Chai High

I feel like I am on some delectable concoction of valium and ecstasy. I would be content if heroin tasted like this. Something infiltrates the air here. A permanent ether (mist? dust? cloud? smog?) exists between peaks - so dense they look like enlarged bushes: smoke after benediction: the smell contributed by the incense of fruit sellers. It's as if parts of all those other dimensions - dreamt up by science and science fiction - otherwise invisible to us, are leaking out to share our puny existence. The physical manifestation of some God character or divine presence inhabiting our realm.

Animals are plentiful and roam the roads and alleys as if they are lords.

Garden of Eden. Calves nothing more than fur and bone sniff you curiously like care free dogs. Monkeys go about their monkey business- picking fleas and chewing bananas. People make way for nature here. The dogs are daubed with red bindis between their eyes. 

I am on an acid trip, spiritual high. Cliche, but true. Everything is meaningful. I lock eyes and smiles with swamis and reflect back their warmth. Nothing can touch me.

I no longer walk. I drift, ebb, flow and float. I can feel my soul swelling in my chest and it pulls in others. I am handed a beautiful fan made of peacock feathers in exchange for a one or two pictures of me and a few handshakes. 

Arcadia, halcyon, nectar, honey are words that spring to mind. I want to smile and say hello to everyone I see. I do. Glorious chai high. I am sticky with secretions and dirty with dust but it makes it all the sweeter.

I feel as if I could go without food or any other physical gratification for ever, if only I am drip fed this essence from now on. All the nutrition I can ever need delivered intravenously. 

Lying back in Savasana I enter the half world between the banks of sleep and wake and sail away on trips, swimming through space and time warps. A plug inserted into the socket of my brain, leaving my body behind. 

Purgatory

Doha Airport. A stark, shiny-floored, strip-lit hell. The air-conned air is dry and stings my nose, already parched from artificial plane atmosphere. Thousands and thousands of watts pumping to battle and oppose the muggy hotness outside.

The terminal is inhospitable. But sterile like a hospital. Music filtres out from stereos in open plan shops, there to make damn well sure you're going to spend that left-over home currency hogging space in your wallet.

The sound leaks, becomes thin and tinny and hisses jarringly, mixed in with all the other noise pollution. Thousands of shuffling shoes upon floor. Shoes belonging to people from a motley crew of nations. People trapped in mandatory limbo hover and drift and hover and drift like fruit flies, looking just as futile and brainless.

Smug and protected the first class lounges nestle evenly spread around the garish sprawl of the transfer terminal. They have their own teams of be-hatted concierges, dripping foundation and ready to administer polite scorn or factory-made salutations depending on your gold card status. Just the right amount of glass is left un-frosted to afford a view onto what we could be experiencing… but are not.

Queues at Costa clash disgustingly with the mess of Duty Free (disappointingly alcohol-free) making my eye balls throb. No sign of any suitable watering hole that might make my nervous system tingle, blood warm and flow more soundly. Bloody Marys on the next flight shall be my consolation prize.

I am at the epicentre of a people-quake. Souls who would never have set eyes on each other do so here. Tea-towelled Arabs and African queens and Vietnamese tourists. I want to stare at everyone and imagine what their home town looks like. I don't. I'm a frightened, sleep and alcohol deprived rabbit caught in Doha departure hall's head lights. The brightness offers nothing to hide behind. I scamper and scuttle away.

Amid the putrid jungle I find the Quiet Room. The most unexpected and unimagined oasis. No freshwater pools or palm trees casting welcome shade. Instead an almost lightless room: only glow the departures screen, thoughtfully placed at the back and out of eye-shot.

The silence is respected and maintained. So bizarre and blissful to share this space with a few dozen other strangers - from and headed for stranger lands - sleeping, slipping into dreams or sailing the seas of their inner weather.

Reclining chairs face the glass facade that looks out onto the hideous nomads of the hall, coughing and spluttering their way in a procession to and from the smoking chamber. The blindness dealt to them by my haven's dark interior has them peering in and pausing, making me despise them more. But in my cool, calm cocoon I feel like they are the exhibit. 

The cupboard of a smoking area oozes its compacted odours, pervading my sacred space. Through the glass doors it looks like a Turkish bath. The trapped creatures within are sweating tar and plastic meals.

No longer subjected to the glaring and invasive light of outside, I enjoy the time before plugging back in to the crackle and roar of air travel once more.

Up in the air, Bloody Mary safely in the bloodstream, I wonder about why such places were made as they were. Is it to reduce flight delays? Is it a genuine mistake? Or maybe the capricious sadism of an anonymous civil engineer?

Are you jealous? Othello at the Sheffield Crucible

We are all acquaintances of the “green-ey’d monster”. Either as its embodiment or its victim: usually both. What many may not realise is that Shakespeare created this epithet for jealousy in his great tragedy Othello. For jealousy is most definitely alive and rife in Cyprus, where the newly-wedded Othello, Moor of Venice, has been sent with his army to ward off the Turks. His ensign, the shit-stirring Iago, masterminds an intrinsic plan to destroy the Moor – whom he both envies and loathes – by spinning webs of lies, inciting men enamoured of Othello’s bride Desdemona to acts of violence, all culminating in Othello committing a final act of murder based on the fictitious infidelity of his wife.

Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre – ever a melting pot for both onstage and offstage talent – sees actor turned artistic director Daniel Evans lead a solid cast and creative team in this eagerly anticipated production of Othello.

Why Iago hates his general is contestable, depending on interpretation. Has the Moor banged Iago’s wife Emelia? Is Iago in love with Othello himself? Is he in love with Desdemona? Is he a psychopath? Is he all three? The room left for multiple interpretations gives the character an interesting depth, and the actor playing him a wonderful occasion to let his imagination run wild.

The happy couple... and green-ey'd onlooker

Said actor in this production is Sheffield-born Dominic West, who plays the machinating Iago to Clarke Peters’ Moor. The pair are back together and happier than ever, four years after filming for the TV show The Wire ended - in which they took on the roles of alcoholic upstart cop Jimmy McNulty and the unflappable, model furniture making Detective Lester Freamon, respectively.

It would be convenient and clever to say something about how much The Wire resembles Shakespeare. And it may be true. Indeed, Peter Aspden in the Financial Times Weekend magazine beat me to it. But such is the far-reaching nature of Shakespeare’s plays that even Eastenders can be said to be Shakespearean. The Bard gives us plots that so beautifully capture human nature and human behaviour that anyone can relate to what is in them. He writes about the very things that make us people: emotions, feelings, dilemmas, passion. Politics are used as backdrops. Historical eras can be interchanged as frequently as the actors assuming the roles. Try doing that with characters.

The centre of gravity in this production is held more by Iago – also the second largest part in any of Shakespeare’s plays – than by the character after whom the play is named. Dominic West gives a vigourous performance as the aggrieved, two-faced lieutenant, slipping in and out of apparent deference and servitude towards Othello and enraged hatred behind his back. It is fascinating to observe Iago in scenes where he assumes a background role.

West chose to perform in a Sheffield accent as this is one which he thought theatre-goers typically associate with honesty – a trait which Othello thinks his lieutenant possesses. Would audiences in London hold similar associations, or would the classical north-south divide ruin this positive prejudice? This southerner thought that any honesty conveyed by the accent was dispelled by ahis somewhat ruffian crew cut!

Clarke Peters’ versatility as an actor is very evident as he is transformed from the poised Lester Freamon of The Wire to the afro-sporting, epileptic Moor general in this production. His spirals into jealous fits of rage are awe-inspiring and redeem any doubt one may have had at the start of the show about his stage presence. While Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Othello in the Donmar’s 2009 production may have stolen Ewan Macgregor’s spotlight as Iago, Peters and West work brilliantly and symbiotically together.

The females of the play are represented as needy and annoying –uncomfortably true to life – and are treated abysmally by their men. However, the dastardly light cast on the play’s men as they receive their comeuppance at the end quells any feelings of feminist indignation at this depiction. Alexandra Gilbreath as Emelia is funny and feisty as Iago’s woman and brings a sparkle to each scene in which she is in. Another small yet eye-catching part was that of Bianca, played by Leigh MacDonald – Cassio’s apparently forsaken love.

Evans, the Crucible’s artistic director, has excelled in orchestrating and coordinating some sublime acting talent with beautiful design and staging input. The gorgeous Crucible auditorium is highly reminiscent of the National Theatre’s Olivier theatre and the large stage means that the actors are spaced rather far apart: a challenge for both performers and the audience if those performers do not project their voices effectively enough - as was complained of Peters by at least one member of the audience.

The expanse allowed for some riotous cavorting – including Dominic West taking his shirt off and the forced inebriation of tee-totaller Cassio (decently portrayed by Gwylim Lee) by Iago to get him to fight one of Desdemona’s many pursuers, Roderigo.  Towards the end of the play, when the intimate scenes between Desdemona and Emelia, and later Desdemona and Othello, take place, Lucy Carter’s luscious lighting and Morgen Large’s design come together to give the space a closeness which is utterly captivating. This is most notable during the scene where Desdemona is undressed by Emelia, in which we are also treated to brunette beauty Lily James’ enchanting singing voice. Alex Baranowski’s music punctuates scene changes and is remarkable in its own right. What a pity that it makes such a fleeting appearances.

During one of the scuffles between Iago and Othello, the latter’s wedding ring came flying off, tinkling to the floor and remained there for the rest of the show. Whether or not this was intentional, it was nicely symbolic of Othello’s preempted and subconscious rejection of Desdemona when he is misled into thinking she has been unfaithful to him.

Quotation of the night (of many worthy contenders!) is awarded for Cassio’s “O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil!” which I think anyone partial to a tipple can attest to. Modern productions of Shakespeare make us realise how little humankind has altered. It is still all about beer, birds and brawls. 

Evans has managed to capture the plenitude of jokes that appear in the script -surely there hasn’t ever been so much laughter in a tragedy as there was on press night in Sheffield?- without detracting at all from the violence and evil of Iago’s scheming that bring about the ruinous end. Well worth the jaunt up north.

Othello runs until 15^th October 2011 at the Sheffield Crucible.

Shaving to save slaves

Hair is an odd thing. Desired in some places, detested in others. It can be a method of rebellion or a means of making a statement, a demonstration of faith or a social label. Musicals have been written about hair, songs sung and decades discernible by their signature coiffures. In more extreme cases, it is a tool for exerting control over and dominating someone.

Hair is a very subjective thing. Some men recoil at the idea of a woman with short hair and will only go for the longhaired blonde variety. There are girls who get giddy at men with long hair. The issue of facial hair (yum) on men is one of much contention among girls and gays. Whatever your hair management strategy, you will never satisfy everyone. Deciding to shave my head for charity demonstrated this even more sharply. After announcing that I was shaving off my hair for Anti-Slavery International I was met with a mixture of heart-warming awe and support or shock and scorn. I was even offered money NOT to shave my hair.

Before

Luckily, the admiration came from the people I cared most about – save for my mother, who, refusing to donate any money, dismissed it as another ridiculous post-adolescent act of rebellion, done only to shock the family. In truth, I arrived at the decision after cutting my very long hair short. After making that leap, a whole new world of hairstyle options lay before me. A long harboured desire to shave my head at some point in my life was jettisoned in to action after my lovely hairdresser, Christy, suggested I could always raise money for charity at the same time as going hairless. She begged to be the one to do it, and was.

I have a habit of being impulsive and going with ideas, which, quite literally, burst into existence in my mind: I know I am being reckless and that I may very well regret the consequences of these ideas. (The trick is to sign a mental disclaimer form with oneself).  But is shaving one’s head and doing away with hair really so reckless? Hair grows back. There are many voluntarily bald men – why shouldn’t a woman voluntarily go bald? Buddhist monks – the very bastions of level-headedness and altruism – shave their heads. Yes, the visual impact of not having hair is dramatic, as a hairstyle can completely change how a person is perceived, but I think the boldness of the change is completely counteracted by the benefit of giving over £500 to a charity who works towards abolishing slavery. If shaving my head is extreme and drastic, it ain’t nothing next to the way in which some human beings treat others.

During 

Choosing what kind of charity to donate to was hard. There are so many evils to fight against, and so many good causes to support. Perhaps slavery had been at the back of my mind after seeing many tweets pertaining to the anniversary of its abolition on 1^st August 1883. I had also recently watched a Russian-Swedish film, Lilja-4-Eva, which tells the story of a Russian girl lured to Sweden under false pretenses to work as a sex slave, and when I discovered Anti-Slavery International I knew this was a fantastic organisation to support and that I was supporting a cause I feel very strongly about.

Freedom is one of our most valued ideals and one of the most sought after rights. The current uprisings in nations which have had their freedom suppressed demonstrates this. It is seen as a basic human right: without it nothing else can happen.

My best of friends, Rachael, came with me to support and film the proceedings. In the car on the way to the salon, I felt the same kind of nausea I did when about to do a bungee jump off Victoria Falls: biology says no! Rachael was preparing herself to clean up a psychological meltdown. Perhaps the clippers exerted some calming vibrations or the remembrance of why I was doing this made me forget any nerves. I was surprised by how much I not only liked, but also loved, my new aesthetic. I was also surprised by how many wonderful compliments I am receiving, many from absolute strangers who come into the deli in which I work.

After

For the last month, every time I receive an email from JustGiving informing me someone else has donated to my charity I get a little surge of satisfaction. My darling mother even came round and donated very generously. It makes me feel as if I am doing something great. What may have started out as a selfish idea to merely have the experience of being G.I. Jane, has now led to over £500 (and counting!) being raised for charity. The page will stay open for a while longer.

Surviving Boot Camp: A Waitress' guide

Catering, hospitality, service: whatever you want to call it, working full time in a café, bar or restaurant is all consuming. Not only are the hours spent in a shift exhausting physically, mentally (and sometimes emotionally) due to the immediacy of your tasks but the pattern of work is changeable, erratic and requires weekends, early mornings, late nights or all three. The nature of the work required is a lot more intense than what might be considered “normal” office jobs, and it is not unusual to feel as if your whole life is spent waiting tables.

Not only is working in a busy eating or drinking establishment like multi-tasking boot camp and shuttling around like a discombobulated house fly, but the kind of relationship and interaction you have with your colleagues and managers is very different – a lot more personal. In more corporate or office settings, teamwork tasks are a daily feature, but this teamwork does not involve brushing past and bumping into other sweating coworkers and bellowing over the coffee machine.

While there is no disputing or refuting the fact that waitressing is manual labour, if the right ingredients are there, then working in such an environment is a wonderful and fun alternative to warming a chair and getting mesmerised by computer glare for eight hours a day. These hard to come by gourmet ingredients are:

-       Kind, fun managers who you get on with and who care about you and the business. These are best found in a small, independent establishment, owned by said managers.

-       A place worth visiting as well as worth working in. Environment is extremely important, regardless of your job. Would you want to spend time in this place if you were passing by?

-       Colleagues you get on with, at least during work time. Depending on personality requirements, a small number of employees makes for a working environment you feel at home in and a working environment in which you feel valued.

-      Food and drink provided. There seems a lot of variety in how much or how little free food or drink is provided by different cafes and restaurants. An alcoholic staff drink at the end of the day goes a long, long way and keeps the blues at bay.

-       A place whose products and practice you care about. If you don’t feel connected with what you are selling, motivation plummets. And how will you be able to sell anything if you can’t generate enthusiasm.

-       It sounds insignificant, but being able to wear your own clothes makes a huge difference. It makes you feel more relaxed, not to mention being infinitely more comfortable. Essential when running about like aforementioned discombobulated housefly.

Even if all these are in place (as they are at the wonderful Jacob’s & Field, where I currently reside), a busy brunch shift can at times seem unending and insurmountable. The trick is to build in little things to look forward to and keep morale up. Here are my ways of dealing and getting through:

-       Caffeine. In the form of tea and Diet Coke. Coffee is also an option but due to its psychoactive effects on me, I stick to the first two.

-       Sugar. In the form of fruit juices, cake and bananas. Anything that can be picked at: you won’t have time to enjoy your snack in one sitting.

-       Iced water. Hydrating and cooling.

-       Diet Coke.

-       The Loo break. A moment of calm, quiet and solitude.

-       Keep busy. Time will go faster.

-       Diet Coke.

-       Washing up, polishing glasses. Another moment of relative calm, quiet and solitude, when you need to escape customer interaction for a while.

-       Concentrate on the task in hand. Taking on board everything that needs doing and everything that will be done over a seven to twelve hour shift will only frighten you. However, your memory needs to be well oiled and in operation for all that multi tasking.

-       People watch. Working in a restaurant, bar or café gives you the opportunity to do something endlessly interesting. Entertain yourself by imagining what customers get up to in their spare time and what scandal might surround them. Entertain these thoughts in thought only while they are still within earshot.

-       Smile in the face of rudeness. Anger and aggression melt away to compliance if you are polite and friendly. Nothing throws people off course more than a smile when they were expecting an argument.

Post-shift restoration:

-       Feet up against the wall. Lie on the floor, with your feet up the wall. Make sure your buttocks are as close to the wall as possible. Breathe slowly and deeply for a while. This takes a huge amount of pressure off tired and overused legs. Stay here for anywhere between 5 to 30 minutes. Put on some music of your choice or listen to a sound meditation to take the calm a bit deeper. Spotify has reams of sound meditations to choose from.

-       Yoga. As gentle or as intense as desired. A day of standing and running – and in my case, cycling – stores a lot of tension in the body. Release it.

Marketing Gone Mad

Everything in Britain - and in much of the Western world, the United States especially – comes prepackaged. Everything is consumed after the consumption of one or another marketing gimmick. While this may be stating the obvious (how else will products, made predominantly by large companies, reach the consumer?), marketing’s virulence is now affecting commodities very different from anything that can be produced in a factory and put in a box. Our constitutions have become so used to its effects that it is now almost impossible to think and act independently of it: we need brands and logos and billboards to know what to like and even how to behave.

One such marketing tool is the opinion leader and an apt example of this is the celebrity chef. Jamie Oliver has got a whole generation of males into the kitchen and cooking, which is a marvelous thing. However, said males were only incited to do so after getting the go ahead from Jamie’s books and TV programs, despite probably having witnessed their mothers in the kitchen cooking every day of their lives. It is not just the 20-something male who falls privy to these phenomena: imagine the thousands who haven taken up an interest in cooking or ball room dancing after the success of TV shows such as Come Dine With me and Strictly Come Dancing.

Celebrities spotted in heat! et al., set off a myriad of trends from religions (Kabbalah) to despicable footwear (Ugg boots); from diets (too many to name here) to restaurants (remember the A to Z list-celebrity Wagamama craze of the mid-noughties?). Not only do these demi-gods create desires, but also become commodities and brands themselves: J-Lo, R-Pattz, Brangelina. We are so used to marketing speak from our incessant subjection to the insidious tactics of branded products that our vernacular and that of the media has also become affected. Clever marketing will also have us, not only paying, but happy to pay £20 for flip-flops originally worn by Brazil’s poorest.

The most glaring example of just how much brands and marketing have taken over life-as-we-know it in this country can be seen at mealtimes. The majority of restaurants – be they higher end or simply food-to-go – are chains and to find a continental-style eatery, free of fanfare and façade, is a challenge (i.e. may take a good ten minutes in Central London).

However, when it comes to eating habits, the trend for everything mass-produced may stem from the fact that the English lack a gastronomic identity: food is not as integral to socialising and culture as it is in most other nations around the globe. We borrow cuisine from all over the world and when asked, a Brit may have to think for several seconds when asked what traditional English food consists of. The only thing the English really do well is teatime fare: flapjacks, Lemon Drizzle, Scones, Victoria Sponge and the venerable Trifle. Interestingly, there has yet to emerge any chain tearooms.

Long gone are the days when food was always bought fresh, locally and meals made from scratch ourselves. Walk into any large chain supermarket of your choice and the array of fruit and veg stays constant all year round, the majority of which comes in cellophane wrapping with a sell by date and nutritional breakdown. We feel reassured by these arbitrary numbers and by sight of a well-known name of familiar colour and font on what we are to put in our mouths. Contrast this to Korea where there is a total overhaul of produce from one week to the next when the seasons change, bringing with it a change of both crop and menu.

So used have we grown to consuming only when fed with ready-packaged morsels, that even exercising needs to be done in a designated gym or during a designated exercise class of the latest trend, wearing appropriately branded sportswear. If it doesn’t fall within these parameters, then it is not regarded as “proper” exercise, e.g. walking or cycling everywhere, manual labour, taking the stairs.

The upshot of this marketing manipulation is not necessarily a bad thing. If more boyfriends and husbands end up treating their other halves to home cooked dinners and anyone carrying an extra few loses a stone or two as a result of an adulation for Kate Middleton and the Dukan Diet, so much the better for them and those around them. My only misgiving is that this dependence on marketing may reflect a small-mindedness and lack of initiative at an individual level. Or are we now powerless to overcome the herd-mentality having been drip-fed for the majority of our lives?

The force of a clever marketing machination can potentially be harnessed for tremendous good (see my Corporations With a Conscience post). If the Man can get us spending pounds on superfluous garbage, then maybe he can also persuade us to project pennies to places where it is really needed.

A new breed of summer reading

Writer. Mother. Musician. Lover. Fighter. Thinker. Poet. Gemma Weekes appears all this and more after reading her first novel, Love Me, published in 2009. Do not let the fact that a bright, young, female musician/poet ‘transitioning’ into writing prose, especially that concerning love and romance, fool you into thinking this will be anything short of beautiful or anything other than potent, for this is anything but chick lit.

Chick lit, romance novels, trash (what you will) have received a bad name and for good reason, too. Bridget Jones’ Diary spurred on a generation of literary works continually rehashing the same old theme of disappointing men, remorse at overindulgence and the woes of one’s dreary career. It would be a pity if Love Me were to be associated with this brand of fiction.

The subject of love is indeed where the roots of this story lie but is also the fuel which sets ablaze a gripping story that pulls you into the grey drab of London and then flings you into the sticky hot summer of Brooklyn - occasionally shuttling to and from St Lucia as you live through protagonist Eden’s obsessions, pains and catharsis: battling with an ongoing infatuation with first boyfriend, Zed, and coming to terms with horrors from that first summer with her first love.

Weekes magics up every sight, sound, smell, touch and even taste with her unique way of describing everything, with few words that manage to echo much louder. She has the true nature of a poet and breaks apart conventional ways of using words: sounds waft, light is loud, humid nights overflow. Love is like a drug, with Eden being drawn in “like a crack dealer attracts stinking, wild eyed cats.” The author’s disregard for sugar coating and putting love and romance in comfortable terms and using expected similies puts this book in its own category of novel.

Blown apart are Black stereotypes with characters such as the tee-total, brooding, guitar thrashing Spanish who abstains from herb yet takes magic mushrooms to break apart the walls of reality. And then there is Eden, herself, locked into adulthood yet harbouring all the hallmarks of teenage awkwardness. Through her narrative Weekes offers insights into the constraints imposed on black musicians being expected to conform to a narrow range of music and also alludes to love’s dark, macabre side.

The novel is pure sensory escapism and a sure fire way to ban the blues, with material in there to please both sexes. Whether or not the heterosexual male can bring himself to buy the gloriously technicoloured covered book is a different matter.