Monday 4 February 2019

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.     

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