Here’s the latest instalment of my beloved’s covid diaries. We’ve both been pleasantly surprised at the positive comments we’ve had about them, but we won’t be able to keep up the weekly posts much longer. As life opened up, there was more going on and keeping the excerpts at a sensible length gets trickier. Also as more and more people are mentioned, privacy issues get more significant and keeping track of the alphabet soup that she has used to anonymise people gets silly.
Tammy is wondering about producing a proper memoir and we will likely still posts diary excerpts that cover some particularly important times (like the cancellation of Christmas which, for those of us not enjoying parties in Downing Street, was a particularly grim period).
For the next few weeks we’ll carry on. This week’s entry is actually very short. Enjoy.
Saturday 27 June 2020
It’s raining. I’ve just come back from the shops by bus wearing a face mask for the first time. Maybe “face mask” is overly grand. It was an old sock Tom cut up, as instructed by an online video. I don’t think masks work by filtering stuff. They work by encouraging people to sit quietly and shut up.
Last Sunday was Father’s Day. Mike and G came over to walk Morley in the park, followed by afternoon tea in our front (and only) garden. For the first time ever, we put out four chairs and a table, and scones and jam and cream. It was all very civilised.
Wednesday – midsummer – was our wedding anniversary. Mike and G sent a good quality champagne. So we had supper in the garden, drinking champagne from our best flutes and eating smoked salmon and cheese cake and cherries, feeing that life was actually OK. More than OK, pretty good. And, after the second glass, very good indeed. Watched a silly rom-com and danced to Vera Lynn’s Anniversary Walz.
On Thursday, for some unaccountable reason, felt muzzy and dehydrated. It must have been the heat.
On Friday, it was (a tiny bit) cooler. Tom and I cycled up the hill (low gear, kept going, just) to meet J at the Roehampton Gate of Richmond Park at 3.30pm. J arrived by Uber at the Sheen Gate at 3.50pm. No matter. Got back on our bikes and met her there. We walked through the park with ice creams, which I’ve been so looking forward to, as another step towards normality.
J has spent much, much too long alone in her flat with her kittens, with only the occasional trip to the vet to take her outside. She made excited coos when she saw a deer or a tree. “It’s amazing,” she kept saying, “It’s green”. J worried about leaving the kittens, even for a walk in the park. She had set up cameras in each room in her flat, and went online a couple of time to check the feeds. She showed me live coverage of a kitten climbing onto her bed and stretching out as though he owned it. J talked about her family, and the (uncertain) future. I even gave her a potted version of my theory of the crisis of capitalism. And on the way back, I found a new route – over Sheen Common – which brought me back home with no hills at all.
On 27 June 1806 Buenos Aires fell to the British. It’s one of the least well-known campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars but the first of the James Burke books, Burke in the Land of Silver, centres on the run-up to this battle (not that there was really a battle) and its aftermath (which was much more exciting).
Why did Argentina matter?
The British invasion of Buenos Aires is often overlooked, possibly because it does not reflect particularly well on British military prowess. Spain’s South American possessions were important primarily because of the silver that they produced. Britain was anxious that, with Spain about to join the war on Napoleon’s side, the French should not get their hands on South American bullion. South America was also felt to be a relatively soft target, because of the unrest amongst the population there who were growing increasingly unhappy with Spanish rule.
Enter Sir Home Popham
Enter the extraordinary Commodore Home Popham. Almost forgotten until recently, Popham has suddenly become fashionable with both historians and novelists, and keeps on popping up all over the place. He deserves this newfound interest because Sir Home Riggs Popham was an extraordinary character.
Sir Home Riggs Popham
Popham had been sent to the Cape of Good Hope carrying 6,000 men to capture the place, but the Cape fell unexpectedly easily, leaving him with a small army and no war to use it in. At this point, he decided that he’d head to Buenos Aires, taking 1,635 men with him (the rest being left to garrison the Cape). Deprived of a change for glory in South Africa, he would find it in South America. They sound pretty much the same, so why not?
Historians still argue about whether this decision was politically sanctioned or not. It was certainly never official, but there’s quite a lot of evidence that the government did encourage him to attack Buenos Aires.
Enter James Burke
Either way, Popham arrived in the River Plate in June 1806, where he sails into the story of Burke in the Land of Silver. The Plate is a difficult river to navigate. Popham was quoted at the time as saying, “It was a bit bumpy,” as his ships nearly grounded on sandbanks. According to some accounts Popham was helped to navigate the unfamiliar river by a British agent. If so, it’s quite likely that the real James Burke was involved. Was he really? The joy of writing about a secret agent is that what exactly he did do is a secret. He may genuinely have been there, but we can’t know for sure.
A square rigged ship on the Rio Plate. (It’s a very big river.)
Popham was in charge of the force while it was on the water, but once it landed control was handed over to Colonel William Beresford. The illegitimate son of the 2nd Earl of Tyrone, Beresford had served under Wellington and was held by many (though not Wellington himself) to have a less than perfect grasp of military strategy. He landed his troops at Quilmes, fifteen miles from Buenos Aires. The Spanish did not have enough troops to mount an adequate defence and, as Popham had predicted, Beresford had an easy march, brushing aside the meagre forces sent to oppose him. On the 27 June 1806, Buenos Aires surrendered.
Things end badly
James Burke had arrived in Buenos Aires with instructions to prepare the way for a British invasion. He could congratulate himself on a job well done. But with the military victory easily achieved, Beresford had to move from winning the war to winning the peace. He told the locals he had come to liberate them from Spain, but he proved no better at handling the aftermath of war than some more modern occupying powers. A series of missteps turned the population against the British and the locals rose in revolt. The British were driven out of Buenos Aires, their tails between their legs.
Aftermath
With the Spanish rising against the French, Napoleon never did get his hands on that silver. The Spanish colonists became our allies again. James Burke did return to Argentina where I like to think he contributed to the struggle of the locals to free themselves from Spanish rule. Whether he did or not, the population did rise against Spain and the independence of Argentina was declared on July 9, 1816 by the Congress of Tucumán.
Nobody is quite sure what happened to James Burke after his ventures in South America, but evidence from the Army rolls suggests that he remained in the Army with a pattern of movement between regiments and ranks that suggested continued to work in intelligence until well after the war with France was over.
Burke in the Land of Silver
Burke in the Land of Silver is the first of the stories I’ve written about James Burke. All my stories have a solid basis in historical fact, but this one is the closest to a true story. Burke’s adventures, including his improbable romantic entanglements with royalty, are pretty close to what actually happened. The story grew out of my love for Buenos Aires and I have visited many of the places featured in the book. It’s a rollicking good read, as well as an excellent introduction to a little-known bit of Britain’s military and political history. It’s available on Kindle at £2.99 (buy it quickly: this price won’t hold forever) and in paperback at £7.99.
Picture credit
‘The Glorious Conquest of Buenos Ayres by the British Forces, 27th June 1806’ Coloured woodcut, published by G Thompson, 1806. Copyright National Army Museum and reproduced with permission.
June 2020 and it’s been over three months since we’ve seen our friends who we would usually see every week. With restrictions on outdoor gatherings lifting, we could finally meet up. We were excited.
Sunday 22 June 2020
The event of the month – the summer solstice picnic in Regent’s Park on Saturday. The first return of music and dancing and socialising.
I studied the map and packed food and worried about clothes all morning. At 2.30 we set off on our bikes for the 1.5 hour ride into town. Yep – we are getting used to this. And cycling through Hyde Park on closed roads was great. London looked excited and buzzy. Lots of picnic-ers and birthday balloons and cyclists and rollerbladers. Even a game of roller hockey by the Albert Memorial as we passed.
The problem came in finding our group in Regents Park. Our instructions said “by the hub near the camels” – which we struggled with when faced with a huge open area, covered with groups of thousands of Londoners meeting up for the first time. I found T, ultra-excited (“I’ve missed this so much. It’s been lonely on my own”) and we wandered the zoo perimeter until we found and L and B putting up a gazebo. Soon we were a large group of at least 20, ignoring all Government guidelines about who can sit with whom, which would be far, far too complicated to understand, even if we cared.
Our host finds it impossible to greet people except with a kiss. Tom and I jumped away, but then compromised with a handshake (Tom) and hug (me). I put my satsumas and tea cakes on the shared food blanket, and looked awkwardly around, wondering how this socialising business was meant to work.
I spent a long time chatting to L. She and her husband have spent time filming funny videos and putting them online. She talked about her two-hour walks, finding routes from one park to another that she has never done before. Her daughter and mother live nearby, so she has kept in touch. But underneath was a huge seam of worry about the collapse of her business.
L is meticulous about her tax returns, so she has been getting 80% of her net earnings for last year (before things really took off). But that’s net earnings, and she is still repaying business loans. “We’ve coped, but we’ve had to think about things differently. We had to worry about whether we can afford to fill up the van with petrol, which we have never done before.”
By now, even Tom was talking to people. Someone produced a violin and someone else had a guitar and people were dancing barefoot on the grass. Tom and I discovered that if we put on our tango shoes, we could just about manage a pivot on the artificial strip provided for a cricket pitch. Then the bandoneon came out. “Last time we played music here we were fined”, our host said. But now the park police had given up. Tom and I ate the wraps we brought, and the shared stuff on the blanket, and soon it was 8pm and I needed to get home before it got dark.
I cycled back through an idyllic London, past crowds on Parson’s Green and Barnes Common, watching cars turn on their headlamps in the long, long summer’s evening. A minor incident on Putney Bridge when I crossed two lanes of traffic and got an angry honk. Otherwise, I was fine until I turned into our road and realised I was absolutely, totally knackered. Crawled up the stairs to bed.
An extra post today because I loved last night’s performance of The Car Man so much and its run at the Albert Hall ends of Sunday and I want people to go and see it.
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This week I’ve been to see two narrative dance performance ie performances where the dance is used to tell a story, rather than just to be pretty. The first was The Crucible by Scottish Ballet and the second was The Car Man by Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures. I found it interesting to compare the two.
The Crucible used a generally traditional ballet approach: lots of point work, great technical skill from the company. There were more modern dance sequences as well but the overall approach was technically mainstream. However, they decided not to use traditional mime, but to carry the narrative by developing the relationships of the characters through the extension of naturalistic actions into ballet forms. For example, as the programme helpfully explains, “ If [the choreographer] wanted to work with gestures that truly showed intimacy, a caress of John’s hand on the side of Elizabeth’s thigh might then carry up to an arabesque.” Even if you believe that 55% of communication is non-verbal (almost certainly a gross over-estimate) that still leaves the audience losing 45% of the plot. You have to watch with close attention, interpreting clues as if you are solving a non-verbal Times crossword. The synopsis provided in the programme is essential if you are to have any idea what is going on.
We saw The Crucible at Sadler’s Wells, a theatre that has no really bad seats, but we were towards the back of the stalls. The stage is under-lit (the gloom is deliberate and certainly adds to the sense of menace) and simply seeing the details of expression (essential given that the big gestures of mime are deliberately not used) was a strain. (It literally gave me a headache.)
The costumes are excellent but the minimalist scenery adds little to help carry a complex narrative. When one character, according to the synopsis, “flees Salem” she simply travels from one side of the stage to the other before vanishing into the wings, the only clue that she is leaving the village being the canvas bag she carries which presumably contains all her belongings.
That just leaves the music to draw the audience in and carry them along. Peter Salem’s score (nominative determinism gone mad here), the programme notes tell us, “draws on 17th century psalms, and evocative sounds such as the courtroom gavel or a church bell but also embraces the electro beat of rave music which heightens the repressed sexuality of the teenage girls.” It is fair to say that it is not a high-energy audience pleaser.
The Crucible may not have been a particularly fun night out but critics loved it, in part, I suspect, because it takes on the challenge of telling a complex story through dance and surely that must make considerable demands of its audience.
And so to Exhibit Two: The Car Man.
Matthew Bourne is committed to telling stories through dance. Many of his works pay homage to cinema (most notably The Red Shoes, which is a re-telling of the famous film). His work seeks to tell stories, sometimes complex stories, in an accessible way. So how does he do it?
In the Albert Hall production we saw last night, the huge performance area is inhabited by the boys and girls of Harmony (we know it’s called Harmony because there’s a huge town sign telling us it is) as they gather around the diner. The set is beautiful and it tells us a lot before the dance even starts. We’re in America, probably the mid-West, and it’s the late fifties or early sixties. The style of the diner and the clothes (costumes are brilliant) tells us that. (Later we learn it’s 1957, but you’d have to pay attention to pick that up.)
The music starts. It’s a rearrangement of Bizet’s Carmen and the powerful rhythm pulls you immediately into the action as the young people start with a performance that gives more than a nod to West Side Story. It’s bright and cheerful, well-lit and upbeat. Even in the vastness of the Albert Hall it’s easy to watch. (It goes without saying that, this being New Adventures, the quality of the dance is stunning.)
The Car Man is not a cheery crowd pleaser. The story, of lust, infidelity, rape and murder ends in tragedy. Harmony, once a peaceful town of happy young people has descended into a hellish place where bare-knuckle boxing and drag racing have replaced the fiestas that used to characterise it. Tough though the story is (and when it was first produced bits were truly shocking) it’s never difficult to watch. Emotionally draining, yes, but in a good way.
Narrative dance can be accessible and entertaining, though Matthew Bourne is one of the very few choreographers still around who can consistently make it work on the scale that he does. But if you can’t make this form work, it’s maybe better to stick with the pretty stuff. Done well, narrative dance is thrilling; done badly, it might impress some critics, but it does audiences no favours and that, ultimately, drives people away from the theatre, which is, I think we can agree, A Bad Thing.
If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll have seen that Tammy and I spent a couple of days in Shrewsbury last week. It’s somewhere that we have been meaning to visit for years and we have finally got round to it.
Like so many people, I was attracted to the place by reading about the medieval town in Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael stories. She describes the abbey at the foot of the town and the castle at the top so well that I wanted to see them for myself. There are still bits of the abbey and the castle standing but, to be honest, not much, though both are worth a visit. We started with the castle. Apart from a tiny bit of wall at the entrance, all that is left of the medieval castle is the Great Hall built by Henry III in the 13th century.
It’s been chopped and changed a fair bit since, with an extra floor added and internal partitions put in and taken away. It was, for a while, a private residence but the 20th century saw it purchased by the Shropshire Horticultural Society who tried to restore the Great Hall to its original appearance. This included putting in not one but two minstrels’ galleries, because everybody knows that 13th century Great Halls had minstrels’ galleries. (They didn’t.) Overall, though, the building is in remarkably good shape.
As you can just about see in the photo the ground floor (where all the light is) is now a museum celebrating the history of the Shropshire regiments. It’s an unfashionably unashamed celebration of the Army with more red coats than I have seen in a while, plus some unusual exhibits like a lock of Napoleon’s hair. (A Shropshire regiment guarded him at St Helena.)
Otherwise little is left of the castle. Even the Norman motte — the artificial high point that is usually the last thing to be lost in ancient fortifications — is but a shadow of its former glory as much of it slipped into the river below back in 1271, taking with it the wooden tower on its summit. The romantic tower that you see today is a 19th century folly.
At the other end of town the abbey, too, is a shadow of the building it once was. Henry VIII’s Reformation saw the destruction of almost all the Abbey buildings and even the great abbey church itself, once 302 feet (over 90 metres) long was truncated to serve as a parish church. What remains, though is splendid. The two lower arches in this photo are original Norman. (The top storey was added later.)
The only other parts of the Abbey to survive were a pulpit which had been part of the refectory so that monks could have the gospels read to them as they ate (and which was saved as it made an attractive garden ornament for the man who bought the land to build on) and a hall for sheltering travellers. The hall features a lot in the Cadfael stories as travellers often drive the plots, so I had to photograph it, however unimpressive it looks.
The Abbey and the castle may be shadows of their former selves, but the town in between is astonishing. Built in the loop of the river there has been no room for urban sprawl or even any major redevelopment and much of the original mediaeval street system and a remarkable number of the buildings still survive. What distinguishes Shrewsbury from many other historic towns is that the ancient buildings have been pressed into use for the 21st century. So the beautiful old market hall (pictured below) contains a cinema upstairs in the late 16th century building.
The public library is housed in Shrewsbury School, which was founded in 1550. (That’s it at the top of the page.) As a school it, of course, had its own library and the idea that people are still using the building for at least part of its original purpose seems to me to demonstrate a much better understanding of “heritage” then all those buildings that we have carefully sealed away so they can be enjoyed as museums. Some of the library’s rooms are spectacular.
In Shrewsbury, most of the buildings aren’t museums unless, of course, they are the local Museum and Art Gallery, which incorporates 13th-century Vaughan’s Mansion, one of only a handful of early medieval defensive hall houses remaining in the UK and a 19th century music hall.
Besides the Norman, medieval and 17th century buildings, the town has a number of remarkable 19th century buildings. This hospital, now developed as residential apartments, stood out for me.
There was a lot to see in just two days and we took time to visit Wroxeter Roman city as well. Once the fourth largest city in Britain, it’s now basically a single wall (known as ‘The Old Works’) in a field but the archaeologists have worked their magic and the place was definitely impressive. As the Romans would have said, though, Sic transit gloria mundi.
The Old Works and the excavated site of the baths
So there we are: several decades after I first said, “We ought to visit Shrewsbury,” we did and it was very, very good. I can recommend it. We stayed in The Old Post Office, itself an amazing old building in the centre of the town. If you have a couple of days to spare, you could do a lot worse.
