Ellis Jones

I’m really sorry, I’m having all kinds of problems with the Blogspot format.

I have a new entry ready, but when I try to publish the server mangles it and it looks a total mess.

I will be publishing shortly on a new platform, and will put the link on the web-site, and announce it on Facebook, Twitter, etc

The new blog will not be in a Google format, so it should be available throughout the world, which Google products are not.

Bear with me!

Ellis

A note about this entry, written in November – I wrote this in near despair – in fact I now publish this blog on both Blogspot and WordPress platforms

As the winter drizzle sets in, as the festivities loom, spare a thought for the street artists. And the geese. Both are in abundance around Walthamstow right now. On walls, doors and gates around E17 there are foxes, herons, and an amazing hawk hovers at the Coppermill bus-stop. 
And behold – an artists and a goose have coincided at my garage door!

Not just any goose – an Egyptian goose, one of the marshlands’ more recent incomers, an elegantly colourful creature, defined by bright plumage and orange spectacles. The artist is the wonderfully talented Hannah Adamaszic, one of the post-Banksy generation, lifting street images away from the weird, often obscure mysteries of graffiti, to bring real style, wit and craft to our public spaces.

Hannah signs her pictures “Hannah Chloe” – look out for her work: for instance, if you walk the east London marshes, her foxes and birds brighten the underpass beneath the train-line from Liverpool St. Or if you were around Waterloo last week you might have been lucky and caught her show “Fresh” in the street-cum-tunnel that is Leake St, close by the entrance to the Vaults, one of London’s wackier performance venues. I hope her main image is still there, adorning the ceiling – go seek it out. And visit Hannah’s website – the link is below. If you’ve a wall, a door, a gate – or a caravan, a boat or a bus – that needs a lift, you need Hannah!

Long ago on a cruise ship far away a bunch of actors, who I’d engaged to perform in plays offered by the RADA graduate/Cunard Shipping Line theatre company, got bored. After some weeks  of filling the languid hours between performing plays and running drama workshops with drinking cocktails and counting seagulls, they decided they should be more creative, so they made a movie. A full-length, feature spoof James Bond movie called “The Scampi Trail”, complete with explosions, helicopter sequences, fancy cars including an Aston Martin, gorgeous women, exotic locations and a selection of arresting, if sometimes eccentric performances, not the least eccentric being one from me as “M”. You can witness the whole thing on Youtube on the link below – but the point of mentioning this now is to announce that the two movers and shakers behind this venture, Will Norris and Craig Gallivan have come up with their second film project. Now these guys are actors – sometimes they have some money, sometimes not  – and certainly never enough to fund movie-making. So they fund-raise amongst their pals, they trade favours (Will reckons the main expense of “The Scampi Trail” was eight bottles of champagne swapped for the loan of cars and locations) – and for their latest venture they also ran a campaign via www.Kickstarter.com

The upshot is a crunchy, finely-crafted “short” called “The Lock-in” which had a private showing last weekend at the Everyman Baker St.
It’s a tightly-scripted, neatly shot dark comedy and has two excellent central performances from the quite exceptionally lovely Sophia di Martino and one of RADA’s (as yet) not sufficiently celebrated talents, Caolan Byrne. It’s going to be rolled out in 2016 on the festival circuit, and I’ll keep you posted.
Caolan Byrne Photo: Jessica Carney Associates
Trailer link: https://vimeo.com/139964274

And talking of “indie” movies, regular readers will recall my warm response to “Radiator”, which was launched at last year’s London Film Festival, and stars Gemma Jones and my (since sadly departed) friend Richard Johnson. Well, as we’d hoped it’s been given a richly deserved, if limited, cinema release. Another cunningly constructed, beautiful example of low-budget work, set in Cumbria – don’t miss it if turns up at a nearby cinema.
                                                   Gemma Jones in”Radiator” Photo: Cambridge Film Festival

Trailer link: https://vimeo.com/106483233
         
Meanwhile, back to goings-on in London E17, some worrying, some optimistic. This blog generally avoids matters political, but on the eve of the parliamentary vote about sending the RAF to try to attack the Syrian terrorists I walked out of the Village pub straight into a demonstration aimed at persuading our local Labour MP,  Stella Creasy, to vote against. 

There were perhaps a couple of hundred people there, and I listened to the case being put sensibly and clearly by several speakers representing the Muslim community. There were also less clear, less convincing and far less articulate speeches by non-Muslim individuals, one of whom tried to stir the crowd into chants of “Walthamstow says NO!” with only desultry, rather sheepish results. The following day our MP chose to support the government motion, and triggered a spattering of infantile social media abuse and threats to “de-select” her.  Oh dear: I fear Dave Spart may have moved to E17. He may even drink in the Village…

And now the optimism, albeit cautious. I reported some months ago that there is hope of saving the superb art-deco Granada Cinema in Hoe St. Local pressure persuaded the Council to refuse permission for it to be sold to an evangelical church, and now it’s been bought by the Antic pub company, who say they are willing to collaborate with Soho Theatre in combining the pub operation with two auditoria offering “art” film showings and live theatre productions. 

Well, the first part of that is now happening  – you can call in and drink beer or cocktails, and munch posh sausage rolls in the faded grandeur of the front-of-house areas, as I did but three nights ago. Will the creative part of the bargain be honoured in 2016? Watch this space…

And if, come the New Year, you feel in need of a paint-job, here’s Hahhah’s web-site:

http://hannahadamaszek.com

If you’d like to respond,  if you disagree with any of the above, or would like to add a comment or two, I’d love to hear from you – you can do so anonymously, if you like – and I’ll happily publish your views. Just click on the word “comments” in the little panel below, and follow the instructions.  

“Where, oh where Jones have you been?”

I hear faint cries from the tiny band of readers who haven’t given up entirely on this blog in the weeks since the last entry. Well, I’ve been to London Bridge, I’ve been to Cambridge, and I’ve been to the Charing Cross Road. And I’ve been BUSY, distracted from bloggery by having to learn lines…


Yes, after years of absence from the boards – what Equity calls an “honourable withdrawal” – I’ve been given a chance to make an honourable return, to fulfil a supporting but hopefully useful function as understudy to the remarkable actor Kenneth Cranham, in a remarkable play. This is Florian Zeller’s “The Father”, which won the Prix Molière  in Paris last year, the English production of which has come to the West End from Bath Theatre Royal via The Kilburn Tricycle Theatre. James Macdonald’s crisp, sparse production has received more five-star reviews than any other London play for over a decade. We’re now settled into one of the West End’s most beautiful theatres – the Wyndhams – for a limited run until November 21st.

It’s one of the best jobs ever – a lovely company, a cracking play, and a meaty part to get the teeth into in rehearsal without too much danger of having to go before a paying West End audience, since Mr Cranham is as fit and robust as they come.

However, the management surprised us by scheduling a public understudy performance for an invited audience last week. About 300 people turned up, and we managed to give a tidy account of the piece – though I say it myself as shouldn’t – we being my fellow understudies Emily Stride and Tom Michael Blyth, supported by principal actors Rebecca Charles, Kirsty Oswald, and Jim Sturgeon. We had a lovely time, and for me it was well, a sort of homecoming. I’d honestly not realised that deep down I was missing performing onstage, and what a stage on which to return!

Wyndham’s Theatre is a jewel – a masterpiece of Victorian elegance designed by William Sprague, commissioned by actor-manager Charles Wyndham, and it’s graced the Charing Cross Rd since 1898. Unlike some other London venues, it has excellent sight-lines, and an acoustic as sweet as a nut. So it’s a joy to visit, whether you go there to watch or to perform. We were so lucky in that we had an outstanding show stage-management team, great resident theatre staff and in Stella Powell-Jones a fine rehearsal director, all of whom went out of their way to make sure last Tuesday afternoon’s experience was as good as it could possibly be for all concerned. We’ve only got a couple more weeks at the Wyndham’s but there is talk of a regional tour next year, so I do hope that if you haven’t seen it yet, you will next year – and if you’re reading this in America, look out for a new production on Broadway, which I understand is planned for next March.

The play explores the distressing world of dementia, and reflects life as seen through the eyes of someone increasingly afflicted by Alzheimer’s – and yet the tricky subject is so skilfully realised by the writer that even audience members with painful related experiences say they find the show rewarding and entertaining. Last week the play was nominated for the Evening Standard Best New Play Award, and Ken’s been nominated as Best Actor. Ken is partnered onstage by Claire Skinner – two outstanding talents, both at the top of their game.

A quick re-cap. We the under-buddies, as we quaintly call ourselves, joined the “The Father” production as it paused between the Tricycle and the West End transfer. Two new principal cast members had to be settled in during 5 days’ rehearsal – this is a commercial production, so learn your lines, turn up and make it work – no leisurely subsidised theatre rehearsal régime here.  We understudies had to sit down, take notes, and get learning, just in case…. 

The TRB production company had hired into rehearsal rooms at the Menier Chocolate Factory, the fringe theatre near London Bridge. It was in fact a lovely, lovely week – if you were about London in September you’ll recall we had a glorious spell of late summer sun, so in our breaks we sauntered around the Southwark streets, just as  Will Shakespeare, Dick Burbage and the other lads in the Lord Chamberlain’s company would have done between rehearsals over at the Globe, two streets away. 











Like them, we strolled into the cathedral (where Will’s brother Edmund still rests) and wandered into the market nearby, salivating at the range of foods the stalls offer. If you’ve a free lunchtime, get down there and treat yourself. Glorious cheeses, wondrous fruits and salads, hot roast pork sandwiches – abundance beyond compare! A different indulgent pic-nic lunch for each of the five days, perched on a wall beside the cathedral, the river glistening in the sunlight, gleaming from the glass ramparts of the Shard high above in the blue.





And then off to Cambridge, for a two-week run at the Arts Theatre. Mostly, we had sunshine there too, and while the production played itself in there was time to enjoy more streets steeped in history, more ancient buildings, each evening a view of the sun setting over King’s College, but yards from the stage door.

  


                                              






                                         

                                                                                           
(Romney Abbey, a New Forest pony at Beaulieu, the Park at Hinton Abner House, Lymington Harbour)









The New Forest ponies are amazing – while they are all owned by local “commoners” (residents who have grazing rights) many of them roam freely in the forest and wander through the villages. My sister and I shared a moment of alarm at Beaulieu when three ponies suddenly charged around the street-corner where we were standing, startled by a passing fire-engine. They are all beautiful and febrile, and bring a whiff of Narnia to this idyllic, ancient landscape. And these truly are the English shires. We met our friends Antonia and Robin for supper at a “Pub with No Name” in deepest Hampshire – low ceilings hung with pewter mugs and dried hops, good hand-pumped beer brewed on the premises, a meal of bangers and lumpy mash. Had Tom Bombadil stomped through the door in search of young Frodo and that darned ring, not an eyebrow would have been batted.

The gentle tempo of the countryside brought comfort, for which I was grateful. This has been in fact a bleak time, as old friends and I mourned the loss of one of our number, a cornerstone of my life since 1967. Many of you will have seen the obituaries of Sue Sheridan (there’s a link to The Guardian one below) whose lovely voice has been part of our soundscape since the days of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide”. We joined with her remarkable family on Thursday at Windsor to say farewell. It was a perfectly planned event – Sue has been battling cancer for two decades, so the ceremony was to her own careful, immaculate design, complete with a neat farewell joke, which left us laughing through tears. I still can’t believe she’s gone.

This was to have been a fairly flippant entry – I indicated in the last one that I’d tell more tales of my time in China, including the visit to Tianjin, where I’d stayed in an amazingly luxurious hotel suite, complete with an alarmingly high-tech bathroom. But of course last week Tianjin saw those terrifying chemical explosions, and my first reaction when the news broke was concern for my university assistant Xixi, whose family live in the city. Fortunately they’re all OK, and she has sent me an inspiring account of the support the local community is giving the victims, especially the families of the young fire-fighters who perished. Clearly there has been at best gross incompetence, at worst wicked corruption. Tianjin is bigger than London – it’s full of elegant, post-colonial buildings, and is home to a world-class Music Conservatoire, which hosted a conference I attended. The journey there from Beijing was incredibly rapid – by a real high-speed train, at two hundred and forty miles an hour. I’ve only just come across this photo from the Daily Mail picture desk, which gives an indication of the devastation caused by the explosions. Imagine this in London’s Docklands…    



Photo: Daily Mail. Please note that sometimes press photos are taken down, despite the source being credited. The Guardian website has another powerful picture at this link:
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/aug/15/the-20-photographs-of-the-week#img-14

Before moving to cheerier matters, I must note a few more echoes of mortality. Richard Johnson’s farewell at the actors’ church in Covent Garden was graced by wryly affectionate mementoes from Laurence Fox and Janet Suzman, and with lovely singing by his daughter Suky. Like Sue, Richard was ultimately a victim of cancer, and this week there was dire news of the death from cancer at only 44 of Kitty McGeever, a heroic graduate from my early days at RADA, who became a much-loved star of “Emmerdale” despite being afflicted with blindness a decade or so ago . A friend of mine refers to cancer as “the blind sniper” – casual, random and merciless.

Sometimes – alas by no means always – the theatre affords a retreat from sadness, and brings a burst of joy. This summer, while many friends and colleagues are in Edinburgh seeking the new and marvellous at the Festival, my excursions into London’s theatre-land have been fewer than elsewhere in the year – but one such has been a sheer delight, the entirely aptly-named musical BEAUTIFUL, at the Aldwych.  The ticket was a present from a friend, and boy did it cheer me up – and not just because I didn’t pay! Go if you get the chance – OK, it’s a sort of “juke-box” show, in that it showcases lots of songs – but hey, what songs Carol King has written  – “You’ve Got a Friend” alone has always been on My Desert Island list – but it’s cleverly written, brilliantly staged and choreographed, cast to the hilt with stunning performers. There are two singing troupes – 4 black guys and 4 black girls – basically representing the Drifters and the Shirelles – who deliver hit after gorgeous hit with glorious, sexy panache. All the central performers give strong performances, and Katie Brayben as Carol King shows every second she’s onstage why she walked away with the Olivier award. She acts with raw honesty, and sings her heart out. DO NOT MISS IT!

Meanwhile, what are we to do about the Greeks? I don’t mean today’s poor souls grappling with too few euros and too many boat people, I mean the plays from their theatre’s Golden Age, which of late seem to have become a magnet for directors and star actors in London. Favourites among these writers from two and half thousand years ago are the trio of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Musings as to why this should be started when a friend from university days very kindly took me to see the current version of “The Bakkhai”at the Almeida Theatre in Islington, a piece which won its writer Euripides the equivalent of an Olivier Award in Athens back in 405 B.C., and in which my friend Tony and I both appeared at Manchester University almost as long ago, directed by Stephen Joseph (of whom more later).

The Almeida show has been scripted by the poet Anne Carson, who also adapted Sophocles’s “Electra” last year, which played at the Barbican and which I also saw.  And in the same season I witnessed Helen McCrory giving “Medea” at the National, and Kristen Scot Thomas deliver “Antigone” at the Old Vic. Now I don’t dispute that these roles are tempting for actors, since they are supposed to get to the very core of human existence, and in order to work at all have to be performed with tremendous power and charisma. Ms McCory in particular has masses of both, as do both Ben Whishaw and Bertie Carvell,  two Radagrads on top of their game at the Almeida.

But the plays themselves – what do they really add to the lives of modern audiences? As prescribed by Aristotle in “The Poetics” if I remember my first-year university studies correctly, tragedy will take an audience through an experience of both Pity and Terror. Ah. I loved watching Ms McCory – though I suspect I might have preferred her doing a play with a bit more zestful action – “Macbeth” for instance – and Ben and Bertie are both mesmerising talents, whose work I will travel far to watch. But in “The Bakkhai” their characters exist in the context of a story about a bunch of out-of-control Greek women, given to ripping men limb from limb in violent, drug-induced sexual frenzy. Now here’s a chance for Pity and Terror, you may well think. But at the Almeida the women are depicted by a beautifully controlled, tightly rehearsed choir of excellent female performers, delivering interesting musical settings of the relevant bits of the text, which I would have happily paid to listen to at concert in the Wigmore Hall.

Bertie acted Pentheus’s bewilderment extremely well, and yes, OK, I felt pity for his plight, but mainly I just enjoyed watching his consummate skill as an actor, without accepting for a second that he was under any real threat.The Bacchic chorus induced nothing remotely resembling Terror. On the other hand, when at the Aldwych Katie Brayben’s Carol King is told her husband has left her and their children to live with another woman, she hits the opening notes of “One Fine Day” – and lo! – the Pity arrives “wham!” in the pit of your stomach, and Terror of how Lust can destroy human dignity and compassion zaps you right between the eyes!

Through my letter box as I write this has come a flyer from Shakespeare’s Globe, announcing that a new version of “The Orestia” is to be offered there shortly, under the direction of Adele Thomas. Now regular readers will know that I took great delight in praising Adele’s splendid work on “The Knight of the Burning Pestle”. If anyone can bring an archaic text to vibrant life it’s her. So over to you Adele – no pressure….  

Theatre of the not quite-so-distant past is being celebrated this summer up at Yorkshire’s finest seaside resort, at the Stephen Joseph Theatre. It is sixty years since the great mentor (who had huge influence on so many of today’s theatre practitioners – including me – and who died in 1967) ran the first season of plays at Scarborough’s Library Theatre, from which developed one of Britain’s most significant regional producing companies, for years of course under the leadership of Alan Ayckbourn. Sir Alan has directed a revival of his “Confusions” to celebrate the anniversary, which I’m looking forward greatly to seeing next Saturday. Not a man who could ever be accused of sloth, he opens his production of his new play “Hero’s Welcome” at the SJT on September 4th.

In this so often distressing world great comedy makers must be celebrated and cherished. Many miles from Scarborough, another great mirth-maker has been honoured by being appointed Artistic Director of the new Chinese National Theatre of Comedy. Chen Peisi’s show “The Stage”, the rehearsals for which I reported on in my last entry has opened to great acclaim in Beijing. Friendly contact has been made between Scarborough and Beijing, which may just produce interesting future developments. It’s very early days – watch this space…. 

Links:

Susan: http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/aug/19/susan-sheridan

Scarborough: https://www.sjt.uk.com/theatre/heros-welcome-0

Beijing:

http://english.cntv.cn/2015/07/17/VIDE1437127080140453.shtml


If you’d like to respond,  if you disagree with any of the above, or would like to add a comment or two, I’d love to hear from you – you can do so anonymously, if you like – and I’ll happily publish your views. Just click on the word “comments” in the little panel below, and follow the instructions.  

Oh dear oh dear not a blog since April!

I’m back at last, back to the land of coppery sunsets – here’s one captured over my back-garden last week, as the waves of heat drifted up from the Sahara…

                                         Sunset, Walthamstow
                                                                                                                     

Sunset, the Forbidden City

If there are any of you still out there, I’m so sorry to have let the more-or-less monthly bulletins lapse. I think last time I promised a message from China – and indeed that was the  plan – I just hadn’t realised that in taking myself off to Far Cathay I was stepping into a Great Politico-Corporate Dispute. This blog is written on a Google “platform”. Now some of you may understand what a digital “platform” is – I don’t and I beg you not to try to explain it – but the Google corporation, in an argument with the Beijing government over who controls what, has withdrawn all Google-related services from the Chinese mainland. So blogging was out, as was indeed any traffic on the TYA e-mail and also any on my personal e-mail account, which has a gmail address.
                                                                                                               
With help from a brilliant graduate student called Eric at the Shanghai Theatre Academy I was able to set up a temporary “QQ” email account, so contact with home was not entirely severed. But normal bloggery was out of the question – but in fact I was so ridiculously busy all the time I was there, any reportage would likely have been flustered and brief. Life continued to be flustered on my return, first from the demands of Miss Wilson and the Battle of Waterloo, and then of a compensatory BA trip to the South of France.

But now the treadmill has STOPPED, and will stay creaking on its spindle for the next couple of months, since  – alas! – the New York University summer course I had thought I was going to lead in Manhattan has been cancelled. But Summer in the City this last week has meant London, never mind swirling dust on the Lower East Side – sweltering sidewalks, warnings of melting tarmac, of trains being slowed for fear the rails might buckle, free bottles of water at the railway stations. After treading the sultry streets of Shanghai, after inhaling the fumes of Beijing traffic, after baking in the mid-day market at Aix, I’m grateful for the fitful breezes whipping ripples across Reservoir Number Five, the poetically-named watery expanse beyond my east London garden fence. There’s so much to report – the Incident of the Shanghai Lion, the Terrifying Toilet of Tianjin, swimming with the Ghost of the Chairman, and not least the Summer Solstice cha-cha-cha, which even yet is the talk of the bars in Provence…

But before all that, a pause to acknowledge the passing of Richard Johnson. One of my favourite actors – a proper, proper Leading Man – the best Mark Anthony of them all, a great producer and director, a brilliant tutor, and wonderful wit and raconteur. His wry account of the – absolutely true – story of his turning down the role of James Bond in “Dr No” was always to be treasured, along with tales of his Hollywood days, adventures with the likes of Richard Harris and Frank Sinatra. Richard had become a pal in recent years – he spent some time leading one of the companies of RADA actors we put on the Cunard Queen Mary 2 – and so it was good to read in the Guardian obituary that his very last movie, which I watched as his guest at last year’s London Film Festival, is to go on release later this year. Starring Richard and Gemma Jones, it’s called RADIATOR and is a lyrical and moving true story set in Cumbria. Look out for it – it’s a treat, and there’s a link to the trailer at the end of this entry. Richard’s funeral was last week, and there is to be a celebration of his remarkable life and work at the end of July, which if course will be reported here. God bless, Richard, miss you lots – especially the phone-calls starting “Listen old boy, I’ve had an idea – now this one’s a cracker…”

I got to know Richard because he was on RADA’s governing Council during my time as VP, so it’s fitting to note some Academy events before I move on to Traveller’s Tales.

The RADA Festival has been in full swing these last couple of weeks – I caught Rob Mountford’s brilliant journey through VAGABONDS, Andrew Bone’s latest engaging foray into film-making, CREMORIES, Tara Hugo’s stunning Philip Glass recital, and the long-awaited musical IN GAY COMPANY. This is the work of the late Fred Silver, long championed by the indefatigable and hugely talented Tom Wakeley.

Kelly Burke

Gary Tushaw

Tom, along with our TV superstar choreographer Darren Royston, gave it a sparkling presentation, featuring a spruce, smart company with two bright stars from my time, Kelly Burke and Gary Tushaw. There are useful links about all of these further down the page.
              


                                      

And before we leave Gower St, another reminder that the great London theatre schools like RADA and RCSSD don’t just train actors – also this week saw the Costume and Set Design exhibition, displaying absolutely top-level work. It was all exemplary, but I was especially taken by Maria Bracher’s zestful, eye-catching costumes.  She’s off into the movie industry – look out for that name as the credits role.

Now –  to roll back a few weeks, to another creative campus. In the month of May, had you been in China and had you wandered by the Shanghai Theatre Academy (which is to be found in the leafy streets of the old French Concession) you could have come across a poster featuring a picture of a fine and shaggy lion.

Amongst the Chinese characters beneath the image you might have noticed my name in European letters. This was advertising two workshops and a lecture I’d been booked to give for the students – not about lions, about directing British comedy. I still don’t know why the lion. I caught a distant echo of Snug the Joiner, and made sure the students at my sessions were fully clear that I was “no lion fell, nor else no lion’s dam”. I noted the look of polite but deepening puzzlement spreading from my interpreter to my listeners, and moved swiftly on.

This visit related to a project back in 2010, when I directed Shanghai Academy students in a Mandarin translation of Alan Ayckbourn’s TAKING STEPS. Now my colleagues at STA, Professor Sun and Dr Shen Liang, are minded to establish an academic study of Sir Alan’s work, to stimulate more translations of his plays and books.  Widely admired and feted though his plays are in Europe and the English-speaking world, as far as is known the 2010 “Taking Steps” remains the only officially-sanctioned production ever to have happened on the Chinese mainland. It’s very early days, but it would be very exciting and intriguing were this to change. The unerring Ayckbourn commentary on the mores of middle-class England may seem far removed from the worlds of the Bund, Beijing Opera and Olympic drummers, but as the economy of this huge nation grows, so grows its middle class…We shall see – there’s more about this in a minute.

And so north to Beijing. I spent two weeks with the Communications Department of the University of Beijing, also known as Peking University, also known as PKU. I worked on a project helping to build the English communications skills of graduate students training in international arts management, and  on moves to further links between PKU and the UK arts world. I also attended a conference on arts management in Tianjin, and spoke at another in Beijing on cross-cultural links, giving a paper called “Is Comedy International?” So it was all a bit busy. But there was fun to be had, and the Head of the Department  – my old friend and colleague Professor Lin Yi  – made sure that I and the other Western visitors were properly looked after by her wonderfully friendly and efficient team, all of whom speak excellent English.

My principal “minder”was XiXi – a ball of high-voltage energy who had spent her teenage years in Canada, and is doing her MFA in Beijing. Extraordinary organising skills, a swift and sharp intelligence – and above all a relentless sense of humour – are going to make her one day a manager to be reckoned with. She’s considering going on to do her PhD in London. If she does, stand back…
                                                                                     
As a pampered academic guest one hardly gets a truly objective overview, but my overall impression, given the five years since I last spent time there, and in the tiny fraction of this huge country I visited, is of more general prosperity, and of even more confidence. During my seven weeks in Shanghai in 2010 one repeatedly came across areas of real, distressing poverty. This time less so – of course, there’s still poverty, but there are thousands of small businesses, looking busy and smart. It’s a nation coming to a peak of economic power – comparable perhaps to Britain in the days of Empire – and of course one hears horrendous tales of worker exploitation out there in the vast factories feeding the shops on Western high streets. This blog has no aspirations to economic or political analysis, one can only convey subjective feelings as a visitor – all I can say is if London felt like a world capital in the 19th century, and New York a dominant super-city for much of the 20th, then Beijing gives a sense of starting to enjoy its turn…

Here are some pictures of both Shanghai and Beijing. Everyone talks about the pollution, and yes you’re aware of fumes in the air – but they’re working on it. For instance, in neither city are there petrol or diesel motor-bikes – just hundreds of electric scooters – which can be a bit alarming at night, as to save power they don’t use their lights  – and in Shanghai drive blithely along the pavements!

Evening rush-hour, Beijing

Morning Tai-chi, Shanghai

Downtown Shanghai

People’s Park, Shanghai

Summer Palace view, Beijing

Photo: Xi Dai

If you’d like to respond,  if you disagree with any of the above, or would like to add a comment or two, I’d love to hear from you – you can do so anonymously, if you like – and I’ll happily publish your views. Just click on the word “comments” in the little panel below, and follow the instructions.