Light and dark.

Light

Here's something that sums up what's happening in Tooting nowadays. An all female three-handed feminist performance of Medea in a shop that used to be Sadiq Khan's Labour campaign headquarters on the High Street, near Lidl. I get two tickets for Saturday night. 

It feels mean to ask my husband to come with me so I ask a friend to come instead. She agrees, and tells him he owes her one when she arrives at our house for a pre-performance drink... or two. I decide getting lightly tanked up is the only way to approach this. Husband skips off to get the wine.

We know it's going to be good when we're met at the door by a charming young man who informs us the performance will be 45 minutes long with no interval and the audience must stand as actors move among us... and there's a bar at the back. 

"This is surreal," my mate says, as we loiter by the fairy lights, sipping more wine and listening to the opening blast of Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive as one of the three young actors mimes the words at us just inches from our faces. 

It was surreal, and great, and watching it made me feel about 18-years-old. Look out for more performances in unusual spaces by By Jove Theatre.

http://www.byjovetheatre.org/

Dark

Not taking my usual route across the common under a tunnel of green and orange - rustling leaves, ribbons of light, breeze in the face, glad to be alive - avoiding that path completely now because the chestnuts are gone. Cycling a different path instead past a man on a bench who pulls back his head as I approach, throwing it forward the moment I draw level in order to hurl to huge gob of spit in my direction. Looking back in disbelief; realising it was deliberate, and it missed.

Later, turning up at a local ward meeting to confront another man who has, in his own way, also hurled a gob of spit on Tooting Common - Councillor Jonathan Cook of Wandsworth Borough Council - ultimately responsible for the loss of the chestnut trees on Chestnut Avenue. 

Seeing him for what he is: an arrogant man, spouting misleading waffle, taking ten minutes to answer my question about council consultations, telling me I know nothing about the situation at Tooting Common, that the people there wanted that avenue of trees felled because lots were dangerously damaged and likely to FALL ON THE CHILDREN'S PLAYGROUND! And that as a boy he remembers feeling sad about Dutch elm disease actually, blah, blah, blah...  Not coming close to answering the question, enraging the audience with his response to this and many other questions, sitting next to his fellow counsellor, Guy Senior, who actually loses his temper at an audience member and shouts at the top of his voice. Wow. 

Light

Another weekday evening, another meeting, a very different one. This time at Goldsmiths College in New Cross where two second year students inform the room about Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi, arrested almost five years ago, sentenced to ten years in prison and 1000 lashes. They quietly explain that he's had 50 of these lashes now and must wait for his back to heal before having more. And the case of Nadhir al-Majid, who had his sentence of seven years' imprisonment upheld by the Riyadh Court of Appeal on June 4th 2017, whose crimes include writing articles such as "I protest, I am a human being." After he was arrested he was beaten, kicked and ordered to stand for hours, then placed in solitary confinement. 

Sitting listening, remembering what I was doing 19 years ago when these two teenagers were born: hanging around playgroups with babies and toddlers who banged bricks and dribbled and filled nappies. Now their contemporaries - these informed and compassionate people - are big enough to stand before a meeting and explain about a Saudi blogger who had his back lashed so hard it "opened up" and why we should all care that writers the world over are oppressed and imprisoned. Thinking: human beings can be amazing, particularly the younger ones.

https://www.englishpen.org/

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. 

Light, by Ted Hughes

Eased eyes open, showed leaves.

Eyes laughing and childish
Ran among flowers of leaves
And looked at light's bridge
Which led from leaf, upward, and back down to leaf.

Eyes uncertain
Tested each semblance
Light seemed to smile.

Eyes ran to the limit
To the last leaf
To the last vein of the least flower-leaf.

Light smiled,
And smiled and smiled

Eyes
Darkened
Afraid suddenly
That this was all there was to it.