The concert included an excerpt from a Bach Partita, folk music from Bengal & Assam and then a couple of Amjad Ali Khan’s ragas, both of which arranged beautifully for violin and sarod.
To give you a feel for Jennifer Pike’s wonderful interpretation of a Bach Partita, here is an excerpt from her performing a different Partita:
To give you a feel for the brothers Amaan & Ayaan Ali Bangash playing together, here is a duet recorded a few years ago. No Jennifer Pike of course and a different tabla player – we saw Anubrata Chatterjee.
The music was beautiful, but I must admit that we struggled a little to understand the ancient and modern connections as explained. For example, the notion that the sarod pieces were basically in the Lydian mode, although I think that term could only apply perhaps to the tuning of the strings, not how the music is composed or played. We could however hear wonderful relationships between the instruments and the notion (explained in the notes) that underlying melodies in the ragas are utilised in similar fashion to cantus firmus styles in late medieval, Renaissance and even Baroque music made sense.
Anyway, it was all beautiful music, deployed in virtuoso fashion, leaving us thrilled with our night out at The Wig, as is so often the case.
Image bot DALL-E imagining ChatGPT writing a cricket match report with me
I thought it would be an interesting wheeze to collaborate with ChatGPT, the OpenAI chatbot on everyone’s lips, to see what would happen if I trained it to write a whimsical cricket match report for the King Cricket website. Just in case you don’t know, my nom de plume for such things is Ged Ladd.
I chose the first match of the 2023 cricket season at Lord’s, which will, as it happens, be a County Championship match between Middlesex & Essex.
I trained ChatGPT with three examples of my previously submitted King Cricket match reports, two of which were about similar visits to Lord’s with my friend Charles “Charley The Gent Malloy” Bartlett. (The third is as yet unpublished). For those who like to delve, here are links to the two Charley The Gent ones:
I then provided the following instruction set for a piece named “The First Day Of The Cricket Season”:
comedy, 300 words, on no account mention the cricket itself.
That last instruction is a King Cricket website rule – match reports for professional matches should not mention the cricket itself, whereas reports on our own amateur efforts are encouraged to go in to excruciating detail.
Predictably hilarious results followed. I allowed ChatGPT a few tries, the best of which King Cricket published:
Click through and form your own view on the extent to which ChatGPT is ready to take over from human writers like me. Bert, a regular comment-provider on the King Cricket website was in no doubt:
“…Well, that’s that. Time to pack up and go home. We, as a species, are now redundant, completely replaceable with AI bots.
It was all there. Ged’s sense of the moment, his use of pathos, and of course his acute sense of humour. There is literally no reason for him to exist anymore. No reason. Literally…
I’d be genuinely interested to know what people think about this. But, just in case you were worrying/wondering, I’m not ready to “throw in the towel” and/or “hang up my keyboard” just yet.
…this year’s Crisis at Christmas experience was an unmasked affair.
The “needs must” experiment of using hotels rather than colleges for the residential centres had proved so successful in 2021, Crisis decided to repeat that model in 2022.
Thus Ged and Daisy returned to the “secret location near Hyde Park” where we did our volunteering last year.
Rudolf spotted near that secret location near Hyde Park
A couple of days before our first shift, Daisy was excited to see our actual “secret location” on Breakfast TV:
ICYMI Charly and Matt talked to BBC Breakfast yesterday about why #CrisisAtChristmas is important for so many people and why our support is needed more than ever this year. pic.twitter.com/B63AgWiHrh
As in the past, we met some really interesting people over this period while doing our Crisis shifts – both guests and other volunteers.
Interesting characters, neither guests nor volunteers, seen near our location
This time, probably because we were returning to the same centre, we encountered several volunteers and team leaders that we had got to know the previous year, which was pleasing. Even more satisfying was the fact that we saw hardly any of the same faces among the guests, which hopefully helps to confirm the evidence that the majority of guests last year were helped back onto their feet.
Feeling Old – Feeling Useful!
When you get to our age, stuff happens that makes you realise how old you are. For example, the realisation that England cricket’s latest wunderkind, Rehan Ahmed, is younger than my cricket trousers, as reported recently on the King Cricket website:
But when volunteering at Crisis, sometimes our age comes in handy – especially as Daisy and I are as fit and able as most of the youngster volunteers.
On our first shift, Christmas Eve, a late arrival had possibly missed his slot and was at risk of being turned away. Our shift leader asked me and Daisy to look after him and keep him occupied while “Crisis central” tried to resolve the problem and find him a room.
An interesting character, we asked him a bit about his background. He told us he was born and raised in South-East London. Almost the same vintage as me. When I asked him where he went to school, he said, “oh, my school’s not there any more. I was a Billy Biro…”
…”oh yes, I know”, I said, “William Penn. I went to school around there too”.
We went on to discuss the relative merits of The Specials and UB40…the time flew by. He also took the opportunity to wipe the floor with me at chess. Twice. Bernard Rothbart would have been stunned – not so much at my rusty rubbish – but at how good this fella clearly was. Mr Rothbart would have approved of the matching up I did on subsequent shifts to help this guest and others who could play to get some good chess match-ups.
It’s not all serving food, chess and chewing the fat with guests
That “Billy Biro” was one of several really interesting characters we met this year. From some, we learnt how they had fallen on hard, crisis-ridden times. Some chose not to discuss such matters and left us wondering. In all cases, we just hoped that our small contribution would help them back on their feet.
Utilising Our Food Charity Skills
Daisy and I did dinner service a couple of times, utilising our FoodCycle skills, which we have been deploying on communal meals for the last 15 months, to good effect.
I particularly enjoyed getting the opportunity to do the washing up (yes really!) in a commercial hotel kitchen, never having had the opportunity to use machines and equipment on that scale before.
Dreaming of washing up
Some of the guests are overwhelmed by the experience of being in a hotel and being looked after by a team of kindly volunteers. One guest almost refused to let me take him to his table and serve him his food, because he felt that “wasn’t right”.
Some find it quite difficult to make a decision along the lines of “vegetarian or non-vegetarian pasta”, one guest seeming almost paralysed by indecision until I suggested that he might like a bit of both. “No thanks, I’ll have the meat please”.
It can be quite a leveller, though. When we were on the coffee stall, one particularly demanding guest came to me for a coffee three times during the 90 minutes or so we were on that duty and complained each time. The first time he complained about the coffee, the second time about the sugar and the third time about the angle from which I poured the milk (left-handed, from a full, large flagon, as I politely and smilingly pointed out). Another guest, when I asked him to repeat his order to be sure to make the coffee to his specification, told me off for not having listened properly the first time.
I was reminded of my father’s favourite put down, usually directed towards a politician of his loathing, that the person in question “couldn’t even run a coffee stall”. In less robust minds than mine and Daisy’s, the experience could induce a crisis of confidence.
But, joking apart, the experience is, on the whole, hugely rewarding and satisfying.
It won’t be the same secret location next year, but of course we plan to return to help Crisis next year; of course we do.
Postscript: Returning To Crisis Sooner Than We Expected
Actually we returned to do a couple of additional part-shifts during the final few days at that location. There were rail strikes on those days so we agreed to cover a few hours over the evening meal surge, utilising our FoodCycle skills.
We saw some of our volunteer colleagues from January last year whom we hadn’t seen earlier in the season, which was nice. It was also good to follow through with some of the guests towards the end of their stay.
The leveller motif was continued and even enhanced though, with one guest who seemed especially keen for me to serve him virtually clicking his fingers in my direction for “service”.
On the other side of that coin though, one guest with whom I had chatted several times over the weeks came up to me to shake my hand as he left after his last evening meal. One other regular, whom I had judged to be painfully shy, quietly said to me as he left the restaurant area on the last evening, “thank you for serving me”.
