(Most of ) September round-up

With the intention of going to more constructive and highbrow events, I bought a ticket for the National Secular Society’s ‘Secularism 2016’ conference on the first Saturday of this month. Due to early morning rail chaos – arrived at Reading station to find all trains to Paddington cancelled due to some sort of signalling problem – I arrived in London much later than I’d intended due to having to take the South West Trains service to Waterloo instead, which takes almost three times as long due to meandering through most of Surrey and south-west London. Resigned myself to missing the morning sessions – though frankly I probably could have made them if I’d made sufficient effort – I walked up from Waterloo to the conference venue, via a visit to the Early Music Shop, which I’d identified from an internet search on the train as selling recorders and recorder music. Have recently decided to take up the recorder, as I have a bit of a yen to play a musical instrument again – I played recorder a bit as a child and teenager but was only ever self-taught, but have vague ambitions this time of finding a teacher and taking some ABRSM grade exams. We’ll see if that comes off.

The Early Music Shop is a charming place on Denmark Street, just off Charing Cross Road. The shop is on the first floor and you have to ring a bell to be let in. Denmark Street has a number of music shops but early musical instruments are evidently a bit of a niche interest – most music shops give over the bulk of their space to guitars and keyboards. The EMS was crammed with recorders and other old-style instruments, along with masses of sheet music. I bought a book of recorder music aimed at Grades 1-2, plus a new brush. Have since bought myself a brand new descant, an Aulos 205, purchased, I’m ashamed to say, not from the EMS but from Amazon. Here it is on the right next to my old cream Hohner recorder. The tone of the Aulos is indeed nicer so hopefully it will be fun to play.

After leaving the Early Music Shop I walked up to the conference venue, the Royal National Hotel in Bloomsbury. The hotel is a fairly dispiriting building on Bedford Way with a central courtyard and various cafes and restaurants adjoining. Pic nicked from TripAdvisor.

I registered for the conference and took a seat in time to hear the keynote speaker, one Jacques Berlinerblau, giving a talk called ‘How to be Secular’ (he has apparently written a book of the same name). Berlinerblau, an American academic, talked mainly about the state of secularism in the US, including how secularism is hampered in the US by being synonymous in many people’s minds with atheism (it’s probably hampered fairly similarly in the UK). He discussed the ambiguity in the US constitution re the separation of church and state, and showed [then Senator] John F Kennedy’s 1960 address in which he argued that the separation of church and state should be absolute (though JFK was admittedly coming from the perspective of being a Roman Catholic hoping to be elected president, so was presumably influenced by a – reasonable enough - desire for his religion to be considered irrelevant to his presidency) and that “no church or church school [should be] granted any public funds or political preference”. Sad that that democratic hope is a long way from being true in the UK – I’m not sure about the US as I’m reasonably sure Berlinerblau noted that state-funded faith schools are in fact illegal in the States. Berlinerblau said a good deal of common sense stuff about picking battles, noting as an example the pragmatic impossibility of removing “In God We Trust” from the US dollar bill.

After the keynote there was a tea break, during which I rather shamefully decided I’d had enough and went for a cup of tea and a KitKat in the neighbouring Blooms Pizza Café before getting a bus back to Paddington (signalling problem now thankfully solved). Must build up more stamina.

The following afternoon Ruth and I went over to Arborfield for Ruth’s niece Emily’s first birthday tea. Emily is now an adorable little blonde munchkin of a child and much time was spent watching her play with her presents, crawl under tables etc. She had a chocolate birthday cake in the shape of a hedgehog.

Emily pointing at her cake

Persuaded Ruth up to MK again for the weekend of 10th/11th. On the Friday evening we booked dinner at Buskers again, where the musician of the night was the lovely Jausme, playing an instrument new to me called the Kankles. She was accompanied by a cellist, which proved a very evocative combination – much of Jausme’s music is apparently influenced by the forests of her native Lithuania. Here’s a clip of somebody playing one. The food, as before at Buskers, was less memorable than the music, but it was nice enough – I quite enjoyed the Moroccan lamb dish I had though Ruth complained her chicken breast was dry.

The music shop portion of Buskers seems to be becoming ever smaller to allow for the expansion of the café/restaurant function – so I hope it remains in some capacity as that was surely part of the original point.

I continued the musical theme on the Saturday night by booking us in to an event at St Mary & St Giles Church in Stony Stratford that formed part of the Willis Pipe Organ Festival being held over that weekend. The event, the 'Saturday Night Silent Movie', featured organist Donald MacKenzie improvising (apparently) a live soundtrack to the 1923 Harold Lloyd (silent) film Safety Last! (I didn’t particularly recognize the film from the name, but it’s the one where he dangles off a clock face.)

MacKenzie apparently specializes in the art of improvised accompaniments to silent films – something of a niche specialism. The organ is not my favourite instrument – perhaps too associated with church – and I probably wouldn’t attend an evening of pure organ music, but had been amused by the prospect of the organ/silent movie combo. In the event MacKenzie played a few solo pieces before the interval, which I sat through politely, and after the interval we watched the movie. The accompaniment was certainly pretty good, in that after a while I forgot it wasn’t part of the film’s soundtrack. The film was entertaining enough, though the latter part, where Lloyd’s character scales the front of a building, I found more tense than funny. It was very well done though.

The booklet we got on entry has endless text about the organ restoration funding, so obviously a big thing for the church.

The following weekend we went up to Open House London on the Saturday. This year I had managed to install the very useful, albeit not free, app in advance, and we had idly flicked through the guide – Ruth had marked a few places in Ealing, I think just because it came early in the alphabetical list of London boroughs, and as I’d never been to Ealing we decided to go there, and agreed that it would be sensible to visit several places within easy reach of each other.

Bluebell House

Ruth vetoed getting a stopper from Reading to Ealing Broadway on the grounds that it would be quicker to get a fast train into Paddington and then get the tube out to Ealing. It wasn’t. However, we did finally arrive, and walked through pleasant streets to the first property we’d selected, Bluebell House on Waldemar Avenue. BH is a gorgeous self-build in what was formerly the garden of the large Edwardian house the owners previously lived in. Evidently the large old house was becoming too much for them but they didn’t want to move away from Ealing, so sold off the house and a portion of the garden and built their own place. Fabulous idea. I tried to abstract away from how well off they must be, as they seemed a very pleasant older couple, despite the husband being so posh he pronounced “off” as “orf”. I was impressed at the trouble they’d taken to work around the mature trees already in their garden, even where this placed restrictions on the new house. The name apparently comes from the bluebells formerly in the garden that were evidently re-planted on the roof of the house, though the owner did confess that only a small patch had survived.

Heath Lodge

After leaving Bluebell House, we walked a bit of a way to Heath Lodge, a stunning development of modern terraced houses. They’re larger than they look in the street level photo, as you go in and then downstairs to the kitchen and living area, and a small courtyard back garden.

After leaving Heath Lodge, we decided that we fancied lunch and established that we were in Hanwell. At first glance, Hanwell appears something of an armpit of a place: after walking along what appeared to be the main high street area along the Uxbridge Road and not seeing anywhere we particularly fancied eating lunch, we turned left into Boston Road past some drunks and walked along that. I had just suggested locating the nearest bus stop and getting a bus to frankly anywhere else, when we stumbled across the W7 Emporium, which looked more our sort of place. Indeed it was, though it was fairly busy so we were obliged to brave the outdoor space – luckily the rain held off.

After lunch, we took a somewhat lengthy bus journey back east to White City to see the Sustainable Drainage Scheme (SuDS) at Bridget Joyce Square. This sort of thing is more Ruth’s cup of tea than mine though I do of course think it’s all a very good thing. The scheme is right in the middle of the 1930s White City Estate – we both wandered in thinking we were looking for the entrance to some sort of treatment plant, and stood for a while in front of a primary school in a pedestrianised open space with some pleasant planting, before being accosted by an enthusiastic chap asking if we were there for the Open House. As he started talking we realized we were in fact standing in the middle of the scheme. The chap talking to us had evidently been one of the team involved in the design, and his story of how the scheme was thought through was quite interesting, including how it had to have some discernible benefits to the local community through the creation of an ‘urban public park’. We walked the ‘wiggly wall’ on our way out – well, you have to.

Felt distinctly sorry for the Open House volunteer on duty at Bridget Joyce Square: it wasn't a particularly warm day, the school was apparently unexpectedly locked and visitors had not evidently been too plentiful, so he must have had a bit of a thin time standing around for much of the day.

Temple Lock

Went over to Marlow on the Sunday for a walk with Ray. At his suggestion we took the train over, for a novelty; I hadn’t taken the branch line to Marlow from Maidenhead for some years. Ray tried to look as we were leaving Maidenhead for signs of the former Maidenhead Boyne Hill station, but we couldn’t see any. After arriving in Marlow we walked to the high street, crossed over and walked through Court Gardens to the river path. Walked along as far as Temple Lock, where we sat for a while, before taking the path away from the river past Lowgrounds Farm and the Harleyford Estate, where Ray used to work and where I lived with him for a time in the mid-1990s. While walking up Harleyford Lane we were passed by Craig, now the head greenkeeper at the golf club, who stopped for a chat with Ray. We walked back into Marlow and had another nice lunch at The Botanist.

Since our visit to Marlow, some idiot in a 30-tonne truck seems to have knackered the historic suspension bridge, which has a 3-tonne weight limit.

Very pleased to manage to make a Book Group meeting at Ali’s on Thursday 22nd, as I’d booked leave the following day to attend an appointment locally (see next paragraph). Ali spoke eloquently about the book, Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border, which seems very well written though I haven’t yet quite finished it. Caught up with the other Claire, who is due to give birth to her first child in November.

Ruth and I reported to the Henley offices of The Head Partnership on the Friday morning to meet one of their solicitors to start setting up our wills. We’d been putting this off for some time, partly through concern that it might lead to an enormous row, but actually we’ve so far got through the process quite civilly. The meeting was quite informative, and we managed to fit in some discussion of the amendments we want to our Deed of Trust on the house. After the meeting we went to the River and Rowing Museum café – now called The Quince Tree – for lunch.

To finish: Runderwear. I keep seeing ads for this on Facebook. I rarely if ever run, though I work with people who do.