Maxx in town on her way to the Loire for a week inspecting chateaux. We’re going out to Mimmo’s tonight.
Miki at the RAA
Miki’s job as listings editor at UK Jack has her reviewing exhibitions. Here she's caught by Reuter photographer Paul Hackett at the Auguste Rodin exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arse.
Take-home ballet
To Sadler’s Wells last night to see the opening of Sylvie Guillem’s new ballet Sacred Monsters. She shares the stage with her colleague Amrit Khan and the musicians. Everything is arranged very informally: the musicians sit onstage and play as if busking on the street; Guillem retreats after a solo to the back of the stage to mop herself with a towel and braid her hair. Each of the principals offers a solo roughly from their respective traditions (Khan is trained in Kathak) then combine for duets of playful combat.(Have they been studying capoeira?)
When others dance well I’m touched, inspired, moved. When Guillem dances my reaction goes further: I’m going to move like that! Take-home ballet.
Cycling in the city This summer’s great pleasure has been returning to cycling in the city, now with Miki’s company. Against her own expectations she’s delighted in it and her new mobility after years on the buses. With the help of Transport for London’s Journey Planner we worked out a quiet route to her newspaper in Bloomsbury, and I learned a few back routes I never knew of. Then an appalled Campfire message one morning: her beloved Claud Butler bike had been stolen from right outside her office window, 20 minutes after she had chained it to a lamp post.
She was disconsolate and wanted to replace it immediately, so that it would be as if the theft had never happened. But I prevailed on her to visit our local branch of CycleSurgery from which she emerged with a Ridgeback Cyclone. Not detecting at first any difference in its performance from the Butler, she was delighted to find herself soaring up Parliament Hill.
Returning from Hertfordshire via Kings Cross I met her for an early dinner at the Candid Arts Café at the Angel, then we locked our bikes outside Sadlers Wells for the ballet. But in my enthusiasm I’d allowed her to leave her back wheel outside the lock, and when we emerged from the theatre, the back wheel was gone. This was too much for her: clearly she is not meant to be an urban cyclist. But it was my fault: I’d overridden her suggestion we locked them in plainer view and told her they were fine as locked. So the next day I begged a favour from Eryka, Manager at our local CycleSurgery branch, and got the wheel replaced. Now both our bikes are fitted with locking spindles; the wheels can’t be removed without a key. Realised I don’t have the experience of riding and locking up a smart bike around town; my experience doesn’t apply here. With London bike journeys up something like 40% in the last year or two, so are thefts.
Marvel my birthday away To Crawley on Thursday and Friday by bike and train through thundery weather to work with Paul Grosvenor on processing multi-policy pension claims. Then cross-country by train on Friday evening to Reading, whence John Scholes & I hid out downriver on his boat to start drafting our contemplated book on APL.
These were the woods the river and the sea
Where a boy
In the listening summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and the singingbirds.
Great weekend: lazy reaches of the green Thames; hours sitting feet-up on the bow gunwhale, talking; hours bent over our keyboards; the return trip upriver, me half-naked at the helm in the September sunshine while John worked out his draft on handling RGB colour triples.
Then a train to Paddington and the climb home through St John's Wood. Miki disappeared into the kitchen and I was relaxing after a shower when the phone rang. It was Miki, asking if I could come up to Parliament Hill, just above the house.
And there could I marvel my birthdayParliament Hill overlooks the City, the Docklands and the Thames Valley. Miki was seated on one of the benches, in front of our picnic table with candle, silver, napkins, champagne flutes and a bottle of French poo. She served a melon and bacon salad, grilled venison and a marmalade & apple pudding and we watched the Thames Festival fireworks spouting from the City.
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
O may my heart’s truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning.
Be strong We’re going to get through this — as a family. Everything’s going to be all right. We’ll get back to our lives again. Everything will be as it was before. I promise you, when we get out of this, everything will be different.
Yes, we’re watching 24. Pray for us. Or cross your fingers.
London walks To the City on Thursday evening to lose our pub-quiz cherries at First Derivatives annual bash for its customers. We did abysmally, I’m proud to say, owing to our wretched ignorance of TV shows and celebrities. So that’s all right. Friday morning breakfast at the Bar Italia in Frith St, and a walkabout the Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House with Arthur Whitney and his fiancée Rita.
No art aspires to the condition of Muzak.The highlights of the weekend were undoubtedly Saturday afternoon punting on the Thames and Cherwell, and on Sunday, lunch at The Plough at Godstow, and the afternoon by the Windrush river at Minster Lovell Hall.
The bike that walked Today very bad news. Miki’s bike was stolen from under her office window, despite a motorcycle lock chaining it to a lamppost. She is inconsolable.
Milk fairy It’s September already: one of us has got to crack. The Express dairyman leaves glass bottles of milk on my doorstep and removes the empties for recycling. Not a word since January. Either he presents a bill soon, or I lose my weak grip on reality and start believing in the milk fairy.
Hooray Arthur Whitney’s in town.
Dignity & Purity It can be scary to rediscover early influences and see just how strong they were. The magic of the Web allowed me to recover recently a copy of a 1960 novel I’d read as a battered paperback in the early 70s: Dignity & Purity by Ian Jefferies. A comic masterpiece, I thought. Here’s the opening paragraph, which I’ve had by heart for thirty years.
By the time I’d got a Doctorate of Philosophy it was 1951, and things were easing up a lot throughout the country. You could buy a car if you knew someone or had no limbs at all, and people were looking smarter, except for the very rich who had nylon shirts.
Ontology, metaphysics — or software?
Many objects are not defined by their attributes, but rather by a thread of continuity and identity.
Neither ontology nor metaphysics, but Eric Evans on the Entity design pattern in Domain-Driven Design.
David Armstrong at Sydney always insisted philosophy has no practical use; but I never did believe that.
Triple congratulations this weekend to my sisters Joanne & Caroline. They have both passed their final examinations for the Institute of Advanced Motorists.
And Caroline completed a 40-mile charity bike ride from Richmond to Windsor on Sunday, raising £150 to support research into bowel cancer.
We wimpishly missed the morning ride upwind and joined her and her friend Judith for lunch in Windsor, before spending the afternoon pottering around on bikes in the almost car-free Windsor Great Park, where we watched a chukka at the Guards Polo Club.
