London Daughter

Wood Green Shopping City

2011-01-28T06:11:00.000-08:00

Funny things happen when visiting Shopping City in Wood Green. A few days ago, a bright white mouse assessed the floor under my table in a closed coffee franchise: a heady experience when combined with the scent of nail-varnish opium wafting across from the beauty parlour and the thuddy Euro-pop entering my ears from overhead. It wasn't unpleasant - just a bit distracting.

And once, at a viewing of Toy Story 3 in the rather ambitiously named Cineworld, I sobbed at the sad inevitability of children growing-up and discarding their toys. Tears streamed down my face as I remembered the day, slightly too late in my adolescence, when I too threw away all my dolls. The eight-year-old tough boy next to me rubbed his eyes disparagingly, whispered profanities and questioned my sexuality.

On leaving the cinema, I spotted a tiny Buzz Lightyear collapsed in mock abandon on the pavement. He was desperately trying to assume the position of the inanimate as a Staffordshire Bull Terrier licked him.

The Man With The Gong

2011-01-24T04:04:00.001-08:00

For years, the beautifully carved torso of the Rank Organisation Gongman, bashed the importance of cinema into my Sunday-afternoon-on-the-sofa head and left me clinging to its resonance. As he swung his arms lustily towards the gong, I was in no doubt of the power of the olden days. My! That man could kill tigers with his bare hands.

So, it was rather a disappointment to see the gong resting limply against a wall in The london Film Museum this weekend. Its papier-mâché frame looked as insignificant as the wall display of a jaded infant teacher. And a felt tip sign was stuck disrespectfully to one side, asking us not to touch.

Carmina Burana

2009-10-26T08:52:00.000-07:00

The Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, once pointed to Orff's cantata as "the kind of clear, stormy, and yet always disciplined music that our time requires." I don't have the vocabulary to write about music but last week's concert in The Royal Albert Hall certainly did sound thunderous. It was also barbaric and extremely exciting. There were lots of bangs and people hitting things.

The first time I heard Carmina Burana, I was a teenager and had happened across a scratched CD in a charity shop. My sickly romantic ear immediately grasped the dramatic nature of the thing and I played it loud and often. It was the sweet immediacy that I hung onto. And the way it made my stomach flip and my heart rate quicken. A simple physical pleasure. At the time, the only other piece of music which had done anything similar was a Nick Drake album - the staple diet of any navel delving adolescent.

In 1936, the last surviving Tasmanian Tiger died, the first superhero in skin tight clothing appeared, the Afghan government granted a 75 year concession for oil to the Inland Exploration Company of New York , a king abdicated and Ipswich Town FC turned professional. Oh - and Hitler and Mussolini were up to stuff too. And amongst this whirl of chaos in the name of progress, Carl Orff knocked up a hit.

I don't care if a critic at the time called Orff, 'A rich man's banjo player.' I love banjos. And I find popular music, even suspect popular music, deliciously exhilarating.

Breakfast

2009-10-23T14:01:00.000-07:00

Breakfast. There is an art to a fried egg. As a child I would demand that the white was burnt to a raffia mat and that the yellow was left inexplicably raw. And this is still how I crave them. The uncertainty of someone else cracking one into a frying pan is sometimes too much for me to tolerate. I have to leave the room. I have to calm down. I don't want to see the yolk being drowned in spoonfuls of oil. Or the white swimming across the teflon. I don't want to silently witness its body turning to rubber whilst its head is smacked down with the euphemistic and bullying cry of sunnysidedown.

And it was scrambled eggs that I craved when doped on Morphine in an adolescent hospital bed. Buttered and loose eggs. Gentle pale juice seeping into roughly cut bread. And lots of salt. My sister always knew how to add the right amount; she'd shake her arm freely over the pan. And whilst I lay amongst the beeps and groans of NHS fittings, I'd think of her in the kitchen next to the laminate cupboards and woodchip. Her body bent over the dark void where wooden spoons would fall, never to be returned.