The Cat and the Canary at Richmond Theatre thrilled entertainingly

This week's touring show at Richmond Theatre was The Cat and the Canary. Apparently the story is strong enough to have been made as a film three times but I have no recollection of ever seeing any of them. However that was sufficient recommendation to go and see it and I booked my usual seat Dress Circle A25 for just £17.25 thanks to an ATG Opening Night Offer.

Just in case you have not seen any of the films either, the premise was, "Twenty years after the death of Mr. West, his descendants gather at a remote mansion to learn who will inherit his vast wealth and the hidden family jewels."

Obviously there were tensions between the distant family members and plans to thwart Mr West's intentions. The questions was who was doing this? This was a whosdoingit rather than a whodunit.

Watching it being done was exciting as the tension was built with devices like thunder storms, and escaped madman and ghostly hands emerging from secret panels. These are all familiar thriller tropes because they work and they worked very well here.

I was not that surprised when we found out whosdoingit but I was just falling into a trap and there were several surprising revelations after that.

The Cat and the Canary set out to thrill and it did that entertainingly.

Kew Orchids (29 Feb 20)

My second visit to Kew Orchids this year was to take my sister there and it was a second visit that I was happy to make. In previous years, before long queues and ticketing, I would visit the exhibition several times; once in-depth and other passing visits because it was a pretty place to go.

We went for the first timed slot of the day, 10:30am, and the careful planning worked out very well. Our 65 bus arrived at Victoria Gate just after they opened at 10am and we were able to walk in via the members' queue with almost no waiting.

We ambled across to the Princess of Wales Conservatory knowing that we had half an hour to get there. Even ambling we were there in about fifteen minutes and were resigned to having to wait for another fifteen so we were very pleasantly surprised to be allowed in straight away. Not only did the remove the need for any queueing but it meant that we had forty five minutes before the next group would be allowed in.

The first big display of orchids was a series of arches in the large central section. Displays like this are best appreciated at a little distance (rather than admiring the individual flowers close-up) and that was a lot easier to do with not many people around. We were back there towards the end of our visit when it was a lot busier and there were several people patiently waiting for a gap in the crowd so that they could take the phots they wanted.

From there we took a necessarily circuitous route and tried to cover all of the main paths in all of the rooms without retracing our steps too often. Without planning, but with good knowledge of the building, I think we achieved that.

The festival seemed less intense this year with fewer staged displays and more flowers embedded in the existing beds. I liked that as I prefer the natural beauty of the individual flowers to the manufactured beauty of the displays.

As this was my sister's first visit to Kew Gardens when it was fully open (the Christmas Lights are a separate thing) we invented a route through the gardens and that worked well too. That had to start with a drink and some cake in the Orangery and from there we went to Rhododendron Dell, Minka House, Bamboo Garden, Sackler Crossing, Temperate House (mandatory) and, finally, The Pavilion to do some shopping.

It was a packed couple of hours and still left us with plenty to do on our next visit.

Blitz! at Union Theatre was joyous

I do not need an excuse to see a musical at Union Theatre having seen so many good ones there and my only problem is finding the time to do so. Blitz! was always on my radar and a visit from my sister (to visit Kew Gardens) was the spur to pick this evening and I dutifully bought three tickets at £22 each.

It was a change in personnel but the same plan; meet in the theatre cafe for a coffee while waiting for the box office to open, secure tickets in Group 1, go to Culture Grub to eat then back in time for the opening of the theatre and to claim seats in the centre of the front row.

All I knew about Blitz! was that it was by Lionel Bart, which was both a recommendation and more than I knew about other shows I have seen.

The first scene hit the ground running with most of the cast on stage singing as they sheltered from an air raid in an underground station. I almost always like songs with lots of singers and I certainly liked this one.

b.t.w. another play that I have seen, The Shelter, told the story of how Churchill was forced to allow working class people to have shelter.

The main story, possibly taking from Romeo and Juliet, was about two local families who argued constantly but two of the children fall in love with each other. A simple but effective premise.

A second theme was about another son who had gone into the army and was home for a few days before going abroad. He was a bit of a jack-the-lad and fell in with some bad people.

The blitz was the other main character in the story interrupting and destroying lives and giving the cast plenty of opportunities to sing anti-Hitler songs.

Having sent the scene quickly and successfully the musical moved forward joyously with plenty to enjoy in the story, the music and the performances. There was quite a large cast and they were called on to do a lot of dancing as well as singing. The movement was superb throughout, as was every aspect of this production. That was hardly surprising given that Phil Willmott's name is on the poster and I know from many past experiences that he creates great shows.

Jessica Martin, as the matriarch Mrs Blitztein, was the star of the show and lived up to that billing. She was more than ably supported by more people than it is possible to mention here. There were many characters in the play telling many little stories and they were all told with flair.

I had expected to enjoy Blitz!, mainly because of the various people involved in it, but it far exceeded my reasonably high expectations. It was simply joyous.

Gurteen Knowledge Cafe: The University of the Future

It is great news that David Gurteen is planning to run several Knowledge Cafes in London this year and good news that I was able to make the first one.

Keeping with the good news, it was held at Regent's University, in Regent's Park funnily enough, and it is always nice to have an excuse to go there. The travel worked reasonably well (Richmond to Hammersmith to Baker Street and then walk) and I got there around 6:15pm which gave me plenty of time to have a few veggie sarnies and a cup of coffee before the event started at 6:30pm. I also had the chance to say "hello" to a few of the other regulars.

The reason we were there was to discuss The University of the Future.

At first glance this is of little interest to me but, on the other hand, I was involved with schools for several years, I like to go out of my comfort zone and I love Gurteen events.

The session was expertly introduced by Peter Sharp who, amongst many other things, has a PhD in Knowledge Management and has worked in the field of business management and professional skills at Regent's University.

In a few drawings (a welcome change from the usual slide format) he explained some of the pressures that universities were under in several areas including money, expectations on all sides, and competition.

That set the conversations rolling. As usual we did these in three rounds of small table discussions (with people moving to different tables in each round) before having a group discussion at the end. Also as usual I took very few notes at the time because the conversations got in the way and what follows is a mix of these notes, additional memories and subsequent analysis in a desperate attempt to produce something coherent.

I do not usually comment on the conversations themselves but it is worth doing so this time because they had a different feel. Having universities as the theme attracted a lot of people from universities which tended to restrict the scope of some of the conversations and they were restricted even further, in my experience, as they seemed to have come with their answers prepared rather than waiting for the conversations to provide some. They were still good conversations, perhaps I felt that because I was an exception to the universities rule (there were others), and I both enjoyed the evening and learned from it.

Peter Sharp opened by contrasting Balir father (50% to go to university) to son (apprenticeships are better) but we never addressed that argument directly as the argument for apprenticeships was not in the room. I think that was a shame as there are clear issues with the universities model and I would have liked to hear how outsiders playing in the same area feel.

If we look at a cube (sorry, I cannot draw this) with numbers of people along one axis (say 0-6 million), their ages along another (say 0-100) and then all the things that universities might provide to students (academic teaching, clubs and sports, social interaction, etc.) then universities fill a very small part of that cube in that they provide some of those services to only 50% of the population for only 3 or 4 years.

There are many other providers of all of these services and the cube is fully populated. The big question for universities, I feel, is deciding where to be in that cube. For example, it may make sense for them to be more engaged in life-long learning so that they can use their skills, knowledge and facilities to provide formal education after graduation instead of leaving this to professional bodies (e.g. Institute of Chartered Accountants) and probably the easiest way to do this would be to absorb such bodies.

Michael Porter famously said, "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do" and I think that applies here. There are lots of things that universities do (e.g. sports) and/or are interested in doing (e.g. teaching life skills like critical thinking) that may be best left to others with universities commission these services for their students for the period that the have them.

Part of this is to ensure that useful skills, like critical thinking, are not exclusively the property of the 50% or so who go to university but are available to all. Someone ranted in the final whole-group session on how this focussing reasoning skills on just the elite had enabled Brexit and Trump. It was me.

There are a lot of players and potential customers in the university world, in its broadest sense, and I think university will operate better if they become part of the community rather than just a campus.

[The photo from the event was copied from cooperativelearning.works who also wrote a blog about it.]

Weekly Walk: Around London

This week's walk took a lot less planning and being close to home we could do a slightly longer distance too. My partner in walking wanted to revisit a couple of parks and to explore some of Central London, so we did that.

The only parts of the plan we had fixed were to start at Hyde Park Corner (we can use the tube for free anytime of day), do Hyde and Regent's Parks, head for Tower Bridge and then back to Waterloo.

Things started well and Hyde Park was busy with other people having similar ideas. It got a bit messy as we hit the north-east corner of the park as roads got in the way of the footpaths for a bit. Walking in London is a constant reminder that pedestrians are second-class citizens.

Regent's Park reinforced that lacking an orbital walking route that does not run alongside the road. The pointed shape of our route shows that.

The section onto Tower Bridge was a succession of relived memories of times working in various places across London and while I had not walked the full route before I think that I had walked every bit of it several times before.

Local knowledge came in useful as we looked for somewhere to have lunch and we hit Rosie's Cafe just behind Tate Modern. I had used it regularly when working on a project in Southwark Bridge Road.

We had to finish the day at The Kings Arms in Roupell, so we did.

There were so many highlights along the way including formal gardens in the two parks, almost all of Clerkenwell, Art Deco grandeur in Herbrand Street, listening to the Fleet running underfoot and crossing Tower Bridge.

A surprise was just how busy it was. This was a grey, if dry, day in February and I would have thought that tourists would have better things to do than come to London at this time of year. Apparently not.

For the record, we covered 25 km in 4:18 hours of walking.