CONTRACTS AND CONTRACTING

The breadth of our building project was demonstrated the other day when I passed the site and observed the vans of "Heritage Blacksmiths Partnership" and "London Concrete Polishing" both parked up. In fact the concrete polishers are there tonight, working through the night, as you clearly have to polish concrete at a particular point in its drying process. The heritage blacksmiths have been superb, rehabilitating all our Victorian doors, and even bringing to life an ancient door-closer that we thought beyond use. The loving care with which the ironwork on our doors has been treated is quite remarkable, and the results are great.

This is the season of spending out budgets, and so Westminster is full of minor works. There are road works all over the West End, while our neighbourhood is full of pavements being relaid. F M Conway, Westminster's preferred contractor, are suddenly very busy indeed. Inexplicably they turned up to repaint the Harrow Road bridge over the Canal, in order to do which they had to set up a little cabin on the entrance to Westbourne Green, and fence off each pavement in turn. Needless to say, pedestrians carried on walking, judging the bridge to be a small enough distance to brave the traffic, which was unwise.They departed this morning, called away to "an emergency at Marble Arch".

While Conways were at work on the bridge a green hire bike was left beside their works, on the road, on a double yellow line. This was the most extreme example I've seen of anti-social behaviour from hire bikes, but I do think we have reached saturation. Not only are there the Boris bikes with their docking stations, but now there are three different brands of free-floating ones, yellow, orange-and-silver, and green. These can just be abandoned wherever you fancy, because they contain a chip which will notify its location, which the user can then find on the app. I fear that we are becoming a sink for these, as they seem to linger a long time, often in tiresome places. I gather that the local young people have discovered that, with the yellow ones at least, a sharp blow to the lock will not only release the bike, but destroy (or dislodge) the chip, and so you can ride off with impunity (apart from the inherent shame of riding a clumpy canary-coloured bicycle).

Last night I went to the extraordinary Playground Theatre in Latimer Road, to see Steven Berkoff in "Harvey" (Weinstein, not the rabbit). This theatre has been going a year, in an old bus depot towards the North Pole end of Latimer Road, a very odd location indeed; I get my car serviced a few doors down. The theatre has a very smart cafe-bar, and does seem to attract a more prosperous clientele than you might imagine. Unsubsidised, they put on some very ambitious things; last summer I saw "Shirleymander", the play about Dame Shirley Porter and her shameful stewardship of Westminster Council, which was attended by a number of people who looked as though they might have known Dame Shirley, and many who clearly remembered her. Last night's show attracted a rather glamorous crowd, with a very tall, androgynous, white-haired young man in leather trousers, high heels and dark glasses only the most extreme. A "famous paparazzo" was also pointed out to me. 

The director of the theatre was at pains to tell us that this was a "workshop production" of a "work in progress", and they gave us all free drinks at the end (a free gin does help one's critical faculties) but I'm afraid it wasn't a total success. Steven Berkoff is a remarkable performer, but this was a very disappointing evening. He has great physical presence, but for all but thirty seconds of the play he was simply slumped in a chair. Only for a moment did you see those extraordinarily scary pale blue eyes glitter. Steven Berkoff has written and directed this show, as well as being the only performer, and I fear that there is no-one to tell him that it's a turkey. We were all expecting to be shocked, I think, but his take on Weinstein was really rather one-dimensional, and while the vocabulary was explicit there was no provocative insight on the issues involved. It was a performance, rather than a play, a monologue from Berkoff with a few recorded extracts from victims' witness depositions. It had no structure, no variety of tone, no dramatic development, and offered nothing very memorable. Still, I've now seen Steven Berkoff in the flesh, and I commend the Playground Theatre for having the nerve to put this on.

The Burne-Jones show at Tate Britain, on the other hand, was more successful than I expected. Yes, there were a lot of those rather drippy women he painted so many of, and some really bad pictures, but there were also some good ones. I found it interesting to see so many together and spot some themes. His treatment of architecture, for instance, is always really poor. He's most comfortable with some sort of shed, like in Botticelli's "Mystic Nativity", but once he has to construct anything more it falls into fantasy. Look closely at "The Golden Stairs" for instance; not only does the staircase defy all laws of construction, but the middle section is so steep and precipitous that it is impossible to imagine all those girls getting down safely. He quite likes girls, and there's a charming portrait of the daughter of George Lewis, Oscar Wilde's solicitor, but he really doesn't like women, he's afraid of them and regards them as sinister. He also follows Michelangelo and basically gives women male bodies (but then some of his men are pretty androgynous too). All this seems quite interesting. And "The Briar Rose" is exquisite, even if it is better in situ at Buscot. Really remarkable are the sequence of Perseus pictures he did for A J Balfour's house, most strikingly the one of the Graeae (look them up). There is a well-worked up painting of this, and then there is the same scene worked as a low relief in wood, gilded and silvered, with a massive gilt Latin inscription above it. This is a piece of decorative art of the very highest quality, and a real innovation. Rather surprisingly it is from the National Museum of Wales, which seems to have several decent works of his. 

I announced on Sunday that I am engaged to be married, which caused a good deal of surprise and confusion, and a lot of genuine joy, which was very pleasing. People are very kind.

WORDS AND MUSIC

We finally launched Helen's book last week, many months after it was actually published. We had hoped to have all three editors present, but since Ed Vickers now works in a Japanese university this was always going to be a challenge, and it was one that we failed. Attempting to accommodate Ed, and Sadaf Rizvi, a colleague of Helen's who now works for the Open University and lives away from London, contributed to our delays, and in the end neither of them were there. Germ Janmaat, Helen's supervisor (the other editor) had arranged a room in the Institute of Education, and had arranged for their research group to provide wine and nibbles. No sumptuous publishers' party for an academic volume like this, "Faith Schools, Tolerance and Diversity", but a few bottles of cheap plonk in an anonymous teaching room on the eighth floor of the IoE. I got there first and moved the chairs out of the way (it's what clergy do). Germ spoke authoritatively about how important a book it is and then I said a bit about the process of the research and writing. Germ said I would be speaking "in a lighter vein" but I warned him there would be no jokes. I made the point that when Helen sent the thesis to people at the Department for Education they showed no interest at all, despite that being the era of "evidence-based policy". I hope I was suitably grateful to Palgrave Macmillan for actually publishing the book, and I didn't rehearse publicly my astonishment at the fact that they didn't routinely provide an index; I had to pay an Italian lady in the Netherlands £600 for the privilege. I do find it rather extraordinary that academic publishers should think it acceptable to publish a book without an index.

I had invited various luminaries of the Anglican education world, most of whom at least sent apologies, but none actually came. I should say, in fairness, that the Rector of Bournemouth (who is a former diocesan director of education, and included in my category of luminaries) tried to get there but couldn't find the room. He was in the building at the right time, but no-one he asked knew anything about it, and unless you got up to the eighth floor corridor there weren't any notices. He didn't have my mobile number, but sent an email, which reached me, but since I had (like a good, well-socialized human being) turned my phone to silent for the duration, I didn't actually read it until much too late. I dread that sort of thing happening to me and so usually carry the invitation with me, or a piece of paper with transcribed details: I once failed to do that and had the shame of taking the Superior of the Delhi Brotherhood to entirely the wrong place for a reception and then having no means of finding out the correct address without coming home, by which time, of course, the moment had passed.


Isn't London wonderful? I take it for granted too often, but after the book launch  I walked my brother-in-law down to Waterloo Station for his train back to Exeter, and was able to go to a concert at the Royal Festival Hall. I hadn't booked, because I didn't know when we would be finished, but I had checked online and seen that there were plenty of seats left, so I just turned up at the box office with confidence, and was able to have a choice of cheap seats. The London Philharmonic, under Sir Roger Norrington, were doing Handel's Water Music and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, and it was a splendid evening. Helen and I sang in Dido and Aeneas with the Plymouth Polyphonic Choir some twenty-five years ago, and so it seemed very appropriate. The LPO's was semi-staged, as ours had been, though the Festival Hall is a lot grander than Plymouth Guildhall, though actually I think we "acted" a bit more than they did, and we even had the odd bit of costume (I remember creating a helmet with wings for "Mercury"). I rather expected to be in floods of tears, but I wasn't. Partly this was because the LPO had a man singing the role of the Sorceress, which Helen sang back then, which is common practice, but frankly a bit odd, and partly it was because I didn't much care for the woman singing Dido, who was (I think) French, and didn't have the clarity of diction you want in Purcell. The result was that "Remember Me" was not the tear-jerker that it should be, but a bit florid and comfortable.

I was shocked by how much of the words I still have by heart; why can't I remember things like that nowadays? I was only in the chorus, and our high point was marching around as we sang, "Come away, fellow sailors, come away". I remember us slapping our thighs as we did so, but I think that was only in rehearsal, because I for one certainly couldn't have slapped in time successfully, and that would just have looked comical (as well as camp). Our Dido was a teenage girl called Alison Chryssides, whose mother was the director of the choir, and she was superb. I got her to sing Mozart for me at an anniversary Mass I celebrated in Reading a few years later, but she has not become a professional singer, but a social psychologist. This is not so surprising, as her father was a fairly eminent sociologist, but I hope she still sings.