Matt O'Connor - father for justice and ice cream extremist

First published in The Evening Standard, 1 March 2011

There aren't many ice cream makers who quote Voltaire and Mary Wollstonecraft. Who long to take an ice cream van to Gaza and serve scoops to the Israelis and the Palestinians as a peace initiative.

But then Matt O'Connor - founder of Covent Garden parlour The Icecreamists, the man who has just won a battle with Westminster Council to carry on serving his "Baby Gaga" breast milk ice cream - isn't your average foodie. He prefers to see himself as an ice cream revolutionary.

Blogging about the politics of breast milk on his website, he insists it's "pure, organic, free-range and totally natural", and far more ethical than drinking bovine milk destined for the calves of other mammals.

The morning we meet at his Gothic black and pink ice parlour on Maiden Lane, he's just heard that Westminster's health protection agency, which confiscated all supplies for the breast milk ice cream, has grudgingly admitted it's safe for human consumption.

"They didn't find any nuclear waste, any chemical bio-hazard," he tells me gleefully. "They came in here a bit mob-handed like inspectors in Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction."

The battle isn't over yet. Pop star Lady Gaga last week began legal proceedings against Icecreamists claiming that the £14 dessert is "nausea-inducing" and "intended to take advantage of [her] reputation and goodwill".

If she wins, it could bankrupt him. O'Connor is unrepentant. "For Lady Gaga to accuse us of stealing her image is laughable when you consider how much she has borrowed from popular culture to create her look and music ... So she's trying to censor us."

O'Connor, 44, with his trademark Flock of Seagulls hair and wild specs, may look like a children's comedian. But he is determined to push the boundaries of flavour. The breast milk wasn't a one-off stunt. He's made ice cream with absinthe, bread and roses. His three-course Sundae Lunch featured pea, beef and horseradish.

Back in 2009 the Sex Pistols threatened legal action when he launched "God Save the Cream" (inspired by their 1977 single, God Save The Queen) containing herbal Viagra-like stimulants.

He claims to be "genuinely shell-shocked" that the breast milk story went around the world. But is O'Connor protesting just a little too much? In his previous incarnation he founded campaigning group Fathers4Justice, which became famous for high-profile stunts such as dressing up as Batman and Superman and scaling cranes and buildings, or flour-bombing the Prime Minister in pursuit of "fathers' rights".

O'Connor organised every protest and was arrested 12 times but took an active part in only one. He stormed York Minster dressed as a priest in a stunt he called In the Name of the Father and ended up being invited to speak from the pulpit.

Love or hate F4J, it put the issue of fathers' rights on the map (Bob Geldof was an early fan).

Critics argued that its actions demeaned dads and damaged the cause. But F4J also changed the nature of protest, showing how the right image in the right place could dominate the news.

O'Connor confides that Plane Stupid contacted him early on for advice. And he loves the fact they teach Fathers4 Justice on the National Curriculum.

However, two years ago, O'Connor closed down F4J - after a father who had phoned O'Connor for advice days earlier killed himself and his children in a car on Father's Day. "Emotionally and physically it had destroyed me. There's only so many deaths, suicides, misery any one person can deal with."

He was also tired of being followed by Scotland Yard, which considered him a "domestic extremist". "They threatened me and my family which I took very seriously." He won't elaborate - except to say he was told he was a greater threat to this country than Osama bin Laden.

Since then he's reinvented himself as the king of ice cream, first opening a concession at Selfridges, then his own stand-alone parlour in 2009 selling boutique ice creams and "cryogenic cocktails". It's a Prohibition-style speakeasy with waitresses dressed as uniformed cops. On the wall is the Voltaire quote: "Ice cream is exquisite - what a pity it isn't illegal."

But for all the punning titles - Obamama flavour, Molotoffee Cocktail - most agree that O'Connor makes great ice cream. He spent time in Italy studying flavour theory at Bologna's Carigiani Gelato University. He talks lovingly of the provenance of the ingredients - Madagascan vanilla pods, Ecuadorean dark chocolate, Italian crema with balsamic vinegar. His chef is Mark Broadbent (ex-Bluebird) and he works with mixologist Alex Kammerling of Grey Goose.

Ice cream wasn't such an unusual choice for O'Connor. As a designer he's been working on confectionery projects for 20 years - he helped Unilever launch Viennetta and Magnum and designed the packaging for Loseley ice cream.

Even at the height of running F4J, he was working on hush-hush launches. As a freelance creative director he was responsible for the banned 2009 ice cream advert (for Antonio Federici Gelato Italiano ice cream) suggesting a kiss between a priest and a nun.

The name for the Icecreamists came to him when he was hauled in yet again by the police. "I told them 'I never killed anybody, I never threatened anybody. We were just overweight guys in Lycra.
That's our only crime.' I told them 'I'm not an extremist, I'm an Icecreamist!'"

He loves ice cream because it's "a universal socialising agent". He reminds me that in Belarus young people defied a ban on political demonstrations by assembling ... to eat ice cream.

O'Connor does his research. Before he put breast milk ice cream on the menu he ran the idea past the "yummy mummies" of Covent Garden (they loved it). Milk was screened at a private clinic to the same exacting standards as blood and milk bank donors. And the woman who donated the initial breastmilk for the icecream, Victoria Hiley, 25, teaches new mothers to breastfeed. "We needed someone legitimate and articulate."

Despite the anti-female reputation of F4J, O'Connor is clearly attracted to strong women: his second wife Nadine is a feminist. He married his first wife Sophie, who is Spanish, when he was 27, and had two sons with her. He accepts now that he was "an arse". He drank. He womanised. Sometimes he wasn't home for days.

Sophie asked for a divorce and sought, via the courts, to cut his contact with their sons to a minimum. It was his annus horribilis. His business partner died in an accident, then the banks foreclosed and took away the company flat. He was homeless, living in a friend's camper van.

One night on Waterloo bridge with a bottle of Jack Daniel's, he considered suicide. Only the thought of his young sons held him back.

He stopped drinking and began rebuilding his career. By 2002 he had £50,000 in the bank - and used it to set up F4J. His accountant thought he had gone mad. "My poor mother genuinely thought about sectioning me."

Ironically by that time he was on amicable terms with Sophie again, and granted unregulated access to his sons, but he wanted to make a larger point about the role of fathers in society. "I wanted to make injustice visible."

He met Nadine - "an amazing woman" - when she was involved in her own custody battle over her daughter, Philippa. She came along to a F4J meeting to hear the other side.

Today they live with Philippa, 11, and their son, Archie, five. O'Connor's two teenage sons, Daniel, 15, and Alexander, 13, stay over regularly. He revels in domesticity. "I've grown up."

And F4J is back up and running again - with Nadine in charge. "For me it's unfinished business that needs to be resolved." There will be no men in tights this time. Instead it will be "children-focused".

It's not mothers who inspired his wrath, but the "secrecy and cruelty" of the family courts. He wants the law changed so equal parenting is presumed, whereas at present the pendulum swings with the mother. "All we want is equality between the genders, equality of treatment."

He's met the present Government and calls them "professional politicians with no life experience". He says it's the most anti-family government so far. "Look at the tax system. My wife and I would be £600 a month better off living apart."

In between it all he has written an autobiography and Harbour Pictures (Calendar Girls) has bought the film rights. He designs his own range of jewellery and has just recorded a F4J song.

And he's got two more body-fluid inspired ices coming out this summer, which should rile the "food fascists".

Entrepreneur by day, provocateur by night. You feel for Nadine, whose job it is to keep him grounded. "I need to be tethered to terra firm," he beams. "Or I float off."

The Icecreamists, 15 Maiden Lane, WC2, theicecreamists.com

All aboard the mystery gastro train

First published in The Evening Standard, 24 March 2011

The text arrives an hour before dinner. "Ginger enthusiasts! We look forward to seeing you at 7pm in New Cross. Turn left out of the station, walk 2min and cross the road."

We scrabble for our coats. We've still no idea exactly where - or what - we will be eating. But Gingerline, London's only nomadic pop-up restaurant and arts space, is more than just a restaurant.

Set up by five female friends, incorporating a mix of performers, designers and food enthusiasts, it's one of the coolest supper clubs around. For each event, they take over an unused location and create an immersive theatrical experience. You're going to get a fabulous meal - anything from wild boar dumplings to roasted sumac-spiced chicken. But huge thought goes into the costume and set design - and the printed menu is a limited-edition piece of art.

When Gingerline announces the dates by Facebook and Twitter you sign up blind. All you know is that it will take place a short walk from the stations on the East London line (the name comes from the line's orange logo), which runs from Highbury to West Croydon and Crystal Palace. And that there will be "gastronomic adventure and artistic tomfoolery".

The collective only reveals the location by text an hour before the doors open - maximum train journey 40 minutes. Guests don't know the contributing artists or culinary theme until they arrive.

For our New Cross supper, the group created a Siberian Circus styled pop-up restaurant - drawing inspiration from Angela Carter's novel Nights at the Circus - where an empty shop next to Prangsta Costumiers was transformed into a trapeze artist's boudoir.

From the minute we arrived - greeted by a glass of vodka - it was a night of madness and intoxication. A beautiful corseted woman swung on a trapeze over our heads. There were showgirls, jugglers, dancers and magicians. Working with Mel Wilson of Prangsta (which has costumed everyone from Daisy Lowe to festival-goers at Secret Garden Party and Camp Bestival), they created a "backstage at the circus" aesthetic.

Steve Tymuk - an accordion player for The Ukrainians - played rousing Soviet-style music.

Even the newspaper covering the tables was a specially designed artwork, translated into Russian and incorporating Angela Carter quotes.

Around 35 of us feasted on a Siberian-themed menu, including venison goulash with chorizo and chocolate (mushroom stroganoff for the veggies) and spiced toffee apple with candied walnuts and ice-cream.

Gingerline is the brainchild of food enthusiast and cook Susannah Mountfort. With five friends who all live on the East London line, she decided to set up an informal, not-for-profit collective - using the train line as the playground for their foodie and creative pursuits.

Mountfort has a day job at Will Hutton's Work Foundation. So what motivates her to spend her evenings cooking in a tiny, impromptu kitchen? "Bloody good question, I sometimes ask myself the same thing!" she laughs. "Starting a supper club was originally suggested to me by food writer and art collector Anissa Helou, whom I was asking for advice about a career in food. She thought that, for someone like me, starting a pop-up is a pretty good way of testing out if you're made of the right stuff."

After reading an article I wrote in the Evening Standard about the The Culture Line (the network created by the 10 museums along the East London line), Mountfort decided to set up a secret nomadic restaurant. "The arts-space and 'menu art' elements were really so I could involve my friends, who are brilliantly talented and supportive. Gingerline, above all else, is underpinned by some really powerful female friendships."

For the first event last November she staged a meal at Rotherhithe's Brunel Museum, inspired by the famous Thames Tunnel's subterranean banquet held in Limehouse in 1827. Diners were greeted from the train by a crew in top hats and crinolines, then led down into the tunnel by ladder. Here they watched spooky projections of Victorian-clad women and singer Kerry Adamson performing Ewan MacColl's Sweet Thames Flow Softly.

A Victorian-style banquet was then served in the museum, including horseradish cream-coddled eggs and braised hogget (lamb) followed by a trio of alcoholic jellies. "Pop-up restaurants, frequently touted as a modern dining phenomenon, can in fact be traced back to the underground rat-riddled dinner hosted by Marc and Isambard Brunel 180 years ago," Mountfort tells me.

The team collaborates with different artists and chefs each time, including Emli Bendixen (photographer), Alisia Casper (illustrator and painter) and Jodie Wilson, head chef at The Garden Café at the Garden Museum, Lambeth.

The events are run as private parties and ask for a £35-£50 donation from each diner to cover costs. The price is low thanks to the generosity of suppliers such as The Fabulous Vodka Company and Crystal Palace's Alan's Antiques.

"We are always hunting for exciting spaces in which to host Gingerline," says Mountfort. "The mystery location intrigues guests who enjoy the last-minute revelation and the exciting journey to unexplored places." She is hunting new venues along the train line, so do drop her a line if you have a great tip.

By the end of a Gingerline evening, you have a table of new friends. Best of all it unlocks many of London's hidden secrets.

But remember, it suits spontaneous and adventurous diners. "If you like to know what wine to bring, what clothes to wear and who you'll be sitting next to, then perhaps this isn't for you," says Mountfort. "Each event, like the location, is completely different, so guests can come to more than one and still not know what to expect."

The next Gingerline event is scheduled for May. For more information go to: gingerline.org

facebookginger

gingerlinetwitter

Susannah Mountfort is the founder of Gingerline and available for comment, email: gingerlinelondon@gmail.com

Blood, sweat and tears at the English National Ballet

This article was first published in The Evening Standard on 8 March 2011

The days of putting glass in the pointe shoes are over," artistic director of English National Ballet Wayne Eagling tells me. "Dancers do get jealous if someone doesn't seem to deserve the role. But so long as people can recognise the talent, it's not a problem."

I'm at ENB's Kensington HQ to discuss how close Agony & Ecstasy, BBC4's new three-part fly-on-the-wall documentary starting tonight, is to Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky's Oscar-winning psychodrama. Filmed over a year to celebrate the company's 60th anniversary, the documentary takes you from the rehearsal room to the boardroom to big night performances.

There are glorious scenes of jumping and pirouetting but we also see young dancers grey with tiredness dancing their guts out. While none tips as far as Natalie Portman's character in Black Swan, the self-flagellation of the ballet dancer is laid bare.

In graphic, gruelling detail we witness the extraordinary stamina dancers need to get through those 12-hour working days. Some are running for up to eight miles daily on stage. It is normal to continue dancing through serious injury. And, yes, there is blood on the ballet slippers.

Director Rob Farquhar zooms in on the blisters and the black eyes. One dancer suffers concussion. We see sweat pouring down the pristine white tutus. During a scene from Romeo and Juliet, someone even gets stabbed by one of the real weapons used as props.

"It's a human interest story," says Eagling. "You see the struggle, the discipline, the regimentation."

It is also the story of a feisty London underdog. The hardworking ENB is often eclipsed by the Royal Ballet at its glamorous Covent Garden base. There are no super-budgets. The ENB doesn't even have a permanent stage. Half its working life is touring. And now it is having to make up for a £650,000 cut in Arts Council funding.

At one point Eagling's reputation is on the line when he has to create his first full-length ballet for the company - a brand new Christmas Nutcracker in five weeks. "From the very beginning I said, 'No other choreographer in the world would agree to this time schedule'," he says wrily. "And yes, it wasn't finished on the first night, we hadn't even had a run-through."

Like football or modelling, it is a short career. Dancers don't earn a fortune (on average around £22,000 a year although the principal dancers can make more than £50,000).

In the face of this relative hardship, it is the job of the ENB's choreographer Derek Deane to "bully" dancers to new heights of perfection. "I drive people mad," he says. "The difficulty is getting the 100 per cent commitment physically and emotionally so they will almost bleed for me."

"He's terrible," agrees ballerina Daria Klimentová, considered a veteran at 38. "In other professions he wouldn't get away with it but most dancers are young and too scared to say anything."

But there is real camaraderie among the dancers, she insists. The ethos is very different from Russian companies such as the Bolshoi and Kirov "where they don't talk to each other and it's very competitive".

In tonight's opening episode, Deane stages Swan Lake in the round at the Royal Albert Hall. For the role of Odette/Odile - one of the most physically exacting roles in ballet - he has lured the Russian world-class guest Polina Semionova (ballet's Cindy Crawford) over to dance with his new find, 20-year-old Russian protégé, Vadim Muntagirov.

But when Semionova fails to get a visa, it's Klimentová who has to dance on opening night - and it's a triumph, even though she is not first choice and has a leg injury. For Farquhar it was great drama: "Watching Daria preparing for Swan Lake in make-up, just about to go on stage, she seemed so vulnerable and really opened up about what it's like to keep performing at the highest level at her age."

After 20 years in the business, dancers like Klimentová are battling their bodies. She observes, only half-joking: "I've done everything. I've had a baby as well. I have been used and abused."

It is not a given that a ballet dancer can have children and continue to work. "When I got to 29, I wanted a child while I was still dancing. I didn't want to leave everything to the end and then find I couldn't have a family. This baby was far more important than ballet," laughs Klimentová.

Although dancers are undeniably slender, there is no evidence of eating disorders. "I can eat everything I want," Klimentová insists, "because the training is so tough."

Farquhar says such candidness is unusual. "It took a while to get the dancers' trust. They find it hard to talk about things like pain, ambition, rejection - partly because it's everyday and ordinary for them."

The documentary team were so moved by the dancers' raw dedication that production company Tiger Aspect plans to hold a fundraiser for the ENB later this year. As Farquhar explains: "We became very fond of the dancers, this is a lifestyle choice for them, but a hard life full of injuries."

Agony & Ecstasy: A Year With English National Ballet starts tonight at 9pm on BBC4.
English National Ballet is at the London Coliseum March 16-19 with mixed bill Black & White featuring the Black Swan pas de deux, and Swan Lake March 22-26; booking on
ballet.org.uk

Waste Land is the Slumdog Millionaire of documentaries

 

First published in The Evening Standard, 10 February 2011

Lucy Walker's Waste Land has been dubbed the Slumdog Millionaire of documentaries. Nominated for an Oscar, it has already won more than 30 awards, including the top audience prizes at the Berlin and Sundance festivals, plus the Amnesty International Human Rights Film Award.

The film, which has a special London screening tonight before its release later this month, follows the Brazilian-born artist Vik Muniz as he creates art out of garbage at the world's largest landfill on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, collaborating with the trash pickers (catadores) who work there.

Often too poor to live in the favelas, the catadores make a living by recycling and selling plastics, glass and food from the landfill.

Sometimes they uncover banknotes, guns, headless bodies. After Carnival, they pick out the discarded costumes and wear them as they work.In the film, as Muniz creates huge photographic portraits of the catadores surrounded by rubbish from the site, Walker begins to tease out the back-stories of these handsome, charismatic people. They come across as anything but passive victims. "That's the most striking thing, the good humour, sheer fun," she says.

One man who finds a copy of Machiavelli's The Prince in the landfill is inspired to learn to read. Another woman, Irma, tells the heartbreaking story of how she came to the landfill when she lost everything after the death of her baby son. They explain that they chose recycling garbage because (unlike prostitution or drug dealing) it harms no one else.

The conditions are squalid, the smell disgusting; but on a bad day they make twice the minimum wage. Many have been living here since childhood, but recently the handsome, dreadlocked Tiao - a dead ringer for Lenny Kravitz - has been organising the workers into the equivalent of a union.On paper, a film about pollution, waste-management failures and the gap between rich and poor in Brazil sounds painfully worthy. But in Walker's hands, it's a thrilling and uplifting journey. She even persuaded her friend Moby to let her use his music for the soundtrack.

"We've had amazing screenings all over the world, and it can be really fun looking at the audience fidgeting at first, and then getting pulled in. You see their faces reflected with tears, as they howl and sob and chew their knuckles," she tells me.

In the flesh, Walker, in her late thirties, is extremely striking, with high cheekbones and compelling, cat-like eyes. Her ex-boyfriends include former Labour cabinet minister James Purnell, whom she met at Oxford (where she also shared a flat with actress Emily Mortimer). Very charming, she has the ability to make you feel you are the only person in the room. And yet people in the film world can find her slightly aloof - many simply don't realise she cannot see out of one eye. "I was blind from birth so I never had any trauma," she says airily. She describes her eyesight as "more like a flat screen than people with wonderful 3D full-depth perception binocular vision" - and insists she doesn't want to be pigeonholed as a disabled director. "You know, there are lots of fantastic one-eyed film directors - John Ford, Claude Chabrol, Bertrand Tavernier, Alfred Hitchcock - just Google 'one-eyed film directors'."

Yet she has also had problems with her "good" eye - "quite a complicated health history involving extreme near-sightedness, dense amblypia [reduced vision in one or both eyes], astigmatism and neurological stuff that's not easy to summarise", she says. "I'm sure this is partly why I'm such a cinephile and visual artist fanatic, because everything visual became so precious and intriguing to me that I saw things with different eyes."

It certainly hasn't stopped her taking risks. For Waste Land, she had to film for nearly three years at the Jardim Gramacho landfill site - 300 acres full of trash, rats, dogs and discarded syringes. There was the risk of leprosy and dengue fever (she had every vaccination under the sun), as well as kidnapping by Brazilian drug gangs. Despite the heat, she spent most of the shoot in a plastic "astronaut" suit.

She first met Muniz - who lives in New York but regularly goes back to Rio - at a British film festival. For some time they had been talking about collaborating on a social project that would also make a good film. Both are fascinated by the role of "garbage" in consumer society. As an artist, he is famous for recreating images recognisable from art history using unlikely materials such as dirt, diamonds, chocolate syrup and plastic toys, while Walker had been researching landfill sites ever since visting one in New York as a student.

Although she insists that she is a film-maker rather than an activist, many of her documentaries deal with marginalised subjects. For 2006's Blindsight, which also won the audience award at Berlin, she followed six blind Tibetan teenagers as they climbed up the north side of Mt Everest with their hero, blind American mountaineer Erik Weihenmayer. She had to learn Tibetan, and climb 23,000ft above sea-level in oxygen-deprived conditions. "I was very fit - I used to race in triathlons and marathons - but mountaineering was a whole new challenge."

Clearly it was a topic close to her heart. If she'd been born in Tibet, she would have been kept in a back room, like the children in the film. "Many of them merely just had awful vision that was never corrected. And that awful vision was not nearly as bad as mine. They just didn't get spectacles. You realise how fortunate we are in this country."

Walker grew up in London, one of four high-achieving sisters (two are lawyers, the other a teacher). Her father was an executive in the toys and games industry. Cinema was her passion. One half-term holiday she went to see The Aristocats four days in a row. "After that, I'd run out of people to take me to the movies and I was inconsolable. For the rest of my childhood it was all about trying to persuade adults to take me to the cinema."

A contemporary at school was Tom Hooper, who recently directed The King's Speech. But as a girl she says it never occured to her that she could make films.

At New College, Oxford, she studied English literature and began directing plays (which she soon started filming on video, too). After graduating in 1992 with a first, she won a Fulbright scholarship to the New York University film school, by convincing them that they needed more female film directors. Here she won a contest to direct a video for Cowboy Junkies.

Her first feature documentary, Devil's Playground (2002), followed a small group of Amish teenagers in the period of "rumspringa", when they are allowed to run wild and free, before deciding to stay cut off forever from modern society. The film was nominated for three Emmys.

She gained a reputation for being able to get young people who are generally inaccessible to open up. "I also like these 'crackpots only need apply' documentaries, these goose chases."

Her aim is to give the ordinary person on the street a clearer grasp of the issues. She has a second film coming out later this year - Countdown to Zero, an exposé of the present-day threat of nuclear proliferation and terrorism, or "a non-fiction horror movie", as she calls it.

She managed to bag interviews with nuclear experts and politicians - including Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter and Tony Blair. She eventually tracked Pervez Musharraf, the former president of Pakistan, to a safe house in a London suburb.

The film has won praise in high places. Hillary Clinton recommended it to her team at the State Department; Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the UN, has also seen it.

But first on the agenda is the Oscars (on February 27), where Waste Land is up against Banksy's debut film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, and Restrepo, co-directed by British photographer Tim Hetherington (who was among American troops in Afghanistan). A win would crown not only her and Muniz's achievement but those of the film's stars.

Today the catadores appear on chat shows in Brazil and open exhibitions - they are no longer ashamed of their profession. For Walker the film is about the transformative power of art.

"I just thought that question was a good one: can you take treasures out of trash?" she says. "I think ultimately the answer is yes The film in the broadest possible sense serves as an advertisement for the benefits of creative education and positive intervention."

Waste Land is released nationwide on February 25; Countdown to Zero opens on June 24. Lucy Walker will be at tonight's UK premiere of Waste Land at Phillips de Pury (phillipsdepury.com), which will be followed by an auction of a portrait by Vik Muniz to benefit See Change (seechangewitharts.com) and ACAMJG in Rio de Janeiro.

Remember you're a #RiotWomble

First published in The Evening Standard on 10 August 2011

You've bought the last broom in Clapham," the man in Asda tells me. He's not joking, the streets around Clapham Junction are filled with people carrying brooms, bin bags, and brushes. I was proud to join this ad hoc army of street cleaners.

Like many others I woke up yesterday feeling tearful. Unable to get transport home to Peckham, I was forced to check into a hotel opposite London Bridge station. I spent the night watching footage of Peckham burning - after 10 years of successful regeneration - and texting friends. I checked out of the hotel at 7am (£200!), and headed for Rye Lane - fully expecting to find a war zone.

In fact, smashed windows at Iceland and Primark were already being mended. There were actors, business people and members of a Salvation Army group on the street. "We needed to make a gesture," Ruth, 20, told me.

Around 20 people turned up in Peckham High Street to help clear away the mess. Yes, there was an air of tension - with police on every corner - but there was no denying the spirit of solidarity.

Most touching of all, a community theatre group, Peckham Shed, had started a tribute wall ("Why we love Peckham") on the boarded-up window of a looted branch of Poundland. Black, white, young and old queued up to sign coloured Post-it notes with messages of goodwill. "We felt we had to come out and get the community talking," a theatre volunteer told me.

Messages included: "Don't destroy my beautiful city", "Diversity + jerk chicken" and "Stop the riot, allow Greggs, man" - a reference to the damage done to the bakery in Monday night's disturbance.

In fact, shocked by arson and looting the night before, over 1,000 south Londoners - teachers, students, musicians - had taken to the streets, alongside council workers, to clean up the damage and restore faith in the idea of community.

The radical clean-up campaign was organised via Twitter and Facebook, with uplifted brooms becoming a symbol of hope.

Yesterday morning Tim Dickinson, author of the BlueWalrus music blog, arrived in front of Clapham's Nando's to find 600 people congregated with cleaning materials.

"Every age group was represented," he says, "from 18 to 50-year-olds. There was one lovely old lady in pink Crocs. Everyone made new friends. As the crowd began doing a Mexican wave with their brooms, free sandwiches arrived courtesy of Battersea Arts Centre."

The operation, tagged #riotcleanup - or #the RiotWombles - was started shortly after midnight on Sunday night by Dan Thompson, who runs a social initiative aimed at encouraging people to use empty shops and open spaces.

By 10am on Monday the tag was the top trending topic in the UK (with fans from Simon Pegg to Stephen Fry) and the second worldwide (top trending this morning is #operationcupoftea - mugs, not thugs).

From Hackney and Enfield, to Camden and Peckham, the clear-up operation - a coming together of resilient Londoners - snaked through the city yesterday. Councils such as Hackney and Camden, whose street-cleaners had been out in force since the early morning, sent their volunteers on to help out at more badly damaged areas like Clapham.

The day started in Hackney, as over 100 Riot Wombles, led by Thompson, gathered outside the town hall, alongside council workers and the vicar of St John at Hackney. By 8.30am Mare Street was clear of broken glass and debris.

The group was told to head to Clarence Road, scene of looting and car torchings on Monday night. There they held a two-minute silence and began cleaning up the blackened remains of two torched cars.

In Ealing, residents rallied to clear smashed glass from the main street with brooms bought from nearby pound shops. According to entertainment writer Rob Chilton: "The spirit was inspiring. Londoners chatting, smiling, helping each other out."

In Chalk Farm, Ricky Wilson, frontman of Kaiser Chiefs (who had a hit single with I Predict a Riot), and fellow band member Simon Rix joined the growing group of "handy mobs" with their brooms to help out.

In Camden, arts producer Bakul Patki oversaw the clearing of bricks and scaffolding used by the rioters in the middle of the night. "Hopefully fewer potential weapons for tonight, on this corner at least," Patki observed dryly.

On the Walworth Road, gardening co-op Guerrilla Gardening was busy harvesting smashed glass and taking away rubble.

After a night of violence and despair, it was a defiant gesture. People seemed to want to embrace the very fabric of London.

Once the Peckham clear-up had finished I moved with many of the crew on to Clapham Junction. By 3pm crowds were waiting patiently with their brooms to tackle the street in front of Debenhams, which was trashed when the store was looted. Declared a crime scene, it was still sealed off as police took evidence.

Teacher Simon Marriott, 30, and his brother Tim, a student, 20, had been here since 9am. Simon came because he was horrified by the sight of fancy dress shop Party Superstores in flames. "I was driving past with my wife last night and got so angry witnessing it. The only way I could cope was by coming down here. It's the first time since I've lived in London that I've been afraid to stop the car. I wanted to show solidarity and prove that these greedy violent people are not the real Londoners."

The riots, he believes, are a sign of consumerism gone mad. What saddens him is that the teenagers rioting are the sort of young people he normally teaches. "It makes me wonder why am I doing what I do," he says sadly.

But moments later we bumped into young people who are doing everything they can to send out a more positive image. As I help youth group Covent Garden Dragon Hall Trust (aged 12-16) clean up broken glass, they explain why they are here today.

"It's devastating," says Sophie, 15. "Young people have been portrayed in such a negative way. I don't want people looking at me as if I'm a criminal."

Naomi, 16, another volunteer at Dragon Hall Trust, has been filming interviews all over London, finding out how the riots have affected locals. In Ealing they met Toby Young. Later they plan to take to the streets to speak to young people about their anger and disaffection.

Dragon Hall Trust's senior youth worker, James Dellow, 38, says, "I guess one of the things we hope comes out of today is the realisation of the idea of the Big Society. What you have here is lots of people who have decided, off their own bats that their community is what's important to them. It's about people deciding for themselves - in a very organic way. We'll have to wait and see if this translates itself into government policy but I'm really hopeful about what young people have shown me today. There's been a real spirit of unity and togetherness."

Everywhere the Blitz spirit was in evidence all day.

Artisan du Chocolat offered free drinking chocolate or ice cream to police officers on duty near their Notting Hill or Chelsea shops; Jamie Oliver, M&S and Starbucks gave out free food in Clapham, Sainsbury's donated water. While Poncho offered burritos for emergency services personnel working their socks off to protect people, businesses and property.

People who had woken up that morning feeling fearful now felt far more optimistic. The broom, raised aloft, plus cups of tea carried on riot shields seemed so very English.

In fact, the Clapham clean-up was such a good story that the place was overflowing with journalists and photographers competing for an exclusive. At one point it was nearly handbags at dawn between me and a writer from the South London Press.

But it was impossible to feel cynical. Decent people had given up their time, got their hands dirty.

And the momentum is still going. A Brixton clean-up operation took place yesterday evening. Meanwhile, earlier today, the Tottenham Wombles organised outside Bruce Grove station.

There has been much focus on scenes of violence and disorder but the domestic power of #riotcleanup shows that a new grassroots movement has been born. It should not be underestimated.

Londoners have discovered their voice. A sign in the window of Claire's Accessories, Clapham, reads: "You are wonderful. Faith in humanity restored".

I, for one, will never look at a broom the same way again.

The ladies are for turning: how Maggie seduced Meryl - and reduced me to tears

This article first appeared in the Evening Standard on 15th November 2011

It's not every day that Meryl Streep bakes you a cake. But on Saturday night, she did just that: an American apple cake, made from a recipe by Julia Childs, the groundbreaking cookery writer played by Streep in the 2009 film Julie & Julia.

You could say the cake was a sweetener because I - and a dozen other opinionated women - had been summoned to discuss a far less palatable subject: Margaret Thatcher.

Earlier that evening, before our informal "kitchen supper", we had crowded into a private screening of the long-awaited biopic of the former prime minister, The Iron Lady. Now, I find myself sitting in Islington in the Georgian home of the film's director, Phyllida Lloyd, eating homemade chicken curry alongside Streep, who plays Thatcher, and screenwriter Abi Morgan (Sex Traffic, The Hour, Shame). Grande dame columnists Polly Toynbee, Suzanne Moore, Janet Street-Porter and India Knight are to my right.

Across the table are actress Tracey Ullman, broadcasters Jenni Murray, Fi Glover, Edith Bowman and Lauren Laverne. A group of strong women, none of us obvious Thatcherites, debating the Iron Lady's legacy.

Arguably what united us was our antipathy towards Thatcher. Growing up as a Lefty feminist in the West Midlands, I felt oppressed by a Tory government which specialised in union-bashing and BBC-baiting, told the unemployed to get on their bikes and introduced the homophobic Section 28 legislation. Laverne is the granddaughter of a miner; Toynbee a well-known Thatcher-baiter; Murray confronted Maggie about her childcare policies on Woman's Hour.

All weekend Twitter hummed with grown women debating what to wear to the dinner party of the year (dungarees, in tribute to Mamma Mia!? Or a French Lieutenant's Woman ballgown?).

In fact Streep, 62, dressed in print shirt and dark trousers, does all she can to keep things normal. She passes around canapés, helps wash up. She has even brought her daughter along to join in the discussion. Streep has a reputation for turning film sets into a family unit. She and Lloyd worked together on Mamma Mia!. She met Ullman on the set of David Hare's Plenty and they have been friends ever since.

But there's another reason she has organised this evening. Streep knows a political biopic of an "old lady" will be a hard sell at the box office where franchises are aimed at teenage boys. The film, she tells us, "is about how this divisive pioneer, who was monstrous in some ways, broke through in a way I couldn't have imagined when I was that age".

After the success of Mamma Mia! she and Lloyd could have chosen a frothy rom-com but Streep wanted to do a film about "the end of a life" which "circles questions of mortality". When she read Morgan's script about Margaret Thatcher, she knew she had found her project.

What drew Streep to the script was her own dislike of Thatcher. "I wasn't a fan. In America she was this woman who hung out with Reagan and we didn't like her policies and it was easy to dismiss her because our iconic political women were figures like Jacqueline Kennedy. In contrast she seemed dowdy - and we judge female politicians in a different way than we do men," she apologises. "I was guilty of that." Making the film gave her a chance to challenge her own prejudices.

But could the film alter my own less-than-rosy views of Maggie Thatcher, milk-snatcher? In many ways The Iron Lady is a feminist re-evaluation of Thatcher's life - and the price she paid for power. It is hard to remain unmoved at the sheer scale of the challenges she overcame to reach the highest office in the land.

The camera films mostly from her perspective - so you are with her from her 10-year bid to win her first parliamentary seat to the physical assault course of first entering the macho House of Commons. It is undeniably a lonely road. Apart from her own daughter, Carol, and Thatcher's beloved dresser, Crawfie, there are very few women in the film, and certainly no other female MPs. This, argues Morgan, reflects Thatcher's own belief that she was the only woman in the room.

Streep's performance is disturbing. Just like Helen Mirren in The Queen, she makes Maggie a radiant figure. I found myself rooting for the brainy grocer's daughter as she battled through the snooty Tory ranks.

But other elements of the film are cartoonish and unsettling: where is the rational, indignant opposition to Thatcher's policies? Union leaders and protesters are a wild rabble banging on her car windows. Devastating political events - the miners' strike, the Brighton bombings - are dealt with in an almost operatic way. There is a chilling moment when she declares "Sink it!" to order a British submarine to torpedo the Argentine ship the General Belgrano. You could easily lose patience with the frantic plotting.

But arguably The Iron Lady is most daring in its treatment of the older Thatcher. The film opens with a fragile old lady trying to buy milk at the news-agent's. With a shock we realise this is Maggie at 80, having given her minders the slip. Denis is long dead. Deluded with grief (or dementia) Maggie spends her days conversing with a ghost.

Both Streep and Morgan read Carol Thatcher's memoir, A Swim-on Part in the Goldfish Bowl - where she revealed that her mother had to be reminded of her husband's death over and over again. "Carol Thatcher came under a lot of flak for writing about her mother's dementia," says Streep. "So did Patti Davis for talking about her father, Ronald Reagan."

Morgan, who has known several female relatives with dementia, is convinced Thatcher was ill at the end of her time in office, believing her drinking habits (lots of whisky) and lack of sleep may also have contributed to her gradual loss of autonomy.

Maggie fans have already protested loudly that the film invades the great lady's privacy. But the family are dealt with generously, from Jim Broadbent's Denis, the clever buffoon who marries a woman who has no intention of being a traditional wife, to Olivia Colman's wonderfully nuanced Carol (all kaftans and brave smiles each time her mother slights her). Tellingly Mark, the favourite twin, is absent from the film.

There is much to admire about this ordinary woman who knows the price of milk, unlike her public-school educated Cabinet ministers; who believes passionately in the idea of public service. There is a moment when Thatcher explains her reasoning behind the poll tax (one of the most hated acts of her premiership). Anyone who believes in Britain must be prepared to make a contribution, rich or poor, she argues. It is brutal, impeccable logic from a woman who can't imagine what it is like to fail.

I found myself secretly applauding when Maggie bemoans an X Factor world where people are more interested in "being" than "doing". Where they elevate feelings above "thoughts and ideas". Morgan wonders how long Thatcher would have survived in the media-­sophisticated Twitter age. The real danger for Lefties is that Streep's performance is so touching. While she is on screen, hostility is suspended. Rather than the political monster of my teenage years, Streep portrays an everywoman battling loss. In one scene, which actually made me cry, she is terrified by the reappearance of Denis's ghost and switches on every electrical appliance in the house sobbing: "I will not go mad."

And this breaks the greatest taboo of all, the one the party faithful can't bear to accept about their heroine. We all get ill, uncertain, grow old. For all that the keepers of Thatcher's flame love to wheel her out for public occasions (remember those pictures of her at Liam Fox's birthday), they can't forgive her for being human. This film does.

Introduction

So, this is here the introduction goes....
Welcome to Liz's blog!