31 January 2020

Beyond Bauhaus exhibition at RIBA

I worked in Central London for several years, lastly near Kings Cross, when it was fairly easy to get to exhibitions at RIBA, even if it meant taking a flexible view of how long a lunch hour lasts. That stopped when I started work in Teddington and I have struggled to pick the habit back up since retiring.

An exhibition on Modernism got me back there.

I made something of the trip walking up from Vauxhall, though walking around Buckingham Palace at Changing of the Guard was not one of my better ideas. Apart from that the walk went well and it was nice revisiting once familiar places like Berkley Square.

I hit another problem at RIBA with the cafe immediately on the right of the entrance and the one of the first floor both being out of action. I consoled myself by taking in the displays on the first and third floors which got me in an architectural mood.

Going back to the ground floor for the main exhibition I found where the cafe had moved to and was able to have a coffee and a toasted sarnie before going in.

The premise of the exhibition was that Modernism in Britain grew directly out of the Bauhaus movement with the relocation of some of the key players, notably Walter Gropius, from Germany to England, and this was the thread that the exhibition followed.

The staging of the exhibition was somewhat unusual, and I have mixed views on it. The extra space needed to display the photographs and drawings was created by adding pillars to the room but instead of mounting them on the outside they went inside and we peered at them through geometrically shaped openings, a bit like Play School. These shapes were included in the exhibition poster though I failed to determine their exact relevance.

That said, I am a sucker for architecture in general and Modernism in particular and I loved the exhibition. One favourite section was that on individual houses built for rich sponsors, often a good source for experimental architecture, and another was on industrial buildings.

In the post-Bauhaus section I was surprised to see several pictures of Eric Lyons' SPAN developments but none of their first on Parkley in Richmond, which is about 200m away from where I live. I cheekily raised this with one of the staff who was overseeing a tour group and she skilfully defended the curator's choice.

Other famous architects featured were Denys Lasdun (NT) and Erno Goldfinger (Trellick Towers) and there were other famous buildings by less famous architects which produced a peppering of works known to me amongst many that were not. Seeing both helped put the known into a wider context.

The exhibition confirmed my love of Modernism and of exhibitions at RIBA.

30 January 2020

HUG workshop: What does sustainability mean for you?

Ham United Group (HUG) is one of the two local groups that I belong to. It is an umbrella organisation and in recent years my main involvement with it has been through the Friends of Ham Lands (FoHL) sub-group.

One of the reasons that I have not been as involved in recent years is simply the lack of free evenings with HUG meetings clashing with other things, notably theatre dates. Then things fell into place and I was able to get to a meeting and it was a good one to get to.

Previous meetings had been fairly formal round-the-table affairs with updates on each of the projects HUG manages and little conversation on each of them. This was a back-to-basics workshop, the first in a series to identify projects that HUG and individuals can undertake to improve sustainability locally.

In three rounds of discussion in small groups we covered sustainability from the perspective of ourselves, our community and our planet.

While some of this was obvious and some of it had been though about in depth by others before, e.g. the UN Development Goals, there were some new ideas and some specific things that we can develop in future meetings.

I was talking a lot, always a good sign (for me, at least) but I did manage to take a few scrambled notes. What follows is my attempt to make sense of them after the event.

There were common themes of what three things we would look for as individuals when moving to a new area, i.e. into a new community. There were the survival basics (shops, healthcare, schools,...), places to go (cafes, pubs, parks,...), things to do (churches, sport, clubs, allotments,...) and good transport (especially walking and cycling) to get to them. Meeting people was the big driver in finding things to do.

In looking at changing behaviours to make them more sustainably we could consider barriers, perceived and real; e.g. why do I drive?

Once we go beyond the individual we need organisations and rules to enable sustainability, e.g. someone needs to maintain the parks, provide the jobs and police the cars.

Already we are starting to find gaps that HUG could help to fill, e.g. to encourage more cycling by providing bicycle repairs, training, safe routes and a market for used bikes.

With meeting people identify as being a key requirement we could look to organise regular meet-ups in one or more of the local cafes (a moveable feast, sadly) or even help to support a community pub given that Ham will soon only have one having lost five or six in recent years.

Tree planting and better gardens were other ideas. Here HUG could provide advise and guidance to residents and potentially promote participation through competitions.

It was an encouraging start and I look forward to the next workshop.

29 January 2020

Swan Lake at Richmond Theatre was a treat

Swan Lake is the most famous ballet for a reason and I needed no excuse to see it yet again.

There was a minor issue with the booking and my usual seat was taken forcing me into the one next to it, Dress Circle A26, which cost just  £21.5 because of the safety rail slightly impeding the view.

I had forgotten that I had been promised a live orchestra so my pleasure started as soon as I arrived and saw the musicians in place at the front of the stalls.

Swan Lake then did very much what I expected it to do. The music was lovely throughout and having a live orchestra certainly helped here.

The dancing was a little unambitious and a little flaccid but it was always pretty enough and the showpiece Dance of the Cygnets was executed well.

There were some other minor niggles, such as the unhealthy physique of some of the dancers (far too thin) and the stops for applause after every little dance. The beauty of the music easily managed to soar above the weaknesses and the evening was a joyous treat, despite the ending!

Weekly Walk: Northolt Circular

Having done all the easy long walks e.g. Capital Ring and Thames Path, I looked to The Ramblers for inspiration, having joined them primarily for that reason, and found the Northolt Circular Walk.

At just over ten miles it was the right distance for us and it was an opportunity to explore a part of London that neither of us knew very well, largely because we had never been there before.

The journey to the starting point, Northolt Station, meant taking District Line East to Turnham Green, District Line West to Ealing Broadway, Central Line East to North Acton and finally Central Line West. A messy journey but it did not take long.

The walk was broadly in four sections.

We started going through parks including the impressive Northala Fields which was constructed from waste from the original Wembley Stadium and the new White City shopping centre. The red dot on the map is where we took the circular route up one of the hills.

The final section heading West took us along an unexpected country lane devoid of traffic and people and our first introduction to mud.

We then headed South-East along the Hillingdon Trail which consisted of mud and more mud. Luckily part of it followed a housing estate and we were able to go along the pavement there rather than strictly following the official route.

The final leg North was along the Paddington Canal, which we had walked previously. This was a welcome dry stretch.

The walk was a lot of fun, despite the mud, and the only downside was the complete absence of cafes and pubs after the initial section. That meant we missed our coffee break and did not get our pub break until we got back to Northolt where The Crown did the trick.

Considered as a test of The Ramblers this was a complete success, i.e. the walk was fun and the instructions were easy enough to follow, and we will be trying more of their long distance walks in the future.

28 January 2020

Scrounger at Finborough Theatre was entertainingly difficult

Scrounger told the story of a woman whose life was severely disrupted by the damage of her wheelchair and her attempts to get recompense. It had good reviews but it did not quite seem like my sort of thing, but it was on at Finborough and I had a Tuesday evening to fill so I paid my £18 and went for it.

A visit to Finborough Theatre these days also means a visit to Cafe du coin in nearby Earls Court Road as it does good food, is great value and has a welcoming atmosphere.

Finborough Arms is above Finborough Arms and I always take advantage of that by having a pint before taking the awkward path up steps and through multiple doors to the theatre. I was amongst the first in so was able to claim a seat in the front row.

Facing me was a three part stage. In the centre, and taking almost all of the space, was a room in a flat in Elephant and Castle, on the right was a small booth that spent most of its time as various offices, and on the left was Islington.

Occupying the flat was the scrounger, Athena Stevens, who wrote the play about an incident that happened to her. Occupying the other spaces and playing all the other roles was Leigh Quinn.

The difficult part of the play started immediately with Athena having a pop at Guardian reading woke people coming to see the play for virtue signalling. There may well have been some truth in that but, either way, getting the audience to question why they were there was a good start.

Athena then told us her story. She narrated some of it with her and Leigh acted out the key scenes. The story was told with humour and carried a strong sense of injustice throughout. It was a David v Goliath story and we were cheering for David, obviously.

There were some nice touches along the way. I particularly liked the ongoing argument between Athena and her friend in Islington as to whether Elephant and Castle is in Central London. Her friend is right, it is not.

The story came to a clear conclusion and while that mattered the journey there mattered more. We all learned something about air travel regulations, what it is like to be lose your mobility, the price f wheelchairs, and the power of social media to build support for a cause and also to draw out the trolls, "scrounger" is what Athena was called by some for just wanting her damaged wheelchair to be repaired or replaced.

The difficulty was always there because of the subject matter and the unapologetic way that Athena addressed it full on and that tension added to the drama. Add to that the considerable humour and the excellent performances and you had a play well worth seeing and another boost for Finborough Theatre's deserved reputation.

27 January 2020

Beckett Triple Bill at Jermyn Street Theatre was delightfully strange

January 27 is my birthday so, even more than usual, I got to decide what we saw that night and I chose Beckett Triple Bill at Jermyn Street Theatre partially because it was Beckett and partially because it was on at Jermyn Street Theatre.

And being my birthday meant that I could justify eating at Getti which is directly above the theatre. Getti is a posh enough restaurant without being ridiculously expensive, which is could be given the neighbourhood. The bill was under £70 for two courses and an extravagant aperitif each.

Completing the financials, my theatre seat Row A  Seat 3 was just £25.

The view from my seat was almost exactly that in the poster, without the stars.

The evening consisted of three short plays, Krapp’s Last Tape, Eh Joe and The Old Tune. These were plays with few voices, only four across the three pieces.

In Krapp's Last Tape an old man is making a recording of his past year and in preparation for this he plays some of his former ones which, in turn, refer to earlier tapes. It was one voice but from different times.

"Eh Joe" was said several times by a female voice speaking inside another old man's head. She recalled some of his previous actions, including her murder. Whether it was a true story or not did not matter, what did was the sneering tone and the phrasing.

Finally, in The Old Tune, two more old men met for the first time in several years and began a strange conversation on shared banalities with each correcting the other on the details.

It is easy to jump to Waiting For Godot when thinking about Beckett and this case the jump is justified as all three plays carried that same sense of absurd whimsy; conversations of no import that go nowhere and do so delightfully.

Beckett Triple Bill was a great birthday present to buy for myself.

25 January 2020

Arthur Brown at Nells was amazing

Arthur Brown remains one of my must-see artists and over the years I have seen him many times, but not as many as I would like, and at many different venues, but Nells was a new one on me.

Nells is conveniently located for me in West Kensington in something of an odd location. Heading north from the tube life suddenly stops and West Kensington was surprisingly quiet, i.e. dead. The only people to be seen were queueing up to get into Nells.

The website said doors open at 7:30 and we got there just before that only yo find the place already packed and almost all of the seating taken. The layout was a little odd and on the right hand side of the auditorium was a small seated area with something like six rows of five seats and Julia was able to get one of these. The view was not great but a seat was seat.

The front of the standing area was full by then so I was quite happy to stand behind the seats and had a decent view over the heads of the people standing, as the picture below shows.

The bar was not too bad either and thew had Camden Pale Ale at Richmond prices which some may consider high but I am used to it and was only having a couple of pints anyway.

Every Arthur Brown show is different and this one was too, and even more so than I expected.

The stage was very much Arthur Brown front and centre with only his regular dancing partner Ms Angel allowed to join in him this space. The three band members were at the side in the dark wearing black. Their outfits included strange hats.

Arthur's costumes were very theatrical and mostly unseen by me before, apart from the fibre optic jackets. He wore face paint again but less of it. His costumers were a significant part of the performance and several times he left the stage to change while the band played on; it reminded me of Bowie in 1973!



Another innovation this time was the large screen behind Arthur that was used to project mood images such as flames.

This was billed as a greatest hits set with the new album launch the following night but there were plenty of new songs this night. All the songs, old and new, had a late sixties sound due to the keyboard - think Doors' Light My Fire. The old songs included Fire (obviously), The Voice of Love, Devil's Grip and a superbly different rendition of my favourite Time Captives. Surprisingly there was no room for previous regulars Kites and Spell on You. Normally they would be among my highlights of the evening but this show was just so good that while I noticed that they were not there I did not miss them.

I am sure that I have claimed that I had just been to the best Arthur Brown gig ever before and I will do it again this time. Because it was.

24 January 2020

Thrilled by Faustus That Damned Woman at Lyric Hammersmith

Because of its convenient location, Lyric Hammersmith is one of the theatres that I go to most regularly and it does not take much to get me there. Which is another way of saying that I cannot quite remember now why I booked to see Faustus That Damned Woman.

I must have booked early because my seat was right in the centre, of the Dress Circle A14 for an incredibly modest £20.2.

But first I had to eat and for the first time I went to both Lyric Cafe on the ground floor and Lyric Bar & Grill on the first. In the cafe I had a coffee and some cake to take the edge off the afternoon before going upstairs for a vegan burger (it was Veganuary) and a cautious half of 5% Crazy Horse chosen because that was the name of Neil Young's main backing band.

As soon as sat down my view of the stage told me that I was in for something different. I was already excited.

I knew some of the bare bones of the Faust legend but that neither helped nor hindered me. The core element, selling your soul to the devil, was there but that was about it.

The deal having been struck we followed Faustus over the centuries as she tried to make her side of the deal count for something. In this she was joined by a jovial daemon dressed in white and was helped by two prominent women pioneers.

The story was articulate, intelligent and entertaining and so did not need an special effects to help it along. But it got them anyway and they made a good play something really impressive. The stage stayed much the same and the clever things were dome with lights, sounds and projections.

Faustus That Damned Woman was a tapestry of delights with a strong story skilfully embellished by the staging and the acting. Everything about the production thrilled and excited.

23 January 2020

HAG Talk: Sandycombe Lodge

Ham Amenities Group (HAG) arranges an interesting of local history talks that I would go to even if I was not involved in the group; I produced the poster on the right.

The talk on Sandycombe Lodge took us slightly away from Ham and just across the water to East Twickenham where England's most famous painter, JMW Turner, designed a house for his father and himself.

The lodge is now run by a charity, Turner’s House Trust, which aims to restore and conserve Sandycombe Lodge for the nation. I was able to visit it a couple of years ago as part of Open House London and had seen some of their work at first hand.

The talk covered the design of the house, which drew heavily on the work of Sir John Soane, the restoration work done in recent years and the life of Turner, father and son, in the house.

It was his father's main home, he walked into Central London to work!, while the artist spent most of his time away touring abroad and staying as a guest in country houses.

Little was said about Turner's paintings as there is no evidence that he did any painting there though he did several of the Arcadian Thames which had drawn him to build a house there.

The talk was detailed and fascinating and there were lots of pictures to help tell the story. I liked the little things like it was common to draw brick buildings as if they had been rendered, i.e. to not draw the details of the rows of bricks, and so it had been assumed that Sandycombe Lodge had been rendered when new (not later) but the detailed analysis of the penny struck pointing shows that it was originally bare brick.

Another minor but fascinating detail was the Sandycombe Road became Sandycoombe Road (with two 'o's) because of the confusion with another Sandycombe Road in Kew.

Little things like that kept me enthralled throughout.



Possibly due to the poster (!), the talk was very popular and there were people standing at the back with all the seats taken. I am quite happy to stand for long periods, lots of practise in bars, and gave my reserved seat up for somebody who appreciated it more.

I really enjoyed that talk and I learned a lot from it but what I enjoyed most was seeing a full room and gaining the satisfaction of knowing that HAG had arranged another great talk.

Captivated by William Blake at Tate Britain

As soon as the William Blake exhibition at Tate Britain was announced I knew that I would go. This was despite seeing a lot of the collection several times before in the permanent display of his works in the same gallery.

It still took me several months to book to see it and I finally got there fairly early on a Thursday morning about a week before the exhibition closed.

I picked a 11am start as on my previous visit I had gone for 10am and that was bit of a rush with the museum opening at that time. The extra hour allowed the place to open properly, including the cloakroom where I left my Winter coat, and for me to have a coffee and a cake beforehand. The extra zip that gave me was most welcome.

The exhibition was held in the usual place just to the left of the main entrance but unusually the eleven rooms were described as just five in the small free guide. This made sense for the exhibition but confused my timing as I was never quite sure how much there was still to see, and that was after I made a dash to the end to see the extent of what was to come.

The exhibition was organised chronologically which made perfect sense as the work he did was governed by his changing commercial fortunes while the style stayed much the same throughout.

What surprised me the most was the size of many of his works. I had seen some of his smaller pieces before, typically illustrations for books, and there were many more of these here and several much smaller ones too.

The picture on the right is something like actual size and I struggled to read the text on most of these. The picture above is enlarged slightly.

There was a great deal to see, over 300 pieces, and everyone required careful consideration. This was not at exhibition that you could whizz through absorbing the highlights on the way.

And there were plenty of highlights.

It took me two and a half hours to get around and that was driven more by my capacity to consume art than by the amount on display. I did not exactly rush through the last couple of rooms but they certainly got less attention that some of the earlier ones. I also lacked the energy to go back and revisit my personal favourites.

The William Blake exhibition did everything that I hoped and more. There were no surprises on the content aside (apart from the two landscapes) and I was able to wallow in his familiar style savouring old favourites and many new items. I also read all the words and while a few of those were curator's licence on interpretation there was a lot of information that was new to me which helped to explain the man and his works.

Tate Britain knows how to put on a show and William Blake was my kind of show.

22 January 2020

Weekly Walk: Kew and Brentford

This Wednesday I had a dentist appointment (one of many!) which meant that we could not start our walk until 11am so we decided to do a local walk to cutout the travel before and after.

The basic route was to start at Richmond Bridge, walk along the Surrey bank to Kew Bridge and come back along the Middlesex bank.

That is about a two hour walk so we mixed it up a little.

First we did a lap of Kew Gardens, we are both members, where was also paused for a coffee.

Secondly we wandered through the waterside of Brent rather than following the main road. That is the squiggly line through the "ford" part of Brentford.

We stopped at two pubs half-hoping for food but settling for beer. They were both pubs we had been to previously but not for some months or years. The Brewery Tap in Brentford was under new management and we were given a very warm welcome. The Ailsa Tavern was in a more prominent position and busier because of this but lacked the Tap's cosines.

The app dropped out at the point (or I may have forgotten to restart it!) so there is a straight line from that point to the end of the walk and the recorded distance of 15.6 km is a slight underestimate.

21 January 2020

Persona at Riverside suffered from the seating

Riverside Studios in Hammersmith was one of my favourite theatres before it was closed a few years ago for a substantial rebuild so I was delighted when the reopening was finally announced and I booked tickets for the first new show there. That was a retelling of the Ingmar Bergman film Persona (unknown to me) and I put out £30 for seat F9, a little warily as I had no idea what the new studio was like.

The evening started very well with a meal and a coffee in the new cafe/bar area called Studio 8. The space was open, welcoming and attractive while the food, a curry!, was excellent and superb value at about £10 including some extras.

The new Studio 3 felt just like the old studios with the emphasis on function rather than form. That was never a problem before and should not have been this time, but it was. The raking between the rows was too shallow and with the stage not raised my view was severely limited.

The shallow depth of the stage, so unlike the old Studio 3, made things worse as the players could not move back further were they could be seen better. In one scene, where they sat on the ground picking mushrooms, I could see nothing at all.

Obviously the poor view severely detracted from my enjoyment of the play which was a shame as it was an interesting story imaginatively told.

Two of the main devices to tell the story I could see. Understandably as this was a play of a film, use was made of projections and while I could not see the whole screen I could see enough between the heads to get the mood, e.g. of a gentle shoreline. Also I presume inspired by the film, there was a soundtrack played on a device labelled 'Earth Harp" which was a harp of sorts in that it had long wires that were strung out above the audience. The harp base was raised and in a corner of the stage so I could see and hear it perfectly.

The story was introduced as a staging of a redreaming of the a dream by Ingmar Bergman that he had turned into a film. That sense of unreality and uncertainty pervaded the story which while superficially simple, a nurse looks after a patient, had many complexities within it. The story progressed slowly and artfully and I enjoyed the journey without having any idea where we were headed. Destinations were reached but these were just other steps on the enthralling journey.

Persona was a delightful play delivered with skill and imagination. It is just a shame that the theatre let it down.

20 January 2020

Ten Times Table at Richmond Theatre was good light entertainment

These days I have to have a good reason not to see something at Richmond Theatre and a play by Alan Ayckbourn is more of an attraction than a deterrent so Ten Times Table was a no-brainer.

The first night discount available with my ATG card meant going on a Monday, not a regular theatre night for me, and it also meant paying just £17 for my usual seat Dress Circle A25.

The story of Ten Times Table is fairly simple, a committee charged with organising a folk festival splits into two violently opposed camps as they rein-act a local historical event. It is class war laid bare.

The comedy comes from the cast of characters each of which has a defining feature from pedantry to nervousness. There was no subtlety behind their exaggerated veneers.

The actors each made the most of what they had to work with and I particularly admired Roberts Daws as the perpetually worried chairman who lost control of the situation and knew it.

The mix of a simple story and simple characters makes it sound like a 1970s ITV sit-com and that is exactly what it felt like to me.

Ten Times Table was funny, and at times it even made me laugh, but it was insubstantial humour with no intelligence behind it. This is not Relatively Speaking which I loved (twice). It was worth the £17 I paid to see it but not a great deal more than that.

19 January 2020

Why I oppose the Board of Deputies of British Jews' pledges

I oppose the Board of Deputies of British Jews' pledges for Labour Party leadership candidates for three simple reasons:
  1. There are other forms of racism and discrimination.  A meaningful pledge should address all of them to ensure complete coverage and consistently.
  2. There are other Jews with other opinions. The Labour Party should listen to all Jewish voices but Pledge 5 stops that.
  3. There are other organisations that need to tackle racism/anti-semitism. If Pledges are useful then they should be drafted for adoption by all organisations. It is ridiculous to pick on one organisation, the Labour Party, when there is no evidence to say that the problem is greater there than elsewhere.

17 January 2020

The Tricycle at Barons Court Theatre was absurd, in a good way

Barons Court Theatre, for reasons I do not quite understand, does not have a mailing list which means that it is a bit hit and miss whether I see all the shows that I would like to see there. I am sure that I am missing out.

I did not miss out on The Tricycle as I was recently doing a check on a few theatres that I had been to and I was tempted by the comments, "a strangely light-hearted tale of poverty and murder" and "perfect example of Spanish Absurd Theatre". That sounded just like me.

The location of the theatre suits me too; it is underneath a pub, The Curtain Up, in a location that is easy for me to get to, funnily enough that is close to Barons Court underground station.

The pub is fairly standard London Gastro these days and there is nothing wrong with that. I enjoyed the veggie option and washed it down with some Winter Warmer. It was pretty busy too with both diners and drinkers so they must be doing something right.

The theatre is in a cave that you get to by pretending that you are going to the toilet. It is an unusual shape too with seating on three sides and with the box office and the technical crew in the corners between them.

I was in early enough to claim a seat in my preferred front row. This was my view for the rest of the evening.

The story, such as it was, concerned four down and outs two of whom had been earning a little money by hiring a tricycle and charging children for taking rides on it. Actually, one of those two men slept almost all the time.

Another man played the flute, badly, as the sign reveals. Completing the gang was a woman.

The story, such as it was, concerned their plan for getting enough money to be able to hire the tricycle again and the consequences of that. But this was absurd theatre and the story did not really matter, that was just a driver for the dialogue. It being absurd I am finding it had to describe, there are no easy reference points though Waiting for Godot is not not unreasonable.

One of the things I liked in the play was the language game that two of the men played. Again I think a reference point might help and this time it is the game Mornington Crescent, the main difference being that one person concedes defeat rather than claiming the win. The words they used were, understandably, like a nonsense poem and there was no obvious connection between them. There may well have been real rules that they were aware of but which the audience was not told about. This is also similar to a game from I am Sorry I Haven't a Clue called Word for Word. These are my reference points from my history and I would be very surprised indeed if the play's author was aware of them.

It is worth making the point that The Triangle was absurd, not silly, and if you like absurdity (Spike Milligan, Monty Python, ...) then you will find it very entertaining. I did.

16 January 2020

Dial M for Murder at Richmond Theatre was thrilling entertainment


I see almost all of the drama that come to Richmond Theatre because, generally, touring companies know what they have to do to entertain an audience and they have slick productions. Dial M for Murder was a case in point.

My usual seat had been taken so I went for the equivalent one on the other side of the theatre, Dress Circle A2 for £31.5. The ones at the side are cheaper than the premiere seats and while A1 has a visual obstruction A2 is perfectly fine.

The entire play took place in this one room and had a cast of just five. Ironically one actor played two roles, the victim and the policeman trying to solve the crime.

We can see all what happens in the room so we quickly know who the baddies are and what set the events we witness in motion. Events do not go quite to plan and, as the title suggests, there is a murder to solve. Trying to solve it is an astute policeman with something of Columbo about him.

There are many tense moments as explanations are sought, stories are invented and accusations fly. There is an outcome the audience is waiting for but it is not at all clear that the outcome is possible and even less clear how it could become so. The tension builds over two very satisfying hours until a firm outcome is reached and the lights fall.

The style of it reminded me of Line of Duty where one long interview can make a dramatic end to a season.

Dial M for Murder did exactly what I wanted a thriller to do.

15 January 2020

Weekly Walk: Wood Green to Regent's Park

This week's walk had a basic plan and it help up well. The plan was to walk through some parks in North London.

We started at Wood Green simply because it is far away and on the Piccadilly Line and so could get there early (by 10am) using our Oyster cards.

I used MapMyWalk this week despite my concerns about the way that it eats batteries so that I could get this map (right) of the route we eventually created from the basic plan.

The first green area was Alexandra Park and we went across the top of this admiring Alexandra Palace on one side and views across London on the other.

At some point we found ourselves on Parkland Walk, which was always a possibility, and sometime later we found ourselves off it, which helped with the decision we had on whether to leave it or not!

We had to skirt around one large green area shown on the map as this proved to be a golf course with no public right of way across it. We walked along the A1 instead.

Leaving the A1 we walked along The Bishops Avenue, which ia also known as "Billionaires' Row". If I was a billionaire I'd be very unhappy as about half the houses on the road are boarded up waiting for redevelopment. It all looks very tatty.

Hampstead Heath was even wetter that Highgate Wood but was full of dogs whereas the Wood was full of toddlers.

It took us two hours to get to the bottom of Hampstead Heath and that was time for a coffee. The place we were aiming for, a proper hipster joint, was closed to we went to the nearby and decidedly more traditional Polly's. It was excellent. I had the all-day veggie breakfast, as is my custom.

It was easy from there and the only remaining choice was where to have the celebratory beer and I chose The Albany by Great Portland Street. I had favourable memories of the place from, my phone informed me, 2013 and it was still decent, even if £6+ for a pint of Meantime is pushing it a bit.

The headline figures were 15.9 km walked in a fraction under 3 hours. That was a good walk.

14 January 2020

The Ocean at the End of the Lane at Dorfman Theatre was magical

Any adaptation of a Neil Gaiman story is going to be of interest to me even if it's a young adult story that I have not read and I was encouraged by seeing Coraline as an opera a couple of years ago.

This was my second visit to the new Dorfman Theatre in, but not really part of, the National Theatre complex so I knew that it was safe to go for the cheaper seats at the top level and I went for Gallery Row R Seat 44 at £34. You can see the view from my seat below.

Not having read the book I had no expectations but I soon learned that The Ocean at the End of the Lane was an otherworld story much in the mold as the excellent Stardust.

It was also a story of young friendships and very old daemons.

The story, as presented here, was fairly simple and without a narrator, or anyone thinking out loud, a lot of the beauty in the words in the book was lost (I know I've not read the book but I have ready plenty enough Neil Gaiman to know that there is beauty in the words here too). That sounds like a recipe for disappointment, and it almost is.

What lifts The Ocean at the End of the Lane from the disappointing to the magical is the staging; the sets change quickly and effortlessly, the daemons are real and scary, the sound and lighting conjure different moods and some of the set pieces are breathtaking.


The pyrotechnics may have been added to excite children, the play was advertised as suitable for ages 12+, but they were not there that night and, instead, it was a healthy mix of ages that were thrilled by the experience. It appeared to be a full house too.

The ensemble cast of little-knows (Googling now I find that I have seen a few of them on stage before) was excellent with most of them playing multiple roles, and not just multiple characters. The two "stars" were the boy and girl at the heart of the story and they were played superbly by Samuel Blenkin and Marli Siu. I was a little surprised when Samuel got a curtain call on his own when it was Marli who had impressed me the most, but it would be churlish to quibble about that too much.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane was a modern fairytale told in a rich and entertaining way.

12 January 2020

Sadiq Khan 2020, Richmond Campaign Launch

With all the doom and gloom around the result of the General Election (and the disastrous consequences for the country) it is worth remember that there are other important elections and Labour wins some of these.

Sadiq Khan was elected as Mayor of London in 2015 and is standing for re-election this year.

He launched his campaign in South West London with stops in several towns in the area, including Richmond. A Campaign Launch rally was held on Ham Common and I went along. After a short call-to-arms speech we posed for this group photo.



My main role in the campaign will be, I suspect, delivering leaflets as I have both the time and the inclination to do several rounds locally. I may knock on doors as election day draws closer but that probably depends on how well things are going and, if I do it is unlikely to be around here. I helped out in Battersea in a General Election campaign several years ago and it makes sense to work where you get most impact.

10 January 2020

Mirror Mirror at Tristan Bates Theatre was nicely strange

I was not going to miss a play written by Robert Calvert, a former front-man with Hawkwind and producer of some iconic solo albums of which Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters (1974) is the best known.

I had seen one of his other plays, The Stars That Play With Laughing Sam's Dice, a couple of times and that was another reason for wanting to see this one. The last time I saw that play was at Pentameters theatre in Hampstead and it was their production of Mirror Mirror that transferred to Tristan Bates. The Pentameters poster for the play was better that Tristan Bates' so I am using theirs!


Mirror Mirror was decidedly weird, and all the more fun for that.

The main theme of the play, the one that gives it its title, was a Reflexotronics mirror which reflects image as other people see us with it being programmed for each viewpoint. A middle aged woman does not like what she sees when choosing her absent husband's viewpoint, so she calls in a technician.

That technician is a main source of weirdness. At first I thought that he was an automaton but it later transpired that he was a clone when, in a high-point of the play, he recited the clone poem that forms the second verse of the Hawkwind/Hawklords classic Spirit of the Age; "I am a clone, I am not alone, ..."

For seventy minutes the two people interact, her with her concerns about her appearance and her loneliness and him being mechanical but not quite with it, and certainly not sympathetic. It was a two-handed play and both Andrea Milton and Thomas Walker Barron were utterly convincing as the two strange strangers.

Mirror Mirror had been updated slightly, the phrase "See it, Say it, Sorted" was certainly not in the original text, but it was still very much of the psychedelic seventies and your reaction to the play would depend on your reaction to the arts of that time. I grew up then and the pay worked well for me, just as Hawkwind's music of that time does.

9 January 2020

Unexpected win in the Pub Quiz

What started as a quiet evening stroll turned into a surprising win in a pub quiz.

The pub bit was not a surprise, I wanted a destination for the walk and I also fancied a pint so I headed for Ham Brewery Tap in Ham Street which is, not surprisingly, in the heart of Ham. When I bought the drinks I was told that a pub quiz was about to start and while I was reluctant at first I was swayed by it being free to enter and scheduled to last only 45 minutes or so.

The format was new to me and I liked it. There were 25 questions on general knowledge and a 5 x 5 grid to put the answers in. The clever bit was we each had to decide which answer to put where so if you were certain of an answer you put it in a box that is on multiple lines and if less sure then it went on a less useful square.

In this case we were sure of the first answer so wrote the question number 1 in a box in the centre (3 down and 3 across) because we were certain that Hercule Poirot was the detective in Murder in the Orient Express. We had no idea what the answer to 22 was so we put that in the square above it.

Once the 25 questions were completed we handed a carbon copy of our answer sheet to the quiz master for checking while we each marked our own sheets.

The second clever part of the quiz was that the answers were given in a different order, i.e. not 1, 2, 3, ... The aim then was to shout "Bingo!" once you had completed a line of five with the correct answers. We had about 10 right, and 2 wrong, before somebody shouted "Bingo!" but there was a second prize so we carried on.

We and another team both shouted "Bingo!" a few questions later and it came down to a tie-break question and the winner was the team closest to saying when Dr Who was first broadcast. We knew it was 1963 but the other team did not so we won the second prize of four drinks vouchers.

We will be going back to Ham Brewery Tap soon to claim our prize drinks and we will be doing the quiz again too.

8 January 2020

BCSA "Get to Know You" Social (January 2020)

Some elements of this month's BCSA "Get to Know You" Social were very different, though the core components remained the same.

For the last few months I had been walking there and I did so again this month. That is always a good way to work up a thirst and an appetite. The cocktail we had in a nearby bar was nice but did very little to assuage our thirst, we needed beer for that.

The appearance of our usual room at the Czechoslovak Bar and Restaurant was the first indication of the major changes that had been made to the place in the month since we were last there. It had been laid out nicely for us and we were offered waiter service for the evening.

I took this picture at the start of the evening when the two of us were on our second pints well before the official start time of the social. It filled up quickly soon after that and we had to bring in additional chairs to accommodate everybody.

The menu was the other big change and we caught it as it went from one extreme, with probably over 100 dishes, to the other with just half a dozen or so, non of which was vegetarian. This month it did not matter as the beer was sufficient sustenance but I hope that the menu has gained a few more options next month.

While we talked about a lot of things over a long evening it was no surprise that Brexit was, again, the main topic of conversation and one group got quite animated on this subject. I was seriously impressed how a young journalist, there first time there, calmly dealt with my vociferous and argumentative friend who was passionately talking nonsense.

Other conversations were less heated and, as always, it was the steady flow of conversation that made the evening speed past, so much so that I ended up catching a train two later than the one I was planning for. The beers may have helped there.

I'll be back next month for more conversations, more beer and to see what further improvements have been made to the bar and restaurant.

Weekly Walk: Waterloo to West Hampstead

For the last few months I have been going for one long walk a week, usually on a Wednesday and usually with the same friend. A typical plan is walk for two hours, stop for coffee, walk for another hour, hit a pub for lunch, then find a way home.

Over those months we have completed the London Capital Ring, large chunks of the Thames Path on both banks, a few sections of London Loop, followed a few rivers, and done several point to point walks.

The monthly British Czech and Slovak Association (BCSA) socials at the Czechoslovak bar and restaurant in West Hampstead are an opportunity for a point to point walk that I often take.

I have walked to West Hampstead from Richmond (two different routes) and from Waterloo taking in many of the Central London parks along the way.

This week I took a different route from Waterloo starting east to Blackfriars Bridge and then walking more-or-less north to revisit Calendonian Road, then turning west to climb Parliament Hill before heading to the social.

It was too dark to take any pictures (but at least the rain that had been promised earlier in the day stayed away) and my main impression of the evening was of walking through urban sprawl and along quiet roads with good-looking good-sized period houses without ever coming across anything that felt like a town or village centre; places like Gospel Oak, Holloway and Kentish Town merged seamlessly into each other.

The walking was fairly easy but I was reminded, yet again, of how hilly London is once you get away from The Thames; Google tells me that this route rises 136m. We were able to maintain a stead pace of around 6km/hour and got to West Hampstead an hour early for the social, so we went to a cocktail bar and had Zombies to get the evening started!

7 January 2020

South West London Humanists: Discussion on Overseas Aid

I like to go to the South West London Humanists monthly meetings because the debates there are interesting and cover an unusual range of topics.

This month the topic was "Why spend so much on overseas aid?" and we were very lucky to have the discussion led by Matthew Rycroft CBE, Permanent Secretary at the Department for International Development, and former British Permanent Representative to the UN.

Matthew Rycroft started his talk with the very good news that the number of people in extreme poverty had halved in the last ten years. But that still meant that 10% of people, that is 700,000 persons, are living in extreme poverty today.

asking us three multiple choice questions on the improvements made in recent years on things like girls' education. In all three cases the most positive answer was the correct one and all three times few, or very few, of us knew that.

The point here is that one of the reasons that Overseas Aid is criticised is that its success is not generally known.

While the picture was positive overall not all countries had made the same progress in all areas and, in particular, progress in sub-Saharan Africa has been lagging.

Matthew then gave us more details of the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals which he explained could be summarised as People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace and Partnership.

Having explained what Overseas Aid is for, how it is delivered and what it has achieved, Matthew then opened the floor to questions which led to an interesting discussions. What follows are my views of what various people said.

Corruption is in the eye of the beholder and there is a big difference between government officials siphoning large amounts out of aid projects and poor people having to pay other poor people to get simple things done, like get an appointment with a doctor.

There were various questions suggesting that aid recipient should behave as we tell them and not as we do, e.g. introduce population controls or divert spending from other areas (space programmes were mentioned but are not relevant; India and China do not get any aid from DfID). I think that is a modern form of imperialism, we know what is best for you, and said so. My passion was noted.

The spending of 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI )is an historical number with no hard science behind it, e.g. it is not the right answer but it is a good one. It may have come from a starting point of 1% with the other 0.3% meant to come from other sectors, notably charities, within the donating countries.

That 0.7% equates to circa £14bn for the UK. To compare, our defence spending target set by NATO is 2% of GDP (a slightly smaller number) which makes that almost three times as big.

Several countries match or exceed that target headed by Sweden who give 1.4%. Given the success story we heard earlier I think that this is clearly money well spend and I would rather the UK was planning to increase the percentage donated rather than spending effort trying to justify what is already spent.

It was a very interesting discussion on an important subject and Matthew Rycroft was a very able and knowledgeable speaker.

5 January 2020

Willoughby Pub Quiz (January 2020)

I have continued to set the questions for the Willoughby Pub Quiz every six or seven weeks as a group of us take it in turns to set the questions in return for free beer on the night we are quizmaster.

Over the years that I have been doing the quiz the way that I do it has established some sort of pattern with the twin aims of making the quiz interesting, i.e. diverse rounds, and easy for me to compile. Sometimes that works.

Recently I have had a theme for the whole quiz (apart from the final round) again with the aims of making things more fun and also easier.

This week it was trains.

Round one was questions on, er, trains, and you can see those here. Round two was music about trains, e.g. Last train to Clarksville; round three was people related to trains, e.g. IK Brunel, round four was films about trains, e.g. Unstoppable, and round five was places associated with trains, e.g. London Waterloo.

Round six was, as always, on this week's news and sport with several points available on each question.

Every time there is one round that is bit of a struggle and this time it was people connected with trains, while there are many engineers and architects associated with railways not many of them are famous and so there was no point putting them in a quiz. My get-around was to have five engineers and five people in the arts world, e.g. the authors of Railways Children and Night Train.

I used to do a picture round, and I still carry one, but as the main quiz finished around 12:30am I left it out, again. One day we'll manage to start the quiz before 11pm and then I'll have time for pictures.

3 January 2020

Joker: Killer Smile is exceptional

I do not read many traditional superhero comics these days but I do most certainly read comics written by Jeff Lemire and drawn by Andrea Sorrentino so I had to give Joker: Killer Smile a try.

As you would expect from that team this is not a traditional superhero comic and it is also very good.

I think that it is fair to say that the Batman and Joker world has been milked for all it is worth in the last few decades and while a few stories have stood out, obviously Killing Joke is one of these, the rest have disappeared in a vast sea of sameness. In such a large sea only the exceptional can stand out.

I think that Joker: Killer Smile is exceptional.

There are only two main protagonists, Joker and his psychotherapists  Dr Ben Arnell. Batman makes a brief appearance, because he had to, but makes no material contribution to the story. This is about Joker, not Batman.

The psychotherapist thinks he can cure Joker and spends hours talking to him in Arkham Asylum. Not surprisingly these conversations do not go the way that Dr Arnell hoped but their consequence is a genuine surprise. It's a tight noir tale that grips from the start and drags you into dark unexpected places.

The story is a good one (so far, I have read two of the three chapters) and the storytelling is excellent. Both Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino are masters in their fields, with the awards to prove it, and as a team they are even better.

Joker: Killer Smile shows how superhero comics can tell great, and scary, stories without relying on people punching each other.

2 January 2020

Mission: Impossible – Fallout; a mission too far

Christmas time means watching a lot of films and I caught Mission: Impossible – Fallout almost by accident, I saw it on the TV schedule after it had started and watched from the beginning on my iPad using the All4 app.

I wish I had not bothered.

The film has had consistently good, or even great, reviews Wikipedia tells me but I felt it moved too far from Mission Impossible towards Mission Dynamic. It was more like a poor Bond film with Ethan Hunt very much front and centre and with the usual action movie scenes of car chases, shoot-outs and running across rooftops.

Too often Hunt admitted to not having a plan when having a cunning plan is the whole point of the franchise.

Presumably somebody in the script team had seen 1993's Cliffhanger, with Sylvester Stallone playing the action lead, and thought that they would just steal a scene from that without anyone noticing. Well I noticed and Cliffhanger is a much better film.

How I mention it, Cliffhanger also does big locations better and the dramatic mountain scenery is a key part of the film. Early MI films had given us locations like Prague, Sydney Harbour and the tallest building in the world whereas Fallout seemed to spend most of its time in underground car parks.

The film also felt as though the producers realised that it was not working and so they pumped it full of unnecessary and distracting music to fill the space where the story should have been.

There were a couple of clever rubber-faced screens but these were too short and both too obvious and they had nothing like the impact that they did in, say, MI2.

Apparently there are two more MI films in the works. I'll be watching those too so I hope they are better than this one. I can forgive one dud in a good series.

1 January 2020

I averaged 23,908 steps a day in 2019

I last posted my annual walking stats two years ago and then my average for 2017 was 18,047, which I was very happy with.

The substantial increase since then is due to several factors but the main one is the motivation to walk more.

Oddly retirement is, I think, only a minor factor as walking to/from walk and taking a lunch break gave me a bedrock of 14k steps a day which I could then build on in the evening with walks to theatres and pubs.

A lot of the extra distance is coming in the late evening, e.g. after the theatre or pub, when I walk for walking sake, there is usually little to look at in the dark, and also to catch up on my podcasts.

I also do one long walk a week with a friend, but more on that later.