Ten: Brighton

Source: MJA Smith

1. Hotel Seattle, Brighton Marina
Okay, so it's not in the heart of the city (it's around a 30 minute walk – or see below), but it's a beautiful, modern hotel right in the heart of the Marina and thus escapes two major issues common to hotels in the city centre – noise (unless you dislike the sound of boat masts clacking) and lack of parking (there's a free carpark nearby). More info at my TripAdvisor review.

2. Volk's Railway
This small electric railway runs from Black Rock next to the Marina all the way to the aquarium – 1.5 miles in all. The 1883 concept of Magnus Volk, an inventor not dissimilar to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's Caractacus Potts, the journey is a fun, kid-friendly way to get from the Marina to the main city attractions.

3. The Pavilion
Brighton's Indian-styled stucco-smothered pavilion was the folly of the Prince Regent and has become a major tourist attraction and landmark. Behind the Pavilion is a buzzing park and café, where a jazz trio was playing the day we sat on the grass for a picnic. Cool sounds in cool grounds.

4. Resident
So you're in Brighton and you want to buy some records; you usually shop at Rough Trade in East London and you want somewhere with the same aesthetics. Where do you head? The answer is Resident. Situated in the North Laine network of narrow streets and wonderfully unique independent shops, Resident could be the Brighton outpost of the aforementioned RT with its eclectic jazz / alt.rock / electronica focus. Brighton also has a rich supply of good second-hand record shops, if looking through racks of old vinyl is more your thing.

5. Lick
It's the seaside, so ice cream is de rigueur, right? Well, Lick (also in the North Laine) sells ice cream, naturally, but the main draw is its frozen yoghurt. Out-of-this-world-delicious is an understatement.

6. Zoing Image
'It's my boyfriend's shop,' she explained, carefully applying initials to the mounts that would soon frame a range of monochrome photos for sale in the shop. 'He started out selling pictures in the street. From that to this.' Zoing Image sells prints, small canvasses and various photo products including magnets and coasters, mostly comprising photos of Brighton, as well as Lomo cameras, books and photo-related miscellanea.

7. Eco Logic Cool
Want cufflinks made of circuit boards? Or coasters made from recycled coffee cups? Then point your environmentally-friendly compass here. And don't miss the fish in the tank underneath the till – a cheap alternative to Brighton's tedious (though structurally beautiful) aquarium.

8. The West Pier
The tragically dismembered West Pier has, over the years lost out more than once to the nearby Palace – now Brighton – Pier, first in terms of popularity, and then in terms of its very corporeality. Eerily bleak, the most tragic sight is the retrieved posts stacked up in a metal mass grave beneath the surviving pier buildings shore-side.

9. The World Famous Pump Rooms
Just east of the West Pier is this popular beach-side café, selling ice creams and locally-made coffee. Expect convivial chatter, Italian accents and great coffee. You'll feel like buying a Vespa and getting all Quadrophenic.

10. Architecture
Fans of Regency stucco-faced splendour will not be disappointed by Brighton, and its sense of preservation of these monuments to the Victorian era of UK holiday-making is impressive. Occasional civic planning inconsistencies aside (most notably Richard 'Centre Point' Seifert's Sussex Heights, a 24-storey, horizon-changing tower), Brighton's elegant cliff-top promenade is the place to head for building fans.

Advantage In Height: The Hub, Milton Keynes

Source: Glenn Howells Architects

Call it force of habit, but on a summer's Friday night, when I've completed the last commute home to Milton Keynes from London for another week, I like to drive along Witan Gate past The Hub. There's just something so convivial about the people sat drinking outside the Living Room, the waiting staff arriving at the back doors of restaurants in the throes of gearing up for busy Friday nights, and just the general sense of people kicking back after a week at work; all of this helps me with my transition from corporate life to family life.

The other reason – the main reason – I like driving past The Hub is one of personal aesthetics: I love tall buildings. I think towers are graceful and elegant. Don't get me wrong, I am appreciative of architecture generally, both modern and historic, but tall buildings in particular have always fascinated me. Trips to Birmingham as a child were all the more thrilling for the views of the Rotunda looming over the city, while sporadic visits to London found me simultaneously intimidated and intrigued by the likes of Big Ben. I didn't have enough Lego bricks in my box to build skyscrapers, but I'm sure I would have done if I could. During the first year at university, I resided in one of the lower floors of a brutalist brick tower; while it was clearly not in any way 'beautiful' in the traditional sense of the word, I thought the simplicity of the repeated floor patterns and the hard vertical lines scaling the height of the tower were nevertheless pleasing to the eye.

Back to The Hub. Designed by the London / Birmingham firm of architects Glenn Howells, the elegant main tower (Manhattan House) is fourteen storeys tall. That would be positively diminutive for London, let alone Manhattan. But compared to elsewhere in Milton Keynes, the principal tower at The Hub is a giant. Surveying the topography of this young city, buildings have rarely ever had more than three or possibly four storeys. They aim at bulk rather than height. Examples would include the dense, brick-clad Santander building on Grafton Street which occupies an entire block. It's vast, but only three storeys tall. Another example is the office of the Inland Revenue on the corner of Witan Gate and Silbury Boulevard. The only exceptions to this are Xscape – a landmark entertainment destination housing a ski slope, gym, multi-screen cinema, bars, restaurants and shops – and Mellish Court in Bletchley, which is an archetypal Sixties residential concrete mass rising seventeen storeys.

The Hub consists of various buildings, all of mixed use and of varying height. The ground floor of each is let to popular restaurant chains, cafés and shops, while the upper floors are all residential. In total, the complex consists of 408 apartments. The buildings are arranged around a large central piazza (Mortimer Square) which occasionally hosts public events, and which also includes a sequence of fountains flush with the paving – popular with toddlers who, defying their parents, love getting drenched in the jets. Each of the buildings has a name which aspirationally links the development to Manhattan. In its own way, this is nothing new – Milton Keynes already has a high-speed variation of the New York grid, and the nomenclature of The Hub appears to be an attempt to develop a quintessentially Milton Keynes version of its buildings too, sporting the names Manhattan House, Brooklyn House, Staten House, Carnegie House, Metropolitan House, Dakota House and Chelsea House.

The latter contains Brasserie Blanc, Raymond Blanc's mid-priced chain brasserie; in defiance of the sleek modernism evident across The Hub's design, the incontrovertibly traditionalist Blanc replaced the flat entrance to his restaurant unit with an old wooden revolving door salvaged from a Brighton hotel; outside it looks awkward, uncomfortable, but from the inside makes complete sense.


Source: MK_Tom / Panoramio

Apparently there was a degree of negative public reaction to the design of the buildings, as there often is to tall buildings generally. The positioning of The Hub towards the top of a hill makes it visible from quite a way off the centre of the city; but, unlike London, there are no views of St Paul's to obscure. This is a city that has existed for around half a century and all of it could thus feasibly be described as 'new'. To my mind anyone complaining about another modern facet to the city is a hypocrite in my book. The buildings required the removal of one of Milton Keynes' coveted underpasses, and unlike anywhere else in the city the buildings are situated right on the edge of the surrounding gates and boulevards, eschewing the usual grassy banks and wide walkways evident elsewhere.

The Hub's inclusion in the city is, to me, more than welcome, and certainly long overdue. But it is also disappointing. When a new tall structure appears on the horizon, it should signal a broader acceptance of such buildings, paving the way for more similar-sized schemes. Sadly, with the exception of the beautiful and chunky Pinnacle, which rises nine floors and has a roof design that references Hugh Stubbins and Associates' Citicorp Centre in New York's Midtown, other new buildings on the cards see a return to the squat, derivative structures abundantly available already in the city: the new National Rail offices, on the site of the old hockey stadium, will be a sprawling 'groundscraper', a design which is all the more disappointing after the advances of The Hub and the Pinnacle.

Greenlet

Those who know me personally, and those who've seen my Twitter feed, will know that I love making cocktails. I went on a cocktail making course earlier this year at Shaker Bar School in East London, which I'd recommend to anyone who has the remotest interest in combining drinks together.

The gimlet is, along with the martini, the Manhattan and the Collins, considered one of the classics. The drink consists of Plymouth gin and Rose's Lime Cordial. According to 2500 Cocktails by Paul Martin (my go-to guide for all things mixology), the gimlet was 'the product of two ingredients that came together by geographical and medicinal circumstance.' A gin distillery was established in the British naval port of Plymouth in 1793, while Rose's Lime Cordial, created by Lauchlin Rose in Scotland in 1867, was considered a medicinal cure for scurvy; given the disease's prevalence among sailors, it was almost inevitable that the cordial would find its way to Plymouth.

This cocktail is a variation on the gimlet, but replaces the lime cordial with Bottle Green Ginger & Lemongrass cordial (available from Sainsbury's), so I called it a greenlet

Greenlet
- 50ml Plymouth gin
- 25ml Bottle Green Ginger & Lemongrass cordial

Shake the ingredients, together with a scoop of ice, and strain into a chilled martini glass.

Cornwall Diary (Part 1)

7 July 2010

We set off from Milton Keynes at about 6.20 and reached Tehidy Country Park just after 1.00 for a picnic. The Tehidy estate was once owned by the Basset family, one of the most powerful western Cornish families and whose family name adorns streets and pubs in the nearby Redruth and Camborne area.


Source: www.cornwall-aonb.gov.uk

The park consists of 250 acres of natural woodland and nine miles of paths, and is centred around a serene swan-filled lake, and also has a small café and information centre. We hunted Gruffaloes (we caught six, according to Daughter#1) and befriended at least three pairs of very tame squirrels.

For the second year running, we were staying at Gwel an Mor, a five star collection of wooden lodges just above Portreath, with tranquil views across the sea. We have always struggled to find good quality, child-friendly accommodation in Cornwall and consequently find Gwel an Mor to be a welcome breath of fresh air. This year we stayed in a 'Tregae VIP' lodge which had the upgrades of a wood-burning stove (low likelihood of getting used in the summer), a hot-tub (yes, I am Hugh Heffner) and a midweek maid service; the latter was the clincher for us – with this being ostensibly a self-catered holiday, when we stayed here last year the place really felt like it needed a clean midway through our stay, and given that we were on holiday, we were relatively disinclined to do that much cleaning.


Source: www.maturetimes.co.uk

The lodges are quirky yet homely – lots of wood throughout gives the place a cosy Scandinavian feel (the Hemnes bedroom furniture from Ikea also helps), and it doesn't take long to get used to the three bedrooms being downstairs and the lounge / kitchen being upstairs in the roof.

Dinner on the first night came courtesy of the fish and chip takeaway on nearby Portreath beach – they're not the best we've ever tasted, and not even as good as last year, but decent and good value nonetheless.

8 July 2010

This being England, weather is of course distinctly variable – even in usually dependable Cornwall – so when we saw the forecast for sunshine today, we decided to head to the beach; the beach, in this case, was Sennen Cove, near to Land's End and rightly regarded in surveys as one of England's best beaches.

Popular with tanned young surfers, sunbathers and families, Sennen is a truly wonderful place with a wide sweeping sandy beach, dramatic cliffs, good waves (if that's your thing) and, in the Beach one of the best restaurants we've ever been to in Cornwall. The restaurant has a good menu, and an excellent selection of unfussy children's dishes. Daughter#1 enjoyed a perfect soft poached egg with soldiers, while #2 had soul goujons; Mrs S had the same goujons in a wrap while I had roasted Mediterranean vegetables from the grill.

Sennen, like many Cornish towns on the tourist trail, has galleries (for buying, not just viewing); in its case, Sennen has two, both housed in the unusual round, slate-roofed building next to the RNLI station. We visited the upstairs one (the Round House), as we do whenever we visit, and came away with lots of pretty ceramics and pictures by local Cornish artists.


Source: www.round-house.co.uk

Heading back to Portreath, we stopped in at Trengwainton for a stroll with my sister and my six-month-old niece. Trengwainton is a serene tropical garden just outside Penzance that's managed by the National Trust. The gardens were given to the Trust in 1961 by the Bolitho family, another of Cornwall's powerful families.

The gardens in Cornwall and manifest, and beautiful, and the tropical climate allows plants unusual to these shores to grow comfortably. My days of being a keen gardener are well and truly over, and I couldn't tell you at all what's growing in our own back garden (apart from weeds), but we love exploring Cornwall's gardens, mainly because they are such fun for kids. At Trengwainton, Daughter#1 hunted for clues as part of a kids trail, which centred mostly around the walled kitchen garden, built to the dimension of Noah's Ark for no discernible reason. Last year we climbed right to the top of the gardens, where the tropical foliage gives way to stunning views across Mount's Bay. My sister often visits the modern tea rooms here, which have an excellent array of lunches and cakes, while the sloping lawn in front contains giant kids games like noughts and crosses; perfect for letting them entertain themselves while grown ups have a natter.

9 July 2010

Ah, St Ives – I'm just not that into you. After a soggy day out there last year, we should've learned our lesson. The place is a tourist Mecca and the narrow main street – Fore Street – should really be pedestrianised. I admit it's not without its charms – much of Fore Street is beautiful, and there are no major high street chains – but it's way too busy for me, and I grew up in a tourist town so I should have a high tolerance. Plus it was drizzling, and I spent most of the morning stood outside congested shops getting wet while trying to deal with a very grumpy Daughter#2 (most shops are pushchair-friendly, but if you have more than one stroller in a shop at any one time it's usually a nightmare). Mrs S hit Cath Kidston and Joule and the unique Chocolat! (chocolate shop) and Fabulous Kids (toy / clothing shop for children) while I had a look around the the Digey's deli section. I looked at some local Cornish liqueurs from a gift shop to make some unusual cocktails. Cornish Smugglers liqueurs are made down near the Lizard and include brandies, fruit cream drinks and other localised variations of popular spirits.

St Ives may be pretty, but it's strangely not blessed with an abundance of places to eat; when we came last year, the rain made the few places that it does have far busier than we'd expected, leaving us eating pasties in the rain while fending off an aggressively insistent seagull on a bench near the Tate. This time we were determined not to endure the same fate, and so we booked a lunchtime table at the Seafood Café before the soggy hordes cottoned on.

Seafood Café is a bright, modern restaurant with an abundance of fish dishes on their menu (and given its location why not?), the waiting staff are nice and friendly and the food is excellent. I ate crab linguine which was delicately flavoured with chilli; Mrs S enjoyed a fish pie while the girls had fish and chips where you could choose from grilled or fried fish.

The best thing about going to St Ives is the journey. Rather than driving and negotiating the paucity of parking, we took the Bay Line train from St Erth which costs £4 per adult. The journey lasts around fifteen minutes and offers stunning cliff-top views of the bay. From 10.00 the train departs at 11 and 41 minutes past the hour, and parking is a very reasonable £1.50 for a full day at St Erth.

After St Ives we headed down to Penzance to hook up with my sister. We had enormous cakes and tea at Penlee House, a white Victorian house which is now the home of an art gallery specialising in the work of the Newlyn school of artists and also the original Penzance market cross, a much-moved historic carved stone cross. We'd intended to have our first cream tea of our stay, but they'd run out of scones; if the enormous doorstep cakes and slices we had were anything to go by, it's not hard to see why.

10 July 2010

We spent most of the day at Trebah Gardens, just outside Mawnan Smith near Falmouth, which is a valley garden designed by Charles Fox. Between the various Fox siblings, the family developed no less than six tropical gardens in the area, their ownership of a international shipping business allowing them to easily transport seedlings and rare plants from around the world in order for them to grow comfortably in the local area's sheltered climes.


Source: www.gardenvisit.com

Trebah slopes downward to a private beach on the Helford river. The route down takes you through rhododendrons, camellias, giant gunnera, a bamboo maze and all manner of plants and trees you would struggle to imagine growing elsewhere in England. Trebah has endured something of a torrid history following the Fox ownership, including a requisitioning of the Helford beach by the US Navy during the second world war as an embarkation station for the Omaha landings; during their stay, the US concreted the beach and stuck in a new road. Thanks to the work of one owner – Donald Healey, the former racing driver and car designer – the beach is now largely restored to its former pebble-filled glory.

The modern visitor centre and restaurant is excellent; during our stay in Cornwall we ate at the restaurant three times. Their Trebah flan with Mediterranean vegetables and Cornish brie is amazing, while their fish cakes beat anything we've eaten in modern gastro pubs hands down; for kids the selections include fish finger sandwiches, and more unfussy and popular dishes. Even if you can't face the steep walks in the gardens, the food alone is well worth making a visit to Trebah for.

The Life And Times Of Milton Keynes Gallery

Mark Leckey, Untitled (MK:G model with green screen), 2010 (detail)
Image courtesy the artist, Cabinet Gallery and Milton Keynes Gallery
Photo (c) Andy Keate

First off, let me say that I don't 'appreciate' art. I see things I like, and like them because I like them; I don't necessarily see what a piece of art might be trying to portray, convey or otherwise, and so I don't attempt to understand it or explain what I see. That said, I still like art and visiting galleries, but for me to enjoy something I have to feel a principally visual, rather than visceral, connection to what I see.

I took Daughters #1 and 2 to Milton Keynes Gallery on Saturday to see The Life And Times Of Milton Keynes Gallery. I'd resolved earlier this year to take them to each new exhibition here, mainly because they do seem to enjoy galleries and looking at pictures and the like, but also because I think trying to culturally enrich their minds is important from as early an age as possible. Plus I think having their imagination stimulated by means other than the TV is even more of a requirement of parents in the modern age. Daughter#1 loved the linear images of the last exhibition we went to see, of Nasreen Mohamedi's works, and both girls were really excited about visiting again.

The current exhibition, organised by artist Mark Leckey and director of London's Cabinet Gallery Martin McGeown spreads across the four principal ground-floor spaces and is intended to act as a celebration of Milton Keynes Gallery's tenth birthday, an event which you'll be forgiven for having missed given that a far better known gallery, Tate Modern, is celebrating the same auspicious anniversary this year.

The clinical, large concrete spaces should have provided ample room for a major retrospective or something more weighty than the slightly tongue in cheek line-drawn renderings of cubes, ears and animals drawn on large curved hanging sheets of paper by Viz cartoonist Lee Healey. These were to be seen in the Cube Gallery either side of what was supposed to be a projection of the revolving pink scale model of Milton Keynes Gallery being filmed in real-time against a green screen; on the projection, images of hypothetical architectural concepts were supposed to appear behind the moving pink gallery image. Except that the camera seemed to be out of tape, leaving just a static blurred image on the wall.

The Middle Gallery featured more Healey images and a video of what could be a computer-generated rendition of the interior of the gallery (From The Long Via The Link To The Middle To The Cube by Tim Bacon). The organic monochrome line drawings and the fast-moving video seemed incongruous together, and like so often with art I couldn't see the point. The room just felt clinical – and not in a good way – and sparse.

Probably the best part of the exhibition was the display of miniaturised excerpts of exhibitions past stuck to the wall in a messy mosaic style in the space known as the Link Gallery. Here was colour, variety, interesting and arresting images. I asked Daughter#1 which was her favourite. 'This one,' she said, pointing at a skull. It was that sort of morning.

The Long Gallery contained a video projection with rapid jump-cut imagery and a booming, computerised voice, all of which felt like a Burroughsian nightmare or a scary wartime propaganda educational film. If it wasn't for the girls getting slightly freaked out, I'd probably have enjoyed it.

So, once again, I've probably totally missed the point of this exhibition, but in my limited frame of reference all I will say is that it felt a bit narrowly-focussed and could have been much, much more than it was. But what do I know? I buy frames from Ikea after all.

The Life And Times Of Milton Keynes Gallery runs until 27 June 2010.

A Farewell to Stratford-upon-Avon

Source: MJA Smith

I was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon and I called it home until I was nineteen, though I didn’t realise until three years later that I’d actually moved away forever. I left the quaint market town in Warwickshire for the concrete topography of the University of Essex in Colchester, not fully aware that I wouldn’t be moving back to the town of my birth once my degree had finished.

But that’s exactly what happened. I met a girl, got a job on a bank's management trainee scheme that needed me to based somewhere that wasn’t either Stratford or Colchester and quietly, almost without me realising, I moved out of the family home. It’s probably only in the last few years, with the introduction of children and the putting down of definite roots, that I’ve finally stopped calling Stratford ‘home‘. It’s only taken 14 years.

A home, of sorts, it remained until recently, upon the occasion of my parents selling up the house they moved into in 1983, the house where I lived out my pre-teens and teenage years and all the essential experiences and rites of passage that coming of age brings. I know for them it was an emotional departure, as it would have been for me also were it not for the fact that they have moved to Milton Keynes and are consequently just a few minutes’ drive away from us (as is pretty much everyone and everything in Milton Keynes come to think of it).

We went to Stratford last at the end of their residency, toward the end of September last year, and it was a predictably moving experience. Wandering slowly round the town, all of a sudden I grasped how little detail I had actually taken in over the years. All of a sudden the buildings I thought I knew had features I'd never before recognised and buildings that I'd never even taken any notice of before jumped out at me for the first time and seemed to scream for my attention. The feeling was dismaying, almost as if the town itself was telling me that I'd neglected its nuances my entire life.

I came away from the town perplexed at how I could have been so blind to Stratford's subtleties all those years. I'd never visited any of the principal tourist haunts, with the notable exception of Holy Trinity Church, out of principle. Like many residents, I'd elected to ignore the things so obviously important to the town's fabric but so crassly touristy, if not forever then certainly until an unspecified point in the future. Now I have no idea when I might visit those places. It's now, at nine months, the longest I've ever gone without visiting the town of my birth.

Like most towns, Stratford is undergoing changes, some of which remove some of the things I remember from childhood, forcing those memories to become like a sepia-tinted dream. The most significant of these is the remodelling of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre on Waterside, a building which seemed unassailable, far too precious and historic – despite being, at less than one hundred years' old, one of the town's more modern structures – to be tampered with. The new design, retaining features from Elizabeth Scott's original Art Deco design with new elements was intended to appease actors who find the theatre's backstage area cramped and dated, but also to offer a more appealing vision to tourists. One can only imagine how divisive the 1930s design was at the time. Improved it may well come to be, but it's not the theatre I will remember.


Source: MJA Smith

Another change which caught me off-guard in September was the conversion of the Island Café at the junction of the Birmingham Road, Henley Street and Windsor Street. The café was empty for the entire time I lived in Stratford, falling slowly into a greater and greater sense of disrepair. Its prime location at the main entry point for coaches of tourists entering the town should have made it opportune premises for any business looking to cream foreign visitor spending, but in spite of this, one day the owners locked the doors and it stayed closed, with movement occasionally visible behind the grime-encrusted windows with their crumbling frames and moth-eaten curtains. (In one of the short stories I began writing for a creative writing class, I imagined the interior of the café from the perspective of a dusty old glass left behind on one of the cafe's shelves; perhaps I'll get around to completing that some time.)

The last time we were there I was amazed to see that the café was no longer in a dilapidated state but that it had been renovated and converted into a smart restaurant called Bernadette's. All my life I'd wanted to see inside that building; I'd even had a teenage daydream where I tried to buy it with my sister and converted it into a swish vegetarian eatery where I'd also DJ an eclectic mix into the small hours. And yet here, on my last trip to Stratford was a completed altered Island Café. I was gob-smacked. I went inside, ostensibly to collect a business card, but also just to say I'd been inside. I think a small part of me rather preferred the ruined state it was in before having seen such a seismic change in a relatively short space of time. I just hope Bernadette's stays open long enough in these straitened times for me to get to visit properly, whenever that might turn out to be.

I did finally get to the bottom of one Stratford puzzle that had bothered me for years – the purpose of the building, pictured at the start of this post, sandwiched between the library and what is now the abomination on Henley Street that is Subway. For years I've walked past this building, a slender Victorian construction done out, in keeping with much of restored Stratford, in a mock-Tudor, half-timbered style. The solid, imposing wooden door to this building was perpetually closed and the diagonally-leaded windows were cloudy and revealed nothing of what secrets might be behind.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that I'd spent a long time imagining what this building might be, but suffice to say that thanks to a childhood diet of reading wizard-and-goblin fantasy books I became convinced it must be a shady meeting place for a secret Masonic guild in the town, possibly dating back to Shakespearian times or even further still. Something about the antiquated door and lack of signage or numbering seemed to lend itself to the remote, and slightly sinister, possibility. The air of dark mystery I'd afforded this reasonably inconsequential, comparatively hidden building over the years has made it my favourite building in the entire town.

Sadly, as is often the case with the truth, the reality was far more mundane. Thanks to the support of the Stratford Society (of which I am a paid-up member), I was put in touch with town historian Robert Bearman, whose book Stratford-upon-Avon: A History Of Its Streets And Buildings had sat, unread, on my shelves for about two years. The answer was squirrelled away in his text all along. It transpires that the building was designed by Arthur Flowers – of the local Flowers' Brewery family – as a technical college with the very laudable aim of providing Stratford boys with vocational skills to help their employment prospects. The college later moved premises, finally settling on the Alcester Road, adjacent to what used to be my High School, itself having since been demolished and replaced. I'm just glad I finally found out what it was originally for. The building is now nothing more than part of the library next door, but in my imagination still the place of illicit guild meetings.

Stratford's historic nature means that it is considerably better preserved than other towns in this country, and the scope for needless and excessive modernisation can thus, hopefully, be avoided. That said, in a town not renowned for changing – because of its historical heart – any small change is therefore likely to feel much larger than it might otherwise be elsewhere. I only hope I recognise the place when I go back, whenever that might be.

Romantic Movies

Source: IMDB.com

I have two favourite slushy, romantic comedy movies (I can't bring myself to write 'romcom'; it just doesn't feel right).

The first is Serendipity, starring John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale. Set principally in Manhattan, the film concerns itself with Beckinsale's firm belief in fate and Cusack's intensifying quest – prompted by his impending marriage to someone else – to track down the woman he met briefly, for a single night, but who left him with no details of who she was and where he could find her. To test her belief that, if they were supposed to be together, then, come what may, they would be, Beckinsale's character writes her name in the inside of a book at a stall, and Cusack writes his name on a dollar bill. The test is that if those objects worked their way back into the other's possession, they are meant to be together. The name of the film clearly refers to the fatalistic theme of the story, but also the patisserie on East 60th Street with the same name, where the two characters share ice cream. It's frustrating, and ludicrously far-fetched, but I love it. The fact that it has New York as a backdrop is just a bonus, frankly. It was also an influence on the name we chose for Daughter#1.

The other is the significantly more successful Richard Curtis movie, Love Actually. It's a favourite, not for the over-exposed Hugh Grant-dancing-to-Girls-Aloud scenes; nor for the cringeworthy Bill Nighy / Rab C Nesbitt relationship; nor the crushing effect Alan Rickman's affair has on wife Emma Thompson; nor the ridiculously far-fetched notion that the hapless guy from the BT ads is able to bed not one, not two, but three hot girls in the States; in fact I can't stand most of the characters or the attempts at clever, casually interwoven plot lines.

My love of this film applies solely to the relationship between Andrew Lincoln and Keira Knightley. Their story, for me, is the only reason to watch this film, and is all the more interesting given that they hardly feature in the plot at all; for me it is perhaps the most moving aspect of the whole film. And it's not because I had a crush on Knightley; her character, yes, but not Knightley herself. Okay, maybe a little, but I'm over it now.

Lincoln is the best friend of a character who gets wed, to Knightley, early on in the film. Throughout the wedding, Lincoln films the proceedings avidly and grimly; we sense some jealousy on his part, and we assume it is directed toward the girl who has stolen his best friend, and possibly the object of his affections, from him.

Later in the film, Knightley arrives at Lincoln's studios unannounced, claiming that he has been ignoring her calls; he is dismissive, casual, and off-handed; she asks to see his wedding video which he tries to prevent her from doing, and it is only when she begins watching the close-up shots of herself that Lincoln has captured on film does she – and we – understand that it is actually Knightley who is the object of his desires.

As a portrayal of unrequited love, I regard it as second to none, particularly in the strained, knowingly hopeless way that Lincoln silently attempts to convey his love for her toward the end of the film.

And it's for those two characters, and these three small segments of this ponderous film, that I regard it as being one of my two favourite romantic comedies of all time. Call me a thwarted romantic or a desperate fool if you will, but you won't change my mind.