roads of stone

182. The truth about global warming

Roads — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:52:29 +0000

The sun is out again in London, after an unusually cool spring. It’s been a cold winter across much of Europe and North America, too. But the year is turning now, as it always does eventually.

Cooler weather will come and go. Floods, droughts, disasters, snowstorms and heatwaves, too. That is the nature of living on the Earth. You’ll see reporters referring unusual weather events to climate change, but that’s largely misleading, and it’s misinformed as well.

So let’s not get confused. That is only weather, and it’s not the same as climate. Reports like those just serve to confuse the public.

The urgently pressing fact is that climate change is real. And it’s happening.

There’s a clear scientific consensus here, except amongst a tiny minority of scientists who are funded by the very worst elements of the fossil fuel industry. This 2004 article explains the point.

The truth is that just a few vested interests have supported an entirely misguided public belief that real scientists are divided on the issues.

So let me tell you now - they are not.

This delusion of differing scientific opinions is peddled enthusiastically by a small number of isolated but vociferous so-called ‘researchers’, many of them funded by big oil. The tragic legacy of this cynical manipulation of public opinion began with the systematic undermining during the late 1980s and 1990s of the global negotiations leading up to Rio and Kyoto (for details, I recommend the dramatic account within Jeremy Leggett’s book The Carbon War).

A decade on, the scale of misinformation (the denial industry) remains breathtaking, as explored in George Monbiot’s excellent book Heat).

Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth did much to draw worldwide attention to the critical role of manmade carbon emissions in driving recent climate change. But the involvement of a political figure is in some respects distracting, since this is a debate which we simply can’t afford to politicise.

And whilst the science is straightforward, Gore is guilty of some simplifications. We need to appreciate that global temperature variations reflect the superimposed effects of both anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions (increasing, and accelerating) and a lower amplitude natural cyclicity in solar insolation (currently entering a relative low).

The solar effects are presently counteracting the influence of rising carbon dioxide, but that is only a temporary reprieve, and it’s not really a reprieve at all.

There’s an excellently-framed analysis here: Climate change in the public debate. A basic appreciation of the science along these lines clearly refutes the oft-cited red herring that global warming stopped in 1998.

That’s a view you’ll hear from the climate change sceptics. They’re good at propaganda, since they’re well funded and well versed in the manipulation of public opinion. But that inference isn’t just misleading - it’s tragically inaccurate.

The point is that inside a decade, the insolation budget will fall again, and carbon dioxide levels will have risen even further, with dangerous effect.

So let me reprise Monbiot, just for a moment. He has four simple questions for anyone who might be inclined to a sceptical view of global warming.

1. Does the atmosphere contain carbon dioxide?

2. Does atmospheric carbon dioxide raise the average global temperature?

3. Will this influence be enhanced by the addition of more carbon dioxide?

4. Have human activities led to a net emission of carbon dioxide?

Monbiot continues, “If you can answer ‘no’ to any of these questions, you should put yourself forward for a Nobel Prize. You’ll have turned science on its head.”

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181. The Ophelia of Suburbia – Hogsmill River, Ewell

Roads — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:19:58 +0000

The rain is falling softly beneath a grey and weeping sky.

Dull, wet, oppressive sinks the afternoon, through a rising restlessness I can’t define. Puddles beneath my feet. Familiar streets chiding my every turn.

Northeastwards from here in Epsom, the city stretches wide. Twenty miles to London Bridge, and as many reaching out beyond. The megalopolis, looming heavy in the rain.

I pull the cap down above my face, and strike a steady rhythm towards the Friday traffic. My shoes are pattering on the pavement, the sound of my breathing counting out the flow of time. Moments passing, each with thoughts unopened and memories wiping clean.

London’s suburbia was surely built for days like these. Unwelcoming, pointless hours spent just existing, nowhere.

Far from the madding crowd, and yet unconnected with the primaeval landscape. No joyful hedgerows here, no rolling contours to stretch the mind. No thrill of city either, nor vibrant urban night ahead.

Just greyness, stretching out in all its mediocrity. City tears, weaving weary paths across the empty afternoon.

Ewell looks grim and uninviting. A hamlet beside the Downs it may once have been, before the city swallowed it between the wars.

And what is it now? A dislocated high street – a clapperboard house and a Georgian façade or two, submerged and cast adrift amidst the seamless thirties sprawl. Commuterland reaching down the railway to swab away its lifeblood and choke the spirit of its suffocated heart.

The cars wait dripping at the lights. All across this Friday’s soggy conurbation, a million drivers’ lives are wasting deep within the traffic. A woe of contraflow far out near Cobham. A lorry shed its load at Loughton. Angst and umbrage, stretching way past Uxbridge.

Across the road stands a lonely pool of water. Encased in brick and stone it might be, and yet it’s as natural as the rain. The name Ewell comes from the Old English Aewell, meaning river source or spring.

Unlikely as it seems, this pond marks a geological boundary, half-sunk today beside a busy road and a suburban council park. To the south lies Chalk, rising dry towards the downlands. And north from here – London Clay, dark and black and muddy, yet impermeable to water.

This ancient springline has tales to tell. Of Roman soldiers, thirsty as they marched on Stane Street. Of early settlement and the birth of this village.

Woodsmen, cattle herders, sheep shearers and farmers once gathered beside the running water. Legend has it that William the Conqueror stopped his horse to drink right here – perhaps on his triumphant march to London, almost ninehundred and fifty years ago.

The stream heads north, and I leave the road to follow through a leafy glade beside the Hogsmill River. Deep and dark, spreading ten metres wide already, the current flows languidly past reeds and rushes and between Victorian houses now, ambling on towards the Thames ahead.

A set of shallow dams and complex channels lie forgotten beside the path – the mill race of a gunpowder factory which stood here long ago. Around a bend, the stream wanders under a boardwalk to find a tunnel beneath the railway embankment. Then, running faster, the Hogsmill River narrows into green and open space at last.

The riverbank is dark and wet, a riverside of mud to splash around my ankles. No buildings are in sight now, just trees and bushes and lush broad grass. A thin leap of stream and floodplain stretching green towards the city.

Nature irrepressible, trickling constant through the tide of all development.

A map stands here, plotting the Hogsmill’s nine mile cut across suburbia to meet the Thames at Kingston. Somewhere nearby, it says, Millais’ most famous work was set – his painting of Ophelia. Hamlet’s tragic love, fallen from a willow tree, laid low amongst the reeds to drown.

The river walk beckons further, and the afternoon is slowly brightening. But it’s past too late already. Reluctantly I find the stepping stones, submerged today an inch or two to fit the rainy afternoon. I splash across and up the other bank to head slowly south, my shoes tripping silently through the grass.

On another afternoon of sparse blue and fluffy clouds of white, I’ll return to find this place. The thin vein of nature and vestigial landscape will paint their play on brighter days, when willows weep green tears of guilt for Ophelia, falling loose across the sunshine.

The last blades of grass run hard against the afternoon’s encircling greyness. Ahead lie houses, streets and offices. The city’s sprawling grasp reaching through the dying hours of a working week still left to kill.

Finally, it’s five miles or six that fall behind me on this run of buried rocks and hidden stream.

An hour cut through London’s damp tragedy of suburbia – and all wrung out, along a muddy road of stone.

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180. Mountains of food - la cuisine savoyarde

Roads — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 02:08:13 +0000

I was in Haute-Savoie last week – part of the ancient kingdom of Savoy – that mountainous corner of France set around Mont Blanc and south of the Swiss city of Geneva. The name Savoy comes from the latin sapaudia, or fir forest – an origin still heard in the French word sapin (fir tree).

Long an independent duchy, the area was occupied by Napoleon’s troops from 1792-1815. After a period as part of Sardinia, Savoy was annexed by France in 1860.

The region has strong associations with Piedmont in Italy, and with French-speaking Switzerland (Turin and Geneva are both much nearer than Paris). The local dialects reflect old mountain French with a smattering of Italian.

But the food doesn’t reflect Italy or France. Savoie is a stronghold of Alpine cuisine. Don’t expect delicate French dishes – this is the home of solidly calorific monster feasts to fuel any long day on the slopes.

Alpine cuisine owes its character to the sheer isolation of mountain communities. Access along the tortuous valleys was difficult in summer, and impossible through the deep snow and ice of winter. Supplies of vegetables, salad and fruit may form the basis of great Mediterranean cooking, but here they simply couldn’t get through.

So the mountain folk survived on foods they could produce locally and store safely for months on end. Just like Switzerland, Savoy is famed for its rustically robust dishes of meat, sausage, cheese, and potatoes.

We found all of these on the menu at Chez Pierrot in Flaine. As you might expect, fondue is a standard here – this year we chose fondue à cèpes, rich with the flavour of mushrooms.

Then a pile of thinly sliced steak – which we cooked right at our table. In southern Savoie and the Italian Piedmont Alps they use a pierrade – historically a hot stone, these days a massive block of superheated iron wrenched straight from the oven.

But a stone cools eventually, and further north in Haute Savoie they favour a braserade instead. To translate this as ‘table barbecue’ just doesn’t do it justice.

It’s more of a mini-brazier of red-hot coals. Potentially lethal in the wrong hands, this safety-spurning contraption will grill everyone around the table as well as your food, firing a memorable glow to the cheeks of all who are eating.

And potatoes? Perhaps you’d expect fried shredded spuds (rösti) like in German-speaking Switzerland, or boiled new potatoes served with raclette cheese as in nearby French-speaking suisse romande?

Here in Savoie they go one better, with a sublime oven-baked dish of diced potatoes all cooked up in cheese: they call it tartiflette, which we can translate as pure tattie heaven. Around 10,000 calories a bowl, at a conservative guess.

What else might we need? A green salad (after this heavy menu, a small concession to healthy eating) laced with a fine French dressing? Bien sur.

To drink? A pale dry Provençal rosé, or a generous grande pression (large draught beer)? More probably both.

Then icecream and a snowball fight to follow, before sweet dreams and a rest for tired legs.

So, hey - our ski-ing was good. April in the Alps served up a deep pile of powder. And we found mountains of food.

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179. Kenya 6: Africa - how can we help?

Roads — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:04:55 +0000

What can we do to help the people of Africa?

Should we visit, as tourists? Is it enlightenment, or voyeurism, when tour companies arrange sightseeing trips to the ghettoes of Nairobi?

The problems are so massive that it’s easy to admit defeat - to assume that if governments can’t sort the problems, then aid agencies and individuals don’t stand a chance.

I don’t share that view. There’s a lot we can do, and here are some suggestions.

Visit Africa, if the opportunity arises.
Take an open mind with you. In world terms, we are fantastically wealthy. And wealth carries with it the responsibility to help others less fortunate than ourselves. It’s too easy to cite safety and convenience as reasons for shying away – if a billion people are living in desperate poverty across an entire continent, surely the least you can do is make yourself aware of it ?

By visiting, you will be investing some of your own money into the local economy, and that’s a very good start. Once there, I guarantee you’ll see things differently. You wouldn’t be human if the sight of hardship, starvation and disease didn’t change you into a more thoughtful person.

When you go to Africa, get out of your hotel.
There’s just no point in travelling halfway across the world to see Africa, and then remaining closeted inside little Europe or little America. Hire a driver, and take a tour of the local surroundings. See how people live. Talk to them. Listen. Smile. Be friendly. You’ll learn.

Take your old clothes and shoes with you.
Rather than junking them at home, or giving to the charity shop, it’s easy to pack your old clothes into an extra case, and take them to Africa. Leave them at the orphanage, or give them to needy people that you meet.

Anything you can take yourself will get through directly, without any commissions or administration costs. You can take quite a lot – as a family, we travelled out with seven suitcases, and came back with three.

Children’s clothes and shoes are especially needed, and don’t take up much space. Just amongst our stash we counted 35 pairs of outgrown children’s shoes.

Take unwanted toys.
Many African children have no toys at all. Electronic goods, or those needing batteries will be of limited use, but basics like dolls, card games, and toy cars and figures can bring happiness to a poor child, anywhere.

Take books, pens and pencils.
We had millions of old kids’ books at home, and stacks of odd crayons and pens, too. They all went in the suitcase, and came out at the orphanage. I read four novels on the beach, and gave them to the orphanage staff. All those books will be well-read now, and the kids will be scribbling for years more to come.

Take unused and unwanted medicines.
You shouldn’t travel with restricted drugs, but most family medicine cabinets contain a few packs of basic analgesics, anti-biotic creams, insect sprays, bandages and plasters which are incomplete or close to expiry. Don’t throw them out – take them with you to Africa. Supplies like these make a huge difference.

Give good tips to thin people.
At home, you’d tip $20 or £10 with a meal. The guidebooks will suggest you tip a quarter of this in Africa. But by tipping on a western scale, you’ll be injecting real cash, and helping an African family buy food for a week, or even a month. Tip those who serve you, in shops, hotels and on buses. It costs very little, it makes a big difference, and it’s rewarding to give.

Book local services, wherever you can.
Most hotels offer trips to local attractions, and arrange safaris and flights, too. They take a huge cut, then send the profits back to their foreign owners.

Just outside the hotel, local companies and taxi drivers offer the same services at lower rates. Your money will be employing local people rather than stuffing the pockets of western tycoons.

You have to exercise rudimentary caution, but if a local company has a good reputation, make the effort to use it.

The best trip of all that we did ? A dhow journey around the bay, arranged through a friend of our waiter. Three unforgettable hours for the whole family, and it cost $20. With a $20 tip, it was a win-win all round.

Recycle your packing.
Two days before we travelled, I ditched the entire contents of my suitcase. I left my new summer clothes and shoes behind, instead taking half-worn stuff. At the end of the holiday, I washed everything out, and gave T-shirts to the waiters and my gym shoes to the pool man. They wore them the next day. I travelled home in my beach sandals. That cost nothing at all.

Give spare food and toiletries.
If you have useful items left at the end of your stay – packets of biscuits, half-used hotel shampoos and soaps – don’t throw them away, give them to someone who can use them. They’ll really appreciate it.

Think about what you’ve seen.
When you arrive home, try to keep an interest in Africa. It’s easy to forget everything too quickly, but try to retain some of the new perspectives you’ve gained. Talk to your friends, and tell them about life in Africa.

Next time the TV news talks about starvation or disease in Africa, don’t switch off – stay and listen, take note of the telephone number and think about making a £10 or $20 donation. If everybody does it, we can make a real difference.

Speak up for Africa.
Many people will tell you that as Africans, these folk must expect less. They’ll say that it’s the African countries’ fault, and we can do nothing to help. So tell them they’re wrong. Explain how you spoke to local people when you were in Africa, and they they’re just like you and me. They don’t deserve their plight, and we should do all we can to help them.

Buy Fair Trade products, wherever you see them.
The system isn’t perfect, but it’s there for a reason, and African workers get a better deal for their labours.

Ask questions of the companies you use.
Enquire with your hotel operator how much tax they pay locally. Most likely, it’s nothing – the byzantine tax structures of western companies are designed to avoid paying. Look at the roads and medical services, and you’ll see the effect.

When you buy imported Kenyan flowers from Marks and Spencer, drop the chairman an e-mail, and ask how much tax the company paid in Kenya last year. You don’t need to push too hard – just asking the question is making a point.

Convince your politicians to make a difference, too.
Have a look at the candidates standing in your next national election. Chances are, one of them will be in favour of cutting your taxes, sending back immigrants and invading a few foreign countries, whilst the other will speak up for people who have much less than you, both at home and abroad. Think about that, just a little, and make the right choice.

Well, that’s a long list. If you have more ideas, I’ll be delighted to hear them.

And if it seems too much effort, then please remember this: the poor of Africa have only problems on their plate, whilst we have so much more than we need.

We owe it to Africa to do all that we can.

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178. Full fathom five - on Elbow Beach, Bermuda

Roads — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:53:21 +0000

“Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground”
- The Tempest, Act 1, Sc.1

“Full fathom five thy father lies” - The Tempest, Act 1, Sc. 2

The sky is falling all around me as the winter afternoon is fading. Down, down we glide, towards the North Atlantic. Three thousand miles of unforgiving sea are all behind us and ahead lies just a pinprick of green holding out against the blue-grey vastness of the ocean.

The rain lashes against the windows as our wings bank on the approach, the landing lights looming nearer in the dusk. A rugged landfall, but now we’re safe.

Outside the airport and across the causeway, a deluge is raging in sheets across the road, the palm trees swaying wildly in the storm. The evening washes itself wet and windswept upon the shore.

* * * * *

The Sea Venture was a brand new ship when it set sail for Virginia in 1609, with 150 settlers aboard, the flagship of a nine-vessel flotilla under the command of Sir George Somers.

Hit by a storm on 25th July, the ship and her company fought winds and giant waves for three days as leaks sprang up between her imperfectly caulked timbers. All hands were set to bailing, but still the waters rose.

Finally on the morning of 28th July, with an exhausted crew and the ship about to founder, Somers steered into the feared reefs of The Devil’s Islands, as sailors called them then.

Bermuda (as we know it now) had been discovered by Juan de Bermudez over a hundred years before, but was inhabited only by the hogs left for provisions by past seafarers. The new arrivals called the island Virgineola – little Virginia.

Wading ashore at Discovery Bay, near the modern airport, the crew made settlement at a site they named St George.

There they set about building a new ship from the fragments of the old, augmented with new Bermuda cedar. An advance party set out to Virginia in the Sea Venture’s long boat, rigged up with a sail. Those men were never seen again.

Nine months later, two ships were ready. The Deliverance, and the Patience finally arrived in Jamestown on 23rd May, 1610. But the sorry colonists they found there were fast running out of food, a plight only briefly alleviated by the arrival of fresh provisions from England.

Somers left for Bermuda aboard the Patience once more, to gather new supplies, but he died there before he could return. His body was transported to Lyme Regis, pickled in a barrel, and his heart was buried on the islands, then renamed The Somers Isles in his honour.

Amongst the other voyagers on the Sea Venture, John Rolfe had seen his wife and son die on Bermuda. Rolfe chose to stay on in Jamestown and later married the Powhatan princess, Pocohontas.

Stephen Hopkins, almost hanged in Bermuda for mutiny, returned to England some years later to find that his wife had died in 1613. Together with his children and new wife, he sailed for the New World in 1620 aboard the Mayflower.

A vivid account of the Sea Venture’s shipwreck written by William Strachey in July 1610 probably formed one of the sources for The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last play, first performed in London on 1st November, 1611.

* * * * *

A thousand leagues of flying have left me far ahead of Bermuda time, and I waken early in the morning.

Last night’s storm has eased, and the cloudtops are shining pink above the dawn. A stiff breeze is blowing, but the Atlantic air is warm and forgiving - a different kind of winter from the one we know in London.

I run out beside the road, past a white-roofed church and pastel-coloured white-roofed houses. The sun is rising slowly behind the palm trees on the hill, but it takes some time to find it. Finally the lane dips away for a minute of easy running towards the ocean.

It’s a perfect view which awaits me on the beach. White sand, stretching out for ever, the cliffs lit yellow by the early sun. The water is pale and blue and swirling softly, ebbing languidly beneath my feet - no white-topped grey old locker this one, but an azure Atlantic of another hue entirely.

I trot along for half a mile, dancing between the waves, listening to the endless sea.

Not far offshore, thirty feet beneath the swell, lies the wreck of the Pollockshields, a munitions ship which foundered here in August 1915, taking her Captain with her. Full fathom five thy father lies. Beyond the wreck and reef, the nearest landfall is in North Carolina, six hundred and fifty miles away.

I run back along the beach, shake the sand from my shoes and climb the hill back to the yellow hotel. From high amongst the cedars, I look back once more at the vastness of the ocean. This tiny island refuge is set adrift in so much water, lost like a thin ray of sunshine peeking through all the lengths of winter.

In a month or two, the tourists will start arriving from New York, seeking days of cool and calm and rest from the summer turmoil of the city. But for now, all is quiet, and there’s a kind of slightly faded elegance about this place which is both restful and enchanting.

Work lies ahead, but tomorrow morning I’ll try a different route, along the old railway trail to Southampton’s lighthouse. Seven miles of the world’s longest, thinnest quarry, I reason, cut into the cross-bedded shoaling limestones laid down between the ancient reefs. And then I’ll return here, to be washed up once more beside the beauty of Elbow Beach.

Bermuda’s shipwrecked shores tell tales of brave New World, of savage tempests and tourists basking in the lazy summer heat. So much history, and such a story, all set in train by a storm almost four hundred years ago.

And this morning, for a winter run beside the ocean, there’s no better place I know.

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177. From white box to empty shell - rebuilding the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Roads — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:54:14 +0000

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.

By sheer chance, or fantastic foresight, my parents had brought me to one of the most important and innovative Shakespeare productions of the entire 20th century.

Yes, Olivier had played here, and Peggy Ashcroft, too, but this was different - and more than just different, it was revolutionary. No more stuffy, complicated Shakespeare - Brook’s production was minimalist theatre, stripped down to its barest elements.

There was no scenery, and no props to speak of - Sally Jacobs’ design used simple plain white canvas and a trapeze to conjure the mysteries of the night.

It was new, and it was risky - but the critics loved it.

The Observer called it “awash with genius… a staggering, astonishing achievement,” whilst the New York Times acclaimed Brook’s Dream as the most genuinely and deeply original production of Shakespeare in decades. And I thought that Shakespeare was always like this.

In those years, perhaps it was. Living in a small provincial market town of just 21,000 people, we really were outrageously lucky - privileged beyond belief, in fact, to see the world’s best theatre just minutes from our door.

I was 14 when I met Ben Kingsley. He had played in that White Box production - although I didn’t know it then - but now he was warm from another stage - as Hamlet, starring alongside Mike Gwilym.

That was at The Other Place, Stratford’s new and experimental, warehouse venue, just around the corner. I went to King Lear there, and A Winter’s Tale, too - a trio of bleak plays which suited the dark simplicity of that space.

On the main stage of the RST, I saw Richard Pasco and Ian Richardson as the King and Bolingbroke in Richard II, with knights on hobby horses and the “sceptr’d isle” speech dreamt on the swing of another trapeze.

Then came Charles Dance in Henry V, Helen Mirren in Macbeth. Patricia Hayes in Twelfth Night.

Peter Brook’s White Box had changed everything about the Royal Shakespeare Company, and about the theatre, too. As time passed, the adaptations grew more audacious, more irreverent, and ever more relevant.

The opening of the first 1978 performance of The Taming of the Shrew, starring Zoë Wanamaker and Jonathan Pryce, was scandalously disturbed by a drunk bursting into the theatre, stumbling down the expensive aisles towards the front and launching into a drunken renditon of Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.

To the horror of all those in the posh seats, he vaulted onto the stage … and took on the part of Petruchio.

Shakespeare had torn off the garb of predictability, for ever. There were gangsters and a motorbike in the Shrew that year. Yet beneath the cloak of modern adaptation, the plays had suddenly become more interesting, more accessible - proving the durability of ancient themes in modern times.

The RSC pushed the limits of the material, too. There was amazement when Trevor Nunn turned Shakespeare into rock opera in a fast and loose musical adaptation of A Comedy of Errors, with Judi Dench as Olivia. At the age of 15, I loved it.

The audiences and critics did too, even if Cliff Barnes in the NYT still couldn’t quite admit it fifteen years later, in his review of the 2001 revival.

The success of that show looks so much less startling now. Nunn’s career has gone on to embrace the London and Broadway productions of Cats, Starlight Express and Sunset Boulevard, whilst his Les Misérables is still running in London after 22 years.

Yet amongst so much that was modern, theatre history found its place as well.

When Shakespeare wrote his plays, the audience was always seated around the stage. Theatres were circular then, as you can see in the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, or at any performance in the reconstructed Globe Theatre on London’s South Bank today.

In 1975, the RSC began to experiment with theatre-in-the-round at The Other Place, adapting its warehouse space to fit the concept. The Hamlet I saw there was staged that way, forging a much closer link between audience and actors.

It wasn’t clear how to carry that idea within the main theatre; since although a thrust stage reaching into the auditorium will be a feature of this year’s new design, in Elisabeth Scott’s original the seating was firmly fixed, all out in front.

For the 1976 season, additional seating was built in a mock-up of the Globe, set right behind the stage. That’s where I sat to watch Romeo and Juliet.

I was studying the play at school, and trying to understand it, and now I was on the balcony myself, just a fevered arm’s length from Juliet as she called to Ian McKellen’s Romeo.

My eyes were glued to Francesca Annis and her thin white dress all night, close enough to see another new twist in that production - Juliet’s clenched hands starting slowly to uncurl, just as Romeo took poison to meet untimely death.

In holding out the desperately unlikely hope of a happy ending, that defied everything we knew about the play. And yet the ploy worked brilliantly, all the same.

Trevor Nunn left Stratford in 1978. I moved away the following summer, after another play or two. But I’ve never left Stratford entirely behind. Much of my family lives here to this day, and the town and this theatre are in me still.

As I run beside the Avon this morning, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre is just an empty shell of walls.

All these years on, the white box is gone for ever now, replaced at last by open sky. And perhaps it’s true - not that much has changed at all.

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176. Ashtead Common 2 - a winter’s trail to spring

Roads — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 01:43:55 +0000

Winter drags in February. The lengthening evenings seem to pack a scary sharpness in their chill, and there’s an unexpected bleakness in these brightening days which makes me yearn for spring.

But it’s not the weather really. It’s my lack of patience for this place, which palls now with every passing week.

The soulless office above the shopping mall entombs me on shivering days like these. Days when inertia sucks the lifeblood of enthusiasm out from in me. Hours spent waiting for the gloom to lift and fall. Days when I don’t feel like running, and I wonder how I ever did.

The crocuses in Epsom Park smile indulgently as I pass on my winter’s route towards the dry Chalk hills above the town. They remind me.

Three seasons have come and almost gone since first I explored these streets - and the year may turn full circle before I leave. It’s a depressing thought, and so I turn around to escape the town a different way.

Ashtead Common is where I’m going. Looking for some hope, some relief, some inspiration, some… well, something uncertain amongst the mud. And a few minutes later, I’m running beside the railway, past the homely cottages and into open space beyond.

The woods ahead appear brown and lifeless across the Common, static against a waft of clouds drifting in the breeze. The sky seems bigger here already - there’s brightness, and that’s a start.

Underfoot, a winter’s tale of swampy mud is lurking soft beside the path. There’s no way through along my favourite route, but a corridor of light is calling me to higher ground between the trees.

I trudge. For a minute or two, the trail rises, and then unwinds, and gradually, finally, my mind begins to open.

These ancient Ashtead trees are old friends of mine, first seen in summer and in a different light. I realise, slowly, reluctantly, that I’m glad to be here, happy to witness this place again, in another season.

Last December, I danced beside the Oxshott Road in swirls of rising fog, trying to catch the last oak leaves as they fell. I caught three, and wished on each. In January, I plodded beside Epsom Racecourse through a soaking rainstorm into a mid-afternoon’s dusk of bone-cold hands and soggy shoes.

And here, in February, these massive boughs and trunks reach upwards bare and stark and empty, the fallen leaves all pale and brittle now as they blot the mud beneath my feet. Time passing as this winter’s course is run.

So many weeks of churning breathlessly up the Downs have fair reward, and I climb more easily than I did last summer.

This pimple of a hill is now just five minutes of faster breathing and sharpened thought, until suddenly the path falls again. Around a corner, my eyes fall downwards as I skirt more mud, dodging thorns beside the path. And before I realise it, the woodland has cut itself apart.

Between the trees and beneath the sunlight lies farmland up ahead. Sometimes a wide horizon is all it takes to free the spirit, and here it is, a mile or so of open countryside stretching out in front of me.

Empty space, quiet and thoughtful, rolling forwards and shimmering softly. I stop to breathe - and it rises, the hope that’s hidden in the view.

These fields are green.

For months, I’ve been gazing moodily at the winter darkness, breathing stifling air inside a lifeless office. Trudging through grey lunchtimes and evening mist.

All that time, the winter wheat has been growing grimly. Through cold weeks of rain and fog and wind and mud that have come and gone.

And finally, in February, we’re here together. The sky is blue above the fields. The air isn’t warm today, not yet, but one day soon I know it will be. This winter will reach its end.

I’ll say goodbye to this place, eventually. Time has taught me whilst I was here, though, toiling on my winter hills and tracking round these massive trees.

Life is full of seasons. And beneath the sky, you can live them all.

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