Clearly, the Daisy Garden did not look like the above photo on the evening that DJ and Steph came to dinner. For a start, it gets dark around 16:00 in London early January. Secondly, Daisy (that’s Janie for the uninitiated) has invested in some fancy new garden furniture since the photo was taken – painted hard wood rescued from old houses in India, recycled as garden furniture, as it happens.
The idea for the dinner started to germinate back in November, when a few of us gathered for an informal Z/Yen/alumni get together – briefly described if you click here. Janie chatted with Steph, phone numbers (or WhatsApp accounts) were exchanged and the rest is history.
Janie has long wanted to try her hand at matchmaking, possibly because she and I were (initially inadvertently, I think) match-made by Kim, DJ’s sister, back in the day. “The day” was the late summer of 1992, which is approaching its 25 year anniversary, so I’m planning a fair bit of retro Ogblogging about that era as this year, 2017, unfolds.
But returning to the evening of 7 January. Possibly in a nod to our own early interactions, Janie cooked one of her signature dishes as the centrepiece of the meal; shin of veal in a clay pot. This dish is quite similar to the ossobuco (traditional style – none of that tomato-laden sauce) Janie cooked the very first time I went to her place for a meal.
But the shin of veal was merely the centrepiece:
preceded by goose rillette and vegetable nibbles;
accompanied by rice and sprouting broccoli;
followed by a platter of fresh fruits and/or chocolates…
…then followed by cheeses.
Drinks a-plenty:
Prosecco (for three)/decent white wine (for me);
Some fine gran reserva Riojas, which (as it happens) DJ gave me for my birthday and I had been saving for a suitable occasion with suitable food;
A bottle of vintage port for the cheese, to more or less guarantee “payback” to some extent in the overindulgence department.
Daisy and I were grateful for a quiet day the next day and an extra day off Monday before returning to the day jobs.
So why a photograph of the garden to head up this piece? Well, one of the most memorable characteristics of the evening (putting aside what good company everyone was, what a superb meal it was and how much we all enjoyed ourselves) was the mildness of the evening. So much so, that we were able to take our drinks and nibbles at the start of the evening in the garden, under the glow of the patio heater, which felt quite magical in January.
Stop press! Update!
Daisy has just seen this Ogblog posting and kindly taken a picture of the magical garden tonight, so readers might see what it looked like (except without the wine, nibbles and the four of us enjoying the evening, of course).
A little knowledge/research can be a dangerous thing, when exploring a field in which you lack expertise. I realise that, in our post-truth, post-expert society, that statement is controversial, but here is a cautionary tale to prove my point.
Many months ago, when I read in the Wigmore Hall brochure that Vijay Iyer was to be the next artist to hold the Jazz residency at the venue, I read his mini CV in the brochure and Googled him. I thought; “looks diverse and interesting; let’s book his first Wigmore Hall concert and see if we like it”.
What I didn’t do was look more closely at the spec. for that first concert and think about whether that particular concert would be to our taste.
I called Janie, wondering why she hadn’t even read the Whatsapp message I sent her about this evening’s arrangements. She was clearly in a stressy mood. “I’m so frustrated with my morning. I can’t get hold of anybody. I have wasted so much time. I’m starting to really stress about getting to the flat on time for the concert this evening…”
There was no point prolonging such a call.
By the time Janie was sufficiently unstressy to call me back to try and finalise the arrangements, I was all stressy because, as I said to her, “I need to wrap up warm and leave the house in five minutes to get to the doctors’ surgery on time for my jabs”.
“You’re not having jabs,” said Janie, “you are having one jab. Jab, singular. No-one but no-one makes as much fuss about having one jab as you do.”
Well, actually, that’s not what the new practice Nurse, Liz, said to me a few minutes later.
I apologised to Nurse Liz on arrival for being a big baby and she said, “just don’t look at me”, then distracted me momentarily while she did the job. “That was easy enough”, said Liz.
I explained to Liz that my mother had an anecdote about me, which she used to tell all-too regularly. When I was very small, on one occasion the doctor and my parents had to chase me around the house ahead of one of my jabs, only for one of my parents (probably mum) to pin me down under the dining room table, allowing the doctor to get down on her hands and knees to vaccinate me right there.
“The NHS was a truly community, personalised service back then, eh?” I said. Nurse Liz laughed and said that she’s had to chase a fair few people around her surgery room in her time too.
In the end Janie got to the flat in good time and I had almost calmed down from the ordeal of my jabs…sorry, I mean jab.
We got to the Wigmore Hall in good time. Despite the stresses of the day, neither of us wanted a glass of wine before the concert – we both had juice. Surely the music would be our de-stressing therapy.
We sat in our seats, where an enormous, beaten-up looking electronic keyboard instrument/speaker was blocking our view of the Wigmore Hall’s exquisite Steinway. Janie tackled a poor unsuspecting young steward on this point, only to be rebutted.
Then Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith emerged. Vijay switched on his electronic instrument, which made a loud hum which reminded me of my father’s old Grundig TK35 reel-to-reel tape recorder, which I loved dearly (the machine, not the hum). I always attributed that hum to the thermionic valves within the machine.
Grundig TK35, ram-packed with thermionic valves. Photograph by Michael Keller, from Rad-io.de.
You see, the bit I hadn’t researched properly before choosing the concert was the other half of the pairing for this gig. Had I done so, I’d have learned that:
Wadada Leo Smith is an American trumpeter and composer, working primarily in the fields of avant-garde jazz and free improvisation…
I guess the pairing of Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith is not entirely “free jazz”, more like BOGOF – “buy one get one free” jazz.
Anyway, that noise was not going to calm us down and make us feel relaxed for the weekend.
Worse – unlike our experience at the Festival Hall nearly 10 years ago, tonight’s concert was primarily a one piece wonder (80 minutes or so) and we were sitting front row central, so the type of early escape we had managed from the Festival Hall in 2007 was out of the question without being rude and disturbing to other punters.
Neither of us were in the best of moods when we left after two encores and some unintelligible speechifying, which put a proverbial cherry on top of our concert experience.
We consoled ourselves with some delicious Persian food from Mohsen and some more soothing music back home as we ate.
I broke it gently to Janie that there were tube strikes planned for Monday, so we would need carefully to plan our trip to the lunchtime concert at the Wigmore Hall that day.
“Who are we seeing Monday lunchtime?”, asked Janie.
“A solo recital,” I said, “I believe it is the trumpeter from this evening.”
“YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN”, hollered Janie.
That was a poor choice of joke for that moment. Actually we’re seeing a harpsichord recital, which should be lovely.
We know a lot more about early music; we didn’t need research or third party expertise to choose that one.
I define daytime television as programmes that are designed for a daytime audience and regularly, probably exclusively, broadcast during normal working hours. Catching up on TV news while I am at the gym or following cricket matches during the day through the TV don’t count as daytime television by this definition.
So, in the five years 2012 to 2016, I guess I had watched daytime television twice.
The first instance was around 2012 or 2013. Hugh Rycroft, one of my old writer friends from NewsRevue, who now devises quiz-based game shows, mentioned to me at one of our Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Dinners back then, that he had devised a new show, Tipping Point, a daytime quiz, being broadcast on ITV.
“I’ll take a look at that”, I said, meaning it. “I don’t think Tipping Point is your sort of quiz show”, said Hugh, meaning it.
I looked up the timing of the show and resolved to watch it the next time I was at the gym in the afternoon at that hour. Thus I took a look at Tipping Point, as promised. Hugh was right; it’s not my sort of quiz show. The conceit of the show is a facsimile of a coin pusher arcade machine, for which contestants win tokens to play and from which they get (or fail to get) prizes.
My second instance of watching daytime TV in recent years was Bargain Hunt in 2014, when Z/Yen’s practice manager, Linda Cook together with her friend and Z/Yen alumna Marie Logan, appeared on the show. We wrote this big moment up for the Now and Z/Yen blog – click here. As it happens, this programme’s momentous first broadcast was on a Friday when I had no meetings, so I actually watched the programme when it was first shown.
I don’t think Bargain Hunt is my type of programme either, although it was great to see people I knew so well on that show.
But let’s be honest, whether or not these programmes are my kind of show is rather beside the point. They must be a lot of people’s kind of show, because they are phenomenally successful. According to Wikipedia at the time of writing (January 2017):
Tipping Point had 10 series and 508 episodes (at 6 January 2017);
Bargain Hunt had 39 series and 1264 episodes (22 January 2016 figures).
Anyway, I saw Hugh again at this year’s Ivan Shakespeare Christmas Dinner – click here. He mentioned that he had devised a new quiz show, which would start broadcasting on the New Year Bank Holiday Monday; Impossible.
“I’ll take a look at that”, I said, meaning it. Indeed, I intended to watch it on that Bank Holiday Monday.
Come Tuesday evening, after finishing work, I was pondering my evening (probably planning to do some Ogblogging), when it occurred to me that I had clean forgotten to watch Impossible; indeed I hadn’t even set the vid to record it.
But these days, what used to be impossible (seeing a programme despite such neglect) is now more than possible, thanks to iPlayer.
Thus I spent a chunk of Tuesday evening watching daytime television.
I did spend some evening time not all that long ago watching bizarre (in this case comedy) telly on the computer, in bizarre circumstances, but that’s another story, click here for it.
The conceit of the show Impossible is that all the quiz questions are constructed to have three rather than two types of answer: correct, incorrect or impossible. Impossible answers fail some aspect of logic in the question. For example, the name of a British film star would be an impossible answer to a question starting, “which American film star…” Impossible answers get contestants eliminated or make them lose their accumulated winnings, adding an additional dimension of pressure to a time pressure-based quiz.
Surprisingly, I rather like Impossible. As I said to Hugh in a congratulatory e-mail:
…I liked it and enjoyed watching it far more than I can ever remember enjoying watching such a programme.
The format is clever without being too clever. I am tempted to watch it again…
Hugh seemed pleased with this note and even suggested that he plans to use the phrase “clever without being too clever” in his elevator pitches henceforward; which surely means that I get a significant share of the (presumably substantial) earnings from successful “clever without being too clever” programmes, for ever.
Joking apart, my fear, though, is that the very fact that I liked Impossible might be the kiss of death for it. I don’t suppose I am a barometer for successful daytime TV shows; I might be an anti-barometer for them.
Indeed, on reflection, I’m not sure that Hugh should want his shows to be “clever without being too clever” at all. The phrase reminds me of Spike Jones’s explanation for why his hugely talented comedy orchestra was not more successful:
“We’re too sophisticated for corny people and too corny for sophisticated people.”
Still, I am rooting for the TV show Impossible. I sincerely hope it gets the hundreds or thousands of episodes it deserves.
If only I could hold sway over Dumbo-pan (above) and Daisy-pan, the way that Aishol-pan the Eagle Huntress can control her horse and eagle.
Our original plan had been to see this movie on Boxing Day, but the excesses of Christmas Day – click here – encouraged us to defer the visit.
The next convenient slot for us was New Year’s Day itself. I didn’t book the tickets in advance of the day – that would have been tempting fate. But our restful Twixtmas and New Year’s Eve – click here – meant that we were fit as fleas and raring to go to the movies.
So, early morning, before being thrashed on the tennis court by Janie- click here for that Twixtmas link again, I logged on to the Curzon site to grab the best seats. After all, who books for afternoon showings of movies that far ahead? Turns out, quite a lot of people do for New Year’s Day; there were not all that many seats left. I grabbed two good ones in the middle of the penultimate row, having missed out on our favourite double seats at the very back.
We went in my car, Dumbo (above), or Dumbo-pan as I was calling him by the end of the outing. It was bucketing down with rain that afternoon.
Anyway, it turns out that George is precisely the sort of person who books his cinema tickets earlier than sparrowfart on the day of the viewing – he’d booked their seats the evening before. Naturally, George had booked “our” favourite double seats. This sorry tale disproves the adage that the early bird always catches the worm. The early bird only catches the worm if the late bird hadn’t caught that worm the night before.
Which brings me neatly back to the subject of birds hunting for live prey. i.e. the film, The Eagle Huntress; that’s why we were all at the cinema.
The Eagle Huntress is about an ethnic Kazakh girl in Mongolia, Aishol-pan, who has an extraordinary aptitude for and love of eagle hunting, the traditional (male) sporting/lifestyle/survival activity of her tribe.
It turns out that George has been in Kazakhstan recently, helping to get a new financial centre properly established there. He showed me a picture of himself trying on a Kazakh hat; a spectacular-looking piece that apparently comprises several dead animals, which George (wisely) declined to purchase. I showed George a selfie (shown below) sporting my comparatively modest-looking but animal free Vermont from Locke & Co.
Despite appearances to the contrary, no animal suffered in the taking of this selfie.
Anyway, we all enjoyed the film very much. Some of the sequences seem a little set up, such as the snippets of old eagle hunters complaining that eagle hunting is not suitable activity for a girl. The music was more blockbuster than art-house movie style.
But you’ll probably forgive this film its attempts to commercialise the story, because it is a true story and it does show a truly remarkable talent in a young girl and the setting is simply stunning. At times it seemed anathema to be hearing Daisy Ridley’s dulcet tones narrating, because those types of wildlife and landscape scenes have to be narrated by David Attenborough. Isn’t there a law about that?…there should be.
I don’t often implore people to “go see a movie”, but this one really is 90 minutes or so well spent. This is not the sort of film that I would choose to see on reading what it is about, so I’m really glad that Janie (Daisy-pan) nagged me into seeing this wonderful, life-affirming movie.
Mercifully the rain was relenting when we left the cinema and waved goodbye to the Littlejohns. I tried calling “Dumbo-pan” and “Daisy-pan”, but I have no sway over the untameable. Probably just as well.
Janie demonstrates the use of an infeasibly large tennis racket to defend an infeasibly small court
Where does a week like that go?
We had planned to go to the flickers on Boxing Day, but due to my self-inflicted bloating from the previous day in Paradise we decided to defer that visit until New Year’s Day – the next Ogblog piece will cover that visit – this one’s about Twixtmas.
Ah yes, Twixtmas. Everything has to have a name these days, or more accurately in this case, a marketing term.
Janie and I have long enjoyed Twixtmas, without knowing that the week between Christmas and New Year even had a name.
As long as the weather isn’t too cold/icy, we normally play tennis during that whole period; Christmas Day itself and Twixtmas, as indeed we did this year. Even my feeling of indisposition did not stop me from turning out (and competing) at the appointed hour on Boxing Day.
Bank Holiday Tuesday was a lot colder and too frosty to play; just as well, really, because Janie had got her dates a bit muddled and booked some work that day. I decided I might as well go back to the flat, exercise at the gym and do some work that day too. Janie hadn’t booked work for the Friday, so we decided simply to swap the Tuesday for the Friday.
We had a brace of titanic tennis battles Friday and Saturday; on both occasions we played for well over an hour and called it a draw at 6-6. But on Sunday Janie was unstoppable, making me fight and fight (often as not in vain) to hold my serve. Still, I kept the set going a full hour, we had fun and we got good exercise, which is mostly what it is about. Mostly.
What else did we do?
We both worked a bit.
We watched A Taste of Honey, the movie, which somehow Janie had never seen, then discussed teenage pregnancy for a while.
We had the next door neighbours, Joy and Barry (one side) plus Marcie (the other), in for drinks and “nibbles” (no-one wants dinner after Janie’s nibbles) on the Friday evening.
We watched a few episodes of the Attenborough Planet Earth II over the week. We recorded the series when it was broadcast, but we normally make very little time for TV. These Planet Earth II programmes really are the bees knees. Indeed, if the programme makers wanted to show us close ups of bees knees, I’m sure they would.
We had a quiet evening in for New Year’s Eve, just as we like it. I think we watched one of those Attenboroughs and then both went to sleep an hour or so before midnight. Needless to say, we didn’t notice the leap second which added fractionally to the very end of 2016.
I Ogblogged a lot during Twixtmas, mostly working on my 2008 retrobogging. I did at one time consider writing Ogblog pieces describing the Ogblogging that I am doing, but came to the conclusion that even my loyalist readers (I include myself in that category) might draw the line at that degree of post-modern, geeky detail.
Janie can even hit the ball infeasibly well off the wrong foot, although only occasionally does so in the heat of battle.
Unusually, he, Kim and Max were going to be around on Christmas day. The idea of Christmas day with friends for once, without cooking/washing up pleased us enormously, so we were up for it.
It was fun.
I wasn’t properly up for such a stonking big meal though:
antipasti (prosciutto, salamis, artichokes);
pumpkin soup;
turkey with stuffing and all the trimmings;
Xmas pud;
cheeses;
mince pies;
chocolates…
Not only that, but the feast was served for six although there were five of us, as Pinball Geoff was due to be there but dropped out at the last minute. That was a shame for several reasons, not least that Geoff would have enjoyed my plastic tashe, as his group, The Bikini Beach Band once supported Sparks. I love that Kimono My House look.
I know you don’t have to eat it all. I know you don’t need to drink half a bottle of Barolo on top of the aperitif of a big glass of white. Oh how I suffered the next day.
Ogblog readers will sympathise with me en masse, I just know they will.
With thanks to Toni Friend for the picture, taken during the famous match between MCC and the visiting Australians in September 2016
I took some real tennis lessons in January 2016 and started playing tentatively in March, perhaps in earnest since April when I started playing twice a week.
This end of year piece builds on that July piece and reflects on my whole first calendar year playing this intriguing game, including some astonishing statistics.
August to December 2016 News Update And Ogblog Links
Strangely, just a week after writing my July 2016 reflective piece, I was selected to play my first competitive match for the MCC, against a party of visiting Australians in September.
I had in any case decided to have a few more lessons in August, once I had played about 50 competitive hours on court.
I also spent some time in Manchester in September, getting a chance to play a couple of times and have a lesson at the Manchester Real Tennis Club in Salford, which I enjoyed enormously.
Here are some links to pieces I wrote August through October – please note that the pieces might not be exclusively about real tennis:
You might observe that I was having a great time playing real tennis during those months, but there was one small problem. Between early July and late October my handicap signally failed to come down; it simply hovered around the rather inauspicious mark of 67.3 – better than my early mark in the mid-seventies, but certainly not the steady improvement towards 60 and beyond that I had been hoping for.
Apparently, this tendency to plateau at times is quite normal, although I think my first plateau was a little lowly and lengthy for someone of my age and stage.
Anyway, I got a good win the afternoon after the House of Lords (27 October – see the last link in the above list of links) and since then the progress has been relentless for a couple of months, ending the year at a more impressive 64.1 – still a long way to go but definitely back on the improvement curve.
Real tennis is quite a good game for a stats geek – not least because the real tennis on-line system is full of stats and tools through which you can measure yourself and weigh up your opponents. Not that I am even faintly at the stage (if indeed I ever shall be) that such tools would do much for me personally.
Digging deeper into the system, I can see how I have got on against each opponent and how those opponents have got on against other opponents – hours of fun to be had if/when I can be bothered.
However, one set of general stats has caught my eye, as this real tennis on-line system, including the handicapping, is used by every real tennis club in the world. I can see my handicap against pools of other players on various measures.
For example, if I look at my handicap compared with the current handicap of everyone who has ever had their handicap recorded on the system (about 15 years worth of data), I am ranked around 6,300 out of the 10,300 or so people who have ever been ranked. That puts me somewhere around the 62nd percentile. Not bad for a beginner.
To be more accurate for playing purposes, it is probably better to restrict my search to active players – i.e. everyone who has played in the last year. On that basis, I am around the 3,000 mark out of 4,100 or so people who have played in 2016. That is around the 74th percentile or “bottom of the third quartile” mark. Still not too bad for a beginner.
But returning to the larger data set, I am intrigued by this 6,300 figure. Because that really is close to the sum total of people on the planet who could possibly stand a chance of beating me at this game. The game is so unlike other racket sports, it would be virtually impossible for anyone, even an elite sportsperson, to simply pick up a real tennis racket and beat someone who knows how to play, without having a lesson or two and a few goes first.
Think about that statistic for just a moment. If an alien being from another planet were to come to planet earth and select a human being at random to play me at real tennis, there is only a one in a million chance that the other person would win.
I admit that this one-in-a-million stat is not a very useful statistic in practice, of course, but it is a rather awe-inspiring one in theory.
Just look at my technique again in the light of my impressive stats
When we learnt that it was on at the Curzon Bloomsbury at a suitable time on the Friday evening before Christmas…no brainer!
Basically, it is a simple rom com story, set in an Haredi Jewish community in Israel.
An unconventional yet ultra orthodox young woman who runs a travelling petting zoo for children, after being jilted by her fiancée, decides to set up a wedding day and hope for a groom to appear by the deadline. Given her track record of matchmaker-arranged dates with Haredim, the new strategy seems no less likely to work than the more conventional approach.
It’s quite a long film given its slight plot, but it is utterly charming, quirky, laugh-out-loud funny in parts and very watchable throughout. Janie was mesmerised by it, not least the “beautiful looking people/eye candy in the movie”.
We were blessed with a delightful Muslim family, three generations at least, taking up the whole row in front of us. (Well, we weren’t going to get Orthodox Jews on a Friday evening).
This family seemed to be enjoying the film enormously – one lady from the group shouted out at the screen a couple of times to very amusing effect. We chatted with the whole family afterwards, agreeing that we had all enjoyed the film; youngsters and oldsters of various creeds alike.
Janie had pre-set a wonderful spread of rillettes and cheeses at the house to round off our week/evening in excellent style.
First Of Three: Brian Eno Singsong and Party, Brian’s Studio, Tuesday 13 December 2016
The first of my “three dos in four days” was at Brian Eno’s place – I have been invited to such dos on several occasions now, often but not always at this time of year. I have known Brian from the health club (BodyWorksWest, formerly known as Lambton Place) for quarter of a century or more.
The party is combined with Brian’s a capella choir gathering, allowing neophytes and bathroom singers like me to have an occasional go.
I thought I arrived in quite good time on this occasion, but the singing was well underway when I arrived; the regulars presumably having made a punctual early start.
The songs chosen were quite relentlessly morbid at first. There is usually a fair bit of spiritual blues material, but this set seemed especially bleak, with unfortunate folk being hanged for crimes they didn’t commit and all sorts. It wasn’t too difficult to pick up on the tunes quickly enough – I suppose that’s why they choose this material for the more open sing-song, but it didn’t feel much like party music at first.
The last couple of numbers were a bit more lively – not least All I Have To Do Is Dream at the end, sung in a doo-wap style. It helped me that I was standing next to a couple of very able, presumably professional singers, upon whose rhythms and harmonies I could latch. A few people afterwards asked me if I was a professional singer, but I’m sure they must have been hearing the sound emanating from those guys, not me.
Brian said that he couldn’t hear me this time, which is a good sign; presumably therefore an improvement on last time. But perhaps he also was deceived by my co-location with the professional-sounding guys.
Anyway, as on previous occasions, I also found the rest of the party great fun, meeting and chatting with several very interesting people. I also danced a bit to some excellent party mix music, well designed for the purpose (mostly 1970’s dance, with some earlier and later stuff thrown in).
I didn’t stick around until too late – I had a scheduled client call quite early the next day – so (as on every previous occasion) I missed the blood, guts, ambulances and police cars stage of the party. Brian subsequently told me that the emergency services stage failed to occur this time, to his intense disappointment.
Second Of Three: Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Dinner, Café Rouge Holborn, 15 December 2016
Since around the turn of the century, when fellow NewsRevue writer, Ivan Shakespeare, tragically keeled over and died while jogging, several of us have gathered a few times each year to keep in touch and reminisce about our NewsRevue days. Just before his death, Ivan e-mailed a few of us suggesting that we should regroup for that purpose, but never lived to see his idea to fruition.
Quite early in the life of this occasional gathering, it became part of our tradition to play a comedic quiz or two towards the end of the evening. I think it was John Random who initiated that idea, but several other people, occasionally contribute a quiz. Gerry Goddin latterly contributes a variant in which we all have to try to write jokes on suggested themes and Gerry allocates points (or deducts points) based on how well the jokes go down, his perception of each joke’s quality and/or Gerry’s authoritarian whim.
For the December gathering in 2002 (I’ll get around to Ogblogging it in the fullness of time no doubt) I went into a local tourist gimcrack store and bought the cheapest, tackiest piece of porcelain royal memorabilia I could find; then I emblazoned it with a legend declaring it to be the Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Trophy. Since 2002, that trophy has been played for earnestly each year. Nine different people have held the trophy over the years; I am proud to be able to state that I was the 2004 winner.
Anyway, it seems to be getting harder and harder to find a venue that operates flexibly enough for a rather haphazard bunch of former (and in some cases current) comedy writers to gather in mid December. Café Rouge Holborn has become the regular venue for the past few visits, but it seems they tried to impose a Christmas season “pre-ordering” regime on us, which was somewhat beyond the capabilities of John Random’s organising and our ability to be organised by anyone or anything.
So, half-a-dozen or so of us had pre-ordered and Café Rouge assumed that there would only be half-a-dozen of us (despite John booking the table for 10); which proved problematic once the eighth and especially ninth person showed up.
To be fair the staff tried their best in what seemed to be chaotic circumstances and did relocate us to a table for 10 quite quickly.
But poor Jonny Hurst ended up waiting for best part of an hour before any food was brought to him at all, at which point a starter and two main courses all turned up at once. I was half-hoping that Jonny would say, “do you know who I am? I’m Jonny Hurst, the chant laureate, that’s who”. Jonny might even have been forgiven for “doing a Jeremy Clarkson”…but Jonny is far too mild mannered and polite for any of that, even when he has a real hunger-on and everyone around him is tucking in. Respect.
Eventually we played the quizzes. Colin Stutt offered a small quiz to warm us up, but the main quiz, for the trophy, was a very imaginative effort from John Random which comprised 10 maps, each of which had a location marked with a year. We had to name the movie that was made in that year set in that place.
I was pleased with my 7 out of 11 (one map had two years and therefore two movies and two points) but Mark Keegan pipped a couple of us 7-istas with 8 out of 11 to claim the trophy yet again – his fourth victory in 15 years. Respect.
Gerry Goddin ended the evening with one of his joke-fest games with some especially harsh marking and the predictable result that Barry Grossman’s jokes pleased him more than anyone else’s – it is nearly always Barry who wins, very occasionally me.
A most enjoyable evening.
Third Of Three: Z/Yen Group Christmas Lunch at Watermen’s Hall, 16 December 2016
For the first time in Z/Yen’s 23 Christmases, we decided to do Christmas lunch rather than dinner this year.
Linda and Michael conspired to find a five course extravaganza of a lunch at Watermen’s Hall, which seemed just the ticket in the circumstances. It’s a comparatively intimate and relaxed atmosphere for a guild’s hall; but now that Z/Yen is that much smaller, our group wouldn’t completely dominate the room.
Michael pipped me an e-mail the previous weekend to ask if I would write one of the traditional Z/Yen singalong songs – normally but not absolutely always my gig.
(Previous Z/Yen Christmas events and songs will be Ogblogged in the fullness of time).
But before exercising our lungs, we ate the following excellent five course meal, washed down with some fine wine and (for some, not me) port.
Z/Yen Group 2016 Christmas Lunch at Watermen’s Hall
(The Company of Watermen and Lightermen)
Menu
Torched mackerel, pickled and salt baked beetroot, horseradish crème fraiche
Smoked ham hock and chicken terrine, pickled apricots, watercress salad
Butter roasted Norfolk turkey, sage and apricot stuffing, bacon wrapped sausages, brussels sprout choucroute with chestnuts
Star anise poached pear, almond crumb, whipped clotted cream
Christmas pudding, brandy sauce
Michael kept me and Xueyi talking about GeoGnomo for a fair chunk of the meal, but otherwise we managed to steer clear of work chat.
Michael was also keen not to torture too many people with our song, but once there were only a few stragglers left (apart from we Z/Yen folk) we found a surprisingly receptive audience; indeed those Watermen and Lightermen joined in the singing with us, rounding off a fine afternoon.
♬ WATERMEN AND LIGHTERMEN AND Z/YEN ♬
(A seasonal song to the tune of ♬”Winter Wonderland”♬)
VERSES ONE AND TWO
Mackerel torched, beetroot pickled,
Ham terrine, we’ll be tickled;
We’ll eat Christmas lunch, Z/Yen Group as a bunch;
Watch us put on weight at Watermen’s.
At the start, we’ll be perky,
By the end, stuffed like turkey;
Five courses of nosh, all terribly posh;
Watch us put on weight at Watermen’s.
MIDDLE EIGHT
After eating turkey laced with trimmings,
We’ll tuck in to star anise poached pear;
Christmas pud as well, you must be kidding,
The brandy sauce could be a warning flare.
VERSE THREE
Head for home, very slothfully,
On the trail back to Lothbury;
Let’s hope that we scoff…ing walk our waists off;
Walking all the way from Watermen’s.
(RISING/ROUSING FINALE): Let’s hope walking makes us Lightermen!
Ged Ukulele Barefoot Ladd, not singing “This Land Is Your Land”
Hmm.
We very rarely see a dud downstairs at the Hampstead – Ed Hall’s project to put works on down there regularly has been a raging success as far as we are concerned.
But sadly, I feel obliged to report that this one, to us, was a dud.
The idea sounded great. An iconic 1970s protest songstress, now a recluse, with an estranged daughter and a fundamentally important secret about that iconic career.
Trouble is, that’s about it, plot-wise. The important secret has a rather “so what?”, tenuous feeling about it, while the motivation of the characters to behave as they do/had done in the past, if the secret was so important to them, was utterly dubious.
It was also difficult to care for even one of the three characters, each irritating in their own way: the iconic songstress, the estranged aspiring chanteuse daughter, and the Californian PhD student who has been studying the icon for six years only then to act as the catalyst for the wafer-thin plot to unfold.
Daisy nodded off about 20 minutes into the piece, once it became clear where it was (and wasn’t) going.
I persevered.
I wondered whether the PhD student’s explanation of protest song types, rhetorical and magnetic, was something the playwright had invented for him or whether it was an actual media studies/sociology course thing. Turns out it is the latter and that the explanation as expounded by the character can be found in the Wikipedia entry on protest songs under “types” and that this particular classification should be credited to the late R. Serge Denisoff, bless him.
The actors sang some protest songs along the way, closing with We Shall Overcome and at one point rendering This Land Is Your Land, quite well.
I rather like the latter song but Janie, tragically not steeped in media studies or the sociology of popular culture, perceives it as a nationalistic US song rather than Woody Guthrie’s intended protest song and has banned me from singing it on my ukulele in her presence. She should click the link I have added to the phrase This Land Is Your Land and look at some of the original lyrics. In particular, the verse that reads:
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
The sign was painted, said ‘Private Property.’
But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing.
This land was made for you and me.
…that verse might come back into fashion some time soon. But they didn’t sing that verse in this rather bland play. Pity.
