Other Culture (film, media, fine art, exhibitions, other people’s writing etc.) – Page 8

Gresham Society AGM & Dinner With Gyles Brandreth, London Capital Club, 19 February 2018

For many years I have claimed that there are only two places left on the planet where people still refer to me as “young man”; Lord’s and The Wigmore Hall. I must admit, though, it’s been a while since anyone has addressed me as such in either of those places.

As it happens, ahead of this Gresham Society event, I spent the early part of the afternoon at Lord’s, playing real tennis, as has been my wont since the spring of 2016. Real tennis is a fiendishly difficult game to play. The professionals point out that the 150-200 court hours I have put in so far leave me “barely out of nappies” in real tennis terms. Presumably I will go through a “young man” phase eventually before becoming a senior player.

We have several senior gentlemen who continue to play into their late 80s and even into their 90s.

Sadly, the video from that bout did not get saved – my opponent that day quite possibly asked for all evidence to be destroyed and frankly, given the circumstances, I don’t blame him.

After tennis, a relatively quick visit to the Z/Yen offices to sort out one or two work things before setting off, with Michael Mainelli, to the London Capital Club.

I think Michael was hoping that we’d be about five minutes late, thus missing most of the AGM, which Tim Connell had promised to keep to seven minutes.

In truth, we arrived just as the formalities were starting, so were able to appreciate all 12 minutes of the promised seven minute AGM.

Then some pleasant chat with several friends before descending to the dining area.

There was no seating plan, but I was lucky to sit with the Ayliffes to the right of me and Margaret Hodson to the left. Discussions with the Ayliffes mostly revolved around the political mess our nation (and indeed much of the western world) seems to me making of itself.

I knew about the musical side to the Hodson family, but was unaware of the horsey side, until that evening. The work that Margaret Hodson does with horse riding for disabled people is truly remarkable – click here for an independent view on it about 10 years ago.

The food was pretty good. A chicken salad round thing which was very well presented and tasty. The toast was quite hard – so much so that Margaret Hodson (and several others at our table) gave up on it. When she saw me persevering, Margaret gave a running commentary on my efforts, which could easily have been horse trials commentary, including the slightly disapproving/disappointed voice when one piece of the toast went flying towards the floor – no doubt a four-point penalty.

Then a slow-cooked lamb shank dish – a good idea for a large function and a very full-flavoured. The dessert was a crème brûlée.

Gyles Brandreth gave an excellent address to the Society. Clearly he was well briefed, so after an amusing potted history of the ups and downs of his career, he spoke highly of the Gresham Society. Gyles placed emphasis on the fact that we are the Friends of Gresham College, waxing lyrical about the benefits of societies that are genuinely friendly.

I totally agree. The Gresham Society is, above all, a very friendly bunch of people. We have a shared pleasure in and purpose through Gresham College, but it is above all a friendly group. For sure that is why I like to attend whenever I can…

…even if Basil teases me almost every time about my aversion to filling in forms and Tim Connell tries to find increasingly convoluted ways to avoid having me play my baroq-ulele…

…but I digress.

Towards the end of his talk, Gyles Brandreth mentioned younger members of the Gresham Society and I thought he might have glanced at me as he said it.

There was a little time left after the address for some more chat with friends before I realised that it really was time for me to head home.

As I was leaving, when I went up to Gyles to congratulate him on his talk and say goodbye, he told me that he was looking at me when he mentioned the younger members. I told him that I thought my days of being addressed as “young man” at Lord’s and The Wigmore Hall were behind me, but perhaps the Gresham Society, now a third outlet for what remains of my perceived youth, will revive my fortunes in that department.

As it happens, Janie and I went to the Wigmore Hall the next evening:

The World Of Byrd: Consorts Hymns Divisions & Dances, Phantasm, Wigmore Hall, 20 February 2018

I’m sorry to report, no joy in the “being addressed as young man” department that night.

But for sure I’ll keep trying; at Lord’s, at the Wigmore Hall and most certainly with my friends at the Gresham Society.

The Gresham Society AGM and Dinner had been a truly delightful evening.

If It Ain’t Baroque…Don’t Fix It, A Day Out With John Random, Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich,18 January 2018

John Random sits on the “Sounding Board” for the Old Royal Naval College. I’m not entirely sure what that means…

…I’m not sure John is entirely sure…

…but one thing it does mean at the moment is that John has the right occasionally to take a guest to tour the Painted Hall Ceiling.

This really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the ceiling of the extraordinary painted hall up close and personal, while scaffolding is up as the ceiling is being conserved.

How could I possibly say no when John offered me such a tour?

John went the whole hog, safety-dress-wise, whereas I, on learning that the hard hat was voluntary, declined the offer to wear one of those.

We were part of a small group, led my the intrepid Martina; a young, pint-sized Italian woman who seemed to know an awful lot about the ceiling.

We are very much in the baroque period for the painted hall and ceiling. We are also steeped in the politics of the Glorious Revolution. So William and Mary take centre stage and sectarian symbolism abounds.

Symbolic characters…not the sectarian ones I am glad to say…I should have listened & memorised…River Thames & London I think…

To be honest, the detail was a bit much for me, but the awe-inspiring opportunity to see this extraordinary work up close and learn about the conservation project was extremely interesting and memorable.

I would thoroughly recommend a visit while there is still time – still several months at the time of writing this – I suggest you do it sooner rather than later.

It was a sunny winter’s day, so after the tour we strolled a bit and I especially wanted to see the chapel, where I had attended at least one concert in the past.

The chapel looked especially splendid in the sunlight – I hadn’t seen it on such a day before – plus it had clearly been through a clean up and refurb of its own since my last visit, perhaps 25 years ago.

As an aside, John Random seems to specialise in memorable days in Greenwich – my previous visit to the place, 20+ years ago, was with Janie to meet John and Jenny on an unforgettable day – click here or below:

Lunch With John Random And Jenny Mill In Greenwich, “The Day That Princess Diana Died”, 31 August 1997

John and I pondered whether any royals had (or would) die on the day of this Painted Hall visit. We decided that, if the worst did happen, we really should abandon any future plans to meet in Greenwich.

Next stop, lunch. John said he’d never tried an eel pie place before, so we chanced our luck in such a traditional place – Goddards – click here. The fact that John doesn’t much like mash and had never tried eel before did not daunt him:

I personally am keen on eel, although usually in the smoked form…

…indeed as soon as I have finished writing this piece I shall sup on smoked eel and salad…

…so let me press on.

John found the eel a bit difficult to navigate, because the stewed eel served alongside the pie has the bone still in. I told John that I seemed to be managing the geography of the eel pieces better than him, which he found a curious turn of phrase.

I was reminded of Charley the Gent’s nerve-wracking encounter with my smoked eel at Lord’s in September 2015 – written up for King Cricket – click here or below...goodness knows what Chas would have made of it if I hadn’t carefully filleted the smoked eel for him:

Middlesex v Yorkshire at Lord’s – day one match report

Anyway, John and I both found the eel pie shop food a little bland – not least the meat in the pie and the parsley sauce – indeed the eel was far and away the tastiest element.

We thought we might enjoy some tea/coffee elsewhere more than we’d enjoy it in the eel pie house, so we went around the corner to Red Door Cafe – a quirky place which was very much to my taste.

The proprietor, William, played a very interesting and eclectic mixture of music, ranging from Leonard Cohen to Arvo Pärt.

Red Door served a very good cup of coffee and also had an intriguing collection of teas…I sampled the white which was very nice. John tried some cake which he said was also very good. I’d certainly go to that cafe again like a shot.

John and I chatted until we realised that hours had gone by in this jovial fashion, but we both really did need to get on and do some other things before the end of the day.

A very memorable and very enjoyable few hours.

Walk With Me, Curzon Bloomsbury, 7 January 2018

Hmmm.

Janie was very keen to see Walk With Me – she had heard great things about Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen master who is said to be the father of the modern mindfulness movement. Janie very much enjoyed some of his lectures on YouTube and thought the film would go deeper.

So much so that Janie was even prepared to schlep to the Curzon Bloomsbury on a Sunday evening, as that was the only slot that worked for us during the film’s opening weekend.

Here is the IMDb resource for the movie.

The film irritated us both for different reasons. In Janie’s case, because the film didn’t go deeper – in fact it didn’t really provide much insight into Thich Nhat Hanh’s ideas at all – it just showed his Plum Village community and a tour beyond…at a snail-like pace.

Mindfulness is one of those concepts I like in theory, but in practice – and I did try a mindfulness course few years ago and did stick it out – I found mindfulness itself a bit irritating.

Add to that general irritation an infeasibly slow movie, the condescending tones of Benedict Cumberbach and a young man sitting next to me who seemed to have brought a lifetime supply of noisy nosh into the cinema with him…

…you get my point.

For me, the only interesting part of the movie was when the monks go on tour to the USA, so you see the slow-moving, mindful monks up against the no holds barred, fast pace of New York City.

Janie missed much of the USA tour part of the movie because she started nodding off at that juncture.

Disgraceful.

I had done my nodding off and missing chunks of the movie during the earlier, unbelievably slow passages.

This link will find you reviews and other information resources.

Below is the trailer:

You might wish to judge for yourselves, but Janie’s advice would be to click through to some of Thich Naht Hanh’s mini lectures on YouTube – e.g. this one – click here – rather than waste your time with the movie.

Human Flow, Curzon Bloomsbury, 26 December 2017

What better way to cheer yourselves up on Boxing Day than to visit Janie’s mum in the morning and then to go and see Human Flow in the afternoon?

Seriously, our adjective of choice for this movie about refugees and the mass migration of people is “troubling”.

Ai Weiwei is a masterful artist, unafraid to combine high art with social and political issues – click here for our thoughts on the Ai Weiwei exhibition a couple of years ago. He shows himself to have a wonderful eye for cinematography too.

Here is a link to the IMDb resource on this movie.

Below is an excellent trailer that will give you a reasonable feel for the film:

It is not a movie for the faint-hearted. Janie wondered immediately after the film whether Ai Weiwei had gone too far when getting refugees to relate and revisit the horrors of their experiences. One woman starts to vomit while recalling her story, while one man, showing the record cards of his decimated family sounds traumatised almost to the point of insanity while retelling their tragedy.

But it is also a movie that looks at the movement of people in the abstract, with statements by political and civil leaders expounding many different views on the causes of and possible solutions for the migration crisis facing the world.

Ai Weiwei takes us to many of the world’s trouble spots. Janie and I have been to many such places ourselves, but have never really witnessed the more extreme causes of human migration first hand.

Janie and I visited a traditional Garo Village in Meghalaya in 2005, only to learn that the village has been razed by the electricity board and the Garo people were now living in a shanty, fearful of the wet season to come.Ai Weiwei is brilliant, in my view, by showing us the many sides to the story, from the deeply human individual cases to some beautifully shot scenes, some of people on the move, others of mundane scenes such as a gigantic pile of life jackets. Janie questioned whether Ai Weiwei’s eye for artistic images was appropriate when depicting scenes related to such suffering – so many migrants are lost at sea for want of, or despite those life jackets.

It is 140 minutes long, this film. I think it is a truly superb piece of documentary cinema. I challenge anyone to watch it and not be moved by it.

It will probably also change some aspect of your opinions on this politically and socially-charged subject. If you think there is a fundamental difference between refugees and economic migrants, for example, this film might make you start to think differently.

This film doesn’t provide answers, but it certainly informs and asks the right sort of challenging questions.

Paddington 2, Curzon Victoria, 24 December 2017

This is a simply fabulous movie. We loved the first Paddington movie; I think we both loved this one even more.

It is even more charming, even funnier and even more action-packed/exciting than the first Paddington movie.

Here is a link to the IMDb entry for the film.

Me, outside a pub in Victoria, before the movie

I posed for a photo outside a pub, The Albert, in Victoria, before entering the Curzon, for reasons explained by clicking the photo above or this link.

This was our first time at the Curzon Victoria – very nicely done the place is too – we’ll surely go to that one again if/when it suits.

But back to Paddington 2 – superb cast yet again, with Hugh Grant doing a brilliant job as the guest villain for this particular film.

There are bits that possibly tickle me more than most people – for example the way my Notting Hill neighbourhood is depicted – so charming & quirky…almost but of not quite as it really is. Except we do have a calypso band on almost every street corner…of course we do.

Indeed I absolutely love the way London is depicted in this film – a subtle blend of modern (e.g. The Shard) and old (steam trains, telephone kiosks, Victorian prisons…umm).

Paddington 2 really did have me and Janie laughing, crying and getting excited by the action like the pair of overgrown kids we clearly are.

If you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading and start making plans to go see this film.

Happy End, Curzon Bloomsbury, 23 December 2017

Reading about this Michael Haneke film in the Curzon brochure, it sounded very interesting and right up our street. Strangely, we have often noticed reviews of Haneke films and thought that they sounded like our cup of tea, but this (I think) is the first we have actually got off our butts and gone to see one.

We’ll be looking out for more Haneke films (including some of his earlier ones) after this experience. We thought this was a really superb movie.

Here is the IMDb entry for Happy End.

Talk about dysfunctional families – this high-falutin’ French family really takes the biscuit. They reminded me a bit of families you sometimes find in Francois Mauriac novels – just a more modern version.

Haneke tends to work with an ensemble of favourite actors and actresses, so it won’t surprise Haneke fans to see Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant, for example. A nice little cameo role for Toby Jones too.

Janie and I thought the stand-out performance was Fantine Harduin as the little girl, Eve, at the centre of the plot. Remember where you first saw her name!

Bass Viol (Viola Da Gamba) With Seven Strings, By DasBee, source https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AViola_da_gamba_basso_7.jpg

So why the picture of the rare seven-string bass viol and a name check for Hille Perl, one of the leading exponents of that instrument? Well, it is only a sub-plot but a rather full-on one; it is not all that often that you’ll see the terms sexting and viola da gamba in the same sentence…or in the same subplot. That subplot put the gilt on the gingerbread for early music lovers like me and Janie.

Fabulous movie, highly recommended by both of us.

Winnie-The-Pooh: Exploring A Classic, V&A, 8 December 2017

Little boy, captivated by the images and artefacts

We booked a late afternoon preview slot for this exhibition months ago, when it was first announced.

We love Winnie-The-Pooh; we don’t love swarms of children. Simples.

Result.

We got to see this charming little exhibition in ideal (for us) circumstances. Enough people around for it to have atmosphere but a quiet slot mid-to-late afternoon, just ahead of any members who might bring their children after school.

The V&A rubric on the exhibition can be found by clicking here.

Reviews and stuff (at the time of writing just previews) can be found through this search term – click here.

We took several photos – if you want to see more than just the few on show in this piece, either click here or the photo below:

The show is an interactive experience, but in a very analogue way – with a staircase to sit halfway up, a slide, an hexagonal spinning name generator and some drawing exercises.

This little girl tried out the drawing exercises

No virtual reality like the Modigliani across the water, nor even any computerised games. Pooh sticks was thus, in my opinion, under-served. One senior lady member wondered out loud whether any children had been involved in the curating of this exhibition. I thought it a good question and guessed that the answer is no.

Still, the exhibition was beautifully designed – Janie thought it one of the most stylish she can ever remember – with lots of hoardings in the style of E. H. Shepard drawings emblazoned with well chosen chunks of A.A. Milne’s wonderfully crafted words and some sound effects, such as bees in the vicinity of the story about Pooh searching for honey. The simplicity, I guess, is a large part of the show’s charm.

I got to visit the North Pole. Janie, of course, now five weeks into her pole dancing hobby, found Pooh’s pole a little tame for her taste…

…yet Janie was surprisingly timid at the idea of trying out the slide, which she did attempt, eventually, rather gingerly in my view:

We had lots of fun at this exhibition and did learn quite a lot about the wider context of the works from the exhibits.

Afterwards, we tried out the new members’ room for refreshments and very much enjoyed it. A much larger, airier space than the previous room, which was rather pokey and “uti” for the V&A. The friendly staff and tempting menu come into their own in this improved facility.

Keeping the wolf (or perhaps, in this case, tigger) from the door

As for the Pooh show, the V&A shop will no doubt do lots of business with some excellent books about the wider context and also some beautiful editions of the Milne/Shepard Pooh books themselves. But we resolved instead to stop off at the flat and pick up my tatty Methuen paperback Poohs for the weekend – by gosh they are dog-eared and falling apart but they are mine:

After dinner, little Daisy dropped off to sleep while I was reading her some of the poems. Bless.

Modigliani Plus Three, Tate Modern, Tate Britain & Royal Academy, 22 & 24 November 2017

The big idea was for me and Janie to take Wednesday 22 November off work to enjoy a members’ preview of the Modigliani exhibition at the Tate Modern.

But the idea grew like Topsy. We both quite fancied seeing Impressionists in London at Tate Britain and also liked the look of a couple of Royal Academy exhibitions showing at the moment: Jasper Johns “Something Resembling Truth” and Dalí / Duchamp.

In the end, it occurred to both of us that four exhibitions in one day is overdoing it at our age…actually WAS overdoing it even when we were younger and less discerning.

So, we resolved to visit the Tate galleries on our Wednesday off (I was so tempted to use the headline “Tate-à-Tate”), then to take in the two smaller exhibitions at the Royal Academy a couple of days later, by taking advantage of late Friday opening.

We enjoyed all four exhibitions, but the highlight for us was undoubtedly the first one we saw; Modigliani.

Following my Evening Of Economics With Eno Comics earlier in the week – click here – I was clear in my mind that the exhibition featured the work of Amadeo Modigliani, the painter & sculptor, not, as I might otherwise have assumed, Merton Miller’s co-author, Franco Modigliani, the Nobel-winning corporate finance economist.

Just in case any Ogblog readers remain confused, I have embedded the trailer for the wonderful Modigliani exhibition below:

We both really loved this exhibition. Not only does it show a superb selection of Modigliani’s work, but you get some real insight into his working world, from his early days in Paris to the end of Modigliani’s relatively short and tragic life.

A tip for anyone planning to go to this exhibition; do make sure you bagsy a (free) ticket for the Modigliani virtual reality studio: The Ochre Atelier. Both Janie and I thoroughly enjoyed that experience. You feel that you are sitting in Modigliani’s studio from three different angles. You can’t quite smell the smouldering Gitanes in the ashtray, but you do sense the breeze coming in through the window.

Impressionists In London – French Artists In Exile 1870 to 1904

We had the car with us, making it a surprisingly short hop from the Tate Modern to the Tate Britain, via Lambeth Bridge.

This exhibition has been somewhat maligned by the critics, but we enjoyed enough of it to justify the visit.

Many of my old school friends, for example, will appreciate the scenes from suburban London where the French artist refugees seemed to congregate for a while; doing some interesting impressions of 1870s Upper Norwood, Sydenham, Lordship Lane and the like – Sarf London Ooh La La?

Cricket loving friends, d’autre part, should love the impressions of 1870s cricket, from Tissot (surely not an Impressionist) hanging out with the I Zingari lot in St John’s Wood to Pisarro’s wonderfully impressionistic crickety park scenes.

In fact, there were quite a lot of Pisarro works on various subjects, probably worth the visit alone. Monet’s foggy London scenes are also well worth seeing if you have never seen them before – as it happens we had seen them before but were very happy to see them again.

Jasper Johns – “Something Resembling Truth”

This was a far more interesting exhibition than I expected. I had a few key images in my head for Johns (flags, numbers…) and didn’t realise the diversity of his work when you see a full tilt retrospective, which this undoubtedly is.

It’s patchy; Janie and I both enjoyed some but not all of the works, but there was plenty to enjoy and I (for one) was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the work and variety of styles. A lesser-known middle period in the 1980s, for example, yielded interesting work to my eyes.

Dalí / Duchamp

Janie and I both love Dalí’s better works and many of those were on show in this exhibition. Duchamp’s art, we felt, was less interesting. Marcel Duchamp was clearly a very interesting thinker, but perhaps not such an interesting artist.

Well worth a look at this exhibition, though, with a good selection of artefacts and photographs as well as art works.

Further, with the Jasper Johns and the Dalí / Duchamp exhibitions located next to each other, it really does make sense to see both in one go, unless you are very short of time and/or have an aversion to seeing two shows in one go.

We had a mixed juice (or non-alcy cocktail) in the RA members bar after the shows, served by a comedy combination of competent barman and clueless waiter.

Here are some link terms to reviews of the four exhibitions:

But don’t take the experts’ words for it – we’ve all had enough of experts after all. Janie and I thought all of the exhibitions were worth seeing, but if you can only see one of these exhibitions, for us it would have be the Modigliani.

An Evening Of Economics With Eno Comics, Economy, 20 November 2017

Brian Eno is a very charitable fellow, so invitations to visit his place are often on behalf of a charity for which he is a formal patron or simply a charity he feels motivated to help.

Economy – click here to find its website ecnmy.org – is a new charity which has entered Brian’s orbit and for which he kindly laid on this event at his studio.

Brian had mentioned the forthcoming event to me some weeks ago, when we ran into each other on the street, so I had saved the date. Brian had told me to expect Ha-Joon Chang and Yanis Varoufakis. I had read the former’s book, 23 Things…, back in the day, but had not got around to reading any Varoufakis. So I one-clicked a copy of And the Weak… , reading it a week (ironically) before the event.

I highly recommend the latter book, btw, especially the “modest proposal” appended at the end of Yanis’s book. Those nine pages should be getting far more thought and attention; they should be required reading for anyone who cares about the future of Europe and European people.

Brian hadn’t mentioned Ayesha Hazarika ahead of time so I had to look her up; a former advisor to the Labour Party and the Remain campaign, now seeking solace in comedy. Sounds like a natural progression to me.

Comedy and economics sounded like my kind of thing.

Before the main event, over pre-panel drinks, I met some very interesting postgrad/researcher types, plus several of the Economy charity’s staff and trustees. A very bright, young and friendly bunch.

Economy’s big thing is to try and make economics understandable to the general public; a very laudable aim. I tried not to bore people too much with tales of The Price of Fish derring do…

…but I do find it hard to express how I feel about making economics meaningful and comprehensible without reference to the book.

I didn’t notice anyone sidling away from me and one or two of the Economy people tried to encourage me to ask a question for the panel session, which I didn’t really want to do and in the end I was rather glad I didn’t get around to it.

Some of the Economy team, Brian and the Panel, photograph “liberated” from Victoria Waldersee (centre)’s twitter feed

As is so often the case with this type of event, the best bits were before and after the formal session. Not that the formal session was all that formal.

Ayesha set the tone for the formal session by being really quite funny when introducing herself and in her early responses. Good self-effacing stuff. Ha-Joon and Yanis picked up on the irreverent tone, but I don’t think either of them should give up the day job for comedy.

Victoria Waldersee of Economy did a superb job of trying to cram a heap of questions about important economic & political issues into a 45 minute panel comprising three people who all talk for a living.

Predictably, the answers didn’t get all that far during the panel session; it reminded me a little of Question Time on the TV – except that on this panel all of the opinion was pitched as anti-economics, anti-capitalist and anti-establishment…

…which is fine as far as it goes, but I wanted to hear what was suggested in the place of everything that is wrong and heard little in terms of alternative proposals and solutions.

More confusingly, I found the panel sometimes at variance with the charity Economy’s raison d’être, with Ha-Joon and Yanis both suggesting that it is impossible to teach economics to youngsters without indoctrinating them with neo-classical economics clap-trap. I don’t agree. We might need a significant shift of emphasis or lens for teaching young people the right building blocks, which means that we might need to teach a lot of teachers to teach differently, but ignorance of vital topics is surely not bliss. Surely it is possible (even if difficult) to change curricula?

Yanis’s big takeaway on education is that young people should be taught economic and political history and not taught that pure economics is sort-of about maths. I buy into that part.

I don’t buy Ha-Joon’s rather emphatic view that economists are to blame for the 2008 crash and each of the preceding market bubbles and failures in the past 100+ years…

…that sounded a bit like a bigot’s rant against his least favourite ethnic group, immigrants generally or some despised far-away nation. Ha-Joon is clearly not a bigot, but to attribute blame so simplistically does an injustice to the undoubted quality of his own mind.

Such simplistic, finger-pointing style was in part a symptom of the shortness of the formal discussion and attempts to match Ayesha for comedy. The audience (there must have been a hundred or so of us crowded into the studio) lapped up the irreverence generally; I suppose that reaction egged on the Professors to attempt greater heights of mirth.

Ayesha, in fact, cleverly switched away from unsubtle comedy when she described her experience of politicians grasp of inflation (almost non-existent) and when she explained inflation in simple, human terms – hard working care workers no longer able to feed their families without resorting to food banks because the prices have all gone up while their wages haven’t.

Very subtle, a very sardonic humour style; it reminded me stylistically of my Norman Lamont song from NewsRevue 25 years ago – click here.

So by the end of the formal session I was convinced that Economy is a good cause but I was not convinced that the formal panel discussion had relentlessly advanced the charity’s cause; economists and economics had been all-but universally damned.

Indeed, so nervous was I of being thought of as having anything to do with that maligned category of people, economists, I didn’t dare mention my Keele connections – click here if you dare – which I always thought of as being “very much of the left” but with a balanced, open-minded aspect; clearly not sufficiently left in some circles.

I didn’t even dare chat about the fact that Janie and I were going to a preview of the Modigliani on Wednesday, just in case we were mistaken for acolytes of Franco Modigliani, the Nobel-winning corporate finance economist…

…rather than Amadeo Modigliani, the painter & sculptor of long-face fame, being featured at the Tate Modern.

OK, I’m now exaggerating for effect…must be catching.

I had some really interesting conversations after the main event; a real mixture of people. One very interesting fund manager who reads books but was now trying to spend the rest of the evening incognito, some more of the Economy people and a very pleasant chat with David Graeber, for the first time in a couple of years.

As always, I thoroughly enjoyed an evening at Brian’s place, meeting interesting people and having my thoughts severely provoked.

I’d like to help the charity Economy if I can; I have one or two ideas…

Culture in Crisis: At Home in Syria, Talk With Zahed Tajeddin & Diana Darke, V&A, 23 October 2017

An excellent talk and reception at the V&A – part of the Culture In Crisis series – two contrasting stories about houses in war-torn Syria.

Diana Darke is an English writer and broadcaster who bought and restored a villa house in the Old City of Damascus some years ago. She talked about the multi-faith, multi-cultural nature of Damascus; we learned that Sunnis and Shias often intermarry in Damascus; those folk are known as Sushis. The old city in Damascus has not been badly damaged in the war, but a corrupt lawyer tried (unsuccessfully) to steal Diana’s house from her. She’s written a book about it – click here – Janie bought the book after the talk.

Janie and I took tea at the Umayyad Palace Restaurant, Damascus, 1997

Zahed Tajeddin is an artist from Aleppo. He bought and restored an old villa house in the old city of Aleppo several years ago. He explained that most of the old city of Aleppo was very dilapidated when he was growing up; his grandparents were the last generation to use those houses as comfortable residences. But a restoration trend had started towards the end of the last century with a few restored and used as restaurants – Janie and I knew about that…

Janie and I dined at the Sissi House Restaurant, Aleppo, in 1997

…but Zahed chose to buy and restore one to its former glory and residential purpose. His description of the project and his pictures were, for me, probably the best bit of the talk. Of course Zahed’s house has been severely damaged in the war; many of the neighbouring houses have been completely destroyed.

Both stories were fascinating. Zahed’s story is sadder, but both of the speakers demonstrated incredible courage and resilient determination to overcome their respective difficulties. Incredibly, Zahed has already started restoring his house again.

There wasn’t much time for questions, which was possibly just as well, because the few questions that did come up were a bit daft.

There was however plenty of time for a glass of wine and chat after the talk. Janie got to buy the book and chat briefly with both of the speakers, asking them far more sensible questions than those that came earlier from the lecture hall grand-standers. We met a couple of interesting young people; one young Oxford student who wants to go to Syria as part of her studies and one young Syrian student at SOAS.

A fascinating evening, rounded off with some fine sushi from the Sushi Shop in South Kensington…we’re talking Japanese style fish here, not a Damascene mix of Sunni and Shia people.

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