We're very fond of quizzes. We always have a family quiz over Christmas, with various people, myself included, contributing a round or two. When Holly and Oliver got married, I had a round where every answer included one or other of their names. William brought a good one this year where the first letters of the answers eventually spelled out CHRISTMAS.
So we enjoyed the first Inter-Hash Quiz Night at the Kingswood Village Club last Saturday, joining three friends (hand - picked for their General Knowledge skills) to form the winning team of 9 contending. There was prize money, as well as a lovely (?) decorated plate which probably isn't solid gold. It all hinged on the last round, when we had just overhauled the previous leaders and were ahead by 3 points. We went on to drop just one point in the final round, so were unassailable, but tried to be gracious rather than smug! Ed and I think we are fairly good at general knowledge, but our complete failure to make any impression at the Surrey Police social club with the Van Lits last year had taught us not to count too many pre-hatched quiz chickens.
Hugh had made an interesting side competition of "Dodgy White Powders" - there were 20 of them, which we had to try and identify. Ranging from salt via cornflour to bleach (marked with skull to avert tasting) it was fun! It's amazing how hard it is to identify things by smell and taste with no other clues.

We went to see this today. I had initially wanted to see it, and then been put off when I overheard a young guy saying he'd seen it and "the torture scenes were very graphic"!
It was excellent. Based on the novel by Giles Foden, Forest Whitaker and James McAvoy were equally good as a charming and charismatic, but increasingly unstable, Idi Amin, and the naif young doctor Nicholas Garrigan who revels in his good fortune at becoming Amin's "friend" and only gradually wakes up to the danger around him.
Supporting characters were also very strong - Gillian Anderson and Simon McBurney particularly - and the rural African scenery was worth seeing too. I did have to turn away once or twice towards the end, but the violence was for the most part suggested and hinted at rather than shown in full gore.

We spent yesterday evening in the company of Dylan Thomas, as performed superbly by Bob Kingdom (originally directed for television in 1990 by Anthony Hopkins). Using Thomas's own writing and purporting to be a biographical lecture by the man himself, it was a feast of words, with humour, pathos and self deprecation jostling for the upper hand. There were no excerpts from Under Milk Wood, but all the other best bits were there - "Fern Hill", "Do not go gentle into that good night" and the hilarious story of the men's club outing with his Uncle.
The time flew by all too quickly, as the length of the applause at the end showed. We were consoled with the news that Bob Kingdom is back in Croydon in April with a new play, about Truman Capote. One for the diary there, then.

I've almost finished my second Christmas book, which was the above, by Julian Barnes. I'm not sure whether I liked it or not. I certainly enjoyed the story about George, and I quite enjoyed Arthur's biography and the story of his love for Jean, although none are particularly endearing characters, and there are lots of interesting ideas in it about belief, and how to prove what we believe, or even how to prove what we know to be true, especially in the face of disbelief or prejudice. And yet I didn't think it quite gelled into one coherent story. Although little surprises were revealed quite neatly along the way, I was often annoyed to have the story switch from one to the other, just as I was really engrossed, while for me the eventual meeting of Arthur and George proved rather an anti-climax, and one of the least gripping sections of all. The who dunnit was never satisfactorily resolved, and then it was fast forward 23 years to the finale of Arthur's spiritualism. Hmm. In a book of its length, I'm surprised that I could read so far with pleasure and yet care so little by the end.
Anyone else have thoughts?

Another sunny day, so we set off first to the Guildhall, ostensibly to see an exhibition of contemporary etchings of London, before and after the Great Fire. Unfortunately Ed hadn't checked properly and it wasn't open today - but luckily the William Powell Frith exhibition was.
Now I know this artist of the high Victorian era isn't hugely admired nowadays - even he said he wasn't a great artist, only a popular one - but his pictures of Victorian life are very revealing of his time, and as always it's fascinating seeing an exhibition with the studies alongside the finished pieces.
My favourite pair was that of the picture "Many Happy Returns of the Day". In the original sketch he had painted himself as rather more youthful than his years and his wife as she probably was. In the finished picture it was reversed - he was as he probably was, while his wife had unnaccountably become more youthful!

We then moved on to the Museum in the Docklands, in the warehouses of the old West India Quay near Canary Wharf. We hadn't been before, but it was packed with good stuff. As with most modern museums, there is rather a lot of "book on the wall" to wade through, but there are some fascinating artifacts and a couple of walk through scenes which are very good.
The thing that caught my eye was in a temporary exhibition to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the first permanent British settlement in North America, at James Town. Well, two things, but one was moored outside. The first thing was a genuine sailor's outfit of smock and breeches dating from the early 1600's. Possibly because survivals of any 17th century clothing is quite rare, and they are usually high fashion costumes preserved for their intrinsic value in the first place, this grubby, patched and torn everyday suit of workman's clothes really gave me that sense of a link with the past.
In the dock outside was a life sized replica of the pinnace "Discovery", one of the vessels that made the historic journey in 1607. I stress life sized, as it is almost unbelievably small. Apparently it had 9 crew and 8 passengers, but I guess it was cramped at that. Well, I suppose it's no smaller than a modern yacht, but as a vessel of exploration and discovery it did seem rather inadequate.

This was the view down the street as I stepped out of my front door to go to work this morning. Snow! Lots of schools were closed apparently; our infant head had sent out a letter to say the children wouldn't go out at playtime in case they got wet.

We wrapped up warm and played out all morning!

We made two snowmen - one of them twice, because one of the naughty boys knocked the first one down. We also rolled two of what were (possibly) the biggest snowballs in the world.

In a city school we couldn't provide coal for his eyes, but by luck today's fruit happened to be carrots! Did the mums complain that their children got wet? Well, some of them did. Did we care? Well, not much...

I lied when I said I'd finished Ed's Christmas present books, as we got one of them out today. It is one of those guide books of walks, and this one purports to be "Walking Shakespeare's London"(by Nicholas Robins).
As a person who has walked the route of London's rivers already (without seeing a drop of wet until the Thames) and realising that in a city where real estate values are what they are, there wouldn't be much left to see after 400 years even if the Great Fire had not intervened, my expectations weren't high.
Still, we set off from Liverpool St station in glorious sunshine, prepared to walk in the Bard's footsteps, if not to see what he saw.
What is interesting about London is that the layout IS still there, even after all these centuries. We were soon walking down Catherine Wheel Alley, up Cock Hill and along Artillery Lane, where the Elizabethans used to go for firearms practice, in the fields outside of the city. No fields now of course, but we came across this lovely little courtyard.

We walked through Spitalfields market (where I bought a lovely set of "3 Little Pigs" finger puppets for nursery!) and on to Folgate St, where possibly Shakespeare and certainly Christopher Marlowe used to lodge. They complained that after the dissolution of the monastery nearby, a rapacious landlord was squeezing local artisans out of their livelihoods, and the once smart area was going rapidly downhill. It still seems so.
Round the corner in Curtain Rd, where the sites of The Theatre, and The Curtain, two playhouses closely connected with Shakespeare, once stood, there was certainly nothing to photograph - there seems to be a car wash where The Theatre used to be, and a 12' brick wall hiding something unpleasant on the site of The Curtain. Even the commemorative plaque was too high up to photograph.

St. Leonard's in Shoreditch was more photogenic, but of course it's a Wren church, post fire. But still housing the remains of the great actor Richard Burbage - probably the original Hamlet, of whom a contemporary wrote "Oft have I seen him leap into the grave, suiting the person which he seem'd to have of a sad lover with so true an eye, that there I would have sworn, he meant to die." Also buried here is the most famous Elizabethan clown Richard Tarlton.

Cutting through Hoxton Square, we detoured off route to the 21st century, with a quick look round the White Cube Gallery. An interesting installation of film clips of shootouts - see how many actors you can name in the time!

The last port of call was the site of Edward Alleyn's Fortune Theatre. Again, nothing to see and not such a beautiful area, but interesting to note that when they did the reconstruction of the Globe on Bankside, they used the contract for the building of the Fortune, because in so many of the details, Philip Henslowe had requested it be built "like the Globe".

We officially ended the walk at the Barbican (the walks in the book are arranged "chronologically" and this one was "the early years") but we couldn't resist walking to St. Paul's and over the Millennium Bridge to the Globe, as a more fitting end to the walk.

A good way to spend a February Saturday!