Ripped Whores and Fogged Streets

Mike Leigh (Naked, Secrets and Lies, Vera Drake) is a remarkable director whose moving character studies of the working classes are, in my opinion, among the best films of the last twenty years.

Mike Leigh is also an arrogant old fart, and after my recent encounter with him, he can get stuffed. I'll soon tell you why.

For many weeks I've been planning to write more on the set-jetting phenomenon. Just to recap, set-jetting is the recently coined term that describes the activity of visiting movie filming locations. The present Ground Zero for set-jetters might be New Zealand, where fans of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings epic can tour Middle Earth. As previously blogged, I set out from Australia on this trip to do a little set-jetting myself, albeit on a much smaller scale. The places that interest me are smaller, quirkier, more personal locations, like Michael Caine's town house in Dressed To Kill, the elusive Ambrose Chapel from The Man Who Knew Too Much, or the New York City skytram that featured in Spiderman and Nighthawks.

Not every film is filmed on location of course, so the first job of the set-jetter is to separate the real from the fictional locations. Then there is the task of locating the real locations. These tasks aren't as difficult as they may seem because of the internet, that sanctuary for the obsessive, and home to the compulsive. Film freaks everywhere have compiled a wealth of information on film locations, all a quick googling from your fingertips. These websites range from spartan lists to rich multimedia experiences that compare movie stills with contemporary photographs of the actual location. For a film nut, researching locations can be addictive. Think of it as location porn. I lost many hours in Australia satisfying the urge. So much so, that by the time I actually visit these locations, the whole exercise is a fait accompli.

Most of the fun of set-jetting is usually in finding the place, if it still exists of course. Some locations are demolished, buildings are altered, or redecorated in such a way as to make them hard to find. And even when the location is left untouched, it still might appear quite different to the human eye for any number of reasons: set-dressing, camera lens, lighting, matte paintings, the position of the camera, or through the use of post-production visual effects. Sometimes a location hunt is like trying to solve a thirty year old jigsaw puzzle, that I know is missing pieces.

When I arrive at a location, I have a tingling sensation of discovery. I might see hundreds of people walk past, oblivious to the place's history. For me, it's like opening a Faberge egg, hidden in plain view. Temporarily transported into a film world, I spend a few moments comparing the location to my memory, then snap a quick photo, before moving on. After all, what else is there to do? With few notable exceptions, Himeji Castle (Ran, You Only Live Twice) being one, most film locations are not open to the public. So to the people who aren't film buffs, set-jetting must seem pretty strange. This is anorak territory. After all, the film's stories are usually fictional, the characters don't exist, in many cases the working function of the actual location is quite removed from its fictional role, and quite often, I've made a hell-of-a-detour to get there. So, you may ask, what's the attraction?

I think the answer lies with good storytelling. When I read a novel or watch a movie, I feel drawn into a parallel world, which might look very much like our own, but is still a world of fantasy. Gangsters run riot, conspiracies are real, and true love is just a corner-turn away. And whether the protagonists are heroes or anti-heroes, we identify with their motivations, their history, and their desires. For me, the sign of a good book or film is the sense of dread that overwhelms me when I finish the last page, or watch the closing credit crawl. It's a dread borne from the realization that something I have immensely enjoyed is now finished, never to be continued, nothing before, nothing after, "THE END". Until, that is, I decide to re-enter the finite confines of that world by starting at the beginning. And with a good film or book, it might only take a few seconds to slip back into that richly drawn world. Surely this is the magic of storytelling?

Some years back I was stuck in an unfortunate rot of desperately wanting to travel overseas, but being unable to do so, for a variety of reasons. A film freak for longer than I care to recall, I turned to the cinema as a form of escape. Watching a movie wasn't just about enjoying the story and appreciating the art, but also about appreciating the artifice of film production . Movies filmed on location suddenly gave me a portal that spanned the seas and offered an up-close view of foreign lands. It was irrelevant whether the fictional location corresponded with its actual location, because the film making process, the art of artifice, is half the fun of it. For example, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indy and his father journey into the Turkish desert to the Canyon of the Crescent Moon, where the Holy Grail has been safeguarded for a millennium. A moon-shaped canyon doesn't really exist, but there is a canyon, at Petra in Jordan, where one can see the ruins of an ancient civilisation that carved extravagant buildings directly into the rock face.

In the same way, we can watch To Catch a Thief or Dirty Rotten Scoundrels to enjoy Riviera glamour (at a fraction of the price), or travel to the suburbs of Los Angeles by slipping in a disc of E.T., Back To The Future, or Halloween. Even a futuristic sci-fi film like Blade Runner offers little treats. It depicts Los Angeles in 2019, wet and grim, no longer sunny, but still the home city of the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Ennis-Brown House, just as it is now. And to those who might question my ability to differentiate between art and real life, I can merely offer the simple suggestion, tired as it may be, that life informs art, and in turn informs life. Consider the spectacle of September 11, playing live on our televisions like a Jerry Bruckheimer / Irwin Allen co-production.

So what is the relationship between story and location? Many filmed stories are universally themed. A simple love story, for example, might be set in Darwin or Dallas, with little difference to the end result. Some other films, I reason, need to be set in a specific location. No amount of skill and know-how is going to make a Godfather-style mafia epic work when it is set in Brisbane. (Which incidentally, is the problem inherent in so many Australian films, slavishly produced in the American style, but without the budget, the production values, or the locations).

Then there are other films, I'd argue, like Frenzy, that are inextricably bound to their setting. The location informs the story by providing a context for the action (like all films), but goes further than that, because that particular story simply could not be told by that director without that specific location, without it's colour, light, or atmosphere. With Frenzy, Hitchcock made a film about the rough hustle and bustle of blue-collar life in Covent Garden's fruit and vegetable market. It's a world which weaves together the certainties of life (food, sex, and death) with a world he knew, being the Covent Garden markets attended by his father, a greengrocer. Hitch paints the picture, we enter the dream world, soak up its atmosphere, and are readied for the sex, violence, and serial killer melodrama that unfolds.

Several times already I've blogged my thoughts of my time in New York, and specifically feeling tha I was trapped in a movie, 24/7. I think there is a very good reason for that. Storytellers use locations like shorthand, drawing on cliches (in turn, hyper-realities) to paint the background with a few quick brushstrokes. This is the trick of the establishing shot, those few seconds of long-distance photography that tell us where we are before we see what we're doing. But until this trip I had never considered the importance of location to good storytelling. Of those films which I describe as being bound to a location, it always seemed to me that the location was a character, alongside the actors. But now I'm beginning to think the relationship is deeper than that. Stories come from experience, and experience relates to character within an environment. Put simply, to tell a story well, it needs to be influenced by the very place where it is told. The character need to be influenced by their environment, otherwise they aren't of that environment. The longer I spend in London, the more I recognise the subtleties that differentiate character traits here, compared to those back home in Australia. Neither is better than the other; just different.

In New York, I found a non-fiction text called Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies, by James Sanders, which attempts to address this phenomenon by taking New York City as a case study. The book's premise is that there are two cities of New York: one being the real city, home to millions, the other being the mythic city that is represented in the movies. More than a "mere mirror", Sanders writes, the mythic version is an "adjunct or underside or dream version" of the real city. This duality is shared by the other "storied" or "fabled" cities like London, Paris, Venice, and Rome. But today, Sanders writes, "we tell our fables with celluloid", and there is no better place to do that than New York, the very place where cinema was invented. The book provides a lengthy quote from Jean Baudrillard (whoever he might be) which sums it all up for me:

"[There is a] feeling that you get when you step out of an Italian or Dutch gallery into a city that seems the very reflection of the paintings you have just seen, as if the city had come out of the paintings and not the other way around. An American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies. To grasp its secret, you should not, then, begin with the city and move inward toward the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outward toward the city."

And that's exactly how I felt when I was in New York. Sure, there are actual film locations to visit. But just by being in New York, one gets the sense of having seen it all somewhere before.

One of London's little surprises for me was the belated realisation of just how much of this city has entered the public consciousness of popular culture, be it through cinema, music, performance, and literature. Through a mixture of plan or chance, the last five books that I have read have featured locations that are within a half-mile from my flat in Covent Garden. It's a weird thrill to read about Tom Ripley visiting Bedfordbury Street, mere metres from the Tesco supermarket that I visit every other day. Or reading about late-night cabarets at the Cafe de Paris, where the Salvation parties are held. Not long after moving into the area, I took a detour off the Strand, and happened upon a little Roman bath, hidden in an alley running through King's College. The heritage plaque disputed the antiquity of the baths, but noted that Dickens refers to them when writing as David Copperfield. I think that's wonderful.

We have this in Brisbane, of course, although to a much, much lesser degree. Books like The Mayne Inheritance, Johnno, and Nick Earls' work do very well because of the accessibility of the locations to the local readers. It's simply easier to imagine a place that you know, and much more fun. It makes books accessible, and easier to read. That's how I got myself to read the early Agatha Christie thriller The Seven Dials Mystery. It's definitely lesser Christie, but made all the more tangible by its setting around the Seven Dials intersection in Covent Garden.

For twenty years, Helene Hanff corresponded with the staff of Marks & Co., a little bookshop at, and featured in, 84 Charing Cross Road. I pass the address every time I walk up to Soho, and never fail to think of this charming story of loss, and lost opportunity. The bookshop is long gone, now replaced by a franchised bar, but the book and its sequel, The Duchess of Bloomsbury, remain with us. Reading both books, back-to-back, was a delight. When Hanff finally visits London, she does exactly what I did when I got here... she set-jets, albeit exclusively to locations of a literary kind. While her first visit to London, the landscape is familiar, having discovered London long before through literature. And now, in turn, I had the opportunity to do the same with her book.

The loss of the little bookstore at 84 Charing Cross Road brings me to my final point tying story to location. Once again I return to Frenzy, and its setting in the Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market where little had changed since the turn of the twentieth century. Hitchcock learned that the market was soon to move to Nine Elms, forever vanishing from central London's landscape. Distraught at the potential loss of a part of his personal history, and with a career in tailspin, Hitch set about making a film on location in Covent Garden (even though he detested location filming), so that history would have a record of something that held sentimental value for him, and presumably others. And there it is, Covent Garden frozen in time, perpetually stuck in 1972, in a film which, I believe, is the master's last great film. A final gift, if you will, for the fans of traditional Hitchcockian cinema.

One of my favourite exhibits at the Museum of London is the on-line archive of turn-of-the-century film footage where I saw Queen Victoria at St Paul's, streets filled with hansom cabs, and other Victorian delights. According to Mike Leigh, the British Film Institute holds three hours of 19th century footage, which was a useful reference for his period film Topsy Turvy, concerning the first production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. I learned this at one of two film chats last night, both held at the National Film Theatre as part of the London Film Festival.

Both events concerned the relationship between London and film-making. The first was an opportunity to view some experimental films inspired by London life. The second chat was chaired by Time Out, to coincide with their recent article surveying the 50 greatest films set in London, as chosen by Time Out writers and film-makers alike. Mike Leigh was on this second panel, along with Sue Hayes (Film Commissioner at Film London), and Stephen Woolley (producer of Scandal, Absolute Beginners, and The Crying Game, and now a director himself with Stoned). Given my recent pre-occupation with London locations, the chat was an engaging exploration of the relationship between story and location.

The film-makers mentioned the various period films they had made, from Vera Drake to Scandal, that recreated parts of London now lost to time. Their comments were interesting, especially as they described the ease or difficulty, as the case may be, to recreate London's past. The audience was invited to ask questions of the panel. I thought I was on to a winner when I asked the filmmakers if they felt it incumbent on directors to make films that capture a snapshot of contemporary London life , for the benefit of future generations, just as Hitchcock did with Frenzy. For reasons unknown, my question must have offended Mr Leigh. Missing the point completely, Leigh launched into a bombastic tirade shouting at me, although I sat only a few metres away, "Frenzy is a horrible film. It's sloppy. It's superficial. It says nothing about London life, and it shouldn't be in the Time Out list. I hope to never make a film like Frenzy. I'd be very happy if none of my films ever stoop to the levels of Frenzy."

"Hey Mike", I screamed, "at least Hitch's film tells us the world isn't a shitty hole of despair. At least I can watch his films without wanting to slit my wrists by the third act. Unlike your stuff..."
Well, actually, I didn't say that.

The audience seemed to be waiting all night for a classic ouburst from the easily irritable Leigh, and with my question they got it. Their cackles of laughter grew to howls, as I tried to shrink into my seat and disappear. It wasn't his criticism that bothered me, it was the tone of his accusatory tirade. At somewhat of a disadvantage, I felt helpless to respond. I just smiled meekly and pretended to laugh along with the audience, all the time praying his outburst, and my restraint, was definitive of our respective characters.

And then, from my extreme left, I heard someone interrupt the director's ranting. This lady informed the audience that she had once met Hitchcock, and even interviewed him. She tried to elicit more information from Leigh, informing both him and the audience, that the British press slated Hitchcock over Frenzy, feeling it was not representative of 1970s London. Sadly, that line of attack didn't succeed in furthering a constructive exchange. Leigh grumbled along the same line, the laughter slowly subsided, and the "chat" eventually got going again, on a different topic.

At the conclusion of the event, I had a brief conversation with the lady who interruped Leigh. She mentioned that the Brits, in her experience, are very sensitive of how foreigners perceive London, which might explain (i) the British press' condemnation of Frenzy as old and tired, and to a lesser extent (ii) Leigh's outburst. In her words, Londoners don't want to be reminded of "Jack the Ripper" London. And with that, I was reminded of something I read in Anthony Shaffer's autobiography (he being the screenwriter of Frenzy, playwright of Sleuth, and third husband to Diane Cilento).

Shaffer wrote that tourists comes to London with an expectation that the streets are shrouded in fog, and the alleyways are littered with ripped whores. This is the mythic city of London. A fictional mirror to its real twin. Art informed by life. It's the very city that the tourist read about in books, or watch on the screen at the cinema. And whether motivated by film, literature, or pop culture lore, these tourists are set-jetting. Hitch knew this, being more astute than some of his contemporaries, or even some contemporary film snobs, will acknowledge.

There is a dual irony to the Leigh fiasco. Apart from completely missing the point of my question, the panellists did eventually answer it, although in response to another. The subject of the chat had returned to "disappearing London". We heard sentimental stories from Leigh and Woolley, both lamenting the closure of favourite cafes and the redevelopment of railyards etc etc, but the consensus was that these things are on their way out, going or gone, and the filmmakers are powerless to do anything about it. While this is partly true, as very little gets in the way of "progress", let's not forget the source of London's rich record of its own history. That "source" being the decision by many people, from Samuel Pepys to Chris Petit, to record the city they know.

Oscar-nominated or not, I wondered, have these filmmakers learnt nothing from their work's potential, from a man like Hitchcock, or their city's own history?

Dannii Minogue @ London Astoria

Last night Troy and I went to G-A-Y club, at the London Astoria, to see Dannii Minogue's half-hour show. She was there (on her birthday, no less) to promote her new single Perfection, which was an unfortunate choice for an encore as it's very blah. The pre-encore costume change didn't help, as the hotpants came off as lesser Young Talent Time.

But the rest of the show was fab. She sang Put The Needle On It and I Begin To Wonder, and covered Blondie's Heart of Glass. Dannii shook her booty as she sang, keeping up with her dancers. She also engaged the audience with a little conversation, and was quite genuinely appreciative of the support.

We managed to score a table at the front of the balcony. The Astoria was packed. Check out the number of mobile phones in the blogged photo. The rest of my photos are on the set page.

Hung Up @ Beyond

On Sunday I went out with Patrick and Peter to Beyond. This day club is located in Vauxhall, a once industrial area that is now home to the MI6 headquarters, and many a gay club and bar that is rivalling in size the traditional village in the West End.


One of the last tracks of the day was the SDP Extended Dub remix of Madonna's new single, Hung Up. It's a great track, with a minimum of vocals on the remix. You have to listen very hard to hear Madonna's voice, as it is drowned out by the heavy sampling of ABBA's Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight).

In the November issue of Attitude, Madonna is quoted as saying, "I'm not in the mood for a ballad. I can't be bothered. I wanna dance!". We all know that's PR code for, "my last album tanked, and I have to do a Kylie-esque return to my pop roots to sell some discs". But not a minute too soon, I reckon. The track is released this Friday.

You can also check out more pictures of Beyond in my Beyond photo set.

Fiction and Salvation

Our regular favourite nightclub is Fiction, a Friday night party at The Cross nightclub. It's located just north of Kings Cross station, under the arches, near the goods yard. The location and decor is best described as casbah-meets-bomb-shelter. Check out my Fiction photo set for more photos.

My favourite London night out is at Salvation, a once-a-month party held at the Café de Paris on Coventry Street between Leicester Square and Piccadilly. Unfortunately I only have some grainy photos at the moment, in my Salvation photo set.

This is the party that I described as like walking on to a Falcon film set. The venue is something out-of-this-world. Built eighty years ago, it was the London nightspot for a very long time, favoured at variuos times by Princess Margaret, the Duchess of Kent, Jerry Hall, Mick Jagger, Boy George etc etc. Now it's used for functions and regular special events. Located two stories below ground level, it was the only London nightspot allowed to remain open during World War II. The owner claimed that the five stories of masonry above the club would protect the partygoers from a direct hit. That proved false when the building suffered a direct hit, with the bomb landing on the Cafe de Paris dance floor!

And Then There Was A New One

Before I discovered Hitchcock, I was obsessed with Agatha Christie for some time. (Before that James Bond, which confirms my Anglophile status, but that's another post). My favourite of the Dame's stories is And Then There Were None, previously titled Ten Little Indians, but (famously) originally titled Ten Little Niggers. The old Dame was clever, but not known for her cultural sensitivity.

Long before the idea became a cliche, Christie wrote an ingenious story about ten people who are invited to an island, and slowly killed off one-by-one by a sadistic murderer re-enacting a children's nursery rhyme. The pace of the novel is breathtaking. Of all her stories, this was one of the few read from cover to cover in the fewest of sittings. I think its success lies in the originality of the plot, and its good fortune to not be a run-of-the-mill detective story. The suspense mounts as the bodies fall, leading the reader to the dark, but inevitable conclusion. And it's that spectacular ending which places the book, in my mind, well above Christie's other work.

There were film adaptations, between 1945 and 1989. The first film, directed by Rene Clair is regarded as the best and fairly faithful to Christie's story, but far too dated to appeal to modern audiences. Then there are three films from B-grade producer Harry Allan Towers, each more outlandish than its predecessors. The 1965 film is set on a remote Swiss mountaintop, and featured the voice of Christopher Lee as the mysterious host, but is mostly forgotten, save for the 60-second "can you guess the killer" gimmick near the end. This was followed by the all-star big-budget 1974 film set in the Iranian desert, with Oliver Reed, Richard Attenborough, Elke Sommer, Herbert Lom, the voice of Orson Welles, and no less than two former Bond villians in Gert Frobe (Goldfinger) and Adolfo Celi (Thunderball's Emilio Largo). The film tanked. But that didn't stop Towers from making a third film, and the worst of his run, in 1989 starring Brenda Vaccaro, Frank Stallone, and Donald Pleasance. Seriously, Frank Stallone?

Despite their own intrinsic flaws, each of these films has the same common problem. The ending is a happy one, as each script was adapted from Christie's stage play, which in turn she adapted from her own novel. There are various reasons why she changed the ending, but none stand up in my mind. This is a seriously dark story, and deserves the seriously dark ending. Only an obscure Russian film adaptation had the balls to adapt the novel and not the play. Desyat Negrityat takes its name from Christie's original title, and is faithful to the novel's ending. While well made, it's unfortunately in Russian, and the DVD transfer is terrible... if you can get a copy outside of Russia. It took almost a year for my copy to be delivered.

Desperately wanting to see a decent screenplay adaptation, I even toyed with the idea some years back of trying my own hand at an adaptation, purely as an academic exercise of course. That idea went by the wayside, probably a week later, but fortunately there are better placed and more motivated Christie fans who have taken the initiative. Kevin Elyot has written seveal of the recent Poirot teleplays, and his new stage adaptation of And Then There Were None opened last Friday 14th October at the Gielgud Theatre. There are bill posters plastered all round London at the moment, so hopefully it will do well. I especially like the sly advertising tagline of "someone's taking the law into their own hands".

This is all part of a revitalised effort to market Christie's stories. Her descendants sold the majority of their interest in her work a few years back, to an entertainment company called Chorion that specialises in exploiting the merits of older artistic works. It also owns the copyrights to the works of Enid Blyton, Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler, and Roger Hargreaves (famous for Mr Men and Little Miss). They've even licensed a new computer game based on And Then There Were None.

At short notice, I was fortunate enough to get a third-row seat at last night's show. The play is well-cast, and features a few famous cinema names like Gemma Jones (Bridget Jones' mother) and Sirens' Tara Fitzgerald. I really enjoyed the show, especially the over-the-top theatre tricks and slight-of-hand that made the audience, myself included, gasp and scream in horror. The play is quite faithful to the novel, with only a handful of changes. For obvious reasons the children's nursery rhyme has become Ten Little Soldier Boys, and the setting is now called Soldier Island. Most importantly, the ending is very dark, and will please the Christie purists. For staging reasons, this new play is not totally faithful to the novel, with room for improvement if ever adapted for the screen... but secretly, I'm thankful for that. ;-)

Red Carpets, Pouting Spice

Check out Victoria Beckham pouting like Nicolette Sheridan at the Swarovski Fashion Rocks show. Her photo is gracing the cover of today's dailies. Also check out Debbie Harry who is looking fabulous, as always, and especially at 60.

I always thought that red carpet photos were candid shots, quickly taken by professionals as the subject slowly moved along the carpet. I've since learned otherwise. Five weeks ago, on the afternoon of my job interview, I decided to destress by walking up to Soho for a pre-dinner coffee. I got as far as the Royal Opera House, about 50 metres away, which was showered in floodlights for a special event. At the entrance was a red carpet, flanked by about fifty press photographers, all clamouring for a clear shot of the carpet. Behind the photographers, and across Bow Street where I stood, were several hundred spectators waiting to see who would arrive. Now I have to admit there were many "celebrities" that I didn't recognise, presumably from sports and local television. But I did see Eva Herzigova, Jerry Hall, Dannii Minogue, Paula Abdul, Simon Cowell, Bob Geldof, Bryan Ferry, and S Club 7's Rachel Stevens. Most arrived in chauffered Audis. Simon Cowell turned up in a huge and brand new Rolls Royce with opaque rear windows. The limousine purred at the entrance for a minute or two, generating palpable suspense, before Cowell stepped out. But the biggest surprise of the evening was when one bearded and greying 55 year old man stepped out of his car. The crowd erupted with simultaneous screaming and cheering, as the street showered with thousands of camera flashes, fired off in quick succession like lightning. All for a very calm and bemused Pierce Brosnan.

After each guest stepped from their car, they walked on to the red carpet and posed for about 15 seconds for each set of photographers, standing so-very-still and barely blinking. It seemed so artifical. (What am I saying? It's marketing.) I wondered if these people take red-carpet courses, or just stumble through the first few times. Camera whore Paula Abdul spent about five minutes on the red carpet. I wonder how, if every, they'd get her off it. She did look good, though. It was all a lot of fun. I have photos, which I'll post as soon as I have broadband at home.

On the subject of red carpets, the Odeon cinema at Leicester Square is host to many UK film premieres. Sometimes they close down part of the square and/or decorate it for a premiere, as was the case with War of the Worlds. Check out these photos, snapped by one of my neighbours.

Hot Lunch

Some weeks back I wrote about The Firm's fantastic staff cafeteria. Here's a photo of today's lunch: Thai red chicken curry with stir-fried vegetables. Check out the dessert. All for the princely sum of £4.30, which is a steal for London.

Where Am I?

There comes a point in everyone's life when they ask the important questions like Who Am I, and What Am I Doing Here? Usually, I'm busy enough with the question of Where Am I, and Who Are You?

If you're curious, click this link to browse to a Google Maps reference centred on my flat. Click the Satellite button, and then repeatedly click the + button to zoom right in.

You might also like to pan the map over to Hyde Park (or use this link as a shortcut). I'm not sure when this satellite photo was taken, but I'm a little scared Hyde Park does not look like the lush and green oasis that I've seen so far. In its place is a brown blot with areas that look like they're covered with something white. Is that snow? Everyone tells me that it doesn't snow that much in London. Does it really get that cold here?

We've had a few very cold days (by Brisbane standards) over the last five weeks. Mostly it has been pleasantly cool. But according to today's Evening Standard, the first half of October has seen daytime maximum temperatures higher than the average by eight degrees. The same article goes on to say that this winter is forecast to be the coldest for ten years. The 1995-6 winter was the last time that the UK even reached "average" winter temperatures, where it was 3.5C in the South. Brrrr.

Drunken Monkey

Not me. This is a pub at Shoreditch.

Bland, James Blonde

Why, oh why, did they go with Daniel Craig? Isn't it obvious that Clive Owen is the only contemporary contender for James Bond? Obvious, it seems, to everyone but Owen (who doesn't want to be typecast) and the people at Eon Productions. Admittedly, Craig does have the weathered features of the James Bond novel covers, but he looks like he needs a good scrub followed with diction lessons.

I know that they're stripping the Bond formula back to bare basics with Casino Royale, something long overdue for the franchise, IMHO. No gadgets, Q, or Moneypenny. But is this going to work, or is it some half-assed attempt to mirror Batman Begins?

As for Owen, he is in London filming the thriller The Children of Men, based on a P.D. James novel. Set in a dystopic near-future where humans cannot conceive, Julianne Moore plays a woman who falls pregnant, and Owen is the bodyguard assigned to protect her. Shooting is planned for the Fleet Street area all weekend. I know this because we got an e-mail about it at work. Fleet Street is totally off limits on Sunday to allow some effects sequences to be shot. Apparently, a cafe will explode, and a vehicle will crash. I'm sure it will be more exciting than it sounds.

¡MADRID!

A blog update is well overdue.

Two weeks ago, on a Wednesday afternoon, I left work and headed to Temple tube station where I met Doug, a friend from Australia. Doug was on a round-the-world trip and had visited Greece for some weeks, and Copenhagen, before arriving in London. for a few nights. In spite of the pressures of travelling, Doug was calm and looked relaxed. I was reminded of how I felt just a few months earlier when I was travelling.

Doug brought me the most wonderful gift from Australia - Tim Tams and Cherry Ripes!! I quickly devoured one box of Tim Tams, but am savouring the rest.

It was so exciting to see a familiar face from back home. Most of the night was consumed with discussing stories from our various trips, and news from back home. It was a wonderful catch-up, aided in part by a really fine dinner at a restaurant on Garrick Street. We wandered, and wandered, until we found something that looked good, and it was. As I explained to Doug, there is so much choice in London (in restaurants, bars, clubs, parks, activities, etc etc etc), that I easily become overwhelmed. There are quiet simply too many options to consider one's options before making a decision. Very different to back home, where one might travel halfway across town to go to a place they know and can trust!

After dinner we haunted a variety of bars in Soho, and I think Doug left with a pretty overview of the London scene. I'd have loved to stay out longer, but 1:30AM was pushing my limits given that I had to be up for work by 8. Hangover aside, Thursday was a pretty shitty day for me. I really wondered what I was doing with this stupid job that seemed so far removed from my area of training. So you can imagine my surprise when I got home and discovered a parcel from Mum and Dad. Inside the huge Australia Post box was two Ekka showbags, a copy of the Weekend Australian, Cadbury chocolates, and a jar of Vegemite. I can buy Vegemite at my local Tesco, imported from Australia, but it's frightfully expensive. The jar has pride of place in my fridge.

The next morning, Friday, Doug and I rose early and took the tube from Covent Garden station to Heathrow. One of the benefits of living on the Piccadilly line is that I can get to the airport without changing trains, which is a luxury given that so few Underground stations have elevators to the platforms.

We boarded our BMI flight to Madrid at the very last minute, only to find out, on-board, that take-off was delayed by 45 minutes due to congestion at Heathrow. We sat on the tarmac waiting for various clearances. As the captain explained, Heathrow congestion triggers a snowball of problems, as the pilots have to renegotiate the flight windows to fly over French airspace. Until that moment I had never considered the obvious complexities of scheduling and managing European flights. I guess things are a lot easier in Austraila with just the one aviation authority. And thinking about the differences between flying in Europe and Australia, I still find it so freaky to think that in Australia you can fly for 6 hours and not even leave the country...

Flying over Spain, I was reminded of our trip to Seville in 1992, and specifically a road trip to Granada. I remember the country-side as being so beautiful, with fruit orchards as far as the eye can see. From the air, things looked very similar. But things changed quite considerably as we flew into Madrid. There, the land was unbelievably dry. We later found out that it hasn't rained since last October. Dotting the farming landscape were hundreds of little villages and hamlets. The roads linked these hamlets to larger towns, and so on, until the whole network looked like a spider's web, or bad varicose veins, from the air.

Having left a chilly and wet London, it was quite a relief to arrive in Madrid on a hot, sunny, and very dry, Friday afternoon. The city has a population of about four million people, but squeezed into an area of 400 square kilometres. Tiny really, considering that Brisbane's area is around 1350 square kilometres. There is an underground metro, second largest in Europe after London, but it seems that Madrid is a city ruled by cars. With Friday traffic, it took forty-five minutes to reach the city centre. My return journey took between fifteen and twenty minutes!

Doug booked the most lovely hotel in the Chueca district just off Gran Via, literally broadway, which is Madrid's main thoroughfare. Chueca is the heart of old Madrid, the gay district, and where Pedro Almodovar sets many of his films. It is a place of narrow cobbled streets knifing their way through five and six story apartment blocks, centred around little residentials piazzas. Chueca is magical, exactly what one hopes Madrid to look like, and so different to the tract housing I spotted from the air on the city's outskirts.

Our time in Madrid was limited, mine more so than Doug's, so we decided to buy tickets for a double-decker tourist bus to get an overview of the city. The company has three bus routes, and on each route we managed to find seats up top, affording us spectacular views of Madrid's beautiful baroque architecture. We saw most of the major tourist attractions, including the Royal Palace, the Palacio de Communicaciones on Plaza de Cibeles, Plaza de Espana, Puerta del Sol, Real Madrid's home stadium, and various galleries and piazzas. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see the inclined skyscrapers of Puerta de Europa, which look spectacular. My favourite Madrid memory was when Doug and I stumbled onto Plaza Mayor, where coffee shops line the edge of a huge plaza. So European.

Madrid is a really beautiful city. We were meant to go there in 1992, until our trip was cut short, and in the intervening years many people have told me that I didn't miss much. That it's a big dirty city, suffering from overpollution, and with a substantial crime problem, all of which being the exact opposite of the Madrid that I saw. When waiting for my return flight at the airport, I started talking with a Venezuelan who now lives in Madrid. He said that Chueca was once a hotbed of crime, but the arrival of the gay community triggered the urban renewal creating the trendy area that exists today. Still Chueca did not disappoint in an Almodovar way. Doug and I raced around to pack as much as possible into our short time there, and we succeeded, but I might save those stories for off-line reminiscing. ;-)

I was a little sad on the flight back to London. Sad to leave my friend Doug, sad to return to the cold and wet weather, and sad to have to go back to my job. My neighbour on the flight was a fun and lively (without being annoying) young Scottish woman, from Ayr, who is a trainee solicitor at one of the other huge law firms in London. She was telling me that she knows of no-one who works for these large law firms, and likes it. I mulled over that for a day or two. While I've been very greatful to have a job, I've not been overly happy with the work. It's all nothing but middle-class whining, of course. So Madrid was a turning point for me. I realised that any job that pays the bills (and pays okay at that), allows me to live in London, and take weekend trips to Europe, can't be that bad. In fact, it's a blessing. So with that in mind I've realised the importance, yet again, of taking advantage of everything that's on my doorstep. As Sara says, "say yes to everything". I've booked a weekend to Brussels in November, and Venice in early December, with Paris to follow later that month.

Abercrombie & Fitch

I'm quite proud of this photo, having hand-held the camera with very little light. The shot was taken just after sundown. This Abercrombie & Fitch ad was plastered all over New York in July, but this billboard on Fifth Avenue, was by far the "largest" of all.

The Empire State Building

While not as elegant as the Chrysler Building, the mighty ESB refuses to be ignored. It's visible from all over Manhattan, standing out like a raised middle finger to the world outside the city. I took this shot from the Brooklyn Bridge, and some considerable distance from midtown.

Tiffany & Co.

It seems that in New York it doesn't matter whether you're on Fifth Avenue or 125th Street when it comes to trash day. As most blocks don't have service alleys, all the trash is put on the street.