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ravenAs a lot of you know, I am in a bit of an unusual situation at the moment: I'm not working, and I don't know when I will be returning to work but it won't be for at least another week. It was a bit anxious-making at the start, especially as this would only be my first month on the job, but, you know: it's not my fault, I'm being paid, and I will have a job to go back to - so I've decided to treat it as a strange and wonderful gift and make the most of it accordingly. So! On Wednesday I finished a story; on Thursday I finished a vid; on Friday I spent my entire day in the spring sunshine in the Green Park, picnicking with dear friends; over the weekend I went on walks and spent a lot of time reading in the local hipster café; and then came today, and I've made a decision.
The decision goes like this: I have time. I have free travel into London. (Actually I have exceptionally expensive travel into London, but it's an annual season ticket.) And the sun is shining beautifully and it turns out I don't even mind cycling when it's not sleeting down at the crack of dawn! So I am going to do things I don't normally get the opportunity to do: I am going to have adventures! Today I went for a long and delightful lunch on the South Bank withsuch_heights (we talked a lot about Leslie Knope; it was the BEST) and in the afternoon I went south of the river to the Imperial War Museum.
Oddly, I'd never been there! I skived off a school trip there when I was sixteen, I suddenly recall. And, actually, I have been to IWM Duxford, which everyone now knows about from Cabin Pressure - it's only a few miles from Cambridge and well worth it. But anyway, I went to IWM London because I am on something of a writing-about-spies-in-wartime kick (is it an idea for a novel? no shush let us not look at it too closely) and was kind of delighted with it from the outside: it's set out beautifully in the old Bethlem Hospital, all light and open space. And it has a great bookshop. But the exhibits... I was sort of underwhelmed by some and overwhelmed by others. They deal with the Second World War pretty well by making a coherent narrative of it, telling the stories of one particular family, which gives them licence to talk about propaganda films and the Women's Voluntary Service and ration books and sewing and bombing patterns of the Luftwaffe and all manner of other things, while still maintaining a certain coherency - and having been fed interminable unconnected details of Life On The Home Front when I was at school, I kind of do appreciate that. (That said, I am hideously bad with history and always have been. I used to tell people that I couldn't reliably explain anything that had happened between AD 79 and the Spice Girls.) I suppose it's almost because I am not very interested in history qua history? I'm interested in the history of the things I'm interested in, if that makes sense.
And the exhibit on spies (spies!) is decent, but sort of plagued by the problem that put me off about the whole museum - it doesn't really contest the notion of war itself? The exhibits aren't uncritically self-laudatory, but they're on a spectrum that certainly has that kind of thing on one end. Which isn't to say they weren't interesting - I especially liked what they had to say about the Special Operations Executive, which is something that totally isn't something that's going to form part of a novel that I'm not outlining - and they had a fabulous touchscreen rendering of an Enigma machine. (Bletchley Park can't be on my list for this week - while theoretically I could drive there, Bletchley is near Milton Keynes and there are fourteen roundabouts in the last ten miles, I really need to go with someone some weekend rather than do that on my own.) So there was that irritating me even through really quite interesting glass cases and documents (forged ID papers for Vichy France! shoes with fake bottoms!) and then there was a brief exhibition of photographs taken in Helmand between 2011 and 2014, and they were super cool and fascinating and the blurbs annoyed me so much I left in the middle.
On the other hand, a whole floor of the museum is devoted to the Holocaust - and that gallery seems to have been excised from another museum and stuck in, compared to the rest? It is exceptionally detailed and systematic, and very critical of Britain during the 1930s and afterwards. I kind of don't want to comment on the specifics of it - it's not my place or area - but the whole thing was immersive and kind of overwhelming, and I ended up spending most of my time in the museum there. So on the whole, I think the museum comes out average. And in any case I'm glad I went - I love how many museums there are in London which provide you with such extraordinary amounts of free education! So there you are.
On a kind of related note, I am reading rather a lot of non-fiction at the moment, all around a loose theme. I'm working through most of the books by the British historian Ben Mcintyre - my favourite so far has been A Spy Among Friends, an account of the life of Kim Philby which manages to be informative and academic but also occasionally wrenchingly, I-can't-read-to-the-end-of-this-page-right-now heartbreaking; there's also a bookskygiants told me to read, Operation Mincemeat, which is the true and totally hilarious story of how a team of British eccentrics in the 1940s made up a fake dead guy carrying fake documents explaining a totally fake super-secret battle plan and dropped him on the coast off Gibraltar for the Abwehr to find. The story includes, inter alia: ping pong enthusiasts, cake-baking secret agents, a whole submarine of British soldiers putting on American accents, made-up terrible hotels, made-up angry Welsh relatives, unapologetic cross-dressing, bemused Soviet spies, and the used underwear of the recently deceased Warden of New College. (On the way out of London with the corpse, they accidentally drive straight over a roundabout. It is the most ridiculous book.)
Right now I am reading Stasiland, Anna Funder's account of how the GDR files shredded by the Stasi on the eve of reunification are being pieced together bit by bit. It's a fascinating, sad book, and kind of brings home to me, again, how recent the events depicted in it are. This is the thing about me and history, I suppose - I'm interested in what made the modern world, and my having been a PPEist I suppose is not coincidental, because PPE is really a crash course in how to understand the modern world. (Not a crash course on the world itself, not really: it leaves you with very little concrete knowledge of anything, and a great deal of willingness to believe in complexity. That was my experience of it, anyway, and despite everything I've never ever regretted doing it.) But the thing about the reunification of Germany is that I remember it, maybe. Kind of. I have a friend who divides people into her contemporaries and not-her-contemporaries by whether or not they remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, and I'm the boundary case - I was born at the start of 1987, and was just short of three by November 1989. Which I suppose means I don't really remember it - what I remember is my dad coming home, from a conference in what he thought was going to be West Berlin, and bringing me a present of a piece of the Wall. I wonder how he explained it to me-at-nearly-three. I should ask. (Maybe: this is history.)
Wow, this got a lot longer and duller than I expected it to, huh. If you have any suggestions for my adventures this week, do tell. Tomorrow I might go the Science Museum! And I will see the Magna Carta exhibition at the British Library, of course. But otherwise time stretches out wonderfully ahead.
The decision goes like this: I have time. I have free travel into London. (Actually I have exceptionally expensive travel into London, but it's an annual season ticket.) And the sun is shining beautifully and it turns out I don't even mind cycling when it's not sleeting down at the crack of dawn! So I am going to do things I don't normally get the opportunity to do: I am going to have adventures! Today I went for a long and delightful lunch on the South Bank with
such_heights (we talked a lot about Leslie Knope; it was the BEST) and in the afternoon I went south of the river to the Imperial War Museum.Oddly, I'd never been there! I skived off a school trip there when I was sixteen, I suddenly recall. And, actually, I have been to IWM Duxford, which everyone now knows about from Cabin Pressure - it's only a few miles from Cambridge and well worth it. But anyway, I went to IWM London because I am on something of a writing-about-spies-in-wartime kick (is it an idea for a novel? no shush let us not look at it too closely) and was kind of delighted with it from the outside: it's set out beautifully in the old Bethlem Hospital, all light and open space. And it has a great bookshop. But the exhibits... I was sort of underwhelmed by some and overwhelmed by others. They deal with the Second World War pretty well by making a coherent narrative of it, telling the stories of one particular family, which gives them licence to talk about propaganda films and the Women's Voluntary Service and ration books and sewing and bombing patterns of the Luftwaffe and all manner of other things, while still maintaining a certain coherency - and having been fed interminable unconnected details of Life On The Home Front when I was at school, I kind of do appreciate that. (That said, I am hideously bad with history and always have been. I used to tell people that I couldn't reliably explain anything that had happened between AD 79 and the Spice Girls.) I suppose it's almost because I am not very interested in history qua history? I'm interested in the history of the things I'm interested in, if that makes sense.
And the exhibit on spies (spies!) is decent, but sort of plagued by the problem that put me off about the whole museum - it doesn't really contest the notion of war itself? The exhibits aren't uncritically self-laudatory, but they're on a spectrum that certainly has that kind of thing on one end. Which isn't to say they weren't interesting - I especially liked what they had to say about the Special Operations Executive, which is something that totally isn't something that's going to form part of a novel that I'm not outlining - and they had a fabulous touchscreen rendering of an Enigma machine. (Bletchley Park can't be on my list for this week - while theoretically I could drive there, Bletchley is near Milton Keynes and there are fourteen roundabouts in the last ten miles, I really need to go with someone some weekend rather than do that on my own.) So there was that irritating me even through really quite interesting glass cases and documents (forged ID papers for Vichy France! shoes with fake bottoms!) and then there was a brief exhibition of photographs taken in Helmand between 2011 and 2014, and they were super cool and fascinating and the blurbs annoyed me so much I left in the middle.
On the other hand, a whole floor of the museum is devoted to the Holocaust - and that gallery seems to have been excised from another museum and stuck in, compared to the rest? It is exceptionally detailed and systematic, and very critical of Britain during the 1930s and afterwards. I kind of don't want to comment on the specifics of it - it's not my place or area - but the whole thing was immersive and kind of overwhelming, and I ended up spending most of my time in the museum there. So on the whole, I think the museum comes out average. And in any case I'm glad I went - I love how many museums there are in London which provide you with such extraordinary amounts of free education! So there you are.
On a kind of related note, I am reading rather a lot of non-fiction at the moment, all around a loose theme. I'm working through most of the books by the British historian Ben Mcintyre - my favourite so far has been A Spy Among Friends, an account of the life of Kim Philby which manages to be informative and academic but also occasionally wrenchingly, I-can't-read-to-the-end-of-this-page-right-now heartbreaking; there's also a book
skygiants told me to read, Operation Mincemeat, which is the true and totally hilarious story of how a team of British eccentrics in the 1940s made up a fake dead guy carrying fake documents explaining a totally fake super-secret battle plan and dropped him on the coast off Gibraltar for the Abwehr to find. The story includes, inter alia: ping pong enthusiasts, cake-baking secret agents, a whole submarine of British soldiers putting on American accents, made-up terrible hotels, made-up angry Welsh relatives, unapologetic cross-dressing, bemused Soviet spies, and the used underwear of the recently deceased Warden of New College. (On the way out of London with the corpse, they accidentally drive straight over a roundabout. It is the most ridiculous book.)Right now I am reading Stasiland, Anna Funder's account of how the GDR files shredded by the Stasi on the eve of reunification are being pieced together bit by bit. It's a fascinating, sad book, and kind of brings home to me, again, how recent the events depicted in it are. This is the thing about me and history, I suppose - I'm interested in what made the modern world, and my having been a PPEist I suppose is not coincidental, because PPE is really a crash course in how to understand the modern world. (Not a crash course on the world itself, not really: it leaves you with very little concrete knowledge of anything, and a great deal of willingness to believe in complexity. That was my experience of it, anyway, and despite everything I've never ever regretted doing it.) But the thing about the reunification of Germany is that I remember it, maybe. Kind of. I have a friend who divides people into her contemporaries and not-her-contemporaries by whether or not they remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, and I'm the boundary case - I was born at the start of 1987, and was just short of three by November 1989. Which I suppose means I don't really remember it - what I remember is my dad coming home, from a conference in what he thought was going to be West Berlin, and bringing me a present of a piece of the Wall. I wonder how he explained it to me-at-nearly-three. I should ask. (Maybe: this is history.)
Wow, this got a lot longer and duller than I expected it to, huh. If you have any suggestions for my adventures this week, do tell. Tomorrow I might go the Science Museum! And I will see the Magna Carta exhibition at the British Library, of course. But otherwise time stretches out wonderfully ahead.
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no subject
on 2015-04-13 08:45 pm (UTC)I really clearly need to read A Spy Among Friends.
I think you might like The Americans at some point if you want something to watch, even though it's definitely not easy viewing - it's all about the recent past as history, that boundary between things in living memory and things considered 'over'. I would LOVE to hear your opinions about that should you ever have any you want to share. :)
p.s not dull so ner :P
no subject
on 2015-04-13 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-13 09:37 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-13 10:42 pm (UTC)(Do let me know what you think of A Spy Among Friends!)
no subject
on 2015-04-14 05:27 pm (UTC)I think we can actually answer your question about speaking Russian, incidentally, but discussing it may be spoilery?
And I will totally keep you up to date omg. :D
no subject
on 2015-04-13 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
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on 2015-04-14 08:22 am (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-14 08:38 am (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-14 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-15 05:16 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-15 06:39 pm (UTC)And best of luck with the new job, if I haven't said so already.
no subject
on 2015-04-13 09:44 pm (UTC)Her: "Have you ever heard of periods?"
Him: "No. And I somehow sense that I have lost any chance of being seen as a debonair man about town."
Her: "Yes. Let's talk about the birds and the bees!"
There is also a part where he is being sent to the Middle East, and he comes home and tells his parents, and his mother mishears it as 'the East End', and says "But Whitechapel is terribly dangerous at the moment!"
"Yes. But I'm going to Cairo!"
"---but that's outside the country."
"This is true."
no subject
on 2015-04-13 10:38 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-14 09:34 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-13 09:49 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-14 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-14 05:27 am (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-14 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-14 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-14 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-16 08:43 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-14 07:06 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-14 09:32 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-15 10:03 am (UTC)ETA: I do love Tosh, really, but he can be singularly unhelpful
no subject
on 2015-04-13 10:41 pm (UTC)And the exhibit on spies (spies!) is decent, but sort of plagued by the problem that put me off about the whole museum - it doesn't really contest the notion of war itself?
That is very much the problem I have with the IWM, although I like lots of things about it; I suppose the clue is in the name, really. One gallery, which is about holders of Victoria and George Crosses, arranges the holders based on what they received the medals for; one area is "Aggression", the celebration of which isn't something I'm too thrilled about.
Enjoy London! I hope you do lots of nice things.
(As I have previously said, I was born a few weeks after the Berlin Wall came down. I have never known a world with it. SO YOUNG.)
no subject
on 2015-04-14 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-15 10:36 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-14 08:36 pm (UTC)My other immediate thought is getting day tickets for Thursday matinees :) and just enjoying spaces usually crowded at the weekend like Hampstead Heath or galleries? or the British Museum has free events like tours or talks that I can never go to because they're during the day.
I can imagine it must be stressful at the start of a new job but I am more than a little envious of you at the moment!
no subject
on 2015-04-14 09:31 pm (UTC)ALSO. As I'm sure you've figured out, my work when it's not ON FIRE is right next to your work (which I'm assuming is not ON FIRE)!. Would you like to grab weekday lunch sometime, when things are a bit back to normal for me?
no subject
on 2015-04-14 09:54 pm (UTC)http://www.youngvic.org/whats-on/golem (also note: https://uk-offers.timeout.com/deals/entertianment-golem-april )
http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/the-hard-problem of course it was no Arcadia (nothing is, alas) but you might find it interesting all the same
http://www.almeida.co.uk/event/carmen-disruption I have tickets for this later in the run as the Almeida is usually wonderful
I want to see this, it's meant to be incredible http://www.rsc.org.uk/whats-on/oppenheimer/
and lastly, heard good things about this and it's slightly more light hearted! http://womenonthevergemusical.com/ their weekday matinees seem to be on wednesdays not thursdays
and yes! surrounding buildings were evacuated but we didn't realise and had a party as we couldn't work without power :) lunch would be fun once you're back,
no subject
on 2015-04-15 05:54 pm (UTC)Hurrah! Let us make plans soonish. :)
no subject
on 2015-04-15 10:37 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-14 10:12 pm (UTC)I've heard of Operation Mincemeat, largely because my dad watched the UKTV History documentary on it ('The Man Who Never Was') about once a week. (I've only read Ben Macintyre's Double Cross, but really liked that, I think largely because of how all the XX Committee disregarded protocol and rules on naming spies and just came up with puns.)
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on 2015-04-15 05:56 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-19 09:01 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-04-19 09:02 pm (UTC)