Fringford meeting

15 Jan 2012: Fringford in Oxfordshire is better known as Candleford in the Larkrise to Candleford books and TV series, although I confess to never having watched it, and didn't know this when we booked a lunch at the Butchers Arms in Fringford. It is halfway between Nottingham and Southampton. We didn't meet Henry and Carol over Xmas due to distance and things, so this was a late Xmas dinner, hence the red hat.
  I would recommend it in future, a fine carvery meal, with nice veggies too, easy to find, ample parking and a good atmosphere.
  There was the most unbelievable percentage of houses in Fringford with solar photovoltaic panels, either up or currently being put up (scaffolding still up). Apparently, a housing association owns several of the houses, so this is a combined effort - although they seem to have missed the December 2011 deadline for the higher tariff.

Cole family visit

29 Dec 2011: Thursday, we took a trip over to Moseley to visit Desmond and Kathy Cole, picking up Daphne, who stayed overnight in Nottingham.

Christmas in Norwich

24-26 Dec 2011: Daughter Sophie was our host for Christmas again, having a 'social Sunday' in Norwich. There were 11 of us at lunch, a mixture of Sophie's friends from Uni and the York tavern, and us. Will cooked a venison casserole!

Tuck in folks!

It's all so delicious that Will finds the casserole emptied

Skyping with Henry and Carol

Getting our just desserts

Lucy and Tom arrive for the evening fun

Thankyou to Sophie and Will for organising this - it's a new paradigm of Christmas celebration (sorry Charles Dickens....) 

Tall Buildings Party

11 Dec 2011: We invited the members of the Tall Buildings design studio to a Sunday-lunch party at our house in West Bridgford, everybody bringing a little bit of food. SN-C made some fine desserts. It was rainy, so we didn't have the hoped-for walk on the hill south of the house, but anyway, a good time was had by all. It is certainly a very international grouping, with students from various parts of India and of China, and a few besides (Vietnam, Turkey and..... err.... England!).

Bike in the vet!

Rear view

21 Nov 2011: Oh dear, I have been without the BMW motorbike for three weeks now, it has been stuck at Bloors having itself fixed. The clutch is worn and this is the largest operation it has had since new - all previous work was minor, although never cheap.

Front view, with much of it laid out on the floor

 I've been managing with the car mostly, to work, but we now have a parking charge per day, so I am now getting into the habit of using the pedal bike more and more. The punctures were fixed on that, but I still have problems with the rear wheel chafing the frame. It's healthy and if one plans to leave early enough, it's workable. My time is still about 40 mins because of the long hill at the end, and the roadworks forcing me to push the bike over a long stretch of grass for the final leg.

Arturo Ui at the Playhouse

12 Nov 2011: We went to the Playhouse for the final night of the run of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertold Brecht. It's always a good night out to the Playhouse, but on this occasion it was one of the largest audiences we have seen - the fame of this production has travelled widely. We saw 4 of our W Bridgford friends during the interval (Jacksons and Jones)
   It's not a fun night out.... the play was written in 1941 when the war was still in the early days, and to those escaping from Germany into exile, it must have seemed that the evil was unstoppable. It wasn't actually performed until 1958!
  This production started out in the Liverpool Everyman and completed its run in Nottingham.
  The play is a black comedy, played out against a background of Warner brothers view of Chicago in the thirties with gangs controlling areas of the city, and there were lighter moments. Of course the most ironic moment is the 'mercantile and middle classes' thinking that Ui would be quite useful to them in their money making schemes, and that if he ever got a bit uppish, they would be able to deal with it. We all know how badly that ended. The play becomes less 'comic' as it proceeds and as the thugs representing Goering and Goebbels take control, on behalf of their master.
   We are all so cultured to see things end happily, that it is deeply shocking to see it end with Arturo Ui and his henchmen in total dominant triumph - his final speech to the people (cauliflower vendors) of Chicago and Cicero is astonishingly reminiscent of the Hitler speeches at the Nuremberg and other rallies, even down to the minute of silence at the start, and the build up to a crescendo of anger and triumphalist hand gestures. 

Sunday Lunch in sunny November

6th Nov 2011: on a sunny day in November we had an enjoyable dinner in our house with our friends, the Harms, and with Sal's sister Rose and her partner Paul. Apologies, I forgot to take a picture of the event, but here's a picture of Paul and Rose's PV array!