Cooling Off
I’ve been over to Glasgow four or five times since the summer and have taken a few more photos of parts of it I hadn’t seen, so here’s another gallery of the place to go with the last one.
The River Clyde in November.
Fanfare for Cardinal Fang
Last week we once again caught the train to London to see our son perform with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain for the 28th concert of this year’s Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. It was another great concert, with engrossing performances of works by Paul Hindemith, Richard Strauss and Aaron Copland, most of which I hadn’t heard before (apart from “Fanfare for the Common Man” incorporated into Copland’s third symphony); and rousing encores at the end of each half. We were sat above the orchestra, looking down on them and the rest of the audience—an excellent view, although it meant the sound was sometimes heading away from us. If you’re curious, the BBC Radio 3 broadcast is available online for the next two months, and the concert will be on BBC television and iPlayer in a week or so.
Murals and Museums
A few weekends ago I popped over to Glasgow on the train to catch up with my cousin, who was in town for a while. It was the first time I’d passed through Queen Street station since its revamp, thanks to the pandemic, although I drove my son to the outskirts of the city last year for a concert. It meant I was able to appreciate some of the new murals that have sprung up around Merchant City in recent years, as I walked to the Cathedral to meet my cousin. I’d never been inside the Cathedral, either; it’s impressively mediaeval for such a Victorian city.
Modern Life is Rubbish
Mortgage rates in Britain are rising in the face of all economic logic and contributing to inflation going through the roof. Experts are being cancelled for criticising the government on Twitter. Police can do what they want to us. And we can now see the physical impact of austerity on the next generation: British five-year-olds are shorter than their European peers.
Two days ago, the prime minister avoided the vote on the Privileges Committee report on whether Boris Johnson lied to Parliament about Partygate. (Let’s see how this poll tracker shifts next week.) On social media, Boris backers have been trying to distract from the central issue of his lying to the House by focussing on the party aspect and again minimizing it all as “a bit of cake”, but the leak of a video filmed at a Jingle and Mingle party on 14 December 2020 has blown up that defence; now it’s “they were just letting off a bit of steam”, despite the invitations actually calling it a party. The fury from people who lost loved ones or had gruelling shifts on Covid wards at the time isn’t going away. This heartbreaking clip from a BBC Radio 4 call-in last week should be played to every last one of the minimizers.
Oh, and the WHO didn’t say that the pandemic was over, despite the British press reporting that it did.
The King’s Bling Thing
I hadn’t meant to watch the Coronation, but a few minutes before 11 a.m. yesterday idly looked up what was happening when and realised that the ceremony in the Abbey was about to start. So I switched on the TV out of curiosity, and we all marked the hour or two of history that otherwise would have passed us by.
