Stories and spirits
Today I happened to be in a tell-me-a-story mood, so I booked online to be told one in the crypt of St Pancras Church. The ticket-booking site was one of those which annoyingly make you register, and I tend to exact revenge on those by getting creative when they ask me to fill in a title. This one even asked for a preferred salutation, which I guessed was some sort of log-in thing.
However, when I turned up at the church and gave my name, a bemused box-office lady greeted me as "O Great and Mighty Omniscient Light Source." Which should teach me a thing or two about messing with websites.
The evening itself was, in an understated fashion, extraordinary. A young man with a beautiful voice has teamed up with members of Punchdrunk Theatre for a reading of two M. R. James ghost stories. I'm glad I didn't read them before heading out; nor shall I reveal any details of what was within... but I left the church feeling hyperaware of fleeting details and ambient sounds, with an eye particularly attuned to the movement of shadows. If you have a free evening before 13 March, I highly recommend witnessing this strange-yet-felicitous performance.
Before the show, I swung by the comic book shop near the British Museum and scored a copy of P. Craig Russell's version of Neil Gaiman's The Dream Hunters. Gaiman initially published this as a prose story with extremely fine illustrations by Yoshitaka Amano, but Russell has adapted it into a full-on graphic novel, and it's pretty much everything you'd hope for from both Russell and Gaiman.
Why I Love P. Craig Russell is a topic for another time, but in the interim his blog is full of reasons to be cheerful on a winter's night.
However, when I turned up at the church and gave my name, a bemused box-office lady greeted me as "O Great and Mighty Omniscient Light Source." Which should teach me a thing or two about messing with websites.
The evening itself was, in an understated fashion, extraordinary. A young man with a beautiful voice has teamed up with members of Punchdrunk Theatre for a reading of two M. R. James ghost stories. I'm glad I didn't read them before heading out; nor shall I reveal any details of what was within... but I left the church feeling hyperaware of fleeting details and ambient sounds, with an eye particularly attuned to the movement of shadows. If you have a free evening before 13 March, I highly recommend witnessing this strange-yet-felicitous performance.
Before the show, I swung by the comic book shop near the British Museum and scored a copy of P. Craig Russell's version of Neil Gaiman's The Dream Hunters. Gaiman initially published this as a prose story with extremely fine illustrations by Yoshitaka Amano, but Russell has adapted it into a full-on graphic novel, and it's pretty much everything you'd hope for from both Russell and Gaiman.
Why I Love P. Craig Russell is a topic for another time, but in the interim his blog is full of reasons to be cheerful on a winter's night.