I thought it was a good film with some great acting, and it confidently handles its central theme: the way that violence breeds and blossoms in contexts of fear, cruelty and loneliness. There were a few clunky bits, usually in the brief reprieves from misery that pass for happy moments, where a heavy soundtrack suddenly landed on the film from nowhere. Elsewhere it’s light soundtracking and use of silence is very effective, so a sudden dollop of wistful folk (backing a montage, of all things) seemed a bit hamfisted.

I was pleased that the film tackles domestic violence, and it does a pretty good job. One of the difficulties always faced by film makers is  how to portray domestic violence in a way that is shocking without it prompting the ‘but why doesn’t she just leave?’ response. Although the visual impact of the bruising on Olivia Colman’s familiar face carries most of the weight, the film was also showed the controlling behaviour of the character Hannah’s husband, and how he flexed his power over her in subtler ways than with his fists. For example when he first appears she is asleep on the sofa and he simply, almost perfunctorily, urinates on her. It showed one of his bouts of contrition and self pity, forcing Hannah to soothe his guilt and offer forgiveness. And her responses to the violence and use of alcohol to cope rang very true.

But to my mind the film didn’t really get across the reasons why Hannah and why women like her don’t and can’t leave abusive situations. Certainly her single line of dialogue about how her family and friends all think he’s perfect didn’t really address it. It’s a difficult thing to do concisely but I think it’s possible, maybe through focusing more on the psychological groundwork which underpins the physical abuse. There was one line of dialogue which I felt hinted effectively at the lengthy attack on Hannah’s self-esteem: she says she needs to leave for her work as a volunteer in a charity shop and her husband says casually “That’s not work.”

What bothered me most in an otherwise brilliant film though was the fact that Hannah wasn’t really a fully formed character the way Joseph was. Her story was obscured by her victimhood. The hints about Joseph’s past and a series of small poignant details built up a subtle but powerful story of a man seemingly unable to escape his own violence. But there was no such picture of Hannah, she was just A Victim. The lack of realistic depth or complexity in her character in a way helped to underline her isolation and the way that the threat of violence had seeped into every minute of her day, but I think better writing could have achieved that too, while giving her a past and an identity.

A related niggle: her desire for children seemed like a bit of a bolt-on, designed to make her a more tragic figure. (Hm. What do women like? Babies!) There was even a massively cliched watching-a-mother-and-child-at-the-park scene. The focus at the film’s climax was about how the abuse had prevented her from becoming a mother. Which is devastating, and difficult to watch, but something about the way it was done made it feel like it was just put in to make her more sympathetic in the light of the revelation that she has murdered her husband. As if suffering daily humiliation, terror and physical violence for years isn’t enough to win an audience’s sympathy.

At the end of the day Tyrannosaur isn’t Hannah’s story, she is primarily a plot device to allow Joseph to confront his own violent reactions. Which is a legitimate directorial decision, he is the film’s main protagonist. But I feel like it was a missed opportunity to write a three dimensional female character, in a film which deals seriously with the subject of violence against women.

Impressively Brompton managed to maintain an air of refined melancholy with hundreds of Chelsea fans trooping through it post-match on the day we were there. Compared to wonderful half-wild Abney Park, the only other Magnificent Sevener I’ve made it to, Brompton was orderly and well-kept. Even the memorials were pretty restrained. We had a look about for any fanciful tombs adorned with weeping maidens or dryads, distracted with grief at the loss of this paunchy ambassador or that balding banker, but there were none (here’s a good one though. I mean, really – her top’s fallen off as well!)

There was a tomb with an enormous lion on top, but we were informed by a passerby that it belonged to a world-famous boxing champ so it seemed a bit more appropriate.

However, there is one mausoleum in Brompton that is so OTT it has generated its own fascinating mythology: the Brompton Time Machine.

It certainly looks the part. Peculiar and imposing, it does have quite a presence when you’re stood beside it. The design is bizarre, especially the odd ‘portholes’ at the top and the not-quite-hieroglyphs around the door. Like Bad Witch, I first heard the time machine theory at the London Folklore Conference at the Bishopsgate Institute a few years ago, and Bad Witch has a good summary of the theory put forward there about its time-travelling properties. As well as just looking a bit weird the key points that make it a bit oooooh are:

• It’s the only tomb in the cemetery for which there is no record of it being built.
• The key is missing, so it hasn’t been opened for 120 years.
• Inside are three fabulously wealthy spinsters about whom virtually nothing is known.
• On the nearby grave of famous Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi there is a relief of Anubis, whose godly snout is pointing towards the tomb. A gesture which supposedly indicates “a soul out of time”.
• Also buried nearby in an unmarked grave is eccentric inventor Samuel Warner, who sounds like JUST the kind of guy who might convince a wealthy spinster to fund a secret project to use ancient Egyptian wisdom build a time machine in the guise of an elaborate tomb.

However, The Clerkenwell Kid reveals that the time travel theory is totally wrong. It’s actually a teleportation chamber.

Doing a little digging (online, not at the cemetery – I’m not *that* inquisitive) I found a lot about Bonomi and a little about Warner, though not as much as you’d expect given that he sounds like a bonafide mad scientist. But it was the time machine’s inhabitants I really wanted to know more about, though I didn’t have much success. Thankfully some descendants of one of their relatives have been doing some family tree stuff so there’s a bit more now than a few years ago.

The mausoleum was commissioned by Hannah Peters/Courtoy, who was the third (and final) mistress of millionaire wigmaker John Courtoy – originally called Nicholas Jacquinet, he changed his name after arriving in England from France – who had two previous families with two other women. They weren’t married, but when he died she inherited his fortune. And it sounds like she earned it, as there was a 50 year age difference between them. Groo. Hannah reportedly died of cholera in 1848.

Also in the tomb are two of her daughters, Mary Ann and Elizabeth, about whom I could find nothing at all, sadly. However the aforementioned descendants did find a photograph of Hannah’s third daughter Susannah. Look! The past has a face! And a bonnet.

And the moral of the story is: who needs a time machine when you have the internet? Hopefully this will be the first of a series as my cemetery-visiting companion and I are aiming to get round all of the Magnificent Seven this year.

The question is ‘how do you plan your digital content?’

I work as general Communications Manager at Womankind Worldwide so I do publications, media, brand etc as well as digital and lack of time is a constant problem.

Our content for Twitter and Facebook is posted in an ad hoc way although I have got lists and alerts set up so I’ve got a pool of relevant external content to fish from. We’re too busy to produce all content ourselves but we have gained a good following through gathering and sharing international women’s rights news, particularly from news sites in the global South.

My current challenge is planning posts for our blog. Luckily my colleagues seem happy to write interesting things for me, but juggling their project visits, current int dev news, our offline marketing schedule and various UN ‘days’ can be a bit of a mission, and I feel we don’t always get to make the most of what we’ve got.

The way we do our blog content planning at the moment is monthly planning meetings with a web working group including a rep from each team, a shared Outlook calendar with key dates and events in and a spreadsheet tasklist where I note down our ideas for posts and assign a deadline and an author. Then I add the post to the shared calendar and send the author an invite.

When I have time to maintain it it works well, but when it slips because I’m busy there’s a bit of a bottleneck, so that’s what I’m trying to find a solution for at the moment.

Would love to hear what others are doing and any tips on systems that work with multiple content authors.

Having been reminded unceremoniously of its existence by a domain name renewal invoice, I’ve decided this poor old blog has lain dormant LONG ENOUGH. It’s time to get back in the blogging saddle.

Of course I’m still blogging rather more regularly for the excellent Bad Reputation but for my not obviously feminist interests it’s time to revive Applejackson.

On the subject of which: My Little Pony is back! Whoah. And for once my diamond hard 80s cartoon nostalgia has melted away: the new version is roughly a billionty times better than the original. For anyone who hasn’t seen it (really, what have you been doing?) It’s very much in the Powerpuff Girls mode – bright, fast, squeaky, witty – which is no surprise as they were both created by the same person, Lauren Faust.

Applejack was always my favourite because she was the tomboy pony (tompony?) But now my world has been spun on its axis because in the series reshod there are TWO TOMPONYS! Applejack and the rather brilliant Rainbow Dash. AND there’s a bookworm pony in the form of academic Twilight Sparkle. Friends of mine have produced excellent blog posts about the feminism of MLP, and the way it reflects the experiences of current twentysomethings.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (to give it its full title) has also pleasingly plundered a compendium of mythical beasts for its adversaries – in the second episode the pony friends fight a manticore! And later some giant ghostly star bears: Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.

Although to be fair the original had some good baddies too. In one the ponies got turned into spiny dragon-creatures, that was quite disturbing. And anyone else remember Katrina the magic junkie witchcat and her shape-shifting lizard lover? They tried to turn all the ponies into slaves when their existing slaves (kind of a hybrid between tribbles and the M&M advert characters) escaped. Katrina appears about at about 2.30 in this clip:

Watching it again it’s all a terrible indictment of female ambition and aggression as Katrina is rewarded with the love of her lizard and social acceptance by the ponies when she gives up her power and becomes gentle and demure.

Another thing I appreciate about the new version is that it explores the implications of the presence of Spike the baby dragon. I can’t remember his exact role in 80s Pony lore, he was just sort of hanging around, but I always found it troubling. What about when he grows up? Are there other dragons around? Do they eat the ponies? In the new version he’s the friend/pet/slave of academic pony Twilight Sparkle, and there’s a whole episode dedicated to answering these urgent questions.

Of course there are new questions in their place: do the earth ponies ever get resentful at the unicorn ruling elite? Is Equestria a feudal state? Why are there so few male ponies? Why does the pony princess Celestia travel in a chariot *drawn by ponies*? Are they slaves? Do they have language too? And the one that bothers me most of all: why would a farm in Ponyville have pigs on it? I can’t stop imagining a My Little Pony Abattoir play set.

But I love it anyway, and although the sharing and fluffiness occasionally gets a bit revolting, I approve of its central message, because, well, friendship is magic. The 80s My Little Pony message was basically just “buy me!” so this is a significant improvement.

Annette Hanshaw

“You are the cream in my coffee
and you are the salt in my stew
You will always be
my necessity
I’d be lost without you.

You are the starch in my collar
and you are the lace in my shoe
You will always be
my necessity
Oh I’m wild about you!

You give life savour
bring out its flavour
so this is clear, dear
you’re my worcestershire dear.”

And ‘You Couldn’t Be Cuter’ (there’s a lovely version by Al Bowlly) being another:

Ivie Anderson

“You couldn’t be cuter
Plus that you couldn’t be smarter
Plus that intelligent face
You have disgraceful charm, for me.

You couldn’t be keener
You look so fresh from the cleaner
You are the little grand slam
I’ll bring to my family.”

Plus all those wonderful Fred Astaire numbers. And some Noel Cowards. And Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ivie Anderson, Mildred Bailey… Oh man it was a great time for popular music! And I haven’t even mentioned all the blues, that deserves its own post, clearly.

Just watch out for the creepy over-in-love lyrics from some quarters (guilty: ‘If I Had A Talking Picture of You’, ‘You’re Getting To Be A Habit With Me’ and many many others…)

Also brace yourself for the occasional racist lyric. Ivie Anderson and Duke Ellington’s ‘Delta Bound’ is magnificent, but the throwaway mention of “darkies” in one line instantly transports me back to 1990s Cornwall and conversations with my gran. Ack.

But yes. Lots of people have been asking me where I found all the songs – I got most of them from a 3 CD set called ‘Top Hits of the 1930s’ which is available on Spotify. I’ve made a playlist of my favourites, with a few extra by Ivie Anderson and Annette Hanshaw thrown in. Incidentally, if you like Annette Hanshaw’s voice (I do, but it does start to grate after a little while) then you should definitely check out the superb Sita Sings The Blues. (Tiny niggle: if you’re talking about BLUES don’t go to Annette Hanshaw, you want Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey for that.)

There are also some *very* old phonograph recordings available on the utterly brilliant Free Music Archive. As you’d expect for recordings from 1917 there’s a lot of hiss in the background, but I just put it on loud in the next room and pretend I have a gramophone. Anyway, here are some of my favourites from the FMA:

That’s partly because I have a large number of old posts in draft form which I managed to rescue when the site died a while back. Rebooting them is satisfying but also frustrating, as they need all new links and the original pictures are gone.

The other reason is because I’ve been bloggin’ elsewhere on the interweb. I thought it might be good to sling up a post linking to some of the things I’ve been doing elsewhere. Just to prove I’ve not just been twiddling my thumbs since xmas.

Women’s History Month

Where are women in the history of art?

An article commissioned by WHM following a massive rant of mine on Twitter about women and art (prompted by a stupid comment in a documentary from Howard Jacobson) It turned out to be a great excuse to revisit a load of essays I had to read on the hop during my degree.

Bad Reputation

I’m part of the Bad Rep team so trying to turn in posts for them regularly. These are some of my favourites, but you should really go and read everyone else’s posts too.

• The Hearing Trumpet: Surrealism and Old Lady Revolt
• What Does Feminism Look Like?
• Why Are Trending Topic #Hashtags so Sexist?
• Reproductive Justice in the UK
• Battle Angel Alita and Cyborg Feminism

Womankind Worldwide

Where are women’s voices in the land rush debate?

My first proper blog post in my new job, it’s so fascinating learning about the global women’s movement, and about time I broadened my perspective out from the UK.

Last weekend I paid a visit to the rather gorgeous Dalston Rio Cinema, to watch It Always Rains On Sunday, which was showing as part of the East End Film Festival. It was one of their ‘Silver Screen’ matinees, which are free for the over 60s and include tea and cake in the ticket price. And let me tell you, the home-made victoria sponge was DELICIOUS, and not just because it was free.

Rio Cinema is very lovely inside, with a huge pale blue arching ceiling and a proper thick red velvet curtain across the screen. It has been a cinema for nearly a century, and there’s a detailed history page on their site, including pictures of it in some of its former incarnations, as the Kingsland Empire, the Dalston Classic, and the racy Tatler.

The film was ostensibly about a Bethnal Green housewife sheltering her escaped convict ex-lover, but actually the star of the film was Ealing Studios version of East London in the 1940s (including the line “Oh, I wish there was no such place as Bethnal Green!” which got a big laugh). There was a lot of detail about the daily life of the family, with their tin bath and their Anderson shelter and cheese ration. Plus a trio of Cockney crooks, a Jewish market wheeler-dealer and a philandering saxophonist. My favourite bit, however, was the switch to a film of a toy train set for the long-view action shot when the fugitive is escaping across a railway yard

The only thing that slightly spoiled it was the commentary coming from some of the more elderly members of the audience, along the lines of: “Ooh, what’s this? He knows, he knows! Ah, blackmail yes. Yes. Oh no, don’t run! He’s coming home!” etc… But hey, I was crashing their performance, so I can’t complain.

Yesterday I went back to Roman Road market for the first time in a while and thought it was high time to post about G Kelly’s Noted Eel & Pie Shop.

It’s not up to me to tell you why pie and why mash and dear god why jellied eels. I’ll leave that up to the wonderful and terrifying www.eelhouse.co.uk, who offer a mail order pie service, and even pie and mash gift vouchers (‘the perfect gift!’)

Trying the pie and mash at G Kelly’s esteemed establishment was one of the first things I did when I moved to Bow, and although I did think that it was pretty bland (that’s obviously what the chilli vinegar is for…) it was hearty and cheap and peculiar. The interior of G Kelly seems to have been left mostly unchanged since the 1930s, all white tiles and mirrors and long wooden benches. On their website they have some fantastic history and a slideshow of old photographs.

They have a much more varied menu than other p&m shops I have visited, offering eels both stewed and jellied, soya mince vegetarian pies, mushy peas and even sweet pies and apple crumble with custard. The staff were friendly, and clearly amused at my confusion when offered ‘liquor’ on my pie – liquor is a thin green sauce made of parsley, rather than the bottle of gin I was momentarily expecting. (“Bargain!”, I thought.)

G Kelly gets busy at lunchtime on market days (Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday) often with queues out the door, as traders come in and put in incomprehensible orders like “one, two and peas, please love” (I think that’s one pie, two scoops of mash, and mushy peas). Saturday afternoons it’s a bit quieter.

Jen and the eels

I think over the years I’ve had all kinds of their pies, but I have never gone near an eel. I am simply not brave enough. Have you seen what jellied eels look like?

Seriously. Step in my much braver friend Jen, who gamely tried some stewed eels with her mash. Apparently they were ok – fishy, squidgey, and yet full of bones. Yum.

There are quite a few pie and mash shops still dotted around East London, including one just down the road from me on Leytonstone High Road opposite Harrow Green. Writing this post is making me hungry, so perhaps I’ll stop in. Hm.

Before I sign off though, photographer Chris Clunn has a great collection of black and white photos of the exteriors, staff and customers in a selection of pie and mash shops.

We visited one of those fantastic ‘attractions’ which consist of two or three entirely disparate items, plus a shop and a cafe. These places have a special place in my heart as they were everywhere in Cornwall when I was growing up and the king of the all is Flambards Theme Park near Helston, which has the following delights available in one place:

• Replica Victorian Village (in fairness, this is awesome)
• ‘Britain in the Blitz’ Experience
• Exploratorium Science Dome
• Aerodrome – plane and helicopter museum
• 3D Cinema
• Garden centre
• The Hornet rollercoaster and other rides
• Gus Honeybun exhibition (you will only know who he is if you were a child in Cornwall in the 80s)

There’s probably more stuff now, who knows. It’s also the only place I have ever seen to open a Santa’s Grotto in August.

Waiting for a train in the rabbit village

Anyway, we found a smaller specimen of this type in Llanbrynmair, Powys, in the form of Machinations which has a small collection of automata, a playbarn and a rabbit village. Yes, that’s tiny stone houses (and one castle!) with rabbits frolicking among them like giant disinterested furry Godzillas. It is utterly wonderful.

However, I dragged my companion all the way to Llanbrynmair from our base at Dolgellau *almost* as much for the automata as for the rabbits. Regular readers will know I am in love with the uncanny and have a thing for robots of all kinds. The kind of automata on display at Machinations were mostly contemporary rather than historical, and artistic and whimsical rather than rotted and creepy, which is my preferred type, but that’s where the interest comes from. Here’s a short video of some of the collection in action, with some fabulously grating creative commons piano roll music:

A Selection of Automata from Machinations Museum, Wales from Sarah Jackson on Vimeo.

There were a few examples from UK artists I was already familiar with, namely Paul Spooner and Keith Newstead of the smashing Cabaret Mechanical Theatre (which originated in Cornwall), but also some who were completely new to me and were very finely made. The silly music in the video doesn’t really suit the intelligence and wit that characterise these contraptions.

Some of them are gently uncanny, particularly the series of people absorbed in their work, I think – in the video there are clips of a potter at his wheel and a woman rolling out some dough. What I like best about these (apart from the carving and the detail in the clothes and settings) was the absolute absence of any sense of performance. The way that the figures are quietly getting on with their daily tasks and seem to be unaware of their audience creates a feeling of a private or intimate space and hints at the internal life of the figure. What is going through their mind as they perform these repetitive motions? The uncertainty of the presence of that internal life is at the heart of the uncanny.

Naturally I forgot to note down the name of the person who made them and now I can’t find it anywhere. If these are your creations, please claim them!

If you’d like to know more about automata here’s a brief history, and for the more robotty end I would recommend Gaby Wood’s book Living Dolls, which looks at the cultural and historical context of (mostly human-like) automata and takes in drawing room curiosities to scientific endeavours to create mechanical life. Spooky stuff.

The protagonist, a young woman called Fausta,  is ill with a disease contracted from her mother’s breast milk known as “the milk of sorrow”,  a condition that only affects those women in Peru who were abused or raped during the years of terrorist struggle.  This Grauniad review says “This Peruvian lament examining how distress passes down the generations is subtle and wonderfully moving.”

Here’s the trailer. Please go and support the screening of weird films at Stratford Picturehouse!*

* ‘Weird’ is intended to be entirely complimentary, btw