Ivory

Our 14th wedding anniversary and a fine dinner at Mosto's to celebrate. Fourteen years of wedded bliss. Honestly. Last year was lace, this year it's ivory. Didn't give Liz a tusk.

Off the Scale

A thick smog has been hanging over Beijing since Thursday. OK, so the capital is no stranger to pollution, but this is off the scale. In terms of the PM2.5 index (that's particulate matters of less than 2.5 micrometres in size), the World Health Organization considers a safe daily level to be 25 micrograms per cubic metre. When I asked my Aussie friend Colin what a bad level would be like in Sydney he said 40. In Beijing it's often into the 100s, but today it's around 700!  We stayed indoors.

Furbies

Alyssa brought someone over for a sleepover tonight. Or rather some thing. It was a Furby. An irritating, semi-interactive fluffy robot which initially speaks 'Furbish', but is programmed to start using English words and phrases over time. It has voice recognition, dances to music, gets angry, goes to sleep, you can 'feed' it, and there's some on-line stuff which it can interact with. It's kind of creepy - like a Gremlin. Apparently it's been around for ten or more years, but the new ones were this Christmas's must-have present. It's on loan for one night only from a friend, but of course she'll want one for herself. Aarrgh!

Dreams of a Life

Tonight, while Liz was out, Alyssa was on a sleepover, and Naomi and playdate watched the dreadful Ice Age 4 in the sitting room, I watched Dreams of a Life in the bedroom. We'd shown it as part of our British Film Week last month but it was the one film I didn't get a chance to see beforehand or during. Time to make amends. 
And it's brilliant. Haunting but compassionate. The story of Joyce Vincent, a Londoner of Caribbean descent, who died in 2003 in Wood Green in north London. Shockingly, her body lay undiscovered, surrounded by a small pile of unopened Christmas presents and with the television and heating still on, for approximately three years. The cause of her death remains unknown (no foul play was suspected), but how could someone's absence go unnoticed for so long? Who was Joyce Vincent? What was she like? How could she have been forgotten?
We were living in London at the time and I remember the tabloid headlines in early 2006 when the story broke. A young film-maker, Carol Morley (brother of music critic Paul), was similarly struck by the story, but for her it was life-changing: she knew she had to make a film about it. But first she had to find out who exactly Joyce Vincent was. Nobody knew anything about her. Morley placed adverts in newspapers, on internet sites, even on the sides of taxis, and eventually people got in touch and, piece-by-piece, Joyce's story came together.
The surprising thing was that Joyce had been a beautiful, vivacious young woman, working in the City. She'd dabbled in the music business through boyfriends (she'd even been out to dinner with Steve Wonder), but for various reasons she began to cut herself off from people, including her family; left her job, constantly changed addresses and finally 'disappeared'. 
Morley's film is excellent: part dramatised (Zawe Ashton plays Joyce), part interviews with those who knew her. I wholeheartedly recommend it, as well as an in-depth article in The Observer from 2009 which is still on-line here.
Ironically, I had the chance of bringing Carol Morley to Beijing for the opening of our Film Week, but chose Terence Davies instead - who at the last minute withdrew. I wish I'd chosen Carol.

The Tube: 150 Today

150 years ago today, the London Underground began. A line went from Paddington to Farringdon and on the opening day 40,000 passengers boarded the subterranean steam train to travel all or part of it (there were seven stops in between). 
1863: imagine!  At that time Palmerston was PM, the Civil War was raging in America and the car had yet to be invented. 
I won't repeat my fascination with tube stations (see this post if you're interested), Edward Johnstone's typeface and logo, Henry Beck's famous map, the poster art, Poems on the Underground... Or indeed moan about its delays, overcrowdedness and the fact that it is very definitely showing its age... Or remember the tragedies of Moorgate, Kings Cross and 7/7/05. Suffice it to say, it's such a part of what London is about and I wish I was there this week for the celebrations.
And that's enough reminiscing.

Stop! Look! Listen!

Over several months I've been working my way through a terrifying 2xDVD collection of health, safety and welfare films. They were among hundreds of short public information films, publications and other campaigns produced by the Orwellian-sounding Central Office of Information, from 1946-2012. People of my age will remember Keep Britain Tidy, Watch Out! There's a Thief About and Clunk Click, Every Trip. There was even a presciently early piece of creative industries propaganda in the 60s called Mini Skirts Make Money! 
But back to the scary stuff. Paraphrasing the booklet notes, I expect there are quite a lot of people of a certain age who bear deep-rooted scars as a result of having been relentlessly subjected to footage of children of their own age being fried alive while playing frisbee near an electric pylon, maimed by a firework, or crushed by a tractor whilst larking about on a farmyard. Indeed Lonely Water (1973) plays like a mini horror film (with voiceover by Donald Pleasance), deploying the menacing tone and special effects normally the preserve of X-rated shockers. In Building Sites Bite we witness one boy being buried alive, electrocuted, run over, crushed by piles of bricks, drowned and his neck broken after falling from a pipe. Others are more psychological: Never Go With Strangers is the stuff of nightmares.
Appearances by Michael Palin, Reg Varney, Valerie Singleton, a young Keith Chegwin and others bring some light relief to the terror and carnage, and there's some great Sham 69, Squeeze and Klark Kent music in the motorcycle safety film, 20 Times More Likely. 
It's difficult to know whether they did any good. I like to think so.   

Bowie's Back

I see that David Bowie, 66 today, has announced his first album in ten years: The Next Day, produced by Tony Visconti (who of course produced most of his 70s classics). Can't say I'm chomping at the bit but I'll certainly give it a whirl when it comes out in March - coinciding with a big retrospective exhibition at the V&A. 
Bowie was untouchable in the 70s. I cut my teeth on the glam of Ziggy, Pin-Ups and Aladdin Sane, was there for 'Starman' on TOTP, went back to Space Oddity, The Man Who Sold the World and Hunky Dory, followed him through the rock-to-soul-to-increasingly-experimental Diamond Dogs, Young Americans and Station to Station, and lapped up the Euro-Eno weirdness of Low, Heroes and Lodger. Saw him once during this time - at London's Earls Court in 1978, while I was still at school. 

The 80s started well, with Scary Monsters, and Let's Dance was OK, but it all went downhill from there, including the awful Tin Machine. I tried to like him in the 90s, and to be fair Black Tie White Noise was passable, the overlooked Buddha of Suburbia soundtrack actually very good (Bowie once said it was his favourite), the Eno-produced Outside decent in parts (and I caught the tour at Wembley Arena), but I just couldn't get into Earthling and Hours. 
Come the 00s, Heathen Earth and Reality were merely OK, although Liz & I saw a great show at the Budokan in Tokyo in 2003... and then nothing. I see that Jon Barnbrook, who designed the last two albums, has come up with a controversial sleeve for the new one (see right). 
Which brings us to the 'Where Are We Now' single, out today. The theme of the album sleeve kind of suggests "forget the past", so it's odd that the song and video are all about Berlin, harking back to the late 70s. Tony Oursler's video is predictably, reassuringly strange, but who is Bowie sitting next to on that couch?