Onward!!

The BBC has had some amazing same-day coverage of the music played at Glastonbury this year. Somehow, watching it makes me feel reluctant to go, though, and that’s strange. I mean, I love live music, I hear the place has a great vibe and everyone just seems to praise it. But watching the concerts makes it seem like maybe there’s too many people there, or something. You can hardly see the stage from the hundreds of flags and other things held up high with inventive things like “SAM’S BOYS” written on (that certainly identify the group’s location to any lost friends). The crowd is a heaving morass of people that seems to stretch on forever, all the way up to the tents pitched on the higher ground. I can’t help but think “can you even hear the bands properly?” and “how hard must it be to move around in that sea of people”.

A lot of people say that it’s about the experience and the vibe and the people more than it is about individual bands. Maybe so, but the effort of getting tickets and the price you have to pay for them kind of makes going for just the vibe a little extreme.

Even so, I do hope my friends had a great time. My weekend has been spent sweating indoors at work on Saturday thanks to the really muggy heat London seems to be stuck under, and having a relaxing day with a lazy brunch and nowhere particular to be on Sunday. I do regret not being able to join my friend for a gig at the Camden Underworld tonight, but maybe discretion is the better part of valour (and wallet).

A friend of mine, who is at Glastonbury festival, received her university results today through her friend who is in London and checked the notice board that results for their university are posted on. She texted me “A first. I’m shaking.”

I wonder how I’ll feel come results day (the 14th). I have this vague inkling that I have done rather okay and will end up with a first myself, but on the other hand it really does teeter on such a fine line. Up until then things seem to hang in a balance, a kind of limbo where little happens. Of course, I am applying to jobs (though not as madly as the friend mentioned above) but it seems I’m only now recovering from the past term, two weeks on. I’m going to spend a week in Spain thanks to some rather amazing friends (and cheap-as-chips Ryanair flights which I admittedly have not yet secured the funds or paid for) which will be very, very welcome. Sun, pool, grill and chill. What could be better? Maybe then I’ll have a clearer head upon coming back, because I feel being in this limbo isn’t the most productive state of being.

Though I am sincerely looking forward to the break (and I feel I deserve it), I can’t help thinking how beautiful summer back in Finland is. It would be wonderful to get some of that, too, but you can’t have everything. For some reason I’ve been feeling like doing things with my hands, which is as inexplicable as it is new. Mucking about at the family summer cottage would give an opportunity to do a bit of that, though, if only in the form of chopping wood and some general maintenance.

It seems all my friends are dismantling their lives and moving away from London within a matter of days. It’s come so quickly I don’t know exactly how to react. What I do know is that I’ve scored some pretty sweet stuff to kit out my room with. Some are mine on a more permanent basis than others, but they’ll make my life nicer for the period of the summer at least. I feel good being able to take stuff that my friends would otherwise likely have to throw out. It’s a type of charity on their part, of course, for which I’m thankful. Now I will have something to read books by without turning on the ceiling lamp, as well as a radio to listen to in my room. Not to mention a mattress topper that will make my slightly-bumpy bed instantly more comfortable.

In a way I’m keeping bits of my friends’ lives for the time being, until they come back to whatever they may be doing in the UK. And, if they don’t come back, well, those bits of their lives become reused and incorporated into mine. It’s weird but so is this whole situation. A big chunk of my life for three years is about to disperse.

Parliament has bowed to pressure and published details of every MP’s expenses claimed from the taxpayer going back quite some time. They’ve blacked out things like addresses, phone numbers, bank account numbers and other understandable things, but it’s still fascinating to see how my MP has claimed £2.20 for teabags and biscuits from Tesco (several times), as well as for hot chocolate (presumably for someone in his company) and guidebooks to Parliament from kiosks within the Palace of Westminster. No doubt these things will be pored over by interested constituents that will then take up the issue when their MP graces a community hall with his presence. They can’t be waiting for that day very anxiously. Thing is, though – I do believe the public has a right to know. I also happen to believe that costs of conducting the business of being a Member of Parliament are fair to claim, including for a residence outside one’s own constituency. But us normal folk have to make improvements to our houses with our own salaries. They really should too.

I’m just waiting for someone to discover a thing that would have needed blacking out but happened to be overlooked. It’s bound to happen, what with several thousand pages of this stuff. The BBC has a service up where you can search by region or postcode in addition to the name, as well as handy notes about what has come to light about specific MPs’ activities. The now-ousted Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, claimed in his final speech that he had tried to reform the expenses system but MPs (their noses too deep in the taxpayer trough) had prevented him from doing so. Remember, though, that this is the same Michael Martin (right honourable and all that) who tried to blow the crisis over when the Daily Telegraph initially broke the story. No doubt there was an element of initial hushing by the MPs a year ago, but maybe they should shift from the blame game to serious reform instead of this resignation circus.

It’s nice to be entertained by things that tickle your intellect, challenging you at the same time as you’re being thoroughly entertained by a well-crafted story. Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia manages that, captivating you in multiple ways. For a moment it gives the audience a chance to ponder the higher mathematics that underlies nature, the dynamics of human ingenuity and the (re)construction of history. By being consistently witty and intellectual without being dry, Arcadia is – to my mind at least – unique.

Stoppard interweaves a story of two periods and one setting in a way that both defines and goes further than the traditional concept of parallel structures: Not only are there characters engaged in illicit affairs in both time periods, there is a character who effectively steps from one period to another while crossing the stage. The constant references to literature, poetry and history mean that one gets more out of the play knowing more about the history of literature or romanticicsm (or the unfair world of academia), but I would argue that even as a kind of surface story about love, loss and genius it works. Assuming, of course, that you’re able to keep up with the rapid-fire delivery of both 19th-century upper-class English and contemporary academic colloquialisms.

The production at the Duke of York’s Theatre featured Stoppard’s own son Ed as the troubled mathematics graduate Valentine, as well as the stunningly beautiful Lucy Griffiths. We were seated in the very front row, which made for an intimate experience, though one that needed a bit of neck-craning. Though I did like the cast as a whole, Jessie Cave who played the character of Thomasina – an aristocratic girl who in her relentless quest for knowledge stumbles onto mathematical concepts she “couldn’t possibly have understood” – disappointed by being rather bratty and unbelievable. While I would expect to see a person clearly acting, she was overdoing it compared to the other members of the cast. As a whole, though, the cast was very good, especially the more veteran actors.

It really made me want to go to the theatre more. There’s something about a performance being put on live, right in front of your eyes, that makes good theatre worthy of praise (and money).

Oh yeah, and it made me realise why on Earth men of the time would wear morning dress as part of their daily attire. Being partly set in a country estate in April of 1809 I can only imagine how cold it would potentially be without a coat, even inside. Things really haven’t changed in 200 years.