Monthly Archives: October 2008

Bringing down the House

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The group mind of my regular readers may recall mention of my former colleague C the actress, who left to find fame and fortune in the lights of the big city.

Actually she left to do a year at drama school which included a part in an off-West End play (a term I just made up; well, if you can have off-Broadway then you can have off-West End. Can’t you?). So she’s done the year at drama school and is just ending her run in the play. A group of us went from work to cheer her on.

The play was on at the New Players Theatre, just off Villiers St between Charing Cross and Embankment, bang beneath the Charing Cross main line. At various points there is an interesting thunder effect from above as the trains roll in and out. It’s exactly the kind of place Joey does all his shows in Friends.

The play is The House of Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca, a laff-a-minute exposé of pride, Catholicism and sexual tension that (Wikipedia says) “foreshadows the stifling nature of Franco’s fascist regime.” Bernarda is a proud, aristocratic, newly-qualified widow who declares eight years of mourning after the death of her not remotely mourned husband. She has five unwed daughters, none of whom is marriageable as they are the only young senoritas of their class for about 100 miles around. The oldest, despite this handicap, has still managed to get herself engaged. At first Bernarda is of the opinion that even the marriage should be put off for the eight-year mourning period, but changes her mind when she sees how disruptive the man’s presence is on the status quo. Best to get it over with as quickly as possible to get him off the scene. But letting the marriage go ahead just makes things worse, since the other sisters are at least all partially in love with the fiancé and the youngest daughter is having an affair with him. The maximum that can be achieved in infidelity is a snog and a grope through a barred window but that can still be quite enough.

One thing leads to another, Bernarda tries to shoot the fiancé (the audience probably wasn’t meant to giggle at the off-stage gunshot, but Lorca wasn’t aiming it at an audience of Brits) and the youngest daughter, thinking Bernarda actually hit the guy, hangs herself. A delighted Bernarda announces that you ain’t seen nothing yet, now we’re really going to get some heavy mourning done. (Actually she talks about “drowning in a sea of mourning” and makes sure everyone knows the daughter died a virgin. Reputation is everything – and, bearing in mind the barred window, it’s hard to see how it could have been otherwise.)

No man ever actually appears on stage, but that only adds to it. At one point the sisters are listening to the men marching off to the fields singing a lusty harvesting song, and both they and the audience are almost weak at the knees at the thought of what could be. As so often in literature, the way to make something sexy is not to have any sex at all.

A colleague who has previously seen the play advised me that “if you can get halfway through and not want to throw knives at Bernarda, you’re a better man than I am.” He’s a better man than I am – I made it about halfway through act 1. Apparently the play was finished in 1936 but first shown in 1945, which was a missed opportunity on the part of the Republicans. One showing of this in the West End when it was written would have doubled recruitment for the International Brigade.

Anyway. C has done her time and will doubtless soon be appearing as 3rd Body in Casualty, Worried Mum in The Bill and all the other things actresses do at the dawn of their careers. I already knew for a fact that she made an excellent Perdita and Sacharissa in the Discworld plays and I had no doubt she could do it professionally, but it’s good to have the evidence of my own eyes and ears. I suppose I can stop calling her C now. Look for Claire Dixon – which isn’t actually her name, but someone of her own name already has an Equity card, so Claire Dixon is what she will be known as.

Incidentally, less than two months after he finished the play, Lorca was shot by the Nationalists. It’s an extreme form of criticism but you can see their point. Franco’s tastes presumably tended more to the burlesque.

Flows in the attic

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  • Contains 3 updates (scroll down)

Nothing chills the heart like the sound of dripping water where none should be …

I tracked it down, yesterday morning just before I was meant to be leaving for work, to a pool of water on the kitchen windowsill that was dripping onto the floor. I mopped it up and tried vainly to find the source. None showed – nothing dripping from the ceiling (and for reasons I’ll come to, I couldn’t see how this would be possible anyway) so I assumed it was just a bad case of condensation on the window. A very bad case, but I’m an optimist. Then I went to work.

I came back at the end of the day and found the water had repooled. Now I looked more closely it seemed to be welling up through the window sill. Hmm. I’ve heard of rising damp, but we’re on the third floor. Abingdon is not known for its supercharged artesian wells. The only other answer is that water was coming down between the wall and the wooden frame of the window. Down from …

… Eyes raise slowly, reluctantly to the ceiling.

The ceiling itself still seemed unmarked and there’s nothing above us except a very low, cramped attic space. The hatch is too small and the space is too limited to do anything with it, like store stuff. It’s just there, cramped and cold and cobwebby. Even more reluctantly, I climbed up to have a look. It took a moment to work out what was going on.

A brief break for further explanation. There is one more flat above ours but it doesn’t extend as far as we do. Their kitchen looks out over the roof above ours. The waste pipe from their sink and their washing machine goes through our roofspace. At one point, for a reason which truly baffles me, it turns a sharp 90 degrees, then another 90 degrees to resume its original direction. Then it goes out of the wall. Just after the first bend, it had broken. It hadn’t come apart at the seams, the actual plastic had snapped, clean off. Everything that came out of that pipe now went straight into our roofspace.

And here is where we bless and offer up small sacrifices to the Gods of Victorian Plumbing. There’s also an old cold water tank up there, probably from before the house was converted to flats. It’s not part of anyone’s system now and it’s bone dry. Beneath it is a small lead-lined trough set into the floor of the attic. It’s about 2m x 2m by 4cm deep, and was presumably to catch any overflow from the tank in days of yore. The broken pipe was pouring straight into this. Thus we hadn’t had a deluge through our ceiling the moment the top flat ran their washing machine. We had to wait for it to gather enough water to overflow, probably when they did the washing up. No deluge, just a gentle trickle. Down the walls. Up through our windowsill.

So, we spent most of yesterday evening with me in the ceiling bailing out the trough, into a bucket which I would pass down the hatch to Best Beloved, who would pass it to Bonusbarn who would pour it down the toilet. The question of exactly what would snap a pipe like that was shelved for the duration of the immediate emergency. Once it was down to a manageable level we alerted our top neighbours (who are top neighbours in every sense). Forensic analysis was swift. Their pipe had blocked and they had called in Dynarod, the day before yesterday. We’re not quite sure what Dynarod did but it involved a “heavy piece of equipment that went on the floor.” Down a plastic pipe? They should surely have known better. Anyway, that’s what dunnit.

Dynarod have been summoned back by Top Neighbours; any moment now I will be called upon to let them in, as repair work will have to be done in our attic. I await their comments with interest. Updates will be posted.

UPDATE 1: the plumber has arrived and has tried replacing the broken length of piping. Unfortunately we have established that the block is in one of the still intact lengths, and putting the megablockageblaster down it again will just result in a new rupture. Conclusion: next door also has a pipe running through the same space – this one being straight and with a nice fall. It’s the waste pipe from one of their bathrooms (they have several …) With permission of neighbour (since given), top neighbour’s pipe will be tapped into next door neighbour’s pipe.

UPDATE 2: pleasantly straightforward. It seems to work. All that needed doing after that was vacuuming out the standing trapped water – of which there was a lot more than I realised. Redoubled prayers of thanks for lead lining. The water was vacuumed out with a device a bit like an aquatic Henry, and of about the same capacity – so several emptyings were needed, after which the toilet looked like the family had had an attack of dysentry. Since restored to its normal gleaming freshness, and now back to work.

As I’d left my lunch at work, Top Neighbour kindly bought us a pizza from Domino’s. Told you he was Top in every way.

We’ll probably have to get a dehumidifier to dry the attic out again, but nothing structural has got wet.

UPDATE 3: Dynarod are delivering a dehumidifier tomorrow morning.

If you see any more updates it will be because something has leaked. Or possibly the duhumidifier blew a fuse and burnt the house down.

Gregory and his girl

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For Saturday night’s viewing: Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). I’m still trying to decide if he cheated.
Spellbound stars an astonishingly young (29 years old) Gregory Peck as an amnesia case who may or may not have committed a murder, and Ingrid Bergman as the hypotenuse a psychoanalytic ice maiden who is thawed by his boyish good looks and determined to establish his innocence.
This contains no spoilers as all of the above becomes clear very early on. Many of Hitchcock’s films have an innocent man, wrongly accused, trying to clear his name. This is a slight variation in that we don’t actually know the accused man is innocent – but if you have a reasonable grasp of movie conventions, and trust Ingrid Bergman’s ability to pick the right guy without hesitation, and cannot possibly conceive of Gregory Peck as a baddie (except in The Boys from Brazil, where he is brilliant as Josef Mengele) then you can take a fair stab in the dark.
The difference is that in films like The 39 Steps and the mighty North by Northwest the innocent man goes to a lot of time and effort to find out what is really happening. Spellbound is unusual in that the final revelation comes through a dream, to which Ingrid Hypotenuse applies her superior psychoanalytic skills to establish the truth.
Apparently Hitchcock was ordered by the studio head to make a film about psychoanalysis, and he duly complied. He wasn’t too fond of it himself and described it as “just another manhunt wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis”.
But like all good Hitchcock, it’s still worth watching. You see little quirks and techniques that you barely notice nowadays, and realise he was the first to think of them. The background music is an orchestra complemented with a theremin; this is one of the films that pioneered electronic instruments to create atmosphere. The piece de resistance is the dream sequence itself, shot on a set designed by Salvador Dali.
So here it is.