Forty Years Of Celebrating Birthdays Together: Dinner With John White At Lita Marylebone, 27 August 2024

John is one day younger than me. We have often celebrated our joint birthdays together over the decades. It seemed fitting, 40 years after we first celebrated together…

“John White The Only One Dancing”, Learning How To Do The Keele SU Disco And Other Late August 1984 Happenings

…to meet around the time of our birthday.

It was my turn to choose and John’s turn to pay. I chose Lita Marylebone, which has received excellent reviews as a relatively recent opening.

Life took me to that Baker Street Quarter of Marylebone a little early on a glorious summer afternoon, so I took a short stroll around friends and family sites…

Annalisa’s place, back in the day

A house in Manchester Street which was, according to Portman Estate records, my Harris family’s place briefly in the late 1920s.

…took some tea outdoors in a cafe and sat reading in Paddington Street Gardens South until dinner time.

Then Lita.

The conceit of the place is sharing plates, which both John and I like. I sense that the maître d’ encouraged us to over-order, by suggesting that we order three plates from the small category, three from the medium and two from the large plates. Perhaps I should have asked him if those numbers were for rotund people like himself, or slim-jims like me and John.

Still, it was great to taste so many utterly delicious plates:

  • Wildfarmed sourdough, cultured butter
  • Kentish radishes, smoked cod’s roe
  • Smoked Basque sardines, ajo blanco, cherries
  • Salad of Romana courgettes, artichoke, ricotta, basil, mint
  • Strozzapreti, Aylesbury duck ragu, Parmesan 36 mth
  • Linguine, St Austell mussels, Cornish cockles, palourde clams, bottarga
  • Slow cooked Cull Yaw, celeriac, preserved winter truffle
  • Cornish monkfish, fennel, heirloom tomatoes, bouillbaisse

Plus some Ratte potatoes, which were surplus to our requirements but very interesting/different from your regular taters.

We chatted about all manner of things and the evening flew by. I took several pictures of John (see also headline picture), but he didn’t take any pictures of me…

…but that was OK, because my earlier appointment had been all about pictures of me – about 300 of them.

John, still crazy after all these years

Me – still hip after all these years

A Day At The Hundred Final, 18 August 2024

Zara Larsson making a mockery of the pavilion dress code.

Janie and I went to the final of the Hundred…again.

Pretty much everything I want to say about the day is beautifully summarised in the King Cricket piece, “authored by Daisy”, in which I am Ged and Janie is Daisy:

Daylight Larssony at The Hundred Final – a match report

If anything were to befall the King Cricket website, you can read that piece here.

The only details to add, as King Cricket match reports religiously omit anything about the cricket itself, are:

  • the women’s final was Welsh Fire v London Spirit, which the latter won. This was the first time a domestic home side had won a white ball trophy at Lord’s since the 1980s, so we were dancing in the seats of the Lord’s pavillion that afternoon;

We had a lovely day.

An Afternoon & Evening “Watching” London Spirit v Manchester Originals At Lord’s

Janie “watching cricket” intensely.

This brace of matches (women’s and then men’s) was also a Nell Mescal concert.

Pretty much everything I wanted to say about our afternoon and evening was captured in a King Cricket piece, which was published with alarming speed, I think because it touched on one of KC’s pieces about Dan Lawrence’s gyratory bowling action.

Conspicuous indifference to Dan Lawrence’s gyrations from a human being

If anything were ever to go awry over at King Cricket, you can read that article here.

In the unlikely event that anyone wants to know what happened in those matches:

As is so often the case with these matches, the women’s one was closer and in that regard far more entertaining. We didn’t stay to the end of the men’s one. We rarely do, regardless of how it is going. You CAN have too much of a good thing – especially when it starts to get a bit chilly in the evening.

But as usual we had a jolly good time.

An Afternoon At Hampton Court Palace Watching Real Tennis Champions Trophy Quarter-Finals, 2 August 2024

I chose a beautiful afternoon to down tools early and drive out to Hampton Court Palace to see some quality tournament real tennis.

I hatched the idea several weeks earlier, when Janie was called for jury service that week and the next. At that time, June, the weather was cold and we’d had more than our fair share of rain. I thought of this booking as a bit of a hedge against my summer sports watching being rain-blighted.

As it turned out, none of my chosen June/July tennis and cricket watching was so blighted and 2 August was destined to be a seriously hot day.

I watched the first of that afternoon’s two matches from the sauna that was the dedans gallery: Nino Merola v Nick Howell. Here is the highlights reel:

In the break between matches, I ran into Linda, whom I know through the Dedanists and have even partnered on one occasion. She was stewarding. When I mentioned the heat, she pointed out that the upper gallery places had barely sold and that I would be welcome to watch the second match from those less crowded and cooler giddy heights. It turned out to be excellent advice, both for me and also to relieve some pressure on the heaving dedans gallery.

I enjoyed the views from the upper gallery – initially (before the match started) the external views:

Then from the inside, the view of the match itself. I have viewed from the hazard end before (at Prested) but never from a great height like this:

Rob Shenkman v Ben Taylor-Matthews, it was. Ben depicted above. Here is the highlights reel:

It was a most enjoyable afternoon. The choice of a Friday afternoon in early August made sense in the end, as the drive to Noddyland was a doddle compared with the usual rush hour jam home from Hampton Court.

The Box by Brian Coyle, White Bear Theatre, 30 July 2024

All production photos by Alex Walton

I received a kind invitation to see and review this play/production – a fairly rare occurrence for me at a location and on a day that I was able to do. Janie has been summonsed to the Old Bailey (she claims it is jury service) so I ventured south of the river alone.

I’d never been to The White Bear Theatre, Kennington before. It is a “room above a pub” theatre, much in the style of, in the old days, The Bush (The Bush Theatre now has its own swanky space around the corner from the old pub), The Gate (which has moved from above a pub in convenient Notting Hill to an inconvenient space in Camden) and The Finborough Theatre (which is still in its original location, but currently has no pub underneath!). Indeed The White Bear appears to be, much like The Finborough, a magnet for new writing, which earns it a huge thumbs-up from me.

The White Bear is just around the corner from picturesque Cleaver Square

I suspect it is the Finborough connection that led to my e-mail address being in Sarah Lawrie’s e-rolodex, as she produced a couple of productions there which I had reviewed favourably: Scrounger by Athena Stevens and Death Of A Hunter by Rolf Hochhuth.

OK, so I had not seen Sarah Lawrie act before, but I had seen director Jonathan Woolf act a small part in a big production: Travelling Light at the RNT, in 2012 just before “I parted ways” with Nick Hytner the following year.

Can Sarah act as well as produce? Can Jonathan direct as well as act?

***Spoiler alert*** – yes they can.

The Box is a fringe-theatre-style one hour drama. Very much the style of play we like.

I found the first 20 or so minutes bemusing. I know I was supposed to be bemused, but perhaps just a bit too long or a bit too bemusing.

I wrote the word “disjointed” in my jotter. I also wrote “collection of vignettes”.

But soon the drama and tragedy that underpins the play was unfolding and the meaning of those disjointed scenes became apparent.

During the initial scenes, I was unimpressed by the acting; it came across as am-dram overacting. Frankly, I was surprised that both performers were fringe-award-winning actors based on those early scenes. But once it became clear that I was witnessing, in those early scenes, fine actors playing the role of ordinary folk acting out fantasies, I was with the message. How could I not be, given that Janie and I have Ged, Daisy and a cast of thousands to play with?

How this might play out in the USA, where even fringe audiences are prone to walk out after 10 or 15 minutes if they are displeased, I don’t know. That’s worth the playwright and cast thinking about, though, as the play struck me as having an American feel to it that could, with minor revision, do well over there.

I was reminded of:

…all of which are very successful American plays. That is not to say that the play is derivative, but several of its themes share themes with those plays.

Photograph by Alex Walton.
Photograph by Alex Walton.

I thought both performers were very good indeed; as the play went on and as the tragedy became clearer, they performed dramatically but without melodrama. Sarah Lawrie in particular came across as a sympathetic character, but as the story unfolded the bottled-up anguish of Martin Edwards’s character also came to the fore.

Photograph by Alex Walton.
Photograph by Alex Walton.

If you want to see this production at The White Bear, you only have until 3 August to see it. It deserves a bigger audience than it is getting at that small but sweet space. But then, how often do I find myself thinking that about fine drama at fringe theatres?

Leamington & Then Edgbaston For England v West Indies, 25 to 27 July 2024

Pretty much everything I want to say about this excellent three days in the Midlands has been said in the King Cricket report, attributed to Daisy:

Blue for Bob Day 2024, England v West Indies at Edgbaston – a match report

Should a mishap ever befall the King Cricket site, a scrape of that piece can be found here.

Daisy omitted to mention the excellent meal Harish, Daisy and I enjoyed at Sabai Sabai in Moseley. We vowed to return there and stuck to our vow in 2025.

The Light Within: O/Modernt Chamber Orchestra Feat. Soumik Datta (Sarod) & Gurdain Rayatt (Tabla),The Wigmore Hall, 21 July 2024

Gurdain Rayatt getting ready

We don’t really patronise The Wigmore Hall for the wow factor. We quite like the fact that we are quite often amongst the youngest people in the audience. We like early music and we get a good dose of that from The Wig.

But we do sometimes book a concert at The Wigmore Hall that we think might have a wow factor and sometimes, like on this occasion, we call it right. It does tend to mean that we are bringing the average age up rather than down, though.

Here is a link to The Wigmore Hall stub for this concert.

We have seen O/Modernt before, under the enthusiast auspices of Hugo Ticciati:

O/MODƏRNT: Monteverdi to Tango & Monteverdi in Historical Counterpoint, Wigmore Hall, 3 July 2015

They like a bit of fusion, do the O/Modernt gang. On this occasion, it was an East/West fusion that they explored, as well as a temporal “Bach to Beatles” shtick.

Here’s what we heard:

  • Johann Sebastian Bach –  Contrapunctus 1 from Art of Fugue BWV1080
  • Pēteris Vasks – Concerto No. 2 ‘In Evening Light’ UK première I. Andante con passione • II. Andante cantabile • III. Andante con amore
  • Max Richter – On the Nature of Daylight
  • Soumik Datta  – Migrant Birds from Awaaz (arranged by Jordan Hunt)
  • John Lennon & Paul McCartney – Blackbird (arranged by Johannes Marmén)
  • Soumik Datta – 1947 from Awaaz (arranged by Jordan Hunt)
  • Jordan Hunt – Misremembrance
  • Wojciech Kilar – Orawa
  • Soumik Datta – Awaaz from Awaaz (arranged by Jordan Hunt)
  • John Lennon & Paul McCartney – Across The Universe (arranged by Johannes Marmén, plus sarod & tabla riff) – encore

To give you a feel for what we heard, here is a clip from O/Moderndt playing Distant Light by Pēteris Vasks. The piece we heard was the follow-up concerto by Vasks. It was a nice touch to have Vasks at The Wig for his premier – I even managed to congratulate him in person as we were leaving the hall.

The sarod, tabla and a heap of special furniture/equipment arrived during the interval for the second half of the show.

Soumik Datta getting ready

Technician “turning it up to eleven” for Soumik Datta and Gurdain Rayatt

There’s no video to be found of O/Modernt and the sarod & tabla fellas all playing together, but here is a 15-year-old clip of Soumik Datta and Gurdain Rayatt playing as a pair, which will give you a feel.

Here is a more recent recording of that pair playing together:

The most “wow” piece of the evening was Orawa by Wojciech Kilar. Here is that piece played by a more formal orchestra than O/Modernt.

The encore had to calm us down again, which it did. Here’s what Across The Universe sounds like in O/Modernt’s hands.

The sarod & tabla coda to the Across The Universe encore helped us all to float away from The Wig.

We heard several younger members of the audience saying that they had been blown away by the evening. This is surely the sort of thing The Wigmore Hall should be doing more often.

Echo (Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen) by Nassim Soleimanpour, Royal Court Theatre, 19 July 2024

To the Royal Court Theatre on a Friday evening. “Why Friday?”, I hear you cry. Because the Royal Court is now, in its wisdom, starting Saturday shows at 6:30, which is a bit early for us in the summer months, when we like to take advantage of the outdoors in daylight.

We fancied this, as we had seen one of Nassim’s previous works, the eponymous one…

Nassim by Nassim Soleimanpour, Bush Studio, 29 July 2017

…and loved it.

This sounded a bit more techie but a similar idea.

That’s exactly what it was.

When we booked it we had no idea who we were going to see. We discovered a week or so before our evening that our performer was to be Rebecca Lucy Taylor aka Self Esteem.

This is what she looks like when she does one of her more regular things – singing contemporary music:

It is hard to review a piece like this because I imagine every performer stamps their own mark on the piece – that is sort-of the idea. But certainly the evening we spent at The Royal Court was a gripping 80-90 minutes of theatre, using multi-media the way theatre can use multi-media best. It added to the live performance rather than making me wonder whether we should simply be at home watching a film.

Here is a link to the Royal Court resource on this piece, including a list of other performers involved.

It seems to have had mixed reviews, but then different reviewers saw different performers respond to the piece in different ways. Here’s a link to reviews.

We found it moving and thought-provoking. We’re very glad we went and we’re very glad we saw Self Esteem. We could have done without the screaming groupies, but you can’t have everything…or rather you can’t omit everything that you don’t want.

An Evening At Lord’s For A Women’s T20 International Between England & New Zealand, 17 July 2024

The last time Janie and I had seen England Women play New Zealand Women was a World Cup Final 15 years earlier…

England Women v New Zealand Women and Pakistan v Sri Lanka, ICC World Twenty20 Finals Day, Lord’s, 21 June 2009

Back then, I wasn’t a member of the MCC but I did know how to tick boxes on a form requesting a chance at returns if there were any.

This time, I simply applied for a guest ticket and this time, now that diversity is all the thing, I could even take Janie as a Member’s Guest into the pavilion and enjoy a relaxed dress code in there.

Janie loves the upper sub deck. Given that the sun indeed chose to shine on us that evening, that is the spot I picked, getting to Lord’s early enough to secure good seats up there.

Last time I travelled to Lord’s separately from Janie for the sun deck, Janie walked straight past me up there, so I decided to take no chances and sent her a selfie so she might recognise me…or at least recognise my shirt.

I hope readers have noticed the little nod to MCC colours about that shirt.

Janie arrived in good time, as evidenced by the headline photo, which she took.

England had already secured the series by the time this match came around. We didn’t think they batted brilliantly but we guessed they’d batted well enough.

As it started to get a bit colder and my picnic got depleted, we decided to catch the end of the match at home.

Everything you might want to know about the match, and probably much more, can be found through this Cricinfo link.

Jimmy’s Last Match: England v West Indies, Lord’s, 10-12 July 2024

Jimmy’s last warm up

I pretty much spent all three days at Lord’s watching this match – interspersed with some real tennis and stuff.

I wrote this match up for King Cricket:

James Anderson’s final Test warm-up and the all-important sourcing of provisions for that game (a match report)

If anything ever goes amiss at King Cricket, you can read that “match report” here.

I have little to add to that report. Here is a link to the scorecard and Cricinfo resources for that match.

My only other comment/memory is a conversation I had with a charming fellow when we were milling around in the Tavern Stand awaiting the post match presentations and inevitable Jimmy farewell ceremonials. He had come down to London from a remote place in the North of England, the exact location of which escapes me but I think Northumbria. He was recently retired and was also recently widowed. He had treated himself to some fancy photographic equipment and was delighted to be able to photograph Jimmy’s last match at close quarters and seemed similarly delighted that he could talk photography with someone like me while he waited.

Did my new friend get better pictures than me?

Almost certainly. But mine with my phone are not too shabby.