Recent Cultural Experiences in London

Last month, I saw a cacophany of fantastic different cultural events in London, including plays, comedy, pantomime and film. It is amazing how culturally rich the capital is.

I saw the wonderful film The Artist, a black and white silent movie with an amazingly talented dog, that marks the change from silent films to the 'talkies'. A star of the silent movies, and a fantastic performer, the main character refuses to jump onto the talking bandwagon. However, he is dismayed to see his fame diminishing in favour of a new talking star, ironically a young hopeful actress he had recently helped get noticed by filmmakers. The film is full of humour, extremely engaging, often very moving and makes me wonder why the genre of silent movies is not more popular.

I saw a queer pantomime, Cinderella, featuring evil stepmother Baroness Thatcher with her sons Boris and David, a gay princess and a polyamorous Cinderella. Simply put together and one night only, the play had an amateur feel. However, the jokes and songs were fresh, with some hilarious political satire, and it was a very enjoyable experience - especially as I knew the actress playing Buttons.

I saw the Ladykillers with the fantastic Peter Capaldi from The Thick of It. This was hilarious and very well put together. It was doubly interesting for me as the playwright, Graham Linehan (who cowrote the fantastic sitcom Father Ted), lives on my road! The comedy, adapted from the 1955 film, revolves around a old lady living in a topsy turvy house with only a sick parrot for company and who often contacts the police with stories about aliens and her newsagent being a Nazi, and a gang of criminals who masquerade as musicians who come and live with her. She is delighted to have musicians in the house and wants them to play for her friends, who have found her boring of late. They however, want to rob a bank and trick the old lady into unsuspectedly helping them. Finally, the old lady finds out and the criminals determine to murder her. Chaos and hilarity ensues. Even from our seats right at the back of the theatre, the comedy and wit was sensational, with a great mix of slapstick, fantastic character actors and bizarre scenarios.

I saw the comedian Adam Riches at Soho Theatre and was very glad I was not too near the front as this show was all about audience participation - he asked two audience members to kiss and snogged one audience member himself - and avoiding being hit by large props members of the audience were asked to wave around. It was highly entertaining whilst often extremely difficult to watch because of the embarrassing topics or scenarios. Adam Riches played a variety of completely different parts, a lazy man in a wheelchair who used a catheter because he could, a squash player, and he was accompanied by two helpers who were seemingly willing to do anything he said including being covered in water. He is great at talking to the audience and responding to them as well as getting people to do things you would think they would be too embarrassed to do. All in all a fantastically funny, laugh out loud covering your eyes and entirely fresh show. Sit at the far back if you want to avoid being forced to be part of the show!

I saw the political documentary Tory Boy about a filmmakers stint at running for MP in the North up against a Labour MP in a safe seat, despite the Labour MP's appalling record for the local area. The film showed how many northerners will vote Labour despite knowing that the candidate is terrible, just because they always have. It exposed how it was impossible for constituents to contact or get a response from their MP. It also depicted the grim reality of campaigning for 6 months in an unwinnable seat, the election tactics, the highs and the lows. Supplementing the filming of events, all filmed live, was some fun animation, some of which explained certain political ideas. Whilst I dislike the character of the filmmaker, this is a very engaging film which gives many insights into the world of local campaigning.

I also saw The Muppets, a fantastic feelgood film that I throughly recommend, the musical Mamma Mia, a lovely light comedy with a great female lead, the political play 3 Days in May, which details a critical point during WW2 when Churchill had to make an important decision about the UK's role in the war, and the wonderful French animation, Monster in Paris, a delightful comic story set in Paris.

All in all, a great month to live in London.

You must watch these TV shows

A friend alerted me to the recent children's three part drama The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff, which as the name suggests is Dickensian in nature. It is set in Victorian times with a star cast of famous comedians and is a great comedy about a poor family who sell curiousities, who are conned by an evil man into going into business with him. Bent on destroying the family, the evil man proceeds to send the son to boarding school where he is beaten daily, the daughter is given a horrible governess who is only interested in her posture and will not let her see her parents and he then exposes the secret past of the mother, Mrs Secret-Past. The drama is fabulous because of the all the detail in the scripting, with fabulous one liners and satire on everything from the financial sector to the French to Cockney. I was devastated to discover there were only three episodes as this is a truly unique children's drama. The series finished at the beginning of March.

As someone who has done lots of law work experience, I was intrigued to hear of the new comedy Suits about high flying lawyers. It is far better than I expected. It presents very interesting cases including some pro bono cases, especially interesting to me because of my work as an adviser at Citizens Advice. I imagine this is partly because a client facing eviction is more dramatic than a merger between two businesses. The witty banter and the intellectual stimulation of trying to work out how the lawyers will handle the specific cases, as well as the personal life and struggles of the main character Mike (who you instantly sympathise with as he has no law qualifications and is winging the whole thing!), make this one of the most engaging and definitely the most intelligent TV sitcom I have seen. As it is American it is hard for me to know what strategy the lawyers can take as the law and legal system there is very different, but it is all the more interesting for it as I can compare the two systems. Slickly filmed, with fantastic opening music and excellent characters, this is a must watch. It is aired on Dave every Tuesday evening and you can watch it on UKTV catch up for the following week.

The Pitmen Painters

I went to see a fantastic play on Friday called The Pitmen Painters at the Duchess Theatre. Written by Lee Hall, of Billy Elliot fame and a Geordie, it was set again in the North of England, this time in Ashington. The play told the remarkable true story of the Ashington Group, miners with very basic education, who having studied Geology now wanted to learn art appreciation.

To their teacher's astonishment, none of them had seen any art at all, whether in real life or in a library. Indeed, few miners had ventured beyond their home town. They were unimpressed with their tutor's slideshow of famous paintings, demanding to know what the paintings meant and how they could work it out each time.

Their tutor had the novel idea of getting the miners themselves to paint, so that they could understand better the nature of art by commenting on each other's paintings. And so began the creation of a body of art never seen before - art based on the town of Ashington and the mines. Art that had been unschooled in form and style, that sought instinctively to represent a life and a point of view.

The play also has some poignant political messages - it not only casts a gentle satire on the Pitmen Painter and union leader miner obsessed with regulations - but also marks some of the political and cultural changes from before WW2 to the 1990s. It heralds the introduction of a free national health service and the nationalisation of the mines. It then marks the closure of the mines under Thatcher and the removal of the clause from the Labour Party which demanded ownership of the means of production. At a time when many are seeking a left alternative to the social crisis this country is facing, the play makes the interesting point that the present Labour Party is very different to the Labour Party that brought in Clement Atlee's wonderful NHS and welfare system.

The joy of the play is in the vernacular humour, in the wonderful paintings and in the teaching of art appreciation. I, along with the miners, learnt about how one can analyse art, how the 'meaning' of art lies in the relationship between the viewer and the painting and may not be known to the painter himself, how often the meaning may lie in what is not painted as well as what is.

I thoroughly recommend the play as an opportunity to learn about art and an opportunity to experience the lifestyle of a now non-existent group, yet one which was common to England not so long ago, the life of miners in the North of England. Their's was a world which felt immensely alienated from middle class society and middle class artists, despite one art collector's attempts to destroy the barriers between them. The result is a unique type of art and a very moving, engaging and authentic play.

Citizens Advice Bureau

I've been training to become an adviser at my local Citizens Advice Bureau since June now, my job in Parliament having ended in May, and the change is refreshing.

I learnt a lot from Parliament, and I don't think there was much more for me to learn after my one and a half years there, but one thing I did learn was that changing national policy is not easy or even possible usually. At least from the vantage point of a Parliamentary Aide, or even a backbench MP. At a local level, its easy to get frustrated if many people have the same problem, a problem you can solve for them individually with time and resources, but which would not even exist if the national policy was written better. However, get into Parliament, try lobbying and it's slow work: seldom rewarding, lots of positive words but very little action.

At Citizens Advice, I can give tangible help to up to 10 people a day, all from my local area, on issues ranging from employers not paying their employees, bailiffs knocking on client's doors, people being sold shoddy products, clients with large debts, to families about to be evicted from their homes.

At the same time I can make a note of the issues and tell the national charity Citizens Advice who are respected by the Government and occasionally listened to - that's why landlords are now legally obliged to hold deposits in tenancy protection schemes. I can also write to our local MPs and the press about the issues on behalf of the bureau with real tangible evidence. I expect it makes little difference, but better to do the two in tandem on the off chance that it might occasionally pay off.

I am learning a lot, which for me is an essential quality for a job, and I currently need to read up on how Citizens Advice handles debt issues. I have given advice at a mental health centre as well as at the bureau and hope to be able to give advice at local children's centres soon. I love working with local people in the real world, and if I ever decide I want to go back to the stage of local or national politics, this will have been an invaluable experience.

Freud's 'The Interpretation of Dreams'

"I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams."  D. H. Lawrence

"Within each one of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from how we see ourselves."  Carl Jung

It is commonplace to see someone asleep on the tube. But few people wake up their fellow travellers to check they haven't missed their stop. This might be a good thing, for dreaming is a good way to order your mind, cluttered from a hard day's work. Indeed, it is recommended to sleep directly after revising something you need to know off by heart, as you are more likely to remember it. We all know the phrase, "Sleep on it, it'll all become clearer in the morning."

Historically dreams have been viewed in a number of ways. To the Ancient Greeks, dreams were often said to be prophetic or warnings of what was to come. The Romantics viewed dreams as a symbolic ‘analysis’ of the world, for example the German poet Novalis believed dreams produced images of sensual reflection. Some people believe dreams are influenced by what you eat before you go to bed. Like Freud, Aristotle believed dreams could be interpreted psychologically.

Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung) is his most successful work and in it we find many of the key concepts we link to Freud such as the role of the unconscious and the Oedipus complex.

That the dream is basically a wish-fulfilment is the fundamental basis of his theory. The obvious examples quoted are those of children’s dreams, where they dream of an unfulfilled daytime wish being fulfilled in their dreams. For example, Freud’s daughter tells her father, the day after spending what she felt was too short a trip on the Aussee lake, at the age of three, that she dreamt last night of sailing on the sea.

The key to understanding dreams, according to Freud, is in understanding that they are almost all wish fulfilments, the wishes of which are frequently repressed wishes, buried in the subconscious. Moreover the wishes expressed in dreams are often disguised, so that it is not at all evident what they are. This is because according to Freud, we censor our thoughts so that they do not disturb us. Thus, dreams are an unstable compromise between desire and prohibition; in dreams we can fulfil wishes which would be unacceptable in waking life.

Freud claims that far from being illogical and meaningless dreams are actually significant events and that the unintelligible features of dreams, logical impossibilities and bizarre happenings result from an unstable compromise between desire and prohibition within us. Thus, at face value dreams can be highly misleading, but on closer study reveal more about our unconscious mind. Freud concedes that there are some unintelligible aspects in dreams, caused by the dreaming mind's tendency to overgeneralise and its indifference to self contradiction.

Freud goes further in attributing a real purpose to dreams: that of the guardian of sleep: the function of dreaming is to stop the speaker waking. Thus, we often ignore outside noises or incorporate them into our dreams so that we can continue sleeping. He quotes the most common dreams of this type: any variation of the dream where you dream of going to the toilet or not being able to go to the toilet, which is dreamt in order to stop us waking when we need the toilet, and dreams where we dream of getting up and getting ready so we gain a few extra minutes of sleep comfortable in the fake knowledge that we are doing what we need to. One of Freud’s patients was told whilst he was in bed that he needed to go to the hospital, whereupon he promptly dreamed he was there, thinking if I am already there I do not need to get up and go.

Freud speaks of the great difference between the latent content and manifest content of dreams. The latent content comprises one or more incidents or thoughts from the 'dream day', the twelve hours before the dream and significant events having occurred in both the recent and more distant past, possibly including those from distant childhood. Freud states that these events may or may not already be distorted in the memory.

The manifest content is described as a compression and condensation of the latent dream thoughts. Freud notes that displacement of the latent content often occurs in the manifest content, which can consist of displacement of anything including people, time and place. He asserts that this displacement is often the result of repression or censorship of certain unconscious thoughts in the dreamwork.


Writers and other artists have tried to convincingly represent the dream throughout time, some like Hesse and Kafka create whole dream landscapes for their characters. Freud thought his theories about dreams could and should be applied to literature, which as he quotes from Schiller in his work, is a 'creative madness' and hence stems, at least in part, from the unconscious. Indeed, he ascribes the Oedipus complex to Shakespeare claiming the real reason Hamlet could not kill his uncle was that his uncle had done what he himself desired to do, killed his father and married his mother.

Freud is famous for positing the idea of dream censorship, particularly censorship of sexual thoughts. However, one must consider that his evidence was based on a number of very similar clients: bourgeois men and women, who had been brought up in the sexually repressed environment of the late 19th and early 20th century. One patient of Freud’s, finding masturbation unacceptable, tried to 'cure' himself of it by sleeping with women. This seems ludicrous nowadays. At least in the Western world, people are much more open about sexuality. Whilst much of what Freud wrote was ground breaking and incredibly thought provoking, the real flaw with Freud's theories lay in his narrow client  base, the study of which perhaps inevitably led to his fixation on sex.

Burns' Night

O my Luve's like a red, red rose,

That's newly sprung in June:

O my Luve's like the melodie,

That's sweetly play'd in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,

So deep in luve am I;

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

Till a' the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,

And the rocks melt wi' the sun;

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

While the sands o' life shall run.

And fare-thee-weel, my only Luve!

And fare-thee-weel, a while!

And I will come again, my Luve,

Tho' 'twere ten thousand mile!

When I studied this poem at school, I was struck by the flowery language and how kitschig/tacky it sounded. I didn't realise until second reading that it was also totally vacuous. How can Burns claim to be so madly in love with the girl for three verses, and then say he's popping off for a while, promising to come back. He's clearly already thinking ahead to looking for new love somewhere else! So his beloved must wait for him to return, content with a poem committing the lover to a ludicrous unbelievable love. I bet he never came back.

I personally think love is a bit silly: everyone feels it in the heat of the moment, the passion, the excitement, the intrigue. But given a new partner a few nights later, one can go through exactly the same rigmarole of emotions. People are in love with love, they miss love and they need love, but the person is immaterial. That's why it's best and safest to love as many people as possible. Then, if one disappoints you, you have plenty of back ups. This is my favourite song about love, it's by The Monkees and has my favourite love lyric - 'don't say you love me say you like me':

I wanna be free,
Like the bluebirds flying by me
Like the waves out on the blue sea.
If your love has to tie me, dont try me,
Say good-bye.

I wanna be free,
Dont say you love me say you like me,
But when I need you beside me,
Stay close enough to guide me, confide in me,
Oh-oh-oh

I wanna hold your hand,
Walk along the sand
Laughing in the sun,
Always having fun
Doing all those things
Without any strings
To tie me down.

I wanna be free,
Like the warm September wind, babe,
Say you'll always be my friend, babe.
We can make it to the end, babe,

Again, babe, I gotta say:
I wanna be free
I wanna be free
I wanna be free

EMA, WikiLeaks and the SDP

Today was depressing. I don't agree with the EMA cuts, unless the reforms mean that students end up with a better deal for poor students, but I resent it when Labour MPs use EMA to score political points in a completely unrelated speech. At the Afro Caribbean Trade and Commerce Launch, the Labour MP for Bristol East, did just that. Policies should not be used to score political points, it destroys any trust we might have in what politicians say they believe. I'm not saying only Labour does it, but there is a time and place - in the Chamber, not at a non partisan event.

Also I realised that although I value open politics and as little secrecy as possible: the Government should not keep things from the public, as Shirley Williams pointed out in her talk on Memoirs: Egoistical or Educational, we are in a Catch 22 situation. If all communication between Government Ministers had to be available for all to peruse at will, and Bush and Blair had to publish their correspondence to find out whether Blair said he would do whatever Bush did as far as Iraq was concerned, that would be a fantastic way for the public to receive justice for their actions. But, in the future, politicians would be far more cautious so that statements like those we suspect made between Bush and Blair would either not be made at all, which would be great in theory, although it might lead to poorer relations between Britain and other countries. Or politicians will begin to communicate in some nontraceable way: a private room with no tape recorder perhaps. Yes, it will be harder for politicians to cover their words up, and WikiLeaks will hopefully still be able to expose some hidden conversations, but a lot will be driven further into secrecy.

I wonder how Shirley feels having left the Labour Party, where she was in the Cabinet with Tony Benn under Wilson and Callaghan, to merge her SDP with the Liberals and form the Liberal Democrat Party in 1988, to watching her baby form a Coalition with the Conservatives. Sure, she is being pragmatic if she supports the Coalition. I too am of the conclusion that it is better to have a Tory government containing Lib Dems who are beavering away to put Lib Dem policies into practice and soften and amend Tory policies, than a Tory led government, which would undoubtedly be more right wing. But it must be a million miles away from what she originally anticipated thirty years ago, as one of the Labour "Gang of Four" rebels in 1981.