2019 overview
It was a year that followed my early retirement pattern of a winter sea voyage, early summer break, Yorkshire music festival in August, and a September wind-down. All of that was interspersed with more than usual theatre and Trustee work for three charities – to the point that I did no sailing or canal trips and the garden got rather neglected
I made time to replace my polluting diesel Touran with a less polluting petrol VW Golf Estate car, as I was not sure the long journeys I do could yet be done by an electric car – next time perhaps! I also bought an e-bike and took it on the wonderful coastal track round Robin Hood's Bay. The view from the south side of the bay in August sunshine was lovely
There were a couple of Westminster get-togethers – sadly one was a funeral in May
INDIA ON A WORLD CRUISE SEGMENT
My transport from Singapore to Dubai
Click the gallery to see the full height of the image
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus lit at night
My transport from Singapore to Dubai
Following my first Peel / Olsen assignment for Four Captains in Cadiz in September 2018, I did my first World Cruise segment in my own right by flying to Singapore and then sailing to Dubai on Black Watch. I had four talks to give in 14 days and I tried two new ones and was pleased with them. I was still a bit jet-lagged in the first port (Phuket) so lazed by the swimming pool and read a book. I had a brilliant holiday there 20 years before on a sailing cruise ship and didn’t want to spoil the memories, so didn’t want to go ashore. The next three ports were in India. Kochi and Goa were new to me and I did coach trips there. The final port was a return to Mumbai, so I met up with a friend there and we had two lovely days walking the streets.
In Mumbai I found a most interesting Moderne petrol station and garage - and a small exhibition with it had the original drawings. I also found the equivalent of St Pancras Terminus but in Mumbai - the former Victoria railway station - the booking hall was fabulous!
Another fascinating place was the Crawford Market. I had seen it the year before but on a bus tour - this time I was able to see it at my leisure. With an overnight stay, I was also able to see the station lit up at night - a bit gaudy but it showed its features well.
THEATRE & CONCERTS
The year saw me lighting at four locations for three theatre companies as well as the festival lighting and staging. I lit Merry Wives of Windsor at the Tower Theatre in Stoke Newington in May which had a very smart touch screen control board and I also lit Dracula at the Bridewell theatre in December for Theatre in the Square (TinTS). The latter company hired a drama studio to present The Herd at Highgate school which turned out to be very poorly equipped and I had to bring in the travelling set from Incognito to save the show. They dropped out of doing Hedda Gabler at the school in July and hired Incognito, which brought us useful income and developed our community programme of bringing in other companies.
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Another ’find’ (actually he found us) was Leon, a talented young magician, who tried out working at Incognito in June and found it worked so well he returned in December for two more shows and all of them sold out. I designed the set for Fox on the Fairway and lit Alan Bennett’s The Old Country.
As a spin-off from a conversation in 2018, we premiered in Joel & Jamie's Yorkshire garden a version of Betjeman’s Banana Blush for quartet rather than orchestra. It was set up under Festival auspices but was a fundraiser for the local Air Ambulance and we donated £1900. Zeb Soanes (BBC Newsreader) and Carole Boyd (from the Archers) did the vocal parts. It transpired Carole started acting at my little theatre.
The Yorkshire festival worked very well this year and there was an outbreak of harmony as we decided to not issue the contract to one character who had been sowing some discontent and a couple of other irregular finance issues surfaced, so he was quietly dropped. The difference was AMAZING without him, as were the replacement people. We returned to manual control for the lighting after a couple of problems with Windows 10 shutting down the control system in the middle of concerts the year before.
70th Birthday Treats
I headed north for my 70th birthday where Jamie did a marvellous 7 course banquet – a course for every decade, plus a cake from Margarethe across the courtyard that depicted six men in a hot tub with a ginger cat on the step. In the day, Joel took me on a rail excursion which included two museums on railway history. One was on the story of building the Stockton & Darlington, on which we had just traveled to Bank Top station, and the other was Locomotion at Shildon where I saw the loco (Winston Churchill) that pulled my boat train home in 1965. The feast is in the Gallery below:
The meal comprised: gradvlax with lobster bisque, garden salad, scollops with black pudding on a pea puree, gnocci, rare fillet steak, cheese board, tiramisu with espresso martini, and the cake!
Trips to Europe in 2019
In May my sailing friend Anthony and I took a river trip on the River Main in Germany that took in several towns and cities with many medieval, half-timbered structures and some Baroque. We embarked riverboat 'Jane Austen' on the Rhine, near Frankfurt and left the ship on the canal leading to the Danube at Nuremberg. We were lucky with the weather and it was mostly sunny. It was a great way to see inland Europe. Analysis of my DNA suggests that I have some heritage in that part of Saxonia in Germany, which ties in with family letters I inherited, but I did not know it at the time. The rest is mostly English (East Anglia in particular) but a smattering of Celtic and some Scandinavian roots with an emphasis on Iceland, surprisingly. In September I joined Cliff and Tim by flying to Bordeaux and got to grips with their bus and rail systems as they picked me up on a branch line station about an hour north of Bordeaux.
