roads of stone

There’s a brick building at the end of the street where I grew up. I run past it every time I’m in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Today, it’s just an empty shell.

After more than seventy years, a new Royal Shakespeare Theatre is being built inside the framework of the old one.

It’s a constraining decision, architecturally - which limits the capacity and design of the new theatre, whilst still destroying the marvellous art deco foyer within. Just think - for £110 mm we could have had a Sydney Opera House instead of a revamped old blockhouse with only 1,000 seats - a third fewer than before.

Looking across the river now, I can see empty space where the heart of the building should be.

And in a way, that’s just how it was in 1970 when I saw my first Shakespeare play here - Peter Brook’s famous ‘White Box’ production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, famously staged inside a chasm of blank white walls.
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So. Farewell then
Barack Hussein Obama
The Audacity of Hope

For five January days
We believed
The world could change

And then New Hampshire
Told you
They’d changed their minds
Instead.

With apologies to EJ Thribb (17 ½)

* * * * *

Coming soon:
To mark the start of USA 2008 this column is taking temporary residence deep in the snows of New Hampshire.

Please see From Scratch for a specially syndicated Roads of Stone, reporting on the US primaries.

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17. It’s puzzling - a letter on Iraq, to Tony Blair
71. How the West Was Won - Iraq implodes

Hot news from the internet red carpets of Tinseltown is that thanks to EllaElla of From Scratch, this site has been nominated for a Thinking Blogger Award.

That must surely have been a misprint, though.

Certainly Tuesday evening’s incredibly muddy Hash Run through a thunderstorm might much more easily have led to a Sinking Blogger.

The trashed state of my socks later could also have justified the soubriquet of Stinking Blogger (but let’s not go there, shall we?)

And after ‘following’ a floating flour trail during a torrential cloudburst, a belated arrival at the pub was more than cause enough for my enthusiastic reclassification as a Drinking Blogger.

Honestly, Ella, there wasn’t all that much thinking involved, but thank you very much, all the same.
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Sometimes the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.

Walking from Waterloo Station to the City of London, you can read this entire poem along the underpass.

Eurydice, by Sue Hubbard

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11. London Snow by Robert Bridges

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champ’d the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor.
The Listeners
Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)

It’s unusual to find a poem on the side of a building, especially picked out in brick and 15 m high, but that is one of the unique attractions of the Guildford Travel Inn.

It may be one of the few, actually, since its location right beside the booming A3 dual carriageway is nowhere near as lyrical as the inspiration adorning it. But it cheered me to learn that its author Walter de la Mare was born in Maryon Road in Charlton, just a short sprint from mile 4 on the London Marathon course.
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I’m sitting on old Guildford station
Got a ticket for my destination
How I wish I was
Homeward bound

I’m on a tour by rail you see
‘Cos tonight I’m out in the great City
And the day at work’s begun for me
This rock hound with a BlackBerry
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“O, how this spring of love resembleth the uncertain glory of an April day” - Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act 1, Sc. 3
Picture a fine and blustery English spring day in Stratford-upon- Avon. I’ve returned from Guildford to my home town for this weekend of processions marking the Shakespeare Birthday celebrations.

An East End boy, I moved to Warwickshire at the age of 9, and these streets I know so well are today lined with flags from over a hundred nations, flying briskly in the breeze.

“Now go we in content…” - As You Like It, Act 1, Sc. 3
Lining up outside the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in warm sunshine, reflecting on London and Chicago behind me, I am instantly humbled when my neighbour tells me this is his 126th marathon. Just the third for me and the day’s long road is frankly unimaginable at this moment, but soon we start and it all begins.
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In pictures: Snow in the capital
There was a rare sight in London on Wednesday as the city disappeared under a blanket of snow (pictures ©BBC).

LONDON SNOW
by Robert Seymour Bridges

When men were all asleep the snow came flying,
In large white flakes falling on the city brown,
Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying,
Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town; (more…)