Rainbow in Rock at The Cavern (20 Dec 25)

Another very welcome gig by Rainbow in Rock at The Cavern in Raynes Park. Superficially it was the same as all the other Rainbow in Rock gig I have been too (and that is a very good thing) but I did nake a few mental notes during the evening.

The setlist, which always changes, seemed to be geared more toward the newer Rainbow material rather then the older Deep Purple songs. There were a couple I barely recognised and there was no space for songs like Burn, Mistreated or Stormbringer.

The keyboards were more prominent that before.

The bar staff were quietly efficient. The service was always quick and friendly, they remembered what I was drinking too.

It was worth going for Stargazer alone, it is possibly the best song ever written, though Like A Hurricane is a contender too.

NT LIVE: The Fifth Step at Olympic Studios

While a play staring Martin Freeman and Jack Lowden was tempting it was not tempting enough to get me to pay west end prices so I skipped the run at Soho Place but it was tempting enough when it transferred to screen under the NT Live umbrella.

I chose my usual cinema, Olympic Studios in Barnes, where central seat F6 cost a modest £18.5.

The timing worked well with a matinee performance at Bush Theatre I was able to stroll down slowly to Barnes pausing for coffee and cake along the way before arriving at Olympic in time for an unhurried soup and a beer,

By chance, both plays were about therapy sessions though this one was framed around alcoholism and the AA 12 Step Programme where Step 5 is "Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.".

For me, The Fifth Step failed almost immediate in comparison to the earlier After Sunday as these sessions seemed contrived and unnatural. I also found it hard to care for either character.

Jack Lowden initially played the alcoholic going through the programme with a lot of nervous energy but as he went through the multiple sessions he gained composure and almost became his Slow Horses character.Martin Freeman play the session leader as a man who was never in control of the process with lots of hesitations and mumblings. It was almost as if he had not learned the part fully. 

The staging tried to stir some life into the production with some light effects and rearranging the chairs(!) between scenes but these were more of a distraction than an enhancement.

The Fifth Step was a disappointment with only Jack Lowden's acting in the early stages leaving a good memory.

After Sunday at Bush Theatre

My theatre going changes over time due to factors like where I am working, artistic directors changing and, obviously, Covid but whatever the reason Bush Theatre in Hammersmith had drifted slightly off my radar and I only sent to see After Sunday because an email from the theatre said that it had a good review from Morning Star!

The synopsis on the website included "Ty, Leroy and Daniel have signed up to a new Caribbean cooking group. But when you’re locked in a secure hospital, too much food for thought can be a bad thing.". This sounded exactly my sort of thing so I am surprised that I had not picked up on it earlier.

Still, no serious damage was done and I got seat A6 fort £20, very much in the no need to think about it price range.

It was good to be back amongst the buzz at Bush and back to a seat in the front row.

While the basic premise of the play was simple, four inmates in a secure hospital attend weekly cookery classes with an Occupational Therapist, the insight to group therapy sessions was unpredictable and engaging.

With the five characters having different pasts and expectations their stories went in different directions and, as with therapy, some of them had significant moments but none of them ended.

Over an hour and a half we had interesting stories rich in all sort of emotions. Stories and characters that I cared about.

After Sunday sounded exactly my sort of thing, and so it proved. I loved it.

The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown at The Lexington

My list of "must see" bands is sadly reducing as we all get older so I was delighted to have another opportunity to see The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. 

The venue this  time was The Lexington in Islington, a place I had walked past many many times but had never visited before, so that was something to look forward to too.

Another bonus was that despite having walked all around that area when working by Kings Cross there were a few roads that I had not ticked off on my CityStrides Life Map, either because they are dead-ends or simply because I was not mapping my walk when I had been that way, so I spent an hour or so before the gig filling the gaps. That was another fifteen streets completed.

I even had time to grab a coffee and a sandwich from the local Pret before heading to the pub and in the pub I had time for a pint of Black Sheep Bitter before heading upstairs for the music.

I was quick enough upstairs to get to stand right next to the stage, something I had not managed to do with Arthur Brown for a little while. That let me take a few close-up pictures like this one.

The performance was much like the ones I had first seen in Lewes in 2023 snd twice since then. It had a lot of songs that I did not know, as well as several classic that I did, all of which were presented very theatrically. Obviously Time Captives was my stand-out song as it was entry into the crazy world of Arthur Brown way back in 1973.

It was another great evening and to cap it all off it finished in time for me to get back to the Grey Horse in Kingston for a couple of pints of The Naked Ladies.

I have walked 20% of Greater London

I used MapMyWalk to record each of my exploratory walks and CityStrides to summarise them all in one place. 

CityStrides also tracks the number of roads that I have walked on each town or city. Of most interest to me are the totals for each of the London Boroughs (I have walked every street in three of them) and the total for Greater London overall.

I have just completed 20% of Greater London. This is in terms of the number of roads walked (7,964 of 39,362) rather than, say, total distance.

The map below shows where I have walked and, more depressingly, those I have yet to do with some large areas hardly touched (there are a few gaps where I did not map my walks, such as the top section of London Loop).

My vague plans is to keep plugging away and to use every opportunity to walk new roads. For example, I have been to Royal London Hospital a few times recently and have walked quite a few new roads around Whitechapel and Stepney,

While walking 20% of London is some achievement iy is only fair to point out that I am only 4th in the CityStrides leaderboard and those ahead of me have managed 27%, 31% and an astonishing 68%. I do not expect to catch any of them.

I have walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames (again)

My claim back in May that  I have walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames got a slight setback this week. Not that unexpected but unwelcome none the less.

The app I use to keep a record of everywhere I have walked, CityStrides, is based on OpenStreetMap which is maintained by a community of users, including myself (much as Wikipedia is) and it gets updated both with changes to the physical world, e.g. new streets, and by clarifications, e.g. marking streets with locked gates as private.

These changes get uploaded to CityStrides periodically and when these changes create unwalked roads (or parts of roads) the unwalked sections appear as red dots.

The latest update for Kingston upon Thames created a few red dots for me, as shown here.

Frustratingly none of these were new roads, just roads newly marked s walkable, and I would have walked them when in those areas had they been marked as walkable at that time. Still, things are what they are and so I set out to walk them all.

More frustratingly, some of the dots were at the very southern tip of the Borough (I live on the northern boundary) so it was a longish ride on two buses to get me to Malden Rushett. 

From there is was a pretty dreary walk up A243 all the way to the large junction with A3, an even drearier walk along both sides of A3 to the border with Surrey and back then further along A3 to Tolworth and just beyond. That accounted for three of the four groups of red dots.

Then I was lucky. I was expecting to continue along A3 to the final group when I learned that I could directly there on a 265 bus, so I did.

The final group was a little bit more of annoying A3 but the final two streets in my quest were in an exclusive private estate so I had lots of impressive houses to look at while tracking the final dots.

And that was it, I have now walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames (again).

Gold Rush at The Half Moon (19 Oct 25)

I was always going to see Gold Rush on their latest return to The Half Moon Putney and this time I made something of an afternoon of it by tackling some location-based challenges in two phone Apps.

I collect Gold Gyms in PokemonGo (I have 750) and this means making repeated visits to specific locations to battle the gyms there, gaining more points each time until you read Gold level. I had a few targets in Putney and Wandsworth that I wanted to revisit, two of them in particular. Over the afternoon I got points at seven gyms and went Gold at two!

The other target was walking new (unwalked) streets for my CityStrides LifeMap. I had already walked most of Putney but there were plenty of gaps heading towards and into Wandsworth. It is a non trivial task to walk out the best route to cover new streets, I had to walk down and back a few dead-ends, but in the end I was pleased to tick-off 19 streets. This raised my total for LB Wandsworth to 975 streets which is just a midge shy of 60%.

I had to look after myself too and that started very well with an All Day Vegetarian Breakfast at Sweet Tooth in Putney, continued reasonably with a coffee in Black Sheep Coffee Wandsworth and finished correctly with another coffee and a cake at Nlack Sheep Coffee Putney.

I had not forgotten the main purpose of my trip and I duly arrived at Half Moon Putney around 6:30pm, in good time for a rest and a pint before the music started.

I do not have a lot to say about the Gold Rush concert that I have not said several times before, so I will mention Tom's guitars instead!

Tom have half a dozen or so guitars on stage and he surprised us on one song with a bright yellow one. He explained that he had been doing something else during the day (he is a co-founder of charity Electric Umbrella) and a helper had put the wrong guitar in the wrong bag.

He also had issues with his black guitar, pictured above, and had to swap it for a less iconic one for the last few songs.

Every Gold Rush concert is different, just as every Neil Young concert is, and my mood is different each time too, so different songs strike me harder each time. On this occasion my stand-out performances were Down by the River, Cortez the Killer (loved the keyboard intro) and Cowgirl in the Sand.

The night ended something over two hours after it started with some good news, Gold Rush had booked to play the The Half Moon four times next year. I will be there.

The Poltergeist at Arcola Theatre

My mission to watch every performance of a Philip Ridley play in London (and easily accessible places beyond) continued with The Poltergeist at Arcola Theatre, were I had first seen it almost exactly two years earlier.

This time it was on downstairs in Studio 2 where front row seat A12 was a sound investment at £25.

I planned the day to give me a little time in Dalston beforehand and I did a little exploring while also looking for somewhere to eat. 

It struck me that gentrification had failed to stick and the posh places that I had eaten at previously were all gone. And so I found myself, yet again, at The Speakeasy which despite being little more than a marquee is a friendly place and serves reasonable beer with good food; it was a pint of Camden Pale Ale and some veggie tacos this time. 

I remembered the gist of The Poltergeist but, as with all Philip Ridley plays, there is so much going on in the dialogue  that I knew I would be surprised, stimulated and entertained.

This was a solo performance (monologue seems inappropriate) and the heavy duties were given to Louis Davison who played the narrator, Sasha, and a host of other people. Incidentally, Sasha is a deliberate unisex name and many of Ridley's solo plays can be performed by a woman or man.

The stage was empty and the only props Davison had to play were his clothes and in his simple outfit in which he strode the length and breadth of the stage assuredly telling Sasha's story for eighty minutes.

On one level it was a simple story with Sasha and his partner attending a family child's birthday party which Sasha found difficult for reasons that gradually became clearer. Through the many conversations with the many party attendees, all played by Davison, we learned that Sasha had once been a promising artist until he had some sort of breakdown, the causes of which also emerge. 

The richness of the plau is in the dialogue, not the plot, and I was totally engaged for the full eighty minutes as I desperately tried to catch each quickly delivered word. And despite the core subject matter, a mental breakdown, the mood was often light and I laughed out loud quite a few times.

Philip Ridley has a distinctive style and voice which appeals to me immensely and The Poltergeist was yet another great example of why that is.