Stratford and nuclear physics

We were booked in to see two plays this month. One was The Shoemakers’ Holiday, by Thomas Dekker, and the other was Oppenheimer by Tom Morton-Smith.

The Shoemaker’s Holiday was very well produced and acted, with David Troughton as the shoemaker who ascends to be Lord Mayor of London, and a young man called Joel McCormack, who seemed to be pretty fresh out of drama school, as one of his cheeky and determined journeymen. I shall watch out for him in future. 

Oppenheimer is a new play written specially for the RSC, and we were beginning to wonder if we had made the right choice between that and a good concert in Nottingham on the same night.

Well, it was brilliant. It set out the technical, logistical,  (do you know that 10% of the total electricity generated in the U.S. was supplying the Manhattan Project?) and moral problems of the Manhattan Project so clearly, and the issue of surveillance, distrust and government control is so deeply relevant today. We were gripped. John Heffernan as J. Robert Oppenheimer, was wonderful, but there wasn't a weak link in the cast.

I’ve been down to the library and got a biography of Oppenheimer, which I fear may be like a Brief History of Time; while I was actually reading it, I understood it perfectly, but as soon as I closed the book, it sort of slipped away. So I read it again, with exactly the same result.

The play has also provided us with after school activities with the grandsons, who were fascinated by exponential mathematics, and how exactly the bomb was built and detonated, and why there wasn’t a crater at Hiroshima. Some of our google searches may look dodgy if GCHQ is watching us. 

January

I’ve been surprisingly busy for the last month or so, and I haven’t been keeping up with the blog. So this is a kind of update.

We had a few days in Edinburgh, which we enjoyed, although the weather was grim. But we didn’t expect anything else. It’s been grim every time we’ve been to Edinburgh, even in the summer. There was nothing on at any theatre – post Hogmanay hangover, I suppose – but we did have some excellent dinners. We stayed in a budget hotel, but it was right on Princes Street, with a terrific view of the castle, and very well placed for restaurants in the New Town. 

View from the hotel.

Apparently there is a modern Scottish cuisine which uses cheaper cuts of meat and local ingredients, and very good it is. We really had to force ourselves back out of the hotel and into the freezing wind to go out for our dinners, but it was always worth it.

A "mortsafe" in Greyfriars churchyard. There were lots of them
to stop graverobbers digging up the bodies and selling them to
Edinburgh University anatomy school. 

There was a fantastic show of Turner watercolours at the Scottish National gallery, which are only ever on show in January, to preserve them from fading, and we walked down the Royal Mile, where all the tartan shops are now run by Sikhs, and went round the Scottish Parliament.

 I had mixed feelings; I like clean lines, and there were a lot of very cluttered bits, especially the ceiling of the debating chamber, and the roof lights. One bit I really disliked was the offices; they all have a window seat as “space for contemplation”; it was obvious that the block had come out as a rectangular building, but the architect thought that was too boring, so he’d stuck these pods on. And then each of these window seats had an external fence of wooden poles across them, blocking the view. That is simply stupid. 

Idiotic fence over the window.

And there was a long screed about democracy and women where Mary Queen of Scots, that well known champion of freedom, the rights of women, and democracy, was cited. But the building seems to work well, and the debating chamber, with its modern layout and modern systems, did rather put to shame the bear pit of the Westminster Parliament.

Leith - there are some massive oil rig supply vessels in dock.

We also went to Leith, which is still in the process of coming up, and visited Britannia. It was much more interesting than we expected, to be honest: between the fifties classic understated design, the crew accommodation, the artefacts presented on the Queen’s tour of various Pacific islands, and the complete contrast with the overwhelming bling of modern yachts of oligarchs, it was a fascinating tour. The thing that really impressed us may sound funny, but it was the laundry. It was massive, as a proportion of the ship’s size, and fully equipped with extremely solid fifties laundry equipment, because on tours in the Pacific, the crew got through so many changes – the crew of the launch might get through five sets of whites in a day.

The other thing I should update you on is Nottingham’s naughtiest dog. I’m glad to say, the title is no longer remotely appropriate. I mean, he’s not Nottingham’s best behaved dog, but he is much much better. A great many treats and a great deal of patience have had to be expended, but at least he has calmed down enough for treats to work. If he won’t come back for a treat, a squeaky toy is the weapon to deploy. It’s difficult, as you do have to let him play with it for a minute or two, and he can destroy a squeaky toy in a few seconds; but we try to regard it as natural wastage. 

Doing his best imitation of a greyhound - BUT returning to owner!

He has to be tired out to give you any peace in the house, but he has stopped bounding over the furniture like a berserk kangaroo. And now he’s keen on licking your hands or ears rather than nibbling them. I’m quite willing to have my ears licked if it keeps him happy, although my daughter thinks it’s awful. I tell her our dog washed all of their ears as babies and toddlers, and it never did them any harm, but I think I lost mothering points for having allowed it.