Trivandrum day 2

I have been to Trivandrum several times years ago, but I never went beyond the station, which is situated in possibly the ugliest part of town. So I had a pretty poor impression of the place. In fact much of the city has traditional Keralan houses with pointed tiled roofs, surrounded by large, leafy trees.

My friend's enthusiasm for Kerala is boundless, but then he is Keralan. "The Communist state of Kerala is the most equal state in India. There is very little poverty. The roads are clean, public buildings are clean, hotels are clean and the food is cheap. There are fourteen cinemas in Trivandrum and the five biggest ones were all built by the communist party. They run this film festival and they make sure that it is big."

I have to agree with him about the cleanliness of the place, the cheapness of the food and wonder of wonders, the rikshaws all use metres. There's no arguing over the price of a ride. Just jump in and tell them to switch on the metre, if they haven't already. And if you want to walk they don't hassle you. 

We started early at nine o'clock in the morning with "A Season in France" by Chad director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun about African refugees seeking asylum in France, unsuccessfully, a very emotional film, moving but understated. Then we hopped in a rikshaw to go to a different cinema to see Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark, a tour de force all shot in one take in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. I'm left wanting to visit the Hermitage, just the Hermitage, nothing else in Russia.

We rushed back to the club for a nice lunch, then to a very old Iranian film directed by Bahram Beyzal, after which we both needed a rest so we went to the India Coffee House, a wonderful spiral building designed by a British architect called Laurie Baker in the 1950s. Laurie Baker met Ghandi, who told him to help the poor so he devoted the rest of his life to designing buildings in Trivandrum that were cheap to build, functional and pleasing to the eye. He used brick or stone, depending on what was available locally, but no concrete. The seating in the coffee house is stepped all the way up the outer side of the spiral, so that each little table overlooks the one below it. The coffee and food are cheap, as they are in all the Indian Coffee Houses. Every city in India has Indian coffee houses and together they form the largest cooperative workers union in the world.

Prime Minister Modi has decreed that everyone must stand for the Indian National Anthem at the start of every film. Last year some people were arrested for refusing to stand. The festival organisers managed to release them. This year there are several refuseniks at the start of each film. So far none of them have been arrested, well not as far as I know. You never know whether there might be some of Modi's spies in the audience taking sneaky photos of the refuseniks. I hope not. Keralans are fiercely independent of the Indian government. 

The crowds are predominantly young men, a few young women and very few older people. So few in fact that over sixty fives are exempt from queuing. But I queue because I'm with a friend. No one takes any notice of me except the press, who keep trying to photograph me without asking my permission, which I consider to be rude, so I cover my face.

My friend is threatening to abandon me and return to his vow of silence. He hasn't actually taken a vow of silence; in fact he's the chattiest person I know, a fund of information on literature, film, music, art, Indian history, but he says that he spends more and more time alone, meditating and that after he's been with a person for a day he wants to be on his own. I rather like having a companion in this sea of Indian people. It makes me feel less conspicuous, but I know people will be nice to me, maybe even chat with me. 

Trivandrum

I was sitting in the ticketing area of the Kerala film festival, a large space with a roof and no sides with rows of young people sitting behind computer screens on one side of the room when my friend walked in. He is one of those larger than life characters whose voice booms across the room, cutting through the desultory chatter of the people waiting for their cards to be processed. His long, curly black hair and big black eyes give him the look of an Indian guru, a term he would absolutely abhor. It was three o'clock in the afternoon and I'd been contending with crowds of pushing, shoving Indian people since ten thirty in the morning, trying to get a pass to the film festival.
"I'm mighty glad to see you" I said.
"What's happening? Why can't you get your pass?"
"I really don't know. I don't understand what's going on."
"Tell them you are a life long member of the British Communist Party!"
"Go on! You are a white woman. Push your way through," indicating a wall of people.
I pushed, and reached a desk where people were thrusting pieces of paper at a desperate young man. I held out my piece of paper. Bodies squashed against mine all round me in the stifling heat. Eventually the young man said something I didn't understand. My friend translated.
"There's a logistical problem with the printing press. They say come back tomorrow. Let's go to my club."

The club is an old colonial place, all polished teak, wide areas with old fashioned arm chairs, a super cooled restaurant where the food is very cheap.

After a snack we took a rikshaw through the winding leafy streets of Trivandrum in search of an alternative film festival, making repeated stops to ask directions, only to wind up back where we had started, right behind the club. The alternative film festival had a board to list the films showing over the next few days, no programme as such and a few alternative young people sporting beards and sitting behind a makeshift desk. No crowds. We registered and took our passes.

Much later that evening I got my pass to the main festival. So now I have two passes and because of my great age I can get into any film I want without having to queue.

Pettigrain reduces stress

Pettigrain essential oil is made by distilling the leaves and green twigs of the bitter orange tree (Citrus  x aurantium).

Recently scientists found that a small sample of healthy professional men and women performed computer tasks faster and better when they inhaled pettigrain essential oil which was infused into the atmosphere of the room where they performed the task. They remained calm and their heart rate was more steady than the heart rate of a similar group who performed the tasks without the pettigrain infusion.

This was only a small sample, so it would be a good idea to repeat the experiment with a larger number of people. But it's interesting that we may be able to add yet another essential oil to the list (lavender, rosemary, sage, vervain etc) of calming essential oils that improve performance, mood and relieve stress.

Huang L, Capdevila L. Aromatherpy improves work performance through balancing the autonomic nervous system. J Altern Complement Med. March 2017; 23(3); 214-221.

Grape Harvest

I have a grape vine in front of my house, which provides dappled shade during hot days in the summer, not that we had many of those this year, but whose leaves fall in the Autumn, letting the winter sun through to warm us on frosty days. Last year a blackbird sat on the grape vine, eating the grapes and dribbling grape juice down the window, leaving long, sticky trails. This year the blackbird is gone, killed by pesticides? died of old age? and the grapes hung blackly from the vine, inviting us to pick them. They were very high up, so Manuel climbed the step ladder and dropped the grapes into the big, plastic bowl that I held below him.

I began squeezing the grapes through a sieve into a bowl. After an hour I had a bottle full of juice. There seemed just as many grapes in the big white bowl. I'll have to think of another way to do this!

Opera

The Victoria and Albert Museum, London

I went to the Opera exhibition at the V and A museum, an exhibition that tries to cover the history of opera, far to large a subject for the time and space available. The museum has used clever techie stuff to beam the appropriate piece of music into the headphones of the person looking at a particular piece of information, picture or video, as they walk round. I was left desperately wanting to go to the opera to see something by Puccini, Verdi or Mozart's Magic Flute.

My first visit to the opera was in Paris, when my father took me to stay with his diamond merchant friends, who took us all to see Carmen. We walked into a warm, womb-like semi circular space, with plush red seats and red walls lined with boxes where the wealthy sat in glorious isolation. There was a low murmur of conversation and a rustle of programme pages turning as we walked to our seats. I was shivering with excitement, just listening to the orchestra in the pit tuning up and when the music began I was ecstatic. This was the beginning of a life long love of opera.

Later, when I was a music student, I used to hitch hike to London and go straight to Covent Garden to pick up a ticket to the opera from the box office, left there by my Uncle. I would sit in my scruffy student clothes in the back row, entranced by the music.

In my early twenties, when I went to live in Ferrara, Italy, some friends took me to the opera. Every town in Italy has an opera house and every opera house is full when they perform the well loved Italian operas. On this cold, foggy night the good people of Ferrara dressed up in their best clothes and glittering jewellery, then milled about in the foyer, chattering, the women inspecting each others dresses.

Once the orchestra struck up everyone quieted down until the first aria, when they sang along with the soloist. They burst into applause when it ended and demanded that the aria be repeated. This was nothing like the rapt silent concentration of the British audience in Covent Garden. Throughout that opera in Ferrara the audience sang along with the soloists, who frequently had to repeat their arias.

The last time I went to the opera was in Gran Canaria, where I could afford a restricted view ticket, four years ago. The performance was surprisingly good, with excellent soloists, fabulous costumes and scenery and even some wonderful dancers.

Autumn Harvest

It's time to harvest the pumpkins, before the first frost. Some of them were so big this year that I had to transport them in a wheelbarrow. It took two journeys. On the way to the allotment I met Jane
"Where on earth shall I put my pumpkins," I asked her.
"I keep mine on the stairs," she told me "because that's the coolest place in the house.
"Oh dear. My staircase leads up from the front door, which is glass and south facing."
In the end I cleaned all the mud off them and lined them up along the bottom of the patio door. My poor lodger now has to contend with pumpkins by the place where he sits to eat his evening meal and calendula, elecampane and bean seeds drying out on the kitchen table.

Maria Sibylla Merian 1647-1717 Botanical Artist

Musa Serapionis   Banana   

"It is used like an apple and has a pleasant taste, just as apples have in Holland."

Maria Sibylla Merian, born in Frankfurt, Germany, developed a fascination with the life cycles of insects as a child. By 1679 she had combined her talents as an artist with her interest in insect life in her first book - The Caterpillar's Wondrous Metamorphosis and Extraordinary Nourishment from Flowers, an ecological depiction of insect and plant life, centuries before the science of ecology was defined. 

When her marriage broke up in 1685 she went to join a protestant community in the Netherlands. When missionaries returned from the Dutch colony of Suriname, South America, she was captivated by the beautiful plants and insects they brought back with them. 

Pallisaden Boom  Palisade tree

Erythrina fusca ( Fabacae)  Coral bean

"When the flower has fallen off the branch rises upwards, the seed case becoming like a stable broom. The inhabitants also use them instead of brooms."

In 1691 Merian and her daughters moved to Amsterdam and made a living giving painting lessons and selling watercolours. The Dutch natural history community commissioned her to paint the specimens in their collections. In 1699 she took her youngest daughter with her on an expedition to Suriname to paint plant and insect life for two years. She had her Suriname paintings engraved  to form a book that was sold by subscription because of the immense cost to print it.  The first edition of 'Transformation of the Surinamese Insects' was completed in 1705 and contained 60 plates, hand coloured by Merian and her daughters. 

She was exceptionally independent for her time and produced important, ground breaking work.

The captions include the Dutch or Latin name used by Merian, the current Latin binomial and the standardised common name as well as an English translation of her description from the 2016 facsimile of the 1705 edition of Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium.

As a woman Merian could not join a painters' guild in Europe and therefore did not have access to oil paints, so she painted with water colours.