caughtwriting

I’ve recently been reading Spitalfields Life by A Gentle Author.  The chap, for I believe the author to be a chap, has a blog by the same name, which is enchanting and engrossing.  Spitalfields is an area of London close to and east of the City of London, the financial district, the original London as settled by the Romans.  It has a very long and interesting history, as characterised by the people who now call the place home.  Spitalfields Life is a social history, recording people and places of the area in charming and gentle prose, and it’s got me hooked.

The characters in the book are portrayed very much as part of the area.  Even the ones who have no real family roots at least have community roots, in that they are a well established and well known part of the area.  And this got me thinking about my own history.  I often feel like I was adopted or orphaned, although I believe I am neither.  When I was growing up, our house was a house of secrets.  Goodness knows how my mum and dad got married, because all I can remember is their intense dislike of one another.  I was born only 18 months into their marriage, so by the time I became aware, they would have been married only 5 or 6 years.  I don’t even know how they met.  My dad was evacuated from London to Devon during the war, but I don’t know anything about that, no one would talk about anything while I was growing up.  My mum never seemed to be able to tell a straight story, one day it would be one thing, the next it would be something else, so I could never rely on her telling the truth.  And some things she said were so blatant a lie that even a child would not believe it.  So you see how I sometimes feel disconnected, disjointed and without history.  When I left home I lived all over the UK, never settling in one place for very long, so I don’t have those community roots either.

I have such a stong interest in social history.  Part of my degree was Oral History and my dissertation was on what the lives of women were like after the end of the war, when the men came home, wanting their jobs back, expecting the women to go back to the home, to their kitchens.  I love to know about how people live their lives, what their everyday existence is like.  I’m fascinated by history, not the type of Kings and Queens but the ordinary person and how they lived.  I have on order a couple of new social history books relating to London in the 18th and 19th centuries.  And it’s only struck me very recently, because sometimes these things have to be blindingly obvious for me to get them.  Maybe I am so interested in history and how people live and lived, because I have next to no sense of my own past.  I might as well be adopted.  Or an orphan.   Just a thought.  I might blog more about this another time.

Two visits to London in one weekend! How lucky am I?!

On Easter Sunday we went up to Greenwich, which is only about 30 minutes drive away and therefore within much easier reach than the West End.  Greenwich always seems colder to me than the rest of London.  Maybe that’s because it’s right there on the Thames, maybe its because I only ever seem to go there when it’s cold.  But London and indeed the UK is still in the grip of an extended winter and it was gently snowing, so we went to the Ansel Adams exhibition at the Royal Maritime Museum.

I first came across Ansel Adams when I was visiting Yosemite National Park in California about a decade ago.  Ansel was from San Francisco and took a great number of photographs of Yosemite, San Francisco, Monterey and Carmel; all places I have visited, so it was interesting for me to see these pictures.  Anyway, a decade ago, there was an Ansel Adams exhibition at Yosemite and I spent a lot of time there studying the photographs.  They were in black and white and very striking, capturing the beauty of Yosemite perfectly.  I’m in awe of his talent in finding an unusual angle or abstract composition, leading me to study the photo closely, instead of looking and moving on as I might with other exhibitions.

The photo which most grabbed my attention was one taken in 1932 of San Francisco Bay before the building of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1933.  I’ve been in love with San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge since doing a project on the area when I was at primary school, about 35 years ago.  I’ve visited the very spot from which the photograph was taken, I know the view fairly well.  So to see a photograph of the area before the bridge was built was very arresting.

There was a small room set aside with video tape on a constant loop, showing an interview with Ansel Adams in the 1980s and a documentary of him made after his death.  It showed Ansel as a man with a great sense of humour, charismatic and interesting company.  He talked about bracketing, which as I understand it, is a technique where you take three photos in quick succession, one under-exposed, one correctly exposed and one over-exposed, so that you can pick the best one (remember these were the days before digital technology).  Ansel was of the opinion that if you employed this technique, you really didn’t know what you were doing, but he said it in such a self effacing way, and with such a twinkle in his eye, that no one could have been offended, and it raised a huge laugh within the auditorium.

I wish my house was big enough to hang at least a triptych of his work.  Stunning doesn’t even begin to cover it.

It’s been so long since my last post that regular readers might wonder whether I’ve been having trouble putting more life in my day.  The truth is, I’ve been really quite busy and don’t have much time on the computer anymore.  My writing course deadlines are slipping away from me and French has fallen by the wayside a bit too.  But I like to dabble in new things, so I’m working on the assumption that I’ll get around to these things soon enough.

On Good Friday we indulged in my favourite activity of all at the moment – spending time in London.  Lindt had sponsored The Great Easter Egg Hunt and we went up to Covent Garden to take part.  I used to spend a lot of time in Covent Garden; I love the place.  In fact, if I had half a million of disposable income, I would buy a one bedroomed flat there and have the whole experience on my doorstep.  As it is, we drive to Wimbledon and get the tube from there.  The eggs to be hunted are huge, designed and made by artists, mounted on pedestals, to be auctioned off after the event in aid of Action for Children.  We found 68 out of the 101, although we were told that one of them had been stolen.  This is a disgrace, as the egg is worth a lot of money to the charity but is more or less worthless to the person who stole it.

As well as the Easter Egg hunt, Covent Garden is host to many and varied shops and boutiques, as well as market stalls.  There are also designated areas for musicians and entertainers to perform.  This is one of my favourite things about Covent Garden and I’ve spent many happy hours hanging off the railings on the upper walkway while an opera singer or string quartet performs on the lower walkway.  I wasn’t disappointed this time either, as there was a fabulous opera singer performing, Seija Knight, who sang several of my favourites, including Schubert’s version of Ave Maria, and the Flower Duet and Madame Butterfly.  I’ve been in tears before watching singers in Covent Garden and this performance just slayed me.  Amazingly, she said that people often come up very close to her as they think she is miming, or using a microphone.  I find this unbelievable as the power and quality of her voice could not be conveyed so clearly by electronic means; she has no need to mime or use a microphone.  A truly special occasion and I was lucky to have been passing at the right time.

How I love London.  There is something for everyone, you just have to know where to look.