Brunel's Tunnel, Rotherhithe to Wapping

The Thames at London was extremely congested. Up until the beginning of the nineteenth century, merchant ships coming into London could only be unloaded between the Tower of London and London Bridge. Sometimes ships were moored for three months on the river waiting for their cargoes to be unloaded. They were easy prey for gangs who cut them adrift and looted them when they ran aground.

Enclosed docks were needed. The first was opened in 1802 by the West India merchants at the northern end of the Isle of Dogs. Other enclosed docks soon followed: the London Docks at Wapping, the East India Docks at Blackwall and the Surrey Docks, all built in the first years of the nineteenth century.

But the nearest river crossing was London Bridge, by now very old and a few miles away from the new docks. An estimated 4,000 vehicles crossed the bridge every day, and 350 Thames watermen also took passengers across the river. Building a bridge this far to the East presented problems - the height of ships' masts meant that the bridge would have had to be very high and the approach roads very long.

The alternative was a tunnel, but the ground under the Thames was soft - gravel, sand and mud. It would not support a tunnel, especially with the weight of the water above. Robert Vazie first tried to build a tunnel in 1807, and the work was carried on by Richard Trevithick, a very capable engineer from Cornish tin mines, but it was flooded just less that 200 foot short of completion. Trevithick proposed a new method: putting cast iron sections into the tunnel excavated from above. This would have worked but it did not attract financial support. The tunnel was abandoned.

A new method was proposed by Brunel pere. His name was Marc Brunel, originally a French naval officer, he came to England to escape the French Revolution.  He went to America where he built a very impressive canal linking the Hudson River with Lake Champlain, so linking New York with the St. Lawrence River.

But in 1818 Marc Brunel patented a device for "forming drifts and tunnels underground". His inspiration was the shipworm, Teredo navalis, which bores into ships' timbers. Digging with the shell-like protrusions on either side of its head, the shipworm excretes the excavated wood out of its body, using it to line and reinforce the tunnel as it moves along.

 

 

 

They started with a shaft at the Rotherhithe end. Marc's new method was to build a brick tower and then simply allow it to sink into the soft riverbank through the downward force of its own weight. At first it appeared to be a tower - an inner and an outer surface of bricks a yard apart, the cavity between them filled with cement and rubble. A superstructure was then set on top of the tower on which a steam engine was assembled to pump away the water which the shaft encountered as it sank and to bring up buckets of earth from the bottom.

The structure weighed nearly 1,000 tons and sank into the ground at a rate of a few inches per day. The downwards progress of the shaft at Rotherhithe became one of the most popular and fashionable sights of London. After it was fully sunk diggers had to go down and give it a foundation and leave an opening for the tunnelling shield, and also dig a reservoir for water drained from the tunnel workings. Marc designed his own steam engine, installed above the shaft to drive the tunnel pumps and bring up the earth in buckets.

 

The shield was an iron frame facing the direction of the tunnel, rectangular. The miners worked in independent cells digging out a small patch at a time, while the frame was braced against the bricks the bricklayers had just finished laying, 6 deep lining the tunnel. Below you can see the miners working in the frame on the right and spoil being removed and bricks brought.

Finally the great shield was lowered into place 63 feet below the ground and the boring of the tunnel began. When fully manned, thirty six miners excavated a tunnel face of approx. 800 square foot. There were two eight hour shifts.

Marc had been taken ill even before the tunnelling got under way, and in 1826 the resident engineer also became ill and resigned. Isambard, Marc's son, had been involved in the work from the beginning. He often stayed below ground supervising the progress of the great shields for up to 36 hours at a time. In January 1827 his appointment as resident engineer was made official. He was only twenty years old.

Isambard was given three assistants, but all were prey to diseases because the river bed was composed of toxic substances, methane gas and foul water. One of the assistants died almost immediately. Workmen and overseers also fell ill. In February 1827, with 300 feet of the archway completed, the directors of the tunnel decided to allow the public to visit the work. Marc protested as the earth was inconsistent and gravel layers threatened the works with flooding. At the end of April up to 700 visitors were coming each day, for the charge of one shilling. The directors cut the workmen's wages which resulted in a strike.

Then there was a flood...
Marc had a stroke...
Another flood...
The tunnel was bricked up...

Today you can see the tunnel at Wapping station on the East London Railway, part of the Overground. You can't see any more of it because it is in use by trains. It is an International Landmark Site, one of only four in the country (and only 250 in the world). Here the Brunels pioneered a method of tunnelling used in every tube system all over the world ever since.

The museum at Rotherhithe tells all the story and you can go into the shaft, but they haven't much money with which to buy exhibits and they need funds to buy items like Brunel's drawings. Please visit and buy books and souvenirs.

London Open House - celebrating architecture, buildings

I decided to volunteer for this as I haven't volunteered for anything recently. You volunteer online and then they send you the Open House "catalogue" of places open to the public for free on that weekend. I decided to volunteer at the Brunel Museum in Rotherhythe on Saturday afternoon as I am interested in Brunel; and the Herbarium at Kew Gardens sounded really great too, (and I read about it in my "Plants from Roots to Riches" book) so signed up for Sunday morning. It was quite easy to get to the Brunel Museum on the Jubilee Line, (and you can also go on the East London line), and the Museum director, Robert, was glad to see us as he really needed the help of volunteers to man the shop/café, buy milk, take money, put the rubbish out and generally be there to talk to people. I went to Robert's talk in the morning and read all the signs and then I was pretty well-prepared to answer questions. My fellow volunteer was an interesting American who had moved from California to the locality (why?) and was looking for something to do since she had retired from research into ?finance/ markets???

It was the devil of a job to get to  Kew Gardens on Sunday morning, I went all the wrong way. There was a choice of jobs. I stood in front of the Open Weekend sign for the Tropical Nursery and tried to entice visitors to it. This is where propagation and care of the Tropical plants takes place, and of course the staff can nurse plants up to be looking fabulous and then pop them into the display in the public greenhouses. Unfortunately it is placed right in front of the small children's play area so most of the people there were concerned with toilets/nappy change and the café rather than seeing the botanical care going on. I was lucky to be standing with a horticulturalist called Lorraine who worked in the Tropical Nursery and specialised in cacti and succulents. I asked her all sorts of questions about the plants and what she does all day! It was lucky she was so nice because I was standing there for a long time. In the end I didn't get to see the herbarium at all, and it is only open once a year. I hope it is open next year, and I will definitely go. I did walk around Kew in the afternoon, (free entry for volunteers) and I will post about what I saw.

There are quite a few attractions at Kew for children; it has changed in that respect. There is a sculpture exhibition at the moment - brilliant for the older ones.

Today's news - Climate change

It's not exactly new news. From the Independent, re: Hurricane Irma.

Jeffrey Kargel, from the Department of Hydrology & Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona, urged governments to question their denial of climate change and get to work making their countries resilient enough to be able to deal with such extreme weather events.
“I have one thing to ask the American government and all other climate change denying politicians around the world: have you wondered at all about climate change, hurricanes, glacier melting, ocean warming and sea level rise in connection with the safety of places near and dear to you, such as the Mar-a-Lago Resort? It is time that you start worrying about that," he said. "And while you are at it, please have some concern about the rest of the U.S. and the world.
“Put most simply, Planet Earth's climate is in upheaval and we know exactly what is causing it: right now, the rapid pace of climate change is set by government policies in the U.S. and many other countries. We cannot turn it around in a few years or even in a decade.  But we can worsen it in a few years or a decade.”

Some of that preparation must be about asking the companies that can be blamed for the events to pay for them, according to Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem Science at the University of Oxford.

“As yet another hurricane barrels into the Caribbean, with extreme precipitation and the impacts of storm surges both exacerbated by past greenhouse gas emissions, we must begin to ask ‘how long can we expect taxpayers and those in the path of the storms to foot the entire bill for the impacts of climate change?'," Professor Allen said.

“In a paper published today in the journal Climatic Change, we show that nearly 30% of global sea level rise from 1880 to 2010 can be traced to products sold by just 90 large corporations. We need to start a conversation about whether it makes sense to exempt companies selling products that cause greenhouse gas emissions from all liability for the consequences of their use. As we found in 2008, giving companies unlimited license to make private profits while society underwrites the risk ends badly for everyone.”

Gig - Simon Armitage - describing Morrissey

I have never been a Morrissey fan, but I respect people who are. I like the songs that everyone likes - This Charming Man - for example. I have never sought out more songs until last year when after listing to an edition of Desert Island Discs and listening to someone - I forget who - try to describe how wonderful he found Morrissey, I decided to give it a go. And I gave it a couple of listens and I liked it a bit, i.e. not much.

Now I am reading "Gig" by Simon Armitage, the poet. I loved Simon Armitage's book about the North. I loved the sly humour. The funny thing is, when we lived in Yorkshire I went to a Simon Armitage reading and I thought it the dullest evening I had ever had. I couldn't connect to any of his poems. I felt rather sorry for my children because his poems were on their English exam syllabus. The person who wrote the prose seemed entirely different -

Like Stuart Maconie, who has some sort of weird emotional connection with Morrissey, Simon Armitage is absolutely fascinated by him.  He does him the great service of trying to describe the emotion of what he can see - the meaning of M's stomach for example ("real, proud, serious") M. does have a fantastic voice and (I'm told) a great stage presence. It seems, from what Simon (sorry mate I am going to call you Simon) writes, that Morrissey projects a seriousness that they crave. Apart from Morrissey's sad rhetoric, people find this release into emotion only at football matches, I suppose, or in fights. In the past, men were more emotionally outspoken than women. Think of Beethoven, all those crashes and bangs, like a man losing his temper and slamming a good few doors, and the melodic passages like a man basking in the sunshine of God's approval. Women, at some point, claimed the ability to voice emotion but I sometimes wonder. When they create art it isn't emotion, it's often about sex, as though their ability to desire and be desired, or their ability to climax and produce a climax in another person, were all there was to them. And of course, that can't be true. I don't know about women who are creating art with thoughts life and death - but there must be some. This is my pre-occupation at the moment - it turned out to be the summary of the talk on films by David Thompson (previous post) and it is the theme of the book of the week, by Robert McCrum, who isn't much older than me. And I find myself glued to the series "Ambulance" which sometimes shows people near death - and even in their last moments. It shows you how marvellous things can be - like the woman giving telephone instructions that save a baby's life, and how a man can face death with equanimity knowing that he has provided for the people he loved.

My friend's husband died suddenly this summer, an acquaintance died of cancer, my parents died last winter. The entire cast of our lives will die even though we don't seem to be perceptibly aging. (See post: We are old, but we boogie)

This is what Morrissey is singing about - a doomed celebration of the fleeting emotions - a longing for salvation in Love always mixed up with the feeling of falling into a lonely grave. "Life has killed me" - that's serious. And all this in songs shorter than 4 minutes. I am trying to understand the music as I write, but I find it very busy music, difficult to like.

Conversation between Jarvis Cocker and David Thompson - on Youtube - effect of movies on us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCxEG2NQv7c&t=3942s


What did Hollywood do to us? It turned us into spectators. And the TV made it worse as people spent hours a day watching it. It made us feel that participation in politics is futile. People in the sixties took to the streets and marched against nuclear weapons - they don't do that anymore. TV has an enormous appetite for disaster and crisis and we will watch the end of the world on TV.

The entertainment that came from the movies was fantastic, inspirational. Now movies come to us, closer and closer (beamed into our heads?) As children we think - "that's what it will be like when I grow up". Movies are always for young people. They teach you, when you are young, how to look, how to walk across a room, how to look at someone of the opposite sex.

Hollywood films were like advertisements for life. From the beginning people in high places were alarmed about the movies. They were feeding poor people dreams that cannot be realised. That's dangerous, politically, and those in authority are still afraid of the movies.

They were made by people who had shaky backgrounds and made fortunes [like Charlie Chaplin] giving themselves the means to behave badly, which behaviour attracted a lot of publicity. The Code came into effect to stop films showing moral lapses so that Hollywood, by policing itself, could avoid being censored by the state. But in the long term it didn't really matter. In the 1960s the code broke down. Crime was shown as well as sex - censorship was abandoned.

For a long time America was the model for movies. Films expressed the belief that if you came to America everything will be alright. You will be fulfilled and happy. This cannot be possible, mathematically. People went to the movies to see futures for themselves. These futures were realised by very few ordinary people - but in Hollywood dreams were made possible - Louis Meyer, Clarke Cable were two examples. This mass medium ensured a certain kind of order and aspiration.

Buster Keaton made a film called "Sherlock Junior" where he is a projectionist and he enters into the screen. It tells the audience that it knows that's what they want to do - be up there in the film. Purple Rose of Cairo, too, is a very interesting film showing how people's lives interact with film.

But now people are having to face the fact that their desires are not going to be fulfilled. Were they idiots ever to think it? People have distanced reality through the screen. The reason we go to the movies is to see wonderful people and imagine you are them. The kitchens in movies (and on TV in America)  are large, the clothes are smart, the people are good-looking.

 Religious faiths had said to people: "God is watching and at the end of your life of mundanity and suffering you will get what you truly deserve." While this view of the world was fading away movies came along as a popular fiction that everyone could relate to. Everyone in the world. It was in the medium. It was a myth that replaced religious faith. But now the myths have been blown apart. What happens next?

Some people believe that now the world will end. We have so many problems that it's difficult to believe that we can solve them.

The way the vocabulary of film developed - the techniques - happened very quickly. Close ups - all over the world people learned that you can vary the position of the camera. Then you are into two cameras and editing the film. In Russia there was great experimentation to see how meaning was effected by making different shots. People discovered that you can play with the order of the stories - and the audience makes the meaning. When the film is finally shown to the audience is when you know whether your film is any good. Film is an interactive medium.

In the early days of the 20th century the Nickleodeon showed U.S. audiences things they didn't know about - like the pyramids in Egypt, a tiger walking through a jungle. A flood, a disaster. The basic visual information was wonderful for people. But now people are blasé, and take the motion they can see for granted.

If you show people wilder and wilder things - faster and greater than life  - through CGI - and other special effects people will perhaps attend less to the human face, although this is still the most powerful communicator.

Film is in our blood but TV is more so.  We absorb what we watch and how it is constructed. TV may give us 5 hours a day to absorb. Using the remote gives us something like jazz - as we move from one programme to another. TV is anti-concentration. But TV is over - as it was. Using the internet is not as passive as TV.

As TV develops there are more and more invitations to people to come on down, or participate in shows. Young people film themselves and each other all the time. They want to be in films. Some achieve fame by making suicide films.

When you go to the cinema, there in the dark, you don't know what horror you are going to be shown. Kids love to be frightened. You can't forget some of the frightening moments you see on screen - such as the scene in Alien when the creature bursts out of John Hurt's chest.

When a character in Hitchcock climbs a staircase - they're vulnerable. Playing with fear is a part of the nature of movies. The audience is helpless. Films are like dreams, at a different level. Dreams are also out of our control.

Now people are watching movies or TV content more and more on their own - something which Edison foresaw. This changes society. At rock festivals people do things in crowds - this is now a rare experience.

Jean Harlow - seemed trashy, sexually ready, didn't seem to be wearing underwear. In the thirties she seemed to be the rawest star in Hollywood, and she often appeared with Clark Gable. She lived dangerously, recklessly, and she didn't take care of herself. Health had little place in the culture. Now movie stars try to preserve their health and their youth - they didn't used to.

Howard Hughes - he is an example of the rich kid who wanted to get into the moves, screw movie stars. His father made a fortune out of inventing a drilling head for the oil industry. As a young man he was charming and personable, but he went crazy. He had everything he could possibly want, and he lived and died alone.

David Thompson sums up: We know we need to dream - it's vital to sleep. Sometimes people are disturbed by their dreams. Freud could tell people what their dreams meant but he didn't say he could make them change or stop. We dream helplessly, randomly. Don't worry about casting the dream out. Probably the truth is that you're going to die and you want to be alive, and you live with an intellectual struggle between those things. For 100 years moving film has had a profound effect on that conflict, sometimes terrifying, sometimes like heaven. You probably can't have one without the other.

Trip to Edinburgh for the Festival

My neighbour Amanda and I spent one evening and two days at the Edinburgh Festival, staying in a Budget Backpackers and seeing mainly Fringe shows. We had a private room at the Backpackers and it was very decent - well decorated inside - modern bathrooms, clean. Good communal areas, services and very kind staff. A brief resume of our trip follows:-

Free show - 4 comedians taking turns at poking their heads through a sheet and going into their spiels  to make us laugh - 2 stars.

Day One
Free show in Royal Mile - Knife Juggler up a ladder - he was quite clever and amusing as well as good at balancing and juggling, but these guys spin out their shows for too long - 3 stars
Scottish National Gallery. Lovely: to see the paintings I am familiar with - like members of your family that I don't often see. - 5 stars
Drag Act with miming - downstairs in a pub - very interesting as the face had lots of black plastic needles sticking out of a stockingnette cover, while the hair part of the head was covered in plain stockingnette. I think needles all over the head would look better. Fun. - 2 stars
Nina Conti - Ventriloquism - big theatre at the Edinburgh Conference Centre - I don't know why she does her act with the monkey, as the act with the people from the audience is so much funnier. - 5 stars
Free show - 3 magicians in a downstairs room - all good. 4 stars
Paid for show at the Underbelly  - Your Ever Loving by Martin McNamara - this was on during the day and did well, but the cast hung on for another week and did a midnight show for tiny audiences - It was about Paul Hill whose "confession" got the Guildford Four and the Maguire family banged up. Poor bloke. He speaks aloud the letters he wrote to his mum from prison as well as telling his whole story. This play is fast and furious and the two actors (Stefan McCusker and James Elmes) were excellent. and the Director had done a great job. (Sarah Chapleo).- 5 stars -

Your Ever Loving uses Paul Hill’s letters, mostly sent to his mother from prisons up and down the country. They’re brought simply and charmingly to life by Stefan McCusker. He is a man enduring crippling restriction and loneliness and yet we see him for the most part in his element, attempting to keep his mother’s spirits up and arranging presents for a daughter he has never met. His situation is rendered sympathetically, but McNamara’s play doesn’t gloss over the faults of the man himself, made violent, taut and spiky by years in prison.   https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/2016/your-ever-loving-review-at-theatre-n16-london/

Day Two
Climbed Arthur's seat. 5 stars for the view.

Amanda

Free Show - Joe Wells, stand up comedian. He is really good and I predict he will be well-known one day. He did a routine about someone's attitudes changing with the passing of time. He took the audience into his world and took us on a journey. We were in a safe pair of hands. He also wore a T-shirt that said YOKO WAS THE BEST BEATLE. You gotta respect that. - 5 stars.
Expensive ventriloquism show at the Pleasance - Nina Conti supposedly talking to a psychiatrist. Very disappointing as the ideas led nowhere. Dull. - 2 stars
Free show at the Cowshed on Cowgate - Scottish Blues band - these old boys (and one of them, who played guitar and harmonica, was really old) knew their stuff and they were amazing. Enjoyed it so much. - 5 stars
Free show comedians - somewhere on Cowgate - forgettable. 2 stars

Expensive show - Room 29 - Jarvis Cocker and Chilly Gonzales at the Proper Festival, King's Theatre. We got the tickets at the last minute so the seats were awful - we were actually higher than the ceiling and I could only feel "connected" to the show by leaning very far forward - the music was lovely - piano music written by Chilly, and lyrics by Jarvis. It would work better in a cabaret venue than in a practically vertical theatre. The idea is that we are entertained by Jarvis in his Hotel Room. "Help yourself to pretzels" he says, in his dark and intimate voice. "Room 29 is where I'll face myself alone", he sings, in a croaky but affecting voice. You can hear this track on Youtube  It is a very confessional piece. He castigates himself for not being able to hold down a real relationship with a girlfriend, preferring something less personal. (Tearjerker.) It looks at the allure of Hollywood, and it considers what the habit of staring of screens has had on us. It considers Hollywood's preoccupation with sex and what effect that might have had on Jean Harlow and Howard Hughes. There is a strange song about Mark Twain's daughter - mocking her because she became an alcoholic. (Why mock her? She was not a talented writer or player but - is that a reason to mock someone?) Jarvis considers the wonderful allure of film and latterly, TV, and how it turns out to be a sham god, an illusion. One song about this disillusion with TV is called "The Other Side". (Unfortunately he went off stage for this bit and appeared in a telly on stage - which was not original and was too static to hold the attention.)

Then he becomes quite distressed with a song called "Trick of the Light" how he fell in love with "life with the boring bits taken out" -  "I wasted my life on a trick of the light" - Then there was a dancer in red who twirled around to a strobe light - this was simply beautiful and we were in the best place to see it - from way up high. There was a string quartet to fill out the music - whirling around to fade out in sadness.

I thought - "Oh this is a work of art" - because it was a considered work that didn't hang together quite right, but it united a number of elements - music, dancing, speech, a screen with pictures and some film, even some audience participation - this wasn't very good either -  in a way that hasn't been done before. I was very glad I was there.

Then another song about how the stars of the thirties were genuinely cool and how the people of today don't compare - no class. The stars of the thirties mixed with genuinely cultured people - refugees from Europe. This is called "Ice Cream as Main Course" and was more resolved - a salute to the past.

After this Jarvis and co did an encore - a Leonard Cohen song called "Paper Thin Hotel" which was very affecting and a high point of the evening.

A Guardian review is here and the album review is here
And that was Edinburgh, which was looking lovely.

Berlin, Warsaw, and Krakow, part 4 - the Jewish quarter

The Jews had a long history in Krakow. They came in 1380-ish and through the early modern period they had a small area with a synagogue and a wall around it. After a couple of hundred years the wall came down and they were allowed to expand their area. Gradually they acquired more synagogues and more businesses and graveyards.

Then the Nazis... In Krakow the Jews amounted to up to 25% of the citizens! according to the museum in one of the old synagogues. This means that they had deep roots here and considered themselves Polish, and contributed to political and military life. They weren't in danger until the Nazis occupied ... and then the Poles seemed to have been "enforcers" of the Nazi rules... You need to come and see the old pictures and photographs to see how strange it was. It was the same in the Czech Republic. For example, Franz Kafka was a Jew and he lived a very integrated life in Prague, utterly unremarkable. Had he lived any longer, the Nazis would have murdered him and his family nevertheless.

When Spielberg wanted to film the story that became Schindler's List, he came to the original Jewish quarter, which was run down. Well, it isn't now. After the famous film, with its final captions saying that fewer than 400 Jews live in Poland today, Jews came back to Krakow, to start again in the Jewish Quarter. Some came from Israel. Hebrew is spoken here (I heard a waiter). I don't know what the Poles think about the Jews coming back. It is bizarre that this tragic area should be a magnet to tourists. But in the evenings the restaurants put on Klezmer bands,  and the music gives the place atmosphere. They do great trade. Our room is three floors up from a restaurant in this quarter. The tree outside our room is a willow, blowing in the breeze. Cars and mini-buses are parked down there on the cobbles. Tours come to visit the memorial to the Jewish community. Tourists come in little private taxis, like milk floats.

Outside the violinist and a cellist are playing "if I were a rich man". They vary the speed of the verses. I can hear the sound of cutlery on plates. A little tiny bit of applause for the musicians. Earlier they played the theme from "Schindler" and it was beautiful, but got no applause. None for "Air on a G string" either. The musicians have a very large repertoire and are very talented - I hope the restaurant owners pay them well.

One night we heard the theme from Schindler's List 4 times.

Schindler's factory building survives, and is a tourist attraction - a long queue for it. We nearly went  - then decided to go to the art gallery next door, because it is weird to go on holiday and visit a site of mass murder as though it was just another thing. "So! That was Auschwitz? Bad! Let's have lunch!" No. These places need more thought, formal clothing, special trips as pilgrims, more respect.

Synagogue

Jewish quarter, morning, synagogue at the end.

Berlin, Warsaw and Krakow - part 3, Krakow - folk dancing

We felt more at home in Krakow straight away. This is because most of the city stayed intact in the war, and it feels right; it feels like a liveable, cultured, parks-and-libraries kind of environment. For example, all around the old town, the walled city, there is a park. We had a picnic lunch there one day and then stayed for a beer. There are so many people about! Mums' groups with toddlers and pushchairs, old ladies walking and chatting, people reading books and magazines, young people texting away and meeting their friends - it seems to be a happy city. In the park there are statues and flowers and fountains and loads of benches. There is a big display about Pope Francis' visit to Poland.

While we were walking to get to our hotel, we stopped to hear a concert in the park - some sort of competition - and we realised that something Warsaw lacks, in our experience, is music - street music.

We have noticed Poles reading in cafes and pubs. I always notice people reading. It seems to be quite usual to go out and read in public - nobody thinks it is somehow sad - (except A.).

We gate-crashed a folk festival in Krakow - went past a big hall and heard the music, so we went to see what was happening. I took some notes.  - "One act follows another. The current troop is children dressed in shades of beige - girls in dirndl skirts and beige blouses, boys in beige waistcoats and trousers. Lots of twirling and running on the spot. Next lot - girls in red bodices, circlets of flowers and plaits. Pairing off and rushing about in a circle. Clapping in pairs. My ex boyfriend would have called it an "effing FERTILITY rite" in a particularly revolted way. The beige troop is a bit more go-ahead - different music and more original moves. However, it looks a bit bonkers. They are like "little primitives" - imagine the Rite of Spring to bagpipe music.

"Lady in flowered blouse, on stage with a mic, announcing the scores? The next act? lots of applause for the kids and their dancing instructor. A boy on his own! Mad leaping and slapping of legs. Kicking legs up and clapping (men). Looking on (women). Slight twirling of dirndls. Then two young men, leaping and slapping and twisting around like you would NOT BELIEVE. They go past us later, heads dripping with sweat.

"The communists kept all this folk culture alive - made it compulsory, probably, and it is really lovely to see it continue of its own volition. But the audience is not as interested as it might be.

"This must be the way farmers showed they were "fit" for courting purposes. The women have a more passive role in the dances. The female role is - serene. A man would value a correctly twirling, serene woman wearing neat plaits and nicely-made skirts and aprons.

"Flowery lady is making more announcements. We don't know what it's about. It's ten to ten. Is it time to go? No! Here comes a traditional band from another region. Blue and white flag this time. It's Greece! with live music! Accordion and clarinet. Drum. Loads of dancers. Dancers in lines. End dancers twirling hankies. Men wear white trousers with SKIRTS and red cummerbunds - black waistcoats, white shirts, black small hats. Men have some sort of gartered socks. The women wear white petticoats with fancy grey coat dresses. on top. They have gold patterns marking their haunches from behind. They wear white hair-coverings and black hats. They twist gaily and uniformly to and fro. I think this is meant to be a round dance but they have to squash it into a long, thin circle because they are on a long, thin stage. The music is absolutely dreadful. (I have a sound file.) In this dance the man on the end of the line does all the dancing - very complicated steps. Now the girls hold hands in a line and do the same dance - End girls have extra moves - hankie twirling. It reminds me of those flamingos which make lines in which to perform stylised "dances". This group has a few screamy fans.



"Somebody has won a trophy! Much applause. More prizes. More applause! We think EVERYBODY is going to win a prize! The announcer is speaking English - a prize for Estonia! Lithuania has a prize! So has Hungary! All prize winners are now lined up across the stage. Some are in national costume, some are not. It looks like a scene from "Shrek". Or Jack and the Beanstalk. The Greeks are back on stage! The kids are on stage! The Greeks teach everybody their slow "Zorba" dance. Back to the audience. The pace is mounting. boys and girls jostling and not getting the hang of it."

Good fun!