But somewhat out of the blue, a few weeks ago, Teresa got in touch to say that she would be making a rare visit to London and the timings worked for her to visit Noddyland for tea.
How very civilised.
Janie went to work immediately on the matter of home baked cakes…
…she called Cafe 11 up the road and ordered a huge chunk of lemon cake and a huge chunk of pistachio cake.
Top method for ensuring that you offer the highest quality of baked cakes.
It was really lovely to see Teresa again, after all these years. There was a fair bit of catching up to do on where life had taken us all, but we were soon able to move on to trying to put the world to rights:
One afternoon wasn’t quite enough to solve all of the world’s problems
The afternoon whizzed by, then Teresa went off to have an early evening meet up with her son John. As Teresa said in her note this morning, which Janie and I echo:
I’m not entirely sure what motivated me to book Joe Lovano, as I was aware that he had some connections with that school but also with many other schools of jazz. I played a few snippets on YouTube and reckoned that Janie’s love of the saxophone would conquer all.
The first two or three minutes did not go well. In particular, Marilyn Crispell’s first few bars on the piano sounded really free, really free, really-really-really free, to me.
Were I a praying person, I would have been praying for the gig to warm up.
It did warm up.
I was more impressed by Carmen Castaldi on the drums than Janie was. He was assisted at times by Joe Lovano himself, who not only played the saxophone but also the gongs and a shaky-stick thing which defies description other than the term “shaky stick thing”. It might have been a cacho seedpod stick. I think that both of them also used some loose seedpods a few times. It all felt a bit experimental and “do what you like” at that end of the percussion section.
But heck, this trio is old enough and experienced enough to do what they like. I have said many times that Wigmore Hall is one of the few places left where stewards refer to us, without irony, as young man and young woman. But these days we rarely feel, as we did that evening, that we are youngsters next to all of the performers. No matter.
Here’s a little documentary released by ECM in 2019 when this trio started working together:
Here’s a recording of a whole live gig from 2022 in Luxembourg, some of which will sound much like the music we heard:
At the end of the evening we ran into John Thirlwell, one of my real tennis pals from Lord’s. Come to think of it, Lord’s is the only other place left, apart from Wigmore Hall, where we are still addressed by stewards as young man and young woman without irony.
Totally genuine picture taken on the night in question
I needed to get one more Ogblog piece in before the end of the 2023/24 tax year, obviously, so have chosen briefly to write up the Ivan Shakespeare Dinner which took place on 4 April 2024.
These gatherings of former NewsRevue writers (most of us relics from the 1990s) are a source of great joy. As Graham said at the end of the dinner,
I laugh far more at one of these evenings than I would if I paid to see almost any comedy show in town.
We’ve been enjoying these events for decades now – a couple of examples below:
John Random is our ringleader for these get togethers. In real life John might not be the most organised person I know, but oh boy is he better than all the rest of us put together in the matter of organising these gatherings.
As the years have gone on, it’s not just been Ivan we have been memorialising but several other “fallen” from our ranks. On this occasion, Barry brought a little memorial photograph tribute, which was lacking a picture of at least one of the fallen and which lacks room for any additional pictures. Either hope way in excess of expectation, or Barry plans to cram in some smaller pictures when the time comes.
John deferred on the quizzing this time, allowing Colin and Graham to confound us with some good quizzy offerings. Graham’s revolved around hit song lyrics, which he (and Sue) expected me to smash [did you see what I did there?] but I came up well short on that game, failing similarly on Colin’s quiz. I don’t think I am much of a solo quizzer to be honest. I work better as part of a team…
Anyway, Ivan Shakespeare dinners are not primarily about the quizzing, they are about mirth and convivial dining. I think I’m reasonably good at that.
Colin commented that we don’t often take pictures at these events, which I realised is true. The six of us who gathered this evening: Barry, Colin, Graham, John, Mark, and me – might never again comprise the exact group of an actual Ivan Shakespeare dinner. So obviously the event needed to be commemorated with a picture – see headline and below.
Proof…not that proof should be needed…that we are all absolutely fine.
There is no reason for anyone to question the veracity of this picture. My plea, should the gutter press start to delve deeply where they are not wanted, is to scream, “leave us alone FFS”.
…Janie needed surprisingly little persuading to do it again. We are not getting away much at all at the moment, not least because of “The Duchess’s” frailty, which makes this type of long weekend away…but not too far away…an attractive propsition.
This time I managed to secure us, via Airbnb, a cottage in Petworth itself, which proved a far easier and more attractive proposition than the “village nearby”, Fittleworth, last time, which required us to use the car and taxis a fair bit.
Before West Sussex, we first we went to Brighton and Hove for a bit of clothes shopping at Pendulum and then a visit to Cousin Sidney & Joan.
The weather was less than special on the Friday, but Dumbo was in fine form (i.e. the car worked properly this year) and we got to do the things we intended to do within the timescales we had intended them.
After checking in to our Airbnb cottage and resting up briefly, we returned to Basmati, where we had dined last year, for an Indian meal on that first night. It was a treat to only have to walk five minutes to get there. Indeed everywhere we went in Petworth we only had to walk five minutes to get there. It’s that kind of town.
Janie-style picture. I look like Clement Freud’s dog while Janie cunningly removes the worst excesses of my bald patch by cutting off the top of my head.
We probably slightly overdid the choosing of blander options at Basmati – I had forgotten that this is a place where they understand “not too hot” and can adapt accordingly. Still, a tasty meal.
On Saturday, we mostly relaxed in our lovely cottage.
In the morning the weather was bright but very cold. We used that as our opportunity to stroll the town, do a little shopping (Janie only bought one item in Tallulah Fox this time, which is a bit of a record), including some grub for smaller meals at The Hungry Guest and a wander around Petworth’s Saturday Farmers Market.
Choosing the morning for our wandering made sense as the heavens opened for most of the afternoon – really heavy, wet, cold rain. We enjoyed the snug warmth of our cottage.
Then the rains topped, allowing us a pleasant stroll to E.Street Restaurant for an excellent dinner.
Janie took an infeasibly large number of pictures of me eating there, which remind me of the pictures “The Duchess’s” carers take every day to prove that “her grace” is eating.
No-one really wants to see that.
Here, instead, is one the maître d’ took of us both.
It was an excellent meal.
On the Sunday, to Petworth House Real Tennis Court, where I met with triumph and disaster…and tried to treat those two impostors just the same.
Handshakes all round after the triumph of my first goPeter Brunner and I, showing stoic resolve to no avail in my second go
Lunch and chat after my second go, after which we watched and cheered Peter’s second go, which was the final rubber and a nail-biter, through which he and his partner prevailed, to level the fixture and enable all to go home satisfied.
In truth, the purpose of fixtures such as these Dedanist matches is more the social and fun of it than the result. Robert Muir and his wife, Carol, expertly organise such days to be maximally convivial; competitive only to the extent that we all have fun playing the game we love.
In the evening, tired but happy, Janie and I supped on some of the cheeses we had bought the previous day, before taking an early night.
Naturally, we celebrated the end of our long weekend on our return to London on the Monday with a game of lawn tennis at Boston Manor, as oft we do.
Michael is doing some scientific stuff as part of his Mayoral year, including a piece of work with the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) proving Einstein’s theory of time dilation by dint of measuring time at the top of the City of London’s tallest building (Horizon 22) and the NPL in Teddington.
Michael explained it in his inimitable style
I’ll let the propeller-headed NPL scientists explain it – click here.
The event on the evening of 15 March 2024 was an excuse for a drinks party to show off this experiment and more.
Janie came too and took loads of pictures.
Having dissed my Jackson Pollock tie at the Gresham do on the Monday, I wonder whether Bobbie would have approved of my Jackson Pollock shirt?The weighty blob experiment confounds everyone, apparently.Janie really liked the views.Several Z/Yenistas and their friends/partners
It was a jolly evening. The time flew by, which is surely what Einstein would have predicted.
My research into tennis history has broadened and deepened since the summer of 2020. This week (mid-March 2024) I was burrowing through some old books in the MCC library, like I do, when I discovered an extract from and reference to an article in The Observer, in 1920, by A.E. Crawley, on this very topic.
The content and conclusions were remarkably similar to those I formed myself, over 100 years later.
Being a subscriber to Newspapers.com, I knew that I should be able to find and clip that article easily enough – indeed here it is:
I don’t know whether to be delighted that I reached very similar conclusions without standing on the shoulders of such a giant…or to be irritated that I did all of that research only to reach conclusions that had pretty much been reached 100 years ago. Mostly the former, especially as I enjoyed the journey so much.
The residual irritation is that the Wikipedia entry on this topic persists with the temporally nonsensical theories around floor markings (never standardised) and clock faces (unknown until long after the emergence of the tennis scoring system).
Someone needs to get busy on that Wikipedia page. I might ask Ged look at it if no-one else picks up on this in the coming weeks.
Parenthetically, it seems to me that A.E. Crawley had a particular reason to raise this topic in The Observer in January 1920. Here, his piece from the same newspaper in February 1920 about a “Bolshevik” move by the US lawn tennis authorities to replace the use of fifteens with single unit scoring:
“I’ay tant joué avecques Aage A la paulme que maintenant J’ay quarante cinq; sur bon gage Nous jouons, non pas por neant. Assez me sens fort et puissant De garder mon jeu jusqu’a cy, Ne je ne crains riens que Soussy.”
“Please, we’re desperate…” I get so many telephone calls that start this way these days.
OK, so I have made that first bit up, but I did get a somewhat surprising phone call from Tim Connell a few weeks earlier, wondering whether I might like to be the “guest” speaker for the Gresham Society annual bash this year.
“Keep it to 10 minutes”, said Tim, a man who claims to bring the AGM business bit of the evening home in five to seven minutes, but pretty much never does.
This year the AGM bit ran to over 18 minutes. I know, because I set off my stopwatch at the start of the meeting.
Anyway, it is always good to see the Gresham Society gang and this year we were in the hallowed surroundings of the Guildhall, albeit the modern members wing. The last time I dined in that part of the Guildhall, after the meal, I started a brawl…
…all of which made this Gresham Society event feel like a doddle by way of comparison. After all, I wasn’t required to sing or play a musical instrument – indeed Tim stipulated that I was required NOT to set my talk to music.
Joking apart, it was a great pleasure to meet Melissa – indeed the company was all relaxed, interesting and convivial, as always at Gresham Society.
There were one or two false starts ahead of my talk, to ensure that all had their after dinner beverages and that temporarily absent friends were all accounted for.
Fortunately for all concerned, when I speak for “no more than 10 minutes” the resulting talk comes in at eight or nine minutes…
…although I started with my old “I thought I’d been asked to talk for 89 minutes” gag.
AI is now capable of reading the charred remains of scrolls found near Pompeii. but apparently my handwriting is beyond the capability of any artificial intelligence yet developed or even imagined.
Anyway, above is an image of part of the talk, which was primarily about The Right Honourable, The Lord Mayor, Alderman Professor Mainelli, who might or might not be the first ever Gresham Professor to become Lord Mayor but he sure as hell is the first ever member of Gresham Society so to do and I can safely say the only business partner of mine who will ever do the Lord Mayor gig. Michael and I have worked together since we met in 1988
The audience laughed a good few times during my talk…one or two of those occasions being at times that I hoped would engender laughter. At the end of the talk, once the stony silence…I mean applause…had died down, Tim Connell presented me with a book as a gift.
One of the book’s authors, Graham Greenglass, I have known since I was a kid, through youth club stuff. I must have met Graham 10 years before I met Michael.
Good book, that Guildhall book of Graham’s. I have been enjoying rummaging in it.
Just as we were leaving the event, Bobbie Scully (another person I have known significantly longer than I have known Michael Mainelli) berated me for wearing a Jackson Pollock tie with a striped shirt. I wonder what she would have made of the Jackson Pollock shirt I wore a few days later:
At Horizon 22 a few days later
It was, as always, a most pleasant evening in the company of friends at Gresham Society.
It is a simple story about a trio of 50-something fellas who were a band when they were college age, returning to the scene of their exploits in Ibiza 30 years later.
Neil D’Souza not only wrote the play but also plays one of the lead parts, very convincingly – actually all of the actors do so: Catrin Aaron, Kerry Bennett, Peter Bramhill and James Hillier being the other four. Alice Hamilton does a grand job from the director’s chair.
The play is a comedy but it has a thoughtful and edgy twist to it too. In particular, the second half starts off full of fun and laughs, but soon “bloke meets woke” in a rather shocking way, changing the tone and bringing the story home in a nuanced way.
We really like comedies that have enough going on that we still have stuff to talk about over a meal or two afterwards. This is one of those.
…Rohan decided to try the National Theatre foyer bars as a venue this time around – cunningly timed with two quite long plays at the Olivier and Lyttelton both starting at 19:30. That gave us ample time to perform in the relative quiet between the start of the plays and the intervals.
The relative quiet was rather noisily broken by the bar staff hoovering up around us, very early in the reading of Geraldine’s piece, but we’ll put that temporary disturbance aside. The venue worked.
And we can all honestly claim now that we have performed at The National Theatre.
Rohan threaded our pieces together, as is his way. In this instance, with the topic “The Phone Call”, Rohan’s thread covered Alexander Graham Bell‘s innovation, the practical telephone. Also the contribution of the lesser known but colourful Florentine, Antonio Meucci, who largely invented that communication method before Bell, but was too polite to patent the critically novel elements of the technology he had discovered.
Geraldine’s piece came first. A charming throwback to 1973, Geraldine recounted her mother’s almost infeasibly regular long-distance calls to Geraldine (who had escaped to New York). Geraldine’s mum persistently tried, in vain, to persuade her daughter to return to “Hicksville” and resume the “normal” life into which Geraldine had, to her mother’s perception, been born.
Rohan then reminded us all that Alexander Graham Bell’s first phone call was to an employee who awaited his call…
Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you
…starting the mighty tradition of bosses using such devices to issue instructions to underlings.
Rohan was rather sniffy about my ability to follow a simple instruction – i.e. to write a story about a phone call. I cannot imagine what Rohan’s beef might have been.
The Phone Call by Ian Harris
We don’t go out so much anymore. Not since the pandemic. It’s not a fear of infection or anything like that. It’s just that we have got out of the habit. It now takes something especially interesting or unusual to lure us back to the theatre or concert hall.
One such interesting concert caught our eyes recently – a concert of African chamber music at the Wigmore Hall, led by Tunde Jegede, who is both a virtuoso kora player and a classically-trained cellist. The kora is a large West-African 21-stringed plucking instrument, sometimes described as a cross between a lute and a harp.
Janie and I like the Wigmore Hall. It is one of the few remaining public spaces where we still normally bring down the average age of the audience quite significantly. But we soon saw, on arrival at the Wigmore Hall for the kora concert, that this audience was different. Only sparsely populated with “the usual suspects”, the average age of the audience was, horror of horrors, below ours.
The front row still had a comfortingly senior look. Next to Janie was a beaming, white-haired woman you might have got from central casting had you requested “a left-over hippy”. The woman was very friendly and chatty – clearly not part of the regular front row mafia. Familiar with the kora – she had spent time in West Africa when younger – she was a fan of Tunde Jegede’s playing but had not previously managed to see him play live. She was, as the young folk say, super-excited.
The first half of the concert was truly magical. Tunde had brought with him a posse of chamber musicians from Lagos, together with a wonderful percussionist. We were transported by the music, not least the entrancing sound of Tunde’s kora-playing.
During the interval, our friendly neighbour said that she was delighted with the live music experience and thrilled that we had enjoyed it. She recommended and wrote down the names of a couple of Tunde’s albums for us to follow up, which we did.
I wondered what those silky-sounding kora strings are made of. Our otherwise-expert neighbour didn’t know. More or less at that moment, Tunde came on to the stage to rearrange the setting for the second half of the concert. As he was standing, with his kora, about three yards away from me, it seemed only polite to ask him about the strings.
I was expecting the answer to be something along the lines of, “skin from an antelope’s anus or a sitatunga’s scrotum“. But instead, Tunde simply said, “Nylon”. “Just Nylon”, I asked, hoping for more enlightenment. “Just Nylon”, said Tunde, gently.
The second half of the concert was also good but less to our taste. Tunde didn’t play his kora – instead he demonstrated his skills as a cellist. The fusion theme was retained, as the pieces were arrangements of traditional African music, but to us the real magic had been the kora.
I tried to work out the common theme in Tunde’s unusual choice of devices for his multi-instrumentalism. I concluded that Tunde likes making music while holding his instrument between his legs.
525 WORDS
I smiled to myself as I hit the save button and e-mailed my piece to Rohan Candappa for review.
Ninety minutes later, my iPhone buzzed.
It was Rohan.
“Ian, old chap”, said Rohan. “A charming vignette, but it has nothing to do with the subject and title – The Phone Call”.
“I beg to differ”, I said. “The piece is absolutely about The Phone Call”. The introductory story about the kora concert is a MacGuffin. The main story is about the phone call.
“Well”, said Rohan, “I did consider e-mailing you, but then…”
“…never explain”, I interrupted. “You and I have collaborated on and off for over 50 years now, Rohan. Many things don’t need to be said.”
It seemed that everyone else was able to understand and obey a simple instruction from Rohan…even Jan.
Strangely, Jan, like Geraldine, had set her story in 1973. Without conferring. The central conceit of Jan’s story, which revolved around an uprooted little girl whose family had recently moved to a different town, was a troubling phone call aimed at one or both parents, inadvertently picked up by the little girl.
Similarly strange was the structural similarity between Jan’s and Julie’s story, which was also about a troubling phone call picked up by someone other than the intended recipient of the call. Julie’s was not set in a particular bygone year, but the details within the story suggested 1970s as well.
David’s story was about a character who bought a vintage GPO rotary telephone through the internet and, as a result, got a phone call more than he had bargained for.
All of The Phone Call stories were charming, thought-provoking and enjoyable to hear. It was also very pleasing to spend time with the ThreadMash gang again, even though we were a somewhat depleted group on this occasion.
Sadly, Kay, who was going to join us, was unable to attend due to the recent death of her mother. Yet Kay made a charming contribution to the collection of stories by e-mail a couple of days later:
“Here is my belated contribution to “The Call”. In the endless process of clearing out my mum’s house, we found the tin in which I used to save my phone money when I was a kid. Like many others, I was expected to pay for my calls!”
They say a picture is worth a thousand words and my goodness that picture of Kay’s is worth at least that many. But Rohan had instructed us to limit our stories to a maximum of 800 words. Honestly, some people can’t comply with the simplest of instructions from the ThreadMaster.
There’s something gloriously quaint about the Finborough Theatre. Even by the standards of pub theatres, it seems gloriously wedded to the past.
In part, that’s because The Finborough is, at least at present, a few rooms above a corner building that used to be a pub, rather than an actual functioning pub.
But also, it is the sort of place that clings to its roots, even in the matter of archaic ticketing practices. These days we receive, when booking The Finborough, a very modern style e-mail ticketing with a QR code for each e-ticket. On arrival at The Finborough, though, the ticket office still asks for your name and digs out the old-style paper tickets, just like the old days.
Don’t you have a gadget that goes beep and reads our e-tickets?
I asked the nice young woman on the desk.
Do we look like the sort of place that has a gadget that goes beep to read tickets?
She asked in repsonse.
Not really. Except that you did send us -tickets with QR codes on them.
I persisted.
We have no idea why they do that.
The nice young woman thus closed that discussion.
Anyway…
…the reason we go to the Finborough is not to admire the ticketing system. We tend to see consistently good small-scale theatre there.
Jab was no exception. A very good two-hander set during the Covid-19 pandemic, about a marriage that disintegrates during the crisis…although you sense that the marriage had been doing a fair bit of disintegrating prior to the pandemic.
Very well acted and directed. Kacey Ainsworth, Liam Tobin & Scott Le Crass take a bow…well, the first two named actually did.
Just 80 minutes long, if you like your shows two hours plus this type of play is not for you. Janie and I have really acquired the taste for shorter plays. Never mind the young folk having short attention spans, we older folk have short buttocks-stuck-in-one-small-space spans these days.
We went home thoroughly satisfied, theatre-wise. After collecting and then, once home, eating our Mohsen dinner, our appetites for food were also thoroughly satisfied.
