Ever wanted to visit German writer Heinrich von Kleist’s home city, Frankfurt (Oder)? I went there this month out of curiosity and have written this travel piece for my blog https://patrickgjackson.com/travel-piece-germany-at-the-end-of-the-warpath/
Have video to embed but not finished editing yet.
Most journalists, a vain lot at the best of times with present company no exception, covet their first byline. While I don’t remember my first at BBC News, I can still feel the kick of seeing one of my pieces trending. Take this 2006 feature marking a quarter of a century since Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor: “Osirak: Over the reactor“. After weeks of hard work on the features desk to pin down interviews and get permissions for things like video, I was chuffed to see the published piece, which had been my own idea, breaking ground for the site in terms of page views for a feature (something a rather sniffy editor remarked to me at the time). Even better was to see it translated and used by the BBC’s language services. Scanning the Arabic version, and aware of all the sensitivities involved, I felt real pride in working for a news group with such high standards of impartiality. Fast-foward 20 years and there are very few BBC pieces out there with my byline while those that do go out are generally the work of minutes or hours at most, not weeks. So what happened? Two things really.
The first and more predictable of them is that my role has changed with the needs of the job. Most shifts I put in now are editorial. On night shifts, which I am happy to do for the extra payments we get, I look after part of the digital news operation, which means selecting, commisioning, editing and publishing stories and videos in real time; curating the front page; managing reader feedback; and handing it all over to the incoming team. I don’t write anything myself because for most of the time it’s not my job anymore.
The other thing is that when I do write – and writing shifts make up part of my daytime rota – they are almost always general news stories. These are usually written up off multi-sourced news agency copy and are the same kind of stories BBC digital news – or “news online” as we were known in the old days – has been turning out since the year dot. Twenty years ago, nobody would have a byline on such stories. Bylines were the preserve of original journalism or analytical expertise. That said, writing such stories well is a real craft. In this respect, I always bow to BBC World Service, past masters at getting key news points into a few lines in their radio scripts. Today, however, all digital news stories are bylined by default. I wrote one today about a plague scare in Russia. Want it in Spanish? Here you go. One reason we were given for this change, brought in a few years ago, was the promotion of transparency on the site. I guess that will matter even more as artifical intelligence generates more and more news content. If you see a story bylined “John Smith” or “Patrick Jackson”, at least you will know it was written by a fellow carbon life form, who thought it through as they wrote.
Sharing something I wrote about my late mother, on her birthday: https://medium.com/@patrickgjackson/in-memoriam-teresa-jackson-ddabcf0607af
It’s not up there like Alien, it won’t challenge you like The Duellists, but Ridley Scott’s new movie The Dog Stars is an easy watch, pleasantly free of any expectations you may have from the great director. In any case, it’s in cinemas now and I liked it enough to write a review you can read here.
Looking over at Puig Major, the highest peak in the Tramuntana mountains of Mallorca, this month. I recorded this time lapse video on 16 January after hiking up to the ruined Castle of Alaró.
Alaró occupies a very special place in the history of the island as one of the last holdouts of, successively, the Byzantines before they were conquered by the Saracens in the tenth century, and the Saracens before they were conquered by the Catalans in the 13th. You really feel the fear of invaders when you climb up to the fort, isolated on top of a steep hill from which you can watch the plains. It clearly existed for no purpose but to shelter people.
You can read about my impressions here.
Ireland will be reunified – by the Post Office. They have yet again told me here in England that a parcel to Belfast is going to the “Republic of Ireland”.
You work 4 night shifts editing the UK news, manage finally to get to a post office just before closing, and they departitioned Ireland while you were sleeping. The scoop you missed.
You are asked why you did not give your full name on the parcel as the sender and you try to explain it’s because it’s going to Belfast and names can still cause trouble over there because of sectarianism. You realise this person does not know what “the Troubles” were, so you say it’s “kinda like Kashmir” and they look at you like you’re a fool, bless you, though you are pretty sure they know what Kashmir means.
At least the Post Office have now heard of Belfast.
I write this a couple of weeks after a holiday in Spain where I sent a parcel to people in Germany in order to finally get around UK-EU customs tariffs.
It was sent from a rundown part of Palma de Mallorca which had wow, an actual, fully staffed, beautifully branded and maintained post office, not a hybrid corner shop like back in England. Okay the parcel took 9 days to cross the Pyrenees but the mule reached Berlin in the end, contents fully intact, pack of fragile M&S apple pies included.
I live in hope my Belfast parcel doesn’t end up on a sorting slab in Cork.
On holiday in Mallorca and reflecting on a strange few days. Not that there’s anything strange about me being here – I am British (and Irish) after all, though most normal tourists arrive in summer while I only visit in winter. Probably my fifth visit now, for a week or so each time, and always in orange season. Do they grow peaches here too? I will probably never know. Maybe I’ll write a page in this blog about why I like the place at exactly this time of the year? Seven things to do in Mallorca in winter, something like that.
I’ll come to the strange part.
There is a very good (imho) Canadian TV serial called Mégantic about how the small, idyllic Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic coped after a huge fire killed 47 people there in 2013. It was caused by the derailment of a runaway freight train carrying crude oil. Watching on TV5 Monde, I had meant to finish the series on holiday and was still doing so when I read about the Almuda rail disaster in southern Spain on Sunday, which claimed at least 43 lives.
Mourning was declared across Spain for three days. Official celebrations for Palma’s great annual holiday, the Feast of St Sebastian, were cancelled, though Tuesday remained a day off for understandable reasons. Walking around the city centre’s main squares on Monday, in the pouring rain, I saw a JCB removing the unused logs set up for the festive bonfire on Plaça Major as braziers stood filled but never to be lit. On Plaza de España, black drapes flapped in the wind at the back of the empty stage.
Some unofficial celebrations of St Sebastian’s did go ahead but with a minute’s silence in respect of the rail crash victims. One charanga street musician told me the holiday had originally been a celebration of the end of a plague in the city and an affirmation of life in the midst of death, so it did not feel inappropriate.
In the Canadian TV series, released a decade after the disaster, each episode focuses on one individual or family, sensitively conveying how they live – or, in some cases, do not – with bereavement and trauma months after the event. I can imagine some of those affected by the disaster in Spain might find consolation watching this some day, but just not now, when the grief is so keen. At several points in the TV drama characters use, with some bitterness, the French saying “il faut donner du temps au temps”, which may roughly translate as “time takes time”. In the immediate aftermath, the survivors and the bereaved are surely living out of time.
Ironically, a new Spanish film with a similar theme but a very different treatment is playing in cinemas this week. In Rondallas (English title: Band Together), a community is still in mourning two years on for seven fishermen lost with their boat. They finally decide to honour their memory by reconstituting the pipe band they had played in. It’s a feel-good film, even a comedy, with a strong theme of friendship.
On Tuesday night I went to see it in the Augusta Cinema, and found myself in a packed theatre. Whether it was because of the holiday or the rain or the subject matter and the timing, I do not know, but when the credits rolled, some in the audience clapped respectfully.
As I write this on Wednesday, I am seated on a bench in Stations Park, above Palma’s underground rail and bus hub, enjoying the return of the sunshine. Small children play in the climbing-frame train across the path from me. I love this giant toy train. I have done from the first day that I saw it, years ago. Some days the innocent play of children feels like the most precious thing in the world.
“Shipshape and Bristol fashion” are the words that come to mind on a visit to Spain’s replica galleon the Andalucía, moored in Bristol last week on a visit timed for the English city’s Harbour Festival.
Your eyes feast on beautifully coiled ropes and lovingly caulked timbers, sails folded with studied rakishness, immaculately ordered officers’ tables and spotless cannon, as you pass around the decks with the other visitors. There is a whiff of Treasure Island in the air animating the kids (of all ages, as they say) along with the pleasure of learning some new history (I had no idea that bodega is also the Spanish word for a ship’s hold but it all makes sense now).
Wandering off along the waterside after my visit, past the other eye-catching ships moored in the city permanently, I ended up in a cafe on Spike Island called the Emmeline where, over a bowl of good salad and decent coffee, I leafed through the generous pages of the free local events guide, B24/7.
This was more out of idle curiosity – I went to university in Bristol and am always drawn back sooner or later to the old haunts – than with any hope of finding something for the early evening of my single day in the city, which would end with a train ride back home. So imagine the pleasant surprise of finding a play being staged just a few streets from the railway station in perfect time to let me catch my train. Not just any play either but Henry V (until 2 August), performed in the open air by an all-women company called Insane Root Theatre.
I had never seen Henry V but there were enough familiar lines – the “band of brothers” speech particularly – to intrigue me, as was the idea of a war play being staged by actresses.
In fact I enjoyed it so much that I wrote, privately, a short review. There was something quite shipshape and Bristol fashion about this production with its tiny cast of seven and minimal props – not counting the spectacular backdrop of one of Bristol’s bomb-damaged churches.
Last week I scribbled down my thoughts about Gladiator II in this blog because I was a bit annoyed by some of the snark around it but also out of loyalty to the brand because I had liked the original and other Ridley Scott films, especially The Duellists. The truth is the sequel has its flaws but it’s a film bound to lose a certain kind of critic in the trees, when the (holly)wood is staring out at them with a cheeky Irish smile.
This week I reviewed a quite different new release, The Last Dance, a human drama from Hong Kong about how we cope with change and death that moved me to tears while delighting me with its quality as a piece of film – the acting, script, cinematography, even the English subtitles.
I was the only one in the auditorium at the cinema in a town near London (which has a large community of Hong Kong emigres). Ironically given that this is a film haunted by the recent pandemic, it felt a bit like lockdown – maybe the approach of Storm Bert had kept people away? – but still, I do hope more people go and watch this film. I would happily go back.
Oh, it does also feature a sword – but fewer sandals.
No man, woman or fanged baboon steps in the same river twice. Why? Because the water’s not the same – as Seneca might have written had he too watched Sir Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, then Gladiator II nearly a quarter of a century later, instead of living out his days in actual Ancient Rome 2,000 years before.
The water’s different. Don’t go catching the late show in your nearest cinema like I did if you expect to re-experience the winter-soldier thrill of army-on-tribe at the Battle of Vindobona. But do settle down with a bucket of popcorn if a summertime amphibious assault mounted by Roman galleys, worthy of Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy, lights your arrows.
A Gladiator sequel cannot cut it without memorable fights and the baboon encounter is as startling as anything in the original but a simple duel fought waist-high in an actual river may stay with you even longer after the credits have rolled, not least because of its cathartic symbolism compared with a very different scene on the River Styx.
Russell Crowe’s sword is in safe hands with Paul Mescal who only bows here to Denzel Washington as the gladiators’ master with his speech on the death of an emperor which is, well, positively head-turning. When Washington goes in one ear, he does not go out the other.
If there are flaws in the sequel, they may lie in a script unlikely to rest in the mind like Crowe’s great line, “Are you not entertained?” Anything else is probably covered by cinematic licence. The large audience watching with me in the cinema into the early hours of Sunday, most of them young and as diverse a crowd as you’d find, seemed happy to the end.
It’s good to know that in his eighties, Sir Ridley can still exhilarate and transport film-goers with a new film as he did, you imagine, back in the 1970s when he first put “strength and honour” on the screen with The Duellists.
