Rainbow in Rock at The Cavern (13 Dec 24)

Rainbow in Rock are my favourite pub band by quite a large margin; my second favourite pub band is Memento which is the same musicians but with a different set list.

The Cavern in Raynes Park is regular venue for them and I get there to see them whenever I can, which is a few times a year things like health permitting. Raynes Park is a doddle to get to by bus and/or walking which helps. It also helps that they sell Wimbledon Brewery's Copper Leaf red ale.

I got their in good time and started the evening close to the band with a pillar behind me.  That position gave me an uninterrupted view allowing me to take this photo. I deliberately took it during one of the quieter moments, Catch the Rainbow from the 1975 album Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow by Rainbow - you can see where the band got their name from.

Rainbow in Rock play a wide range of Deep Purple and Rainbow songs nd they delight in choosing some of the more obscure ones while leaving out obvious songs like Smoke on the Water and Highway Star. Every Rainbow in Rock gig is different.

There is one ritual that they are keeping to, for the moment at least, and that is to end the first half with Child in Time and the second with Rainbow Rising. And long may they continue to do so.

A day of walking

I had little option other than to walk all day and so I chose a good way to do it.

I had to be at St George's Hospital in Tooting for 10:20 and at a bar in West Hampstead at 6pm which meant I either had to waste time getting home then going out again or I could simply walk an elongated route in the time available.

And getting to St George's meant two short walks of around half an hour first from home to Norbiton Station then from Wimbledon Station to the hospital. By the time I started the main walk I had done about 6km.

The walk from St George's to West Hampstead was dictated by CityStrides and was in two parts. Firstly it was long straight roads in areas I rarely walk south of the river then lots of meandering north of the river where I have walked many times and was looking to tick off as many new roads as possible.

I had no specific route in mind, other then to keep heading vaguely north but not to do so too quickly, and I used the CityStrides app to plan each 10 to 15 minute segment by looking at the roads ahead and seeing which ones I had not walked before, conveniently shown on the map as a series of red dots that I needed to walk through.

Choosing the route this way took me though some interesting places mostly, as you can probably guess from the map, quite well to do ones and I do like looking at grand buildings (even if the wealth they represent came from exploitation and theft, as all wealth does).

There was also plenty of other interesting things to see, particularly street art. I was walking not sight-seeing and the only thing I stopped to photograph was this stunning art. This is only part of the black and white drawing which extends a fair way to the left.

I had two breaks along the way, a superb brunch at Reyes a little north of Clapham Junction and a fair coffee and cake at Toast Cafe in Little Venice.

 

I kept an eye on the remaining distance to West Hampstead so I knew with some certainty how long it would take me to get there and I duly arrived just before 6pm for a well deserved pint in the recently refurbished The Railway. I had a further four pints later in Bohemia House at the monthly BCSA Get to Know You Social, my reason for going to West Hampstead in the first place.

The statistics do not really tell the story but, for the record, the walk was 35km and took me something over 7 hours, including breaks. I deserved those beers!

Parks and more

We had a rough plan for this walk, which we built on successfully.

The plan was my usual walking companion's idea and, not surprisingly, that included some parks; this time it was Holland, Hyde, Regents and Primrose.

Starting at Earls Court meant the ritual of waiting for the barriers to open at Richmond Station at 8:57 and joining the swarm of old people using our 60+ Oyster Cards at the earliest opportunity.

From Earls Court is was more or less straight north to Holland Park with a slight detour on the way to take in a new road for my CityStrides LifeMap.

I wanted to take in some new roads in Notting Hill on the way to Hyde Park but that would have meant more hills which my companions, quite reasonably, objected to.

We took an unusually simple route across the top of Hyde Park simply to avoid as much traffic as we could and also the Hyde Park Winter Wonderland!

The transition from Hyde Park to Regents Park is a confusion of choices with most of Fitzrovia laid out in a grid and with no clear best route. So we did the only sensible thing and hit as many new roads as we could! Of course these were all roads that we had walked only not when mapping the route.

Regents Park was something as a failure as Broad Walk Cafe was closed for substantial refurbishment. Luckily we had a Plan B.  

While avoiding hills is generally a good idea it is impossible to go to Regents Park and not climb Primrose Hill. The view their is always worth seeing because of all the notable landmarks but I was surprised to see so few cranes and the few that were there were all clustered in the Far East (Tower Hamlets?).

Plan B was to have coffee in cake in Alma jst to the north of Primrose Hill. We had discovered it on a previous walk and knew that it was good.

I had expected that to be more or less the end of the walk as, when he suggested the plan, my companion said he wanted a shortish walk but over coffee he said that he was good for another hour or so which meant that we could walk back all the way to Waterloo.

Overall we walked 19km in 4 hours (including the coffee break) which was a pretty fine start to the day.

National March for Palestine (30 Nov 24)

Four weeks after the last National March for Palestine I was back in Central London for yet another one.

This time we assembled in Park Lane before moving along Piccadilly to Eros, down Haymarket to Trafalgar Square then back along Whitehall for the final rally. A fairly short route but the roads were narrow in a couple of places and corners always slow things down and so it took me the best part of two hours to complete the route.

Another reason for the slowness is that I was marching with (or rather behind) a Socialist Workers Party group and they know how to maximise visibility of their banners through walking slowly and leaving a space in front of them, space for the people with the megaphones to lead the chanting from.

The good news was that in the intervening four weeks the the International Criminal Court (ICC) had issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister (Benjamin Netanyahu) and former defence minister (Yoav Gallant) but the depressing news was that had made no difference to the UK Government which remained committed to supporting genocide and war crimes by, amongst other things, supplying Israel with weaponry.

That attitude of our Government means that I fully expect to be marching again before too long.

Parlour Song at Golden Goose Theatre

For various reasons, including not working in Central London anymore, I do not go to the theatre as much as I used to and it is always good to have a solid excuse to get back to one of the smaller theatres and that excuse came with a Jez Butterworth play at Golden Goose Theatre.

I am not necessarily a big Butterworth fan and the final push to see this came from having seen his The River recently (at Greenwich Theatre) and loving it.

It was also good to be able to go back to Golden Goose Theatre in Camberwell (probably) which I had only been to once before.

Oddly, I have been to both Greenwich Theatre and Golden Goose Theatre just twice (so far!) and in both cases it was first to see a Philip Ridley play and then to see one by Jez Butterworth.

Small theatres are kind to the pocket and my (unallocated) seat cost just £17. I could actually have paid less but I declined the old person's concession to support the theatre.

First I had to get there and find somewhere to eat.

Getting there was the easy part with a bus to Norbiton Station, a train to Vauxhall and a pleasant walk of about half an hour down to the theatre.

A quick look at a map beforehand suggested there was an Indian restaurant a little further along the Camberwell New Road so I went for that. I arrived at New Dewaniam just as they were opening (6pm) and was ushered into a large comfortable room. This was something of a find as the food was excellent and a little unusual, e.g. I had a pumpkin dish, and the service was friendly and attentive. I do not often find myself in Camberwell but if it happens agaain I know where to go to eat.

Golen Goose Theatre is a little odd in that it is quite integrated into the pub of the same name and the waiting area for the theatre is, I presume, the former lounge bar of the pub.

It had been a couple of years since my last visit there and I was impressed that Executive Director Michael Kingsbury remembered me, admittedly I had also known him at the nearby White Bear Theatre and had spoken to him a few times before.

The theatre was laid out differently from how I remembered it, though that could have been a false memory, with three rows of raked seats on three sides of the performance area. I was one of the first in and was able to grab a seat towards the middle of the front row, always my preferred location in small venues.

The backdrop was a plain sheet and the prop looked like a couple of crates inside of which were two men. The crates were some sort of Ikea magic and they were reassembled as other things and moved several times during the performance. They were the sole prop which suited my love of simplicity.

This was the story of two men, neighbours in an estate on the edge of town (good views of the motorway) and the wife of one of them, One of the men, Ned, works in demolition and the play starts with him showing videos of some of his projects to his neighbour, Dale, who has seen them all before.

From there the play flows in several directions that include familiar domestic issues to the surreal disappearance of objects. Ned's wife, Joy, appears to lead the story to other places. Their relationships go through cycles of constructions and deconstructions echoed by the props. These cycles have no clear beginning or ending and so the play ends, just as it started, with a nondescript moment. And this is fine.

Parlour Song is an interesting and entertaining view inside three fairly ordinary lives that occasionally collide in unusual ways.

Trashfuture live (24 Nov 24)

Thanks to my sons' insistence, I have been listening to the Trashfuture podcast for a little while now and also thanks to them I went to see them live for a second time. And as with last November, the whole family was there to celebrate our eldest son's birthday.

But first we had to have a pizza and Franco Manca in The Cut did the job. It's far from the most exciting menu in the world but we have simple tastes and we went for options 1, 2 (twice) and 3. We are easy to please!

Between The Bridges is an odd venue, little more than a marquee with benches, and the being a liminal area between inside and outside meant that it was okay, and necessary, to keep your coat on. On a more positive note, they sold reasonable beer.

At the previous Trashfuture live event the main man, Riley (far left), was sick and November had to lead the show and this time she was ill and another podcast stalwart, Devon, had to fill in. In other words, the people in the poster were not those presenting the show but that is just a statement for the record, it made no material difference.

For almost ninety minutes Riley led us through the Boris Johnson magus opus Unleashed. The Trashfuture crowd are intelligent, which is rather the point of the podcast, and this was an analytical takedown of Johnson as well as a funny one. Two big points were that Johnson used the book to hit back at everyone who every slighted him and all the things that went wrong were someone else's fault even if that fault amounted to not stopping him from being stupid.

Of course there was a great deal more to the discussion than that and the observations and jokes came thick and fast, so much so that it warrants a second listen and I am hoping, as I did last year, that the live event comes out as a free episode.

Memento at The Cavern (23 Nov 24)

Fates had conspired against me for much of 2024 and I had missed a few Memento gigs through things like double-booking and illness so it was great to be able to see them again at, what has become. the usual venue, The Cavern in Raynes Park.

It was also great to get my timing right, for once, and to arrive at the pub just before the band started playing.

The pub had changed it beers since my last visit but that was okay as the beer that I went for was good and soI had a few of them. The new beer was complimented by old friends and acquaintances and the pub had a very welcoming and convivial atmosphere. 

Memento started playing just after 9 and finished soon after 11 with just a short break in the middle. Along the way they played their usual mix of rock (Kashmir) and heavier pop (Love Is Like Oxygen) songs, including a couple by Uriah Heep which is always a good idea.

Memento know both how to play these songs and how to put them together into a consistently exciting set, and that made for a great evening. Again.

The Forsyte Saga at Park Theatre

Like many people my age, The Forsyte Saga burst into my life with the late 60s serialisation on BBC 1 staring, amongst others, Eric Porter, Nyree Dawn Porter and Susan Hampshire. It made a big impression then and that was reinforced with another good adaptation on BBC Radio in 2017. I love the sweep of the drama over generations and the way that the many characters interact.

So when Park Theatre put on a version I was obviously interested.

There was a slight complication in that the saga was told over two separate plays, Part 1: Irene and Part 2: Fleur. It made sense, given the travel time to Finsbury Park, to see them on the same day which meant a Thursday or a Saturday and it was Thursday that won that battle.

The Forsyte Saga was selling very well limiting my options further and I settled for a seat in the Circle and got E12 for both performances. For some reason Part 1 cost £31.5 and Part 2 was £35.55.

First I had to get there and find somewhere for lunch, both of which proved to be very easy; National Rail and Victoria Line did the first part and Frame did the second. Frame was newish to the area and is now my designated pre-theatre restaurant for Park Theatre.

The view of the stage from my seat was good, i.e. I could easily see all of it.

The set at the start was promising too with just four chairs on stage, and that was about as far as it got. The story worked well on radio so there was no reason for it not to work well on a stage with very few props.

Depending on how you look at it (and I wish that I hadn't looked!), the story of the Forsytes is 3, 5 or 11 books, and the famous TV series was 26 episodes so a five hour adaptation had to leave an awful lot uncovered and unsaid. 

It did that by focussing on two characters, Irene and Fleur. These are from two generations with Fleur being Irene's step daughter (from her first husband, Soames', second marriage). That curtailed both the length and breadth of the story but you would only know that if you had heard the full story before, as two plays these were complete in themselves.

That story was a simple(!) one of a rich family with lots of members living the lives expected of them (country houses, operas, etc.) with those lives complicated by relationships.

I do now know if it was a deliberate feature of the adaptation or me completely misreading it but I felt that Soames came out of this quite well while both Irene and Fleur (particularly Fleur) came across as a bit flighty and fickle. Of course there was a major incident (no spoilers) which goes against this narrative but that was not dwelt on greatly and, while not forgiving Soames at all, was over a century ago when things were very different (it only became illegal in 1991).

With a large family and a modestly sized cast many actors played several roles and that worked very well, as it always does with good actors. Only checking the cast list now I realise that I had seen several of them on stage before, e.g. Flora Spencer-Longhurst (Fleur) was in The Real Thing at Rose Theatre and Nigel Hastings (James and Jo) was in  And Then Come the Nightjars  at Theatre503. Also Michael Lumsden (six roles) has been in The Archers for 25 years and it is always nice to catch one of them live.

The strength of the play was in its convoluted story and this was significantly enhanced by the very clever staging, particularly the intricate movement that let the story move from scene to scene smoothly to create a continuous narrative.

It is easy to say that I cannot find fault, not even the littlest, with The Forsyte Saga but it was far more than just faultless, it was excellent theatre and very easy to recommend to any one who likes theatre or stories.