Sutton 2 - 4 Kingstonian

I had not been to see local team Kingstonian play since early in the previous season but the triple whammy of playing our local rivals Sutton United in the Isthmian League Play-off Semi final on a warm sunny evening was simply irresistible.

I have been to the Sutton ground a few times but all my previous visits were to see bands playing in the social club so going in to the stadium was a new experience for me.

So too was the journey by ThamesLink from St Pancras to West Sutton via such unknown outposts of South London as Tulse Hill, Tooting, Wimbledon Chase, Morden and St Helier. It's not a very direct route by any means and it took a leisurely hour to just creep in to Zone 5. Another good reason for not living in Sutton!

The ground is pretty basic, as you would expect for the Isthmian League, but it claims a capacity of over 7,000 so there was plenty of space for the 1,401 of us who braved the sunshine to get there.

I met a few friends, some planned and some unexpected, and with the many fans in red and white hooped tops it felt much like a home match.

There is a covered terrace at one end only and we spent the first half there waiting for the stream of Kingstonian goals.

We did not have long to wait and were up 0 - 1 after little more than ten minutes.

Then things rather fell apart. The Ks looked unthreatening coming forward with long balls punted to the lone striker and his four markers. Defending looked hard too and Sutton often looked like doing scoring. They managed to do so twice and the first half ended at 2 - 1.

We made the long walk to the other end of the ground and starting talking about overtime and penalties and whether the Ks could still come back from a 3 - 1 deficit.

How wrong we were! The game of two halves proved to be a game of two halves with Ks vibrant, aggressive, purposeful and threatening throughout.

A firm shot from the edge of the box made it 2 - 2, a powerful header from almost the same spot made it 2 - 3 and some clever dribbling round the last defender and then the goalkeeper made it 2 - 4 and a convincing win.

The play-off final is on Saturday against Borehamwood and even though I have no idea where that is I shall probably go carrying with me high hopes of another win and expectations of watching Ks play in the Blue Square South next season. Sadly not against Weymouth as they have just been relegated from there.

Not voting Lib. Dem. in Richmond Park

Richmond Park is a marginal constituency. You can tell this easily by the amount of electoral bumf that drops through the door every day. The montage is a selection of said bumf collected over about a week.

The currently MP is Lib. Dem. Susan Kramer but she is up against a formidable opponent, the Conservative Zac Goldsmith who grew up just around the corner from me and who still has family in the area.

The two parties have adopted very different tactics, Zac is pushing his policies but the Lib. Dems. are playing a nasty cynical political game.

OK, so we expect the "it's a two horse race" story but what's the point of claiming that a Lib. Dem. vote will keep the Tories out if Clegg refuses to rule out working with them after the election. Vote Clegg, get Cameron rings true.

But that's not what upsets me about their campaign. It's the scaremongering about possible changes to a local hospital and the deliberately misleading comments about parking charges in Richmond Park.

Whether some services at Kingston Hospital are under threat or not is not the issue, it's the way the Lib. Dems. have whipped up a frenzy on the issue and have seriously scared people about the proposals. They have even hinted that Kingston Hospital might close completely which is sheer nonsense - and they know this.

There are ways that the local MPs could engage in the NHS strategy discussions (and it is right that these discussions are being had) and they could easily represent their constituents' interests without scaring them needlessly in the process.

Scaring vulnerable people in this way just to get re-elected is unforgivable and is reason enough not to consider voting for the Lib. Dems.

The Richmond Park car parking charges issue has also been exploited cynically for political self-interest. These new charges are part of a raft of changes to the Royal Parks that were considered by Parliament recently. In the House of Lords the Lib. Dems. put forward some arcane motion (a Fatal Amendment, which had only been used three times ever) that would have killed the whole bill, not just the charges bit, and so it was rightly defeated.

The sole reason the Lib. Dems. did this was so that they could claim, as they do repeatedly, that the Tories could have stopped the charges but refused to do so. Again, the Lib. Dems. know that they are not telling the whole truth but they consider being re-elected to be more important.

Clegg walks the national stage promising a new way of doing politics but on the ground their tactics are shameful, cynical and downright nasty.

I have never been a Tory supporter but the approach of the Lib. Dems. locally means that I would rather they won here, as long as that does not give the Tories a majority overall!

An architect's life

April's meeting of the Kingston upon Thames Society gave us an insight in to the life of an architect.

The story was told by Simon Tupper of local architects Initiatives in Design (IID) who were responsible for the building that we were meeting in.

The talk was usefully punctuated with many examples of IID's work, most of which seemed to be on churches or schools.

Simon went in to some detail on the design process from initial idea through to managing the finished building and explained the architect's role in this and how it varied from client to client depending on how they wanted to run the project. For example, some clients had over the build to a developer and the original architect either ceases to be involved or has to work with the developer as the new client.

IID, like the vast majority of practices, work on reasonably normal buildings. Things like the Gherkin may be the public face of modern architecture but not many architects get to work on projects like that.

As a result, most of the work came across as a fairly mundane mix of identifying the best building materials to use (and these change all the time so lots of research is needed) and working with local Development Control (a.k.a. Planning) departments to agree plans for a site. There was very little of the innovation and design flair that I was hoping for.

I am very interested in architecture but nothing Simon said made me want to be an architect.

What I found more compelling were the case studies used to illustrate the talk, some of which are outlined on the IID Timeline on their website.

For example, I was surprised to learn that one of the local independent schools has a new 300 seat theatre. This is larger than, say, the Orange Tree in Richmond and it seems a waste to have it locked away in a fee-paying school. Schools with theatres is a growing trend as they compete with each other for students and their parents' money.

I also learnt about Jolly Corner in St Andrew's Church that was built in remembrance of the well paediatrician Dr Hugh Reginald Jolly. This church is about five minutes walk from where I live yet I have never been inside it. A visit there is now on my to-do list.

This may have been my false impression from the brief talk but we saw lots of pictures of the outsides of schools and even a few floor plans but nothing was said about the design of classrooms and the educational benefit of this. I remarked some time ago that the new local secondary school, Chessington Community College, had some great communal spaces but the classrooms were traditional, inflexible and small.

The talk was very good in explaining what an architect does and in describing some of the project, and that made for a thoroughly worth-while evening put. Less positive was the impression that architects are not trying that hard to fundamentally improve the built environment around us (of course they are heavily constrained by their clients) and so I ended the talk better informed and with a better understanding but also with a twinge of disappointment.

L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato by Mark Morris

If there's a weakness in my cultural life it's that there is not enough dance in it.

The theatre features most months and opera gets a healthy does every Summer at Glyndebourne but dance flits in and out only once a year or so.

But when it does flit in it does so with panache, exuberance and passion. Just as it did at The Coliseum for Mark Morris' L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato.

The Coliseum is not my favourite venue, mainly because the auditorium is cramped and old fashioned, but it has its good points and the newish extension is one of them. Not only does it make more communal (bar!) space but it also provides views of the old part of the building and across Trafalgar Square.

The setting for the dance was a simple white stage with multiple openings at the sides to allow the dances to enter and exit from multiple points to make complex and entrancing patterns.

The only effects or props used where some coloured screens and veils that dropped at times to divide the stage and give a ghostly appearance to the dancers at the back.

The music was simple baroque, including Handel's pastoral ode set to the poetry of John Milton, and while it was pleasant verging on gorgeous it's main role was to provide the subtly landscape for the dance and to be almost unnoticed itself.

The dancing was sumptuous producing mesmerizing and almost chaotic patterns in the individual figures, couples, small groups and full ensemble; and often in many of these at the same time.

One enchanting scene had all the dancers making Busby Berkleyesque shapes as they paraded around the stage, but the normal pattern was for each dancer to be slightly off-step with the others, sort of dancing apart together.

This simple technique was very effective as when all the dancers are doing the same thing at the same time then you only need to look at one of them (or all of them as one whole) to see what is going on but if they are all doing different things then there is a lot more to see and savour and you have to try and look everywhere at the same time to catch the richness of the moment.

My favourite scene had three lines of dancers moving slowly across the stage, as if on parallel conveyor belts, with translucent screens between them. These lines stopped frequently freezing all of the dancers briefly in exotic poses before they restarted their journeys in unison. Here the simplicity of the parallel lines combined wonderfully with the individual moves of each dancer to produce an compelling tableau that I could have watched for ages.

Scholars will have noticed that the new dance stories that I have included here over the last 3 to 4 years have featured choreography by Matthew Bourne or Mark Morris and while they are undoubted masters of their art there is other great dance out there. So, not only do I need to see more dance, I also need to see more variety. That sounds like a plan.

Extreme gardening

One of the nice things about moving in to the brand new house fourteen years ago was that the front garden had been landscaped for us.

Since then nature has done its work and some of the once small plants have subtly grown in to monsters and have taken over large swathes of the borders.

Last weekend their reign of terror ended.

The piles of butchered plants that you can see on the drive had, mere moments before been encamped on the flower beds.

The vicious hacking, sawing and pruning (I enjoyed all that!) reclaimed about 1 metre of the bed across the whole width of the garden.

All we need to do now is get rid of all that garden rubbish and get some new plants to fill the new spaces.