Author: Ian Louis Harris

Z/Yen Seasonal Event: 1 Blossom Street, Preceded By Drinks At St Helen’s Place, 12 December 2008

Only the one picture from the 2008 event can be found some 15 years later, although somewhere on a backup device somewhere I suspect there are more.

Anyway.

It was a good and memorable evening that year. Giles Abbott (who had been doing voice work with several of us) and Soosy were guests of honour that year.

We had hoped to go to Dennis Severs’ House for the pre-dinner outing, buy that idea fell through for that occasion – we had a works outing there a few months later instead.

Hence we had drinks at our St Helen’s Place offices before traipsing to 1 Blossom Street for an excellent meal in a private room. All the regular Z/Yen Xmas party stuff ensued: eating drinking, Secret Santa, gimcrack gifties, quizzing, and of course the seasonal song.

Z/YEN AT CHRISTMAS

(Song to the Tune of “Merry Christmas Everybody”)

Are you hanging Z/Yen e-diaries on your wall?
Are you off with Jez for one great long pub crawl?
Are you going somewhere fancy?
Like Dubai or Grand Cayman?
Or a tube around the Circle Line Zone One?

So here it is,
Z/Yen at Christmas,
Everyone’s in party mood,
Except for Ian’s vibe,
He’s more like Mr Scrooge.

Are you waiting for the telephone to ring?
Are you sure you’ve got the voice enough to sing?
Is it Linda always tells you
You’ve received more client files,
That’ll take so long to process you’ll get piles…

So here it is,
Z/Yen at Christmas,
Everybody’s having fun,
Look to the future now
We sing in Unison.

Are you hanging Z/Yen e-diaries on your wall?
Has Monique picked up another cold sales call?
Does he claim he’s Michael’s brother?
Or he’s Ian’s long lost friend?
Does his patter drive you half way round the bend?

So here it is,
Z/Yen at Christmas,
Everybody’s up the creek,
Look to the future now
We’ll still be here next week!!

[Someone has to shriek like Noddy Holder…………..”Z/Yen’s Christmas!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”]

So here it is,
Z/Yen at Christmas,
Everybody’s up the creek,
Look to the future now
We’ll still be here next week!!

MTWD Keeps Up With The Times, MTWD and Times Newspaper Piece, 6 December 2008

I’d forgotten about this piece until I stumbled across it while going through my MTWD articles. Patrick Kidd of The Times asked me to write the piece for their on-line thingie.

Here’s the MTWD article about it – click here.

Just in case SportNetwork lose the above piece in the meantime, I’ve uploaded it here on Ogblog, so this link will work.

The link to The Times article no longer works – perhaps because of the pay wall (although I’d expect that to at least ask you to pay) or perhaps The Times used similar techies to the SportNetwork crowd.

Anyway, here is the text I submitted – I don’t suppose Patrick edited it much.

Ged Ladd, from the Middlesex supporters’ website “Middlesex Till We Die” http://www.cricketnetwork.co.uk/boards/list/s66.htm?67 presents an Ashes Top Ten of heroes who have not only played in Ashes Tests but have also played first class cricket for Middlesex.

 

  1. Andrew Stoddart. Andrew Stoddart played 16 tests against Australia, captaining half of them, in five series between 1887/8 and 1897/8; his highlight being 173 in Melbourne in a winning 3-2 cause in 1894/5, starting a great tradition of Middlesex players captaining Ashes series victories home and away.  A stupendous sportsman, he played both rugby and cricket for England; he also famously once scored 485 in 370 minutes for Hampstead against Stoics after a sleep-free night on the razz.  Sadly, he found the game of middle-aged mundanity harder than elite sport; in 1915 he took his own life, perhaps due to debts and ill health.

 

  1. Sir Pelham (Plum) Warner. Plum Warner was a distinguished Middlesex and England Captain who captained England to a 3-2 series win in Australia in 1903/4. Like several of the Middlesex and England captains, his personal record in tests was less distinguished than his captaincy record, but Plum Warner did more than enough to get a stand at Lord’s named after him; the one between the Pavilion and the Grandstand.

 

  1. Patsy Hendren. Elias Henry Hendren scored over 57,000 first class runs between 1907 and 1938, including 51 tests, 28 of which were against Australia at a very respectable twixt-wars average of just under 40, including 3 tons and 10 fifties. His one test wicket was against the Aussies.  An Ashes hero and a Middlesex Collosus; any man with 170 first class hundreds to his name is something special.

 

  1. Gubby Allen. George Oswald Browning Allen is another Middlsex and England captain with a Lord’s stand named after him (the small one between the Pavilion and the Tavern Stand). Genuine all-rounder Gubby Allen quietly took 21 vital wickets in the Bodyline series. He also captained England in an Ashes series, but (unusually for a Middlesex and England captain) it was the losing (2-3) tour of Australia following the Bodyline series.

 

  1. Denis Compton. The Brylcream Boy himself not only scored 39,000 first class runs and played 78 tests (phenomenal numbers for a player whose career spanned the war), but he also regularly appeared as a winger for Arsenal. He averaged just under 43 in the 28 tests he played against the Aussies (compared with an overall test average just over 50) and is the third of our Middlesex Ashes heroes to have a Lord’s stand named after him; between the Grandstand and the Edrich Stand (Bill Edrich just missed the cut for our heroes list).

 

  1. Jeff Thomson. One half of the “Lillian Thomson” pairing which terrorised England’s batsmen on several occasions, Thomo took 100 England scalps at just over 24 in his 21 test outings against England. Given his personal success, he was on the losing side surprisingly often for a top-ranking Aussie; the next three Middlesex and England Ashes heroes were a large part of the reason for his failures.

 

  1. Mike Brearley. A master of the art of captaincy, Brearley captained England to three Ashes series wins in the 1970s and 1980s; his only low point being a 0-3 series defeat in the “non-Ashes, aluminium bat” tour. His personal batting effort, averaging just over 22 in 19 Ashes matches, is almost beside the point in the context of that unique degree of Ashes captaincy success.  Self-effacing and currently president of the MCC, it seems unlikely that a Lord’s stand will be named after him for the foreseeable future.

 

  1. Mike Gatting. Twenty-seven tests against the old enemy at an average of 37+, he scored 4 tons and 12 fifties against Australia. One of Middlesex’s finest, he will long be remembered as the victim of Shane Warne’s “ball of the 20th century” and also (hopefully not for too much longer) as the last England captain to bring the urn back from a winning Ashes tour, 1986/7.

 

  1. John Embury. A 64 test veteran, that’s a massive test haul for an English off-spinner. 25 of those tests were against Australia; he took 78 scalps in those tests at under 35s.  Effectively a bowling all-rounder, he also managed a Brearley-busting average of 28 in his Ashes outings; undoubtedly a man who lifted his perforamances for the big occasions, none more so than the battles against Australia.

 

  1. Glen McGrath. England’s utter nemesis for donkey’s years (ask Atherton, for example), his 30 test outings against England yielding 157 wickets at just over 20 including 10 fivefers tells just part of the story. His ankle-busting encounter with a stray practice ball just before the start of play at Edgbaston in 2005 was probably the single most significant Ashes series-turning event in history.

 

If the editor were to allow me the indulgence of an eleventh man, wicket-keeper John Murray would make an excellent addition to the above ten to make up a complete team.  It’s a little batsman heavy but a bit of medium pace from Gatt in his prime plus some of The Brylcream Boy’s dobblers would provide some makeshift bowling on the rare occasions it would be needed with that strong four-man attack.

 

I’d like to thank Seaxe Man at MTWD whose excellent three-part series of articles on Middlesex’s England Captains, “Did You Know?”, provided much inspiration for several of the above pen-portraits:

http://www.cricketnetwork.co.uk/main/s66/st89359.htm

http://www.cricketnetwork.co.uk/main/s66/st89910.htm

http://www.cricketnetwork.co.uk/main/s66/st90380.htm

 

What A Megillah…An MTWD Dinner, 4 December 2008

There is a long, almost self-explanatory thread on MTWD planning this dinner – between October and the event itself on 4 December:

Here is a link to page one of two of the thread.

Here is a link to page two of two of the thread.

Just in case anything ever happens to Sportnetwork, here is a scrape of Page One…

…and here is a scrape of Page Two.

The subplot to the planning was a whole load of nonsense which got one site user banned and had several others incensed.

At one point in the e-mail trail Barmy Kev and I talked about boycotting the evening, which would have made it very interesting indeed as I get the impression that, in the end, it was just the two of us who turned up and dined.

Sometimes I wonder whether we should have renamed the site MTWLTWTL (Middlesex Till We Lose The Will To Live).

We went to the O2 Centre on Finchley Road.

We plotted lots of interesting stuff for the MTWD website that evening by all accounts.

Strangely, I don’t think anyone ever attempted one of those MTWD Xmas dinners again. I cannot imagine why not.

In A Dark Dark House by Neil LaBute, Almeida Theatre, 29 November 2008

This was a very troubling play by Neil LaBute – as his plays so often are. At the Almeida, as LaBute’s plays so often are.

Here is a link to the Almeida resource on this production.

The acting was terrific but we didn’t get the same wow factor from this one as we sometimes do with LaBute.

Good LaBute but not the very best LaBute was our verdict. But we were still discussing the issues deep into the weekend.

 

Kenny Werner & Martin Speake Quartet, London Jazz Festival, Wigmore Hall, 23 November 2008

We have been enthusiasts of Jazz at the Wigmore Hall ever since we saw the Tord Gustavsen Trio at “The Wig” as part of the London Jazz Festival a few years earlier.

This Kenny Warner and Martin Speake concert was very good, although (to our taste) not quite as suited to the Wigmore Hall as the smaller, tighter sound of ensembles such as Tord Gustvsen’s.

But what do we know?

In this excellent review from Jazzwise Magazine – click here – Martin Speake himself says:

‘Even the handclaps sound good in this room’

It does thrill us to witness, so often, performers clearly in awe of the venue and so delighted to be able to play there. It makes us realise how lucky we are to live so close to the place, to be friends of it and to attend so regularly. As I write this note (10 April 2017) I am looking forward to a visit to the Wig this very evening…but for early music, not jazz this time.

Returning to the Kenny Warner and Martin Speake – we actually got the latter in the first half and the former in the second half.

We enjoyed both – I got more out of the Kenny Warner which had a Dixieland sound to it which pleases me more than it pleases Janie.

Still, a lovely way to spend a Sunday evening, especially when you have booked the day off work Monday.

A Couple Of Bridges To Cross But Perhaps Not So Many Magic Tables Back then – 14 August and 20 November 2008

14 August 2008

We crossed the river and played at Hampton Wick (Maz’s new place) for the first time. Some business on the e-mail about Andrea driving and co-ordinating pick-ups around North-West/West London.

My thank you note to Maz was not too revealing – it read:

Many thanks for a most enjoyable evening last night. Excellent meal and, as always, good company. Nice to see your new home, too, which I thought was very you; you seem very happy there. Shame we didn’t get the cards but you can’t have everything I suppose.

Looking forward to the next one.

20 November 2008

The next one turned out to be at Barmy Kev’s place. I supplied the card table and accoutrements, so must have driven there. Kev’s mother-in-law Mabel was in situ, as Kev’s set up e-mail revealed:

Ironically Olivia’s mum still with us, will be for a year now, don’t ask, but will find a way round this and no rowdy behaviour after 11pm.

Ged , if you can supply table cards , scoreboards etc, this will help.

Subsequently, by which I mean some 10 years later, Kevin and Mabel achieved more than 15 minutes of fame when a video about Kevin and Mabel’s use of a “Magic Table” to help people with dementia went viral – some 3 to 4 Million views at the time of writing (January 2019):

But back then, it was simply bridge with dinner en famille.

I can’t find any post match analysis (by which I mean bridge match, not magic table match) on the e-mail trails, so perhaps we didn’t get much in the way of magic bridge hands on the table that night. I do recall a very enjoyable evening, though and the e-mail wires were certainly busy trying to set up the next one for the January.

Dinner With John White At The Pearl But Total E-Mail Silence, 19 November 2008

Nothing in the e-mail trail about this. Nothing at all. Not setting it up. Not cancelling it.

The e-mail trail stops with John apologising that he will have to miss my Gresham Lecture a couple of weeks before this date…

Commercial Ethics: Process or Outcome?, Gresham Lecture, Barnard’s Inn Hall, 6 November 2008

…but I know that John came to the lecture because I even wrote him into the script and handed him a bootleg CD as he dashed off to his unavoidable engagement that night.

So I guess we must have spent some time talking to each other on the telephone during those weeks. I remember talking on the telephone. That’s what we used to do to arrange things before e-mail and messaging and things.

Anyway, it was my trusty payments log that helped me solve this one, as I spent a suspiciously John & Ian dinner sum at The Pearl on the very night recorded in my diary.

Pearl At Renaissance Chancery Court – click here for a link.

Here is a review from a year or so before we went.

Review scraped to here just in case – after all, the place is long gone now.

I remember a good but pricey meal. The company, needless to say, was excellent. John must have chosen the place because I paid.

Do you remember anything else about it, John?

Mountain Hotel & Audience by Vaclav Havel, Orange Tree Theatre, 15 November 2008

It seemed like a good idea when we booked it. Here ‘s a link to the rubric that enticed us, along with the cast and creatives information.

We’d had previous experience of Vaclav Havel’s plays, so shouldn’t have been surprised to find the absurdity a bit lame and the drama weak.

In particular, I thought Audience (about a playwright stacking beer barrels in a warehouse) tame.

So what do we know?

Still, we enjoyed our Don Fernando dinner afterwards and never feel completely let down after an evening at the Orange Tree.

Mountain Hotel and Audience by Vaclav Havel, Orange Tree Theatre, 15 November 2008

This double bill was part of a Vaclav Havel Season that autumn at the Orange Tree.  We only attended this one evening.

Vaclav Havel is one of those writers that you really want to like and there are always some very clever lines and some interestingly weird scenes in his plays.  Yet somehow Havel never quite seems to work for me or for Janie.

Still, we enjoyed the evening.  The Mountain Hotel one was a typically Havel peculiar mix of people thrown together in a hotel garden being absurd together.  I think we even considered sneaking away a half time, but stayed to see what the second play was like.  Audience is a short quasi-autobiographical piece about Vanek, who works in an absurd beer factory.  It did not motivate us to return and see the other short Vanek plays later in the season.

It was all very well acted and well directed; David Antrobus is an Orange Tree regular and is reliably good.

You can read all about it, including who played whom and stuff, here.  Someone at the Orange Tree is doing an amazing archiving job; I am grateful to them.

Michael Billington, a long term Orange Tree fan, is polite but clearly didn’t much like the evening either.

Philip Fisher in the British Theatre Guide is more upbeat about the evening.

Ian Shuttleworth’s FT piece can still be seen archived here.

Gethsemane by David Hare, Cottesloe Theatre, 8 November 2008

This one felt like a hot ticket when we booked it months before and also seemed well suited to my mind set just 48 hours after my Gresham Lecture on Commercial Ethics.

But this play was about the arguably thornier topic of political ethics and political pragmatism.

What a posse of cast and creatives for this one – click here for the Official London Theatre information stub.

I recall being most impressed by the performances and the production. Also, the play did its job of getting me and Janie talking about its big issues for the rest of the weekend. Yet this didn’t feel like premier league David Hare to me; I felt there was something lacking in the play.

It was that sort of play/production – influential people were supposed to talk about it but not all that many people got to see it. Janie and I saw a preview, so had every right to wax lyrical from an informed perspective and from the outset.

What good news for everyone that Janie and I tend to keep our counsel to ourselves on such matters.

Well worth seeing.