Well, that was a cultured 24 hours. I took my dad last night to hear a folk-jazz guitarist and an Irish harper at the Colchester Arts Centre. They are called Chris Newman and Maire ni Chathasaigh, except that there ought to be some accents over the Irish gaelic name that Blogspot's compose a post page won't do. They are very good, and my dad likes them. He had them as visitors to the folk club he used to run in Wales for his seventieth birthday celebration, in lieu of a party. Chris Newman is a great fan of 1930s swing jazz, and Maire is a traditional musician from West Cork, and they play some pure Irish folk, some jazz, and a lot that is somewhere in between. To get the accidentals on the Irish harp you have to flick a lever at the top, and whereas in a traditional folk piece the same settings would probably last you all the way through, to play jazz you have to flick the levers in mid flow. Frequently. As Chris Newman says, it's fun to watch. The harp seems to take a lot of tuning mid-concert, a process that involves various giant allen keys, and leaves Chris with some time to fill in, but he is a genial chap. He comes from Watford, he told us, one of the best towns in England to come from.
Today the Systems Administrator and I went to Cambridge to visit the exhibition Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence at the Fitzwilliam Museum. This brings together four pictures by Vermeer of women in a domestic setting with pictures by other Netherlands artists of the same era, and has reviewed very well (Telegraph, Observer, Independent). As I looked at one of the pictures in the first section I heard a woman standing next to me say to her companion 'Oh, I see, they're not all Vermeers'. Well, no, they wouldn't be. Four is pretty good going, and includes one loaned from the Louvre and on display in the UK for the first time ever. They are wonderful paintings. Go and see them. You have until Sunday 15th January. Entrance is free, though you are invited to make a donation, and if only I lived nearer to Cambridge I'd drop in often.
We had lunch first in an excellent side street pub which I'd heard get a plug recently on, of all places, The Today Programme. It is called The Cambridge Blue, and it says something about the organisation of human memory that when I was trying to remember the name of the road I couldn't recall Gwydir Street, but knew that it was something Welsh sounding. It is CAMRA's Cambridgeshire pub of the year for 2011, and why it came to be featured on the Today programme I really can't remember, but the beer was excellent and the food was nice. My carrot and coriander soup had a generous amount of coriander in it, and the SA says the sausage was good. There was no music, and the staff were cheerful. There were two partly used sacks of coal just inside the door, and packs of tonic all over one of the tables in the other front bar, behind which a little old boy was sitting impeturbably reading, but I don't mind an amount of clutter myself (the coal and the mixers. I don't mean the old boy was clutter).
A group of men of mature years were waiting for the last of their party to arrive, then all piled into a large taxi. They were happy and excited, and you could tell they were going somewhere special because they'd put on their tidy trousers (mustard coloured cords etc). The landlord told us they were going to a Michelin two starred restaurant for the £100 a head taster menu. 'They'll be drunk as lords by the time they get back' he proclaimed joyfully. 'A hundred quid a head. They might have put ties on'.
I had made a pencil sketch from Google maps of where the pub was, not having a working printer at the time. It had enough information on it that we would have found it (left hand turning off Mill Road). The SA has a pocket sized Garmin electronic navigator, which I find impossible to use, since by the time you are zoomed in close enough to see the street names, you can't see more than one stretch of about one road at a time, but the SA likes it and seems to understand it. Each to their own.
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