All along through this drawn-out school accreditation/certification process that had to be completed before I can even apply for a student-visa renewal, I've been comforted by the knowledge that I'm fine staying in the UK and starting classes so long as I can get my application in before the end of the month. That much is still true. Even when I found out that for some unexplained reason there'd been a week's delay in even telling me that the letter I needed from the school was available for me to pick up (the fact that I was apparently the only one whose letter wasn't mailed out notwithstanding), that was no more than an aggravation. What I hadn't figured on, however, was what I found out when I picked my letter up: there's a good chance I might not get my passport back from the Home Office until after Christmas, meaning I wouldn't be able to go home for the holidays. This is distressing.
So now I'm trying to figure out if I can avoid paying the nearly $1000 expediting fee to get the thing processed in person. Ouch.
More than ouch. Way more than ouch.
And to add to the whole thing I have to go back to school tomorrow to get the letter reissued because it says the school year I'm applying for an extension for ... ended in July 2009. There are other frustrations that this extra delay has set in motion, but I'm sure you get the point.
Anyway, since there was nothing more I could do about the application on Saturday, I took my bike on the train again and went to Essex for the day. Cold, windy, and hilly, but a tonic for my spirits. I stopped in a few towns with great names, like Saffron Walden (a few others I've been close to on my rides these last two Saturdays: Tiptoe, Sway, and Ugley), visited some very old churches and a windmill, walked a "turf maze" (what we'd call a labyrinth), got lost a few times, and finished the afternoon in a small town pub that seemed so far away from London as to have absolutely no need for the big city at all. I came back exhausted, with deadened legs, and in a much better mood.
Tonight a housemate and I went to the Barbican and saw a show called Raoul, by James Thiérrée. Amazing, inspiring, fascinating, magical, delightful--if you ever get the chance, catch his show. Londoners aren't prone to giving standing ovations, but he got a long and enthusiastic one. It seems unfair to identify somebody by their relation to somebody else (you know, like Jesus, son of God), but Thiérrée is Charlie Chaplin's grandson, and the show had that kind of lyrical, graceful, acrobatic quality to it. If Chaplin were creating theatre now, this might be the kind of thing he'd do. Thiérrée is an amazing physical performer, so fluid in his movements and endlessly inventive. He has a background in circus and acrobatics, which you can tell, but it's not a three-ring circus kind of thing at all. It's really hard to describe. You might call it Lispa to a sublime degree. Highly visual, imagistic, not dependent on language at all. He shook like a leaf, he flew, he became a horse, then an ape. He danced, he used music magically, he played with the audience. There were larger-than-life puppets--a fish, a crustacean, a fossilized bird, a jellyfish, an elephant. OK, that last one was only life-sized.
It was basically a one-man show, but he had an alter-ego (another actor) who briefly came and went and then became Thiérrée or back again. Usually you could see how they did it. Once, in apparently full view, he/they did it in a way that neither my housemate nor I could figure out. And then as a great comical counterpoint, there were times when a prop guy would come out (carrying a huge ladder for example) and Thiérrée would try futilely to hide him.
It really was a tour-de-force. And an inspiration for the coming year.
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