Paul in London

Scenes from Clapham Common Saturday 12:39 Originally uploaded by Pauly_ . By day a family friendly location, by night a little area for gentlemen who like to take it outdoors. The tall grass hides an awful amount of litter - which includes an astonishing amount of paper towells and things made of rubber... You do have to watch your step if you stray off the paths... Incidentally two men who beat to death a man in October last year near this area pleaded guilty yesterday to the crime. One of the men lived in Clapham. While these two will likely receive sentences of 30 years, there are other locals that are likely to continue with this sort of thing...

Everyone is talking about hayfever. After a long winter everything that contains pollen has just exploded out all over the place as warm weather finally arrived. Fortunately there is a cure for hayfever which apparently involves snogging somebody for 30 minutes . Well that seems more fun than sticking Vaseline up your nose (which is what they recommended on the BBC morning show today)…

In keeping with a week of corporate greed, I had the opportunity to see Gorky's play Enemies performed at the Almeida Theatre on Thursday. It is a new translation by David Hare and it was fantastic (the critics seem to think so as well). As an ensemble piece the actors worked so well together, and they were rather pleasing on the eye as well but I digress… Gorky's play is about trouble at a Russian factory. When the managing directory of the family-run factory is shot and killed is it the start of a worker uprising or was it just an accident? The family is split between those who see conspiracies and those who sympathise with the oppressed workers, so the drama is set. This translation keeps thing going at a brisk pace and there is enough fiery dialogue in it to keep anybody's attention focussed on the action at hand. The final scene although a tad abrupt, did really sum it all up well (and was accompanied with a slight amount of theatrical flourish)…  It was enough to ma

After Monday's play about corporate greed in Edwardian times, on Wednesday I saw a film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room which was a play about corporate greed in Bush times. Actually, it was more than greed. It was how a company managed to get away with criminal activity and even prospered with the support of the financial system, banks, regulatory bodies, the media, you name it. While the people at the top are facing criminal charges, others who invested (not always voluntarily) their pensions into the company find that they have no money. Based on the book of the same name, it traces the rise and collapse of a company that never really made a profit, but managed to state its earnings on the potential for future profits (Arthur Andersen its accountants no longer exist as an accounting firm due to their work with Enron). The company was good at one thing and that was publicity. And the video footage from the company is the basis for this great documentary. You feel like you w

Monday I caught the Voysey Inheritance at the National. Written in 1905 by Harley Granville Barker (a pioneer of modern directing methods and an advocate of the concept of a national government subsidised theatre one learns from the programme notes), the play is full of great lines and observations of the upper middle classes in Edwardian times. The family at the centre of the drama find out upon the death of their father their wealth was the product of a finance fraud, and it is left to one of the sons to pick up the pieces. The cast helped too with Dominic West (as the son), Julian Glover, Doreen Mantle and Nancy Carroll part of a terrific ensemble. The production is getting quite a number of raves and given that stories of insider trading, managers raiding pension funds, and financial mismanagement still dominate the news these days there seemed something thoroughly modern about the play as well… The only downside to the production would have to be the set which not only looked che

Scenes from Pall Mall Sunday 16:35 Originally uploaded by Pauly_ . For the last few days a giant 40-foot mechanical elephant had been parading around Central London. Today was the last day to see it. It was part of a street theatre piece called The Sultan's Elephant . It was free and certainly got the punters into the city . Scantily clad women danced on top of it for some reason (perhaps to entice more father's to take their children to see it ) and the trunk did appear to spray something out over the crowd...

Scenes from Suburban SW4 Originally uploaded by Pauly_ . Sunday hedge-pruning anyone?

Scenes from Piccadilly Circus Sunday 00:49 Originally uploaded by Pauly_ . Waiting for the night bus...