I seem to be living through very strange times here. The Brexit referendum vote seems to have unleashed all sorts of crazy things. The latest is the shocking announcement by Boris Johnson that he would not be seeking to become Prime Minister. On the other hand, when I was watching the England vs Iceland footy game, the English fans told me that they could never be confident, even against a little country like Iceland, because England has a history of losing such games. Similarly, history has taught that the frontrunners for the Conservative leadership never win. So maybe the Boris thing should not be a surprise.

“Et tu Michael? Then die Boris!”: Michael Gove used to be known as Cameron’s Brain. He is smart guy and was the equivalent of Cameron’s Attorney General and one of the leaders of the Leave campaign. Until today, it was assumed that he would become Boris’ Brain, as he had announced his support for Boris and was seen as his campaign manager. Then yesterday, an e-mail from his wife (a Daily Mirror correspondent) was leaked by Sky News (all owned by Murdoch). She advised him to get solid commitments from Boris before supporting him and said that Boris had no credibility with Murdoch or anyone else without Gove. Then, first thing this morning, Gove announced that he was withdrawing his support for Boris and was going to run himself (thereby stabbing Boris in the back before Boris could do it to him?), saying that Boris “was not up to the challenge”. Pretty cold, huh? Boris counted votes and concluded that he was dead and announced that he would no longer run. The weird thing was that Boris gave what sounded like his speech announcing his candidacy, only changing the punchline at the very end.

So Now What for the Conservatives?: There are five candidates. Two must be chosen by the other Conservative MPs and the two in the lead are probably Theresa May (who was a lukewarm Remain supporter) and Michael Gove. Especially compared to Boris, these two are so lacking in charisma that they make Cameron (who had all the charisma of a ham sandwich) look like Michael Jackson. But who knows what will happen next.We do know that eventually two candidates will be chosen and there will be a vote among the Conservative members, who are mostly old, mostly male and who total only 130-150,000. It is absurd that the next Prime Minister would be selected by such a group, so one would think that a snap election has to happen sometime this year or early next year. But, again, the way things are going, it is hard to make any sort of prediction.

Meantime, in the Labour Party: Jeremy Corbyn seems to believe that he has the support of the rank and file of the party, a large number of whom his supporters signed up last year. He may be right, although he has been so ineffective (if well-meaning) that one wonders if even the true believers on the left are losing faith. Corbyn does not seem to be inclined to leave, even though he has pathetically little support from his Parliamentary colleagues and he can barely form a Shadow Cabinet. He and his supporters take the position that the recent vote of no confidence was illegal, although it was so overwhelming that it is hard to ignore. Since Corbyn won’t take the hint, someone is going to have to challenge him formally. If it gets down to a vote, there will probably be a big influx of new voters, adding to the roughly 400,000 members currently on the books. If Corbyn does not resign, there is a very real chance that the Labour Party will split in two and other parties will pick up the pieces. It is really hard to see how this all doesn’t end up as a disaster for Labor in the next election.

In Question Time yesterday, Cameron said something like “I know that it is in my Party’s interest that you remain as leader, but, my God man, it’s time for you to go”. I doubt that Corbyn will take such advice from someone he hates.

Quite a mess!

The Land of Perpetual Clouds:  I know it is incredibly boring to write about the weather, but I do have to say that the absence of any real seasons, which isn’t so bad in the winter, is kind of depressing in what purports to be summer. It is hard to think of a day in which the temperatures have passed 70℉ and clouds and occasional rain dominate. Bill Bryson, upon moving back to the UK, was asked what he would miss about America and he answered “Weather”. Now I get it.

My Favorite Poster from the Brexit Campaign: This one was around the corner from our flat. I never saw it in any other places, although I understand it was not a one-off. Perhaps if there had been more, there would have been a different result. (Just kidding.)

Brexit Reactions: If you care about this issue, you can read about it endlessly in the NY Times (or the Guardian’s web site). There are a few things that are striking:

• There was a palpable feeling of shock, anger and grief in London on Friday and continuing through the weekend. The service at New Unity on Sunday had a funereal feel to it. The young members of the congregation were particularly upset.
• The results have also led to all kinds of ugly, racist incidents. One has to assume that the tone of the campaign and the gloating by the utterly repellant Nigel Farrage  (head of the far right UKIP Party) has energized and validated the lunatic fringe, who now seem to feel that it open season on Poles and anyone of color.
• As you may have heard, there is no one in charge of the government any more. Cameron has essentially resigned and is in caretaker mode until the Tories can pick a new Prime Minister. And that looks like it will be very divisive.
• At the same time, the Labour Party is imploding, as Corbyn has just lost a no confidence vote among the Parliamentary MPs by a spectacularly lopsided 172-40 vote. He probably has sufficient support with the rank and file members that he can and will fight this, further weakening Labour regardless of who wins. I can’t see any good way out of this mess for the Labour Party. The left wing of the party, vaguely led by Corbyn, is ready for a fight against the centrists in Parliament, who they think have sold out Labour’s principles. You should read the Facebook posts I’ve been getting from left-wing friends in the New Unity congregation. It would be nice if there were some alternative leader who inspired confidence, but no one on the left will challenge Corbyn and too many of the other candidates are either nobodies or MPs tainted by being Blairites. (There may even be a fight about whether Corbyn can even run, which will cause further bloodletting.) There is likely to be an election called in the next six to twelve months and it is not impossible to imagine the Labour Party being crushed so badly that its future existence is in doubt, which is weird since the Conservative Party is also in utter turmoil and is extremely unpopular.
• The fact that the Leave side, led by Johnson and Gove, have been exposed as having no real plan about what to do if they actually won just makes matters worse for the Conservatives. There seems to be a real disgust with Boris Johnson as the fact that he is backtracking on pretty much every argument he made in favor of Brexit just confirms that he was acting as the worst sort of political opportunist. There is an Anyone But Boris faction in the Tories, but if he becomes one of the two candidates for leadership (probably against Theresa May), you would have to bet on him winning. Of course, whoever wins faces an impossible task and then another election.
• It is just such an awful mess, with no grown ups in charge and no likelihood that Britain can extricate itself from the hurricane that the referendum has unleashed. It may all be going in slow motion, but is like a lava flow. It keeps moving day by day and cannot be stopped.

New Unity Service: On Sunday, I helped organize the service at the New Unity congregation. I had originally wanted to do a sort of art communion combining a celebration of the summer solstice with the end of a quarter in which the services were about healing and recovery. I went through the prior services and took out excerpts to create a 1015 minute reading that reviewed twelve services. The plan was to give each person a piece of colored paper (summer colors) on which they would be asked to write or draw something about the past quarter and the them of healing and recovery. We would then all bring our paper to front and create a collage on big piece of foam board. (The Art and Soul covenant group did something similar in Montclair, but didn’t include the writing by the congregants.) Then the Brexit vote happened and Andy and I agreed that this shock had to be acknowledged. Fortunately, the healing and recovery theme fit in all too well for the Brexit disaster and the service went quite well. I forgot to take a picture of the group collage, but I’ll do it eventually and send it out.

England Loses to Iceland: On Monday night, England played Iceland in the quarterfinals of the European Cup and were outplayed by a country  the size of a London suburb and lost 2-1. The British consider themselves to be a serious power in soccer (football here) and this loss came as a huge shock. But it probably shouldn’t have been. England has only won a handful of important international games over the last thirty or more years and has been repeatedly humiliated or at least knocked out of World Cups and similar competitions at early stages. They do have the richest Football League, but that doesn’t mean that the British players are the world’s best. They seemed to completely lose their composure when they fell behind Iceland, who were far more disciplined. Perhaps their history of failure was weighing on them. Of course, it seemed to me that England could not win a European Cup match just days after voting to leave Europe. Maybe this one can be blamed on bad national karma. In any event, losing to Iceland was another disorienting blow here.

I’ve been struggling with two paintings that have been in progress for seemingly months. Of course, that is partly because I’ve been traveling a lot and having lots of company and then I fell behind on writing for the same reasons. Over the past week or so I’ve caught up a bit on the writing part, although I have to say that the travelogue sort of posts are a different kind of prose. They are more focused and require me to spend time with the multimedia elements. In a lot of ways, I think I like the ones that are more random.

The painting that has been sitting around the flat the longest is one that started out as a photo of me and Jerry Fried standing in front of nearby scenic alleyway. I got the two figures done fairly quickly, although I’ve been fiddling away with them ever since and then had to come up with a background that looked a little like the alleyway without being so busy that it distracted from the main subject. I eventually finished a background, but there wasn’t enough going on, so I added some wall signs and sandwich board, which helped some. But it still wasn’t right. Here is where I was on it:

You may recall that I was complaining a couple of blog posts back that this painting wasn’t either realistic or impressionistic and was really more cartoonish than anything else. I decided to go with that idea and bought permanent ink black pens and drew on top of the painting. The result is below. I think it is an improvement. I’m still thinking about adding a figure in the middle distance, but I’m going to leave it for now.

“Wild”: On Brexit Referendum Night, we were off to see “Wild” at Hampstead Theatre with Kathy and Jim. It is new play by Mike Bartlett that is inspired by (but not exactly about) the Snowden leak of documents. It opens with a Snowden-like figure sitting in a Russian hotel room a few days after the leak, his life utterly turned upside down. He is visited by a woman (played by a mesmerizing Caoilfhionn Dunne–and that’s not a typo) who seems to be a representative from a group that will help him. But is she? Does he want to be their spokesman? Who can he trust? She leaves and a man visits, saying he is the representative and she isn’t. Who is lying? Maybe both of them? Should Andrew (the Snowden guy) be worried for his safety? They seem to know everything about him. Does he have any privacy? Does anyone? The play goes on like this and sometimes got a bit talky and was not always completely coherent. At one point, the woman actually stabs her hand to prove herself to Andrew (which didn’t really make sense) and to get him to join them (whoever they are), but when she returns later with the man, there is no scar. It was all a fake. And then it turns out that not just the phone in the hotel room is a fake, the whole hotel room is a fake. This leads to an incredible bit of stagecraft as the man and woman spectacularly dismantle the room, which disappears piece by piece before out eyes, leaving a black room. The completely shaken Andrew then has to deal with his world literally turning over as the stage begins to rise up at one end and then keeps going and the entire box set turns on its side, leaving Andrew sitting on a chair (somehow) facing down at the man and the woman. The man leaves and the woman is trying to get him to come down and join their organization. She then pulls out a large pin and point it at herself. There is bright flash and explosion and she disappears, leaving pieces of paper fluttering to the ground as the play ends. Frankly, this whole ending was so amazing and such a mind-boggling scene of spectacular stagecraft that it almost didn’t matter that the play itself was slightly incoherent. It was really quite fun overall and Ms. Dunne, who had the best part and pulled it off very well, led a very good cast.

Scottish Power: No this isn’t about Scottish politics. It is just a story. When we first moved here, I discovered that we got our utilities from Scottish Power for some reason. I dutifully called to change the account our names and could barely understand the very nice Scottish lass with a thick brogue on the phone. A month later, I got a bill in the prior tenant’s name, so I called again. By this time I was better at understanding the local dialects and managed to get the account changed. A few months later, I got another bill and noticed that I was only being billed for electricity. So called and asked if I had a gas account. I was told that there seemed to be some problem and that they would look into and get back in touch with me. I not only never heard from the them again, they stopped sending me any bills. I finally got a letter last week telling me that I had to sign up for an account. I called back and gave them the number of my electric account and was told that they would call me back in an hour. They never called. So I called the next day and finally got someone who was able to navigate their billing system. He told me that I already had both accounts and that I had been switched to  digital billing (but it turned out that they had misspelled my e-mail address, so they never told me.) He advised me that there was some reason why my gas account, while set up, could not be activated. He said that they would work on it. (I doubt I will ever get billed.) A few days later, I finally got an e-mail asking me to pay my outstanding electric bill. I did and got an e-mail thanking me for the payment, but it was addressed to the prior tenant. I asked them to correct it, but it seems to be losing effort.

 

I have to admit that, deep down, I never thought this was going to happen. And I wasn’t alone. The bookies were giving odds on Remain (and they made a fortune apparently, as betting was reportedly heavy) and the markets were assuming that the status quo would win out. Late polls seemed to indicate that the Remain side was going to pull it out. So when we went to bed last night with the ballots being counted, it seemed like a close vote with the Remain side eking out a win was most likely. There was no exit polling and the media was so burned in the last election (which they and the polls got completely wrong), so there were no projections and the paper ballots are counted by hand. As a result we went to be knowing only that Gibraltar had voted overwhelmingly to stick with the EU (no surprise), but with the actual result up in the air and no result expected until early the next morning. We woke to the clock radio telling us that the Leave side had prevailed and that Cameron had announced his resignation. It is all pretty shocking. Here are some thoughts:

• It was always pretty clear that Cameron would not survive a loss on the referendum. It was surprising that he resigned so quickly. Even the Leave side wanted him to stay in place (at least in the short term), anticipating the exact turmoil that is taking place. But I don’t blame him.
• The scathing response of Nicolas Sturgeon, the leader of Scotland, makes it absolutely clear that there will be another vote to leave the UK. She says that Scotland is being taken out of the EU against its will. So you can say goodbye to the “United” Kingdom.
• This all will happen over time. The UK is still in the EU. Under Article 50 of the EU Agreement, the British government has to give notice to the EU that they are leaving, which would start the clock running and Britain would be out in two years. The actual notice probably won’t happen until a new PM is chosen by the Tories. Thus, the whole thing will unfold over time. The divorce negotiations will be very rocky.
• It is hard to believe that a recession in Britain is not inevitable. The only real question is how bad and how long.
• This all probably helps Judie’s law practice in the short run. Companies are going to need lawyers to figure out how the navigate this changing landscape. I imagine that the financial sector of London is just freaking out right now.
• It is possible that the big winner in this is going to be Ireland! Many companies are going to be looking to move some or all of their operations from London to an EU country and Ireland is the most obvious destination.
• Exactly what happens in Northern Ireland, which voted to Remain, is unclear. Are firm borders between Northern Ireland and Ireland inevitable? This would change the politics in both countries.
• Boris Johnson and Michael Gove tried to sound statesmanlike and reassuring. It seems most likely that either one of them or Theresa May will end up being the next Prime Minister. Boris was booed by crowds around his house this morning, but that doesn’t mean much. It seems to me that he has to be the front-runner.
• Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, comes out badly in all of this (as always). The Remain side needed vigorous support from Labour voters, which did not materialize. While this is probably because the traditional Labour coalition is breaking up, it is also true that Corbyn has never been a supporter of the EU and was a lukewarm supporter of the Remain side. You are hearing some people blaming him for this loss, which isn’t fair but is just another issue for the anti-Corbyn parts of the Labour Party. This may be the triggering event that leads to a challenge to Corbyn.
• It will be fascinating to see what happens to the EU. Reform? Collapse? Beginning of the end of the Euro?
• There was an element of anti-intellectualism, anti-immigration, anti-elite impetus behind all of this. The young, the college educated, the cities such as London all supported Remain by large margins. The Leave side won with support from the poorer countryside, older, white voters and the less well educated. It resembles the Trump coalition in a way.

Turmoil doesn’t really do this whole mess justice.

 

The Globe Theatre and “Taming of the Shrew”: Last night, we went to the Globe Theatre with Kathy and Jim and saw “Taming of the Shrew”. We had never been to the Globe before. It attempts to be a re-creation of the original theatre, although no one really know what that building looked like. It has three levels of benches (they will rent you cushions) surrounding a standing area which contains the stage. (In Elizabethan times, the poor would stand and the upper classes and nobility would sit on the stalls.) There is no roof over the standing area and a only part of the stage is covered, so you can get quite wet going to a play there. I took a picture before the play started, which you can see below. It gives you a good idea of the theatre layout. Unfortunately, it also illustrates that our view was slightly blocks by the pillar holding up the roof over the stage.

The production itself was OK. One of the things they appear to like to do at the Globe is intersperse music in the plays, which I am willing to guess is what they did originally. So there is a small band playing on a level above and behind the stage. This production was pretty broadly played most of the time. There were lots of sight gags and the actors would occasionally break the “fourth wall” and involve the audience, especially those standing along the front of the stage. Between that and the music, it gave the whole thing a feel of what Elizabethan theatre might have been like. I liked that part. Because of where we were sitting  and the fact that the actors are not miked, I missed some of the lines, but I know the play pretty well and really heard all of the important bits. It was enjoyable.

However, I had two complaints about the way it was directed. First, while much of the play was acted broadly and aiming for laughs, the scenes between Petruchio and Kate seemed to go beyond the simple misogyny of the play into a kind of brutality. It was more like Gitmo interrogation than Petruchio taming his shrewish wife. I just couldn’t get any underlying affection, so when Kate finally agrees that the moon is the sun, etc., it is more like she is a broken POW or a hostage suffering from the Stockholm syndrome than a woman having a human relationship. I know that the play is misogynistic and sexist, but this interpretation was really quite creepy.

The other thing that bothered me about the production was the director’s effort to tie “Taming of the Shrew” to the Easter Rebellion in Ireland (it is the hundredth anniversary) and the Irish’s abject failure to produce the promised reforms sought by the many women who fought in that Rebellion. It meant that the acts opened and ended with angry Irish ballads and the actors all had thick Irish brogues (making it all slightly harder to understand) and wore modernish Irish clothes, which was fine I suppose, although you wouldn’t have known that it had anything to do with the Easter Rebellion without reading the programme. I’m guessing that this Easter Rebellion reference influenced the way the Petruchio and Kate scenes were played. I guess the idea was to make the point that women were treated as property and that Petruchio treated Kate as he would a wild horse to be tamed. Its pretty simplistic and it robs the play of any real interpersonal relationship between the two of them, making the end of the play unsatisfying and vaguely depressing. I suppose portraying Petruchio as an awful, hyper-sexist, sadistic jerk might have worked if the rest of the play had been darker and the other men had at least a vaguely similar outlook. But since the rest of the cast was playing it for humor and a more normal interpretation, Petruchio comes off as as psychopath. Oddly, I think this may have been the director’s intent.

The acting was good, of course, and you can’t blame them for the unsettling interpretation of the central relationship. I understand that it is tempting to add a twist to the interpretation of Shakespeare since the plays have been done so often. But sometimes, the director gets in the way of the play itself.

The Vote Approaches: Speaking of unsatisfying and depressing, the campaign leading to vote on the Brexit referendum is winding down and vote will be on Thursday. The two sides took some time off last week after the truly tragic murder of MP Jo Cox, a woman who had spent her entire life trying to help the poor and oppressed, first as an OXFAM worker and later as a charismatic MP. It seems pretty clear to me that ugly, coded racist, and anti-immigrant rhetoric of some of the particularly strident and awful Leave proponents (a minority I grant you), encouraged the far right killer to feel that his act was justified, although few are willing to come out and say it. It probably won’t impact the final outcome, although one might argue that it broke the seeming momentum that the Leave side seemed to have ten days ago and could disgust enough people to make a difference it what will likely be a close vote. It is really a question of turnout. In particular, if young voters, who are said to overwhelmingly support Remain, show up at the polls, that side would easily. But they won’t, so it up in the air. It will be interesting to see the reaction of the losing side.

We got back from France and the World War I battlefields and the very next morning we were on the express train to Edinburgh with Chris and Nancy. It is certainly a nice way to get there. A little over four hours from Kings Cross to the center of Edinburgh, with no need to deal with all of the airport stuff. For some reason the first class coach was only slightly more expensive than coach on the way back, so we got to experience that, although the regular coach was really fine. I find that there is less to say about this trip than some others, partly because so much of the trip was enjoying the stunning vistas and I spent less time thinking about history and architecture.

Edinburgh: It really is a lovely city, with most of the buildings a sort of honey-colored sandstone. It has largely escaped being destroyed for centuries (unlike London or even Bath) and much of it is very old and charming. I came to realize as we toured that my knowledge of Scottish history is pretty rudimentary and that the city is, in many ways, a celebration of Scottish history. Now, as it turns out, most of the interesting events in that history occurred before 1600, with endless bloody conflicts with the English (and before them the Vikings and Romans). The Scots were a pretty tough and violent group, much tougher to subjugate than the Welsh or Irish. I wonder if that has something to do with the wild landscape in much of Scotland. The Romans got so sick of dealing with them that they just built Hadrian’s Wall. The English and Scots periodically butchered each other for centuries (often in disgusting ways), but ultimately the Scottish king James I succeeded Elizabeth I and the violent part of their history came to an end. The significant history that followed was mainly literary (Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, R. K. Rowling, etc.)

We really only had a about a day and a half in Edinburgh and we were pretty tired from all the travel in France (and Judie had to get some work done), so we really didn’t see as much of the city as we wanted. We did eat at some nice restaurants. There seems to be a serious food scene there and it isn’t all haggis (which I rather like). We did make it up to the castle at the top of the big, volcanic hill at the end of the Royal Mile (the topographic reason why Edinburgh is where it is). It has spectacular views and all kinds of anecdotes about its history (although after three days of Major Tim, I was a bit sick of hearing about battles and slaughter) and guards that periodically change (I’ve seen an awful lot of that over the past several months).  While Judie was working, I was able to wander about and go the the National Museum. We are thinking of going back in August for the Fringe festival. Some photos follow:

          

Isle of Skye: I was expecting it to be beautiful, but I really had no idea how spectacular it would be. What was especially surprising was how drop-dead gorgeous the drive was. We rented our car in downtown Edinburgh and drove up through the highlands in western Scotland. Glen Coe is probably the best known of the many lovely areas we went through, but each one was jaw-dropping. Some pictures follow, but they really don’t do justice to the drive:

             

Skye itself was lovely. Out hotel was in the middle of a group of volcanically formed mountains (any peak over 3000 feet is called a “munro” and there are a big number of them in Skye). We took some long hikes, although we didn’t do much climbing. We went once along a lovely long inlet that led out towards the sea from our hotel and which was surrounded by green peaks and once out to Talisker Bay. We went on a tour of the Talisker Distillery and the best thing about it were their self-designed distilling vats, which looked like something out of “Willie Wonka”, bulbous shapes with various pipes going in and out and twisting around, all painted brightly. Rich Lustig and Chris and I played golf on Skye’s small golf course, which was at an impossibly lovely setting. Unfortunately, it began raining just as we started and either poured or drizzled for all nine holes. We persevered, getting utterly soaked. By the time we finished nine, even the Scots were giving up and coming in. We ate lunch at a famous restaurant (absolutely in the middle of nowhere–you had to drive miles on one lane roads to get there) called the Three Chimneys one afternoon and went to the impossibly adorable town of Portree one evening for dinner. Of course, evening is a relative term in Scotland in June, since it doesn’t actually get dark until about 11:00.

We drank a fair amount of scotch whiskey, especially at our hotel’s pub, which had hundred of whiskeys available. I began to get a feeling about the different styles and the terroir that leads to the different flavor profiles. It was a pretty lively place, which had a band and dancing one night as well. (And, weirdly, the young woman who managed the place was from New Jersey.) While sitting and drinking at the bar one evening, we met two older gents from the Midlands, who were on their annual climbing trip to Skye. Each time they try to do the Cuillin traverse, a hike that takes you up and down the spine of that range and over eleven munros. They had quit for the day because the rain (that hit our golf) made it impossible to see more than five feet up there. The had tried that traverse four or five other times and only finished once (taking three or four days, not including going up to stash supplies at various spots). The other times had been stopped by weather that made it too dangerous and once when one of them slipped and was tumbling head over heels toward a cliff when he was saved when he hit a bog. They were entertaining, but, as far I was concerned, crazy. Some Skye pictures follow, but you really had to be there.

                 

Royal Ascot: On Friday, we went to Royal Ascot with Judie’s sister Kathy and her husband Jim. It is an expensive day out for what is basically just a day of horse racing. There are two things that makes it special. First, the Queen comes to all five days of Royal Ascot and each  of the days open with her being brought down the track in a carriage to the Royal Pavilion. (See the picture below of her passing by while Judie and Kathy are taking pictures.) And second, everyone who goes gets incredibly dressed up, so the real entertainment is looking at the other people there. Photos of us follow:

        

A few more notes about the experience. To get there, you need to either drive or take the train from Waterloo (about and hour, as it it past Heathrow.) I felt a bit silly on the Tube wearing my fancy duds and top hat, but when we popped up into Waterloo, there were lots of people similarly overdressed all streaming toward a platform. We barely got seats on the train, which was a good thing because at each of the six or seven stops along the route more and more people got on, until the cars were more crowed than rush hour Underground coaches (excepts that all of the sardines were very well dressed). When we finally got there, it took nearly 10 minutes just to get off the platform. For £78 a person, we had the privilege of being in the Queen Anne Pavilion, which was right along the homestretch. (The British tracks run in the opposite direction of US tracks.) To be there, we needed to adhere to the dress code. Hats for women, suits and ties for men, etc. But we didn’t get anything else with our ticket, not even a seat. Of course for hundreds of pounds more, we could have sat in special boxes or enclosures and had champagne and strawberries, etc. The bars were easier to find than the food and the patrons certainly drank it up. Pitchers of Pimm’s Cup, bottles of sparkling wine, lots of beer, none of it cheap. It was quite the booze-up. If I ever go again (and I have to say that I’m not inclined to do so), I think I’d go completely over the top and opt for one of the expensive enclosures.

Ultimately, of course, it is just a horse race and you go there to bet on the ponies. When betting, you still have a choice between the parimutuel windows and the bookies on the track, who now have electronic odds boards, rather than the traditional chalk boards. I preferred the bookies, since it made the whole experience feel more like being in a Dick Francis novel. We won ￡200 on the second race and then proceeded to lose most of it, finishing slightly in the black. Since I had budgeted losing a couple hundred pounds, I felt like we came out way ahead. We skipped the last race in favor of beating the crush on the return trains.

All in all, it was fun and one of those really British experiences. It is hard to imagine any sort of event in America where you would see hundreds of men in morning suits and silk top hats and tens of thousands of women in fancy dresses and either hats or fascinators and not a single person wearing jeans or a tee shirt. It is sort of vestige of the class system, but it allows the hoi polloi to join in if they are willing to pony up for a ticket and get dressed up. This slight democratization of the event makes it less horrifying. Of course, the unwashed masses (including us) can’t go in the Royal Pavilion,  which is limited to those who are recommended somehow. A few more photos follow:

            

“Sunset at the Villa Thalia”: On Thursday night, we went to the National Theatre with Chris and Nancy and Kathy and Jim to see “Sunset at the Villa Thalia”. It is set on a Greek island in 1967 and then in 1976 for the second act. It is about a young British couple (an aspiring playwright and his actress wife), who are visited by an American couple. The American husband, Harvey, played superbly by Ben Miles (who NYC theatre fans may have seen as Cromwell in “Wolf Hall”) is force of nature, who you soon suspect is a CIA operative. He charms and bullies and cajoles everyone around him and ultimately convinces the young couple to buy the villa from the Greek family who are emigrating to Australia, really capitalizing somewhat on their desperation. On the one hand, this was a play about the relationships between these couples. But the characters, except for Harvey are not sufficiently developed for there to be real dramatic tension or compelling theatre. Elizabeth McGovern has moments as Harvey’s wife, but she is never allowed to be much but brainless and ditzy, which seems like a bit of a waste of her talents. Pippa Nixon has a few moments as the young actress/wife, but her character is mostly just strident and lacks much nuance. And poor Sam Crane, as the young playwright, has little to do as his character is an ineffectual cipher. The author tries to add some spice to all of this by setting it at the time of the coup in Greece and then returning in the second act with references to the overthrow of Allende. Harvey gets to make speeches about the importance of democracy and maintaining the world order and that sort of hot air (which no CIA operative would ever have said) and, while Miles is so great that he almost makes the speeches convincing, the key word in that last clause is “almost”. Pippa Nixon has a big speech attacking American foreign policy of the period, but it is all pretty obvious. The whole political subplot was both simplistic as political commentary and clumsily tied to the rest of the plot. By the end of the play, you were left wondering, “What was the point of all of that”. However, despite the weaknesses of the script, it was a pretty entertaining night of theatre, simply because Ben Miles and the rest of the cast squeezed whatever there was to get out of that script and the set and lighting were lovely.

Brexit: If you care anything about this issue, you have recently had the opportunity to read countless articles about it in the NY Times and probably other sources. (It would seem to be a great vehicle for John Oliver, but he hasn’t touched it as far as I can tell.) It is certainly the second most important vote that will occur in 2016. Right now, it is beginning to look like the “Leave” group will win, which would certainly be a short-term economic disaster for Britain and bad news generally for the world. It is all a result of a toxic blend of anti-immigrant racism, jingoistic nationalism and a conservative wish to return to days that have long since passed. (Sound a little like Trump?) In addition to causing a recession and a permanent shrinking of the economy here, Brexit could lead to the break-up of the United Kingdom, God only knows what in Europe and Ireland and will lead to the demise of David Cameron. It will set the stage for the vicious far-right wing of the Conservative Party to take control, with their agenda of finally eviscerating unions, privatizing and/or eliminating the Nation Health Service, lowering taxes on the rich,  dispensing with regulations, etc. It could be a very ugly period coming up and I think getting back to the US next Spring will look pretty good, assuming the American electorate doesn’t do the unthinkable.

 

Our trip to France was filled with all sorts of interesting events and places where we learned a great deal about what happened a hundred years ago. Before I go through them, though, I have say that our overall feeling was one of sadness, mixed with a certain bewilderment at the totality of what we were seeing and hearing. The war itself was unspeakably awful. The trench warfare, the endless bombing, the sides separated by less than 100 yards at many points, forested areas reduced to stubby and muddy rubble, the ever-present danger of poison gas attacks, and countless men dying in miserable conditions. And what for? So the Kaiser could have an empire to match the English and French? Because the British seemed incapable of going more that 20 years without getting  into a war? Just because these nations and monarchs had been fighting in Europe for untold centuries and just did it out of habit? Just a mind boggling waste of human life.

Nobody was there: One of the eerie thing about touring around this area was how empty it was. There were very rarely other people at any of the battle sites or monuments, except for an occasional American at a cemetery. And much of the area is farm land, so, other than a random guy on a tractor there was no sign of life between the towns. But what was really weird was that the towns themselves were empty as we drove through them and most of the houses were shuttered. Maybe they all go to work in the bigger towns like Verdun? But we also didn’t see any kids. It gave it all a surreal quality.

Trenches, bomb craters and other remains of war: Early on the first day of touring (as opposed to traveling), we stopped along the side of a road through the wood that had once been a Roman road. When I stepped a few feet off the road into the woods, I immediately saw a large hole and then about ten or twenty feet to my right was another hole. And crisscrossing area were linear cuts into the earth. These were old trenches that had been built along the road and artillery craters caused when the trench system along the road had been systematically bombed. The craters and trenches had been filled in over the years by leaves and stuff, but they were still clearly visible. The incredible thing was that they were just everywhere you looked that wasn’t being farmed for miles and miles. The landscape was still seriously scarred, even after over a century. But these weren’t the biggest scars. Those were enormous craters, often twenty or more feet deep even today and up to hundred feet or more in diameter, caused by mines. Both sides had engineers who would dig underground tunnels out to a certain point, fill the end with explosives, backfill and then set it off. This mining could be offensive, since it would destroy whatever was above it, but it was also defensive, as it would create a deep crater that would stop tanks and that no soldier in his right mind would venture into. These were everywhere too. The first place we saw a lot of them was at a bluff overlooking the Saint Mihiel Salient, a hell hole similar to the one I describe below. This is where Great Uncle Arthur’s regiment had left for the Battle of Saint Mihiel. We also saw the remains of concrete bunkers and fortified gun emplacements.

      

Butte de Vauquois: This was an incredibly powerful example of the lunacy of the War. Vauquois had been a little town up on a woodsy hill, overlooking the valley leading to Verdun. The French and Germans fought over it for four years. The town was completely destroyed, all the vegetation was blown to bits and the two sides were dug in on opposite sides of the top of the butte, separated by around 30-40 yards. In between them were a series of extremely deep, undoubtedly muddy craters caused by huge mine explosions, which must have made any direct assault all but impossible. But, just in case, there was barbed wire and those iron spike things, which are sill rusting away there. The trenches and craters are also still there, as are the communication trenches snaking down the hill and many smaller craters caused by artillery attacks. You can stand there now, surrounded by grass and trees and flowers and can admire the view down the valley and the small monument. But it doesn’t take that much imagination to realize that you are standing in a place that was once hell on earth.

   

Machine guns and other weaponry: I think I had always imagined World War I as soldiers in trenches firing at each other across a no-man’s land in a sort of fighting that was essentially close quartered. It turns out that, while that was true, weapon technology had changed the style of war in the Twentieth Century. Large artillery could fire accurately over ten miles and the smaller artillery had ranges of many miles. What was even more surprising to me was the range of the fixed machine guns, which was well over a mile. If you were charging across a field, you wouldn’t even hear the shots before the bullets reached you. The machine games were positioned and aimed so that they would fire obliquely against an advancing line, trying to hit down the line, rather than spraying fire by moving the gun. As a result, when troops were advancing across open terrain, they would avoid staying in a line and would be separated by as much ass 30 yards, so that incoming artillery could not take out groups of men. You had to imagine those poor soldiers going through an open field, probably slogging through mud and over barbed wire, sometimes up and down steep hills and getting mowed down by machine guns and artillery so far off that they couldn’t possibly see them. And the soldiers they were trying to actually engage might be ahead in the tree line, in trenches or other reinforced places, firing at them as well, and possible also out of sight.

Uncle Arthur: I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical about going on a trip that was focused on Nancy’s Great Uncle’s death. It seemed like we would be spending too much time on a trivial moment in a larger story. But it turned out that the focus personalized the tour in a way and gave it a larger meaning. Rather than simply going from monument to cemetery to the next battle site or line of trenches (which we did plenty of), we were either following his trail or at least relating what we were seeing to what he must have experienced. His regiment had been in support at the beginning of the Meuse-Argonne campaign, but they eventually switched and relieved the unit in front of them. Major Tim determined from the maps and other research that he had been fighting in a forest near Brieulles-sur-Meuse and Dannevoux when he was killed. In the photo below, you can see Major Tim and Nancy, next to those exact woods and certainly no more than a quarter mile from where he died.

Cemeteries: This whole area is dotted with cemeteries. There are a huge number of French cemeteries, which tend to be smaller. (The one below is bigger than most.) Their crosses are often made of concrete, which degrades and, perhaps because there are so many little cemeteries to maintain, they are sometimes slightly overgrown with broken crosses (which Major Tim, of course, attributed to French character flaws). Most of the French cemeteries had Muslim tombstones, which were in a different shape. In some, these were put in a separate area and set facing Mecca (see below), while others were just mixed in and facing like all of the others.

There were also a surprising number of German cemeteries. The regular German soldiers were not sent home for burial and I was mildly surprised that the French didn’t get rid of them. These cemeteries would often have as many as four soldiers to a cross. The crosses were thinner and made of metal and were very attractive. I was interested to see stars of David on many of the crosses, representing, of course, German Jews who had died. Major Tim told us that Hitler had issued an order that prohibited his German troops fro desecrating those Jewish burial sites, on the grounds that they had died for the Fatherland.

The American cemeteries were very different, in that they are very large and immaculately maintained. American families had a choice between bringing their dead home for burial or leaving them to be interred with their comrades in arms. The two that we visited, one for Saint Mihiel, containing nearly 5000 dead and the one for Meuse-Argonne, which contained over 14,000, were gorgeous, with grass that would make a golf course jealous and beautiful rows of trees and flower beds. Nancy was able to visit the graves of four other Maine farmboys who had been in Great Uncle Arthur’s regiment, although he had been sent home for burial.

There is something about the geometry of all of those crosses, especially all of the white marble crosses in the large American cemeteries that was incredibly powerful. The patters and the lines of sight keep changing as you walk through, which somehow reinforces the fact of the number of dead that are present. Some pictures follow, but don’t really capture this.

  

Flags: While we were at the American cemetery for Saint Mihiel, we were looking at the views when Major Tim said “Hey. That looks my friend Jeff.” Jeff was someone who he knew as the superintendent of a different cemetery. He had been transferred and was now in change of this one. He greeted us, showed us around, answered our questions and showed us where they are systematically replacing the old headstones. He took us to his office, where he gave Nancy advice on her searching and told us anecdotes. As that was ending, he said “It’s almost five o’clock. Would you like to help me take down the flags?” The cemetery had two big poles with large flags and we got to take them down. And then he directed us on how to properly fold a flag, so that you end up with a perfect triangle. Doing that, surrounded by thousands of headstones, was a powerful moment.

    

 

This is a bit of a catch-up post, most of which was composed before we left on our various trips over the past ten days.

The Deep Blue Sea: We went with Chris and Nancy to the National Theater to see “The Deep Blue Sea”, a play by Terrence Rattigan first performed in 1952. (It was later a film, starring Vivian Leigh in 1955.) It is a story of a woman who has left a loveless marriage and run away with a handsome pilot who can’t seem to get over the War. But it turns out that he is really incapable of loving her and the attempted suicide ends up terminating their doomed relationship. The play begins with her attempted suicide and doesn’t get much happier from there. Helen McCrory plays the central role of Hester with the usual good supporting cast. (She is one of those actors who is more famous in British theater, although she did play Mrs. Malfoy in the “Harry Potter” movies.) Her dissolute love interest is played by Tom Burke, whom we saw playing a strikingly similar role in the much more modern “Reasons to be Happy” at the Hampstead. There are some melodramatic moments, but over all the play is so well constructed that it maintains your attention, even if it is a bit dated in some respects. The central psychological drama manages to ring true today, possibly because Hester was an atypical and modern woman for 1950s Britain. The push and pull of her relationship with her ex-husband and lover are key to developing her character, but it is her scenes with the upstairs doctor that are most compelling. The dramatic tension comes from your doubts as to whether she will end up killing herself or pull herself together and get on with the rest of her life. The play does not clearly resolve this question in the dialog, but a the end Hester is left alone and is staring at her lover’s clothing as she is packing it up to send to him and you think, “Uh oh. This is it.” But she had just put an egg on the stove to fry and she is startled out of her reverie and goes and finishes cooking the egg and then sits down to eat her egg sandwich as the play ends. This little bit of stage business gave the feeling that the urge to end it all had past and that she was going to move on with some sort of life. I wonder if it was in the original stage direction?

Painting slow-down: I haven’t been able to get to my paintings much lately, although I have two in process which I can’t seem to finish. One is a study of Jerry Fried and me standing at the end of a nearby alley. Right now it is in a sort of nether world between being realistic and impressionistic. I’m beginning to think it is more cartoonish than anything else, so I may go that way. As for the second one, I’d decided to do something without some much little detail and started painting two frogs sitting on lily pads. I discovered that I am incapable of drawing a decent looking frog, so after several attempts, I just painted the damn things over and now have a perfectly pleasant, if slightly boring, painting of some lily pads. I’m not sure where to go with that one….

We are finally back from a fairly exhausting trip with our old friends, Chris and Nancy, that saw us go to World War I battlefields around Verdun in France and then up to Edinburgh and the Isle of Skye. Lots of driving and riding in cars (something we haven’t done much in many months), plus trains and the ferry across the Channel (so we got to see the White Cliffs of Dover, which always remind me of the movie “Help!”).

The World War I trip was one that we would never have planned, but Nancy has been researching her family history and wanted to go to where her Great Uncle Arthur had been killed. She arranged the whole thing, including our own tour guide, so all Judie and I had to do was get out our credit cards and tag along. I was worried it might be a bit tedious, but it turned out to be both fascinating and fun, thanks in large part to our guide, Major Tim Pritchard-Barrett.

Major Tim: Our guide was a former major in the Welsh Guards (who fought in the Falklands War). He was from an upper crust family in Northern England and went to private schools and Sandhurst (the UK equivalent of West Point). (One twist for him is that he also had roots in South Carolina.) He had that patrician sort of snobby English accent and freely expressed his prejudices against immigrants, gypsies and, especially, the French (lazy sods). So on the one hand he was a bit of a jerk, but at the same time he was interesting and had one of those dry, British senses of humor. Most important, he had encyclopedic knowledge about World War I and military history and really knew the ground we were covering. He had done research specifically for Nancy and was able to pinpoint, with amazing precision, where her Great Uncle Arthur had marched and fought and where he had died when the hand grenade he was carrying was hit by a shot and exploded. While he was a bit of a mixed bag personally (especially since we spent so much time in a car with him), as a guide he could not have been better. Photos below. Notice him studying up for the day.

   

Where We Were and Some Historical Context: Most World War I tours, especially the British ones, concentrate in the Somme area, near Flanders, where the British French and German armies slaughtered each other for four years for no particularly good reason. The American forces never got up to that part of the War and, instead ended up near Verdun, supporting the French troops. This was partly because General “Black Jack” Pershing, who led the American Army, rejected the French idea that American troops be slotted into the lines wherever needed in a piecemeal fashion. Pershing insisted that the Americans be together in one fighting force. So they ended up West, around Verdun. That area is one of those places where battles had been taking place for centuries. It is near Waterloo and other Napoleonic battles, was the center of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 (in which the Germans had taken back most of Alsace and Lorraine, leaving France only the area around Verdun) and later World War II. I’d guess that people like Charlemagne marched through there and neolithic cave men probably smashed each other with bones there. The French were absolutely determined to keep Verdun and the Germans were determined to take it, so there had been years of awful fighting in the area by the time the Americans showed up with their impossibly green troops. (Major Tim told us that shortly after the Americans arrived at the lines, the Germans did a quick “Welcome to France” raid in which they killed a bunch of soldiers and withdrew taking over 100 prisoners.) But, of course, more and more American soldiers kept arriving and by the time of the Armistice, Pershing had two full armies and plans to march well into Germany. America may have formally joined the war in 1917, but by the time the Americans were really ready to fight, it was the summer of 1918 and there were only two campaigns in which they fought:

The Saint Mihiel Salient: Saint Mihiel is a town south of Verdun on the Meuse River and on the train line which was supposed to supply the French in Verdun. The Germans managed to capture it early in the War and had never lost it. Their successful offensive had created a kind of triangle sticking into French territory along the battle front, which for some reason is called a salient. It is mostly flat fields along the middle of the salient with wooded hills along the sides. In a battle that went from the 12th to 15th of September, the American and French forces attacked from the sides of the triangle, leaving Saint Mihiel itself alone, until they met in the middle, effectively cutting of the German troops in the town and forcing their surrender.

Meuse-Argonne Campaign: This is the more difficult and well-known American war effort. It is where Sgt. York became famous, where the “Lost Battalion” fought and where Great Uncle Arthur died. The American forces attacked to the North over a terrain of forested hills and ravines, separated by open fields. The Americans, did great the first two days, as the Germans dropped back to heavily fortified lines and then the offensive bogged down and the fighting got very ugly. At one point, there was some pressure to replace Pershing, according to Major Tim, but that never really got anywhere.

Helping us understand all of this were some incredible maps of the American battles, created after the war by Major Dwight D. Eisenhower for book he wrote analyzing the U.S. operations in France. The maps seem to be staple part of many of the newer monuments. See below.

I’ll write more about my impressions of all of this and add some more stories in the next post. But before that, I need to mention a few non-War things:

There had been torrential storms before we came and the rivers in the area were over their banks in many places. You may have read that the had to close the Louvre at that time to move artwork to higher floors. This made the off-road explorations that Major Tim took us on a bit problematic. But it meant that everything was beautifully green and the poppies were growing like crazy.

We stayed at an amazing French chateau (see below) called Chateau du Monthairons. In addition to being beautiful, it had wonderful meals and we ate there twice and once in Verdun. During World War I, it had been used as a French Field Hospital and it had lots of pictures of that. During that period, the composer Maurice Ravel worked there as an ambulance driver and there is a story posted about a moment when this unknown driver found a piano in the hospital and shocked everyone by sitting down and playing beautiful music. (During World War II, the Chateau was German Officers’ Headquarters. There were no pictures displayed of that.)