'Treasure Island' at Bristol Old Vic

Hot on the damp heels of Bristol Old Vic’s Christmas show Swallows and Amazons is their equally watery al fresco summer adventure: Treasure Island.

Bristol’s famous theatre may be undergoing some careful renovations inside, but that won’t stop the wonderful Bristol Old Vic from putting on a show. And since they can’t perform indoors, they’ve simply erected an amazing stage and seating arena on the cobbles in the front of their historic venue.

Tucked away behind a seemingly incongruous collection of scaffolding and green baize is a suitably ramshackle corridor that leads you to the temporary stage, complete with ushers wearing pirate hats and with toy parrots on their shoulders, guiding you to your seat and tempting you with a programme (which is well worth the cost – not least for the useful vocabulary sheet, and DIY hat).

Mother Nature blessed us with a balmy July evening, and Bristol’s seagulls swooped and squawked above our heads, adding a real sense of atmosphere to this famous sea-faring adventure. One that was brought to life by a multi-talented cast of just eight, who assume a variety of roles and slip between them with seamless professionalism. The plentiful references to Bristol in speech and song were warmly appreciated by the happy audience, too.

The tale of Jim Hawkins and his quest to find the buried gold on Treasure Island is well known and well loved, and is rightly a much-loved classic. Jim’s confrontations with the legendary Long John Silver have been lapped up by generations – who manage to gloss over the blood shed and greed to enjoy the boy’s own adventure at face value.

All of the cast are fantastic. But the stars of the show are clearly Jim (Jonny Weldon) and the wonderful Long John Silver himself (Tristan Sturrock). And while Jonny is a relative newcomer, a quick glance at the programme reveals why Tristan is as good as he is: he’s been a part of the Kneehigh theatre group for more than 20 years (surely the finest theatre group in England, on which note – I urge you to see their show The Wild Bride at St George’s this October: NB, buy your ticket soon, as last week they’d virtually sold out every night).

This production of Treasure Island includes a few respectful nods to its predecessor Swallows and Amazons (incorporating the musicians into the cast; the passing of the ship at the end), but this only adds to the feeling of inclusivity that the audience feels at joining Bristol Old Vic for yet another stellar production.

We Bristolians are truly lucky to have such an amazing theatre on our doorsteps. And I can’t wait until they reopen their main doors and unveil their brand new theatre inside.

Treasure Island is playing until August 26 – go and see it while you can. You can book tickets in person at the Bristol Old Vic box office, or by buying from their website here.

The Women of Twitter

I bloody love Twitter. I love Grace Dent, too. So when she wrote a book about Twitter, well, that was like heaven in paperback form.

When I joined Twitter last December, Grace was one of the first people I followed. Not deliberately – but so many other people I knew followed and Retweeted her, that I needed to join in to keep up. And never once has my finger hovered over the ‘Unfollow button, which it has for many others.

Grace’s book, How To Leave Twitter, is brilliant for many reasons. Here’s some of them:

- It’s very funny.
- It’s very funny because it’s so true to life.
- If you can’t laugh at yourself, you’re screwed.
- Grace loves Twitter but she knows where to draw the line.
- The line is somewhere near the WiFi ‘off’ button.
- But she always comes back, because that’s the magic of Twitter.

Twitter is an amazing network of people you know, people you didn’t know you wanted to know, a few desperate celebrities trying to cling to the last hint of fame to bolster their flagging egos now they haven’t had a TV show for 15 years (Wincey Willis, I’m looking at you), and, of course, the lovely Martin Kemp from Spandau Ballet (who I heart. Big time).

Grace acknowledges all of this, and more. Because she also recognises that Twitter is governed by an amazing network of witty, snarky, wise and savvy women – who know what’s going on in the world, who’s doing it, and what needs to be done to make things better. Which is why the strongest part of her wonderful book is where she laments that all too often women are denied a voice on TV – yet on Twitter, we can talk as long as we like, unedited.

As she says, on TV women are often “screen parsley stuck on the side of the plate”, pointing out that “no one would really notice if you scraped them into the bin”. Grace points out there are hours and hours of TV screen time every day devoted to men (“potatoes in jumpers”) being able to tell us what they think. BUT WHERE ARE THE WOMEN? Since no one wants to hear what we have to say, we’re all on Twitter… in our millions.

Here are some of my favourite funny women on Twitter: @gracedent, @scouserachel, @DawnHFoster, @caitlinmoran, @soul_of_twit, @sueperkins, @gail_brand. There are many more, though. MANY.

(In the interests of equality, I should stress that I also know there are some amusing men on Twitter, too: @wowser, @GarethAveyard, @RealBobMortimer, @Headspill, @StephenMangan… oh, and some others.)

Laurie Penny... looking familiar

A few weeks ago, I bought Laurie Penny’s short book Meat Market. I’d planned to blog a review of it but, after reading, was left feeling so “meh” about the book that I never did.

At £9.99 (less via Amazon) for 68 pages, Meat Market patently isn’t good value. But I knew this before I paid. However, after reading it I wondered how the publishers (Zero Books) were justifying £9.99 for what constitutes little more than a badly-edited pamphlet.

This aside, the content of Meat Market left me underwhelmed. Not so much in the message Laurie was imparting (ie, that women are items to be consumed), but more because I didn’t feel I was reading anything new in her book, or that I had learnt anything from it. I wondered what the point of Meat Market was.

Meat Market constitutes four brief chapters, which loosely inform each other, but none of them feels like new writing from Laurie. And here comes the big problem. Some quotes within this book appear to NOT be new. (If I'm wrong, then please forgive me writing this humble blog post.)

ONE: On page 18, Laurie quotes Finn Mackay (who Laurie calls ‘MacKay’, and the proof readers never corrected). No source is given in the footnotes, leading me to assume this is an interview Finn gave to Laurie for Meat Market. But when I contacted Finn yesterday to ask if she had been interviewed by Laurie for the book, Finn not only had no knowledge that she was even mentioned in the book, but said: “She never interviewed me or told me she was using quotes in her book. It must be from conversations years ago. I don’t think I’ve even spoken to her [Laurie] for about two years.” In fact, the quote Laurie uses by Finn was originally printed here.

TWO: Laurie attempts to pick apart some views made by Julie Bindel. While on page 38 Laurie states that she is quoting Julie from a 2009 article, on page 42 Laurie makes the claim that she interviewed Julie specifically for Meat Market for the subsequent quote (“… Bindel, when I spoke to her in the process of writing this book, emphasised …”) . A fact Julie refuted yesterday in a Tweet to me: “She [Laurie] said she interviewed me for her crap book. All lies. She never did.” A lengthy Twitter discussion broke out between Julie and Laurie, and Laurie confirms that the quotes she attributes to Julie as new and for the book were in fact based on a 2009 phone call. Laurie said: “I interviewed you in the autumn of 2009, on the telephone. It lasted about an hour! I can dig out the transcripts if you like…” But it’s the same quote attributed to Julie as being gathered in the preparation for Meat Market that Laurie uses here. Laurie later Tweeted to clarify: “that article was extended into c3 of my book. Just because you [Julie] don't like what you said doesn't make me a liar for writing it down”. (NB: I’m not calling Laurie a liar about anything, but I do wish it had been made clear to readers that some of the book had been available in other formats prior to publication.)

So, while I originally was left feeling cheated by Laurie’s book because of how unsubstantial and dated much of the content felt to me, there are now at least two instances of people quoted not even knowing they were going to appear in this book.

This made me wonder about the book in general, so I went on Google and put in “Laurie Penny” alongside the names of a few random others quoted in Meat Market. And this is what I found:

P2 – Dr Petra Boynton’s quote is from Laurie’s article here.

P13 – Dita von Teese’s quote is from Laurie’s article here.

P23-24 – Anorexic Hannah’s quotes are from Laurie’s article here.

P39-44 – Sally Outen’s quotes, trans Amy’s quotes, AND trans Kasper’s quotes, are all from two of Laurie’s articles here and here.

And, I was very surprised to see that quotes on page 62 from Judith Ramirez are identical to those printed in a March 1988 New Internationalist article by Jane Story.

- Is Laurie re-using quotes? If so, I wonder what people think about this?

- If this is true, I wonder why it was not made clear that parts of Meat Market have been previously published – as is usual when this is the case?

- I also wonder why the Judith Ramirez quotes (from 1988, and for your reference Laurie was born in 1986) are presented as if Judith spoke to Laurie, rather than being credited to where they appear to have come from. (Perhaps I'm wrong about this, and Judith did repeat herself verbatim to Laurie during her research for this book.)

Book Review: Jennifer Egan “A Visit From The Goon Squad”

If time is on my side, I read approximately two books a week. The divide is fairly evenly split between fiction and non-fiction, old and new releases, female and male authors. But the soaraway Book Of The Year 2011 to date is Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad.

Based on the recommendation of a trustworthy brother, I snapped it up and devoured it instantly… racing through the chapters and abandoning the TV for several days in order to lie on the sofa, sip wine and read – and re-read – the carefully constructed chapters of this book, that cross all manner of timescapes, genre and literary permutation.

A Visit From The Goon Squad has (so far) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (among a raft of other accolades), been a New York Times bestseller in 2010 (hardback) and 2011 (paperback), and is currently in production by the wondrous HBO for an upcoming TV adaptation. For this, I cannot wait. (But will.)

The goon squad of the title refers to the thuggery of union activists in the 19th Century. However, for this book, Egan is reclaiming the 19th Century ‘goon squad’ to refer to the heavy-handed tactics of that cruel creature known as Time on her protagonists – who experience the remorseless effects of time (past, present and future) in increasingly stark ways.

While some have declared this book to be no more than a series of loosely connected short stories, I don’t think this is true. Yes, each chapter of A Visit From The Goon Squad places a different person at the centre of the narrative, but each chapter (whether the chronology of it precedes or postdates the previous) also builds on the story arc of the whole book, to ultimately create something I can’t recall ever having seen in another novel. So perhaps those who’ve called Egan’s latest book a “post, post modern book” (eg the Wall Street Journal) are right, although Egan herself refutes that in the link here.

In some tenuous way or another, the many characters and protagonists in A Visit From the Goon Squad are connected to music executive Bennie Salazar and his kleptomaniac assistant Sasha. But the volume of characters is not confusing, the unidentified leaps through time make sense, and the reader’s emotional investment in the characters is extraordinary considering the fleeting time we spend with them.

And time is what we cannot escape in this book. However subtly the concept is inferred, we always sense a dark clouded clock looming over the heads of the characters as they try to eek an existence. Speaking to The Daily Beast in 2010, Egan said: “Time is the stealth goon, the one you ignore because you are so busy worrying about the goons right in front of you.” And this quote seems to underscore the simple message at the root at the heart of an intricate book of complexly interwoven stories about being lost to time.

Royal Mail

Back in early April, I sent a note to the future Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in anticipation of their wedding. In which I suggested it would be a lovely gesture if they wanted to chose to contribute a small token to my upcoming marriage, seeing as how we taxpayers are obliged to contribute to the cost of theirs... even if we can't afford it.

Here is my original letter:

Dear Ms Middleton and Prince William,

Congratulations on your forthcoming wedding. I hope you have a lovely day and a very happy future together. It certainly looks like it will be a very grand occasion from the press coverage that I’ve seen so far.

My fiancé and I are also getting married this year, on 28 October, and we are very excited to be getting married in the same year as such an important royal wedding. However, ours will be a much smaller affair than yours, owing to the fact that we earn low incomes and are struggling to keep our heads above water.

I was wondering whether – since, as taxpayers, my fiancé and I are obliged to contribute to the cost of your wedding – whether you would like to contribute anything towards the cost of our wedding? I appreciate this is an unorthodox request, but since we have had no choice about contributing to your ceremony (despite our low incomes, and the fact that only this week I’ve had to ring the electricity board to explain I cannot make the minimum payments), it would mean so much to us to know that you had chosen to support our ceremony.

I’m not sure what your final wedding budget is (some estimates say £20,000,000), but ours is £2,000: a fortune to us. So anything you could contribute would mean so much to both of us, as well as to our friends and family who are not only helping to pay towards your wedding, but are also chipping in to help my fiancé and me make our smaller-scale day as magical as possible.

Wishing you every happiness,


Well, they replied today... and while it doesn't look like they're coughing up, they do sound like they have lovely manners. Or, rather, their lady in waiting does.