Review: The Mousetrap

The good people of Malvern love a murder, by which I mean they love an artfully produced whodunit, which is why on this rainy November night the Malvern Theatre was full, not a spare seat to be had.  Knowing what lay in store, folk were ready for a treat and obviously, those who had enjoyed previous productions and who are intimate with Agatha, were expecting something worth tempting them out on a night like this, something special.  And something special is what they got, because although the place was packed, as it was observed to me afterwards: 'there was not a sniff, cough or fidget the whole way through'.  True enough and no further accolade is required to underline the quality of this performance of 'The Moustrap'.

What I will say is that the individual performances were excellent.  As usual, the stage contained a number of well known actors, by which I mean well known from the telly, and the play gave them the chance to step out of familiar roles into vintage dress, an opportunity they seized with obvious relish.  It's wrong to single out any sole performance for praise but it's fair to say that the spirit of impending panto season had obviously gripped some of the cast, with Steven France and Karl Howman in particular in fine form, giving a masterclass in how to perform at the very edge of restraint, and when to knowingly push things just that bit further.

Indeed, for a whodunit featuring ghastly grisly murder, the entire play was not short of laughs, there were genuine comedic characters and some finely judged comic moments, all of which gave the darker moments of the play that much more chilling impact.

The play is celebrating its sixtieth year, yet still seems fresh.  Partly this is because the set up, strangers thrown together in a country house hotel that is then cut off from the rest of the world by snow, is timeless, or at least has been timeless for the last sixty years.  But also because, unfortunately, some of those darker themes in the play are still with us and, at the time of this performance, still sadly topical.  The audience were watching a play cherished in part because of its longevity that dealt with contemporary themes.

In 'The Mousetrap' four expected and one unexpected guest arrive at a newly opened hotel and, as the snow thickens outside, the plot thickens inside with the discovery that one may be a murderer.  The first half of the play, with the introduction of the characters and the building of suspicion into paranoia, ensures that the audience has a busy time pointing the finger of suspicion first one way and then the other.  'The Mousetrap' is a glorious mechanism, the plots and sub-plots weaving and ticking along but there is more to it than an admirable structure, as the characters come to life, the audience are drawn in.

And what a pleasant place to be drawn in to.  Once they have cleared out the murderer, I'd quite fancy a week at the hotel.  The set was excellent, an unchanging single room that somehow managed to convey that yes, behind this door is a writing room, behind that one a dining room, behind that one a music room and so on.  As important as the scenery was the lighting, which managed to suggest that particular winter dusk you get when it's been snowing and, for one pivotal scene, transforms the stage and the theatre as day becomes dusk.

That 'The Mousetrap' is celebrating its sixtieth year is testament to its quality as a play and this was an exceptional performance, with cast and crew obviously conscious that they were performing something beloved, with national treasure status.  There was an air of celebration to the performance that might not have been there last year and may not be there next year but that does not matter because, at the conclusion of the play and after the curtain call, one is asked not to reveal the plot.  In that one delicious moment there is complete complicity between audience and performer and with a huge collective wink, everyone goes home happy.

Re:cycling

Bikes.  Lycra.  Olympics.

This has been a spectacular summer for cycling.  Not actually cycling, of course, it’s been bloody miserable weather and unless your cycle came equipped with those pontoon things that they fit to helicopters to allow them to land on water and get attacked by sharks, it’s unlikely you will have enjoyed cycling this summer.  Certainly, I get out on my bike now and again, usually when I want to make a short hop and am both to lazy to walk it and far too tight to bother paying for parking at the other end and certainly again, this year, I began to question being too tight to pay for the optional rear mudguard on my bike, as the spray from the rain thrown up by my rear wheel somehow managed to both hit the nape of my neck and soak my arse.

The spectacular cycling was mainly happening in the velodrome of the Olympic Park and in the streets around Hampton Court, where Team GB showed two things; that if you are one of the greatest cyclists in the world at the peak of your form, you are likely to be looking at the arse of the member of Team GB in front of you and thinking very dark thoughts indeed, and that if you wear lycra, you need to have the body of an Olympian underneath it.

Cycling is, apparently, the new golf.  This, I think, means that middle-aged men have something to get them out of the house at the weekend for a few hours and also something to spend vast sums of money on in order to have a better time doing it.  I have no idea where carbon fibre comes from but I do know that bikes made out of it are very expensive and, presumably, whoever owns a carbon fibre mine spends most of their evenings rolling around in cash, hookers and coke.

The worrying words in the paragraph above are ‘middle-aged’.  In isolation, not a cause for concern.  Let me throw in another word.  Lycra.

I know, I know, we all thought that the practice of wearing lycra as a surface layer finished in the eighties, at the conclusion of which it was tossed in the huge cultural skip along with ra-ra skirts and rolling up the sleeves on your jacket.  Apparently not so.  Middle aged men are wearing lycra to cycle.  The result…have you ever seen sausage meat being squeezed into its skin?  No?  Lucky you.

Because the reality is if you want to be a champion cyclist, you have to be superhuman.  This is why the only people who should appear in public wearing lycra are those with super-powers, or the sort of people who have got up at four in the morning every year since they were eight and spent all day practicing pedalling.  By which I mean Olympians.

Because to be a champion you need an unhealthy degree of obsession.  You may think all you need is enough steroids to make a racehorse break the sound barrier and more blood bags than a vampire banquet, but not so.  You also need a bike so advanced it makes a Formula 1 car look like something that clowns pile out of in the Big Top.

Middle aged men will proudly show you their carbon fibre bikes so light that they can pick up with one finger, after they have unscrewed the GPS system, the water bottles, the on-board defibrillator and so on.  This is a far cry from the bicycles of my youth that gave so much joy, machines that appeared to be made out of scaffold poles welded together and were practically indestructible, or at least child-proof, which is practically the same thing.  These same hearty beasts of burden in grown up form propelled district nurses around and were often to be seen with bags of groceries suspended from both handlebars as stately matrons returned from the shops.

The Olympics came to London to inspire a generation.  They did.  In this case, it’s the generation of blokes over forty who walked past the Harley showroom and straight into Action Bikes for some serious kit and some very tight pants.

Bikes today are so light they have to be tethered to railings to stop them floating away.

Shed Red 2012

The Shed Red 2011 is nearly ready for drinking, that is, nearly ready for drinking by other people after I give bottles as Christmas presents, once the recipient has signed a legally binding disclaimer, naturally.  Indeed, I have already given one bottle away to a relative who was interested in trying home wine making or, to give it its scientific term; ‘getting drunk on the cheap during a recession’.  Early reports are that Shed Red is better drunk after leaving it to breath for a couple of days.  This, I am given to understand, gives the chemical smell and aftertaste time to dissipate.  This may well be the first wine that should not be decanted near varnished surfaces.

So while Shed Red 2011 will shortly only be a memory, and for those whose higher brain functions it inhibits, maybe not even that, excitement is building about Shed Red 2013 – okay rosé!

This was a golden summer, but only in terms of the medal haul of Team GB.  Weatherwise it wasn’t great, in fact the Met Office put out a press release officially declaring it the most ‘bloody miserable’ summer since records began, and that includes the one with the Ark.

The wet summer has given us a truly golden autumn.  The trees have been spectacular this year, leaves shimmering gold and amber and fiery red.  They are, as a result of the (surprise) wind and rain, mostly on their way to being attractive mulch now, but for a few days the colours were glorious.

The wet weather may have produced attractive foliage, but it’s been hard on the crops, my vine in particular.  One of the most important decisions in any grape grower’s life is when to prune the leaves from the vine, allowing the sunlight to shine directly on the crop.  The problem is that the leaves also shelter the grapes from being battered by the rain.  This year, the decision was simple, there was no sunshine and there was plenty of rain.  In addition to a lack of sunshine, I am now able to say with certainty that grape guzzling critters are quite happy to brave the elements while the cats that kept the squirrels at bay last year were, presumably, at home curled up on top of a radiator, occasionally shitting in their owner’s shoe to relieve the monotony or whatever the hell it is that cats do.

The result is that the yield, as they say, is down.  This has affected not just my harvest, but the good people at Nyetimber, who are reported not to have even bothered harvesting this year.

Yea, well, Nyetimber may have bottled it (or not), but it takes more than a vastly reduced yield and the possibility that the under-developed grapes may result in a drink that requires its own entry on the periodic table (SRx) to put team Shed Red off getting out the demijohns, the sugar and the fining powder and other chemical additives that make the stuff drinkable and, importantly, makes drinking it ‘quite an experience’ rather than ‘death by misadventure’.

I have actually tried some of the 2012 and it is an improvement on the 2011, a darker colour (although still a rose rather than a true red, it is a much darker blush, think ‘social mortification resulting in having to make a large donation to a badger sanctuary’ rather than ‘used wrong soup spoon at dinner’ levels of embarrassment) and a more complex taste, there is almost no way in which this could be mistaken, or used for, paint thinner.

Moreover, this is very much a limited edition.  Last year there was about forty bottles of the stuff, this year, a mere eleven or, as my winemaker explained the other night ‘ten’, not that I begrudge him a bottle although I hope that he sipped it and savoured it rather than bolting it with the determination of Frankenstein attempting to destroy his own creation.

Odd though that a year which gave the smaller crop of poor grapes has produced a superior wine.  One thing is for sure, when drinking a 2012 vintage, people will be thinking about gold.  A shame Nyetimber passed on that.

Books and Bookers

What is the greatest prize in writing?  Obviously, it’s making enough money from selling your writing to enable you to do a couple of hours scribbling in the morning and then slope off for lunch and legitimately describe everything that happens after that as ‘research’. 

There are other, more formal examples such as the Nobel prize for literature, the Golden Dagger award for mystery writing, the Daily Mail Letter of the Day for the most Frothingly Insane Rant About Gypsies, the Orange prize for jolly well having a bash at trying to be as good a writer as a chap and, the daddy of them all, the Booker!

The Booker prize has traditionally fulfilled two functions, first it tells the sort of people who only read one book a year what book to read this year, and second, because it’s televised, it confirms everyone’s prejudices about the publishing industry, that it’s full of people who talk too much and only stop talking when they are drinking.

Publishing is changing.  You no longer have to have your manuscript rejected by hundreds of publishers to feel belittled and crushed.  On-line publishing means that you can make your writing available for free and you can feel belittled and crushed directly by the public, cutting out the middleman and moving straight to ‘bitter’ without ever having passed ‘success’.  Of course, anyone truly unsuccessfully dedicated to their art will describe their writing as ‘difficult’ and themselves and ‘misunderstood’.  These people can often be seen smoking furiously and, in their weaker moments, wondering if they should just sell out and write something commercial that involves handcuffs and things being pushed up people’s bottoms – so that’s either erotic fiction or crime writing then.

It’s good to see that travel writing and biography have their own prizes and that writers of non-fiction get recognition, especially when the book recognised is not, for instance, written by a comedian taking a ‘sideways’ look at the people of Mongolia – the only time a writer should take a sideways look at anything is when they are stretched out on the pub carpet.

But perhaps prizes for fiction writing are, to a certain extent, unnecessary.  The measure of a success of any book is going to be the amount it sells.  The measure of the popularity of any book is going to be the numbers it sells week on week and the measure of the worth of any book is surely if people are reading it years from now. 

What prizes for fiction allow is a panel of judges to have the opportunity to advise us that the corking novel that we really enjoyed, enthralled us, kept us up nights and transported us more effectively than that economy class flight it made bearable, the same novel we recommended to all out friends and bought for family members was, in fact, too shit to even make this year’s longlist and what we should have been reading was the one about the depressed piano tuner with the difficult relationship with his mother and which does not have a happy ending at all and is very, very unlikely to ever be made into a film as the scene with the lobsters will never get past the censors.
How great then, to see Hilary Mantel win the Booker Prize this year, winning it for the second time, for the second book in a trilogy, which just like the first is a bestseller.  The sheer bloody balls it must have taken the judges to go with a populist choice that is already on the Ikea coffee tables of many people, that is popular with readers, and that in paperback form will be a pleasingly hefty beach read when on holiday and handy for twatting mosquitoes.

Prizes shouldn’t matter, but as long as we have them, who they are given to does.  The reality is that awards will always be with us, from the best in breed in the fat pigs class at the local agricultural show to the Golden Thingie award for best actor.

And really, who of us can truthfully say that offered a rosette and a ten quid book token, we’d turn it down?

Why do people photograph food?

 Why do people photograph food?  For any number of reasons.

Mainly because it’s free.  Before digital photography you had to first pay for film and then pay again to get it processed, so people took a lot less photographs.  It was not unusual to see for the first and last photographs on the same roll of 24 exposures to be of Christmas – and not the of same Christmas (although chances are that ‘The Sound of Music’ would be visible on telly in the background in both shots.  ‘The Sound of Music’ at Christmas, ‘The Great Escape’ at Easter, those are the correct films for the major Christian festivals in the calendar).

In addition to cost, getting your film developed meant others saw your photographs (before the invention of digital photography the only way a 17 year old would see a picture of your drunk girlfriend naked was if he worked in Boots), and nobody wanted to be known as the Guy Who Takes Pictures of Chips.

With the advent of digital photography, we are free to take pictures of food, then e mail them to our friends to torture them by pointing out that they are not about to tuck into a huge portion of egg and chips.  Yum!  Or the weapons-grade variation, taking a picture of a mid-morning pint when on holiday and e mailing or texting it to a friend at around the time when you know they are at their most frazzled.

To a certain extent, the growing trend of photographing food has been driven by the illustrations in the growing pile of celebrity chef cookery books that continually clutter our kitchens.  Food porn is not, as you might rationally suspect, something to do with cucumbers or a bloke holding up a melon without using his hands, but a term used to describe luscious pictures of food intended to make the food look delicious, like the photographs in fast food joints convincing you that what’s in the cardboard container you have just been handed is luscious and plump and full of flavour, rather than simultaneously limp yet full of flavourings.

There’s something of an OCD aspect to all this too.  I can quite understand the pleasure one can take in, for instance, taking a picture of the occasional tasty looking dish or, even better, a surprising looking offering on a plate or, jackpot! a rudely shaped scoop of mash, and then e mailing it to your mate to compound the monotony of their day, but I can also imagine that there are people that delight in documenting everything that goes in their mouth. 

Knowing something of human nature from the internet, I strongly suspect that there are probably people who equally delight in documenting the other end of the process.  The next time you get all self conscious when you hear the distinctive click of a camera shutter in the next stall over in a public lavvie, just remember it may not be you who has just become an addition to some pervert’s album.  But it probably is.  In either case, screaming is perfectly acceptable.

The next step is blogging about your food and while there are probably a gazillion blogs where foodies exalt excellent cooking while pretending to be restaurant critics in the same way that kids wrap their sheds in tin foil and pretend to be astronauts, the most entertaining ones focus on the rougher end of the culinary experience, such as the ‘traction man’ blog that highlighted the problems with hospital food (starting with it being the last thing anyone feeling under the weather would want to be confronted with) or the excellent ‘no second helpings’.  Both blogs took pot shots at the establishment and attracted the attention of the national press in the way that some twat who wrings 1,000 words out of couscous never will.  I hope.

Food is life and people are recording more of their lives than ever, even the intimate – eating is putting something in your mouth – experiences.  On balance then, I’d rather see a recording of a pie than a sex tape, especially if it’s made by the sort of people who like pies.