 750 amendments to the draft declaration for next week's summit to strengthen the UN and review progress towards its Millennium Development Goals to halve world poverty by 2015.

The report launched yesterday is a clear challenge to Washington. The Bush administration wants to replace multilateral solutions to international problems with a world order in which the US does as it likes on a bilateral basis.

"This is the UN coming out all guns firing," said one UN insider. "It means that, even if we have a lame duck secretary general after the Volcker report (on the oil-for-food scandal), the rest of the organisation is not going to accept the US bilateralist agenda."

The clash on world poverty centres on the US policy of promoting growth and trade liberalisation on the assumption that this will trickle down to the poor. But this will not stop children dying, the UN says. Growth alone will not reduce poverty so long as the poor are denied full access to health, education and other social provision. Among the world's poor, infant mortality is falling at less than half of the world average. To tackle that means tackling inequality - a message towards which John Bolton and his fellow US neocons are deeply hostile.
India and China, the UN says, have been very successful in wealth creation but have not enabled the poor to share in the process. A rapid decline in child mortality has therefore not materialised. Indeed, when it comes to reducing infant deaths, India has now been overtaken by Bangladesh, which is only growing a third as fast.

Poverty could be halved in just 17 years in Kenya if the poorest people were enabled to double the amount of economic growth they can achieve at present.

Inequality within countries is as stark as the gaps between countries, the UN says. Poverty is not the only issue here. The death rate for girls in India is now 50 per cent higher than for boys. Gender bias means girls are not given the same food as boys and are not taken to clinics as often when they are ill. Foetal scanning has also reduced the number of girls born.
The only way to eradicate poverty, it says, is to target inequalities. Unless that is done the Millennium Development Goals will never be met. And 41 million children will die unnecessarily over the next 10 years.

Decline in health care
Child mortality is on the rise in the United States
For half a century the US has seen a sustained decline in the number of children who die before their fifth birthday. But since 2000 this trend has been reversed. Although the US leads the world in healthcare spending - per head of population it spends twice what other rich OECD nations spend on average, 13 per cent of its national income - this high level goes disproportionately on the care of white Americans. It has not been targeted to eradicate large disparities in infant death rates based on race, wealth and state of residence. The infant mortality rate in the US is now the same as in Malaysia.

High levels of spending on personal health care reflect America's cutting-edge medical technology and treatment. But the paradox at the heart of the US health system is that, because of inequalities in health financing, countries that spend substantially less than the US have, on average, a healthier population. A baby boy from one of the top 5 per cent richest families in America will live 25 per cent longer than a boy born in the bottom 5 per cent and the infant mortality rate in the US is the same as Malaysia, which has a quarter of America's income.
Blacks in Washington DC have a higher infant death rate than people in the Indian state of Kerala

The health of US citizens is influenced by differences in insurance, income, language and education. Black mothers are twice as likely as white mothers to give birth to a low birthweight baby. And their children are more likely to become ill.

Throughout the US black children are twice as likely to die before their first birthday.
Hispanic Americans are more than twice as likely as white Americans to have no health cover
The US is the only wealthy country with no universal health insurance system. Its mix of employer-based private insurance and public coverage does not reach all Americans. More than one in six people of working age lack insurance. One in three families living below the poverty line are uninsured. Just 13 per cent of white Americans are uninsured, compared with 21 per cent of blacks and 34 per cent of Hispanic Americans. Being born into an uninsured household increases the probability of death before the age of one by about 50 per cent.
More than a third of the uninsured say that they went without medical care last year because of cost

Uninsured Americans are less likely to have regular outpatient care, so they are more likely to be admitted to hospital for avoidable health problems.

More than 40 per cent of the uninsured do not have a regular place to receive medical treatment. More than a third say that they or someone in their family went without needed medical care, including prescription drugs, in the past year because they lacked the money to pay.

If the gap in health care between black and white Americans was eliminated it would save nearly 85,000 lives a year. Technological improvements in medicine save about 20,000 lives a year.
Child poverty rates in the United States are now more than 20 per cent

Child poverty is a particularly sensitive indicator for income poverty in rich countries. It is defined as living in a family with an income below 50 per cent of the national average.
The US - with Mexico - has the dubious distinction of seeing its child poverty rates increase to more than 20 per cent. In the UK - which at the end of the 1990s had one of the highest child poverty rates in Europe - the rise in child poverty, by contrast, has been reversed through increases in tax credits and benefits.

Parts of the United States are as poor as the Third World, according to a shocking United Nations report on global inequality.

Claims that the New Orleans floods have laid bare a growing racial and economic divide in the US have, until now, been rejected by the American political establishment as emotional rhetoric. But yesterday's UN report provides statistical proof that for many - well beyond those affected by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina - the great American Dream is an ongoing nightmare.
The document constitutes a stinging attack on US policies at home and abroad in a fightback against moves by Washington to undermine next week's UN 60th anniversary conference which will be the biggest gathering of world leaders in history.

The annual Human Development Report normally concerns itself with the Third World, but the 2005 edition scrutinises inequalities in health provision inside the US as part of a survey of how inequality worldwide is retarding the eradication of poverty.

It reveals that the infant mortality rate has been rising in the US for the past five years - and is now the same as Malaysia. America's black children are twice as likely as whites to die before their first birthday.

The report is bound to incense the Bush administration as it provides ammunition for critics who have claimed that the fiasco following Hurricane Katrina shows that Washington does not care about poor black Americans. But the 370-page document is critical of American policies towards poverty abroad as well as at home. And, in unusually outspoken language, it accuses the US of having "an overdeveloped military strategy and an under-developed strategy for human security".

"There is an urgent need to develop a collective security framework that goes beyond military responses to terrorism," it continues. " Poverty and social breakdown are core components of the global security threat."

The document, which was written by Kevin Watkins, the former head of research at Oxfam, will be seen as round two in the battle between the UN and the US, which regards the world body as an unnecessary constraint on its strategic interests and actions.

Last month John Bolton, the new US ambassador to the UN, submitted 750 amendments to the draft declaration for next week's summit to strengthen the UN and review progress towards its Millennium Development Goals to halve world poverty by 2015.

The report launched yesterday is a clear challenge to Washington. The Bush administration wants to replace multilateral solutions to international problems with a world order in which the US does as it likes on a bilateral basis.

"This is the UN coming out all guns firing," said one UN insider. "It means that, even if we have a lame duck secretary general after the Volcker report (on the oil-for-food scandal), the rest of the organisation is not going to accept the US bilateralist agenda."

The clash on world poverty centres on the US policy of promoting growth and trade liberalisation on the assumption that this will trickle down to the poor. But this will not stop children dying, the UN says. Growth alone will not reduce poverty so long as the poor are denied full access to health, education and other social provision. Among the world's poor, infant mortality is falling at less than half of the world average. To tackle that means tackling inequality - a message towards which John Bolton and his fellow US neocons are deeply hostile.
India and China, the UN says, have been very successful in wealth creation but have not enabled the poor to share in the process. A rapid decline in child mortality has therefore not materialised. Indeed, when it comes to reducing infant deaths, India has now been overtaken by Bangladesh, which is only growing a third as fast.

Poverty could be halved in just 17 years in Kenya if the poorest people were enabled to double the amount of economic growth they can achieve at present.

Inequality within countries is as stark as the gaps between countries, the UN says. Poverty is not the only issue here. The death rate for girls in India is now 50 per cent higher than for boys. Gender bias means girls are not given the same food as boys and are not taken to clinics as often when they are ill. Foetal scanning has also reduced the number of girls born.
The only way to eradicate poverty, it says, is to target inequalities. Unless that is done the Millennium Development Goals will never be met. And 41 million children will die unnecessarily over the next 10 years.

The health of US citizens is influenced by differences in insurance, income, language and education. Black mothers are twice as likely as white mothers to give birth to a low birthweight baby. And their children are more likely to become ill.

Throughout the US black children are twice as likely to die before their first birthday.
Hispanic Americans are more than twice as likely as white Americans to have no health cover
The US is the only wealthy country with no universal health insurance system. Its mix of employer-based private insurance and public coverage does not reach all Americans. More than one in six people of working age lack insurance. One in three families living below the poverty line are uninsured. Just 13 per cent of white Americans are uninsured, compared with 21 per cent of blacks and 34 per cent of Hispanic Americans. Being born into an uninsured household increases the probability of death before the age of one by about 50 per cent. More than a third of the uninsured say that they went without medical care last year because of cost

Uninsured Americans are less likely to have regular outpatient care, so they are more likely to be admitted to hospital for avoidable health problems. More than 40 per cent of the uninsured do not have a regular place to receive medical treatment. More than a third say that they or someone in their family went without needed medical care, including prescription drugs, in the past year because they lacked the money to pay.

If the gap in health care between black and white Americans was eliminated it would save nearly 85,000 lives a year. Technological improvements in medicine save about 20,000 lives a year.
Child poverty rates in the United States are now more than 20 per cent

Child poverty is a particularly sensitive indicator for income poverty in rich countries. It is defined as living in a family with an income below 50 per cent of the national average.

The US - with Mexico - has the dubious distinction of seeing its child poverty rates increase to more than 20 per cent. In the UK - which at the end of the 1990s had one of the highest child poverty rates in Europe - the rise in child poverty, by contrast, has been reversed through increases in tax credits and benefits.

Thoughts on Katrina and the Big Easy

2005-09-07T11:44:00.000+01:00

My daughter has been sending me and her friends and other family, articles and her thoughts on New Orleans and the Hurricane.

Michelle holds many of the views that I held when I was her age and a little younger. She finds Bush and all he stands for pretty repulsive and I understand why - but actually no longer agree with that view of the world so on this, as on quite a few other issues we disagree - although I love her dearly.

So this article which is not actually pro Bush particularly but it does have quite a different spin on the whole business. Mark Steyn is a journo who writes regularly for American and British papaers on the centre right. I have enjoyed his stuff (and sometimes winced at it) in the Telegraph and the Spectator here and think that what he has to say here about self reliance is really important. So go on - read it - it might give you something to think about.

The Big Easy rocked, but didn't roll
By Mark Steyn – taken from the Daily Telegraph on the 6th of September

Readers may recall my words from a week ago on the approaching Katrina: "We relish the opportunity to rise to the occasion. And on the whole we do. Oh, to be sure, there are always folks who panic or loot. But most people don't, and many are capable of extraordinary acts of hastily improvised heroism."

What the hell was I thinking? I should be fired for that. Well, someone should be fired. I say that in the spirit of the Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, the Anti-Giuliani, a Mayor Culpa who always knows where to point the finger.

For some reason, I failed to consider the possibility that the panickers would include Hizzoner the Mayor and the looters would include significant numbers of the police department, though in fairness I wasn't the only one. As General Blum said at Saturday's Defence Department briefing: "No one anticipated the disintegration or the erosion of the civilian police force in New Orleans."

Indeed, they eroded faster than the levees. Several hundred cops are reported to have walked off the job. To give the city credit, it has a lovely "Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan" for hurricanes. The only flaw in the plan is that the person charged with putting it into effect is the mayor. And he didn't. But I don't want to blame any single figure: the anti-Bush crowd have that act pretty much sewn up. I'd say New Orleans's political failure is symptomatic of a broader failure.

I got an e-mail over the weekend from a US Army surgeon just back in Afghanistan after his wedding. Changing planes in Kuwait for the final leg to Bagram and confronted by yet another charity box for Katrina relief, he decided that this time he'd pass. "I'd had it up to here," he wrote, "with the passivity, the whining, and the when-are-they-going-to-do-something blame game."

Let it be said that no one should die in a 100F windowless attic because he fled upstairs when the flood waters rose and now can't get out. But, in his general characterisation of "the Big Easy", my correspondent is not wrong. The point is, what are you like when it's not so easy?

Congressman Billy Tauzin once said of his state: "One half of Louisiana is under water and the other half is under indictment." Last week, four fifths of New Orleans was under water and the other four fifths should be under indictment - which is the kind of arithmetic the state's deeply entrenched kleptocrat political culture will have no trouble making add up.

Consider the signature image of the flood: an aerial shot of 255 school buses neatly parked at one city lot, their fuel tanks leaking gasoline into the urban lake. An enterprising blogger, Bryan Preston, worked out that each bus had 66 seats, which meant that the vehicles at just that one lot could have ferried out 16,830 people. Instead of entrusting its most vulnerable citizens to the gang-infested faecal hell of the Superdome, New Orleans had more than enough municipal transport on hand to have got almost everyone out in a couple of runs last Sunday.

Why didn't they? Well, the mayor didn't give the order. OK, but how about school board officials, or the fellows with the public schools transportation department, or the guy who runs that motor pool, or the individual bus drivers? If it ever occurred to any of them that these were potentially useful evacuation assets, they kept it to themselves.

So the first school bus to escape New Orleans and make it to safety in Texas was one that had been abandoned on a city street. A party of sodden citizens, ranging from the elderly to an eight-day-old baby, were desperate to get out, hopped aboard and got teenager Jabbor Gibson to drive them 13 hours non-stop to Houston. He'd never driven a bus before, and the authorities back in New Orleans may yet prosecute him. For rescuing people without a permit?

My Afghanistan army guy's observations on "passivity" reminded me of something I wrote for this paper a few days after 9/11, about how the airline cabin was the embodiment of the "culture of passivity". It's the most regulated environment most of us ever enter. So on three of those flights everyone faithfully followed the Federal Aviation Administration's 1970s hijack procedures until it was too late.

On the fourth plane, Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick, Thomas Burnett, Mark Bingham and other forgotten heroes figured out what was going on and rushed their hijackers, preventing the plane from proceeding to its target - believed to be the White House or Congress. On a morning when the government did nothing for those passengers, those passengers did something for the government.

On 9/11, the federal government failed the people; last week, local and state government failed the people. On 9/11, they stuck to the 30-year-old plan; last week, they didn't bother implementing the state-of-the-art 21st-century plan. Why argue about which level of bureaucracy you prefer to be let down by?

My mistake was to think that the citizenry of the Big Easy would rise to the great rallying cry of Todd Beamer: "Are you ready, guys? Let's roll!" Instead, the spirit of the week was summed up by a gentleman called Mike Franklin, taking time out of his hectic schedule of looting to speak to the Associated Press: "People who are oppressed all their lives, man, it's an opportunity to get back at society."

Unlike 9/11, when the cult of victimhood was temporarily suspended in honour of the many real, actual victims under the rubble, in New Orleans everyone claimed the mantle of victim, from the incompetent mayor to the "oppressed" guys wading through the water with new DVD players under each arm.

Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.

New Orleans is a party town in the middle of a welfare swamp and, like many parties, it doesn't look so good when someone puts the lights up. I'll always be grateful to a burg that gave us Louis Armstrong and Louis Prima, and I'll always love Satch's great record of Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?

But, after this last week, I'm not sure I would.

Remember you can comment here or you could just email direct on jameslkay@ntlworld.com

Becky and Richard's wedding in Ullswater

2005-08-30T16:57:00.000+01:00

This is a group of 'Becky's women' with Becky looking splendid in her silk dress designed by one of the McCartneys.
Click on any of these phots to expand their size.

The beautiful 'other woman' on my arm here is my partner Caroline looking splendid in her posh frock besides the old geezer in a suit. Top left is Cal and I on the park bench outside the hotel earlier in the day just before the actual ceremony.
And this is Becky and Richard on the Lake at the beautiful hotel that they chose for their wedding. Caroline and I were delighted to be asked to join them and their family for a few days.

Bank Holiday weekend

2005-08-29T13:21:00.000+01:00

Checkout Caroline's blog for some pictures from our visit this Bank holiday weekend to the West Midland's Safari Wildlife Park.

http://www.carolinesawley.blogspot.com

What her pictures don't show are the many candidates for Darwin awards that we saw hanging out of car windows with mobile phone cameras trying to get good closeup shots of the lions, wolves and tigers. Perhaps they thought the staff were joking when they put up all the 'keep your windows closed' posters. Sadly the tigers and lions did not on this occasion rise to the challenge of editing the gene pool.

We were on our way back from Stratford on Avon where we had seen 'As You Like It' and Sejanus (by Ben Jonson). As you like it was a bit tedious and not very well done. Partly this is because it is - IMHO - a bit boring to start with, and partly because the production was a bit lacklustre. Touchstone, the clown was well done mind and livened up proceedings a bit.

The 'Melancholie Jacques' (pronounced jay-kwees for the non Shakespeare buffs) was a miserable bastard as might have been expected but lacked the vulnerability which makes his character more sympathetic. When this is well done the audience go away thinking good thoughts about him and feeling sorry for him in his existential anguish. I was rather hoping he would get run down by a run away coach and four.

Why did we go and see it if it was such a drag? Firstly because the RSC often pull out all the stops and produce even less than wonderful plays in ways which squeeze every drop of joy, fun and meaning out of them. The second reason is that rumour has it that Hillbark Players are seriously considering doing this play in 2007. This was a good chance to check it out before deciding whether or not to audition for it.

Apropos of which we have good news to report on the audition front. Both Caroline and I have been cast in our favourite parts for the forthcoming production of Shakespeare's 12th Night at the Gladstone Theatre in Port Sunlight - see http://www.bebingtondramaticsociety.co.uk

I will be Sir Toby Belch - one of Shakespeare's best known drunken lechers. Toby is the 'Lord of Misrule' in this popular comedy which was traditionally performed to celebrate the 12th night ritual of turning the house upside down. The servants become the lords and masters and vice versa for the night. This is the occasion for much drunkenness and disorder and the festivities are led by the most outrageous member of the lower orders often dubbed 'the lord of misrule'. I have played this part before - for Network Theatre in Liverpool and enjoyed it greatly then.

Caroline - has been cast at Maria - Toby calls her "Mahr-eye-ah" and "Penthisilea" and his "little wren of nine". He lusts after her and believes that she loves him "...but what of that?" Cal also played the same part in the Network production and made a really good job of it. I am really looking forward to this play and to working alongside Caroline. Our last few roles have not been in the same plays. We have lots of ideas from our last production of this play but of course it is up to the Director to give shape to the play. I am sure he will his own ideas about how he wants these characters played. Nontheless it is good to have plenty to start with as ideas on the character.

Returning to the the RSC productions that we saw this weekend - Sejanus - a little known Ben Jonson play directed by the wonderful Greg Doran - was an entirely different kettle of fish from the lacklustre "As You Like it". It is set in ancient Rome and plots the power struggle around the role of Ceasar in the middle of the reign of Tiberius.

The Swan is more atmospheric than the main theatre and its potential for menace was exploited to the full by Doran. Sejanus is a scheming commoner who has risen to military power through the patronage of Tiberius and he plays a character not unlike Shakespeare's Richard the 111rd. He schemes and suborns the gutless senators to support his cause to be the next Ceasar after Tiberius.

The plot twists and turns but eventually Tiberius outwits him and sets him up for a final denouement in the Senate. Here he is confronted by Tiberius' new general Makro, who thrashes him and then leads him off to be literally ripped to pieces by the mob. Not too much gore on stage although the front row did get an unintended stage blood shower when Makro slit the nose of Sejanus before dragging him off to meet the mob.

Great fun - go to see it if you can. http://www.rsc.org.uk

Oscar Night on the Wirral!

2005-07-24T13:28:00.000+01:00

Caroline and James at the "Oscar Night" celebrations of Riverside Players in Heswall on the Wirral. It was all very light hearted and just about everyone there got an "Oscar". They were presented by Andy Webster - see below with Caroline (Most Popular Actress in a leading role - for Madame TicTac - go to the May 2005 entries in this blog for pictures of Caroline as the sixty-five-year-old deaf/blind TicTac).

You might recognise Val Marshall - (Oscar for Creative Make-up - brilliant Giant Heads for the BFG) - the other side of Andy Webster above - who got best director. Val was also Katherine in the recent "Taming of the Shrew" production by Hillbark Players http://www.hillbarkplayers.co.uk.

I shared most popular leading male role for my performance of the BFG in the BFG.

and one last one of me

2005-07-13T09:01:00.000+01:00

This is the last in the Taming of the Shrew series. I am now moving on as a director for my next show which is Roald Dahl's 'Fantastic Mr Fox' to be performed in Heswall on the Wirral in January 2006. I have recruited 3 farmers, a few farm hands, Mr Fox, Mr Badger, and a great American woman to play a 'Kathy Bates in Misery' type character. We are shortly to recruit the little foxes, badgers, moles, rabbits, chickens, ducks and assorted other creatures. Ho Ho!

and more

2005-07-13T08:58:00.000+01:00

This one is Baptista and Gremio - the unsuccessful suitor for Katherina's hand in marriage.

More Shakespeare images

2005-07-13T08:53:00.000+01:00

This is a picture of the final wedding breakfast. From left to right - Katherina (Kate), Petruchio, the pedant and Baptista - yours truly.

2005-07-05T17:19:00.000+01:00

and now check out the ermine

2005-07-05T17:18:00.000+01:00

and yet another with Tranio in the background to my Baptista - its all in the eyes!

2005-07-05T17:14:00.000+01:00

A few more shots from our Taming of the Shrew - more to xome a little later

2005-06-22T15:02:00.000+01:00

And this is how much we trouble the prompter - during a recent on site rehearsal

2005-06-22T15:01:00.000+01:00

This is a part finished stand in the background and lecherous Gremio with Bianca in the foreground.

2005-06-22T15:00:00.000+01:00

These are a few rehearsal pictures from the Taming of the Shrew at Royden Park. See my earlier post of the local papaer's review. More photos from the show once I get them from our photographer.

Review of 'Taming of the Shrew' my current play

2005-06-22T14:52:00.000+01:00

I am currently playing 'Baptista' - the shrew's father and 'First Player' in Shakespeare's play 'The Taming of the Shrew' which is at Royden Park in the Wirral all this week in an open air setting. Here is what the Daily Post had to say about the show.

Jun 22 2005
By Philip Key, Daily Post

THE Taming of the Shrew is one of Shakespeare's more controversial comedies today, suggesting as it does that the key to a perfect marriage is the total submissiveness of the wife.
It's a problem director Frank Nance neatly circumvents in this open air production from the Hillbark Players. Petruchio's domination of his new wife Kate was all a dream, it seems.
He uses Shakespeare's introductory scene involving a drunken tinker Christopher Sly fooled into thinking he is a lord and forced to watch the comedy.
But he also tacks on the final scene in a disputed 16th Century play The Taming of A Shrew which has Sly waking from his drunken slumbers and - in this case - being led off by the ear by his angry wife.

As the same actors - Michael Hetherington and Val Marshall - also play Petruchio and Kate it's a neat answer to a regular staging problem.

That said, the production presented at the park in Frankby is, in any case, a huge piece of entertainment. Even before the show starts there are displays from the excellent acrobats of the West Kirby Gymnastics Club and dancers of Wirral Theatre School.

The comic characters are boldly presented but always with a sense of story - the constant role-changing in the play can be confusing but rarely here where characters really are characters.
The result is a great night out where Shakespeare's work remains as it was for the original audience, a living event.

2005-06-18T16:42:00.000+01:00

another street of pleasing older properties slated for the chop

2005-06-18T16:41:00.000+01:00

coming down - how dare they!

2005-06-18T16:40:00.001+01:00

and another few

2005-06-18T16:40:00.000+01:00

and another

2005-06-18T16:39:00.000+01:00

These are a selection of the properties still targeted for demolition. Some are very attractive - others less so. Almost all are already superior to anything they are likely to build in their place. This by the way is what great chunks of our money is being spent on - so called Euro grants it is of course UK taxpayers money heavily top sliced by Eurocrates before being doled out to local authorities who see it as a windfall and spend it on stupid schemes like these.

Partial victory over demolition in Tranmere!

2005-06-18T16:11:00.000+01:00

You might have seen earlier that a local residents group which I chair (now called the Church Road East Association of Residents or CHEAR) has been campaigning against a local authority Housing Market Improvement Initiative (HMRI) .

The thinking behind the HMRI is bit like the US general in the Vietnam war speaking to a south Vienamese campaigner against the US presence in his country. " We are here to save you from the communist dictatorship. Unfortunately in order to safeguard democracy for you it might be necessary to obliterate your village!"

In Tranmere the HMRI is supposed restore the local housing market - allegedly in decline - into robust health by demolishing most of the houses - nice victorian and edwardian terraced houses, and replacing them with Barrat boxes - nasty little shoeboxes - designed by accountants and built by robots. This is such a fatuous concept that I am not even going to bother explaining why it is dumb.

We formed a local campaigning group and as an earlier blog mentioned we have been giving local councillors and officials a bit of a seeing to.

Well, it seems to have begun to work.

We have just been informed that half of the houses that were earmarked for demolition, will not know be knocked down and instead local residents will be helped to improve them where it is needed. From my point of view this is very good news as the threat to our home has been lifted. I hope that the other residents whose houses were threatened with demolition but are now saved - don't just fade away but instead give their support to those still under threat. We will see. I have included here a few photos of homes still under threat.

2005-06-03T00:20:00.000+01:00

This is 21 Seymour Street where I live with Caroline - the green door.

2005-05-18T15:41:00.000+01:00

Demolition at the end of my street. We have formed a new campaigning local group in the part of Tranmere where I live. The local authority are pulling down this tower block - which we generally approve of - but also want to flatten the entire area and build Barrat houses for the aesthetically challenged.This we do not approve of and will be chaining ourselves to railing etc in due course. We have already had a local Councillor down to a community meeting attended by nearly 30 of my neighbours. We gave him a serious talking to but it remains to be seen what happens next.

My new job - now on the web

2005-05-17T08:40:00.000+01:00

I have now got my own little bit of the UCLAN website which you can see here.

http://www.uclan.ac.uk/facs/health/ethnicity/staff/jkay.htm

I am working over summer on assimilating the materials necessary to lead two modules on the MA/Diploma in Equality and Diversity and also building some new links between the Centre at UCLAN and the Chartered Management Institute and the Institute of Directors.

2005-05-05T00:38:00.000+01:00

and this is what Cal really looks like - another recent picture

2005-05-05T00:37:00.000+01:00

And another closeup - with lots of ageing make up

2005-05-05T00:35:00.000+01:00

In the cafe

2005-05-05T00:34:00.000+01:00

The fox is real - gawd help it

Caroline as Madame Tic Tac

2005-05-05T00:29:00.000+01:00

Here are a few shots of Caroline in Madame TicTac - in which she played a deaf/blind brothel keeper in the 1950s East End. It all ended in tears of course.

I now run my own country

2005-04-28T23:47:00.000+01:00

My daughter Michelle has introduced me to a great way to exercise my (slight) tendency to megalomania. You set up your own country. Here is an extract from the UN log on my very own ...

The Most Serene Republic of Psychobabblonia is a large, economically powerful nation, remarkable for its compulsory military service. Its hard-nosed, hard-working, intelligent population of 36 million are either ruled by a small, efficient government or a conglomerate of multinational corporations; it's difficult to tell which.

The small, pro-business government concentrates mainly on Law & Order, although Education and Religion & Spirituality are secondary priorities. Citizens pay a flat income tax of 4%. A powerhouse of a private sector is led by the Trout Farming, Cheese Exports, and Beef-Based Agriculture industries.

Psychobabblonia's children are widely acknowledged as the most foul-mouthed in the region, citizens are enjoying a recent large cut in taxes, same-sex marriages are increasingly common, and the latest Harry Potter book is a bestseller. Crime is a serious problem. Psychobabblonia's national animal is the extreme bunnyrabbit, which teeters on the brink of extinction due to widespread deforestation, and its currency is the ergonon.
Psychobabblonia is ranked 3rd in the region and 7,584th in the world for Greatest Rich-Poor Divides.

If you want to see my nation - Go to the link below[ http://www.nationstates.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi/target=display_nation/nation=psychobabblonia ]

New Job for James

2005-04-22T08:38:00.000+01:00

I have now started a new part-time job at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) in Preston where I am now the 'Organisational Change Manager' in the Centre for Ethnicity and health. 'The Centre' at UCLAN can be reached from the following link if you're interested http://www.uclan.ac.uk/facs/health/ethnicity/index.htm

My job there will be to take over teaching and leading two modules in their MA/Dip course on Equality and Diversity - the modules are those concerned with - yes you've guessed it - organisational change. I will also be getting involved in some research projects and resurrecting my PhD.

The course outline for the MA is below - as a pdf - if you are interested
http://www.uclan.ac.uk/courses/factsheets/health/ethnicity/3439.pdf

At the moment my time is taken up with reading all the previous lecture notes and revising these for my input. It is great to be going back into academic work.

2005-04-21T16:01:00.000+01:00

This is Cal as Mrs Clandon in Shaw's "You Never Can Tell"

2005-04-21T15:58:00.000+01:00

Some centurions about to have a quick fag with their favourite senator outside the Colloseum in Rome

2005-04-21T11:06:00.000+01:00

this is an older one of me on a boat in Turkey

2005-04-21T10:58:00.000+01:00

This is the send photo

2005-04-21T10:57:00.000+01:00

We went to the Science Museum and ended up in Hobbiton

2005-04-21T10:55:00.000+01:00

This is Caroline with her new Car

2005-04-21T10:47:00.000+01:00

A recent photo of me getting my IOD Chartered Director Award

First real blog

2005-04-21T09:50:00.000+01:00

At last I have managed to get going on my blog. This is just a short hello and will be followed by others hopefully. I think for a while it will just be family reading these but once I get going maybe I can draw in a few others.

Latest news - I turned sherriff on Sunday chasing barefoot a bad guy down my street - the little shit had just kicked a wingmirror off my shiny new (to me) BMW,. I caught him after a 50 yard dash - 60 yards and he'd have got away but adrenaline was working for me till my muscles realised what I was doing. To cut a long story short the cops were called and he's in court today - a mere five days later. I am going to spit on him from the gallery this afternoon so don't have much time.

Heigh ho - more to follow - oh and I am doing a further stint of filming the Raven this evening and tomorrow. - once upon a midnight dreary etc.