steepholm

I finally started watching The Traitors last night - only two years after everyone else, as is my custom. I can definitely see the appeal of the format, cheesy and derivative as the setting and presentation are (the steam train to a Scottish castle, message-carrying owl, etc.). Anyway, the game-theory aspects are compelling. (Have you ever read nightspore's Comeuppance, on the intersection of game theory and narrative? I recommend it.)

I knew that it was based on a format from the Netherlands, where the show is called De Verraders, but when I described it to Moe she said it reminded her of the card game 人狼ゲーム ("Werewolf Game"), where the battle is between villagers and the werewolves in their midst. That in turn seems to have come from an American game, "Are You a Werewolf?" (2001), perhaps via a French game, "Les Loups-garous de Thiercelieux" (2003), although the latter - which somehow won German game of the year - may have been a separate adaptation of the ultimate(?) source of all these games, "Mafia," invented in 1986 by Dimitry Davidoff of the Psychology Department of Moscow State University. In Davidoff's version, we have mafiosi rather than werewolves or traitors, but it's very tempting - given that we are now in the Soviet era - to see them as a transparent stand in for the secret police.

So, The Traitors has a very international history. Perhaps, given the current direction of political travel, rather than pure entertainment, we should think of it as useful training.

Back when your granny was a wee lass, there was a small railway station at Ashley Hill in Bristol, just where Ashley Down meets Purdown, and in the shadow of the Muller orphanages. It looked like this:



Later, Dr Beeching (or a similar functionary, but let him stand for all, a la Judge Jeffreys) closed the station, and so it remained for many a year. The orphanages were by this time part of Brunel College, and were then converted to flats, while in their grounds had little houses built on them, in one of which I lived from 2006 until 2020. For much of that time, there was talk of re-opening the station under the name Ashley Down, and whenever it came up we were a little excited and a little nervous, but only a little because we never thought it would actually happen.

It did happen, yesterday. To celebrate the event, I took a two-minute journey from Stapleton Rd to visit the new, clean, yet untagged station. Not railway station, as in old-fashioned British English, not train station, as in US English, but "rail station". This is the shining new world we live in.










I felt a little self-conscious, I admit, photographing train things like an otaku in an anorak, but I was far from alone. The only depressing bit was this bench-cum-misericord, presumably designed like this to deter homeless people (because if only we didn't encourage them they wouldn't insist on being homeless?), but equally deterrent of passengers, I imagine.

For years, I've been meaning to go Pywll Mawr, aka the Big Pit - a coal-mine-turned-heritage centre, not far from Pontypool. I see the sign for it every time I drive to work in Cardiff, and my daughter even went on a school trip about 13 years ago, but I haven't had the motivation to follow in her footsteps until Monday, when I took Yuko and Moe. The main spur was Moe's wish to soak in the background to the Ghibli film, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, which was partly based on Miyazaki's visit to the South Welsh coalfields in 1984, at the time of the miners' strike - which inspired the feisty spirit of the miners in his film, but also its landscape.

Anyway, partly due to the weather, but mostly the place itself, we had a great time. We started off with a visit to the nearby Blaenavon Ironworks, or what's left of them, with their furnaces, workers' cottages, balance tower and the rest.



The coal mine did not allow cameras - or indeed anything with a battery - underground. This is because it's still legally classed as a working mine, even though it's 44 years since any methane-releasing mining went on down there. But believe me when I tell you that it was quite an experience, going down long tunnels that wholly justified the necessity of helmets in terms of their height. I had a strange, Baudrillardesque sense that this must be a real mine because it so strongly resembled all the fake mines I've seen in various films and TV programmes over the years - my only point of reference.

Certainly, the landscape round about did seem quite Laputa-esque (with just a hint of Ivor the Engine). And this point-by-point comparison backs up that impression.

Well, I don't think I've ever had such a long period of LJ truancy. It's not that I've been depressed, inactive or in a vegetative state, but I did get to a point where I wasn't sure that I had much to say that would have been of general interest here. For example, I've had plenty of fun trips with my lodger, Yuko, and more recently, Moe, my new, second lodger, who was in Bristol for a while 5 years ago and no doubt crops up in entries from that time but had to return to Japan (where she is a nurse) because of Covid. Each adventure had its own incidents - but were they different enough from previous trips to warrant a whole new entry? Perhaps - but in any case, it didn't get done.

I also went to Japan again, this time in the company of my daughter and her boyfriend - my first non-solo trip! For that reason, I didn't blog it as I usually do, because I was too busy inducting these Nipponic neophytes into the ways of that most rewarding country. It was a great two weeks, though, and I think I can safely say that I converted them to something approaching my own state of besotment.

The UK election came and went, and of course I had many thoughts about it all, but none that couldn't have been predicted from earlier entries. Tl;dr, I'm glad the Tories are out, but the possibility of fundamental improvement that flourished briefly under Corbyn is long gone, and Starmer, with his authoritarianism, reheated austerity policies (except for the rich) and lack of any political or moral core, is barely an improvement on - indeed, only marginally different from - Sunak. Also, his health minister seems about as transphobic as Kemi Badenoch could wish.

On the other hand, I got promoted to Professor last month - which was very pleasing. Perhaps it should have happened earlier - I was startled to read in the official letter that I was now (at 61) an "early-career professor" - but I'd never actually applied before, which makes me feel a little like the hapless protagonist of Kafka's short story, 'Before the Law'. It probably means that there were a lot of committees I never had to sit on that I might otherwise have been obliged to chair, but perhaps other, more exciting opportunities would also have come my way? We'll never know.

In general, my own life has been pleasant this last half year. I've enjoyed good health (no recurrence of the detached retina), plentiful friends, my daughter and Will only a ten-minute walk away, and even a blessedly cool summer (though that was not everyone's perspective on it). My cat, Maisie, went missing for 9 days but turned up unharmed under a shipping container at the end of the street, and has now put the whole distressing incident thoroughly behind her. None of this calm weather makes for ideal blogging, perhaps.

Anyway, apologies to whoever might have been wondering about my whereabouts - and indeed to my future self, who may in her dotage wish to use this journal to help sort out her muddled memories. I'll try to do better in future.

How did I spend yesterday afternoon, judging by the above picture?

a) Enjoying conversation and cocaine at my local drug parlour?
b) Watching Fantasia Eroticopious with the curtains drawn for the umpteenth time?
c) Waiting to be seen at Bristol Eye Hospital, with pupils dilated by a stinging liquid administered on arrival?

Those who know me well will know that c) is correct. (Thursday is of course my Fantasia Eroticopious day - what's yours?)

It all started brightly, with a routine contact lens and eye check at my local Specsavers. The lens test was excellent - no deterioration at all over the last two years. I remember the optician asked me how I was feeling, and I replied breezily, "Oh, just coasting gently towards the grave, you know," and we both chuckled at what seemed a very distant prospect.

[I was also inspired to ask - a random bit of research - how many people reading eye tests pronounced 'Z' the American way these days. She said that a surprising number did so, though not yet quite 50%. I thought this interesting information, as mostly we hear the letter in the context of set phrases (JayZ, Gen Z, etc.) rather than in the splendid isolation of an optician's chart.]

The eye test was to have been done by a different optician, but we never got as far as looking at charts, because he found something sufficiently alarming in the initial retinal exam that he packed me off to the hospital for a same-day emergency referral.

The hospital is, luckily, an easy walk from my house, so I went in after a hasty lunch, and was ushered into the A&E ward, where I was fully braced to see every other eyeball hanging cartoonishly from its socket, but actually everyone looked perfectly normal. A sign noted that people were seen on the basis of urgency rather than order of arrival, so I was as alarmed as I was relieved to be taken off almost immediately by a nurse - but this was just to have the dilating liquid, it turned out. That was the first of several medical encounters over the course of the afternooon, each with a member of staff of greater seniority than the last.

Finally I was told that my optician was right. There's a tear in my retina, which could cause liquid to escape and build up pressure, putting the retina in danger of becoming entirely detached. I also had lattice deterioration (yes, I had to look it up, too).

That was the bad news. The good news was that my body was falling apart in ways that more or less cancelled each other out. The deteriorating lattice had formed a kind of seal, preventing the liquid from the torn retina from causing any serious issue. The doctor explained this while performing kirigami with a tissue that was standing in for my eyeball. It seemed a rather fragile defence against blindness.

For a while, they debated whether to laser me that very day or to book me in for actual surgery down the line, but as it was almost time for Pointless they ended up labelling it a chronic condition and sent me home, with an admonition to expect an Outpatient appointment shortly.

If it's broke in two equal and opposite ways, don't fix it.

My brother came down to Bristol for the weekend so that he could join me in St Paul's for the first carnival since I moved here in 2020. It didn't disappoint. Although it got unfeasibly crowded later, wandering the local streets just before things really got going was a lot of fun.

What I like best about the carnival is that, as well as professional food stalls, half the people in the area get out their oil drum smokers and cook ridiculous amounts of jerk chicken, curry goat, rice and peas, dumplings, etc., from their gardens, along with rum, Red Stripe, etc. (Special temporary licences are available for carnival.) It's truly a community thing, even if later on 100,000 people zoom in on the place:



My house happened to be on the procession route, so later on I was able to step outside and see this, literally outside my front door. (See if you can spot Yurika, my current tenant, sitting in seiza on the bin shed.)



I momentarily thought the last picture might be something to do with celebrating the year of my birth - then I remembered the Bristol Bus Boycott...

Yesterday I drove Hiroko two hours south of Bristol, to Agatha Christie's holiday home, Greenway, a Georgian villa sitting very picturesquely on a hill near the mouth of the River Dart. It's a rather lovely place, and with its tennis courts, fernery, croquet lawn, boathouse, etc., it does feel as it one has stepped into the pages of a Christie novel, or perhaps a game of Cluedo. Indeed, she used the house and its grounds as the basis of Nasse House when writing Dead Man's Folly.




Anyway, the house is really worth going to if you've even a slight interest in Christie - it's been in the care of the National Trust since 2000.

Of course, when we got home we hit Britbox and watched the Suchet version of Dead Man's Folly, and enjoyed spotting some of the same locations (the boat house, the battery, and of course Greenway itself, instantly recognisable despite now being magnolia).




But hold! Sometimes the house looks rather different!



The reason for the swap isn't hard to see. A garden fete takes place in fron of the house in the story, and the lawn in front of the real Greenway slopes away sharply, making it unsuitable. So, a sward-rich imposter was substituted. Greenway and the imposter house are repeatedly, indeed brazenly swapped throughout the 90 minutes of the drama. They may be in a similar style, but how could one frontage possibly be taken for the other?

They presumably were, though, by most viewers. Even I, having been to the house just that day, had to rewind to make sure my eyes hadn't deceived me. It makes all the cases of doubling and disguise in Christie's stories - including this one - somehow much easier to believe.

I went with my brother to see My Neighbour Totoro at the Barbican last night - an early birthday treat from him. It was an excellent production, which I can't show you any pictures of, on pain of being smothered by soot sprites, but can assure you was wonderfully inventive, visually and aurally.

Why I am I taunting you like this? Well, it's just that having the show broken into two halves brought home to me how much "tighter," from a plot point of view, the first half of the film is than the second. Up to the point where the girls and Totoro make the seeds grow, it's really hard to fault. And then we get the formal climax, or double climax, first with the mother being reported to be dangerously ill, and then Mei going missing as she tries to walk all the way to the hospital carrying some healthy corn that she's just picked, and being believed to have fallen into a nearby pond when the search party finds a slipper like hers.

Except that it's not her sandal, as her sister Satsuki quickly confirms. Mei is actually fine, if temporarily lost. And the mother, when they eventually reach her, turns out not to be that ill either - it was just a cold.

It seems to me there's an obvious alternative plot, which I find it hard to believe that Miyazaki didn't at least consider. In this version - which is also basically the version in Mei's head - the mother really is in danger, and the children save her by bringing her some needful medicine or charm, perhaps carried to the hospital by magical agency. This is the plot of The Magician's Nephew, where a winged horse plays the part of the cat bus, and of many other stories besides. (Likewise, Mei could have fallen into the pond and then been rescued.)

Was Miyazaki holding back on the 'mild threat' with a view to his very young audience? Or was his restraint a more purely artistic decision - a distaste for crude plot trump cards? I don't know, but I report it as I found it.

I feel a little thwarted.

The other day I was contacted by GB News, the newish right-wing channel, to talk about children's books with Michael Portillo on his Sunday morning show. My immediate instinct was to decline; after all, I don't really want to prop up a right-wing organisation. On the other hand, when I asked whether there was a particular reason why they wanted to talk about children's literature this week, I thought I saw an opportunity - for the hook was a new production of The Famous Five at the Chichester Festival Theatre, which was said to have changed or at least moderated some of Blyton's more dubious aspects (the framing of foreigners as ridiculous and/or suspicious, the patronising of the working class, etc.). I smelt a conversation about wokeness and cancel culture in the offing, and considering that my conversational partner would be Michael Portillo, a chance to put down one of Thatcher's ministers in front of literally tens of dozens of GB News viewers.

So, this morning I took the train to Paddington, walked the few minutes from the station, and was allowed into the underground lair of GB News. The various floor managers, doormen, receptionists, etc., all treated me well, but I was slightly disconcerted to find myself in the green room with Claire Fox, once a Revolutionary Communist and critic of the House of Lords, now (of course) a libertarian member of the House of Lords. (The floor manager pecked her cheek as she left, and saying how it was always lovely to have her there.) And there, not far away, was the editor of the magazine Spiked, megaphone of choice for alt-right sympathisers in the UK. Most bizarre of all, two large, vacuum-sealed joints of beef sat on a nearby table. I never did find out why.

Anyway, eventually I was miked up and ushered onto the sofa, where I had the following chat:



As you will see, despite the initial framing the questions never got onto the question of Blyton's use of stereotypes, snowflakery and the rest, and so, although I was able to land a glancing blow about English Heritage's right to free speech (the decline of which Portillo had just been the bemoaning with the Spiked guy), I wasn't given a chance to deliver my knockout punch. I actually said to him afterwards, "I thought we were meant to have a ding-dong about censorship," to which he replied, "I decided not to go down that route" - which shows that it had been on the cards, at least. Perhaps some politician's instinct warned him off?

Anyway, rather than waste the moment entirely, I thought I'd record the conversation as it should have gone (with apologies to A. A. Milne):

PORTALUMP: When a production erases pork pies in favour of hummus, or modishly suggests that swarthiness isn't a reliable index of potential criminality, isn't that a perfect example of woke censorship?
STEEPHOLM: That's a bit rich coming from you, given your involvement in what was by far the biggest act of censorship of children's reading in my lifetime. I refer of course to Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which made it illegal for children to encounter any positive representation of LGBT people in the classroom. Surely, making millions of citizens into non-persons, by force of law, is a far more egregious example of snowflakery, cancel culture and censorship than toning down Blyton's language?
PORTALUMP: Oh no! I am hoist by my own petard!
STEEPHOLM: Aha, you have fallen into my trap for catching hypocritical Thatcherites!
PORTALUMP: Oh! [nervously]: I -- I thought it was a trap I'd made for catching left-wing liberal snowflakes.
STEEPHOLM [surprised]: Oh, no!
PORTALUMP: Oh! [apologetically] I --I must have got it wrong then.
STEEPHOLM: I'm afraid so. [politely]
STEEPHOLM'S EGO [which wasn't going to be there, but we find we can't do without it]: Oh, Steepholm, how brave and clever you are!

Oh well. At least I can chalk it up among the more interesting Sunday mornings I've spent this October.

Berkeley, in Gloucestershire, is not an obvious place of Japanese pilgrimage, even if it has the Temple of Vaccinia.



Here is my friend Eriko, clutching a COVID-19 vaccine plushie, and standing in front of the world's first free vaccination clinic, in Dr Jenner's back garden.

Still, there are some interesting Japan connections to be found. Witness, for example, this portrait (dated 1591) of Thomas Cavendish - the first Englishman whose name we know ever to meet a Japanese. In his case, it was off the coast of Baja California, where he captured a Spanish galleon and found two teenaged boys aboard, whom he then brought back to England. They'd have been there when this picture was painted, in fact.



Then there's this bit of Edo-era propaganda, persuading Japanese people to take the smallpox vaccine by picturing it as a demon-slaying kami astride a cow. Hey, whatever works!



And what about this kid who somehow found herself timelipped back to Civil-War era Berkeley castle, where she used her karate skills to break the siege?



A fun break in the middle of Monday, and I hope to see Eriko - whose visit was fleeting indeed - again in the Spring, when she returns to resume her work on spiritualist churches in Bristol.