listen again

We thought we'd settle down last night and listen to the Radio 2 Folk Awards via Listen Again.  Last year we watched them live on the telly, and we used to listen on the night on R2, but this week I had a music society meeting on Wednesday evening, and the Systems Administrator had disappeared to Ludlow in search of racing (there wasn't any, and English Heritage had closed the castle because of the snow, and the church was locked.  Who was the woman bigging up the UK as a tourist destination yesterday on R4 and saying that the weather was good for visiting attractions all year round?).  Anyway, we were going to listen to the awards.  I'd even managed to avoid finding out who won, apart from June Tabor getting a lifetime achievement award, which was broadcast on the Today Programme at 7.08 on Thursday morning (it is richly deserved as she is the best UK female traditional singer living, but why mention it on Today?  What with Syria, Egypt the US election, Greece, the rest of the Eurozone crisis, quantitative easing, UK health reforms, the UK company results season getting underway, not to mention the ruddy Olympics and the English football team manager, you'd think they'd have enough news and current affairs to keep them going.  And if they'd exhausted those topics they could always tell us something about what's going on in China, or Africa, or Russia, or Japan (never seem to hear about them nowadays), or Latin America (apart from Argentina's attitude towards Prince William going to the Falklands)  Sometimes I think that Today is dumbing down).

Anyway, we were going to listen to the Radio 2 Folk Awards on the telly on Listen Again.  Except that we couldn't, because our broadband download speed had dropped to nought point one something megabits per second.  I told you that any apologies I owed to BT were only muted, because their service is so crappy so often, even if it was not actually their fault that my computer kept falling off-line a couple of weeks ago.  It was only the download speed that was almost non-existent, the upload speed was fairly OK.  The Systems Administrator said that this had to be a BT fault, and it was good that it was so bad, because BT would have to mend it.  I checked this morning using the useful Broadband Speed Checker site and the download speed was up.  To 0.6 Mb/s.  It ought not to be under 2.0 Mb/s.  If the Today programme is short of material maybe they could give us an update on rural broadband provision.  That's 'rural' in the sense of villages around 65 miles as the crow flies from Charing Cross, not the outer Hebrides or Herefordshire.

The good news is that the Lucien Freud tickets turned up in yesterday's post.  There's nothing like giving up hope sometimes to make things happen.  Also a piece of rose thorn finally worked its way out of my knuckle.  I hadn't given up hope of that, since the swelling was getting ever more localised and focused into quite a small lump, instead of taking up my entire knuckle, and it looked as though things were developing.  It was a tiny piece of wood, no more than a couple of millimetres long, and it has taken my hand something over two months to expel it.  This was the second fragment of thorn, and I'm fairly sure it was the last.  My hand began to look calmer almost immediately, in a way it hasn't since the accident, which probably means it is finally free of foreign bodies.  I'm glad it's gone, since even I didn't really want an ugly lump on one knuckle that turned purple whenever my hands got cold.

The cats think it is too cold and wet to go out, and I can't blame them. I wouldn't want to walk around in melting snow in bare feet getting freezing slush on my tummy.  I don't even want to go out there in wellington boots, and have only been as far as the chicken house and the bird table, and to water the hellebores that are still sitting in their pots in the porch.  This morning the cats radiated fractious boredom, and now they have gone to sleep, the big tabby curled around my laptop on the kitchen table, and Our Ginger snoring on the worktop next to the Aga.  Later I shall have to evict them and wipe the table and the counter very carefully before making 24 helpings of apple crumble for the music society supper concert.  I told the chairman that I'd cleaned the kitchen in readiness, but she just smiled at me brightly and vaguely and said surely everybody had animals in their kitchens.

 

 

 

visit to the museum (part II)

The Hajj exhibition at the British Museum was interesting.  This is on until  mid-April, so you've plenty of time to go and see it.  The first part deals with the scope of the pilgrimage, with maps and photographs of major pilgrim routes, coming across Africa, down from the Indian sub-continent, and from as far afield as Indonesia, and describes the history of the Hajj, with accounts of early pilgrims.  There are some colourful touches, such as a ritual tent being carried through Egypt on a camel, and the experience of a seventeenth century European captured by slavers and forcibly converted, who was taken by his master.  This all sets the scene for the final part, where a video explains what it is that people do when they actually reach Mecca.  Non-Muslims are not permitted to enter Mecca, or Medina, but there's no taboo on our  seeing photographs and models, and there are some beautiful textiles.  Visitors like me who can't read Arabic script must miss a lot compared to those who can, but the curator has done a good job of explaining it.  I found some of the ritual requirements quite strange, like the neat little calculating devices for working out the direction where Mecca lies for purposes of prayer, but not any more extraordinary than this morning's debate on the Today programme about the ordination of women bishops in the C of E.

Unfortunately I couldn't work out any timetable for buying timed tickets for two exhibitions in advance that would avoid the risk of missing my first slot if the trains into London were late, while getting me back to Liverpool Street before the rush hour prohibited period for cheap day returns, without the risk that I'd find myself touring one or the other exhibition against the clock.  I wandered about the museum for a while after visiting the Hajj display, so as not to spend too long at the station waiting to be allowed on a train again, and ended up spending forty minutes there anyway.  Trying to enjoy London culture from the provinces can turn into an endurance test.

The tickets for Lucien Freud and the two LSO lunchtime concerts have still not arrived, so I rang the National Portrait Gallery and Barbican booking offices to find out what the form was.  They both said that if the tickets never turned up it could be sorted out at the door, provided I had my booking reference and the credit card I paid with.  In the case of Ticket Master I have to ring them five days before we are due to go.   I don't have any expectation that the tickets will ever arrive, so hope to goodness it does all work smoothly and there isn't a hoo-ha on the door, particularly as I'm going with somebody.  Memo to self to book online in future, especially if that means printing your own ticket and cutting the vagaries of the postal service out of the loop.  The home-printed receipts for the British Museum worked beautifully.  You just show your piece of paper at the door like a regular ticket bought at the desk, and in you go.  (When we went to a concert at the London Irish Centre in Camden a while back they insisted on taking our pieces of paper, and giving us instead tiny green cloakroom tickets).  I only booked these wretched missing tickets over the phone because I arranged the trips while my internet connection was playing up.

The snow was still lying on the ground, and the thermometer was stuck just above freezing all day, so there was no doing anything outside, even if I hadn't still had a cold.  In lieu of any more enticing project I spent the day cleaning the kitchen, which badly needed doing.  The post, while not bringing my tickets, did bring a nice thank you letter from the ladies group I talked to last week.  They have discovered the reason why the heating in the hall was not working, which is that when the new kitchen was fitted somebody installed a radiator directly below the thermostat for the central heating.  The vet sent us a condolence card about the cat, which was unexpected but kind.