The next day my friend C— took me to Crystal Palace Park, where I saw the empty space left when the famous Crystal Palace burned down in the 1930s (it was very big) and more importantly the park's collection of dinosaurs. These are models made in the 19th century by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under the direction of Richard Owen, at a time when dinosaur fossils first started being found in quantity, causing a sensation as they made plain that the world was much older than the Bible suggests and once contained strange animals not mentioned there. I've been fascinated by the Crystal Palace dinosaurs since first hearing about them as a child. Part of their charm comes from their reflecting a mid 19th century understanding of dinosaurs, with the animals being depicted in ways that do not reflect current views of them. As a result none of them are feathered and their colouring is fairly monochrome. Also, Hawkins and Owen made some choices about how the animals' bodies worked that would soon be out of step with scientific opinion, most famously depicting the iguanodons as four-legged and rather fierce looking when we know now they were bipedal herbivores. But there is a definite appeal to seeing the sculptures peeping out from behind bushes, and they do bring home how fucking enormous even small relatively dinosaurs like the iguanodon are.
Then into London, where on autopilot I did a circuit of the shops I typically visit in London: the LRB bookshop, Gosh comics, Sounds of the Universe, and Selectadisc. I bought nothing in these places as these days I find myself struck by the feeling of having too many records and comics, and in any case I don't really know if I actually like comics any more, and can never remember what I am looking for when I am in these places. Also it was hard not to shake the idea that everything these places were offering was available in Dublin, so why carry it all home? Nevertheless, I did stop for tea and cake in the LRB cakeshop (tasty, even if they are now using teabags (O Tempora! O Mores!)) and "availed of the facilities". I realise now that I forgot to check out Fopp, whose prominent display of mid-price CDs might have tempted me, as might their range of DVDs (I've been thinking for a while now I'd like to pick up a copy of problematic Doctor Who fave The Talons of Weng Chiang). But I did my bit to keep the London retail economy going in Foyles, where I picked up two things I have been looking for in vain here in Dublin: William Godwin's Caleb Williams, which I intend to reveal as the next subject of our gothic book club, and (from the handy music shop that nestles within Foyles) Glassworks by Philip Glass.
In the evening I met two old pals from the Bowlie Forum (one of whom is also one of my Frank's APA buds). We discussed the Frank's festival divide (Le Guess Who v. Primavera) and I did find myself wondering whether we might need to set up a festival exchange programme. Then I had to rush off to the Globe Theatre for a performance of As You Like It, one of those Shakespeare plays featuring cross-dressing. In this one as well as having female characters disguising themselves as men for reasons, the play also had some characters being played by actors of the opposite gender, which led to no end of confusion for me. Weirdly though I think it was less gender fluid than stagings in Shakespeare's own day, where having boys playing women who would then be disguised as men was par for the course.
The play itself is fairly light, featuring some funny stuff and some mild danger before a happy ending that sees key characters falling in love with each other while legitimate rulers are restored to their inheritance and estranged siblings reconciled. You could argue it is a bit slight but those Shakespeare semi-comedies are always good fun. The play does also feature one of Shakespeare's most famous speeches (the one about all the world being a stage, which goes on to deliver that whole seven ages of man thing).
Two other things struck me about the show. I've been to a good few Globe performances, but this I think was my first time going to an evening show. As a cheapskate and as someone used to standing for gigs, I always buy groundling tickets for the Globe, which means that you are much closer to the action than the people who have paid more for the seats. This though was my first time experiencing what might well have been the authentic Elizabethan groundling experience: the crowd was full of yappers. There were a bunch of talkative younglings behind me and looking sternly at them with finger on lips only shut their yap temporarily. I did think of going full "SHUT UP YOU CUNT" on them but i) I naturally avoid confrontation and ii) maybe as noted above a degree of audience noise is part of the authentic cheap ticket experience. So I moved to another bit of the space, and so found myself near to a couple of somewhat yappy girls, who at least were kind of good-looking.
The other thing I was struck by was how the Globe has drifted a bit from what I took as its original mission of serving up performances that approximated closely to Elizabethan staging, making their shows both entertainments and windows into the past. For this while the costumery and so on seemed fairly vintage, the musical accompaniment was based on pop songs of our era, breaking the Elizabethan spell. Is this good or bad? You be the judge.
And then it was back to the wilds of South London, where I was staying with C—. After another night of being slept on by a black cat I got up early, made my way to Euston and took the train to Holyhead and the ferry home.
My exertions led to a certain fatigue and, more ominously, I found myself with a cold that I kept wondering about from the point of view of the dread Covid, so I ended up missing both of the Saturday night Dublin events I had rashly promised to attend (the Mindfuzz club night, at which Andy Votel was to feature on the decks, plus birthday party of Dublin's coolest person, at which a live karaoke was due to feature). For similar reasons I missed the Mick Harvey Dublin concert I had become aware of just before leaving for London. I did make my first gamelan class of the autumn session but by then I was back at work and my holiday was over.
Did you have a holiday? What did you do on yours?
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