A Week at the Edinburgh Festival

Just back from a week in Edinburgh, visiting my sister, celebrating my birthday, and Doing the Festival! This is what we did, each with a mini-review in case you're thinking of going to any of them yourself:

Monday:
Walked along the Water of Leith to Dean Village (beautiful) to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to see the exhibitions of new work by Hiroshi Sugimoto and a retrospective of drawings and sculptures by Tony Cragg. Thumbs up for Sugimoto (who I like anyway) especially for Lightning Fields, which manages to capture forms from bursts of energy which seem to be alive, like weird sea creatures from the bottom of the ocean... Photogenic Drawing (blow up prints of Fox Talbot images from the 1840s) seemed more of an academic experiment. Take-it-or-leave-it thumbs for Tony Cragg - I like those weird sculptures that look like lots of faces in profile but after a while it is all the same.

Midnight till 2 am: 'Political Animal' at The Stand, politically satirical stand-up hosted by Andy Zaltzman. His bits in between the guests were the best and funniest thing about it so if you're not sure and don't want to stay out late then I'd go for his 'Armchair Revolutionary' show instead! But it fulfilled all my expectations of the Fringe! Late night comedy stand up in basement bars... So worth it for the experience alone.

Tuesday:
'The Proceedings of that Night': Excellent. This will probably turn up on Radio 4 at some point. Short single-hander play about an actor recording a ghost story for radio, inexplicably all alone late at night in an isolated recording studio... As he reads it the ghost story starts to fight back. Truly spooky!

'Blood and Roses': also really good. A promenade play, where we turned up to a meeting point in St George's West church and were given headsets to listen as the play played out in our heads, while we followed an usher who led us round nearby streets and into spookily dressed staged spaces. A love story through different times and places, with some witches thrown in for good measure.

Wednesday:
'The Queen: Art and Image' at the Scottish National Gallery. Not that I'm a patriot but I thought this was a really interesting exhibition - about celebrity, the developing image of the Queen over the long period of her reign, how this image is manipulated according to political events or popular opinion, especially the need to make her increasing accessible to her subjects... Plus many of the world's greatest artists have photographed or painted the Queen and there were some iconic and beautiful images. In particular I was struck by 'Lightness of Being' by Chris Levine (do a Google Image search), the accidental portrait taken while the Queen rested her eyes between long exposures while he worked on the actual portrait. Both are in the show and are holographic, so the reproductions don't really capture how the images follow you around the room...

Explored the craft market in the graveyard of St Johns church. Bought a cheese knife with a handle made from bracingly scented juniper wood as a memento.

National Museum of Scotland - which has recently reopened its doors after a major refurbishment lasting more than a decade I think. They have done major work on restoring the Victorian building, and the natural history displays are spectacular - particularly as they have a contemporary feel yet are inspired by the original Victorian approach - and I spent quite a lot of time in there. However I found the rest of it - the, er, art - disappointing and I am sorry to say the Islamic displays were risible.

Thursday:
A discussion at the Book Festival about Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, marking the centenary of his birth this year. This was K's choice and it was nice to do something at the book festival - most of the interesting talks were happening the following week... I hadn't read any Czeslaw Milosz - had hardly even heard of him - but it was a really interesting session, with some of his poetry read out, in English translation as well as in the original Polish, and I certainly will investigate him now.

'The Conference of the Birds': this was Isla's choice, a student production (we had had lunch that day with the Islamic history tutor of some of them!) which used a lot of physical theatre to depict this allegory of the world's birds undergoing trials and tribulations while they search for their king, the Simurgh (for which, read God). But it was really well done, and really nice to see something quite experimental - took me back to my own days of student theatre.

Friday:
My birthday! I am officially in my late 30s now. We took a trip to the seaside - driving along the East Lothian coast to Gullane where we had a wonderful 2-hour walk along its sandy beaches and back along its dunes, before heading for North Berwick for lunch - a feast of lobster and chips from the wonderful and much-to-be-recommended Lobster Shack at the harbour... We saw the lobsters being delivered (still alive of course) so they were totally fresh and absolutely delicious!



Pudding was Signor Luca ice cream (made with all local ingredients) while sitting on the sea wall looking out to the sheer rockfaces of the Bass Rock with its colony of tens of thousands of seabirds... It was gorgeously sunny and warm so K and I got a bit burned while Isla just went a deeper brown as she always does!

Back to Edinburgh in time to see 'Cowboys and Aliens' at the cinema - there was some low-brow activity as well!

Saturday:
'Me, Myself and Miss Gibbs': a really original show put together by Francesca Millican-Slater, which tells the story of a postcard she picked up in a junk shop in Devon, sent on 15 July 1910 to a Miss L. Gibbs, instructing her to 'Be Careful Tomorrow'. Francesca became obsessed by the postcard and about trying to track down Miss Gibbs and why she should be careful tomorrow... It was a really interesting little detective story, beautifully presented (best use of an OHP I've ever seen I think), told from the perspective of her personal journey to find out what she did, how she felt about the 'historical stalking' she was doing, who she met along the way... Really excellent.

After this we wandered up to the Farmers' Market on Castle Terrace, catching it just before everyone packed up for the day, and had the most amazing Aberdeen Angus beefburgers! Followed, somewhat later, after some lazy wandering and provision-purchasing (can't leave Scotland without some hot-smoked salmon, though the preferred Hebridean Smokehouse variety - smoked in peat, yum! - was not in evidence), by a tray of macaroons at Valvona & Crolla's VinCaffè...


That evening, opening night of 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' at King's Theatre. This was the only thing we did as part of the actual, original 'International Festival'. My sister and I both really loved Haruki Murakami's book, though K hadn't read it so I think he spent most of the performance wondering what on earth was going on. It was really well produced and staged, with lots of interesting projection and puppetry, and I enjoyed the mix of Japanese and English language... K said the next day that the memory of the performance seemed like a hallucination which was exactly the nature of the book, so an amazing achievement, really, to capture its surreal nature.

There was much more food, drink, meeting up with friends, chatting, walking, exploring my sister's new neighbourhood (she now has her own flat off Leith Walk)... It was exhilarating and exhausting! Back to work for a rest!

Just another day at the beach...

As usual, I have been struggling to find time to catch up with this blog. The longer I leave it, the more things that come along that I want to blog about, which makes for interminably long posts…! But today I am going to limit myself to blogging about the fun I have had celebrating my birthday, and a few rambled digressions…

It was my birthday on the 19th. I’m now 35. Feels like a landmark. As K encouragingly put it, I'm halfway to 70!

We both took the day off work, and brilliantly, it was an absolutely gorgeous summer day - a mini heatwave, according to the BBC - and by far the best day to be out and about. I highly recommend mid-week days off! It makes you feel like you've worked two two-day weeks! We started our fun-packed and busy day by getting the 9.36 train to Brighton where we ambled around taking in the trendy, buzzy seaside town – and, rather unexpectedly, a fine neo-Nasrid building which is now the Brighton Dome concert hall and city museum - until finding the perfect spot for the morning's third cup of coffee, in the Pavilion Gardens.

The tower block in the background rather spoiled the effect of the turrets!

This guy busking on the French horn while standing on stilts was rather fun!


The point was to go to the Brighton Pavilion, where neither of us had ever been, and which - though I knew it was one of the earliest examples of Orientalist architecture in Britain - we knew very little about. It turned out to be a royal palace built by the Prince of Wales, later George IV, son of Mad King George, when he set up home in the society town of Brighton to escape from the pressures of being heir apparent. It also turns out to have the best interior decorative scheme in the Chinoiserie style that was so popular in the late 18th century! No photos inside, so I can't show you, but it was absolutely awe-inspiring in parts! The banqueting room and ballroom were particularly luxurious and overwhelming, including an amazing chandelier above the dining table, which hung from the claws of an enormous dragon. The whole thing weighed a ton and some of the king’s guests were scared to sit underneath it! I could sympathise! But visiting the pavilion was a real and memorable treat, and just enough outside of both of our areas of work to be a mini-holiday.

If it weren't for the grass, would you believe you were in Brighton?!

We were not the only people who had the bright idea of a trip to the seaside on a lovely English summer day - and Brighton beach was a far cry from the quiet idyll of Harris, or the delightfully relaxing day we spent at Bexhill at Easter... Despite the online warnings against doing so, we decided to get fish and chips from one of the stalls on the beach, so we could sit and look at the sea view, which we did, and they were not great quality, but the principle of the thing needed to be observed...!


It was crazily crowded, because of the school holidays, which naively we had not taken into account - but we got some good paddling in (no Kent method was attempted, though it was tempting apparently...) before heading back up the hill to the station... Alas, it was all too brief - we'll definitely go back and have a more extended wander round the interesting-looking shops and cafés, especially in the old warren-like part of town known as The Lanes - but we had to be at the National Theatre for 5, since we'd booked to go on a Backstage Tour! We were a bit early so we walked from Embankment and wandered along the South Bank in the sunshine, and I just took random photos of some of the things I love most about that part of London, since I don't often just wander around my haunts with a camera...

The view – in the foreground is Waterloo Bridge, which we often go over on the 59 bus travelling to and from Brixton, and from the top deck you get the best view in London: St Paul’s, the Gherkin and the City in one direction, the Houses of Parliament and the London Eye in the other, and on both sides the curl of the Thames. Just fab.

I have always loved the fact that this one part of the South Bank is completely given over to graffiti and skateboarders – and the fact that all the youngsters who hang out looking oh-so-cool and rebellious have no sense of being completely institutionalised by an area where these otherwise rather anti-social activities are perfectly allowed, even encouraged!

Of course the best thing is the second hand book market under the vast curve of the arch of Waterloo Bridge – I love browsing here. On my birthday, we scraped together our last few pound coins to buy The Blind Rider by Juan Goytisolo, which apparently he has said will be his last novel. I really like his writing (Cinema Eden is just fantastic) and I wanted to buy a book there on my birthday as a memento of that lovely day…

What we were less pleased to discover is that the area in front of the BFI – which used to be the best place to go for a drink in that part of London, and had wonderful long wooden bench tables which you had to share with your fellow drinkers, in a truly socialist South Bank experience – has been poshed up and turned into a terraza for fine pre-film or -theatre dining. The grungey BFI bar of old is no longer. We were quite disappointed to see that.

The Backstage Tour was fun and interesting, though perhaps would have been more so had we gone during the working day (ours started at 5.15), when more people would have been behind the scenes, in the art studio and prop stores, actually doing things. Also having been heavily involved in the backstage side of theatre when we were at university, I wanted to know more about where the stage manager sat, how they prepared for a show, gave their cues, how the lighting design worked etc etc… But we got to see the sets for the plays were weren’t going to see that night, including All’s Well That Ends Well, whose set looked great – a bit like A Nightmare Before Christmas in massive 3D…

It made me want to go and see it – though we have seen quite a lot of Shakespeare already this year: we had a trip to As You Like It at the Globe a month ago, with Jane for her birthday, which was brilliant fun as always at the Globe, and nice as well since it was a text I had studied for A-level and seen staged by friends as the Oriel College summer show. The second Shakespeare we have seen this year was The Merchant of Venice, an outdoor production in the Bishop’s Garden at Hereford, when we went down a few weeks ago for the 3 Choirs Festival – K’s father was local festival administrator this year (a bad case of ‘recycling deputy headmasters’, as he amusingly put it). We had a really lovely long weekend – in all these years of going to Hereford, where my grandparents also lived when they were alive, I had never been to 3 Choirs, but the night I arrived on the train (K went down for the whole week), we went off to the Cathedral for a performance of Bach’s violin sonatas by Rachel Podger. It was absolutely, stunningly beautiful. The acoustics of the unaccompanied violin in one of the most beautiful medieval cathedrals in England. And Rachel Podger was an absolute virtuoso – somehow she managed to make two layers of completely different sounds come out of her strings at the same time. Wonderful.

Anyway, The Merchant of Venice was good too – I don't think I had ever seen it performed. There was a nicely down-to-earth amateurish quality about the set but the acting was excellent (this company, The Festival Players, specialises in giving opportunities to up-and-coming young actors). It was an all-male production, which really makes you understand just how funny all the cross-dressing and mistaken identity of Shakespeare’s plays would have been in his own day.



But back to my birthday and the National Theatre. That night we went to see Phèdre, by Jean Racine, a 17th-century French playwright who drew heavily on the classical tragedies – in this case, the Seneca play Phaedra, which I had studied for finals (and, typically, could not remember all that much about…). This was in a translation by Ted Hughes, and I really loved the Hughesian poetry of it – especially since Racine’s original text was also self-consciously literary – but I think K is right in his assessment that it did not make for a very dramatic play. On top of that, we didn’t think the quality of the acting was very good – and this was the great Helen Mirren in the title role, and the leading man of the moment, Dominic Cooper. It was also directed by Nicholas Hytner, the National Theatre director, so it should have been brilliant – but it wasn’t, sadly. The two supporting actors carried the show and their acting abilities really shone – Margaret Tyzack as the nurse, who had a really wonderful voice, and John Shrapnel as Hippolyte’s companion, especially in the scene where he has to report his gruesome death. And the set was magnificent, in true National Theatre style – and somehow the changing light on the glowing horizon really managed to capture the quality of the light in Greece… So it wasn’t all bad!!

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Last Saturday, the birthday celebrations continued. We went fruit picking with my parents and my sister, at Parkside Farm just outside Enfield. It was a brilliant day out! We had a picnic lunch to start with, and all brought enough for several picnics, so we had far too much food…

My father is here seen wearing his Terry Pratchett hat. When he was wearing this at home in Shepherd’s Bush recently, some of the local Aussies passed by, and one of them asked him – ‘Are you a real wizard?’ !!

Then we hit the fields!! We picked up a load of empty punnets and a cart which we trundled around behind us as we picked ever more and more fruit and vegetables and eventually completely filled it! I had decided I wanted to try making jam so everyone really got carried away on my behalf, especially with the berries – there is also something completely addictive about picking fruit! It was just so wonderful to be outside in the sun all afternoon (we have actually had several weeks of an actual summer here in England!!) – and a brilliant family thing to do. My sister and I have really fond memories of doing this with our grandparents in Herefordshire, and on that day there were loads of kids getting carried away in the bushes, as it were. Occasionally a loud cry would ring out – ‘I’ve just found the biggest raspberry in the whole world!’

Does anyone know what a ‘Himbo’ is??


My mother and my sister both pretending to be raspberries!

The farm had developed this ‘table-top’ system for growing their strawberries which meant you could pick away without having to bend down and break your back! Very civilised!

Some, ahem, ‘low-hanging fruit’, which we quickly picked! These strawberries - warmed by the sun - were so sweet and tasty!

Stained hands after blackberry picking (and some judicious munching)!

Our cart weighed down by our pickings!

K defeated by hunter-gathering!

We have been living off plums, sweetcorn, spinach, marrow, french beans and raspberries all week – the blackberries I have pureed and frozen, in preparation for making ice cream, though some of them I have baked with apples in a pie we are going to eat with my sister tonight; the raspberries and strawberries have been sorted, hulled, weighed and frozen, while I work out how on earth one makes jam…!

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After what seemed like an interminably long car ride from Enfield to Brixton – with all the punnets of fruit very carefully packed in the tiny boot of my sister’s (bright orange) Daewoo Matiz, we finished the day with a Victoria sponge birthday cake at home! I had made the sponges in the morning before setting out to the farm, and we filled it with strawberry jam bought from our lovely friendly deli on Abbeville Road, Jersey cream bought from the farm, and strawberries we had picked with our own fair hands! YUM!

They brought the candles!

It didn’t last long…!

Fixing the Family Graves

Last weekend we travelled down to Swansea for a weekend away with my parents and sister. This was timed to celebrate my father’s birthday on 2nd March, and meant we were there for St David’s Day (he is called David because he was born the day after the Welsh National Day), and though I must have been there then as a child, I don’t remember, and it was quite an experience to get caught up in such outpourings of Welshness! That particular weekend it was made all the more exuberant because of the fact that Wales had been playing France on the Friday night in the Rugby Six Nations tournament – as soon as we crossed the Severn Bridge into Wales, the roads were eerily quiet and empty, and it felt like we were driving through the small hours, rather than 9 o’clock in the evening. Unfortunately Wales lost, and this gave rise to an awful lot of hanging and slow shaking of heads over the course of the weekend – and to shared moments between strangers that must have sounded rather enigmatic to anyone listening in who was not aware of the defeat in this game which is more of a religion than a sport in Wales.

It was tough getting out of London. As soon as I got to Brixton tube station, they were closing it because of signal failure at Stockwell – something that happens all too frequently while they work on the seemingly-endless “improvement works” (notice how these have been rebranded recently, so we can’t complain about disruption). I missed one bus, then piled onto another that came along soon after, and instead of going straight through to Victoria as I had initially planned, I made the split-second decision to get off at Stockwell and connect to the Victoria Line from there – I am sure this is what the signs up at Brixton had advised… As I was crossing the road, something felt not quite right, and I suddenly realised I had left our suitcase on the bus! With K’s wide angle lens in it and my father’s birthday present!! (my sister and I had his grandfather’s gold pocket watch refurbished – not exactly something you want to lose…) I ran like a fool back to the bus which had just pulled away from the stop but I banged on the door and yelled at the driver – “My suitcase! I’ve left my suitcase!” Fortunately, he opened the doors (they’re usually real sticklers about only opening doors at stops) and drove onto the next stop where I got off, having safely retrieved the suitcase. Phew. But then it turned out the Victoria line was suspended from Stockwell as well, and I can’t even remember now what I worked out I needed to do to get to my parents’, but of course by the time I did eventually get there (probably only about 20 minutes late in the end, having lingered in Wendell Park taking photos of crocuses wide open to soak up the sun) they weren’t quite ready to leave anyway. A quick stop at B&Q to pick up some provisions (we were also on a mission to clean and fix up the family graves) and then off to collect K at Richmond, which led us into horribly heavy traffic and took about another hour from there to get onto the motorway. But then we were off and, as always, heading out of London felt so refreshingly like sloughing off an old, tired skin…

We arrived late at our B&B – the very oddly-named Christmas Pie, but extremely cosy and welcoming, more like staying as a guest in someone’s house than somewhere you pay for. Excellent breakfasts too, and huge! Which was just as well as we had heavy work to do!

There are several family graves at Oystermouth Cemetery, in the wonderfully-named Mumbles, where my father grew up, once more of a sleepy fishing and holiday village than an outpost of Swansea, but this is where we spent most of our time (apologies to my father for saying this, but Swansea City proper does not have all that much to recommend it – though he’ll be the first to admit that the Council ruined it during reconstruction efforts after the extensive damage it suffered during the Second World War). Mumbles is lovely, on the other hand. Since no-one in the family really lives in or near Swansea any more (though that’s not strictly true) the family plots have got a bit run-down and overgrown, and on one of them, two of the corner stones had come loose, and my father wanted to fix them up before them went missing.

It was nice to see that the snowdrops had come out on our grandparents’ grave (significance of this mentioned in an earlier posting)


and that the new lettering had now been added to the headstone, so that my grandmother was finally there in her own right.


We set about picking out the fallen leaves and twigs and just generally tidying and cleaning and sprucing everything up.


Later on we went and spent a small fortune on daffodils to arrange on the top of the graves.

The real construction work was done on an older tomb higher up on the slopes of the cemetery, where two marble corner blocks had come loose, and K and my father mixed up some cement to stick them back on.


My father had once done a brick-laying course, and it turns out he can mix some good cement.


The Rev. Samuel Owen would be pleased to have his grave back in one piece, I am sure.


Oystermouth is a really lovely, atmospheric Victorian cemetery (it opened in 1883), which sweeps up the side of a steep hillside, and is surrounded by woodland. It has this wonderful avenue of large old cypress trees right down the middle of it.


Somewhat amusingly (at least, it’s amusing that such awards exist), it was shortlisted for the Cemetery of the Year Award in 2007. Quite a number of the old graves have been left to fall into ruin,


- the onus really is on the families to keep them up, and my father is just keen that, while we’re hale and able, we do what we can with ours. It really is a special thing to have a physical place where you can go and think about and remember your relatives – many of the people buried in these graves died before my time, or I only remember them very hazily from my childhood, but now my grandfather and grandmother are there, and though they’re in our thoughts and memories all the time, it really makes a difference to have a physical place to be with them. It reminded me of being in Syria during the Eid holidays in early December last year – after attending the Eid prayers at the local mosque, it is traditional for families to go and visit the family graves and to hang on them a wreath of an aromatic plant, a bit like rosemary for remembrance. I had two days off from the exhibition during Eid, and had arranged an overnight out-of-town trip to Krak des Chevaliers, Hama and Apamea (all of which was absolutely fantastic), but the driver I hired asked if we could meet an hour later than arranged (not by me!), to give him time to visit the graves. Then, as we were driving through northern Syria, all the cemeteries we passed were garlanded with these fresh green wreaths. It felt really special. I can’t really imagine what it would be like if your relatives’ ashes had just been scattered somewhere and you didn’t have an actual place to be with them. My grandmother was cremated (one of the most meaningful cremations I’ve ever been to) but I am glad her ashes were put in a casket and buried with my grandfather.

Having fulfilled our family duty, we went off for a big lunch of fish and chips, which surprisingly took a long time to find for seaside town, though we eventually ended up at Covelli’s, not far from where we started out. I can still feel the crispness of the batter on my haddock! It was wonderful! My mother and sister went off for a cup of tea (and secret birthday-card shopping) in Treasure – a shop which really cannot be missed during a visit to Mumbles (this was the shop window in honour of the rugby/St David’s Day - there was going to be a prize-giving the next day for the best dressed window, but we left before finding out who won...)


while K, my father and I went and clambered around Oystermouth Castle,


a rather impressive castle, dating from the 12th to 14th centuries, though sadly you can’t go inside since it is in too ruinous a state – my father says he has never known it open while he was growing up here, and doesn’t think his mother had ever been inside either. Some good views of the bay though from up here.


Swansea harbour has a very impressive tidal drop of about a mile.


We were so tired by the end of the day that we were almost falling asleep over our rather tasty dinner at Papa Sancho’s, home of the intriguing stonegrill cooking phenomenon, as well as being founded by, guess what, a former Welsh rugby star. Must have been all that sea air.

On St David’s day, the sun was shining, and we were back in Mumbles for a walk along the beach – though the tide was in when we started, so we didn’t actually get onto the beach until the very end. Le tout Mumbles was out doing the same thing, and it was all very jolly, with everyone sporting their daffodils (normally I get a load of funny looks if I go about with my daffodil in London), and the occasional leek.


We laughed at the interesting names on some of the boats

(this one's called 'Kangaroo Poo')

and saw the lifeboat coming back in from what must have been an exercise – it was really interesting to see how it gets hauled back in up the launching ramp, on what must be enormous chains.



My father can remember the boom going off in the bay to alert the lifeboatmen on duty that they needed to get their arses down to the boathouse. He said everyone else just stopped when they heard it.

We made our way to the end of Mumbles pier, built in 1898.


My father used to play here as a child, and apparently my great-grandmother and other relatives of her generation came here for entertainment. Nowadays there is a rather Disney-fied Welsh dragon slide


and some of those silly pictures with cut-out heads for your family to pose in for the cameras!


But it does have some rather fine Victorian ironwork.


We got down on the shingle and looked for nice stones – my mother found an enormous one to use as a doorstop, which no-one else offered to carry!


A last look at the Lighthouse (which dates from 1794)


and we wandered back along the bay to Mumbles, where the farmers’ market and “dragon festival” in honour of St David’s Day had really kicked off!

(and I always thought the Welsh were a short race...)

After some rather fine lamb burgers,


and some purchases of fine local produce, not to mention some free Welsh-cakes, we headed off to Joe’s ice cream parlour, home of legendary Swansea ice cream since the 1920s. My father remembers the owner, Joe Cascarini, always doing his accounts in the corner of the shop. This is a Swansea legend apparently – as is the ice cream, and I must say it was possibly the smoothest, creamiest vanilla ice cream I’ve ever tasted. I had a rather fine strawberry sundae.


We gave my father his birthday present,


which he seemed very chuffed with, and I was glad again for not having lost it on the Number 2 bus!! (Since then, my mother has bought him a chain to go with it from Ebay)

We stopped off briefly in Swansea city centre, for K to take photos of Swansea castle, another fine structure of which much less is standing than at Oystermouth – in fact, I had absolutely no idea there was another castle in Swansea! My folks went off to explore the Welsh Tartan shop (!) while I busied myself with taking photos of the fountain in the main square, where the water had been dyed red for rugby/St David’s Day. There were posters up everywhere warning people that “this dye could stain” (really?)! It was rather macabre actually, though compelling, and I couldn’t stop taking photos, just as most of the kids around couldn’t stop dipping their hands in, just to see if they came out red…


And then we set off back to London. It was good going until we got within spitting distance, and then the traffic almost came to a grinding halt – what you might expect, coming back into the Big Smoke at the end of the weekend, but much much worse than anyone had remembered it, and it took us an hour to get a couple of miles. The cause of the problem was revealed to be a major two-car collision at the junction with Chiswick. Rather horrible really – it looked as if it might have been fatal. So we didn’t get home quite as early as planned, but my parents managed to return the Streetcar we had hired, just in the nick of time. (That’s a great service by the way, and it has done us proud, not least on trips to Swansea – the first time being a car emergency in order to make it to my grandmother’s funeral on time. A bit of ring composition, here, perhaps?)