Perspective

Great to get home in time to catch A finishing off a beautiful poster about the travel writer Isabella Bird and learn that she'd been appointed Playground Buddy, as well as to hear that that N had won a poetry competition. Feel very proud of them - and puts work very much into perspective.

A day in the office

What do I actually do at work? Here's a fairly typical day:
0700 - breakfast
0730 - cycle to work
0745 - started looking at overnight emails
0900 - car to Embassy 
0930 - meeting with UK Trade & investment aout their creative industries plans for 2012
1030 - UK Now update for Ambassador and department heads
1130 - car back to BC
1200 - sandwich & emails
1330 - UK Now update to arts team
1400 - meeting with Ogilvy re UK Now PR
1500 - taxi to an office in central Beijing
1530 - meeting with CCTV (equivalent of BBC) about Cultural Olympiad next year 
1600 - meeting with Jackie Chan's agents (don't ask)
1700 - taxi back
1730 - arts budget teleconf with London
1800 - teleconf with UK, Shanghai & Chonqing about an event
1845 - emails
2000 - leave.

Risky Business

Another 12 hours in the office, 6 of which were a Risk Workshop. All organizations have risk, but it was interesting going through our long list. There's all the usual things like employment law, tax, contracts, health & safety, data protection, cyber attacks, IP, envirionmental laws... And then there's stuff like duty of care to people we invite to China and of course some major local issues like (Chinese) Government policy & permissions.  But funnily enough, the most awkward is our status - we're a charity and a Non Departmental Public Body in UK and diplomatic here in China (the 'ands' complicate things to say the least). At the end of the session, we walked back to our desks with huge weights on our collective shoulders.

Trick or Treat

Hallowe'en seems to have lasted days. The girls wore spooky outfits to school last Friday, we hollowed out a pumpkin yesterday and made soup out of it, and today the girls trick-or-treated around Golf Apartments with various other children. I don't think Hallowe'en figured at all in my childhood.

How's about that then?

This was the sight that greeting us on opening the curtains this morning. Fog or haze or pollution or whatever you want to call it, so thick you could feel it. So, a day spent largely inside.

Now then, now then, guys & gals, as it happens Jimmy Savile died yesterday, two days short of his 85th birthday.

What a character: teenage coal-miner, wrestler, 'Britain's first DJ', Top of the Pops' first (and last) presenter, Mr Fixit, ghastly tracksuits, gaudy gold jewellery, weird hair, big cigars, clunk click, charity-man, drove a Roller, but lived in a caravan (or am I making that up?). Anyway, TV won't see the likes of him again. But even Jim couldn't have fixed today's weather.

Fave films: 1930s

The 30s were the Hollywood 'golden age' of the big studio star system, the all-singing all-dancing musicals, the first great horror movies and, conversely, Disney. These and a still-strong European cinema makes a top 15 a hard choice, but here goes:

- The Blue Angel (von Sternberg, 1930)

- L'Age d'Or (Bunuel, 1930)

- Frankenstein (Whale, 1931)

- City Lights (Chaplin, 1931)

- M (Lang, 1931)

- Freaks (Browning, 1932)

- King Kong (Cooper & Schoedsack, 1933)

- The Goddess (Wu, 1934)

- The 39 Steps (Hitchcock, 1935)

- Things to Come (Cameron Menzies, 1936)

- Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (Disney, 1937)
- La Bete Humaine (Renoir, 1938)
- The Adventures of Robin Hood (Curtiz, 1938)
- Goodbye Mr Chips (Wood, 1939) 
- The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939)

I probably first watched most of these on TV - Wizard of Oz, Goodbye Nr Chips, 39 Steps, Robin Hood etc on Sunday afternoons, The Blue Angel, M, Frankenstein etc late at night... but the arty ones would have been at Brighton's Duke of York or London Scala in fabulous double (or even triple) bills.   

OK, the two weirdest ones first: L'Age d'Or must have been seriously shocking at the time, was certainly strange when I first saw it, but now seems quaintly 'avant garde'. But Freaks is just amazing and still shocks. I remember seeing it for the first time and thinking, is this real?? The rest are all fairly obvious, and don't need elaboration.

Could have gone for some (or all) of the big studio musicals like Busby Berkley's 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933 and Footlight Parade) or Leonard's The Great Ziegfeld ,or any Fred & Ginger title. Never could get into the Marx Brothers. Also just missing out is John Wayne in the first great Western, Stagecoach, Bette Davis in Jezebel and Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII... as well as Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, Renoir's La Grande Illusion, Jean Vigo's L'Atalante and Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet.

And what, no Gone With the Wind??

We are the World

Another school show. (Do they do any work?!)  This time it's songs of the world with quite a bit of dancing and occasional playing of instruments. Our two did well with a Brazilian samba concoction and an African megamix. And then all the classes got together to blast out We are the World, sung with a healthy smidgen of irony by A, I was pleased to note.