Everything that needs to be said about that day, and more, is covered in that piece.
Middlesex CCC AGM 17 May
I was there. I played real tennis at Lord’s beforehand and then hung around for a bit ahead of the AGM. It was a meeting with drinks afterwards.
Middlesex v Durham 19 & 20 May
I barely saw any cricket before and after playing tennis on 19th, but I did see a bit.
The plan had been to take Fran & Simon as guests on 20th, but the weather was decidedly iffy, so we delayed that visit until July. Instead, I got stuff done at the flat in the morning and sauntered over to Lord’s to watch a few hours play as the weather cleared in the afternoon.
Before setting off I got a message from Madz, who is now part-timing as a photographer for Durham CCC, wondering whether I planned to be at the game that afternoon.
We agreed to meet beneath Old Father Time, her favourite vantage point for the photos. Also the favourite vantage point for travelling Durham supporters, who were, by the time I got there, making serious headway with their preferred brews. I’m not certain that they were all drinking Newkie Brown, but it felt and sounded like that sort of crowd.
It was good to catch up with Madz.
At one point, the soon-to-be-new-England-wunderkind Matty Potts came on as 12th man for Durham (being rested ahead of the test match) and fielded for a few balls in front of our stand.
I caught this picture on my smart phone as he came our way:
Matty Potts A Few Days Before Stardom
I was pleased with that photo. Madz wondered whether she could have done better with her Nikon and infeasibly long lens.
Did you get one of those, pet?
…asked one of the Durham stalwarts, as a few of them took a passing interest in my snap.
I missed it, unfortunately,
said Madz.
You’re only here for one thing, pet,
said the stalwart, inducing much laughter from the Durham crowd and also from Madz, who clearly knows those fellas well enough and was able to enjoy the joke.
I sent the snap to King Cricket, who agreed that it was the best picture of Matty Potts he’d seen so far and wondered if he might use it, which of course I said he could and he did on 1 June (naturally crediting me…i.e. Ged Ladd) and also 2 June:
But it turned out that one of Janie’s cohort, Sini Simonen, is not only a good Samaritan but also a virtuoso violinist. When Sini let it slip that she and her quartet, The Castalian String Quartet, were due to appear at the Wigmore Hall in a few month’s time, Janie and I agreed that, if we were available that day, we would go.
The links in the above piece to the exploits of my mother’s cousin Sid, not least his virtuoso playing of both violin and hand saw, are worth the price of admission alone. OK, there is no price of admission, but the stories are priceless.
…the Wigmore Hall concert on 1 May 2022 was an all Mendelssohn string quartet affair, but with a twist: we first heard Fanny Mendelssohn’s sole String Quartet, followed by Felix Mendelssohn’s 6th String Quartet.
Both were a very enjoyable listen – Fanny’s piece much lighter and easier on the Sunday morning ear than Felix’s. Felix was in sombre mood when he wrote his 6th, dedicated to his recently deceased and beloved sister Fanny – possibly also anticipating his own impending doom – he died soon after completing the work.
Impending doom? Felix portrait c1846
The concert was very well patronised – if not a complete sell out then surely the place was near to full. The performances were, deservedly, extremely well received by the Sunday morning audience.
Janie and I asked the elderly gentleman sitting next to us if he had enjoyed the concert.
Yes indeed. I prefer Fanny.
On balance, so did Janie and I.
Sini had said to Janie several times that we simply must show our faces in the Green Room after the concert, so it would have been rude to partake of the traditional Wigmore Hall sherry rather than visit the artistes in that hallowed room.
There were plenty of other groupies around in The Jessye Norman Room, but Sini greeted us warmly and we chatted for a while.
Before setting off for The Wig, I had discovered that the Castalian String Quartet had released an album this week, Between Two Worlds On Delphian…
I also couldn’t help but notice that the album includes a couple of arrangements of Renaissance pieces – one by Orlande de Lassus and one by John Dowland, as well as a Beethoven late Quartet and a modern quartet by Thomas Adès.
Sini, with characteristic modesty, mentioned in passing that she has arranged the Renaissance pieces as an experiment. She also kindly pressed a copy of the Between Two Worlds CD into my hand as we said goodbye to her.
Following an enjoyable stroll around Fitzrovia and Marylebone, Janie and I listened to the album as soon as we got home. We can both thoroughly recommend it; in particular the beautiful sound of the Renaissance piece arrangements. Choral works of that era were often arranged for consorts of viols, of course; the string quartet being the direct progeny of the viol quartet.
It was an enjoyable day and such a fitting way to remember my mum’s 100th anniversary.
But there was one more coincidence to come – as I read the programme notes to the Between two Worlds album. The viola player on the album was not Ruth Gibson (whom we saw at Wigmore Hall) but Charlotte Bonneton. Wasn’t Charlotte Bonneton the young musician mum and I saw along with Karim Said that very last time mum went to a concert?
Yes indeed – it turns out Charlotte was The Castalian String Quartet’s viola player until quite recently – for some 10 years – perhaps already with the group when we saw her perform with Karim Said in September 2011. Perhaps Sini and/or some of the other Castalians were even there to support Charlotte that day.
I know the classical music world isn’t big – but it isn’t that small either.
Most people who know me and knew my parents thought that Peter Harris was my father. People who knew him better might have known that he was Peter Isidore Harris and/or that his first given name was Isidore – Peter came later. A handful of family members would be aware that the family on arrival in England were named Russinov, that my grandfather was known as Harris Russinov and that dad’s name on his 1919 birth certificate was Isidore Russinov.
Isidore, Anne & Michael Russinov, c1925
But it turns out that my father was actually some bloke named Teodoro Rossiter.
…I thought I should learn from Ron’s superb research into my mother’s family and do a similar dig into my father’s family. After all, research is a significant part of what I do for a living and Ron’s example had been very instructive as well as informative.
The central learning point from Ron’s research is that the recent on-line publication of the 1921 census opens up a new trove of information – probably the last such “big reveal” trove that will occur in my lifetime.
I thought it would be easy for me to find a family named Russinov in London in the 1921 census search engine…
…but absolutely nothing came up. I tried all the tricks I know to vary the spelling, allow the machine to approximate the spelling, look beyond London just in case they were away from London at the time…
…nothing.
I even tried Harris. Lots of other Harris families but definitely not mine.
Peter Harris in 2005. Were there secrets behind that smile?
I knew the family was in Fitzrovia (the south-eastern quarter of Marylebone) at that time and I even had a relic from the 1920s – a business certificate allowing the family to trade under the name Harris – which had at one time adorned the certificate wall of the Z/Yen office but was latterly in storage. I was pretty sure that 1920s certificate had an address on it.
Unfortunately, the certificate – which is for sure somewhere in Z/Yen’s secure storage dungeon – is being stored very securely indeed. It wasn’t where we thought it would be and 30 minutes of further searching in the dungeon convinced us that it must have been filed quite deeply – no doubt to be found when searching for something completely different.
I all but gave up on the idea of finding my paternal family in the 1921 census.
But I’m a tenacious sort of chap and was pondering the matter quite a bit. Then at the weekend a thought dawned on me. The granting of business certificates, at that time – indeed deep into the 20th century- often needed to be announced in a gazette. Such announcements naturally included the address.
So rather than search genealogy sites in vain, I searched my Newspapers.com subscription with my grandfather’s name instead. Instant pay dirt:
The Marylebone Mercury and West London Gazette on 3 Jan 1925
Interesting law, Section 7 of the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act 1919, requiring migrants to seek permission (at significant expense) to use an English-sounding rather than their natural-born alien name for their business.
Interesting street, Upper Marylebone Street. It subsequently became the eastern end of New Cavendish Street and was confusingly renumbered. Before my family’s time, Thomas Paine wrote The Rights Of Man at No 7. No 7 Upper Marylebone Street was a well-known hang out for radicals, writers and radical writers.
…locates Paine’s (now defunct) building, No 7 Upper Marylebone Street, on the site of 148 New Cavendish Street and No 4 – my Grandfather’s place – in a still-existing Georgian terraced house – now numbered 154 New Cavendish Street:
I’d found the family house from 1925 but had I found my family there in 1921? The transcription at first glance did not look promising:
But on reflection, this was unmistakably my family. Grandpa Harris, already 39 years old. Grandma Anne (Annie) much younger, 30. Uncle Alec, 13 at census time. Uncle Manny, just 10. Uncle Michael, a new born babe. Indeed, had it not been for the industrial action that delayed the 1921 census by several months, Uncle Michael might have missed it by a few days.
And there was dad, under the name Teodoro Rossiter.
No-one had even mentioned to me the use of the name Rossiter as an early anglicisation of the family name. As for Teodoro, it is a charming name, but hardly an anglicisation or simplification of the name Isidore.
This made no sense.
I decided to invest in a scan of the original document. It set me back the princely sum of £1.75 (a half-price special offer that weekend – who could resist such a good value deal? Dad would have approved and possibly even would have bought two copies to celebrate his bargain.)
Now I’m not qualified to opine upon or judge handwriting – Ogblog readers who are crazy enough to examine my hand-written diary entries can attest – but I think the hand-writing on the original census document is mighty fine and I think my dad’s entry very clearly says Isodore (admittedly not Isidore) Russinov and all of the “Rossiter family” (as transcribed) are written extremely clearly as “Russinov”.
I award myself 9 out of 10 for detective work and I award the transcriber 1 out of 10 for the transcription of my dad’s name…awarding 1 only because I don’t do 0 out of 10.
When I talked this through with Janie, she wondered whether this might mean that I could be related to Leonard Rossiter, the wonderful (deceased) comedy actor.
Used under fair use rationale to depict Leonard Rossiter in this article. To be clear, the transcription error of the family name “Russinov” to “Rossiter” does not in any way indicate that I, or any other member of the Harris/Russinov family, is related to Leonard, or indeed any other, Rossiter. In short, I didn’t get where I am today by being related to Leonard Rossiter.
I explained to Janie that transcription errors, much like noms de plume, don’t tend to have relatives.
My dad has had an unfortunate record of transcription errors with his records. In the late 1980s, when dad was around or approaching 70, he received a letter from the NHS addressed to Isadora Harris inviting “him” to have a cervical smear test. There must have been SO much wrong with the NHS record that led to that mistake.
Indeed, dad seems so prone to nominative transcription errors, I considered titling this piece “My Trans Dad”, but decided against on balance.
More seriously, I did of course find out some interesting facts about my family history.
I had always suspected that Grandpa Harris probably hailed from Vilnius, as I was aware that he had journeyed into the Belorussian part of the Pale of Settlement where he met and initially settled with my then very young Grandma Anne. But I was also aware that Uncle Manny had been born in Vilnius and had guessed that the family had probably returned to Grandpa Harris’s home place before migrating.
Vilnius in 1915
Grandma Anne stated in the census that she (and Uncle Alec) were born in Igumen, which is a Belarussian town now known as Chervyen. Trigger warning – it was the scene of multiple atrocities during the 1940s – don’t click the preceding link if you’d rather not know the details. It is about 70 km south-east of Minsk – about an hour’s drive today.
The family came a long way in a short space of time, from shtetl life in Igumen and Vilnius, to London life in Marylebone…
…but then the name Teodoro Rossiter is a long way from Isodore Russinov or Peter Harris.
This was our first concert experience of live music since before the start of the Covid pandemic.
There’s nothing like a bit of “Lamentations of Jeremiah” and “Stabat Mater” to cheer us up in a time of pandemic and war.
Actually Janie and I are big fans of The Cardinall’s Musick. Also, we thought that one hour concerts would be a good way of getting back on the bike in terms of concert going – this is the first of a few we are going to see this spring season.
Mostly familiar stuff, such as Byrd, Victoria, Tallis and Palestrina, plus some rarer material such as the Lamentations of Jeremiah by Gerónimo Gonzales – a composer so obscure that even Andrew Carwood couldn’t find him in the Grove or on Wikipedia.
But that just means that Andrew didn’t look hard enough – there are about 100 listings for Gerónimo Gonzales on Facebook. Our 17th century composer geezer is bound to be one of those – no?
The concert was broadcast on Radio 3 as a lunchtime concert and also was streamed, so you can watch it all on Vimeo if you wish – embedded below.
https://vimeo.com/696602289
You can even, if you look very closely indeed, grab a glimpse of Ged & Daisy at the very front on the right hand side – my bald patch glistening next to Daisy’s mop of reddish hair.
We enjoyed a snack lunch at Euphorium in St Christopher’s Place, then went back to the flat for a while before venturing into Piccadilly/St James’s to Boodle’s.
Last year I gave an on-line talk for that club, under the auspices of Oliver Wise…
…who told me at that time that he would like to host us for dinner at Boodle’s. As with so many things in this time of Covid, it took quite a while to find a suitable and allowable date.
It was worth the wait – we had a delightful evening with Oliver, Sarah, Julian Dent (another fellow realist and distant cousin to Oliver) and Julian’s wife Kelly. Great grub too.
A fine end to a really lovely day off, with live concert music again, at last!
As I get older, I realise that certain statements that older people make, such as, “the policemen look younger and younger” express how those older people feel, rather than an objective reality about the average age of policemen.
But when I say, “the county championship seems to start earlier and earlier” I believe that is pretty much true…although not by all that much.
The last time I froze this much, Daisy and I went to see the second day of the 2013 season in Nottingham, 11 April that year, reported on King Cricket at that time…
I had arranged to play tennis at 14:00. I got to Lord’s in time to see most of the first session of play. I decided to sit in the relatively sheltered central part of the pavilion forecourt, where I watched, read and chatted a little with one or two other hardy folk. The stewards reckoned I wouldn’t last long out there but actually it wasn’t too bad in the morning and the new soft padding on the pavilion benches…
…standards are falling…
…made the whole experience less painful than expected.
Young Josh de Caires bowling
After a very close game of tennis, which my adversary won by dint of the odd point here and there, I took my time over my ablutions and then grabbed a soft drink followed by a light bite and coffee – initially in the pavilion bar but subsequently, as the sun was shining, I took my coffee in the new Compton Stand – a vantage point from which I took the headline picture (also replicated above).
But even in the sunshine, it was bitterly cold by that afternoon period, so I decided to return to the pavilion.
By the time I got to the pavilion, Josh de Caires had taken a wicket. This was to be my burden all afternoon; I didn’t actually get to see a single wicket – I was either changing or on the move every time Middlesex took a wicket. One of the friendly pavilion stewards even asked me to keep moving around, as my moves seemed to coincide with Middlesex’s success so comprensively.
Anyway…
…I decided to focus on 19-year-old Josh de Caires’s bowling.
I watched for a while from one of my favourite vantage points, the writing room. If you ever wondered what it looks like from behind the sight screen, wonder no more – the above picture gives you a pretty good impression of it…indeed much like an impressionistic art work.
I had brought plenty of warm clobber with me and I decided to don the lot of it. After all, as Alfred Wainwright famously said:
“There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.”
Thus I braved the middle tier balcony, as evidenced by the following pictures…
…for about three overs, before I decided that jumper, thick jacket, scarf, hat and gloves were insufficient for me as the sun was going down on a seriously chilly April day.
I congratulated the handful of hardy folk who remained on the balcony, admitting to them that I was a wimp. One agreed. One consoled me by letting me know that I was far from the first to have tried and failed to brave the afternoon chill. One pointed out that I hadn’t lowered the ear-flaps on my hat, which might have made all the difference.
I watched the remainder of the day from the impressionistic comfort of the writing room. Naturally Middlesex took a wicket while I was ambling down one flight of stairs from balcony to room.
I had a very good day. I read, I chatted, I played tennis and best of all I watched some live cricket again.
My Grandpa: Lew (or Lou) Marcus, with his older brother Max
Meet my Great Uncle Max Marcus (1878-1952). He was the oldest of the multitude of Marcus siblings to venture from the old country to Blighty. My Grandpa Lew (1892-1959) was the youngest of the siblings.
But where exactly did the Marcus family venture from?
The family legend has been vague to say the least. Before the term “self-identify” had been invented, the Marcus family self-identified as “Litvak musicians”.
The word Litvak is a Yiddish term for Jews of Lithuanian (or more generically places we would now call The Baltics) origin. For families like ours, who came to Britain in the late 19th century, that meant that they would have been Russian subjects in The Pale Of Settlement before coming to Britain.
Great Uncle Max as a young man – c1900
The other matter of clarity from the family legend was that Great Uncle Max came to England with his wife, Leah, as an advance party, establishing themselves, at least to some extent, before the rest of the family followed towards the very end of the 19th century.
I did a little bit of on-line genealogy around 2011, liaising with my cousins Ted & Sue, which yielded very little about the family origins. It did encourage me at that time to interview my mother, plus cousins Jacquie Briegal and Sidney Pizan (the latter being Max’s grandson) – I have quite a few notes and yarns for future pieces, but almost nothing on the Baltic origins.
1901 census shows 9 year old Grandpa Lew with parents and some siblings in Whitechapel
I couldn’t find Max and his nascent family in the 1901 census when I looked in 2011. But I did find them in the 1911 census. In April 1911, Max and family were in Great Yarmouth. Once established as a musician in England, for much of his working life, Max split his time between London and Yarmouth. The picture below is probably Yarmouth.
Max playing double-bass with a small band, which I refer to (in PDQ Bach terms) as a schleptet.When in London, Max played with De Groot at The Piccadilly & Regents Palace Hotels
In the 1911 census, Max claims that he and Leah come from Austria. This claim is a stretch, almost worthy of the UK Government 110 years later, in its extremely loose association with the truth.
In reality, Viennese waltz music was all the rage in those days; it was probably “professionally convenient” for Max to hold himself out as an Austrian exponent of waltz music. It is almost unthinkable that Max (or anyone else from the Marcus family) had ever so much as set foot in Austria (or any part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) before 1911.
Max, Leah & emerging brood circa 1907. Far right is my Great-Grandma Annie.
Max and Leah’s offspring and descendants turned out to be a pretty musical lot. On the far left of the above picture is my mother’s cousin Sid, who ended up as a first violin in and sometime leader of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. Harry, the younger boy in the above picture was, by all accounts, an even more talented violinist but suffered from stage fright, so made his career teaching.
To the right of Harry (Harry’s left) in the above picture is Becky, who became Becky Pizan:
mother of Sidney Pizan (who, along with my mother, provided the family pictures you are enjoying);
reportedly a very gifted pianist in her own right (as was, according to my mother, my own Grandpa Lew);
grandmother of the artist Adam Green, whose extraordinary, almost accidental research a few weeks ago has led to a swathe of discoveries.
I thoroughly recommend that you click through to Adam’s piece about my mother’s musical cousin (Adam’s Great Uncle) Sidney Marcus and the discoveries that flowed from that- click here or the link below.
For those who just want to skim the topic, Adam has helped to identify Sid Marcus as The Saw Player on several 1930s recordings, such as the following:
My mum always referred to Sid as “a multi-instrumentalist” without going into too much detail. I hadn’t previously twigged that Sid’s “fifteen minutes of fame” second instrument was the hand saw.
Adam, via Radio 3 and Ron Geesin (composer, writer and self-confirmed absurdist), established that Max and his family, in the 1921 census, stated that they came from Kovno – now known as Kaunas, the second-largest city in Lithuania.
Adam says in his piece that he was a bit surprised, as he thought that branch of his family hailed from Riga.
My take on the matter, having been bitten by Max’s 1911 claims, was that Max on census day was not a 100% reliable witness to his own origins, but that Kaunas was unlikely to be a complete lie (unlike Austria) as it was unlikely that anyone in England would give a fig about which Baltic town Max and family might hail from.
I decided to redouble my efforts and try a bit harder to find Max and his branch in the 1901 census. I had drawn a blank when I looked back in 2011 but I hadn’t looked that hard.
As it turns out, I should indeed have looked harder back in 2011, although the search engines might not have been so good back then.
The 1901 census page for Max, Leah & Simon [sic] Markus [sic]
The trick was to look for Leah and to ask the search engine to be non-exact in the matter of surname (as well as first name) spelling. Thus we find Marks (latterly known as “Max” – we have since learnt that he was previously known as “Mendel”), Leah and baby Simon (latterly known as “Sidney” or “Sid”) in Back Church Lane Whitechapel, very close to the rest of the family and very close to Tobacco Dock, from whence it seems the family was scraping a living in the tobacco business in those early days.
Let’s drill.
Where are they saying they come from?
Let’s drill some more and zoom:
Max comes from Nidy and Leah comes from Yugger?
OK, so in 1901, before they had mastered the English language and how to spin with it, Max and Leah admitted to having been born in different places. I am pretty confident that “Yugger” is the way the census dude wrote down Leah’s attempt to tell him that she was born in Riga.
What about Nidy? I’m pretty sure Max was telling the census dude about Nida, Lithuania.
Now I’m going to be honest here and admit that, until I did this research, I had never heard of Nida, nor had I even heard of the Curonian Spit, the 60+ mile long sand dune depicted below.
In the late 19th century, Nida was an art colony. Confusingly, the northern part of the Curonian Spit now shown as Lithuania was, at that time, part of Greater Russia, whereas the southern part that today is part of Russia, including Kaliningrad was, at that time, Königsberg, part of Prussia. As my mum would have said, “don’t start”.
For a family of musicians, I suspect that Nida, with its relatively wealthy Prussian visitors, was a suitable place to spend the summer season and earn a decent crust, even if you retreated to Kaunas for the winter and urban gigs…
…and then it dawned on me. Great Yarmouth is also a summer season town, built on a spit, albeit a smaller spit than that massive Curonian one.
When Great Uncle Max chose to divide his musical time between London and Great Yarmouth, I’ll guess he was simply continuing the family tradition from the old country, having found a coastal place that reminded him just a little of his youthful summers on the Baltic Coast.
Of course there is a fair amount of supposition in this, but it is hard to imagine why Max would invent an answer to “where were you born” by falsely giving the name of a holiday town on the Baltic Coast.
Perhaps we can find some corroborating evidence on this. I note that Max, Leah and Sid had two boarders sharing their Back Church Lane home in 1901, Michael Freedland and Marks Freedland, both of whom also claimed to have been born in Nidy (Nida). So here is a shout out to possible descendants of the Freedland Brothers – has your family history handed down stories about where your family came from and how they came to England? Because it seems likely that those young men’s fortunes were, at least to some extent, conjoined with that of the Marcus family, from the old country and for a while in Blighty.
To close, my favourite picture of Max is the one below, from 1936, with young Sidney Pizan, dressed up and out for a stroll in Westcliff-on-Sea. It seems he really loved his coastal resorts, did Great Uncle Max.
Afterword: Extracts From E-Mail Conversations With Ron Geesin Casting Doubt On My Nida Theory But Not Necessarily On My Litvak Waterside Theory
Ron to Ian 4 April 2022:
“…On your latest research, hold on a minute! On the next page of the 1901 Census, there’s a ‘Caroline Davis’ ‘Needle Worker’. This gives the enumerator’s written forming of N and W, quite different to each other. So the Marcus entry has to be ‘Widy’…”
“…and there’s a village just outside Kaunas called Vijûkai. Could this half mumbled and ‘interpreted’ by an ill-informed enumerator come out as ‘Widy’? It’s not uncommon in Censuses for people to sometimes state their real original village and then later state the nearest town.”
Ian to Ron 5 April 2022
“…I don’t find the “Vijûkai” for “Wida” idea convincing, although it is just as convincing as my own wild theories! There would have been many long-since destroyed shtetls near Kaunas of which one named Wida or similar is quite possible…”
Ian to Ron 13 April 2022
“…Apropos your thoughts on Vijûkai, which feels to me a long way from anything that might be pronounced or written as “Widy”, there is a neighbourhood near that place which feels more “Widy” to me, named Vaišvydava
Both of those neighbourhoods are on the outskirts of Kaunas and the general area had a significant Jewish population back then, so it is plausible that we have found our Widy. Not on the lagoon coast but it is on the riverside coast! The general area is named Panemune…
Unable to muster the time or energy to write an 800-900 word piece on the topic “The Deadline” in the genre “Fiction” for our first live ThreadMash in two years, I instead submitted the following 920 word letter of apology.
Dear Kay
I regret to inform you that I shall be unable to submit a ThreadMash piece on the theme “The Deadline” in the genre “fiction” by the due date.
Normally I’m good with deadlines. I’m nothing like the writer Douglas Adams, who was so lousy at deadlines, publishers knew not to bother setting them for him. Adams famously said:
“I love deadlines; I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by”.
Although I am relatively good at meeting deadlines, naturally I tend to leave written pieces until the last minute; who doesn’t?
At the turn of the century, having foolishly agreed to write a charity textbook, I managed to meet the deadline only by dint of arranging to have some wisdom teeth removed and thus being forced to stay home for two weeks of convalescence for which I set myself a 2,000 words per day target to get the last 20,000 words of the book done on time.
It was on that occasion I learnt, for the first but not the last time, that book publishers don’t expect the authors to meet deadlines, so I was met with five weeks of silence until the editor picked the thing up at their appointed time. The same thing happened when my co-author Michael and I submitted the first draft of “The Price of Fish” on deadline; five weeks of silence because the so-called deadline isn’t a true deadline.
You don’t want truth, do you, Kay?
You want fiction.
Our first book, "Clean Business Cuisine" was fiction. We wrote it without a publisher and therefore without a publisher’s deadline. Once we had a publisher and a production schedule, I arranged the first book signing with what seemed to be plenty of leeway for the production deadline. But of course we ended up with a race against time to get copies of the book to the book signing location, Halifax, ahead of the event. That “skin of teeth” deadline was met, just. I even turned up at the venue on time myself; but in my rush to change into my dinner suit that evening, I forgot to take a pen with me to the venue. That’s right, I turned up at my first ever book signing without a pen. As the venue was a youth theatre where the narrowest writing implement to hand was a permanent marker pen, this was an existential crisis for the book signing, until a customer showed up with a pen to lend me for the evening.
I could have fleshed out that deadline story, but it is a true story about fiction…not in itself fiction.
Actually I have a bit of a problem with deadline stories in fiction. They tend to follow a predictable pattern, whereby suspense is generated through the device of a deadline, often, especially in thrillers, through convoluted circumstances.
The Perils Of Pauline is a classic example of ludicrous deadline, or cliff-hanger thrillers. For bizarre reasons, villains in this type of story seem compelled to condemn their potential victims to a death that will scare them for several minutes before killing them, allowing time for the victim to extricate themselves from danger, or for a hero to arrive and rescue the victim. Bond villains are another example of fiends with this monstrous flaw. I find these fictions implausible and not to my taste.
I did consider writing a topical pastiche of the thriller deadline story, in which the villain tries to construct the cliff-hanger scenario, having tied the potential victim to a railway track, but the locomotive-driven demise is confounded by excuses from the track and train operators apologising for delays caused by Brexit, Covid and latterly Putin. Meanwhile the hero’s efforts to rescue the potential victim are similarly impaired by Brexit, Covid and Putin excuses from would-be suppliers of motor vehicles, horses and rope cutting equipment. The risk of the victim dying of neglect becomes an interesting additional angle to this otherwise simplistic, predictable storyline.
I should add, parenthetically, that The Perils Of Pauline never did have the heroine tied to a railway line; that specific scenario was used several times in the copycat series The Hazards Of Helen.
Joking apart, my dear Kay, this whole business of people being unable to set a sensible deadline and then meet it is no longer funny. It is inundating me with needless tasks and starting to get me down. The worst example of this Brexit, Covid, Putin (or BROVIN syndrome, as I call it) is the “temporary” pipe which has been dangling around our Notting Hill Gate home for more than two years, while the flat above mine awaits a not especially complex plumbing solution. An elephant gestates in fewer than two years. The entirety of our street, Clanricarde Gardens, including the shops adjoining each side of the main road, was built in the 1870s in fewer than four years. I feel like going onto the Bayswater Road and protesting about it, but a large bunch of other protesters have beaten me to it and taken root there.
No, the real truth, Kay, is that BROVIN syndrome has finally got to me. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am unable to generate 800-900 words between now and the deadline.
Sorry about that.
With love and very best wishes
Ian
PS You may complain in writing to the ombudsman, ICAT (The International Court for the Arbitration of ThreadMash – Justice R Candappa presiding). But don’t expect a response from ICAT before the deadline.
“Temporary” trailing pipe since December 2019Clanricarde Gardens – whole street constructed 1869-1873Local protests about other matters, more pressing than trailing pipes
The Evening Itself
We had a good time at The Tokenhouse – a venue that Rohan booked in quieter times; we suspect that they will seek larger groups henceforward.
It was wonderful to see many members of the gang in person again after so long. Unfortunately several were unable to attend – Kay’s last minute Covid indisposition reminded us why we hadn’t been together in 3D for so long.
Kay did join us via Zoom, however. Her story had a dystopian past quality to it that was only tangentially about deadlines…
…contrast with Jill’s dystopian future story about existential deadlines.
Several of the stories (Jan’s, Flo’s & Adrian’s in particular) managed to weave romance into the deadline scenario; in two cases ideas around internet dating and social media flirting were front & centre.
Rohan and David can explain for themselves what their stories were about, while Adrian probably couldn’t provide a logical reason why he ended up in a pantomime lion costume at the end of his performance piece.
Jan, Julie, Flo & Jill, keen to pose rather than look naturalDavid posing as his natural self, half capuchin monk, half capuchin monkey Adrian, no longer donning his lion outfit (don’t ask)
To lose one cricket great in a day may be regarded as misfortune…
…but this piece is not the place for that kind of joke.
Rod Marsh and Shane Warne were both great Australian cricketers – larger-than-life personalities. I was lucky enough to see both play live – in Shane Warne’s case many times.
Rod Marsh (1947-2022)
Rod Marsh was one of my “love-to-hate” heroes from my school days. Heroes from school days leave their mark in a different, perhaps more indelible way.
I only saw Rod Marsh play live once, although, on TV, as a kid, I saw lots of him. Latterly, as I got to see lots of cricket live, Rod Marsh’s was a face I’d quite often see around the grounds (in my case Lord’s and Edgbaston), especially during the Ashes.
Here is my report of the one time I saw Rod Marsh play live. Marsh was one of the Aussie players who walked around the ground to entertain and chat with the crowd on that relentlessly gloomy weather day.
I learnt that Rod Marsh had died early morning, before going to the gym and progressing with the rest of my day.
A Day Going Through Old Photos With Jilly, Oblivious To The Extent Of Cricketing Greats Loss
I spent a very pleasant day with Jilly Black, going through her photo archives, doing a bit of scanning and working out how we might scan a plethora of differently sized films etc.
Naturally a hearty lunch and general catch up chat formed the centrepiece of such a day, but below is one of the few dozen pictures we did actually scan.
Roberta & Jilly while at the notorious Kibbutz Afek, 1980
Jilly and I had such a laugh when we spotted that Jilly had written “Afek 1981” on the photo packet. After stating with certainty that the omnishambles had been in 1980, I suggested two possibilities for the 1981 mention:
that Jilly had labelled the pictures many years later and had misremembered the Afek year by one year;
despite everything that had gone wrong and all the pains I (and others) had gone through to try to relieve the suffering of the youngsters, that crazy bunch of teenagers had returned to Afek the following year for a further dose of draconian discipline and disease.
I concluded that the most likely answer was the second of the two, not least because Jilly is so good with numbers.
After Jilly left, I looked at the news headlines on my smart phone and learnt that Shane Warne had also died that day.
I saw Shane Warne play live many times between the late 1990s and the end of his playing career.
Although I saw him representing Australia far more often than I saw him play county cricket, my favourite memory of watching him play is from a county match.
I wrote it up at the time on the Middlesex Till We Die website. I’m sure the current editorial team will forgive me for extracting the most relevant three paragraphs here, but if you want to read the whole piece you can find it on the MTWD site here.
Watching Warne
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Thursday night I had time to come and see the end of play and sat behind Shane Warne's arm for over an hour. Friday morning, knowing the folks weren't due to arrive for another 30-40 minutes, I sat in the Pav and watched him from in front of his arm. It really is a wonderful thing to be able to sit in exactly the spot of your choice watching a player of that quality bowling live. I should add, by the way, that I think Ed Smith and Ed Joyce played Warne extremely well on Thursday and Friday. The man is a legend and was bowling really well. Forget the joke runs that Ed Smith made at the end of the innings - he deserved them really; his first 100 was worth 150 when you consider the quality of bowling he neeeded to see off to get there.
A Couple of Wickets and Joke Bowling
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As soon as I got paged by my mother and went towards the gate to meet the folks, a couple of wickets fell. Joyce and Styris. It was to be that sort of day. I took the parents into the Long Room and sat them down for the famous "Long Room view" of the cricket. The match was moving along pretty slowly. 3 or 4 minutes later, I see Warney coming our way. I explain hurriedly to my folks that this man is a living legend, but neither of them have heard of him! The grumpy gent sitting in the high chair behind us makes an audible disapproving snort noise. Mum asks if it would be appropriate to congratulate Warny, on his return, for the achievements I have just described to her. I suggest that he has probably had enough adulation and will be able to get by without hers.
I then explain to them why I thought he'd come off (agreement) and what was going to happen next (joke bowling), which seemed ridiculously complicated and silly to the parents (understandably). Soon Nic Pothas is bowling. I explain that he is the wicket keeper and doesn't normally bowl. I also explain that he is an eccentric who wears different coloured underpants depending on whether he is batting, keeping or training. I wonder whether he even has a bowling colour of underpants and whether he had the opportunity to change into them. Even Mr Snortnoise seems to approve of this joke.
It was truly a bittersweet. nostalgia-laden day. A really agreeable catch up with Jilly, sadly tinged and sandwiched by the sad news from the cricketing world. Such is life.
Anyway, I started to hatch a plot several years ago – 2018 when at Falkland Palace playing real tennis, to be precise – where Ewan Lee informed me that he was teaching his pupils to play fives on squash courts. The slightly different size and colour can be compensated for with a special ball, he told me. Squash courts are good for fives and vice versa. It occurred to me that Lord’s, with two squash courts, might be a very good place for fives.
Let’s not talk about why it took me three-and-a-half years from idea to actual plan and fruition. Let’s just talk about the fruition.
Early in 2022, I ordered a selection of fives equipment (several sizes of gloves & inners, plus a couple of those special balls) as a donation for players at Lord’s to share. Most of the gloves were “white-labelled” but you can buy, for a few bob extra, gloves labelled for the old school, so I treated myself to a personal Alleyn’s pair.
What would Mr Tindale have done? What would Mr Banson have done?
The equipment arrived 25 February and I had a provisional arrangement to have an initial go with Jack Clifton (one of the real tennis pros) and Janie on Monday 28th February.
What a glorious day it was.
I had arranged to play real tennis at 14:00. Janie and I arrived a little early for that session, enabling me to show her the (very) basics of fives for quarter of an hour or so before my game. It transpires that 10-15 minutes is sufficient for the addiction factor of the compelling game that is fives to kick in. Janie said she’d practice on her own for a while and come and watch the tennis a bit later. She did show up to watch the tennis for quite a while, but not before she’d warmed up her hands a fair bit for fives.
After I’d come a close second (which seems to be my regular placing post-Covid) at tennis, Jack, Janie and I had a good introductory knockabout on the fives court.
Jack took to the game very quickly indeed – I’d suggest that anyone who is a natural sportsperson for hand-eye co-ordination ball sports should be able to pick up fives and find pleasure in it rapidly.
Janie’s new-found addiction was slightly mitigated by her concern for her hands and fingers when playing a hard-ball game. As a podiatrist, she does need fully-functioning hands for work and worries about even the slight bruising that is inevitable (especially at first) even with padded gloves. I remember a similar conversation when she tried wicket-keeping.
Jack and I tried a couple of short games before the former returned to the pros office to do some work. “But for you, this too is work”, I said, but to no avail. Janie and I played for a while longer, while waiting for the next pair of combatants to finish their tennis match, as I had semi-lined up one of them to have a go at fives.
Graham Findlay, an Old Fettesian and increasingly handy real tennis-player, had previously told me that he used to play rugby fives at school. I should have guessed that he would have been very handy at the game; he’s very handy at games.
Both of us were able to boast an interval of 40 to 45 years since we had last played fives.
You can just see Graham in the background checking out the fixture list
Janie volunteered to watch and shoot some hand-held video from the squash court viewing gallery.
The first three clips show the progression of our warm up and refreshing our memories about the rules.
I had remembered the serve rule, but forgotten that lefties normally serve from the other side
Graham claims not to be remotely into it yet, then plays a classic leftie’s winner
Graham practices some serves from the left-hand side of the court
The next three clips show some highlights (or should I call them lowlights?) from our match: A Very Old Fettesian v An Alleyn’s Very Old Boy. Hold on to your hats:
The first rally of the match and Graham is unquestionably “too good”
Graham goes 3-1 up, Janie advises and I somehow scramble a winning rally
At 3-2, Janie advises some more and I pull off a classic shot to confound a leftie
We should draw a veil over the rest of the match. After all, fives is a quintessentially good-natured, sporting, fair-play game. It’s not about the score. It’s not about winning or losing. I’m sure, dear reader, you understand my points…or shortage thereof.
Graham wondered afterwards what Dr Colin Niven (a former teacher of his at Fettes and a former Head at Alleyn’s) would make of it – would he cheer for Fettes, Alleyn’s or just give three cheers for the sport?
There was simply no way we were going to let a global pandemic totally ruin our Z/Yen staff Christmas gathering for two years.
OK, we had to do without completely at the end of 2020. OK, the Omicron wave made it impracticable to persevere with our original date – 17 December – in a week where everything else was also postponed or cancelled.
But we were determined that this would be a postponement, not a cancellation. Those fine people at Watermen’s Hall, together with the rather wonderful The Cook & The Butler people who do the catering there, came up trumps with an early opportunity for us to regroup in mid February.
They kept very quiet about their choice of menu ahead of the day, perhaps because it was full of nice surprises and treats, some of which might well have been late decisions.
More than just sound good, that five course meal tasted really good too, with excellent choices of wines to wash the food down.
We did almost everything we had planned for the original event, including our traditional Secret Santa. The picture above shows my table. The one below the other Z/Yen table, capturing the moment when Peter discovered that he had received the best Secret Santa ever – a massively extendable diagrammatic representation of the central part of the River Thames.
Given the setting of Watermen’s Hall, this present couldn’t be bettered and it did the rounds of the room several times.
The only problem with Peter’s Secret Santa present was that Juliet couldn’t contain her pleasure at how well the gift had gone down, exposing herself (as it were) as having been that particular Santa.
For some reason, by way of contrast, no-one has owned up to giving me a tin of Senior Moment Mints.
The picture below depicts Charlotte and Bikash chatting about their spoils while Michael addressed the assembled throng – a loyal toast I think.
One thing we chose not to do was sing the 2021 Z/Yen Christmas song. Linda did bring it along, as it had been all ready to go back in December 2021. But we chose not to proceed with singing it, as the entire meal had been changed and we can’t even “trail slothfully back to Lothbury” any more.
Still, I thought I should still publish the “unused canticle” for completists of my oeuvre to collect, debate and savour like connoisseurs, at their leisure, in the privacy of their own metaverses.
I think we drew the long straw with the February 2022 menu, personally.
After such an enjoyable meal and conversation, not wanting the afternoon to end, most of us retired to Jamies St Mary’s to continue the discussions over a few more quiet glasses – such is the City early evening on a Friday post-pandemic.
