News from Nowhere

Friday you already know about: what next?

durham_rambler had discovered that there was an exhibition about Topic Records at the Barbican library (this link explains more, and links to a video: 75 years of folk music in ten minutes). GirlBear was familiar with the space, and was able to warn us that it wouldn't be a very large exhibition, but even so, the three of us felt it was worth a visit. We allowed ourselves an hour to look round, and that was plenty, even allowing time for reading documents and reminiscing about the records. I'd have liked more about the field recordings, and less about the stars, but I'm already converted and don't need to be preached to: and I'm sad enough to get a buzz out of things like Davy Graham's first recording contract.

After lunch, GirlBear had an assignation with the Society of Recorder Players, and durham_rambler and I visited the Museum of London. ( Where there are many splendid things, and I took many pictures. )

We dined that evening with helenraven - or perhaps I should say with kelpercomehome, since she lured us south of the river with promises of wines she had discovered on her travels. The journey was more exciting than it should have been, since the nearest tube station was closed (though we didn't find this out till the doors of the train were closing) and we had forgotten the number of her flat - which wouldn't have mattered if it weren't for the security gates fitted since our last visit. So we coulsn't simply proceed along the walkway until we recognised a friendly door. But we worked it out, we arrived, the wine was excellent and the company even better - and that was Saturday.

The BBC has announced the death, aged 104, of E. R. Braithwaite, best known as author of To Sir, with Love, an autobiographical novel about his time as a teacher in the East End of London; the book, in turn, is best known as the basis for a film starring Sidney Poitier and Lulu (and how often do you get to join those names?). It's a long time since I read the book, but the assessment in this article in London Fictions matches my recollection: an interesting account of a particular place and time, not the greatest literature but well enough told, though the hero / narrator is perhaps a bit too good to be true (or sympathetic).

I had a particular reason to be interested, though. My mother always claimed that Braithwaite's job in the East End was as her maternity leave replacement, which made me in a way responsible for the book. We took this, as we took all my mother's stories, with a pinch of salt: she was a great myth-maker, and lived the post-truth life half a century before the term was invented. Nonetheless, it's not impossible. That London Fictions piece identifies the school as St George in the East, where I believe she taught (and which sounds like quite somewhere in itself), and a biography on the British Library site places it in 1951, which is right. So who knows?

Just leaving a wet and rainy Northallerton, and I have a large tumbler of sauvignon blanc ("they don't teach them about portion control," says durham_rambler, and how right he is).

Anything we have left undone is going to have to stay undone - no, wait, I wish it were that simple. If there is anything the builders need us to have done which we have not done, they will either have to do without or do themselves. I wish I found this reassuring. Boss builder saw us off with a cheery "Don't worry about anything!" surely among the most alarming words in the English language, second only to "We are pleased to announce an upgrade!"

But we are on our way, and not sorry to be leaving building and decorating behind us for a bit. We have a week in London, with a curious double focus: it just so happens that GirlBear's birthday coincides with the anniversary of the Battle of Jutland. It always does, of course, but this year we will be celebrating a significant birthday and commemorating the centenary of the battle. Actually, the main activity around the Battle of Jutland will be taking place in Orkney, and I can't claim that I wasn't tempted, but it wasn't really possible, because, on the one hand, birthday! and on the other hand this is what we will be doing tomorrow.

There is a project to install a paving stone at or near the home of everybody who won a VC in World War One, and one of these is Jack Cornwell, who was durham_rambler's grandfather's cousin. Wikipedia version here and Charles Causley's version of the story on Google Books. It's clear that the ceremony is going to be in patriotic mode, and any reflection of the 'Who puts a 16 year old boy in the line of fire?' will be kept strictly to ourselves.

Keeping busy. We had a dinner date on Friday, but a free afternoon, so GirlBear and I took the bus to Crouch End and shopped, for supplies and gifts, luxuries and necessities. For a while it looked as if we were going to have to report that only GirlBear had bought a book, but then I found one - Karen Maitland's latest, which was very satisfactory. I also bought soap, orange juice, artisan bread, sellotape, various cards, toothbrushes, vacuum packed chestnuts - a pleasingly random haul. I also took photographs of Hornsey Town Hall, which has some lovely decorative detail, some of it incorporating the motto Fortior quo Paratior: if I'm interpreting that correctly, it's very apt for these pre-Christmas days of preparation and planning!

We were just approaching our rendezvous point, when the car, with durham_rambler and BoyBear in it, pulled alongside, and we jumped in with packages flying in all directions. The drive out to Waltham Cross went smoothly right up to the last moment, when we had a disagreement with a man in a white van (details redacted because reasons). No one was hurt, though the car now has an impressive dent at the back - luckily not breaking any lights, so we could drive on.

The evening recovered, we had a fun Christmas dinner with A. and A. at the local Wetherspoons, the Moon and Cross, and returned with them to their house for coffee and more chat: places, and civic planning, old friends and folk events we have known. I loved A.'s story about going to a sing around at a friendly but rather grand house, and been caught in a sudden downpour on the way: so there I was sitting with the dog's head in my lap, and the Siamese cat sitting on my shoulder, drinking the drips from my hair...

Yesterday durham_rambler and I went out to Essex to visit his family; a busy, bustling time with Christmas shopping, football practice, changes of plan of a medical nature (not dramatic, not drastic and not my story to tell - but disruptive). There was time to admire the tree, and admire it even more when the malfunctioning string of fairy lights had been replaced with not one but two new ones; and there was time for a game of Lexicon, and to be shown the splendours of a football game on the X-box (football, not interesting, but the graphics are indeed impressive).

Then we came back to Tufnell Park for dinner and a start on the Chritmas crossword (so far, we are not impressed). And tonight there will be the Carol Evening, so I should go and do my share of preparation.

- much impact on the accummulated pile of newspapers (just as one wheelie bin per fortnight makes very little impact on the jungle that is my garden). Nonetheless:

1. Other holiday cottages are also available. I don't suppose I'll ever rent one of these fabulous modernist houses on Cape Cod - unless I could persuade all my New England friends to come and share it with me! Nor do know why The Guardian feels the need to dress the article up with a come-on headline about Mad Men...



2. Italy seems to be flavour of the month at The Guardian, and I can see why. How about Puglia, down in the heel of Italy's boot, where you can stay in one of the stone beehive 'trulli'? Or Ravenna, and up the coast to Venice, and then maybe beyond to Trieste? Well, maybe one day...



3. Then there's London: Iain Sinclair walks the Ginger Line so we don't have to. At book length I find Sinclair unreadable, but half a page seems the right length for his blend of bile and lyricism: "The arches beneath the elevated tracks, oil pits dealing in MOT certificates, mysterious lock-ups and rehearsal spaces for bands without names, were being rapidly upgraded to fish farms offering meditational aids to keep money-market buccaneers on an even keel, Japanese restaurants and artisan bakeries operated by downsizing hedge-fund managers. The word 'artisan' signalled the change in demographic."



4. Who is Henry Jeffries, and how has he persuaded The Guardian to give him a weekly column which is effectively an advertisement for his (forthcoming, self-published - via Unbound) book? It is, admittedly, tucked away in the increasingly pointless cookery supplement, but it appears under the title of the book, and is invariably followed by a plug for the book. To add insult to injury, it is often informative and always entertaining, even though is is usually about drinks in which I have no real interest. Here, for example, is what it has to say about vodka: he recommends Vestal Vodka from Poland, saying "Most of their vodkas are not only vintage (made from a single potato harvest), but also from a single variety of spud." Varietal vodkas - who knew?



5. Today's news is full of the outcome of the Greek referendum. The problem seems to be that Greece may have taken the first step to leaving the euro while remaining in Europe, and this is a bad thing. The UK, of course, declines to enter the euro, while remaining in Europe, and this is a good thing. No doubt it's entirely different.

The Bears' house, as helenraven remarked on Friday, has a strong family resemblance to our own: it's a big old terraced house, whose inhabitants do not regard home improvements as an entertaining pastime. BoyBear and my mother, Skip, bought it together, many years ago, selling a long lease on the basement flat to help finance the purchase. My mother had a self-contained flat on the ground floor, and since her death the Bears have let its large front room, with use of bathroom and kitchen, but kept the back room, which gives them access to the garden, space for GirlBear's art projects, and a sofa bed for guests.

Recent changes in the basement flat have revealed the presence of dry rot, and BoyBear has been working with the leaseholder to arrange for the necessary work. He should probably have realised that this was going to be disruptive not only in the basement but also in the wall immediately above, but for those of us who are not good at the stuff, words like "dry rot" tend to freeze the brain, and it wasn't until Thursday that a message left on the answering machine revealed quite how disruptive it was going to be. The company doing the work wanted to confirm that everything was clear to give them access on Monday. This is why BoyBear was left at home on Friday to wrangle telephones, and discover what access they needed, instead of walking along the Dollis Brook with us. We came home to discover that, despite a scary moment where it sounded as if we were going to have to rip out the entire kitchen, the preparation required was substantial but manageable. A professional had been booked to come on Monday and remove the gas cooker, and the rest of it - the back wall of the big room, on either side of the French windows - we could do ourselves.

So the entertainments planned for Saturday were replaced with much rearranging of Stuff: audio equipment taken well away from where builders would be generating dust, our cosy nest in the sofa-bed folded away, books stacked in the space this made available, and covered with a dustsheet, plants taken out into the garden, the spare glasses removed from the cabinet to the left of the French windows and taken upstairs (with the exception of half a dozen cocktail glasses, which were boxed up to go to a charity shop), likewise winter clothes removed from the wardrobe on the right. We gazed at the shelves of odds and ends which had belonged to my mother and decided that they were far enough from the area of work, and that while we appreciated the reminder that there were still belongings of Skip's waiting to be dealt with, it wasn't going to happen right now. Then we examined the furniture.

The cabinet that held the glasses was a pine dresser, the sort composed of a cupboard underneath, and a separate set of shelves (in this case with glass doors) standing on top of it. The shelves should be reasonably stable, but it's as well to secure them in some way. We could see that Skip had tackled this by screwing a hook into the top of the cabinet, and using wire to lash it to the decorative fitting which no longer supported the curtain rail (because the cabinet filled some of the space previously covered by the curtain). But unfastening the wire did not free the cabinet, and examination revealed it had also been nailed into the dado rail. durham_rambler and BoyBear between them were able to free it, though this dislodged a length of the rail. "Typical Skippy workmanship!" we said, picturing her at the foot of the ladder giving instructions to her press-ganged 'volunteer'. Moving the base of the cupboard was easy, because it was another typical Skip item, Potemkin furniture with neither back nor base, so we were able to lift it bodily, leaving the tins of paint standing on the floor where it had been.

One down, one to go. The 'fitted wardrobe' looked like a handsome piece of furniture, with art deco door fittings (which didn't match) and one elegantly inlaid door: but it was obvious that a piece of that style could not have been fitted into the alcove, and besides, why just the one good door? So it was no surprise when we started to take it apart, to discover that it too had been bodged together from what was available - that one good door, a sheet of hardboard, the side of an old bed. These had been screwed, nailed and in places glued into position, with odd offcuts holding the different elements at the same height. It took some doing, but the four of us together, some pushing, some pulling, and durham_rambler wielding the mallet, managed to remove it - all bar the clothes rail and the shelf above, which we left. We were asked to clear up to a height of 1.5 metres, and we had.

Duty done, we went out to the Cellar Upstairs for a couple of very enjoyable sets from Gail Williams and Jim Younger, a fine spot from the wonderful Tom Paley, and not enough from Dorten Yonder.

For the last several years, the County Durham Plan has been a large part of our lives; and when I say 'our' I'm talking about durham_rambler and myself, but also about various residents' groups and civic societies. Our friends and neighbours are either as deeply involved as we are, or have heard us talk about it so much for so long that they probably feel as if they are. We have attended County Council consultation sessions, we have made comments, we have submitted critiques, we have studied the Plan in detail and at length. durham_rambler has collated population projections and mashed up maps, and he worked more or less full-time last summer to co-ordinate and complete the evidence of the City of Durham Trust: our holiday had to be squeezed in between the closing date for the submission of evidence and the opening of the Examination in Public, at which a Planning Inspector considers the Plan and decides whether it is sound (this is why we were in New England too early for the Fall foliage) - and on our return there was a month and a bit when he was spending several days a week at the Examination in Public.

So yes, the process has eaten our time and out lives, and it hasn't done our business any good either. But we considered it worthwhile, because this is important: the Plan is the structural plan which determines how the County is managed for the next ten or twenty years. A good Plan helps make County Durham a better place to live, but this - this was not a good plan. As I understand it, the Council's strategy is to use the City to attract businesses, and therefore jobs, to the County, by building lots of houses in the Green Belt. Not that I do understand it - or rather, I don't understand why the availability of housing for existing staff should tempt a business to move to Durham and take on people who already live here; nor do I see any good reason why that housing (supposing it to be needed) has to be in, rather than outside, Durham's very narrow Green Belt; and surely no-one now believes that you can reduce traffic congestion by building more roads, and...

Enough. You get the picture.

Ten days ago the Inspector issued his interim report. This found against the Council on a number of aspects of the Plan: it rejected the planned relief roads, the removal of land from Green Belt and the half-hearted policy on controlling studentification in the City. This is good news for us. But how is the Council to make a strategic policy for the future? The Inspector offers them three options: they can continue the process with the existing Plan (in which case he is likely to find the Plan unsound); they can suspend the Examination process and see what they can rescue from the Plan (though suspension would normally be for a maximum of six months, and they'd have their work cut out to get the work done in time); or they can withdraw the Plan (which leaves Durham with no strategic policy).

So what does the Council do? Does it sit down to examine the Plan in the light of the interim report, to see what it has left, and what it can patch up? You think?

First, it sets up a meeting of business men (and a woman) to act as cheerleaders. These - unlike us - are the people whose opinion matters.

At the next Council meeting, it complains that the Examination in Public process is unfair, and that the Inspector is "Bristol-based" (Bristol being where the Planning Inspectorate, a Government Department, has it offices; you might equally complain of the Durham-based passport office...).

Unofficially, you can see the level of debate in this Twitter exchange between a County Councillor (and member of the Planning Committee) and some Durham City residents.

I am beyond angry.

There's a rather more entertaining tirade about planning in The Guardian, where Ian Martin lets rip about London - The city that privatised itself to death: "The utter capitulation of London’s planning system in the face of serious money is detectable right there in that infantile, random collection of improbable sex toys poking gormlessly into the privatised air. Public access? Yeah, we’ll definitely put a public park at the top (by appointment only). Oh, absolutely, we are ALL about community engagement: members of the public are welcome to visit our viewing gallery in the sky, that’ll be 30 quid, madam."

When I wrote about our day out in London, I said that our afternoon's walk needed a post of its own, with pictures. And now that I have sorted through the 108 photographs that I took in the course of that walk, I'm ready to write that post. Ready, too, after a dew days of snow and wind and rain, for a sunny afternoon's walk. ( Under a cut, because inordinately long, and many pictures. Not all 108 of them, but many... )

It is the winter solstice and we are in London, to celebrate it with the singing of carols.

We arrived on Thursday, in time for the Islington Folk Club Christmas party, which is a jolly affair, with music and sandwiches and fun amd games. The game in question is Pass the Parcel, and there are forfeits, one of which ended up with the whole company singing Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll to the tune of Adeste Fideles.

On Friday durham_rambler and I went to the William Morris exhibition at the Portrait Gallery, which was not quite what I had expected, but made more sense (I had wondered why it was at the NPG, because I had not realised how many portraits it included). Interesting, but I could have done with more depth. Afterwards we walked down to the river and along the South Bank, but that's a picture post in its own right. But one picture from Trafalgar Square:



London has come over all ecumenical, and in addition to the Norwegian Christmas tree, there is a giant menorah and a blue cockerel. Feel free to devise your own rituals involving these three items and as many pigeons as you please.

We are in Ely, with D. and valydiarosada. Despite the warnings of the weather forecast, we did not in fact have too hard a coming of it: we avoided the tailback at Catterick (emergency gas leak) by cutting through the town, the rain was squally and the wind was gusty, but the worst problem was traffic on the Lincoln ring road. And we arrived and were soothed with tea and warming stew and comparative malbec tasting (Mendoza good, Cahors better) and television. This morning D. gave us a brief introduction to Ely (the river, the self-illuminating sluice gate, the cathedral, the ducks), then we drove through the fens in watery sunshine for lunch at the Maid's Head (I recomend the sweet potato wedges, pity about the accompanying dip). I am writing this as the afternoon slips away, and valydiarosada is in the kitchen making apple pie to the accompaniment of carols from King's College.

I had expected to have written about our trip to London long before now: but I had expected to have done a number of things which somehow have remained undone. I had envisioned the days between our return from London and our departure for Ely as a little oasis of calm in which I could achieve a number of tasks in an orderly and unhurried manner: this did not happen. I know these are the shortest days, but they are supposed to have as many hours as other days - so where did they go?

Anyway, London: ( It's a big place, a long post and several pictures )

And on Monday, we returned home, and the rest you know. Except that on Saturday we had yet more seasonal music, this time from the Albion Christmas Band: we'd been uncertain about this, and maybe a little confused by a previous Sage concert from a second-generation Albion Band, but the Christmas Band turned out to be Ashley Hutchings, Simon Nicol, Kellie While and Simon Care - of whom Simon Care was the least familiar name, but the one whose CD we took home with us (having heard it playing during the interval). No reflection on the band, which provided a lively and various evening; we counted seven pieces we had sung the previous week, but in very different versions (the watchword appears to be 'boisterous', and I got the idea that the band felt there was something missing, and were trying to supply the stamping and ringing of the absent morris side). I'd happily go again next year.

Which brings me up to date, I think - Merry Christmas, everyone!