Travel, Theatre, Music, Cricket, Tennis, Writing, Life
Wallace Collection – Great Hall, November 2023, with thanks to Chris Parkins
I have written up this visit on the Gresham Society website – click here.
If anything ever befalls the Gresham Society site, you can read my words on this scrape here.
This was my first visit to the Wallace for several years – Janie and I went in 2008, primarily to see an Osbert Lancaster exhibition – click here or below:
I’m not sure quite what put us on to this superb movie, but we booked an all-too-rare showing of it weeks in advance at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith. I suspect this was our last visit there before the closure for major redevelopment of the site.
It is a most unusual, true story. The American singer-songwriter, Rodriguez, was for some time billed as “the next Dylan” (the kiss of death for many a career) but vanished into obscurity.
Unbeknown to him, he was a cult, underground figure in South Africa where his music was extremely well-known and where he was believed to have died. After South Africa emerged from the apartheid era, some fans tried to track down Rodriguez’s story, discovered that he was still alive and the rest is history.
Here is a link to plenty of resources on the film and Rodriguez’s story.
Here is the IMDb item on this movie.
And below is the official YouTube trailer for the movie:
I also bought the soundtrack album, which Janie and I have enjoyed listening too quite a lot.
It isn’t often that a movie sticks in our thoughts for a long while after we saw the movie, but this one really did. Highly recommended.
An evening visit to the National Portrait Gallery to see David Bailey canonical exhibition.
Janie and I went with Toni Friend.
We really liked the exhibition, as did most but not all of the critics.
Afterwards we went on to Haozhan chinese restaurant for dinner – we felt this place had gone down since our previous visit, but still was a good enough and convenient place to end an enjoyable evening.
Because I had been to see the Colombian Gold a few week’s earlier – click here or below…
Beyond El Dorado: Power And Gold In Ancient Colombia, British Museum, 21 November 2013
…and in any case because Janie was more interested in the Shunga exhibition – click here…
…Janie and I saw a different exhibition from the rest of the people on our pre-Christmas Dinner works outing.
Below is the trailer vid for the Shunga:
We really enjoyed this exhibition.
I sense that the Z/Yen team enjoyed El Dorado too.
The whole event was themed as “Gold” in honour of the El Dorado aspect. Almost everyone wore something gold.
Sardo was a Sardinian restaurant, rather a good one, which itself had a somewhat gold look to it.
I crafted a seasonal song to go with the gold theme:
DRESSED UP IN GOLD
( Sung to the tune of “Silver and Gold” )VERSE ONE – SILVER AND GOLD – ORIGINAL VERSION (by Johnny Marks)
Silver and gold, silver and gold
Ev’ryone wishes for silver and gold
How do you measure its worth?
Just by the pleasure it gives here on earth
Silver and gold, silver and gold
Mean so much more when we see
Silver and gold decorations
On ev’ry Christmas treeVERSE TWO – BITCOINS AND LAND – LONG FINANCE VERSION
Bitcoins and land, bitcoins and land
Long Finance topics are bitcoins and land
How do you measure their worth?
Just by the value they gain and disburse
Hedge funds and bonds, hedge funds and bonds
Seem such a bore when you show
Bitcoins and land valuations
In each portfolioVERSE THREE – DRESSED UP IN GOLD – Z/YEN VERSION
Dressed up in gold, dressed up in gold
Z/Yen folk this Christmas are dressed up in gold
How do you measure dress sense?
Not by this sartorial elegance
Shrouding in gold, shrouding in gold
Might cause some people offence
(If) Z/Yen folk wear such decorations
At normal Z/Yen events
We have loads of pictures from this event, which I have uploaded to a Flickr album for ease of navigation – click here or below:
After our visit to the Wigmore Hall for the Fabio Zanon concert – click here or below…
Fabio Zanon, Wigmore Hall, Lunchtime Concert, 22 November 2013
…followed by a bite of lunch at the Wig, we hot-footed it across to Bloomsbury to see The Everlasting Flame exhibition.
Information about the exhibition, with some super sample images, is archived on-line – click here.
This exhibition rounded off a super cultural day off.
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I went to a private viewing of this exhibition, thanks to Tony Friend of College Hill (latterly Instinctif).
It was a very convivial corporate hospitality event in that grand foyer of the British Museum…
…so much so, that I felt very much in the minority when I took a good look around the exhibition. There was plenty of time to eat, drink, be merry and see the wonderful show.
Click here for a link to the British Museum resource on this exhibition. There are some super images of the main exhibits.
I was so taken with this exhibition I suggested it as the Z/Yen pre Christmas dinner cultural event for a few weeks later.
Below is a link to the promo vid:
Below is a British Museum vid on the goldmaking techniques of the ancient Colombians:
I have written up this event for the Gresham Society website – click here or picture link below:
If anything were ever to happen to the Gresham site, click this scrape link instead.
Here are the other pictures from Janie’s phone:
A rather unusual round trip, taking a week or so off work, for cricket, walking and stuff. This short break was a substitute for the longer trip we had planned for Malawi, which we ended up deferring to September and was well worth the wait.
But back to our Midlands and the North trip. We started with a couple of nights in Nottingham, in order to enjoy the second day of the county cricket season as guests of Nottinghamshire CCC. I wrote up our Nottinghamshire day, 11 April, for King Cricket – click here for that King Cricket (cricket-free) report.
Just in case anything ever goes awry with King Cricket, here is a scrape of that piece.
Here’s the match card – in case you want to know about the cricket.
Then on the 12th to the village of Wormleighton, in Warwickshire the spiritual home of Janie’s family. No-one knows how the family came to have that name. Probably because someone in the dim and distant past came from there and probably not because Janie is descended from the Spencer family (which pretty-much owned the village), despite the Churchillian and Princess Diana resemblances in Janie’s family.
There is an ancient video of “the Worms” visiting the village of Wormleighton en famille in 1971 – here or below
On this trip, Ged and Daisy made a little video of their own search for the ancient village of Wormleighton – here or below.
For the uninitiated, Ged and Daisy are our pet names for each other and have been so for over 20 years.
We stayed at Wormleighton Hall, which is a rather grand farm house just outside the village – formerly the squires residence I shouldn’t wonder and now the home of the tenant farmers who make the whole thing work commercially by running the place as a small hotel as well as a farm. Lovely family; into all the local countryside stuff. We visited the Mollington point-to-point which they were attending on the 13th and took some excellent pictures of the local tribes at leisure.
All 80 pictures from the whole round trip are contained in this Flickr album – here and below.
On 14th we went to Chipping Norton to visit brother-in-law Tony and his lovely second wife Liz.
Hockney says you cannot properly photograph these Wolds scenes
On 15th, off to North Yorkshire, driving the eastern-side to see and photograph Hockney country before reaching The Star, where we stayed and ate in great style for a few days.
On 16th we went on a Farndale walk in search of daffodils, surprisingly successfully as the cold start to the spring had delayed the daffs, but they were just starting to show well our day – good fortune.
Some more nice pictures in the Flickr link above; also another little Ged and Daisy video – the attack by a savage sheep (mistaken for a ram) and the skipping lambs at the end being delicious highlights – click here or below .
17th we drove South-West to Saltaire and had a look at the town and some art gallery-style Hockney stuff. 18th we spent at leisure and walking around the Star’s vicinity (Harome).
19th we drove home. Middlesex were again in action against Derbyshire (Day 3) and as we drove home we realised that an improbable early result to the match was on the cards. After stopping off at the house, I went on (alone) in the car to catch the end of the match and witness a Middlesex win – here’s the card. Quite a week for us and for Middlesex.
I don’t receive much corporate hospitality – never have.
But Z/Yen had been doing some stuff around Long Finance and the London Accord with Bank of America Merrill Lynch at that time, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been taken unawares when I received a message from Kegan Lovely headed:
Lichtenstein Corporate Supporters Evening Private View: 26 March from 6:45 -9:00pm
As I said in my reply to Kegan:
My first thought when I saw the subject line was “those bankers, always supporting and sponsoring tax havens!!”
Then I realised what a kind invitation it was. Janie loves her modern art, so if you do have a pair of tickets left and if it isn’t too rude for us to arrive c19:30/19:45, we’d very much like to join you that evening.
It really was a timely and kind invite – Janie and I had been planning to go to this exhibition for sure – we both really like Lichtenstein’s work. Back then, Janie was not a member of the Tate, so the opportunity to see the works on a quieter, private evening viewing felt like a real treat to us.
In the end, Kegan was poorly, so couldn’t even make it to the event that night to be our host in person, but Janie and I got to enjoy the exhibition and some corporate hospitality too.
Here is a link to the Tate resource on this exhibition.
The vid below gives you a pretty good idea of what the exhibition was like:
My review at the time is there in my thank you e-mail to Kegan:
Many thanks for the Tate Modern event. Janie and I both really enjoyed the exhibition. Even though we had seen a lot of Lichtenstein’s stuff before, we had never seen it all in one place. Also there were lots of works – especially the sculptures, design pieces and “explosions” – that were completely new to us and very good. Lichtenstein was more versatile and multi-talented than I had previously imagined.
Janie and I absolutely loved this exhibition of Hockney’s big landscape works.
It was the day after Uncle Michael’s funeral. We had booked a Friday late slot for this exhibition many weeks before. The exhibition was colourful relief after a sad day.
Here is a link to the exhibition’s resource on-line.
Janie loved it all so much she bought the book and we went off to Yorkshire in search of Hockney’s Wolds the following spring…to be Ogblogged when I get to it.
Hockney says you cannot photograph those Wolds and in a way he is right, but still I did have a go when we visited in 2013:
Below is a video in which curator Marco Livingstone explains the exhibition:
In short, we really loved this exhibition at the Royal Academy.
