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Goa: In search of Vindaloo

There are only two occasions when it is acceptable to wake up and have a drink before 10am. One is Christmas morning and the other is at an airport before a holiday. On 25th December 2015, both of these conditions were satisfied, so I drank a half with breakfast at the Gatwick Airport Wetherspoon’s (‘the Beehive’). I was flying to Goa, where I’d booked a holiday to laze around on the beach. Then, after ten days, I would head on to Varanasi for something more active.

As well as swimming and reading, I had another plan for my trip. I recently read Lizzie Collingham’s book, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerers. She describes it as “a biography of the curries of the Indian subcontinent”, promising that “each recipe tells the tale of the different people who prepared and ate the dish”. It’s an excellent book, explaining where the dishes on the English curry-house menu come from.

My usual curry order is a vegetable vindaloo. Sometimes they are good, other times disappointing, but at least you have an idea how spicy it is going to be. Reading Collingham’s book, I discovered that this much-maligned dish had a tangled, curious history, spanning five hundred years.

Travelling on Christmas Day has its advantages. It meant I got a chocolate with my airline Christmas dinner, and there was a brief visit from Santa Claus. I landed at about eleven on Christmas Day but it was well into Boxing Day before I passed through immigration and found a taxi to Mandrem Beach. It was about two before I was in bed. Spending the day in planes and airports meant it wasn’t the most exciting Christmas Day of my life, but it did mean I woke up in Goa on Boxing Day.

This is the saddest Christmas chocolate I've ever seen. — This is the saddest Christmas chocolate I’ve ever seen.

And it was pretty good. I was about three minutes walk from a quiet beach – Mandrem is very peaceful compared to its brash neighbour Arambol. I found my way to a seafront cafe and had breakfast. A little later I came back and installed myself on a sun lounger. Once an hour I would go swimming, but the rest of the day I read. Every so often I would move the sunbed back a little to stay in the shade.

I’d read about goan food before setting off, and was impressed by the dishes available at Brighton’s Goan takeaway, the Nishat Tandoori. The thing is, most places on the beaches didn’t go much for local cuisine. They had a few dishes, maybe a vindaloo or a xacuti, but these were crowded out by the usual traveller fare. Some people refer to India, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia etc as the ‘banana pancake trail’ because of its reliance on certain standard dishes. Many of the Goan cafes and restaurants had menus similar to the ones I had seen in North India or Nepal. Even worse, the few goan dishes they had contained meat, which is no good for me as a vegetarian.

So, while I was content to laze around on the beach for a few days, seeing out the last of 2015, I’d need to explore a little to find an authentic vindaloo.

An Article in Ernest Magazine

Ernest Journal is one of my favourite magazines. It describes itself as being “for curious and adventurous people”. Recent issues have featured ghost villages, numbers stations, some amazing travel features, and Queen’s Brian May writing on Victorian Diableries. The most recent issue, number four, includes writing by me about the Antarctic explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard. The magazine also smells truly excellent, which is an important consideration for paper-based goods.

The piece came about through meeting the editor, Jo Keeling, when I was speaking at Wilderness Festival last August. Jo was running the Odditorium, the venue where I spoke. Nervous before my performance, rather than have an actual conversation, I told Jo at great length about Cherry-Garrard. Instead of making excuses to get away, Jo invited me to write an article about it. I sent her a slightly strange outline and she said she I should go ahead with it.

I first heard about Cherry-Garrard through a friend’s recommendation. I ended up reading his book, TheWorst Journey in the World, among a lot of Antarctic literature for my MA dissertation (I read about a dozen books for this, which ended up as a mere 2 pages of the final text). The Worst Journey refers, not to Scott’s fatal mission, but to the miserable trek that Cherry-Garrard engaged in with two companions.

It’s strange to think that most of Cherry-Garrard’s reputation rests upon a single section of his work, where he describes the stubborn fortitude with which he and his companions faced the grim, unrelenting cold – just to collect a couple of penguin’s eggs, needed to support an evolutionary theory that was dismissed without needing his sacrifice.

My article was particularly inspired by the work of Sara Wheeler. As well as writing a biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Wheeler has written an account of her own time in Antarctica, Terra Incognito. It’s a powerful, emotional book, as well as being incredibly funny in places.

I’m currently working on my next article which will be about… something odd and unrelated. And I love that there are places like Ernest with spaces for this sort of writing. My piece sits alongside an article on modern reproductions of Shackleton’s clothing (featuring a rather grisly fact) and a guide to wild butchery (“Remove skin and store away – you can use it to make a rug later”).

Ernest 4 is amazing and is available here – and if you’re in Brighton, the magazine shop on Trafalgar Street should have copies.

Cheeky Walk: A Perfect Walk

The last entry in the Cheeky Walks book – and the longest outside Brighton – is the Perfect Walk in Arundel. I don’t like to read too much of the walk in advance and assumed Arundel meant twittens and history. Instead this was a country walk, with long, scenic stretches beside the river Arun and deep woods. So, probably best not to do it in Winter. Right from the start it was thick with mud, and Lela had decided to wear her trainers instead of hiking boots or wellingtons. But we pressed on – for 8½ miles.

It was pretty good though. Arundel castle appeared and disappeared, providing a regular reference point. There were turkeys. And there was a wooden suspension bridge. And the least level cricket pitch I’ve seen in Sussex. But the mud was incessant and exhausting. The mess around the stiles did make for fun puzzles – which route to take to avoid getting wet feet?

IMG_20160214_142633 (copy) IMG_20160214_124707 (copy)

We didn’t have a hope of a table at the George and Dragon in Belpham, but easily found a riverside table at the Black Rabbit. Sadly the food is less wonderful than it was many years ago in 2012 when the guide was written. They don’t do veggie roasts, and the veggie burger was underwhelming. Still, they had a fantastic location and gherkins that looked like worms emerging from the burger.

One of my favourite things about the cheeky walks is you sometimes feel like the directions are about to lead you wrong, but they never do.As the book gets older, the directions become less accurate. In this one, it warns at one point “if you pass the phone box, you have gone too far”. The phone is gone, but the box is now an information resource:

The weather may have been poor, but we saw the first signs of Spring. Maybe not a perfect walk, given the ground underfoot – but it might be worth trying again on a summer’s day:

Back to the Cheeky Walks: Sex and the City

Last year I decided I to do all the tours in the Cheeky Walks guide. In the end, I managed 9 out of 21, failing do do any of the ones outside Brighton. It was good fun and this year I’m going to actually finish the book. Not least because it is now four years old, and some of the directions are going to fall out of date.

(29/2/16 – Edit – as Tim points out in the comments, the new edition of the book is now out, with everything updated. I will be sticking with my old edition, as I am determined to finish this book)

Last weekend it was the turn of the penultimate Brighton entry, “Sex and the City”. This walk was less epic or curious than some of the others and, going from Brighton Station to Kemptown, was also less scenic. But that’s not to say it wasn’t interesting – I learned that Aubrey Beardsley was a Brighton resident, and that the houses near St Nicholas church were once a home for penitent prostitutes:

IMG_20160207_122427

There were also some funny asides in the commentary, and certain locations led to interesting anecdotes. A few of the features had gone, such as an alleyway to a sex shop in Ship Street and the moving of the bodycasting shop.

We ended with a drink at the Barley Mow pub, chosen as the ending point because of its ‘sperm table’. It was a good day.

We have nine more walks to go, most of which are far outside Brighton.

The Power of London Road’s Stone Circle

Towards the end of last year, I noticed a couple of numbered stones in the pavement around the New England area. I was curious – there had to be a reason why they were there – but I couldn’t work out what they were for.

During a conversation with Jake Spicer, I found out that the stones were part of a circle laid out around by The Brighton School. This circle was their first work and featured stones laid in pavements, on the Level and in private gardens. Apparently this is the “first urban stone circle in England, and probably the world”. (A good description of the work is here). I love this project – it’s playful and connects to some fascinating English traditions.

Last night I was reading Britannia Obscura by Joanne Parker, a book on ‘mapping Britain’s hidden landscapes’. The third chapter of this was about megaliths and includes an interview with Philip Carr-Gomm, who heads the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids.

Carr-Gomm explains how the stone circles are part of a magical landscape that includes some very modern features: “We don’t worry about time… Whether a monument or a hundred years ago or a thousand, what matters is that it’s important to me today. There’s a reality between linear time.” The druids even worship at some ‘fake’ stone circles made in the nineteenth century – so the London Road certainly has the potential for power.

Parker also refers to the tradition that some stone circles could not be counted. She suggests that this is because it is sometimes hard to tell which rocks should be included, but also refers to folklore – a baker who tried to count the Rollright Stones by putting a loaf on each one, only to find they were disappearing. Given that some of London Road’s stones are on private property, they are equally hard to count.

The chapter concludes by questioning what gives stone circles their power. It can’t simple be their scale or the work involved, says Parker, as there are many larger man-made objects. After considering some sort of healing effect, Parker concludes that they put us in touch with a deeper sense of time: “maybe, just maybe, something of what we are and do might endure beyond our scores of years”.

The MechaPoet experiment

The MechaPoet has now retired from performance. She currently sits on a chair in my flat beside the printer. I like to think they are friends; possibly, in time, something more.

MechaPoet was an attempt to produce a performance poetry robot. The idea came from discussions about creating real-person slash fiction with text generators. This led to the idea of MechaPoet, an attempt to relieve human beings from the drudgery of writing poetry. Me and Chris (my partner in the enterprise) have posted a few times about this (1, 2, 3 posts from me and one from Chris ), but I thought I’d do a quick overall post summarising things.

The technical side of MechaPoet was relatively unsophisticated, being based upon Markov Chains. The wikipedia page on this is not a particularly easy read. A simple way to explain them is that the Markov chains store every combination of two words in a text, and the word that follows them. This map of the text can then be used to generate plausible sequences of words that aren’t found in the original text. The best explanation of Markov Chains is by on-the-lambda.com, who illustrate the concept with the Smiths song, this Charming Man. They go on to show how Markov chains can be used to generate wine reviews.

Obviously the project wasn’t just using Markov chains. I found a corpus of word pronunciations and used this to find generated phrases that ended on the same sound, and this could be used to generate couplets. The rhyming made the poems much more interesting. To quote Chris:

As someone who gets a bit sketchy and stressed out when I hear a lazy rhyme (part of the reason that I gave up rhyming altogether a couple of years ago), it might sound like quite a contrary request, but I think it gives a real shape to what MechaPoet comes out with, and makes the leap from the sort of Avant-Garde poetry that looks like an arbitrary list to the sort of semi-avant-garde-rhyming-doggerel that can be all too familiar to someone who goes to enough poetry nights. What was surprising was what eventually came out – sometimes, poems that are genuinely quite moving, and which contain some remarkable and surprising images.

The idea such an unimpressive way of generating the content was not simply laziness. I’d been thinking of something Matt Jones had said, about being ‘as smart as a puppy’: “Making smart things that don’t try to be too smart and fail and, indeed, by design, make endearing failures in their attempts to learn and improve. Like puppies.” The idea bring that it’s best not to try being too clever, but to cover for the shortcomings by being charming – hence the cardboard body of the robot.

A good example of simplicity working well is a bot written by Mark Humphrys which ‘passed’ the Turing test with “profanity, relentless aggression, prurient queries about the user, and implying that they were a liar when they responsed”. There’s also the classic story about the Eliza bot, where people felt their interactions with it were both significant and personal.

We had an interesting ‘uncanny valley‘ problem with the voice. The first version of the MechaPoet used the FreeTTS voices, which were good enough to tell that you were hearing poetry, but many of the words were garbled. After a show-and-tell at Brighton Java, Luke Whiting suggested using Google text-to-speech. This is incredibly good, so much so that I had to make it sound imperfect to make the listener more sympathetic. (There was some research on this effect, and I’ll add a link when I find it again). The final version of the MechaPoet was a server-based poetry generator which was accessed by an Android phone providing the speech generation.

During the project I met up with zenbullets and shardcore, two local digital artists. I first met them after telling them their dedbullets collaboration was featured in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing. Zenbullets’ book Novelty Waves is worth a read, by the way, and some of shardcore’s talks are online – for example, What is it Like to Be a Bot?

Shardcore, quite rightly, pointed out many more sophisticated techniques I could use, but lack of time and focus meant I never explored them. It’s a great shame, as we were given some lovely ideas. As Shardcore writes about Markov Chains, “I’ve never been a huge fan of Markov chains for creating text, since the results can be somewhat haphazard and ungrammatical.”

There are still some fun projects involving the technique. King James Programming takes three texts as its source, moulding them into a new form. (“And it came to pass, that he who fleeth from the noise and confusion of ordinary software engineering or academic research.”) Or there is Garkov, which uses Markvo chains in an attempt to produce plausible Garfield strips.

I also wrote The MechaPoet in Java, which is a lousy language for hacking together prototypes, particularly for text manipulation – but when I wanted to produce the robot, I didn’t want to fiddle about learning Groovy, or sharpening my blunted Python skills.

MechaPoet was intended as a performance poet. She was involved in Chris’s award-winning Brighton Fringe show, as well as an appearance at the Hammer and Tongue night which, I think, baffled people more than it entertained. We never quite managed the trick of making MechaPoet entertaining rather than interesting.

(MechaPoet was a she, by the way. It’s amazing how many people assumed that a robot/performance poet must be a ‘he’. Hopefully, we weren’t sanctimonious in that, but if you’re going to gender a spray-painted cardboard box with a phone inside…)

I do want to return to the MechaPoet project at some point. I started work on a haiku generator (referring to haiku as the 5-7-5 version of the form). I’m convinced that the constrained, gnomic style of these haiku means it would be easy for a computer to create poetry far superior to what humans could do. My eventual plan is to use some sort of Bayesian filtering to pick good haiku. So far, I’ve got no further than a rather scrappy github repo. But it does at least have some unit tests.

I must also recommend Bot or not, which allows users to guess whether a piece of poetry is wtritten by a human or a computer. Apparently Blake’s The Fly is the most human-like poem written by a human being.

Two Knocks for Yes

Last Friday I spoke as part of the Two Knocks performance at St Andrew’s Church in Hove. I’d been involved in some early discussion and it sounded so ambitious that, when I was invited to participate I had to say yes.

I gave a talk about ‘The Folklore of Death and Water’. It was a deliberately bland title, playing with some of my obsessions while feeding into other aspects of the event. I was a little nervous as the night approached, particularly as the audience hit 100, but I was fairly happy with my performance.

The venue was probably the most atmospheric place I’ve ever performed. It was incredible speaking from the pulpit, the audience dimly lit in front of me. The building was sufficiently spooky to freak me out completely during rehearsals. I was talking while Curtis listened, Emily ran tech and Simon checked his kit. We had the doors locked so that we weren’t disturbed. From where I was I could see through the doorway into the church’s entrance corridor. As I described a haunting, I saw a shape move past the doorway. The rehearsal fell apart as I started laughing nervously. I’m not the sort of person who imagines seeing things.

As I said in the talk, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe in hauntings. Even during daytime rehearsals, the effect of the performance and venue was spooky. I hope there are more of these in the future. Future events will be announced via the Two Knocks mailing list and the soundtrack is online.

The ‘South Lanes Burger King’ Petition

I missed the fuss about the recent petition against a new Burger King in Brighton’s Lanes – the only post I saw on facebook simply questioned the petition’s reference to the ‘South Lanes’ (now corrected). But it looks as if there is a planning request for “Installation of 3no. air conditioning units, 2no. chiller and freezer condenser units and other associated alterations.” at Clarendon Mansions, evidently for a new Burger King.

I’m not a fan of burger restaurants that aren’t Grubbs, and haven’t set foot in a Burger King for about a decade. Even so, this petition made me uncomfortable. And that’s not just snark about the misnaming of the Lanes (although, as one signer suggested, “if we’re concerned with the history of the area let’s get its name right”).

Why did the petition only go up just before the deadline? The petition’s creator implies that the annoucement was delayed to prevent protest. Is this the case? I assume there is some sort of standard consulation period. Was this really not followed?
Are the “independent Burger provisioners … already resident around the street serving up far better nom noms?” really competing with a Burger King? Maybe people who don’t use words like nom-noms have different requirements? Some people genuinely prefer visiting a chain they are familiar with.
“the move to open more chain shops on East Street signals the beginning of the end on a irreparable slope of genericism, that sees our local elected council try ever so hard to turn our city centre into a carbon copy of every other British city” – Any evidence for this?
The petition refers to “proven fake evidence supplied by the police” against the Northern Lights bar. The petition owner needs to publish this proof. And, while there have been some bitter arguments over licensing recently, there have also been some venue owners distorting the facts significantly.
Whitbread, who own the lease on the building have left it empty for three years. Is an empty pub really better than an open restaurant?
“The council have decided, Brighton’s lovely vibe now needs more corporate sponsors”. Is there any evidence for this claim, given that the planning request was from a private individual?
10,000 signers in 24 hours is impressive. What are the signatories doing about other things that are far bigger problems in our city, like the housing crisis, lack of mental health provision, collapsing seafront infrastructure, parking problems and poor public transport? (And where were they when the petition for a life-size replica of the West Pier was published? Why weren’t there this many objections to the strip club just down the road?)
The planing applicant was previously a franchisee of the Aquarium redevelopment, one of the few business to survive there. No question here, just wanted to point out how awkward that area would have looked without a Burger King.

As the Argus points out “The petitioners [sic] concerns may not be considered valid planning objections because the building already has permission to be used as a pub and will not need permission to become a restaurant…”

A lot of the objections are based around the idea that a Burger King would be the ‘wrong sort of development’. For whom? This idea of Brighton as a utopia of independent businesses is one that I love, but it needs a lot more thought than simply rejecting businesses people don’t like – particularly when the same street has a number of chains on it. We need a stronger vision of Brighton than snobbery.

I’m not saying that this restaurant is a good thing, but I am sick of these knee-jerk petitions (particularly ones with this many typos); and I am tired of ill-thought outrage about planning, when there is often a little more to these stories than the things announced on social media.

Season Notes 4

This post has been sitting around in my drafts folder for months without being published. But I like these season-notes and want to keep them going. So, catching up very quickly on April to June:

I finished my long post-Crunch holiday with a trip to Morocco and, at the end of April, I started a new contract close to Brighton station. The election was a great storyline but a disappointing result. I saw Nick Cave play in London. I discovered that my Dad had met Grace Hopper (I’ve no idea why he didn’t mention that before now).

Birthday celebrations were fun. I saw Eddie Argos doing his spoken word tour; and Lou-Ice and Sara visited for the launch of Swenglish. The Glastonbury Festival was the best yet, with Sarah, MJP, Rosy, Robin, James and Dina all being awesome. Kanye was ambitious but missed; Patti Smith played an incredible set where the Dalai Lama’s appearance halfway through was not the highlight.

I had a few performances. I did a piece at Hammer and Tongue, featuring Chris Parkinson on video. I asked him to be Flava to my Chuck D and he killed it. I spoke at the Catalyst Club on ‘Not Walking Around the World’; I gave a talk as part of Brighton Fringe on Sussex Death Folklore, which I loved researching and was delighted by how warmly people responded. I was part of the Nocturnal event at the Towner Gallery.

I wrote about the Cheeky Walks for Brighton-A-Budget and did a piece on meetups for the Crunch blog. I also published my first collection of stories, and tiny booklet of 6 stories in 600 words (review here):

The i360: Sauron’s Trojan Horse

An artist's impression of the completed i360 — An artist’s impression of the completed i360

A week or so back I realised I could see the i360 from my flat. When I mentioned it on Twitter, a friend said that its red light reminded them of the eye of Sauron. And there is something oppressive about the way it overlooks everything.

I’ve written a lot about the i360 over the years (see here and here). I try not to resent the project but given the disruption to the seafront, the decay of the Terraces and the associated development, I really wish it wasn’t going ahead.

Scribe tweeted me a recent celebratory article from the Guardian which talks up the project and its organisers. As the piece points out, the i360 probably will make a profit (see my discussion of the Council’s loan document). The piece goes on to acclaim it as an exciting development, linking it to the Pavilion and the West Pier itself. The article claims that most people are in favour, but there is something bullying about the tone:

It will loom over the seafront, more or less where Brighton meets Hove, and nobody in either town will be able to ignore it… It seems presumptuous to give a quarter of a million people a new symbol that they didn’t ask for, but that is unavoidably what’s happening, which makes the emotional stakes extremely high.

Rachel Clark of the West Pier Trust is quoted as saying that “far more people… are in favour of it than against”, which is fair enough. Most people I’ve met have a weary contempt or make jokes about its ridiculous phallic nature. As to Clark’s claim that the i360 will transform Brighton, “putting it absolutely fairly and squarely back on the map as an exciting, glamorous and daring place to be”? I wasn’t aware the town at any risk of disappearing from the map.

At the same time as the i360 goes up, the old Concorde/Sea-life development remains a ghost town, although there is a new scheme to do something with it. Further East, the ‘artist’s quarter’ near the Concorde 2 is being evacuated as sections of Madeira Terrace are close to collapse. Estimates of the cost of repair are eye-wateringly (fantastically?) high. All the focus on the i360 draws attention away from the very serious neglect of other parts of the seafront.

As much as I resent the i360 for disrupting the flow and calm of a massive area of seafront, I am most concerned about the scale of the associated development. I’d always imagined it being a tower with ticket/waiting area. But there is also a restaurant, as well as a 1000-person conference center. This sounds like a large development, and I find myself wondering if the i360 is little more than a way of redeveloping an area of the seafront. Is there additional development to come? And, if the tower should be removed in the future, will this new development be left behind?