A senior moment or two

A new edition of Roger Bryan's book about tricks to improve memory It'll Come in Useful One Day would have saved me from a senior moment yesterday. Well, two, if you count the christmas pudding I found on a shelf, two years past its expiry date. I love christmas pudding, and I ignore use by dates on products such as christmas pudding, so I stuck it in a colander over a large saucepan and began to steam it for the recommended hour and a half. I refilled the water twice and was nearly there but something distracted me. In due course, I began to sense, rather than smell, something amiss in the kitchen, ran in and realised that the water had boiled away some time before. The transparent lid over the pudding and colander was full of steam but there was something dangerous about the ensemble. I let it cool a bit and then decided to pour some boiling water into the top, and stood well back. A violent popping ensued, and it was clear that the new water had immediately vaporised. I poured in some more boiling water and left it to cool down some more. What had happened is that the intense heat had melted the plastic tub that encased the pudding, and welded the bottom to the colander. I had ruined a colander and a saucepan. I tipped out what could be detached of the pudding, wondering if it was irremediably contaminated by melted plastic. There were some slighty suspicious white blobs in the mess, but I was so consumed by appetite for christmas pudding, now bought so dearly, that I ate nearly half of it. It did have a slightly plastic taint, but I persevered. Today, I threw away the colander with the pudding basin welded to it, and relegated the burned saucepan to non-food 'other duties' such as for melting candle wax.

Another gallery visit

What could be more heavenly than bowling along in a number 11 London bus on a sunny day in the direction of Trafalgar Square? We sped along Victoria St and the two great churches - cathedral and abbey - , past the gaggle of tourists outside the Foreign Office, the Treasury and number 10 Downing St, then more tourists at the entrance to Horse Guards, standing boldly to be photographed beside the mounted guardsman on his patient big black horse, past other offices of state, round in front of Nelson's column and his brace of lions, to alight at the stop opposite Charing Cross and the short walk up to the National Portrait Gallery. I was a quarter of an hour early for my appointment, so browsed in the shop, toyed with some lime and orange silk-covered bangles and bought my Christmas cards. My friend Joan is a portrait painter who used to live just up the King's Rd from me. She and her late husband, architectural correspondent of the Observer Stephen Gardner, had a bolthole in Tunbridge Wells, a pretty cottage where she now lives and paints. That's three of my friends - four including me - who have 'downsized'. We exchanged plans for Christmas: she will be beside the seaside in Deal, reading Claire Tomalin's new book about Dickens; we will be in Centre Parcs, Penrith - nearest literary landmark, Greystoke, home of Tarzan, the boy lost in Africa and brought up by apes. The view from the restaurant atop the Nat Portrait Gallery must be one of the finest in London: a vast panorama of ice blue sky streaked with white clouds above rooftops, across Trafalgar Square from St Martin's in the east, south down Whitehall to Westminster, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, then swinging west to Admiralty Arch and clubland, St James's. After lunch, we lingered for ten minutes to look at some portraits: Andy Warhol's exquisite Joan Collins and an unusual black and white Mick Jagger (another image - a colour photograph in mildly ethnic getup - also adorns the foyer: didn't he do well for a Dartford boy); Ruskin Spear's enigmatic Harold Wilson wreathed in pipe smoke; Patrick Heron's T S Eliot (unrecognisable, both the artist and the sitter); a rather alarming Ted Hughes - conveyed in windblown streaks of paint, anchored by two unnerving pale blue eyes; Lord Clarke of Civilization, in brutal profile like one of his Renaissance Italian dukes; Bryan Organ's iconic Diana and Charles hung next to each other, portrayed - now it can be seen - as lonely, separate and isolated as they were in life. Joan was going to have a go at getting into the Leonardo so we walked together across the front of the National Gallery where some mysterious scaffolding was either going up or being taken down, she headed in to the Sainsbury wing entrance and I walked on, along a very familiar route past the Institute of Directors where I was once a member, and just across from the Athenaeum, my ex-husband's club, scene of many a meal for some visiting celeb; then round into Lower Regent Street up and left into Piccadilly to jump on a bus to take me home. Fortnum's window this year is themed on variety and spangled showgirls; the arcades are garlanded in blue and silver, red and gold. I think of the words from the Tempest with which Bruce Wall ended his London Shakespeare Workout (part of Play's The Thing) on Tuesday:

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

A Walk Down Piccadilly

Yesterday, I decided to go to the National Gallery to get a copy of the Leonardo exhibition catalogue so I can study it before I go to see the pictures on Dec 13. There is a lot of hooha about how big the lady's hand is in the Lady With Ermine (the picture used on the cover). But lots of Leonardo's pictures have weird perspective: enormous babies, and yet more enormous hands. We're not talking about photography here, peeps. On my way I stopped off in Piccadilly at the Royal Academy, to renew my membership and see Building the Revolution - Russian Art and Architecture 1915-1935. What is fascinating about this period is not only how beautiful the designs were, but how pitiful the buildings now look in photographs of the few that were actually built, neglected by a failed system. Yes, the system failed. I think of that a lot at present. Beautiful dreams can have horrible results. If you delve a little into the dream that was the Soviet Union or indeed the European Union you find a fatal lack of grass roots democracy, the emergence of an elite who thinks it knows better. Even election results are rejected if they aren't the 'right' result. VIP visitors from the USSR used to clutch at my arm and whisper 'Don't let it happen here, Lisa'.

Wellbeing

The wellbeing, 'arts inclusion' event Play's The Thing yesterday was at Toynbee Hall, the organisation where John Profumo worked quietly after the Christine Keeler affair ended his more public life as Minister for War (those were the days). The organisers, Escape Artists, work with excluded groups, such as prisoners, to improve their chances of not re-offending. I opted to join the London Shakespeare Workout, led by Dr Bruce Wall, who gave us some statistics about how many people are in prisons in the UK and how much their incarceration and re-offending costs us. Bruce works all over the world, in prisons from Bangkok to Malta, at universities such as Cambridge and with directors - notably Jonathan Miller and Peter Brook.For over two hours we played games based on developing group communications, including three exercises directly based on Shakespeare. One which involved us all was shouting out at random five-footed (iambic) phrases - the rhythm favoured by Shakespeare. Three volunteers (all actors) played out a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream, and one other volunteer (ditto) did an exercise with Bruce himself, based on a passage from King Lear. At the end, as we were gathered round, I said how odd it was that in premises established by 19th century Church of England reformers (Toynbee Hall http://www.toynbeehall.org.uk), engaged on an exercise profoundly informed by Christian principles such as 'judge not, lest ye be judged' and 'let him who is without sin cast the first stone', the King James bible and indeed Shakespeare himself, Christianity was nowhere mentioned; the only religion mentioned on the agenda was Buddhism. There was a silence, broken by the awkward, sympathetic comment: 'faith sits better with me' - a remark that merely served to underline the curious black hole into which Christianity among the intelligentsia in general and the C of E in particular has fallen.

I'm indebted to the Writer's Almanac for alerting me to the fact that today's the birthday of pop philosopher, historian, and poet Jennifer Michael Hecht, born in Long Island in 1965. Hecht holds a Ph.D. in the history of science, a subject that fascinates her -- and simultaneously convinces her that art trumps scholarship. She inhabits each world -- teaching, studying, and publishing both poetry and historical, analytical nonfiction -- but ultimately pledges allegiance, she says, to poetry. "If you look at a testimony of love from 2,000 years ago, it can still exactly speak to you, whereas medical advice from only 100 years ago is ridiculous," she said in an interview with the Center for Inquiry. "And so as a historian, I write poetry. I'm profoundly committed to art as the answer. Indeed, I don't put science really as the way I get to any of my answers; it's just helpful. It's poetry that I look to. It's the clatter of recognition. Everybody has different ways, but I attest that poetry works pretty well."
Hecht was speaking on the topic of her latest book, called The Happiness Myth: The Historical Antidote to What Isn't Working Today (2007), in which she argues that happiness is a phenomenon influenced far more by culture than by what we think of as scientific fact. In it, she writes: "We think our version of a happy life as more like physics than like pop songs; we expect the people of the next century, say, to agree with our basic tenets -- for instance, that broccoli is good for a happy life and that opium is bad -- but they will not. Our rules for living are more like the history of pop songs. They make their weird sense only to the people of each given time period. They aren't true."

Play's The Thing

I am going to a workshop Play's The Thing http://www.playsthething.org.uk in trendy East London tomorrow. I expect to be challenged (and challenge), but that's good from time to time. Yesterday I went to the 70th birthday party of an old friend in Wimbledon, where Anna 'the tulip lady' Pavord, who I have known since 1974, was also a guest. After she and husband Trevor moved to Dorset, we used to meet at Dorchester train station on Friday evenings waiting for our daughters/husbands - on one memorable occasion when Brian Johnson was broadcasting live (or rather failing to broadcast, because he and Jonathan Agnew both became helpless with laughter) his now famous 'leg-over' commentary. She made positive noises about coming up to join in our Moffat Book Events symposium next May 26 & 27 What Are Gardens For? Trevor grows blueberries commercially and thinks that we might be able to do so under our turbines, because blueberries like acid soil and a good hard frost.

Good news and bad news

Well, the good news is that I had an email from Michael, brother of Bob, a close friend who died of Aids in the early 198o's, to say his (Michael's) wife and daughter are coming to the UK next month. His brother, Bob, was a brilliant lawyer based in Los Angeles who loved London and strolling up the King's Road with my older daughter Abi, then in her early teens, bantering and catching men's eyes. Bob told me an adage way back then which has striking contemporary resonance: if you're going to borrow money, borrow so much that if you struggle to repay, the bank's in trouble not you. Yesterday, we also had a very happy planning meeting for our Sept 14-17 2012 Moffat Book Events conference to explore the causes (religious experience and the arts and sciences) espoused by, and generally celebrating the life of, the late great Alexander Men 1935-1990 www.alexandermen.com. We have a great team, Sarah Mathieson of Vantage based in Melrose as organiser, an unrivalled venue (St Andrew's church, Moffat), and an exciting programme; we have a fascinating variety of international speakers; we have a good idea of what to offer our parting guests on the Monday (Sept 17) by way of a pilgrimage. All will be revealed on St Andrew's Day, ie Nov 30. My internet connection was down when I got back from St Andrew's, but my son in law rang BT and they talked him through a re-set of the router, so that's also now OK. Our MBE project manager, Marilyn Elliott, MBE member Moira Cox and I met towards the end of the day to agree a final version of a marketing strategy for Moffat Book Events going forward, so that's another good job done. At our Men conference meeting we all agreed how good and funny 'Rev' is (the series about a London vicar written and played by Tom Hollander). The bad news is the death of a young contemporary, Andrew Wyld, reported in The Times today. His older half brother David dated my flatmate Alix Mitchell (murdered in France in the summer of 1965) when we were students. I met Andrew when he was a child; I gave him a 'gonk' - a little pocket money toy. He made a wonderful career in the art world. And an email from New Zealand alerts me to a sudden cancer scare for an old family friend - we lived in the same London square for 30 years. To end on a more upbeat note: we have a visit today in the forest from members of the memorably-named BASH - the Biggar Association of Smallholders to whom we will open the secrets (well, lift the lid a tiny bit and then slam it shut - these are commercially sensitive technologies) of distilling spruce essential oil and brewing spruce beer. Enough said. My lips are sealed. Oh, and I nearly forgot: a friend - another Liz - alerts me to the surprising circumstance, that a friend from student days who was an actor, the Rev Adrian Benjamin, is now a Prebendary of St Paul's. Yes, that St Paul's. The one with the dome on top.

Rotting vegetation

I was out and about on a remarkably mild (people in shirt sleeves) and sunny day in St Andrew's yesterday, including a visit to the St Mary's college which must be one of the most beautiful - if not the most - ancient (16th cent) quads in the world. There is a thorn growing there which was planted by Mary, Queen of Scots. But it is about another sort of vegetation that I wish to write. To set the scene: last year I stayed for one night at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, famous for its connection with the TV Inspector Morse series. At dinner and the following morning, I noticed a very strong smell of stale cabbage in the dining room and entrance hall. On a hunch, I looked 'stale cabbage smell' up on Google and discovered that it is a gas given off by rotting vegetation, typically from faulty drains. Well, that smell also pervades this hotel, of similar vintage to the Randolph (the hotel, not the vegetation, or maybe both). I mentioned this coincidence to the staff on duty in reception, who looked at me as though I needed my head examining but later when I went up to my room on the third floor two more staff were there. They confirmed the smell was detectable in the corridor and in the room, and the senior of the two in smart blue suit said that DynoRod were at that moment working in the basement. The hotel is horribly overheated especially at night. Despite having my windows wide open, I tossed and turned - and it didn't help that THAT SMELL was drifting in and out too. A message from a neighbour in Moffat bears the bad news that one of the town's tourist venues, a nice garden centre-cum-cafe and fishing ponds has gone into receivership. This news, along with the drains put me in apocalyptic mood, perceiving the stench as somehow a metaphor for something wrong deep down in the underpinnings of our settled society. I hope I am proved wrong.