Steady As We Go Into 2019

January 8, 2019 / fgrtommo / 2 Comments

The first snowdrops have arrived. I sensed a little more light in the kitchen when I came downstairs this morning. Moles are extending their network of tunnels and earth mounds across the vegetable patch. These are some of the diverse, recent signs that we are moving inexorably towards Spring. Now Christmas and New Year celebrations have passed, I’m looking forward to that.

The First Snowdrops I Have Seen This Year

The relatively quiet period following New Year is a good one for taking stock and making New Year resolutions.

This time last year, I was settling into retirement and thinking about how my first full year of retirement might go. It felt important then to think about my New Year resolutions as markers for desired progress in a couple of directions. Overall, 2018 was very enjoyable for me and retirement has lived up to expectations even though, as I pointed out in my last blog post, I didn’t achieve all my specific objectives. Going into 2019, I don’t feel I need to change very much.

So, many of my resolutions for 2019 are to continue where I left off in 2018. For example, the objectives I had around health – losing weight, drinking less, walking more – can be simply perpetuated with the targets I largely achieved last year, namely:

Get Below 11 Stone (and stay there this time)
Average 15,000 Steps/Day (a joy since the surrounding countryside is so lovely)
Have 140 No-Alcohol Days (increasing progress from last year plus starting to track alcohol units consumed too).

Also, I will carry forward the objective to implement better composting arrangements in the garden. This sounds trivial but it requires me to get my achy back returned to something like full strength. It also requires confirmation of new compost bin location. In turn, that depends on planning with Long-Suffering Wife (LSW) the future for the old and gradually collapsing stables in our field. This is because installing the new bins will involve significant earth and rock moving and don’t want to have to relocate them nor restrict the options for the stables’ demise or transformation. This resolution is therefore a proxy for taking a few significant interim steps as well as one aimed at improving my compost.

I only have three new resolutions.

The first is less news and more music. This recognises that, in recent months, I have been listening to a lot of news (especially related to Brexit and President Trump). On average, I estimate I have been listening to 4 hours of radio news each day in addition to reading the Guardian newspaper reasonably thoroughly and watching the late evening news on TV. I want to stay current and have an informed view but this is probably excessive (especially as I get so frustrated with what I hear). On the other hand, I have multiple lists of new music I want to listen to and I want to re-appraise some of the best of what I already know. Simple: dial down BBC Radio 4 news, dial up Spotify, and keep going to gigs/concerts.

The second is to step up the number of trips of 1-2 days that I make with LSW to other parts of the United Kingdom. I have started the way I mean to carry on we made a short-notice trip to The Gower Peninsula in Wales when we saw the weather was going to be nice earlier this week. We re-visited a bed-and-breakfast, a restaurant and some coastline we had good memories of from almost three years ago. The two days away were a good template for further excursions we will make on top of the frequent trips to London I plan to continue well into 2019.

Worms Head: The Gower Peninsula, Wales

Coastline Near Worms Head

Oxwich, The Gower, Wales

Finally, although I’m still not ready to add a commitment to voluntary work to my 2019 objectives, I do think I should try to develop a plan for a plan for volunteering in the next year. I know that I should find time for ploughing something back and finding a new sense of purpose and so will look at some options. Frankly and selfishly though, and with the brief but quite intense experience of helping with the local village’s Neighbourhood Plan last year behind me, I don’t want hard new commitments to get in the way of everything else I am enjoying so much. I won’t be rushing into anything.

Two Exhibitions And More

December 8, 2018 / fgrtommo / Leave a comment

For those who followed my last post, no, I didn’t write this on the train home from London. No, I didn’t stay awake either but I didn’t snore (surely not!).

I was tired after my trip to London. I didn’t get back until late on Monday from seeing Malcolm Middleton (an indie-rock Scottish depressive who somehow always manages to cheer me up with what he calls his ‘downbeat shite’) in a converted old men’s club in Hackney. Then, on Tuesday, I went to see the Japanese film and Palme D’Or winner called Shoplifters with Eldest and Middle Sons and that didn’t finish until quite late. Those relatively late nights were each followed by a couple of nights on a sofa bed which is never as restful as my own bed, a lot of walking through Christmassy streets and a nice lunch with an old ex-work colleague.

Malcolm Middleton And Band At The Moth Club

Quite a lot of the walking was around a couple of exhibitions.

The first was Fashioned From Nature at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) which is on for another month or so and which I would recommend. The V&A has an amazing permanent collection of fashion but this exhibition was more interesting for me (I am hardly a fashionista!) because it dealt more with the social and environmental impact of fashion than the development of fashion through the ages.

There were certainly some remarkable individual pieces of clothing but the focus was on how humans initially used nature to cloth ourselves – using flax for linen, fur, cotton, silk, bone, feathers and even beetle shells – and then how fashion and clothing manufacture has damaged nature through mass production/consumption.

Fashioned From Nature Exhibition At The V&A

That environmental damage began even before the industrial revolution. I learnt, for example, that the phrase ‘mad as a hatter’ came from the mercury poisoning common among those who made felt hats. They breathed in the mercury nitrate they used and that disoriented them before they flushed it into the water supply. As synthetic materials were developed and mass produced, so the risk of chemical damage increased, the demand for agricultural monocultures grew, slavery became rife, and the problems of pollution and waste (such as management of micro-plastics resulting from clothing) became more complex.

Ornate Flowered Hat By Philip Treacy

Protest Fashion

A Cellulose Dress

There were a wide range of interesting exhibits showing sustainable fashion. Others illustrated how fashion has been used to highlight the importance of clothing reuse and repair, and the impact of fashion on nature. Overall it was an impressive, relevant exhibition and an absorbing hour or two.

I also visited the Modern Couples exhibition at the Barbican which was subtitled Art, Intimacy and the Avant-garde. This exhibition pulls together work of 40 couples active in art in the last century. It attempts to show how these couples, through their passion, ideas, contacts and often experimental and strange relationships, influenced the work they produced.

Death and Life By Klimt

Toboggan Man By Lavinia Schultz & Walter Holdt

Bird Superior By Leonora Carrington

As with the Fashioned from Nature exhibition, there were some very strong individual pieces on show. Many of the relationships that were described were very interesting with several of the featured artists (Max Ernst and Man Ray, for example) cropping up two or three times in apparently intense but short-lived liaisons. Some of couples’ relationships ended in suicide or murders of passion. As I navigated the exhibition, I became increasingly thankful for my rather more straightforward and stable married relationship.

I Am Beautiful by Rodin (An Amalgam Of Two Previously Separate Works In Celebration Of His Love)

Over 40 interwoven themes were explored across the 40 couples presented – including how the men in the relationship tended to become the more famous even where the participants were libertarian and feminist. These themes and the sheer number of couples covered made the exhibition large and rather complex. It was impressive but I confess that I had to absorb it over two sessions; fortunately I now have the time to do that sort of pacing.

In other news: the Volkswagen is back. Long-Suffering Wife (LSW) has been grudgingly reliant on my ailing and rust-ridden Saab to get to work. But now the local garage has replaced the Volkswagen’s engine (and more) following the cam-belt assembly failure a couple of weekends ago. They did this all at their cost since it was the cam-belt replacement they had done that prompted the problem. The garage even gave us a bottle of wine for our trouble so we will continue to use them and recommend them – provided the car gets us to the airport tomorrow on our way to the Christmas markets of Cologne. We’re looking forward to them.

London’s Regent Street Christmas Lights

Remember, Remember

November 12, 2018 / fgrtommo / Leave a comment

The week has been busy and I have had a number of interactions with the United Kingdom’s national commemoration of the armistice at the end of the First World War on 11 November 1918.

Illuminated Commemorative Poppies In Our Local Town, Nailsworth

When I was in Lincoln last weekend I saw rehearsals for a memorial ceremony while I visited the cathedral.

Remembrance Service Choir Practice At Lincoln Cathedral

Then, at the football match I went to see in Lincoln, there was a pre-match rendition of The Last Post, a minute’s silence and a collection by, amongst others, a man dressed as a huge poppy. There was a similar pre-match marking of the armistice when I went to Oxford United’s stadium for another football game there. On both occasions, the bugle playing was eerie and moving as the notes swirled around the windy stadia.

Remembrance Ceremonies At Oxford (Top) And Lincoln Football Grounds Prior to Matches With Forest Green Rovers

During my visit to London last week to see a band with Middle Son (MS), I also fitted in a visit to the ‘Beyond the Deepening Shadow’ installation at the Tower of London. This consists of 10,000 hand-lit memorial flames and it was as impressive as the installation of bright red poppies spewing out of the Tower of London a few years ago. The flames are a remarkable and imaginative way of marking the end of the First World War and the sacrifice of so many soldiers during its execution.

The scale of that sacrifice became even starker to me as I visited another exhibition – ‘Shrouds of the Somme’ – at the Olympic Park to the east of London. In contrast with the Tower of London exhibition where the crowds were enormous and the queues were hours long, the Olympic Park exhibition was very accessible and there was more time to think about what I was seeing.

1st World War Commemoration At The Olympic Park, London.

The main display here consisted of 72,396 shrouded figures – one for each of the British Commonwealth servicemen killed at the Somme whose bodies were not found – laid out in rows across a field. There was then a separate set of the same shrouded figures – one for each day of the First World War – labelled with the number of servicemen killed on each day. It was a very impactful exhibition.

The numbers of dead in the First World War are quite well known but still incomprehensible. The 72,396 are just the dead whose bodies were not recovered mainly because they were simply fragmented and lost in the mud. The 953,104 total dead represented at the Olympic Park are just those from the UK and the Commonwealth. The 9 million soldiers from all nations who died were far outnumbered by the more than 20 million wounded and beyond that there was mental scarring beyond understanding. It was a crazy, horrific war.

The nationwide commemoration and remembrance of the First World War – the centrepiece exhibitions I saw in London, the faces of soldiers etched on beaches around the country I saw on the TV news, the processions and the local displays and events, including a poignant and unexpectedly long roll call of the war-dead in our own little village – has all been very impressive and moving. At the Olympic Park especially, I had time to reflect on the importance of remembering the disaster of past wars and avoiding a repeat. The current rise of nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic makes the lessons of the past especially timely. Unfortunately, it is one thing to remember the lessons and another to act on them.

On a jollier note, MS and I had a really good time watching Roosevelt, a German electro-pop artist. I can’t recall smiling so much during a musical performance. The music is straightforward and the next note always seems exactly as anticipated – does that make it predictable or just perfect? Either way, we both had great fun seeing Roosevelt again.

Roosevelt At Oval Space, London

Co-incidentally, he is from Cologne where we are having a Christmassy city-break next month. However, we went to dinner last night with a couple who are fascinated by bio-dynamic agriculture, the annual equinox cycle and creativity tied into the seasons. As usual, the discussions were fascinating but they didn’t want to talk about Christmas or our Christmas market visit until next month. Instead they wanted to continue focus on the joys of autumn. They are right; the autumnal weather is still good and the colour on the trees and bushes remains marvellous. Autumn is still out there waiting to be enjoyed.

I make no excuse for including yet another set of pictures from my walk into town this morning. I am privileged to have the opportunity to enjoy these walks every day.

Autumn Views And Colour On My Walk Into Town

Autumn Gardening

October 6, 2018November 7, 2018 / fgrtommo / Leave a comment

The summer weather has been terrific this year and the sunshine and relative warmth has continued into the beginnings of autumn. The sun now sets too early behind trees and the gradient of our paddock for Long-Suffering Wife (LSW) and I to continue our pattern of evening drinks in the new walled garden that we established earlier in the year. However, the weather has been conducive to relaxed walks through the gently browning countryside and to steady clearing and digging over of the vegetable patch ready for winter.

Autumnal Sunset From My Vegetable Patch

Despite the dry summer, there is still plenty of beetroot and chard to harvest. Also, I have managed to keep my leeks alive and, having transplanted them in newly dibbed holes, I find I have over a hundred to nurture and then eat through the winter months. That’s a lot of leeks to go into soup with the sack of potatoes I dug up a couple of weeks ago!

Leeks, Leeks and More Leeks All Over The Vegetable Patch (With Beans, Beet and Chard)

Once again I am reminded of the relatively slow and relaxed pace at which I can undertake gardening since my retirement. I have always loved this time of year (and early spring) in the vegetable garden, when creating tracts of freshly dug earth is the main task. Since retirement, I have more time to pause between bursts of digging, to rest my back and to admire the neatness of the bare earth that, following application of some manure, will be poised for next season’s planting and growth.

The past couple of weeks have been a pleasant mix of pottering around the garden, social events with family and friends, and more sightseeing in London. My trip to London was based around an irregular but broadly quarterly get together of old male friends over a restaurant dinner (dubbed ‘The Boys Night Out’). This is working through an alphabet of nations cum culinary styles and we were up to O for Ottoman last week. It was cheap and cheerful and good to catch up.

I also walked for miles to and around the vastness of Hyde Park (with its tediously noisy and ever more numerous green parakeets) and visited the Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum.

Views of Hyde Park (The Round Pond, The Princess Diana Garden And Christo’s Floating Pyramid of 7,506 Oil Drums)

The Kahlo exhibition focused on her way of life rather than her art. The exhibition makes clear what a tour de force she must have been. She was fiercely determined to overcome adversity (including polio, a near fatal accident, a miscarriage, leg amputation, periodic political ostracism) and she constantly underlined her strong sense of identity. Her love life was lively and complex and her life-long partner – a muralist called Diego Rivera whom she married twice – must have been a patient man. The exhibition is sold out so my recently instigated V&A membership (giving me free, unlimited entry) paid off. The investment of time was very worthwhile.

The V&A Frida Kahlo Exhibition Including Her Prosthetic Leg With Bells On, A Hand-Painted Corset And Typical Mexican Dress

Eldest Son (ES) and his girlfriend stayed with us for a weekend. It was lovely to have them and the highlight – apart from the curry and the roast dinner that ES asked LSW to make – was a visit to Gifford’s Circus. This is an internationally famous but locally based circus that LSW has seen a few times. It was my first visit and I really enjoyed the energy, innovation, daring and clever humour; it was a real treat in a packed, traditional circus tent.

The Big Top

One Of The Gifford Circus Acts

LSW and I also had a sunny late summer day in Bath. We were there to see Olafur Arnalds, an Icelandic multi-instrumentalist who combines electronica, piano and strings to create atmospheric, evocative music that both of us love. The concert was a great success – great sound, good seats and LSW loved it (always important since I want to go with her to more gigs).

We made time for dinner and also a trip to the American Museum and Gardens set in beautiful countryside to the east of Bath. The gardens are being renovated and extended and will be worth another visit in a year or two. As ever, it seems, we were blessed by wonderful weather.

The American Museum And Gardens, Bath (House, Pumpkin Garden And Lovely Views)

But autumn with its shorter days and colder, wetter weather is here. That will bring different pleasures.

Neighbourhood Activity

September 8, 2018September 8, 2018 / fgrtommo / Leave a comment

For over three years, Long-Suffering Wife (LSW) has been helping development of the village Neighbourhood Plan. This aims to set out for the District Council how the people of Horsley wish to see the land in the village used and developed over the next 25-30 years. The Plan has required much consultation, drafting of fine words and picture taking, and very many meetings for LSW. I also got involved earlier this year in drafting and formatting a particular section on preferred green spaces in the village.

Picture of Our Village Taken From The Draft Neighbourhood Plan Consultation Leaflet

The group co-ordinating the Plan development, including LSW, are now on the final push to get the plan to a state ready for review by the Council and a further round of local consultation. Last week they asked for help to structure the Plan appendices and to achieve greater consistency of look and feel across the whole document, mainly by reducing the range of formatting quirks employed by each contributor.

Following prompting from LSW, I volunteered. LSW has long wanted me to get more involved in village affairs and this was my chance. Little did I think that it would end up echoing the intensity and effort of my pre-retirement days but, after 25 hours of sitting at my PC editing the document over four days, I’m done!

There may be further rounds of such intense effort required following review and consultation. However, I’m a Windows user and the bulk of the others who have technical and design input are Mac users. The two are not compatible and so I’m ready to bow out. Even if I am not required going forward I have earned some ‘brownie points’ with LSW.

That is just as well since I have proactively planned to be away during the village fete where LSW has a key role organising the Village Hall catering. Some time ago (admittedly when I knew the date of the fete), I arranged to meet up with my Best Man (BM) in Cambridgeshire and to fit in Forest Green Rovers’ (FGR) away game at Milton Keynes Dons. My absence this coming weekend, which will include a trip to London too, is being frowned upon by LSW. But at least I moved the Neighbourhood Plan forward beforehand so, on balance, I’ve got away with it.

I have been away from home quite a lot recently. In late August I was in London to catch up with a couple of past work colleagues and to see a band that I have been tracking for about 5 years. They are The Correspondents and, although the music is not all to my taste, the live act is as full of energy as anything I have seen. I even played a part in the lead singer’s crowd surfing exploits and got my hands on a (minor) celebrity for the first time. I recommend checking out video of their gigs – the lead singer’s moves are amazing.

The Correspondents At The Old Queens Head, London

Following that, I went to Nottingham to visit my parents and see FGR win at Notts County. It was great to be able to show my Dad how far FGR have come since I first started supporting my local team 20 years ago.

Despite being away so much, there has been time to participate in a couple of regular village events which I used to miss when working in London: the monthly Village Quiz Night (we came second again) and the monthly Men’s Night. Both are good ways to keep up with village gossip.

The quiz is particularly well constructed and run and is a very enjoyable challenge. Our team, usually of six but occasionally augmented by visiting offspring (Middle Son (MS) joined us a month ago and someone else’s daughter joined us this week), is varied. That means our knowledge doesn’t overlap too much and we are contenders. I usually can contribute on sport and geography but I’m too slow or too dense to add much elsewhere. These events are nice slices of rural life I didn’t have prior to retirement and both events help to keep our pub in business.

One less alluring aspect of rural life this week was an invasion into our garden of 70 sheep through some broken fencing in the adjacent field. Our grass got a welcome trim and some unexpected fertiliser but a few of the fruit trees and my leeks took a bit of a battering. Fortunately the farmer was nearby and available. He shooed them back within 30 minutes or so and damage to garden and sheep was insignificant (indeed, the sheep probably enjoyed the change of routine). Oh, the joys of country living!

Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It

August 8, 2018 / fgrtommo / Leave a comment

Will Smith’s ‘Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It’ was hardly the sort of music that was available at the Cambridge Folk Festival and so is a slightly misleading title for this. But, during my visit to part of the festival last weekend, there were a lot of jigs and I did do a lot of foot-tapping and unobtrusive swaying to the sounds on offer. They were primarily various forms of folk music but also blues, soul and Americana. The sun shone, the atmosphere was relaxed, the festival facilities were first rate, and the music – while not entirely my favourite genre – was very easy on the ear and some was excellent.

Cambridge Festival, Stage 1 With Kate Rusby, A Laid Back Audience (So Many Folding Chairs!) And A Big Sky

I went with an old friend of mine – my Best Man (BM) at my wedding just over 33 years ago. I was able to stay with at his house, a 30 minute taxi ride away from the festival, for the weekend. We chatted, caught up on our respective lives and plans, ate and drank well, and enjoyed both the folk festival and the surrounding countryside (which, in a refreshing contrast to the deeply incised valleys around our Gloucestershire home, is open and undulating). It was, as hoped for, a wonderful change from my routine.

Once again, my retirement meant that, for me at least, the weekend was more relaxed than would have been the case a few years, or even a few months, ago. I was able to drive to and from Cambridgeshire in a measured way outside of peak traffic hours, there was no rush to do anything and we got the gentle pace of our activities about right.

On the Saturday of the folk festival we arrived when it opened but realised that an 11 hour stint of listening to the array of bands across several stages would exhaust us physically and mentally, especially given the hot and sunny weather. We saw about 15 bands/performers over about 8 hours that day. The best of these, for me, were The East Pointers (Americana) and Eric Bibb (blues) but the majority were traditional and rather basic folk bands. We left early for a curry dinner, thereby missing a couple of headline acts, but, frankly, we were sated.

Cambridge Festival: The Shee, Eric Bibb And Alison Russell From The Birds Of Chicago

On the Sunday we decided to only attend the festival towards the end of the day. That enabled us to fit in a visit to Ely. The town was gorgeous in the sunlight and history oozed from every turn. Ely’s cathedral is terrific; it dominates the town and also the flat, fenland countryside for many miles around it. It lost much of its ornamentation during the 16th century Reformation and then during Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan reign (he lived in Ely after all!). But the grandeur and sheer engineering feat of its towers, nave and Lady Chapel remain.

Ely Cathedral, The Ouse And Oliver Cromwell’s House

Ely Cathedral

After tucking into a craft beer and lunch we walked around the town and down the Ouse River before popping into Anglesea Abbey on the way to Cambridge; another weather-enhanced treat.

Anglesea Abbey

We then returned to the folk festival and timed our arrival to see Kate Rusby (lovely voice) and, my BMs favourite, Birds of Chicago (excellent, radiant harmonies with a vibrant and emotional – almost tearful – female lead). We also saw a clearly famous and popular John Prine but we looked at each other during his set and it was clear we had both had enough folk music for one weekend.

We left the music, sandals, tattoos and occasional whiffs of pot at the festival for a snack and a final bottle of wine back at my BM’s comfortable house and listened to some of his vast collection of CDs. We congratulated ourselves on getting the pace of the weekend right. As we looked back on a very good time, my BM prepared for a new working week and I considered the prospect of the leisure of another episode of relaxed retirement.

And so it is…..

Getting Hot In London

July 29, 2018July 29, 2018 / fgrtommo / Leave a comment

The highlight last week, in most ways, was a trip to London. However, the timing turned out to be awkward given the extreme temperatures. It was baking on the London streets, even warmer on the tube and there were fewer places to hide from the heat than I can find at home in the country.

It was great to see and catch up with Eldest and Middle Son over dinner. We drank and ate well at Bar Duoro in Southwark in a reprise of the feel of my time in Porto the previous week.

The other main reason for my trip was to visit, for my first time, the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy.

This year the Exhibition has been curated primarily by Grayson Perry. I was keen to see his stamp on the event having read a book by him – The Descent of Man – last year. It was an unusual book about masculinity, its origins, its role in society and its possible future. It provided some insights into his own childhood and emotional development and so I was keen to see how this was manifest in the Summer Exhibition.

Extravagance And Colour At The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

Even the rooms not curated by Grayson had his imprint and he co-ordinated the Exhibition into a rather crazy and exuberant whole. As usual (as I understand it), the Exhibition comprised a huge number of works (about 1,350 this time, varying in price from £100 to more than £100,000 and 95% sold already) which, in many of the rooms, were crammed into the space available so that it was almost impossible to focus on any one work. The overall impression was one of irreverence, humour, colour and fun.

Works By Phylida Barlow (lost In Thought) And Debbie Lawson (Red Bear) In The Summer Exhibition

There were undercurrents of left wing politics, social justice and anti-establishmentarianism that occasionally burst out in individual pieces. But most of any seriousness was seemingly wilfully undermined by the overwhelming scale, the hints at subversion and the sheer ‘bonkersness’ of several of the selections and their layout. It was fun but a bit overwhelming.

Some Of The More Overtly Political Pieces At The Summer Exhibition

A Work By El Anatusi At The Summer Exhibition That Reminded Me Of Similar Items By Him I Had Seen In Cape Town Earlier In The Year – It Was Nice To Make The Connection!

The BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery was much smaller scale and more accessible. The little stories accompanying the pictures were helpful in providing a ‘way into’ the art that contrasted with the feeling of being hit by a colourful sledgehammer at the Summer Exhibition a couple of hours before. The National Portrait Gallery was busy but I enjoyed the feeling of intimacy with the art there.

Winner of The BP Portrait Award 2018 – The Angel At My Table By Miriam Escofet

At least it was cool in the galleries. On my second evening in London I ventured to a gig at Rough Trade to see three ‘up and coming’ bands (Echo Ladies, Linda Guilana and Grimm Grimm). They were all interesting in their way but the heat near the stage was excessive and it was too hot to get excited. I was glad of the chance to browse the listening posts at Rough Trade but appreciated getting back out in the gentle dusk breeze on the walk back to the flat.

IMG_0521 (2)

Hot In Rough Trade Records With Echo Ladies

I had planned to visit the Asterix Exhibition at the Jewish Museum on my last day in London, but the prospect of even higher London temperatures prompted me to cut my visit short and I returned to Gloucestershire early that morning. My retirement means that I have the flexibility of rescheduling and planning another London trip soon and that is already in train.

Back in Gloucestershire, I am licking my wounds from the barbs of Long-Suffering Wife (LSW) remembering our (33rd) wedding anniversary while I completely failed to do so. Usually we both forget the anniversary but LSW has upped her game and I will need to respond in kind.

Also back here in Gloucestershire, the extended hot spell has finally broken and we have some rain at last. Already, the pasture opposite our house has shifted almost imperceptibly from brown towards green. The rain feels like a relief but I’m looking forward to resumption of normal sunny service next week before I go to the Cambridge Folk Festival with an old friend. I’m looking forward to the next break in routine that will bring.

Pleasantly Full Days

June 19, 2018June 19, 2018 / fgrtommo / Leave a comment

Life seems to have been particularly busy in the last ten days or so since my last trip to London. There I got a dental check-up (my teeth are fine), visited the Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece Exhibition (fascinating and beautifully laid out) and took Middle and Eldest Son to dinner and The Lantern Society, my favourite Folk Club (what a treat to catch up with them both!)

At The Lantern Society

Rodin’s The Thinker And The Kiss – Two Items In An Intriguing British Museum Exhibition

The weather has been highly conducive to gardening. We have had long periods of sun, but reasonable temperatures, and just enough rain. As a result, many days have been dominated by clearing weeds, planting out seedlings, localised manual watering and working out how to keep the destructive birds, mammals, molluscs and insects at bay. Almost everything that needs protection now has some form fencing, netting or other damage prevention measure in place. I will now sit back, wait and watch the ways the animals will thwart me anyway.

In my last post, I compared the post-modernist house of Erno Goldfinger to a previous house of ours. My last visit to London and overnight stay in the Barbican reminded me, too, that the post-modernist gardens there are now being echoed by Long-Suffering Wife’s (LSW’s) planting of our new walled garden. Our final load of gravel and the water feature have now arrived and so our new garden just lacks maturity, but there are already some similarities with the Barbican gardens (although the scale there is massive compared to that of our ex-car parking area). It has certainly been pleasant sitting in the new garden in the sun with a glass of wine after sweating over weeds, seedlings, bean poles and netting.

Our New Garden And The Barbican Gardens; Ours Has Some Maturing To Do!

LSW and I have also been enjoying the annual Nailsworth Festival and, especially, two walks arranged under the auspices of the festival. The first was a history walk in the vicinity of our house. It added to our knowledge of the footpaths, industry and religious history of the area – particularly the historic presence of the Quakers and Baptists in what was once one of the largest non-conformist settlements in the country.

An Attentive Audience On The Nailsworth History Walk

The second was a 12 mile walk billed as being a walk from Nailsworth to ‘the sea’. In fact, ‘the sea’ was the tidal estuary of the River Severn at a point where a number of sea going ships were beached to bolster the coastline alongside the canal along which we had walked. The so-called Purton Hulks, were an interesting climax to a full day of walking up and down the Cotswold escarpment and across the Severn valley in perfect walking weather. LSW and I certainly pushed up our daily step count averages that day!

Views During Our Walk Nailsworth To The Sea

Purton Hulks

We also had a good day out walking in New Quay and Aberaeron in West Wales. We were staying with friends who have a second home there in what seems to be a lively and familiar community of second-homers based in London, Birmingham and South Wales. The health benefits of all the recent walking were offset by rather too much tasty food and drink in New Quay. On the route back from Wales, these indulgences continued as we stopped off at a family party celebrating a brief visit of one of LSW’s first cousins (once removed) from Singapore; lovely!

Views Of New Quay, Wales And Nearby Cliffs

The food, drink and merriment isn’t going to stop this week with more of the World Cup to watch and celebrate (I hope), and the marking of LSW’s birthday with dinner in London on the way to a weekend in Paris.

So: busy and full days, full weeks and, as I near 12 months of retirement, I will shortly look back on a full year.

Spring and Stuff

May 19, 2018May 19, 2018 / fgrtommo / 3 Comments

Spring has arrived late but with waves of sun and warmth that suggest it is trying to catch up on lost time. Leaves and blossom have burst into life and colour and the landscape suddenly has that fresh feel of Spring. The carpets of bluebells in the nearby woods are already usurped by the wild garlic and the paths and verges are lined with cow parsley 4 foot high. Already, we seem to be marching into summer.

Cow Parsley, Wild Garlic, Bluebells And Cowslips On The Walk Into Town

The recent improvement in the weather has encouraged me to resume vegetable gardening in between trips to London (a cheeky, impromptu visit primarily to see a favourite band, Kefaya) and Nottingham (to see my parents). I have been planting seeds, digging the vegetable patch and putting up a bit of new fencing. For the first time, I am retired from work during a Spring. When I was working, I used to perform what I called ‘speed gardening’ at weekends. This year I can devote time throughout the week to a more relaxed style of gardening.

From bitter experience I know that not all this reinvigorated effort will bear fruit in terms of usable crops. Not everything germinates or thrives and squirrels, deer and badgers have taken more than their fair share in recent years. However, now Spring is here, frustrations with the local wildlife, and memories of needless gluts of vegetables that the animals don’t like, are set aside and the vegetable patch is cultivated once more. Once again, in a few months’ time, we will probably be scouring recipe books and the internet for meals requiring lots of beetroot or courgettes and having beans with every meal.

About three weeks ago, Long-Suffering Wife (LSW) had one of her periodic purges of our possessions to populate a table at a village table-top sale. I had my usual power of veto to prevent the discarding of things that might conceivably be useful to me, our sons or any of their as yet entirely unplanned children at some point in the future. However, I kept my veto in my pocket and a car-load of stuff was priced up and went for sale.

Unfortunately, our village evidently has a lot of people who want to offload things but few who wanted to accumulate them. By the end of the sale, due to LSW buying yet another designer tap, she came back out of pocket and only one item lighter. Given the investment of time in pricing all this stuff up, LSW had another go at a local car-boot sale. She had about £60 more success but it’s clear that much of what we are trying to sell is going to take the normal trip to the local charity shops.

We gather so many material goods over a lifetime. Some have a now outdated function and some are purely decorative but are no longer in vogue or have a place. A classic example was an Apilco tea set which we once used and loved but which has been in a cupboard untouched for years. We tested whether any of the sons wanted it and got negative responses (‘its horrific’ said one). They already have what crockery they need and, if they need more, will go online at Amazon, John Lewis or Ikea. Handing stuff down over the generations doesn’t seem to work any longer.

Apilco Tea Set Awaiting A New Home

At our age, we simply don’t need many additional material goods. Indeed, LSW is strong – and persuasive in the face of my greater, but softening, reticence – on reducing our footprint by clearing our old stuff out. Thank goodness for the recycling work of charity shops but the dump is also a regular destination.

These thoughts were going through my mind as LSW and I visited the annual neighbourhood open studios events of the last couple of weeks. Lots of creative and talented people were displaying their art and craft work in their homes and in local galleries; some was impressive. In past years we have bought some of the items but, more recently, we have walked around the open studios rather aimlessly. We just don’t need any more things to sit on shelves or to go on walls.

LSW has recently started a ceramics course. My fear is that her work – worthy and perhaps even lovely as it may turn out to be – will be another avenue of stuff entering our home. If so, then at least I will have a bargaining chip in negotiations around hanging onto some of my long-standing possessions for another year. But my realisation that I have to declutter that stuff is growing – maybe I’ll go to the next car boot sale or even learn to try eBay…..

Kefaya At Archspace, Haggerston, London; One Of My Favourite Bands

Not Too Old Yet

May 4, 2018 / fgrtommo / 1 Comment

Following my last post here, I was admonished by both Long-Suffering Wife (LSW) and Eldest Son (ES) for not mentioning an incident that occurred last time I was in London.

Following the gig I saw with ES and one of his best friends, we wanted to find a bar in Camden that would allow us to unwind a bit with some more drinks. We approached a lively bar but I was refused entry; ES and his friend were welcome but, evidently, I was not. Admittedly my memory from similar past occasions may be fuzzy but I can’t remember being denied entry to a bar or club before. I was astonished but all three of us found it very funny.

At the time I assumed it was because I was overly merry – ES would probably corroborate this – but later, as I considered how relatively little I had had to drink over the few hours of the gig, I wondered if the barrier to entry was on grounds of age. I didn’t ask at the time and so I will never know, but I would have increased the average age of the clientele significantly had I gone in. Given that we managed to get into the next bar I shan’t worry too much but, with yet another birthday coming up tomorrow, I wonder if I will experience this sort of ageist rebuttal again.

LSW and I had no such problem getting into another venue – The Forge – in Bristol last week. The Forge had cropped up one of LSW’s favourite blog sites as one that hosts craft workshops, yoga sessions and performance art including music. We went more to see the venue than the band (although listening to them on Spotify had allowed us to build optimism that we would enjoy them in advance).

Awaiting The Band At The Forge, Bristol

In practice, the headline act – Albert Jones – turned out to be excellent. The venue was also great although the audience was seemingly full of close friends who spent most of the time catching up with each other rather noisily instead of listening to the music – something I’m always irritated by more than I should be.

We conjoined the trip to The Forge with a scouting exercise around residential north and west Bristol. Cheltenham, Bath and Bristol are nearby cities and towns that LSW and I are considering as a place to live in at some point in the future. In part, a move to an urban area would reduce our reliance on a car while putting us in easier reach of entertainment and other facilities. It would respond to our probable decreasing personal mobility as we get older. Moving house is not something that we plan to do for several years – we are still upgrading the current one for goodness sake! – but it’s better to think and plan ahead.

Having walked several residential streets and looked at a number of estate agents’ windows, we concluded that Bristol is definitely an option. I would like the big, gritty, city feel but LSW would prefer Cheltenham due to its smaller size and more sophisticated feel. Visiting The Forge with its huge windows and elevated out-look, tempted LSW to imagine life in a top-floor loft apartment in a converted warehouse. I’m not sure how that will reconcile with the need to think about our future mobility. However, it’s fun to contemplate the possibilities and we are lucky to be able to do so.

Meanwhile, although it may be my birthday tomorrow (and I apparently increasingly run the risk of exclusion from some bars and clubs), LSW and I are still in good health. We can therefore focus on enjoying our current house, garden and rural community rather than worry too much about next steps yet.

My Retirement Journey

I've Retired! What Next?

Music