On Tuesday 28 July, we went to see performance number 30,367 of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap at St. Martin’s Theatre in London .

We went in part because the play has been running for 74 years, and is the longest running play in the world. So we figured something must be good about it to have survived that long.

Some passages in the play tell its age. Characters speak about rationing, which ended in Britain in 1954, two years after the play debuted.

Agatha Christie wrote Three Blind Mice in 1947 and it aired on the radio that year. She wrote it for Queen Mary’s 80th birthday and it was popular and so she expanded it into a full-length stage play and renamed it The Mousetrap.

It’s a murder mystery in true Agatha Christie style. The relevance of three blind mice is that the nursery rhyme melody is the killer’s ‘signature’.

The plot is built on a real-life tragedy of a child who died in 1945 on a remote farm of neglect at the hands of his foster parents.

The boy was starved and then beaten, and the case was notorious and led directly to the 1948 Children’s Act that mandated that local authorities had to establish a dedicated Children’s Department and appoint a Children’s Officer to monitor foster homes.

Looking at the circumstances from today, 80 years later, I think about how the war was still on, and literally millions of people were dying in theatres of war around the world. And London and other cities in England had been bombed and thousands died.

Yet somehow the death of a ten year old child shocked the nation. Maybe the nation was hanging on to some kind of sanity in the face of six years of war.

The theatre is small and cosy, and we sat just a few rows from the stage. The stage set was the drawing room of a country house, and it was quite a setup. That’s an advantage of running one play and not having to take down the set to make way for something else.

The scene is the drawing room that leads off to the entrance hall, around a corner so we never see the front door, but only hear it bang shut.

Another door leads to the dining room, and a staircase leads to the upstairs rooms, while another door leads to the back stairs. So when characters leave by one door and enter by another, it builds out in our minds the image of the country house of which we only see the drawing room.

What did we think of it? The acting was good, purposely dated, and there was a moral heart to the play, incidental to the main plot, when one character speaks about the need to face difficulties that still inhabit the mind long after the events.

When the play ends and the players are lined up to take their bows, one player stepped forward to swear us all to secrecy over who the killer was. And in the best tradition I can only tell you that….

The exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London is on now, and ends 6 September 2026. I snapped these with my phone to show the many faces of Marilyn Monroe.

Tamara and I came out of the exhibition feeling positive towards Marilyn and what she gave out to the world.

The texts below are quotes and descriptions from the exhibition.

With Marilyn, the love affair was not posing for the camera. It was love for her audience – her public – who eventually would see the photo. She loved the public, her fans, more than any one human being.’
Sam Shaw

I now live in my work and in a few relationships with the few people I can really count on. Fame will go by, and, so long, I’ve had you fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle.
Marilyn Monroe

She was much more of a partner than I’d expected. The first hour or two I had an idea of what I was after. I had all kinds of imagery floating around, and she was picking up on it, performing it all!
Bert Stern

Fashion photographer Bert Stern (1929-2013) was commissioned to photograph Marilyn Monroe by Vogue: it was one of the star’s long-held ambitions to appear in the magazine. The session took place in across three days at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, where Stern made more than 2,500 images, aided by props such as sheer scarves and jewellery. Music and champagne contributed to the relaxed atmosphere of the sitting.

Reviewing the contact sheets and transparencies, Monroe crossed out several images that she disliked.

The urgency and expressiveness of her interventions rendered the rejected images particularly compelling.

Her apparently harsh critique was the the subject of considerable fascination when they were published after her death, and in the decades since.

Vogue did not consider the nude images suitable for publication, and commissioned a second session focussing on high fashion, which were published in the magazine a month after Monroe’s death, accompanied by a moving tribute from the author Joan Didion.

Life magazine, 3 August 1962 Interview with Marilyn Monroe by Richard Meryman, photographs by Allan Grant Since its publication this article has taken on a particular resonance as Monroe’s final interview, published just days before the news of her death emerged.

Monroe was used to media exploitation, and she urged Meryman to ensure that her words would be taken seriously:

What I really want to say: That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship…We are all brothers. Please don’t make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe!
Marilyn Monroe

‘She romps, she squeals with delight, she leaps on to the sofa. She puts a flower stem in her mouth, puffing on a daisy as though it were a cigarette. It is an artless, impromptu, high-spirited infectiously gay performance. It will probably end in tears’
Cecil Beaton

George Barris’s joyful photographs of Monroe on Santa Monica beach, taken just days before she died, were initially published in the UK – first in the Daily Mirror and later in Town magazine. In his article, the journalist, David Robinson wrote: When she died, everybody tried to explain her, which would have interested her a lot, because she was all her life trying… to explain herself.’
Terence Pepper Collection

Just The Right Number Of Cooks

‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’, the saying goes. Maybe these cooks are not too many, though, because they are at cooking school. Not that I knew that then when I photographed them.

I was heading for ‘The Classic Camera’ shop, which is in a courtyard very close to The British Museum. It specialises in Leica cameras and although I am not in the market for a Leica, I am kind of interested in the little D-Lux 8 mini Leica.

The Classic Camera’ a nice shop to in which to browse. And the man in the shop was interested in talking about the transition from film to digital.

As soon as I came into the courtyard off the street heading to the shop, I saw lots of white coats. I couldn’t see them clearly but it was enough for me to get my camera out and ready, because who knows.

And when I saw they were all cooks, well I was surprised.

And here is a lesson for you dear reader. First, I had my Ricoh GRIII with me. It has a fixed 28mm lens, which is good for getting in on the action and making the viewer feel they are in the scene. But it also means getting close, and I was somewhat nervous because I thought maybe the assembled cooks might take offence.

At that time I didn’t know they were all at school leaning to be cooks. And I don’t know how much difference it would have made if I had known.

All I could think of what that I was not on a public street. And that is a big factor in the right of a person under UK law to photograph strangers.

Now, let’s say there had been a parade or a protest march on the street and I had been shooting constantly for the previous hour. Then I would have been hot to trot, freer and more intoxicated with the feeling of photographing. But this was not how it was and I was a bit hesitant.

So I took a couple of shots and then went into The Classic Camera. When I came out, the cooks were gone.

A waitress was picking glasses and asked her if she knew who they were. Oh yes, she said, they were at the cookery school in Le Cordon Bleu – where she worked and outside of which we were standing.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey – I suggest you don’t read this until you have seen the film.

In an interview published in the Radio Times, Christopher Nolan said that for him the most significant part of the film was the conversation between Odysseus and his wife at the end. He tells her how he is appalled and saddened by the bitter realisation of his own savagery, at who he is and who his men are.

There is a hint of something disturbing all the way through the film, but we don’t know what the revelation will be. The hint is that Odysseus is accompanied sporadically by a young woman who plainly only he can see.

When Odysseus is confessing to his wife, there is a long flashback of the sacking of Troy by he and his men.

We see Odysseus and his men cutting their way through the Trojans. And we see him looking at the young woman of his visions, and now she is on her knees begging, as one of his men slaughters her.

We see that this is the beginning of his awakening.

All the way through, Odysseus has been hearing about the dreaded Sea People who bring terror wherever they go. Now he realises it is they who are the Sea People.

The writing was on the wall when Odysseus foils Circe, when she tells him that his men are savages, and deserved to be turned into the pigs they are.

Does Odysseus’ recrimination get through to the audience no mater how little they might know of the Odyssey story?

Well if it does, it is undermined by the fact that in the end it is a shoot-em-up. Imagine if there had not been a big fight at the end, and Odysseus had talked the suitors into going home.

No fight, no crescendo, no release? Oh how we would have been disappointed.

And in that case there is no real moral to the tale at all.

Where the film differs from films like Shane or A History Of Violence is that in those stories the hero is reluctant to fight until the fight is the only way forward.

Of course, even there, we are watching and waiting for the spectacle, for some version of the Roman arena that will give us the release that makes the experience fulfilling.

Here in the Odyssey, Odysseus doesn’t seem to doubt for an instant that the fight is the proper course of action. There’s no soul searching about whether it is OK to fight in these circumstances.

Either way though, we get our bloody fulfilling of our bloody lust.

And that is really the bottom line – that for all the recriminations, it is still a fight – the fight, any fight – that we want.

Will we as a species ever not want that?

And

I read an interview with Matt Damon’s stunt double. She is very small and she and friends were pitted against big men – and that is how it looked to us in the audience that Odysseus and his men were fighting giants.

As a film, there are a couple of bits that didn’t carry me with it. Three times we watch the Greeks running back to the boats to escape some evil. Once is dramatic, three times begins to look more like Monty Python.

The final scene of the crowning of Telemachus and of Odysseus and his wife Penelope sailing off into the sunset and their self-imposed exile was so disjointed and rushed that I had to smile.

As a side note, the film was worth seeing just for long scene where Circe turns the men into pigs.

I asked a friend who knows Classics what he thought. He says that in the original poem all the suitors are killed, and Odysseus has absolutely no problem with killing them all. And it is the suitors’ relatives that Odysseus persuades to go home when they come for revenge the following day.

These are members of the Jonesboro Majestic Marching Cardinals from Arkansas performing in the London New Year’s Day Parade on January 1, 2026, in central London.

The musical instrument is a sousaphone, which is a tuba designed for marching bands.

It is coiled to wrap around the musician’s body and rest on the left shoulder, to make it easier to carry while marching compared to a traditional concert tuba.

The forward-facing bell projects the deep bass notes to the audience over the heads of the band.

About The Photo

Early this morning I was reviewing image quality from the Fuji X-T50, and this photo that I took with the 55-200mm lens. The lens is really too long to balance well on this small camera.

Now, half a year after I took the photo, I still recall that the camera and lens combination isn’t very pleasant to hold because the lens weaves about and the body is too small to control it, but out of all this, I like the composition.