Floating balls of light

We're in a car speeding along the M11 from Northern Essex. At about 4pm this afternoon, seeing what a lovely day it was, Nathan and I jumped in the car and headed off to see the parents in Thaxted.

I was very pleased that we went. We were able to stroll down to the spot which my mum has started to describe as the "cosmic place;" that little corner of a field behind the village where the brook turns a corner and the trees whisper secrets to one another.

We were fed a magnificent meal which my mother described as eccentric because it was the product of her defrosting the freezer! We had some little filo pies that she didn't even recognise. I wasn't sure if they were savoury or sweet, but they tasted very good.

After eating, we popped back out and watched the sun setting over another field behind the village. It was magical to watch the clouds and vapour trails turning from yellow through gold and orange to purple. The moon was the merest crescent. Jupiter hovered in the sky above it. I wondered what Turner would have made of vapour trails. They have entirely changed the way we perceive the sky and I'm convinced his paintings would have been thick with them.

We sat in the sitting room. Nathan knitted. I did a bit more work on the music quiz. It was very relaxed and lovely.

As we drove back home through the darkened country lanes we could see planes taking off and arriving at Stansted Airport; balls of light like giant stars floating above the horizon. It's a rather eerie sight, but one that I've come to enjoy.

Parakeets

I've gone almost cross-eyed today sorting out rounds for our music quiz on May 9th. I've learned how to use Garage Band just to splice the chosen tracks together. I'm marching along...

I took myself for a massage in the late afternoon to see if I could get my shoulder sorted out. Honestly, you get to my age and suddenly can't remember how it feels to not have some part of the skeletal system which isn't quite working properly! I'm told it only gets worse. Call the vet and pop me in a bin on your way home..:

My masseuse is called Peter, and he lives down the hill and through the wood, which is about as Enid Blyton as any description could get. The sad truth is that down the hill and through the wood takes a man from Highgate to the infamous Cranley Gardens, the erstwhile home of serial killer, Denis Nilsen, who dispatched about fifteen young gay men in the 70s and 80s when Highgate was a lawless frontier and there was no such thing as a hate crime against a gaybo!

Anyway, today the area looked exactly like the sort of place which ought to be down a hill and through a wood. The streets were lined with blossom trees and the houses were covered in lilac wisteria. I tried to convince Peter to vote Liberal Democrat. I'm not a natural liberal, but a constituency MP like Lynne Featherstone is utterly worth keeping. This is the woman who brought in the gay marriage bill, and is currently doing great things in the fight against FGM. More importantly she's also the woman who sorted out the fly-tipping in the alleyway behind my house, and bashed Haringey Council's multiple heads together when they mistakenly sent the bailiffs in!

Massaged, and light-headed, I came home and insisted that Nathan come up to the Heath with me to take advantage of the glorious last forty-five minutes of sunshine.

We sat in our favourite spot, which is up towards Kenwood in the huge field where the green parakeets hang out in large numbers. It's a beautiful place to sit whilst the sun sets and turns the parakeets into flitting emerald darts. We sat on a rug, and ate hummus, cream cheese and bread from the delicatessen at the top of Southwood Lane whilst dogs gambolled and skipped around us.

Boating

We've just spent the evening with Hilary, rather unexpectedly, on her beautiful boat in Chelsea Harbour.

I now completely understand why someone might want to live in a house boat. One might assume it would be claustrophobic, low-ceilinged, and unsettling on the stomach, but in actual fact, the movements of the boat are incredibly gentle, and the living spaces are small enough to feel cosy but not so small they feel stuffy or enclosed.

We had a lovely night: great food in the form of a vegetable tagine, and wonderful chats about musical theatre, child-rearing and our recent trip to France. Hilary told us she'd been surprised to learn that Hitler had served in the First World War. This particular factoid came up as we were being shown around the Beaumont Hamel trenches. I think he was at Vimy Ridge, amongst other places, which is why our Canadian guide was so knowledgeable on the subject.

We had a bit of fun doing some filming for the Pepys Motet album. I've decided to shoot a little promo video for that project as well as the more professional one we're doing for Brass. It's almost impossible to market any recording these days without some kind of film which can do the rounds on social media, so we got the candles and lanterns out and had a play.

I'm ashamed to say that the rest of the day was spent doing admin. I had a lot to do - quite a lot of which was for our music quiz on May 9th - and Nathan was working on a knitting commission, so it made sense for us to sit next to one another working, but only communicating from time to time.

Speaking of which, I'm now in bed, and my husband is merrily snoring next to me, which must mean it's time to sleep!

Kew

I went to Kew today with Philippa, Dylan and my godchildren, Deia and Silver. And what a uniquely beautiful day it was...

We met at Highbury and Islington train station. They were changing trains and had five minutes to get the kids, a heavily-laden buggy and two scooters from one platform to another. It doesn't sound like a massive challenge, but when you have two young children, any journey is littered with an astonishing amount of potential hazards, so it was astounding that we managed to hook up and change trains in our allotted time period without major incident!

Kew is lovely at any time of the year, but on a stunning spring morning, it's almost unbeatable. The tube station is surrounded by charming little independent shops, one of which is a somewhat eccentric charity-shop-cum-newsagent. Musty rails of clothes and old jigsaws rubbing shoulders with cans of coke and chocolate racks. There are artisan bread stalls and funky-looking cafés. It's really very lovely.

The walk from the tube to Kew Gardens is only about five minutes, and takes you along palm tree-lined streets. It's slightly peculiar to see palms in London, but there's more than a whiff of the art nouveaus about the area, so it all seems to fit in.

Kew Gardens was bathed in sunlight. There were so many flowers in bloom. Tulips, daffodils, magnolia, cherry blossom. It's Kew Gardens! I'm not sure why I'm even attempting to list the riot of flowers we saw today.

We went first to the palm glass house. It's hot, wet and sticky in there, which is never good news for an hairy man like me. We climbed a wrought iron spiral staircase to a walkway right in the roof of the building which looks down over the canopy of palms. It's particularly hot up there. Uncomfortably so, but worth it for the view. The building is the most astonishing feat of Victorian architecture. You can still imagine why Victorians were frightened to go in these sorts of buildings for fear of plates of glass falling on their heads.

After an hour we exited the glass house, dripping in sweat, and made our way to a set of cherry blossom trees for a picnic lunch. Philippa had made cheese and hummus sandwiches which were, in a word, delicious.

We walked on through the gardens, though a sort of Mediterranean grotto, to a Henry Moore sculpture of a mother and child, which was warm to the touch on the parts which were in direct sunlight, and freezing cold in the parts that were in the shade. I rather liked the sensual contrast.

We went from the statue to the treetop walkway, which is a fifty-foot-high giant metal structure which gives people the opportunity to walk along a pathway which crosses the tops of a series of incredibly tall trees. It's vertigo-inducing stuff, particularly when it's as blustery as it was this afternoon. The entire structure wobbles and shakes.

For the rest of the afternoon we hung out at the children's play area, which is a particularly fine one. Deia and Silver had a lot of fun jumping and running about whilst we drank a lovely cup of tea.

The journey home was uneventful, but for our needing to stop off at Willesden Green because Deia needed the loo. It was no hardship. It  gave us an opportunity to have another cuppa in the station cafe, which, for the record, is a lovely little spot, run by a lovely little man!

Nathan picked me up from Gospel Oak, and I was home before 7, feeling hugely relaxed and more than a little sun-kissed. I worked this evening.

Late night

Of course I’ve woken up in the night and realised I haven’t blogged. It’s no real hardship. I’ve always liked this time in the morning. It feels very still and magical. All the senses are much more heightened. Cars continue to drift along the A1 outside whilst halogen street lights drifts in. 

I’m watching the BBC Young Dancer of the year. This week focusses on contemporary dance, which seems like a load of nonsense, really, with its contractions, random body flinging and non-specific acting. I’m slightly irritated to see that four out of the five finalists are from London; proof positive for me that young people in London are blessed with opportunity whilst those in the sticks fade to grey. 

It’s also interesting to note that there’s a large amount of ethnic diversity within the five finalists, in fact, the Northern lad is the only one I’d probably describe as white. I’m genuinely all for that, but am also aware that I’m not looking at a representation of the statistical ethnic make-up of the British Isles… Yet again, I’m left wondering if the disadvantaged white kids in Northern and Midlands schools are getting as much access to culture as those down south.

The other thing I’d say is that all five finalists (apart from the Northern lad) sound quite posh… another indication from my perspective that the divides in this country are not racial but class-based.

Anyhow… There are enough people standing on imaginary soap boxes at the moment, so that’s plenty enough philosophising from me. 

There’s not a lot else to write about today, which was spent doing admin, writing press releases, entering another competition I haven’t got a hope of winning and repeatedly listening to one of PK’s rough mixes from the Brass soundtrack. Today’s song was the epic Prologue, which is twice the length of any song, and seemed to generate a huge number of notes despite my being hugely happy with it on first hearing. 

Lost musicals

Nathan and I have just been to see an evening of excerpts from new musicals at LOST Theatre in Vauxhall. LOST (and I'm told I must write it in capitals despite not knowing what it's an acronym for) is a lovely little theatre space in the middle of nowhere. If it were anywhere else in London it might stand a chance of being a popular venue, but it's miles from any tube, in the middle of 1960s brutalist housing blocks, and windswept streets scattered with Caribbean cafés and Asian convenience stores.

I'm afraid the shows we watched largely irritated me. Writing a musical is something which has to be taken seriously.  You need a plot, you need dramatic songs which further the plot, and you need subtle dialogue. More than anything else, you need to do your research to avoid crashing anachronisms which make an audience wince.  I don't think I saw a single song in all four excerpts which didn't feel like it had been crowbarred in in some way. The large majority of songs were written in the pop idiom and there wasn't a single character on stage who I gave a damn about. I just kept wanting to scream that we HAVE to do better than this in this country. We HAVE to write better musicals. We must learn to respect the art form.

Julie had produced one of the pieces, which, in fairness, was the one which showed the largest amount of potential. She's been a hands-off producer on the project, so I don't feel bad about saying that it wasn't wholly successful. The show is in its infancy, and putting thirty minutes of it on its feet was a good exercise which will have taught everyone a great deal. She'd assembled a top-notch cast, however, who acted and sang the s**t out of the piece. It's funny: within a minute of a group of actors waking onto a stage, you know whether or not you're in a safe pair of hands, or need to hold your breath for a bumpy ride. The three women in Julie's piece passed that particular test as soon as the lights went up. You can tell an assured actor sometimes just by their stance.

There's not much else to say about today, other than that I did admin. Today's task was working on copy for the inner sleeve of the two albums we're releasing. PK sent me the second draft of the first three songs from Brass, so a fair amount of the afternoon was spent listening to them. He's done a great job... Unsurprisingly!

Filming in the garden

Another day of hard core admin which found me sitting at the kitchen table firing off emails left, right and centre.

I did manage to leave the house for an hour before lunch when I took my computer down to Highgate Wood and sat on a bench working. I took a mug of tea with me which generated an astonishing amount of attention, which seemed a touch unnecessary. I mean, you wouldn't stare at someone walking down the street with a paper cup from Costa would you?!

Sitting in Highgate Wood, which we all know is the North London habitat for yummy mummies, I was astounded by how much baby talk I could hear. I'm told there's a reason why women talk to their children in ghastly high voices. I mean, it's plainly not just because we're trying to bring up a generation of backward counter tenors, is it? Some of the games that mums have to play with their kids are freakishly dull as well. Peek-a-boo is particularly loathsome, as it anything which involves repetition. It's a good job I'm not a Dad. I'd be giving it five minutes before announcing utter boredom and telling the children they need to find a mutation of the game which is more mentally stimulating... or they're on their own. I never talk to children in silly high-pitched voices either. They have to learn that low voices are far more interesting, and that head voices are for imbeciles, guitar-playing junior school teachers, opera singers... And Fern Britton.

Nathan came home from teaching at Urdang school and immediately vanished into the sitting room to record his fortnightly knitting vlog.

I continued working through the admin stuff until about 6pm, when we went out into the glorious evening sunshine and drove up to Ali Pali, which was bathed in a rich orange light. The idea had been to do a bit of experimentation with filming on my camera, but it didn't go particularly well. I wanted blossom billowing from the trees, but the few trees of blossom that were there weren't ready to let go of their floral cargoes, and the sun was always in the wrong place. After a few attempts, we aborted and came back home.

Never one to have a wasted day, I immediately went into the garden and set up a night time film shoot with our chimnea and a shed load of candles, which glinted in the still night air. Little Welsh Nathalie and Richard came down to give us a hand, and became "fire drop" monitors, standing above Nathan, dropping little pieces of tin foil down on him which almost looked like specs of falling flames.

I'm actually trying to record a video for the Pepys Motet album launch and have opted to film the Great Fire of London movement. The concept for the piece is to film various performers on the recording singing just two lines where their voice is particularly prominent. The idea is to always film at night - in different modern London locations - but for each of the shots to have a bit of fire in them, mostly in the form of candles or lanterns.

Nathalie brought her beautiful candelabra down which became the star of the shoot. Frankly, all the twinkling stuff I had hanging from trees became rather pointless. What we've filmed looks fab. I've just taken a look at the rushes. I'm excited to get someone else in the can. Lots of possibilities...