Today, a footballer known to the world as Ronaldo retired. He's 33 years old. If you pay any attention to football he's been around for what seems like forever, in footballing terms.
There's a famous story which I found myself repeating about my first night on Latin American soil. I was taken to see a football match. I was hugged by a fat, sweaty man on the terraces. Thanks to him I learnt my first Spanish words the hard way. Saltar. Cantar. It was a fitting introduction to what was to become the other side of my life.
What I didn't realise, when telling this story, was that there was a kid of 17 playing for the Brazilian team, who scored two goals and ended up on the losing side. Because he was young, he wasn't famous in Europe at the time. There would have been no reason for me to have heard of him. His name was Ronaldo.
It's only this evening that I've worked out what team he played for in Brazil before he went to play for PSV in Holland. The same team that was playing against Nacional, in the Estadio Centenario, that night. The 28th October 1993.
The details of the match itself have always been hazy. I know Nacional won. Largely because of my capacity to learn in no time at all what the Spanish word for 'to jump' meant. I remember there were penalties involved. But not how many, or how decisively. Though now it comes back to me.
On that night, I was still a 'pibe', albeit of slightly more than 17 years. I had long hair and honey coloured skin. I didn't have the faintest idea that the internet existed and that it would become part of my life. Therefore I had no way of even conceiving the fact that one day I would be able to rediscover that night. That I would rediscover my first night in Latin America on the day that the kid who scored two almost immediately forgotten goals would eventually choose to retire.
Thanks to this thing called the internet, I would see the faces of the people who were all around me again. Hear the sounds of the stadium again. It's the sounds which, above all else, remain familiar. All of which I rediscovered here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvjtFM4vKrg&feature=related
+++
This match was the quarter final. In the semi final, I learn, Nacional were eliminated by Flamengo. The game was "Suspendido a los 77 minutos por incidentes." I suspect that translates. I wasn't there to saltar.
Ronaldo and the internet and myself. And everyone else. We've all been a long way round the houses since that mad, spectacular first night of victory and defeat in Montevideo.
+++
14.2.11
12.2.11
new writing in new places @ #royalcourt
Hungover, I just make it in time for the start of the talk. Three writers and a director. Most of the things said seem reasonable, with everyone careful to stress that the purpose of the new writing initiative abroad is not to produce a 'royal court' play, but to explore and exchange. The writers relate how much they've got from the trips abroad, something that doesn't really seem surprising. There follow a few questions which are too complicated for my addled brain to follow, ably fielded by the panel.
It's only at the very end that the discussion threatens to explore the subject in more depth. The last questioner in particular raises an issue which anyone who's worked in theatre abroad will be aware of, the pros and cons of the subsidised system, and by implication the increased motivation required to work in a non-subsidised theatrical culture (ie most of Latin America, Asia, Africa etc). The question is rebuffed with the bland assertion that "there are no cons to a subsidised system" and there's no time to proceed further.
By this point, in part through Michael Wynne's engaging story of the Elephant and the Bus Engine play, which perhaps raises more questions about the scheme than it answers, the other side of the Court's agenda has emerged more strongly: the desire to find a play which will resonate with the Court's audience. Whilst this is of course a reasonable objective, what was never really touched on was the way in which the writers themselves (as I know from personal experience) are aware of this agenda and cannot help but be influenced by it in the engagement with the Court. (With the subsequent risk of what might be termed a beauty pageant.)
Throughout the talk there seemed very little disposition on the part of the speakers to place themselves in the shoes of the writers who participate in the Court's international schemes. Perhaps its because it's very hard to do this within the context of a passing visit which, as Wynne suggested, is also likely to be a formative event for the writer. The Court's International playwrighting scheme is a laudable endeavour which undoubtedly benefits writers across the globe. But like any scheme, it will have both its pros and its cons, and it seemed a pity that given the opportunity to engage in a public debate, there was so little impetus to explore both pros and cons within a wider, global, context. More time for questions would have helped as it seemed as though there were many theatre practitioners from around the world whose opinions we didn't get sufficient opportunity to hear.
+++
It's only at the very end that the discussion threatens to explore the subject in more depth. The last questioner in particular raises an issue which anyone who's worked in theatre abroad will be aware of, the pros and cons of the subsidised system, and by implication the increased motivation required to work in a non-subsidised theatrical culture (ie most of Latin America, Asia, Africa etc). The question is rebuffed with the bland assertion that "there are no cons to a subsidised system" and there's no time to proceed further.
By this point, in part through Michael Wynne's engaging story of the Elephant and the Bus Engine play, which perhaps raises more questions about the scheme than it answers, the other side of the Court's agenda has emerged more strongly: the desire to find a play which will resonate with the Court's audience. Whilst this is of course a reasonable objective, what was never really touched on was the way in which the writers themselves (as I know from personal experience) are aware of this agenda and cannot help but be influenced by it in the engagement with the Court. (With the subsequent risk of what might be termed a beauty pageant.)
Throughout the talk there seemed very little disposition on the part of the speakers to place themselves in the shoes of the writers who participate in the Court's international schemes. Perhaps its because it's very hard to do this within the context of a passing visit which, as Wynne suggested, is also likely to be a formative event for the writer. The Court's International playwrighting scheme is a laudable endeavour which undoubtedly benefits writers across the globe. But like any scheme, it will have both its pros and its cons, and it seemed a pity that given the opportunity to engage in a public debate, there was so little impetus to explore both pros and cons within a wider, global, context. More time for questions would have helped as it seemed as though there were many theatre practitioners from around the world whose opinions we didn't get sufficient opportunity to hear.
+++
10.2.11
west london tales 12 - egypt
Playing on my laptop, beside this screen, a woman with a blue scarf talks from Tahrir Square. The noise from the square slips down cables, slides through oceans, emerges through speakers, sings in my sitting room. Everything connects?
I took the lift this morning and saw my downstairs neighbours for the first time since I got back. More often than not the reason we talk to one another is because there's been a leak from my flat downstairs to theirs. (Generally arising from the Ethiopian couple who live upstairs.) In spite of this, I get on OK with my downstairs neighbours, an old man and his middle-aged daughter. But today, in the lift, they were distracted and made little attempt to communicate. The daughter was on the phone, talking in Arabic and her father, a hunched man with big specs who's always in slippers, looked concerned, trying to work out what the person on the other side of the phone line was saying.
Then I remembered. They are Egyptian Copts. They had bigger things on their mind.
+++
I took the lift this morning and saw my downstairs neighbours for the first time since I got back. More often than not the reason we talk to one another is because there's been a leak from my flat downstairs to theirs. (Generally arising from the Ethiopian couple who live upstairs.) In spite of this, I get on OK with my downstairs neighbours, an old man and his middle-aged daughter. But today, in the lift, they were distracted and made little attempt to communicate. The daughter was on the phone, talking in Arabic and her father, a hunched man with big specs who's always in slippers, looked concerned, trying to work out what the person on the other side of the phone line was saying.
Then I remembered. They are Egyptian Copts. They had bigger things on their mind.
+++
9.2.11
pace kipling, but in spanish
La lucha siempre era, siempre es, y supongo siempre seria contra el fracaso.
Aveces pierdes, aveces ganas.
Aveces sentis que estas perdiendo cuando realmente estas ganando.
Y aveces sentis que ganas, cuando la realidad es que nunca puedes ganar todo el tiempo.
Hay epocas de victoria y epocas de fracaso y es asi la vida.
El truco es acordarte de lo que no esta pasando cuando esta pasando lo que esta pasando.
+++
Aveces pierdes, aveces ganas.
Aveces sentis que estas perdiendo cuando realmente estas ganando.
Y aveces sentis que ganas, cuando la realidad es que nunca puedes ganar todo el tiempo.
Hay epocas de victoria y epocas de fracaso y es asi la vida.
El truco es acordarte de lo que no esta pasando cuando esta pasando lo que esta pasando.
+++
4.2.11
Going running in Montevideo
My friend Mr Kemp informs me the optimal method of fat-burning exercise is light jogging. Around the age of forty, when I lived near some fields for a while, I took up running. It killed me. I’d go round and around a field I’d known for 25 years until I was fit to drop. The first lap might have been a pleasure but subsequently it became a torture. The trouble was the challenge. It’s hard not to be competitive. If I did three laps one day I’d want to do four the next. And so on. The most I ever managed was eleven. But every peak was followed by a descent. Sometimes you were back to three. It lost its charm. I moved. I didn’t have to run anymore.
A while later I was living where I live now. I felt self-conscious about the idea of running in public. I didn’t want people to see me suffering. Across the road from me was a gym. It cost more than a £100/ month. I couldn’t afford it. A year or so later, I decided my health was more important. Whatever that means. I joined. Basically to run on the treadmills. They had a device to measure how far you’d run and how fast. I started on 3K and built up to 5K. Soon I was back in the trap of trying to go faster higher further than I’d ever been before. After a Summer of running whilst watching cricket on the monitor, the enthusiasm waned. The gym remained across the road. Costing me as much as it taunted me. It was relief that I finally got round to cancelling my membership, knowing I was going away.
I brought my running shoes with me. It’s always a risk. Maybe you’re going to end up leaving them in a corner, goading you. The second day I was there we had a row. These things happen. It was one of those getting-back-together-after-being-apart-for-a long-long-time rows. It was stupid. There was no logic to it. We sort of got over it. I said I was going to go for a run. Which I did. It killed me. All over again. The row was soon forgotten. The next day I went again. I got as far as the disused railway station. Curious, I swerved to go under an arch and check it out. As I did so I pulled a muscle in my side. I had to walk back.
It’s cold in Montevideo in September. The houses aren’t made for Winter. The cold seeps into the walls, there’s no central heating, and it stays there. You wear layer upon layer. Everyone gets ill. I got ill. I got horribly raking-cough ill. I had to work but the only thing I wanted to do was go to bed. I couldn’t. C was on tour. In the days I wrote. In the afternoons I worked. In the evenings I shivered. I didn’t go running.
The play happened. I hadn’t been running for ages. Been to Rio and Buenos Aires and wanted to go running there but there wasn’t the time. It was November. The weather was getting warmer. The shoes beckoned. I started running again.
From out of the front door of C’s flat, a flat which basically turns its back on the street, you can see the Palacio Legislativo. A big, Italianate building, which holds the Parliament. Sitting on top of a hill. In all the years I’d visited I hardly ever went near it.
The Palacio was a couple of kilometres away. It made for a target. First I jogged down the street in front of the flat, Piedra Alta. Most streets in Montevideo run for twenty or thirty blocks. This one runs for two. There’s a ruined old car on one side and a pension further down. A sign saying ‘Ingles’ at the top. At the bottom you’re near the Palacio Penarol, a giant yellow building which houses the Penarol basketball team. Then it’s uphill, towards the Palacio Legislativo. The streets are nondescript but empty. Full of low level one or two block houses. A mix of residential and business. Offering a scrappy, slightly out-of-centre feel. The Palacio itself is surrounded by a giant roundabout, with slow moving traffic trundling round. No sign of any Westminster crash barriers. I got to the steps and paused, taking in the view.
Over the next two months, the running became more regular. I started straying further and further. I ran on Christmas Day and New Years Day. People has set up their barbeques in the streets, whole families eating outside. A man wearing a hat guarded an empty garage, fighting off the sun. People meandered. There were no other runners on these streets. These streets weren’t made for runners. They’re littered with jagged paving stones, dogshit, rubbish. The sun beats down and you head for shade.
Montevideo is named after the fact that a sailor shouted from the sea his excitement at seeing a distant hill. So the story goes. The hill in question, Cerro, is on the other side of the bay, far from the centre. In theory, the city is supposed to be more or less flat. Only it’s not. It has peaks and dips and troughs. Nothing too dramatic, but a peak is always a peak and a trough is always a trough. There is a Spanish word, which got used a lot in the Himalayas. It’s a word I can never remember straight away. The Montevidean hills gave me time to focus. Climbing a gradual but consistent slope, the word would infiltrate its way into the brain. Repecho. You don’t know exactly what it means. And you also know exactly what it means.
Round every corner there’s something new to see. Dilapidated buildings, crumbling art deco houses with a stone lion stuck on the top. A bar adorned with vines. On my last evening we finally went there. And drank beer. The waitress came from Mozambique. We talked about how impossible it all looked. C did. And I felt trapped because she was talking about how powerless she is and she was right. She is. We are. It is.
But that’s later and earlier I’m running, exploring, beyond the Palacio, past the antique shops, East to the disused building with the plaque for the birthplace of Florencio Sanchez, the greatest of the Uruguayan playwrights, they say, a hundred years since his death. To the West where the new Plaza has been opened, with the skateboard ramps and the landscaped steps and the small trees that people use for shade. To the East, past the railway station, disused, a statue of George Stephenson in front slowly fading away, the place boarded up, more Victoriana. Behind it the containers stacked up in Montevideo’s ever expanding port, containers from Europe and Asia and the Americas, full of god knows what, waiting to go god knows where.
I run and I run and the city runs with me, bright in the sun, desperately seeking shade, laughing at the gringo running alongside it, where’s he going – why is he doing this?
It was Summer now. The sun shone as I ran. I returned draped in sweat. Running was no longer a chore. To go running in Montevideo is to step out of self-consciousness. To step out of self-consciousness is to feel free. Really free. No-one’s looking or judging. No policemen in the head. No criteria. Just a simple goal of heading off somewhere and then returning.
Just like one of those runs, I didn’t really know where I was going when I set out to write this piece. But I knew I’d discover something, something which would help to lead me home.
+++
A while later I was living where I live now. I felt self-conscious about the idea of running in public. I didn’t want people to see me suffering. Across the road from me was a gym. It cost more than a £100/ month. I couldn’t afford it. A year or so later, I decided my health was more important. Whatever that means. I joined. Basically to run on the treadmills. They had a device to measure how far you’d run and how fast. I started on 3K and built up to 5K. Soon I was back in the trap of trying to go faster higher further than I’d ever been before. After a Summer of running whilst watching cricket on the monitor, the enthusiasm waned. The gym remained across the road. Costing me as much as it taunted me. It was relief that I finally got round to cancelling my membership, knowing I was going away.
I brought my running shoes with me. It’s always a risk. Maybe you’re going to end up leaving them in a corner, goading you. The second day I was there we had a row. These things happen. It was one of those getting-back-together-after-being-apart-for-a long-long-time rows. It was stupid. There was no logic to it. We sort of got over it. I said I was going to go for a run. Which I did. It killed me. All over again. The row was soon forgotten. The next day I went again. I got as far as the disused railway station. Curious, I swerved to go under an arch and check it out. As I did so I pulled a muscle in my side. I had to walk back.
It’s cold in Montevideo in September. The houses aren’t made for Winter. The cold seeps into the walls, there’s no central heating, and it stays there. You wear layer upon layer. Everyone gets ill. I got ill. I got horribly raking-cough ill. I had to work but the only thing I wanted to do was go to bed. I couldn’t. C was on tour. In the days I wrote. In the afternoons I worked. In the evenings I shivered. I didn’t go running.
The play happened. I hadn’t been running for ages. Been to Rio and Buenos Aires and wanted to go running there but there wasn’t the time. It was November. The weather was getting warmer. The shoes beckoned. I started running again.
From out of the front door of C’s flat, a flat which basically turns its back on the street, you can see the Palacio Legislativo. A big, Italianate building, which holds the Parliament. Sitting on top of a hill. In all the years I’d visited I hardly ever went near it.
The Palacio was a couple of kilometres away. It made for a target. First I jogged down the street in front of the flat, Piedra Alta. Most streets in Montevideo run for twenty or thirty blocks. This one runs for two. There’s a ruined old car on one side and a pension further down. A sign saying ‘Ingles’ at the top. At the bottom you’re near the Palacio Penarol, a giant yellow building which houses the Penarol basketball team. Then it’s uphill, towards the Palacio Legislativo. The streets are nondescript but empty. Full of low level one or two block houses. A mix of residential and business. Offering a scrappy, slightly out-of-centre feel. The Palacio itself is surrounded by a giant roundabout, with slow moving traffic trundling round. No sign of any Westminster crash barriers. I got to the steps and paused, taking in the view.
Over the next two months, the running became more regular. I started straying further and further. I ran on Christmas Day and New Years Day. People has set up their barbeques in the streets, whole families eating outside. A man wearing a hat guarded an empty garage, fighting off the sun. People meandered. There were no other runners on these streets. These streets weren’t made for runners. They’re littered with jagged paving stones, dogshit, rubbish. The sun beats down and you head for shade.
Montevideo is named after the fact that a sailor shouted from the sea his excitement at seeing a distant hill. So the story goes. The hill in question, Cerro, is on the other side of the bay, far from the centre. In theory, the city is supposed to be more or less flat. Only it’s not. It has peaks and dips and troughs. Nothing too dramatic, but a peak is always a peak and a trough is always a trough. There is a Spanish word, which got used a lot in the Himalayas. It’s a word I can never remember straight away. The Montevidean hills gave me time to focus. Climbing a gradual but consistent slope, the word would infiltrate its way into the brain. Repecho. You don’t know exactly what it means. And you also know exactly what it means.
Round every corner there’s something new to see. Dilapidated buildings, crumbling art deco houses with a stone lion stuck on the top. A bar adorned with vines. On my last evening we finally went there. And drank beer. The waitress came from Mozambique. We talked about how impossible it all looked. C did. And I felt trapped because she was talking about how powerless she is and she was right. She is. We are. It is.
But that’s later and earlier I’m running, exploring, beyond the Palacio, past the antique shops, East to the disused building with the plaque for the birthplace of Florencio Sanchez, the greatest of the Uruguayan playwrights, they say, a hundred years since his death. To the West where the new Plaza has been opened, with the skateboard ramps and the landscaped steps and the small trees that people use for shade. To the East, past the railway station, disused, a statue of George Stephenson in front slowly fading away, the place boarded up, more Victoriana. Behind it the containers stacked up in Montevideo’s ever expanding port, containers from Europe and Asia and the Americas, full of god knows what, waiting to go god knows where.
I run and I run and the city runs with me, bright in the sun, desperately seeking shade, laughing at the gringo running alongside it, where’s he going – why is he doing this?
It was Summer now. The sun shone as I ran. I returned draped in sweat. Running was no longer a chore. To go running in Montevideo is to step out of self-consciousness. To step out of self-consciousness is to feel free. Really free. No-one’s looking or judging. No policemen in the head. No criteria. Just a simple goal of heading off somewhere and then returning.
Just like one of those runs, I didn’t really know where I was going when I set out to write this piece. But I knew I’d discover something, something which would help to lead me home.
+++
3.2.11
entre las cosas que extrano
america latina
las partes de america latina que no conozco
rio de janeiro
buenos aires
los andes
incluyo los partes que no conozco
montevideo
montevideo
corriendo por montevideo
santa catalina
cabrera, que solo vi una vez...
el cielo
taxis
teatro
que no hay fronteras
mirando peliculas
la feria
la otra feria
todos las ferias
y los ferias de mas. que no conozco
carne
gente
la futura
la pasada
los techos
tres de la manana
cuatro de la manana
y lo de mas
mas gente
puesta del sol
mar
cocinando
adivinando
viviendo
dia por dia.
+++
las partes de america latina que no conozco
rio de janeiro
buenos aires
los andes
incluyo los partes que no conozco
montevideo
montevideo
corriendo por montevideo
santa catalina
cabrera, que solo vi una vez...
el cielo
taxis
teatro
que no hay fronteras
mirando peliculas
la feria
la otra feria
todos las ferias
y los ferias de mas. que no conozco
carne
gente
la futura
la pasada
los techos
tres de la manana
cuatro de la manana
y lo de mas
mas gente
puesta del sol
mar
cocinando
adivinando
viviendo
dia por dia.
+++
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