Friday, November 15/2013

The Saatchi Gallery is holding previews of its new exhibits. It says for its Facebook fans, and that is indeed how we found out, but one assumes that the exhibit is simply open to the general public before any formal opening ceremony. The Saatchi is always worth a visit. The offerings are uneven, but they're often intriguing and the best shows are excellent. It's actually a much braver gallery than the Tate Modern.

Today I'm most interested in a set of large paintings by a young American, Michael Cline. The large canvasses lead to highly disturbing speculation and narrative, at odds with the innocent blandness of the style. The subject matter is horrific: the room for rent appears to be a cardboard box, a struggle is taking place over a body lying underneath police tape, police arrive in a room where one person is dead and the others eerily, corruptly unconcerned. 

These are not the only disturbing works on display. A whole gallery features nameless wooden grave markers and slick paintings by Russian Denis Tarasov of gravestones bearing full length portraits of the dead, most of whom have died unnaturally young. And then there is the unnaturally flattened body, entitled "Crush" lying in the corner of a room that features a major construction illustrating vandalism.

Then a trip out to Hammersmith to check out the Polish Cultural Centre. There is a small exhibit of paintings there as well, featuring four young Polish painters, and J picks up a couple of Polish magazines while we're there.

Thursday, November 14/2013

A white Lamborghini of breathtakingly futuristic design is parked in Queensway, not very near the curb and more or less impeding traffic. Licence plates not UK but not diplomatic either. Arabic numbers on top and regular ones underneath. Easier to understand the sense of entitlement with a car like that than to fathom why the owner was oblivious to possible damage to his own vehicle so imprudently positioned.

A brief visit to the British Library. Spend a little time with the Magna Carta exhibition. There.s also a small display of children's book illustrations. Actually, I'm most taken with a little book in the shop featuring quirky places to see in London, but unwilling to spend £11 ($18.35 CAD) adding a non-electronic book to my suitcase. 

Supper at the little cafe at the Mary Ward Centre, an adult education facility. It's an easy walk from the British Library but a bit awkward to find, hidden behind Clerkenwell Road. A lovely little find, though. Gourmet quality vegetarian food at student prices. J has a lentil and vegetable stew and I celeriac and mushroom pie with rice and cheese topping. We share a green salad. Delicious.

Our final stop is at the London School of Economics for a lecture (passing on the way our second interesting car of the day, a GWiz electric at a free charging point - electric cars are also exempt from the daily congestion charge for driving in central London). 

The speaker is Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Professor at Harvard and former minister in the da Silva government in Brasil. The event is being broadcast for BBC Radio 4, and it's very interesting. Unger's vision is of a society that moves beyond the "poisonous" confines of economic nationalism: It's intolerable that we should embrace globalisation where goods  and money are free to move but people are imprisoned within the nation state. He sees a world in which each adult is responsible not only for a productive job but for caring for someone outside his or her own family and insists that this is not an impractical utopian ideal but a way of life that would be embraced for the deep satisfaction it provides. The proposals, he says, don't depend on the view that we can radically change ourselves. We want ordinary activity gradually to expand. For example, suicide dropped during WW II and rose afterward because people were engaged in something bigger than themselves. We want that enlargement not only in crisis: nobody who has tasted a larger life will want to abandon it.

Wednesday. November, 13/2013

South Bank again and Tate Modern. The gallery is being renovated and expanded on a large scale, so there's no exhibition in the turbine hall and won't be until some time next year. There is a Paul Klee exhibit on, but we're reluctant to come up with the £16 each ($26.70 CAD) to see it and settle for some of the free galleries. Interesting photographs by Syrian born Hrair Sarkissian, who displays a set of pictures of squares in Syria that have been used for executions. The forty year old photographer says that executions were usually held about dawn but bodies left until nine or so, and he can remember seeing some hanging once as he walked to school. The photos are themselves taken at about 4:30 AM, and the squares are peaceful but....

Then back to Kilburn High Road, where we end up having supper at The Bell. Their seafood and chips basket, two for £7 ($11.70 CAD). Along with a pint of bitter each, it's comfort food, if not health food. The pub itself is rough and ready, with a regular clientele that provides plenty of unscripted entertainment. Though you're best seated well away from the loos if you don't want to find yourself thinking of cat boxes. I'm assuming those at the bar have had a great deal more to drink than we have, though they're probably more extrovert to begin with. The colours are nailed to the wall, in the form of a huge poster in support of Celtic football team, a reminder that Kilburn was once mainly Irish, though it's now largely West Indian and Asian. The conversation would make for good theatre of the absurd: a long dialogue about having a bath, with many reminders that nakedness is not sufficient - it 's also necessary to run the water. And there's song as well: a bit of Don't Cry for me Argentina, sung by a Caribbean man of indeterminate age. As we came in a customer was being loudly ordered out, but this turned out to be another patron's wish and not management edict. It's pretty friendly though, and I ask J if ut reminds him of Winnipeg's North Main in his student days.

Tuesday, November 12/2013

To Canada House, our High Commission for a discussion between Canadian journalist Doug Saunders (Globe and Mail, etc) and British journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on the subject of the myth of the Muslim tide, also the title of Saunders' latest book. We're lucky to have noticed it was on, lucky in that Saunders is one of the journos we follow on Twitter and he referenced it. So we emailed our request to the government and were duly informed that our names had been added to the list. We've often been to Canada House before, mostly in the old days to check our email and once, during the volcanic eruption no-fly time to be provided with rather superior biscuits and lukewarm advice, as well as internet access. This is a rather better part of the building, still undergoing lengthy renovations and expansion than we've been invited to visit before. It's the same location on Trafalgar Square, but this time we're taken upstairs to reception rooms with leather furniture and served wine as we wait for the discussion to begin (although it's still impossible not to think that for less than $10,000 we could do considerably better for them in the way of Canadian art for the walls).

The talk is a bit late starting but the time happily filled chatting, in part with Rouben Khatchadourian, political affairs counsellor at the High Commission. He's had various Middle East postings following a military career that took him to Bosnia and has a quiet, modest style and a commitment to the low key work of diplomacy that lasts beyond the length of a single parliament. 

The discussion is interesting and works quite well unmoderated. Doug's basic thesis, backed up by many stats, is that there is no tide of "them" taking over "us". Numbers of Islamic immigrants are not enormous, most don't come from poor and overcrowded areas, and high percentages are well educated, committed to their adoptive countries and (within a generation) fairly typical citizens of their new homes in all respects including birth rates. Yasmin is, as always, more scattered and more passionate, equally distressed by racism in the west and by western over-optimistic tolerance of practices she regards as dangerous, such as the wearing of the hijab. Her point is that the growing insistence on having small children wear it is essentially a form of sexualising them. It's an interesting and valid point, but I can't help feeling some reluctance at the idea of identifying an ideal and then insisting that everyone adopt it. And there are practical difficulties. What precisely is a hijab, and will the queen be forbidden to wear a kerchief to the racetrack? There also seems to be no sense that there may be a protective social value in pluralism. Societies can go rogue and secularism is neither value free nor inevitably positive. Provocative though.

Monday, November 11/2013

There seems to be a steady trade in umbrellas, trade being the operative word. They're for sale at little shops all along the high street for £3 ($5 CAD). But only in a downpour should one pay that, because pound shops sell identical ones for only £1. Still, trade is what we seem to do - leave one on a bus, find one on a train. Sometimes trading up and sometimes down. The best of them I lost in Paphos, of all places, last year. We're one up at the moment, having found an extra on a District tube carriage Saturday, but it may not last. Nothing wrong with the umbrella, but they do tend to take their leave.

Remembrance Day, but we're in Starbucks at eleven, and if there's silence it's accidental.

To the Museum of London for a Gresham lecture, this one entitled "Is Man Just Another Animal." Steve Jones, the presenter, is an appealing personality, and entertaining as well as informative, with a gift for putting information in perspective. We may share 95% of our DNA with chimps but we share 50% with bananas. The differences are significant. We are the only primates unable to survive on raw food alone, requiring cooking to compensate for short intestines, small mouths, reduced teeth and a modest stomach. Those who try to survive on raw food alone eventually starve - a man does not live on what he eats but on what he digests. Only in brain size do humans come off superior to the other primates. But human brain size is smaller than that of Neanderthals and no larger than it was 100,000 years ago. 

Back to Kilburn High Road for dinner - our first time at Roses this trip. It's always good comfort food at prices the fast food places along the road can scarcely match, and always locals eating there. We start with large bowls of potato leek soup. Then I have roast lamb, roast potatoes and gravy, and J fish and chips. They do fish better than any other place we know, the perfectly cooked fillet longer than the ample plate. 

Program on telly tonight on speeches that shook the world. Most original hint (used by Enoch Powell amongst others): don't pee before you deliver the speech - it provides that extra sense of urgency.

Sunday, November 10/2013

Stroll along Bayswater Road for the weekly Sunday art display, a mile or so of mostly paintings hung on the fence that marks the north side of Hyde Park. Some are clearly for the tourist market - sketches of Tower Bridge or Big Ben - but there's quite a stylistic variety as well as a range of quality. And wit - a portrait of Her Majesty reading The Racing Post, cigarette grimly held between clenched teeth. We're charmed by a bright composite of central London with the iconic spots juggling for space like the illustrations in a child's book, and chat with the artist about travel as a way of life. I've been remembering the first time I came here on a Sunday nearly twenty-five years ago and was captivated by the work of a young Polish Englishman - and suddenly spot works that I'm sure are his. Wenczka - that must be the name. It is.

Then a walk along the South Bank, also Sunday busy. They're building little wooden kiosks, happily Christmassy, along the pavement. It's reminiscent of the frost fairs held on the ice centuries ago when the Thames froze over, though the crowds then were Londoners and most of these people aren't. Westminster Bridge is almost clogged with camera wielding tourists.

Last stop is Greenwich, at Goddard's Pie Shop (established 1890 but sadly relocated a couple of years ago to a rather less charming building a block or so away from its original home). The crumbles are still large and delicious and overflowing with custard, though (£2.90). Their specialities are pies - steak and kidney, chicken, mushroom, etc - and eels, but having no room for two courses we're always forced to choose, and opt this time for apple and black currant crumbles.

Saturday, November 10/2013

To Somerset House for an exhibition,

linked vaguely to next year's hundredth anniversary of the beginning of WWI. Somerset House itself initially difficult to access, as the Strand is closed fore annual Lord Mayor's Procession - an impressive affair with ancient coach, and guilds and much period costuming. We only catch a glimpse. The Worshipful Company of Joiners and Ceilers. What on earth are ceilers? All very cheerful.

Stanley Spencer, eccentric painter, near mystic, and sometime war artist is featured in a collection of war paintings completed between 1927 and 1932 and showing scenes of ordinary, even domestic, military life, based on Spencer's experiences in Macedonia and at Beaufort Military Hospital - scenes including daily routines like sorting laundry and filling water bottles. The paintings are normally housed at Sandham Memorial Chapel, purpose built for Spencer's work. The major piece in the chapel is The Resurrection of the Soldiers, a vision of the end of the war in which heaven has emerged from hell and stunned, rather than ecstatic, soldiers are rising from the subterranean. It's reminiscent of the resurrection painting at Cookham parish church in Spencer's home village, where recognisable local residents are shown stumbling from their graves on the day of judgement. A painting we saw on a day trip to Cookham a few years ago.

Supper at The Indian Veg, our standby vegan buffet. The food is as good as ever, probably a little better, but nothing remains the same forever. After years of serving an eat-what-you-like meal for £4.99, they've gone to £5.50. Still an incredible bargain, and no charge for bringing your own wine or beer.

Friday, November 8/2013

Bit of puttering along Kilburn High Road and then over to Bishopsgate to see Owen Jones interview Tony Benn about the last of his many diaries - A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine. We're lucky to get a train as there's been a fire in one of the stations and somebody under a train at Victoria (an almost daily occurrence), causing major delays. As it happens, though, we're in plenty of time, largely because I have mistakenly written down six instead of seven as the starting time, which gives us front row seats.

Benn is in good form for an increasingly frail man of eighty-eight. He has had a long and  honourable career as a Labour MP (fifty years in the House of Commons, for which he gave up a peerage), a campaigner for social justice and against war, and a compelling speaker and political diarist. In his prime there was nobody to match him in the last categories, and it is to his credit that so uncompromising a socialist maintained friendships with people of all walks of life and political persuasions, from Billy Bragg to former Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath.

Physically Benn is showing his age, but he's sharp, and is, of course, delivering narratives and analyses that he has formulated well already - probably in the same words. So when Jones suggests that in his old age some may have recast Benn as a grandfatherly character rather than a major dissident - a harmless, kindly old gentleman - the reply is immediate and practised: I am kindly, I am old, I could be a gentleman - but I'm not harmless. And he's comfortable with the thought of death (a great adventure) and with a religious framework, though he's no longer orthodox in belief. Of the Old Testament he says "My mother taught me that the kings had the power and the prophets had the righteousness - and I believed her and it's got me into a lot of trouble".

Jones does a lovely job of shepherding - compensating for Benn's deafness by fielding and rephrasing questions from the audience and shaping the interview with an attractive energy and wit. He's got a book of his own for sale too - Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. Very tempting, but books are heavy and for the first time we're travelling entirely electronically. 

So happy to have finally gone to one of Benn's events. There may not be many left.

Should have been bedtime at midnight but Deric Longden's film, Lost for Words, starring the incomparable late Thora Hird, another national treasure, is on the telly. We've seen it before, but it's brilliant, if sad, and we can't resist. Is the other star, Peter Postlethwaite, gone now too? Yes. And so, this summer, is Longden, the script writer. We must be getting old.

Thursday, November 7, 2013

Out to West Harrow to see Jean - timing influenced by the fact that we've had Bishopsgate Institute mail her our tickets for tomorrow night when Owen Jones will be interviewing Tony Benn on the last of his published diaries. Benn says it's the last, not just the latest, and as he's eighty-eight now he's entitled to a retirement that he doesn't seem inclined to subside into. In fact he decided not to stand again for parliament in 2001 after spending over fifty years as a Labour MP - very much Old Labour and not New Labour - saying he wanted to have more time for politics. Fortunately we bought the tickets online weeks ago, as the event is sold out. Benn's diaries rank among the best political diaries and many of non-Labour political persuasion still remember him as the best political speaker they ever heard.

Lunch with Jean, whom we last saw, briefly, in New Brunswick in September, and, as always, four hours of talk passes almost instantly. 

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Despite a slow start, we arrive early and circle London until it's six a.m. And we can legally land - first in the queue. Tube to Bayswater and a slow coffee and internet stop at Starbucks to allow the little hotel time to have a room ready. Starbucks has done some room changing. Gone is the seedy and probably unhygienic comfort of the basement cave. All clean, square, desk-like little wooden tables. Neat and cold. Same friendly staff but gone too are the characters - the man who brought his own toast and the mentally afflicted man who sat for hours with a single cup off tea his ticket to warmth. Gone where? Miss the cosy muddle.

Small jetlag nap and then out to Camden High Street. By half past three it's getting dark. So much farther north than Winnipeg.

BBC announces that Yasser Arafat may have been poisoned, while Al Jazeera says almost certainly poisoned - 83% probability. Interestingly they're both reporting on the same set of findings by a Swiss forensic team and choosing totally different quotations from the findings. The BBC feels obliged to point out that the polonium poisoning verdict was one that Arafat's wife would have wanted. Undoubtedly true, but irrelevant, one would have thought, to the findings of the (presumably unbiased) Swiss team.

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Bus from St Vital to Winnipeg airport, where I pick up two cups of coffee from Starbucks. The girl asks if I want a receipt. Must have mistaken me for a senator. 

The flight to London is completely full as they've cancelled a direct flight from Calgary and added the resulting bodies to our flight. Seems to happen increasingly with Air Canada - reminiscent of China twenty-five years ago. The food is deteriorating as well. Do Air Canada's caterers ever actually eat their own offerings? Salad involving dark yellow kernels of corn and pale yellow (once green?) leaves of cabbage in a container with no actual dressing but a little water in the bottom. The container itself is about two and a half inches squared, which is more than enough. Maybe they look at the uneaten portions and conclude that nobody eats salad so they needn't bother. Fortunately the wine is quite adequate.

Read, electronically, the whole of James Bartleman's memoir of a childhood in the other Muskoka, the one inhabited not by wealthy holiday makers and cottage owners but by day labourers living hand to mouth and natives existing on the fringes of white society. It's funny and moving and inspiring. Partly the story of any boy growing up in a northern Ontario town in the forties and fifties - fishing and reading comic books and splitting firewood, partly social commentary, and partly the account of a boy of imagination abd vision and integrity - and luck - who went from an uninsulated shack and half-breed status to the lieutenant governor's residence.  Called Raisin Wine in honour of Bartleman's father's favourite home brew production.

Tuesday, April 23/2013

Shakespeare's birthday and the Feast of St George. Only in the year of volcanic ash were we here this late. And today it's spring - warm and flowery and alive - so off we go to Canada tomorrow, to the land of endless snow.

Monday, April 22/2013

Second visit to Autograf, the wonderful Polish restaurant in Tottenham. More perogies, cabbage rolls (this time with mushroom sauce - a good idea) and goulash. Probably the only people in the restaurant who ordered in English - although even with us there were a few words of Polish thrown in.

Sunday, April 21/2013

Meet Jean and Shanthi for lunch at a little cafeteria serving Malaysian students. To prevent its being swamped by tourists and non-Malaysian students, admission is accorded to those speaking a Malaysian language and their group. So Shanthi is our admission card. Interesting food, and quite a variety for such a small space. Jean says it reminds her of the food they ate when she was teaching in Singapore. So we have curries, brinjal, samosas, sweets, ginger tea. Very nice. London is such a rich place culturally.

Saturday, April 20/2013

Rubens Ceiling centre panel

Third time lucky - Banqueting House is open, as promised on website, finally prudently consulted. Very interesting. The execution spot of Charles I. We've often wondered at which window, and there is a bit of uncertainty, in part due to some rebuilding. Despite the name, the banqueting house was largely used as a reception place for foreign dignitaries, the Rubens ceiling intended to impress - and no doubt succeeding. Charles I was beheaded on a scaffold outside the window, and always makes me think of the line from Macbeth - nothing in his life became him like the leaving it (said of the previous Thane of Cawdor, not Macbeth). Charles prorogued parliament for years (sound familiar?) and insisted on the divine right of kings, but he died bravely, wearing a warm shirt lest his shivering be mistaken for fear. One can only imagine his children, aged nine and thirteen, being sent in the morning to say good-bye to him - horrific for both parties.

Friday, April 19/2013

Attempt number two at the Banqueting House. Closed again. But you said yesterday it would be open today. So it was - until one o'clock. Fortunately the National Gallery is nearby. Head toward a room that promises a Hogarth. It does have one not-particularly-interesting Hogarth. But also a great horse by Stubbs. It's prancing and magnificent and must have been quite hard to do, in that there would  have been no photographs at the time and no possibility of asking the horse to pose mid-prance. Contrast with a large painting by Van Dyke showing Charles I, easily recognisable from the next room, on a horse that is hideously disproportionate, and not, one assumes, for any symbolic reason. Maybe court painters just aren't willing to say that they don't do horses.

Thursday, April 18/2013

Serendipitous day. The plan was to go to the Banqueting House, scene of Charles I's execution. Should have googled first, of course. It is closed for some function. We'd planned to be indoors because heavy showers were expected, and as we walk down the Strand they arrive following great gusts of wind (also predicted and the reason we haven't bothered with umbrellas). Shelter for a bit in the doorway of a coffee shop and then hop a bus that's going a long way. Actually West Hampstead. By which time we've had a rethink and take the tube one stop over to our usual favourite spot - Kilburn High Road. Lots of browsing along the charity shops (rain stopped by now). We're thinking dinner when we remember that Roses has lamb kleftiko as its Thursday night special. That seals it. And happily so, because it's the best lamb kleftiko either of us has ever tasted - butter soft and folding back from the leg bone as it's done to total perfection. Better than we've ever had in Cyprus, and, we reflect, for less money that we could possibly buy the raw lamb in Canada. So happy postponement to the Banqueting House in favour of the banquet.

Wednesday, April 17/2013

It's sunny and much warmer. Men sitting smoking shishas along Queensway. We skip the crowds for Maggie Thatcher's funeral. The funeral itself is highly controversial. A state funeral in all but name, minus the lying in state. The cost is supposed to be £10 million. Which many regard as scandalous. Others are cynical about the opportunism in a grand Conservative funeral as the coalition is faltering along with the econmy and the IMF is highly critical of the Chancellor of the Exchequer (shown in tears aat the funeral, presumably engendered by  the occasion and not the IMF). There`s an interesting question of protocol regarding the assessment of greatness. Defined by policy, by longevity, by tenure as prime minister, by international activity? Any PM who served more than ten years? If Blair were to die accidentally would he be accorded the same sort of funeral? Of course Thatcher won her war and arguably didn't start it. And who decides? Not the House in this case, but a PM who happens to be from the same party. Yes, she was the first woman prime minister. Would the apply to a first black PM? A first disabled one? The only comparable funeral was Churchill's but Churchill was much less controversial and his government, happily, a wartime National Unity government.

Speculation: Invited guests, many of them elderly, had to be in St Paul's by ten for an eleven o'clock service. And to leave their homes or hotels much earlier. How many loos are there in St Paul's and how many in the congregation went without morning coffee?

We to the National Portrait Gallery in the afternoon. Another look at the portrait of Richard III, after rereading Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time when R's body was discovered and identified this year and then visiting York on Sunday. A painting of Elizabeth I that looks like a death mask attached to the top of an elaborate dress. Presumably the sitter only had to pose while the face was being painted and the rest could be added later. In this case the shoes peep out from under the hem at an angle that seems not quite right. Also view an interesting set of busts by Epstein.

Walk down Whitehall, where there's a protest on regarding a coming execution in India. Then tube and DLR to Greenwich for our semi-annual visit to Goddard's Pie Shop (same family since 1890). Can never hold both pie and crumble (eels also available) so we now go for crumble. Today's choice apple and black currant with massive amounts of custard.

Tuesday, April 16/2013

We're not up early but get to enjoy Jasmine (4) and Leila (nearly 2) after Giles drops them off to be looked after for the day. Jasmine is very self possessed, talkative and socially adept. Leila is quieter but self-reliant in a different way, talking to herself while she plays with the toys. Interesting to watch her analysing how a toy works (some of Grandpa's genes?). She has very good fine motor co-ordination. Doug's sister Kathleen stops in with her grandson Johnny, an active, happy little boy (10 months old?).

We take train and tube back. Genie has saved us our old room and it feels like home now.Time for a little shopping in Camden Town, including a bottle of ruby cabernet which we take with us to Indian Veg, where the owner is happy to provide us with wine glasses. Good as ever.

Monday, April 15/2013

We're off and so are our very gracious and generous hosts. Phil and Elaine have a newly acquired motor home and are heading off Liverpool way to try it out and visit friends. It's both airy and compact - really nicely planned. I could quite happily live in a space like that, at least for half the year.

We stop at Leeds on our way and take a look at the house where D and J lived when their girls were little. Very nicely located in a dead end road across from parkland, and they sound a little wistful. Lovely big house too.

As we reach London, we can see that the weekend sun and warmth has done its best and cherry blossoms,magnolias, forsythia and camellias have joined the daffodils. Late but lovely.