pedanther

One of the reasons why, until this month, I hadn't been to town since 2019 was a lingering fear that if I went into the crowded city I would come back with something interesting and respiratory. In a typically human display of logical thinking, however, having made up my mind to go I didn't take any serious precautions against that outcome, and went cheerfully unmasked among crowds on trains and in buses and in rooms full of boardgamers and so on and so forth.

So it wasn't entirely a surprise when it became apparent, within a week of my return, that I had in fact acquired something interesting and respiratory.

It isn't covid, or at least I've got a negative result on all the covid tests I've been taking. I even tried a brace of those fancy new ones that also test for flu and RSV, and got negative results on those as well. So I'm not quite sure what it is, except that it's definitely annoying.

It started with a general feeling of being tired that had developed by Saturday morning into enough of a something that I cancelled my social plans for the afternoon and spent most of the afternoon asleep instead. The worst of it was over within a few days, leaving just the post-nasal drip and associated cough which do not appear to be in any hurry to go away.

I've been sticking at home to be on the safe side, and skipped board game club and other social occasions. (And a committee meeting, which felt particularly weird because I don't think I've missed a meeting of that committee in years and there's a part of me that worries about what they might get up to without my eye on them.)

One of the ways I passed the time during the week was re-reading Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic tetralogy, and then the sequel tetralogy, The Circle Opens. I started reading them years ago along with the Mark Reads online book club, but for some reason I don't now recall I stopped partway through. The decision to re-read them now and finish the series was partly a choice to read something fairly undemanding that I knew I'd enjoy, and partly a deliberate attempt to manipulate my reading statistics on StoryGraph: The all-time stats page includes a top ten list of the authors a user has read the most books by, which in my case starts with Terry Pratchett at #1 and continues down through several excellent SF writers, two creators of classic detective series, and the most prolific author of Doctor Who tie-in books, to finish – now – with Tamora Pierce at #10. The previous #10 was an author who I regrettably read voraciously during my undiscerning teen years but would now rather not give any hint of endorsement to, so I'm glad to have crowbarred him off the list.

Remarkably Bright Creatures fit the themed reading challenge for November ("a book about families") and the last book of The Circle Opens fit the challenge for December ("Finish a book or series that has been lingering for a long time" – and also the alternate option, "a book about someone who is gifted"), so I've completed that set of challenges ahead of schedule. On the other hand, I'm straggling with the random book challenges: I haven't finished the October book yet (This Is Improbable is one of those books that was designed to be dipped into on odd occasions, not read in long stretches) and I haven't settled on a November book. The November challenge is to pick a book at random from the books with your favourite StoryGraph 'mood' ("adventurous", in my case); I failed to get on with my first pick, as previously detailed, and my next few attempts to re-roll the choice landed on books I wasn't in a suitable frame of mind for. Part of the trouble, I think, is that if a book with my favourite mood has been sitting on the to-read shelf for years there's probably some reason I'm not keen to read it. I'm currently having a shot at a Sabatini novel I picked up in a second-hand shop once, and being reminded that although Sabatini inspired several classic adventure movies I've never entirely got on with his books at first hand.

Went to town, for the first time since before Covid. Caught up with my favourite aunt, my favourite niblings (and their parents), and a few friends from the old days. Got dragged along (not unwillingly) to a community orchestra rehearsal, where I played a trombone for the first time in years and was reassured by how much I still remembered. Got my dress shoes repaired. Visited the beach and looked at creatures in tide pools. Went clothing shopping, with questionable success. Successfully avoided coming home with more books than I arrived with. As usual, was too busy doing things to write anything down in detail.

One unanticipated benefit of being away from home with no reliable access to news media or social media was that certain major world events were just a faint noise in the distance instead of something I was living through as they happened. Actually, having most of a week away from social media probably did me a lot of good in general.

My hold on Remarkably Bright Creatures came up shortly before the trip, and I borrowed it with the intention of reading it on the train, but when I got my ebook reader out it turned out it had somehow not downloaded, so I had to leave it until I got back. Instead I read the new Rivers of London novella, and finished off Try Whistling This. I also tried reading my November book for the random book challenge, but I gave up on it after a couple of chapters. It had originally been published as a serial with a rotating set of authors taking turns writing chapters, and I found the effect off-putting; instead of setting up a definite story, it felt like the opening was throwing balls up in the air for other authors to catch, without any real idea of where they would land or any reassurance that they wouldn't be fumbled and dropped. While I was in town, my main book for reading on buses and trains was my other library book, Say Nothing, a fascinating non-fiction book about events in Belfast during the Troubles, which I managed to finish before I left, partly because it's so compelling but also partly because I spent so much time on buses and trains (everything is so far apart in the city).

I played the Dungeons and Dragons: Adventure Begins board game with the niblings. They enjoyed it, especially the bits where players are encouraged to tell a story about what happens when you roll the dice, and were curious about the differences between the board game and regular D&D.

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Before the trip away, we had another session of Pandemic: Legacy, and are now three-quarters of the way through Season One. I'm still enjoying the gameplay, but finding the unfolding season plot predictable and uninteresting.

At the regular weekly evening boardgaming session, we played Nemesis: Lockdown. We had very fortunate starting conditions, with no aliens showing up for several rounds, and most of the players having co-operative objectives that meant we could share information honestly and didn't take long to establish what we needed to do to survive the endgame. The downside of everyone being so well equipped for survival was that the game went on for hours - we only narrowly managed to get finished and packed up before the venue closed. Every game of Nemesis: Lockdown I've played has run long, and I think from now on it's going on my list of games not to start playing in the evening. (It may also end up on my list of games not to play at all, because the other thing that's happened every time I've played is that I've been killed by aliens over an hour before the game ended and been stuck with nothing to do waiting to see how it all turns out.)

In the end, I only went to see two shows at the Pop Up Globe, as the morning performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream was cancelled due to unfriendly weather. It would have been nice to see it, but having now been to two performances in one day I think three might have been overdoing it, and it meant that instead I got to spend a relaxed morning hanging out with relatives.


The mission of the Pop Up Globe is to demonstrate what Shakespeare's theatre looked like not only in the physical surroundings but in the presentation, as popular entertainment in a setting where the audience were clearly visible (and frequently audible) to the actors. This was reflected in the performance of Measure for Measure, which did a lot of broad humour, sight gags, and audience interaction, along with extra lines from time to time in modern vernacular, generally directed at the audience and involving topical gags. (Although some of them served dramatic purposes instead -- the last interpolated line in the play gave Isabella the final word.) Pompey's comic monologue about all the old friends he's met again since he was thrown in prison was completely rewritten to feature names familiar to the current audience. Anachronisms were gaily scattered through the show: the Duke set out for Poland lugging a suitcase on wheels, and when he disguised himself as a friar, it was as an American revivalist preacher (more audience interaction - "Can I get an amen?").

( Four-hundred-year old spoilers )

There were places where I would have liked more seriousness and less buffoonery, but it was appropriately serious in the moments that absolutely had to be, and in general the style of the show worked in the setting. I enjoyed it immensely, and even if it had been the only show I'd seen I would have counted the weekend well spent.


Which, if I haven't phrased it carefully enough, is going to make it sound like I didn't enjoy the performance of Hamlet. I did; it was well enough done, it just didn't wow me the way Measure for Measure did. Hamlet was always going to have to work harder to impress me; unlike Measure for Measure, I've seen a lot of productions of Hamlet already and have strong opinions about it. I also think that as a drama it's a trickier fit for the house style; you can't go all out with the gags and the audience-pumping the way they could with the comedy.

There were still places where they acknowledged the audience, and anachronistic touches. The comic gravedigger was in modern dress and sang "Like a Virgin" instead of the usual Elizabethan ditty. And Polonius, though otherwise dressed in period, had a mobile phone, with a running gag about it always ringing at inopportune moments -- which paid off dramatically when it rang while he was spying on Hamlet's conversation with Ophelia.

As is often the case with such a large collection of characters, many of the supporting actors played multiple roles. One interesting set was that the same actor was Old King Hamlet, the Player King, and Fortinbras. (With an extra note of interest to recall, every time someone talked about how great a ruler Old King Hamlet was, that earlier in the day the same actor had been the unrighteous ruler Antonio in Measure for Measure.)

It was an abridged script, to keep the performance under two-and-a-half hours. The main omission I noticed in the first half was that scene with Polonius and Reynaldo that everybody leaves out, while other scenes were trimmed down (Hamlet's encounter with the ghost, most of his conversations with the players, etc.). I really started noticing the edits after Hamlet is sent to England. We got Fortinbras talking to his captain, so we'd recognise him later, but not the rest of the scene where the captain meets Hamlet and Hamlet does a soliloquy. The account of how Hamlet dealt with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was cut to a bare minimum, or perhaps a bit less than that. (And, to save on characters, instead of having a sailor tell Horatio about it, we got Horatio telling Gertrude, which has implications I'm still thinking about.) The gadfly Osric is left out, replaced with a generic servant.

The duel at the end was very effectively staged, one place where they definitely hit the right note of crowd-pleasing spectacle, and featured what I presume were period-authentic blood effects.


Other notes:
- The stage had at least two trapdoors, a small one with a lift that the ghost used for entrances and exits, and a larger one with a lid that opened outward and steps going down, that acted as a dungeon in Measure for Measure and the open grave in Hamlet.
- There are two companies of actors touring with the theatre, each doing two plays. The two plays I saw were done by the same actors, with each actor having a large part in one play and smaller role(s) in the other: the leads from Measure for Measure appeared, appropriately, as the company of players in Hamlet. The actor playing Hamlet himself was Claudio in Measure for Measure, meaning he got both the speeches about fearing death and what might come after.
- Each company also includes a small group of musicians who accompany the performances on period instruments. Some of the music for Hamlet was very eerie.

Five things I have done within the last few months, for the first time ever without adult supervision:

1. Taken a load of rubbish to the municipal tip.
2. Run a load of dishes through a dishwasher.
3. Mown a lawn.
4. Driven through an automated car wash.
5. Gone on a plane trip.

(The plane trip was, unsurprisingly, the most stressful one, although only in the planning stages; the day itself went without a hitch. I was alarmed the night before to receive a text message informing me that my flight had been cancelled and rescheduled, and then bemused to discover that it had apparently been rescheduled to the exact same date and time as it had already been scheduled for. It turned out what had happened was that the number of passengers booked on the flight had been low enough for the airline to assign a smaller aircraft than the one originally assigned, which from the booking software's viewpoint made it a different flight that happened to be at the same time.)

Veselé Vánoce!

I'm in a picturesque* medieval town in the Czech Republic** for Christmas Day. The forecast is warm and sunny, with a continued absence of snow.

*In both the traditional and Pratchettian meanings of the word.

**We came here from Prague via Vienna, so I've added Austria to my life list too. That's it for now, though; the foreseeable future contains only countries I've already been to.

1. We won our division again, and retained the title of National D Grade Champions. I gather this means that if we contest again next year, we'll be required to move up to C Grade and give someone else a shot. I also gather that we're probably not going to be contesting next year; the expense in time and money is not sustainable for many years running. (Of the two, the time cost is perhaps the more important. Over the past few months, the amount of time we've spent preparing for the contest has meant that we've done hardly any performances locally, and those we have done have sometimes suffered for our attention being elsewhere. That's no way to carry on.)


2. The flying turned out to be no problem. It was actually a lot like being on the train, except that it's been years since the train had a meal service included in the price of the ticket. (And the view out the windows, of course. One striking moment there was when I realised that not only were we flying above the clouds, we were so far above that they seemed to be almost on the ground themselves.)


3. Brisbane continued the theme by being a lot like Perth. The details varied, but the only time I got a visceral sense of unfamiliarity was on the second day, when I was walking down the street at twilight and heard an utterly strange bird call out of the gathering darkness.


4. Saw quite a bit of the South Bank while I was in Brisbane, it being on the route between the hotel and the contest venue, as well as the Botanical Gardens, Australia Zoo, and the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary. At the latter two, I kept wanting to tweet a running commentary of the animals I had now seen in the flesh ("Have now seen a real live komodo dragon. It was asleep."), but since I don't have Twitter I settled for texting my observations to poinketh instead. ("Giant African tortoise: on close inspection, probably awake.") I didn't take many photos myself, since I'm not much of a photographer generally and anyway the whole point of the experience was about seeing the animals without a camera acting as intermediary, but I did decide I might as well shell out for the official Portrait of Tourist and Koala.


5. At one of the ANZAC Day services yesterday, in between a hymn and the recitation of the Lord's Prayer, a choir sang "Imagine". I think this means "Imagine" has now reached that point of comfortable familiarity where the words go straight through the listener without slowing down.