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.

Filumena at Richmond Theatre

This was one of those occasions where I knew nothing about the play or the playwright but the synopsis sounded fun and it starred two names, both of whom I had previously seen on stage a few times, so I was happy to book. Somebody beat me to my usual seats so I had to book at the other end of the front row of the Dress Circle where seat A2 cost a modest £35 with my ATG+ Opening Night Offer.

Going to Richmond Theatre is a habit and so is going to Wagamama beforehand to eat a tofu firecracker and drink a large positive juice.

 

The synopsis set the scene: "Filumena Marturano lies on her deathbed, waiting to marry the man who has kept her as his mistress for twenty-five years. No sooner than they are married, she makes a miraculous recovery, much to the surprise of her new, unwilling husband and his younger lover!" and at the start of the play that had already happened, the story went from there.

It was a gentle story that revealed more of the characters' past and their hopes for the future, with a few surprises along the way. A character driven drama like Filumena needs believable characters and good actors to bring them to life, and this had both.

Filumena was never going to be anything other than a BBC early evening drama, and it did not pretend to be. The production knew what the play is all about and how to make it work which made for an entertaining evening.

Walking 35km to West Hampstead

This was a variation on a theme but it has never worked so well before!

The simple aim was to get to West Hampstead around 6pm for the monthly BCSA Get to Know You social taking as many steps as possible. And as I had a reason to leave the house around 10:30 I had a lot of time to do that.

The first part of the journey, as far as Southall (north side of Osterley Park), was driven by PokemonGo and the few target gyms that I have in that area.

After that it was a simple (!) matter of finding new ways to walk to West Hampstead in the time available.

My CityStrides LifeMap shows the roads that I have walked previously and all I had to do was avoid those whenever possible. Of course that was not always easy, or possible, as the significant constraints like railways, major roads, rivers and canals, have limited crossing points and so I kept been drawn into familiar territory before crossing the obstruction and then picking a new route from there. 

For example, the little bulge in the top left of the route was me walking to Wembley Central station to cross the railway lines.

As always, one of the great joys of deliberately walking along new roads is you find new things and Alperton was something of a revelation in a couple of ways. The area by the station has become swamped with nondescript high-rise blocks (bad) and around the corner there is Shri Vallabh Nidhi Hindu Temple (good). 

I had walked to West Hampstead via Wembley a few times previously so had walked all the obvious west-east routes before and that forced me to walk north-south a few times to hit new territory. That was expected and it was good to find things like Wembley Brook.

Soon after crossing the North Circular, and setting a new record for the number of pedestrian lights I had to wait for to cross one road, I came across BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, also known as Neasden Temple.

While walking, I was mostly following my LifeMap to find new roads but I was also checking Apple Maps to see how far away I was on foot from West Hampstead so that I could time my arrival, I walk at 6km/hour which makes the maths very simple. I made one final turn north towards Dollis Hill from where it was almost a straight line to the finish.

I arrived in West Hampstead just a few minutes before 6pm (seven hours after starting out) perfect timing.

I had objectives targets for this walk (steps, PokemonGo, new roads, arrival time) and I achieved every one of them. A perfect walk.

City of London churches and more

Over the years I have got very used to being the one who plans the regular walks that I do with a friend, either I plan absolutely everything or he comes up with a rough idea and I have to turn it in to a route with suitable start and end points and a reasonable walking distance. This was one of the later cases.

While I mostly worked in Central London he was in places like Libya and Angola so he likes walking in London to discover places he does not really know and where I seem to have been to every pub. His idea this time was to visit churches in City of London.

That meant joining the queue of old gits at Richmond Station waiting for the barriers to open at 8:57 to catch the tube. We went all the way to Tower Hill to start our exploration on the east side of the City.

This time I had not done a detailed route and it was just a question of looking for the nearest cluster of churches and heading that way, there being no obvious route between them.

Where possible, we went inside which is something I had never done before so I was discovering something new too.

I forgot to checking on to the first few churches on Swarm but I did do the final nine so I knew that we went to some places with great names, including St. Botolph without Aldersgate, St. Vedast-alias-Foster and St Sepulchre-without-Newgate.

We had a coffee break in the one below, St Mary Aldermary.

This is also one of the several places where either we got lost or the church did. The maps show that Saint Nicholas Moldavian Church is next door but we walked all away around the block and could not find it. The two churches may be sharing one building, as we found elsewhere but there was nothing obvious to show this.

I am nothing like an expert on churches but I was pleasantly surprised at how varied and interesting the interiors were. The stained glasses were my favourites and I also appreciate grand architecture. There were several surprises to, such as the statue by Damian Hirst of St Bartholomew being skinned alive in St Bartholomew the Great (we failed to find St Bartholomew the Less).

The mural below is in St Alban the Martyr, a somewhat hard to find church in Holborn.

Somewhere along the way, St Lawrence Jewry I think, a helpful guide gave us a paper copy of the map at the top, which would have been very helpful a couple of hours earlier!

We saw enough in our haphazard wanderings to tempt us back to look at more churches, we only saw around 15 of over 50.

Our walk took a more usual course after that and we headed more or less due west to Hyde Park and the ever so familiar Serpentine Cafe for lunch.

My friend had to leave at that point and I took the opportunity to tick off some more roads in Kensington and Chelsea.and I surprised myself by completing 40 new roads in under two hours. A great way to end a fun series of walks.

Hawklords at 100 Club (10 Nov 24)

I have absolutely no idea where time goes! I would have sworn blind that I last saw Hawklords in spring 24 but my calendar is pretty convinced that it was in October 23.

It also told me that the first time I saw them was at 100 Club in November 2014 so this was something of a tenth anniversary. It was also my fifth time of seeing them at 100 Club and the eighth time that I have seen them altogether.

I guess that makes me a fan, certainly enough of one to pay £25 to see them play live again.

Travel worked well and I got to 100 Club just before the 7:30 opening time and joined a couple of dozen of similarly aged people, mostly men.

Getting in early got me the place I wanted at the front next to one of the annoying pillars.

The support band, The Galileo 7, entertained mightily with a distinctly British but hard to categorise sound. They describe themselves as "psych-pop", which works.

This Hawklords was the same lineup as last time with Jerry Richards on guitar and vocals, Mr Dibs on bass and twiddly electronics, and Dave Pearce on percussion. Being a three-piece is not ideal for 100 Club which has an extremely wide stage so they were well spaced out and there was a notable gap in the middle where a front man would have been.

That gap was filled for some songs by Capt Rizz, also a former member of Hawkwind, who made quite a difference with his movement, outfit and singing. 

Hawklords had anew album to promote, Relativity (the appropriate sequel to "Time" and "Space") and I assume that most of the songs that I did not recognise, and there were a lot of them, came from this. I did recognise the occasional Hawkwind classic, e.g. Brainstorm, that made it into the set but these did not differ musically,

I enjoyed their previous gig, at The Forge in Camden, even though it seemed to lack something, perhaps the sound was not quite right or perhaps the venue was too bright, and at 100 Club those niggles were absent and the concert was truly excellent throughout. Even the audience, which can be problematic at times, were on top form.

Hawklords have settled into a nice rhythm with the current line-up and songs and I'll remain a fan for as long as that rhythm continues.

16km from Whitehall to Clapham

I was in London for another National March for Palestine and I combined that with some general walking and some new roads to add to my CityStrides LifeMap.

I love CityStrides but it is built on map data from Open Street Map (which I also love) and, for reasons, that does not distinguish between, say, High Street Kingston and High Street Richmond and so you have to walk every High Street in Greater London for it to count as a completed street. Of course there is no problem when streets have a unique name like Lennox Gardens Mews!

Despite that difficulty in completing roads in London I managed to add 31 roads to my total making it 6,022 London roads completed, which is 15%.

Most roads have several nodes, including the two at each end, and there were another 47 roads that I walked part of, most of which I do not ever expect to complete. But perhaps one day ...

CityStrides also keeps totals for each London Borough (where there are far fewer duplicated roads) and on this walk I pushed my completion rate for Wandsworth to 38% and Lambeth to 15%. I really need to go to those places more often.

The National March for Palestine explains the straight lines at the top of the map and the hunt for new roads explains the wiggles in the middle. For the final section I took a fairly direct route to Clapham Junction Station but still managed to find a couple of new roads.

Of course walking new roads is about far more than just ticking things off on a very long list, it is about discovering new things.

And this new things was a great discovery.

If I was not walking every part of every street in that area then I would never have walked around Carey Gardens Housing Estate and I would not have found this mural by local artist and activist Brian Barnes. Called "A Brief History of Time" it has lots of (mostly) local references, including Stephen Hawking in the top left.

There was other street art and interesting estates, some fine middle-class homes in Clapham Manor, some impressive Victorian schools, and a few green spaces.

It was a good walk.

National March for Palestine (2 Nov 24)

It is depressing that more than a year on it is still necessary to march in large numbers to try and get our government to understand that actively participating in Israel's genocide is a bad idea. I am prepared to keep marching for as long as it takes and I was joined by over 100,000 who think the same way.

The routes vary a little and this time we started in Whitehall crossed The Thames at Vauxhall and finished at the American Embassy at Nine Elms. As a simple walk (ignoring for the moment the purpose of the march) it was a good route with wide roads all the way and only one pinch point (by Vauxhall stations).

That meant passing Houses of Parliament which was good for the politics and also because we were seen by plenty of tourists and visitors too, these are public demonstrations for a reason and I prefer it when we march through busier areas.

The next march is scheduled for Saturday 30 November.

The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown at Dingwall's

I am neglectful and do not always get around to posting about converts that I go to but, even so, this is the fourteenth time that I have done so since this blog started in 2006.

Over those almost twenty (!) years I have seen him at many different venues and with many different musicians and this was the my first time at Dingwalls and the third time seeing him with this band.

Dingwalls is a pretty basic venue and while I am sure that it is fine for your standard no frills guitar band it was not great for a show as visual as this. That said, I soon got used to the heads hiding the lower part of the stage and I could hear the music perfectly.

The show, unsurprisingly, followed the format of the Eel Pie show in April bot musically and artistically though there were changes. If I ever took notes and if Setlist was a complete and faultless record then I could be more certain on the extent of the changes but I think that the back projection was more extensive (and the two statues downgraded as a result) and the formerly regular song "I put a spell on you" made a return as the final encore.

I think there was a change to the set order too and I liked the way that (new version) Time Captives ended the main part of the set. Not only is it my favourite Arthur Brown track, originally recorded as Kingdom Come, but the communal singing of the "La Da Da" ending is a perfect ending.

The only disappointment is that I do not have another Arthur Brown concert in my diary yet.