slemslempike | Freemasons, Ink, Nation, Adam Hills (Reply)

I went to the Freemasons' Hall in Great Queen Street, which had pleasing glimpses of men in fancy dress through half-open doors. The museum is substantially larger than I had expected, but is lacking in a lot of context. It seems to be aimed mostly at people who are masons themselves (I was the only person in the guest book with "n/a" for their lodge), rather than people who have really no idea whatsoever what masonry entails other than there was a thing with police, and having seen that episode of The Simpsons (ie me). There were lots of cases of aprons and badges, and then more peculiar things, such as the "bread roll converted into a silver inkwell", which 1) WHY? and 2) it doesn't look like a bread roll converted into a silver inkwell, it looks like a silver-plated dogshit.

I hadn't realised that freemasons were also targeted by the Nazis, and that anti-semitism and anti-masonry were apparently linked (by the masons, if no-one else) - if anything, given the association with royals, I would have assumed that they would be more ani- themselves. Anyway, I now know from a cursory glance at wikipedia that masons were apparently killed in the holocaust, but the museum seemed to suggest that the greatest tragedy of the second world war was that some of their bookcases were overturned. Oh, and their badges were destroyed or confiscated in the occupation of Guernsey, and so they made paper badges instead.

There was a rather peevish section on people making fun of masons, including this plaintive paragraph:

"The goat is a regular character in parodies of Masonic ceremonies, although it is difficult to say why as it does not in fact appear in any of them, or indeed as any other form of Masonic symbolism. There is simply no goat to be seen."

There is a recent lodge set up around karate, which had a nice badge. Oh, and some art deco Czech badges designed by Mucha.

I then went up to Finchley to meet

snowballjane at Leisure Games, which has WALLS of board games and was great. I found one that I wanted desperately but couldn't justify spending £50 on. HOWEVER, I have since bought it on ebay for £20, and people should STAY TUNED for FURTHER INFORMATION in the not too distant future.

The main purpose of our excursion was to visit the Stephens Collection, which is a tiny exhibition about the man from Finchley who revolutionised ink with his blue-black writing fluid. They have a letter from Dr Stephens' sister, writing to the local paper of the outrage that even though he had bequeathed his house to the community, that they were unable to visit it, "even on Thursday afternoons"! Jane and I were unable to fathom why it was in particular Thursday afternoons that should be an exception, if any time were, but since the museum is only open on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons, the community of Finchley is STILL not able to see it on Thursday afternoons. Anyway. The woman in the museum gave us a strange plastic pen reader thing, and you pressed it to a small label on the cases and it told you what was in them. Much fun. I especially liked the old bottles, and the historical writing implements, and the advertisments ("whoever benefits from inferior ink it is NOT the buyer").

I don't generally try to see adaptations of books because I figure I should just experience it in its original medium, and I have to prioritise instead. But I simply couldn't imagine how on earth they would stage Nation, and wanted to see how it went. I liked it, though this review suggests that people unfamiliar with the book might not get as much out of it. In the end the scenes I was most interested in seeing weren't in the adaptation (the crumbling to dust of the ancestors). They did a wonderful job with the shipwreck and underwater scenes, complete with figurehead on the prow of the ship.

I thought that Daphne was a bit too modern not faux-Victorian, but loved the parrot very much. He was played by a man in feathered breeches. The child was a puppet, which was initially much better than an actual child, but then it started singing cutely and I was nearly sick. They did manupulate it really well (and it had a small penis too), and I suppose they can't help making a singing two year old overly cute. Oh, and in the interval I made a BRILLIANT joke about the harpist. You should have been there, it was ace.

Back in Lancaster I went to see Adam Hills with Alice and Jen. I enjoyed it quite a bit, though some of his audience interactions were rather dull, but the ending was shit. A really cloying, embarrassing, chiding attempt to tell us that we must all try to inflate people rather than deflate them. He was appearing as part of the comedy week. The previous night had been Roy Chubby Brown, and Adam Hills was using his mic stand. He professed not to know anything about his act, and it was nice that the audience unanimously went with "shit", and when pressed further, "racist". He wanted to leave a message on the mic stand for him when it got returned, and the audience wanted to go with "don't be racist". But when he came out again after the interval he'd decided he wanted to be "positive", which really is the insipid limitation of the whole "inflate everyone" thing. I'd also heard an awful lot of his material before, despite not having seen him live for years and not seeking him out on TV.

We watched Doctor Who on Sunday. OH GOD IT WAS EVERYTHING I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE, AND LESS. Roll on regeneration.