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.

State of Emergency by Falk Richter, Gate Theatre, 7 November 2008

A short dystopian piece about lives in a gated community in some future or remote authoritarian place.  Here is a link to The Gate’s stub on this piece.

We have done this sort of play on a Friday evening at The Gate before (and since), because it is sometimes so convenient to see them and stay at the flat on a Friday, but heavy/dystopian drama is not my first choice of activity for a Friday night.

Anyway, beyond our temporal reasons for being unsure about it, the critics also seemed unsure:

The acting was top notch and as always we marvel at the way they manage to turn that small space above a pub into a proper space for drama. But Janie and I concurred with the reviewers about the play.

Not sure whether I cooked or whether we grabbed some Turkish food from the (now late, lamented) Manzara. As I’d delivered my Gresham lecture the night before and (it seems) gone off early on the Friday morning to see clients, I’ll guess the latter and jolly tasty it will have been too.

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

This was my first Gresham Lecture and by gosh the preparation felt like hard but very interesting work.

A lot of the material from this one ended up in The Price Of Fish.

Here is a link to the lecture – you can watch it, listen to the audio, read the text, download the text, look at the slides, download the slides…

Here’s the YouTube of it so you can watch from here instead (but for the resources as well, you need to click the above link):

More observant followers of this lecture (e.g. John White) noticed that I strung some lines from songs and stuff through the slides. I made up an iTunes playlist for the lecture – back then, iTunes playlists felt like fun things to try.  Here it is: 

We held a traditional Z/Yen-Gresham reception in the Headmaster’s Study after the lecture. Doubtless someone pointed out my resemblance to the Chandos Portrait of Shakespeare in that room – someone always did. As I explained on Facebook to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death:

After the reception, Michael Mainelli escorted an honoured few of us to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese for one of his traditional post lecture meals. Not sure exactly who attended but I do recall Michael, Elisabeth, Kim, Micky, Charlie, Me, Janie and a few others.

Faces In The Crowd by Leo Butler, Royal Court Upstairs, 25 October 2008

This was a very memorable, very intimate play.

The set was effectively a small studio apartment which we, the tiny audience, was observing from above. You really almost felt you were in the apartment with the couple. And the couple were discussing very intimate stuff.

Official London Theatre maintains a basic resource on this production – click here.

Janie and I took Charlie (Lavender) with us to this one, which I think she enjoyed very much. We’re struggling to remember what we did for grub on this occasion; we think we possibly ate at the Royal Court itself.

Definitely more plus than minus for us.

Waste by Harley Granville Barker, Almeida Theatre, 18 October 2008

This one turned out to be a bit of an Alleyn’s alum-fest, with Sam West directing and Nancy Carroll performing. But that won’t be the reason we booked it.

Janie and I have been Almeida members for donkeys yonks – indeed I have been going there fairly regularly since the late 1980s.

This looked like a cracking production on paper, so we’d have had no hesitation in booking it.

The Almeida is great on archiving its productions, so details of the production, some good pictures and extracts from the reviews are all there to be seen – saving me the trouble – click here.

We agree with all of that lot. It was a cracking production of a rather wordy play – Harley Granville Barker was a decent playwright but Ibsen or Strindberg he ain’t.

We were very glad to have picked this production. Seeing a lesser production of this play would have been a bit of a waste.

Memorial Conference for Les Fishman, Management Centre, Keele University,15 October 2008

Leo Fishman – nothing like her grandpa in matters tennis

Professor Peter Lawrence (who had been my P2 economics tutor) got in touch with me about this conference and I was delighted to make space for it.

Firstly, I had very fond memories of Les Fishman, Peter Lawrence and indeed other tutors from the economics department at Keele.

Secondly, with the 2008 recession having just kicked off big time and no-one knowing what was going on, it seemed a good opportunity to find out what my alma mater’s economists thought about it all.

Thirdly, with only a month or less to go until my Gresham lecture on Commercial Ethics, I thought some clear head time in the rarefied atmosphere of the Keele Hill might do me some good for that project too.

Peter Lawrence offered to put me up, but I explained what a terrible house guest I am, so checked in to the Crewe Arms in Madeley Heath.  I don’t think we ate there that night – I think Peter picked me up from there and took me to a gathering elsewhere. Several of the other academics and visitors were there that night, including Keith Tribe and I think also Shirley Dex.

Here is the programme from the Wednesday conference:

progmem(1)-5

I also was sent a copy of Les Fishman’s seminal paper about the effect of the Vietnam War on the US economy: vietnampaper-1 and also a paper by Norman Flynn about the economic impact of the Iraq War econwar.

The conference was very interesting. I especially remember David Leece (who was my P1 tutor) explaining how relevant the work of Hyman Minsky was becoming in the light of this particular recession – spot on.

2016 picture – thanks to Mark Ellicott

I visited the Students’ Union briefly, its appearance had changed somewhat since my previous visit but the print room was still populated by Pat Borsky and (I think temporarily) also Barbera, so it really was like stepping back in time 25 years seeing those two.

Pat Borsky: could not be described as retiring…apart from the day she retired in 2016 – thanks again to Mark Ellicott for the 2016 pictures

Fun networking with several of my former tutors/lecturers, a few other former students (Paul Smith I recall), several delightful members of the Fishman family and others too.

One strange unintended consequence was meeting Leonore Fishman who (with a bit of encouragement from her dad, David) subsequently asked me for a job and ended up working for Z/Yen for a few years. Stuff happens.

Leo Fishman at Jez Horne’s “Z/Yen Stag Do”, 2010. Thanks to Monique Gore for this picture.