The Waste Land at Wiltons Music Hall: £15.00

It felt fitting. On a bleak January day, with New Year’s decadence still revenging, I set out to hear T.S Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land.

I hadn’t left the house all week. London can piss off with its snow. Snow looks rubbish in London, looks dirty and shameful- is a sheepish nuisance.

And January is the cruellest month anyway- not April- is a cruel waiting game. Waiting to break resolutions, waiting to lose weight, waiting for money, waiting for delayed trains.

But most of all waiting for spring – for April- for Eliot’s:

cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

The Waste Land begins bitterly and develops savagely. For me, it is a disturbing attack on humanity; its heap of broken images strip me bare and leave me with nothing left. With nothing to hold on to. Tragic confusion prevails. Read alone again and again I’ve tried to hold on to its countless references, tried to make sense of what is, undisputedly, one of the greatest poems in history.

Watching it being performed in the historic Wilton’s Music Hall I hear it for the first time.
Jess and I cry from start to finish.

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

And I accept what I’ve known all along; that January is about fear and nothing else. That London is no waste land, there is no dry sterile thunder without rain. In a back alley off Aldgate East, I can sit in the world’s oldest and last surviving grand music hall and watch T.S Eliot be performed as though the actor’s life depended on it.

London has it all if you look hard enough.

Shantih Shantih Shantih.