J-Fest

This year's J-FEST was in a field a few miles from Abingdon. Organisers had laid tracks across and around the side of the field to help wheelchairs.

On the main stage were some excellent local bands. In addition, there were signers to translate the lyrics and dance out the rhythm.

There was a wheelchair dancing stage nearby.

The J-Fest is a music festival accessible to all. There were lots of stalls, and activities, including people painting murals. Many people there knew Jodi, and Jodi's mum and friends organised the festival in Jodi's memory.

Lechlade-on-Thames - The Christmas Shop and Mild Death.

We began the walk through the churchyard of St Lawrences Church in Lechlade-on-Thames. There is a plaque to say that this is called 'Shelley's Walk' after the poet wrote 'A Summer Evening Churchyard' here.

The walk then followed a tree lined path beside a steam or ditch. The air was crowded with small flies and midges, a sign that Spring had arrived. Birds sang and could enjoy the easy pickings of so much food .

We crossed a wooden footbridge beside a screen of poplars.

Then followed the Thames Path back through St John's Lock, the highest lock on the River Thames, where a statue of Father Thames lay without the expected trident but with a plastic paddle.

The ground was soft and the driest place to walk was near the bank of the River Thames where we passed several fishermen. The spire of St Lawrences could be seen across the even land.

I wondered whether it was the same St Lawrence that I knew from Caterham Surrey. There are a number of St Lawrences: Saint Lawrence (d. 258), the Christian martyr, after whom all others are named; Saint Laurence of Canterbury (d. 619), second Archbishop of Canterbury... (wikipedia)

We walked under the footpath arch next to the Halfpenny Bridge, so called because until the town's people protested and got their way, a half penny was charged for going over the bridge.

Walking on from there, along the River Thames, we came to another wooden footbridge. Larger barges and river craft do not usually go beyond this point. We headed back to Lechlade over a path called 'The Seven Styles Walk' - here were no styles, just open gates separating small fields.

Back in Lechlade I took a picture of the Christmas Shop. It is open all year round, but was closed when we went by. The business first started in 1985, selling traditional German Christmas products. Nearby in the post office there were some knitted decorations and ornaments for sale - some of those  for Christmas. Christmas all year round could be an eccentricity of Lechlade.

We went inside St Lawrence's Church where there was an interesting painting 'Presented to Brigadier John Cooper by the congregation in gratitude for his ministry - August 2010'. We visited the Londis store where there were plenty of toilet rolls available. Abingdon has run out due to Coronavirus panic buying. Some locals had a broad Gloucestershire accent.  In the community library was an information centre where we learned more about Lechlade from the friendly volunteers. We had some excellent soup and sourdough bread at Lynwood & Co. There was a good antique shop and a hall given over to antiques. The lady at the desk was coughing so we did keep our distance.

I read Shelley's poem when I got home. It describes the coming of night in the churchyard:
...Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild
And terrorless as this serenest night...

Faringdon and Folly

Faringdon Old Town Hall has been there since the late 17th Century. It comprises one room on sturdy doric columns.

Faringdon Corn Exchange was hosting a large Country Market on the Friday we were visiting.

Faringdon seems a normal and very pleasant market town until you approach the Pump House where there is a stone diving helmet and some words that when you first read them do not make sense ... 'a man who never has an occasional flash'  ... 'of'  ... 'silliness' ... 'Mistrust'.

But start at the right place and you get 'Mistrust a man who never has an occasional flash of silliness.'

Inside the town's pump house museum there is more than an occasional flash of silliness.

There is an exhibition about Lord Berners who lived in Faringdon House. He was a composer , painter, and author. Besides writing an opera and five ballets , he composed the film music to "The Halfway House " in 1944. As an artist he staged at least three exhibitions in various London galleries. His writings included First childhood, The Camel, The Girls of Radcliff Hall, Far From the Madding War, Percy Wallingford and Mr. Pidger, Count Omega, The Romance of a Nose and A Distant Prospect. To his parties were invited many famous people we still know of to this day, such as Igor Stravinsky, Salvador Dalí, and H. G. Wells.

As well as being a composer, painter, and author, he also built the last ever major folly tower in 1935.

The museum has displays to remember how he dyed pigeons at his house in Faringdon in vibrant colours and entertained Penelope Betjeman's horse Moti to tea and painted its portrait.

He built the folly tower on the hill overlooking Faringdon.

He liked silly notices and there is a notice 'Members of the public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk.'

Nearby is a piano. The keys no longer play after a long time out in all weathers but you can strum the strings. Lord Berners had a small clavichord keyboard in his Rolls-Royce.

When you look about you can see that Lord Berners continues to influence the people in the town in the number of dyed pigeons and silly notices.

Pitts Rivers Museum, Oxford - Body Arts

A display of Body Arts can be found on the first floor of the Pitts Rivers Museum in Oxford.

The displays are divided into 'Temporary Arts', such as cosmetics and body painting; 'Permanent Arts', such as piercing and tattooing and body shaping; and 'Lifecycle Arts', with ornaments and dress worn at ceremonies marking: birth, puberty, marriage, adulthood, and death.

Local tattooist, Bob 'Eagle' Smith, donated some of his old equipment to the museum, including tattoo needles and a tattoo machine and inks, together with photographs of him at work in Oxford, England in the 1990s.

There were designs used by people in Nigeria to paint their bodies, using the seeds of uli plants.

Next to a variety of combs from around the world were some false eye lashes. Eylure 107 is an angled lash with a smooth, vintage finish.

A 5,300-year-old mummified body in an Austrian glacier was found with a large ear piercing, and to this day piercings are popular. From Oxford, England body piercing equipment, donated in 2001, was on display.

We may think it strange to see the cane belts used in Nagaland India to reduce the size of these men's waists but the ideal body shape continues to change. In our own culture, bodybuilding, using extreme diets and exercise; and breast enlargements, using surgical techniques, allow people to change their body form closer to their ideal.

In some places binding has been used in very young babies to permanently change the shape of skulls. In Ancient Peru people aspired to have a beautiful head shape and aimed to look a bit like the exaggerated form of the model.

Look at the museums own web site body arts to go into much more detail.

Discovered Tewkesbury

Discovered Tewkesbury at the weekend. The Abbey church is still standing, unlike Abingdon. We went to a choral evensong with some lovely singing. We were in the choir area where the monks would have sat as there was a small congregation.

Like Abingdon, Tewkesbury had severe floods in 2007. Both the River Severn and the River Avon run alongside the town, and join here.

Wetherspoons - The Royal Hop Pole - had school art work on the walls about the flood.

John Ruskin's 200th Birthday Celebration

We joined a packed church in Coniston to celebrate the 200th birthday of John Ruskin. 

There were children from Coniston C of E Primary School singing, and reading poetry. There were also children from the John Ruskin School, Coniston performing on brass instruments. They had a day of Ruskin Celebration and church was one part of it.

 
Rather than be buried in Westminster Abbey John Ruskin chose St Andrew's Church, Coniston. He lived beside Lake Coniston.

After the service, some of the congregation gathered round the wonderful Ruskin Cross for a prayer

and to lay some flowers.

"The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it."  John Ruskin.

A lot of his ideas are still very relevant today. Speaking at the service, a lady from the Ruskin Museum in Coniston  traced back some of the twentieth centuries great achievements to Ruskin's social reforming ideas: the founding of universal education, the minimum wage, the NHS and welfare state. As an art critic and painter he taught many people how to see and appreciate nature and art.

Berlin - first visit

Between the 11th and 18th of December we were staying in Berlin.

We saw many reminders of Berlin's turbulent recent history. The facade of the Anhalter Bahnhof  (railway station) has been left as it was after the WWII bombing. The rest of the building has been demolished. From here 9,600 Jews were transported from 1941 to 1945.

A Holocaust Memorial has been created on land near the old Berlin wall. The memorial is made up of a grid of concrete blocks of different heights. In the centre they tower over you and are probably intended to be disorienting.

Most of the Berlin Wall, constructed by East Germany to stop citizens going to the west, has been removed. The East Side Gallery, painted by many invited international artists, is the largest section of Berlin Wall still standing. This picture depicts Leonid Brezhnev (USSR Leader) and Erich Honecker (East German Leader) greeting each other with a fraternal kiss. It reads 'Mein Gott, hilf mir, diese tödliche Liebe zu überleben', which in English means 'My God, help me survive this deadly love'.

One side of the wall holds the East Side gallery. The west side has more standard graffiti.

The East Berlin red and green men at pedestrian crossing are featured on tourist gifts. There are also bits of the wall to be purchased in various sizes. That these have become tourist gifts does nothing to remove from some people's memory how threatening it felt at one time with the border guards and spies everywhere. People were shot trying to cross the wall or swim the River Spree.

The most famous Berlin landmark is the Brandenburg Gate. The wall ran down there too cutting it off in no man's land.

Even the Reichstag was off limits until reunification, when by a small majority it was decided to move parliament back from Bonn to Berlin. The Reichstag interior was rebuilt and a dome added. The dome has a spiral walkway that gives views down into the chamber and out across the city. This is now the place were the German Government meet.

We also visited Charlottenburg Palace (porcelain room above) and learned about the first King of  Prussia, and his wife Charlotte, who died before this and others rooms she had helped design were completed. We learned how a later King of Prussia became the Emperor of Germany in 1871, after the different German lands were united. The royal family had the name Hohenzollern. They had fairly humble origins but big military ambitions.

Berlin Zoo is a peaceful place for tourists to visit in the former western sector. On a cold day there are many indoor animal enclosures to help keep visitors and animals warm. It was the first time we ever saw a real Panda. The Male Panda (Jiao Qing) sat behind bamboo, eating the stalks. The female panda did some climbing on a rock, and ate bamboo as we watched. East Berlin made their own zoo, which still exists, and the two zoos now work together.

We also saw a lot of interesting art on our trip, both in the Gemaldegalerie,  part of the new culture centre, and in the old National Gallery on museum island. We had hoped to visit the New National Gallery shown in our 2019 guide, but it is still being built. There is a lot of building work in Berlin.

During the visit I was reading Leaving Berlin, a novel which tells of the start of the cold war and the competing Russian, American and fledgling East German agents and informers.  I finished the book on the return trip from Berlin Tegel to Gatwick Airport. In the book were place names, we had visited. That made the exciting story even more engaging.

Death of a South Nutfield Lad

On the war memorial in top Nutfield are many familiar village names and the words "Lest we Forget" our men of Nutfield.

On the 1st of November 1918 (one hundred years ago) the Surrey Mirror carried this piece... 'Death of a South Nutfield Lad'

"It is with much .sorrow we record the death of Pte. Albert Edward Joiner (“Bert”), aged 19 years, late East Yorks Regt., second and dearly loved son of Mr. and Mrs. G. A. Joiner, 29, Trindles Road. South Nutfield, who was killed in action in France on the night of Sept. 3rd, by a machine gun bullet. It was a relief to know he did not suffer any pain, as was killed instantaneously.

Showing a keen interest in gardening he entered the gardens at Nutfield Priory shortly after leaving school, and stayed there until the time of joining the Colours.

Pte. A. E. Joiner was a member of the Nutfield C.L.B., a very persevering boy, possessed of a very cheerful disposition, refined, and was greatly beloved by all who knew him.

On joining in May, 1917. he was placed at Dover in training battalion, from there he went to Bridlington, in Yorkshire, at that time being the East Riding Yeomanry. In February he was sent to Ireland, where he remained until July, and was then drafted to France, and afterwards transferred to the East Yorks Regt.

Mr. and Mrs. Joiner have received many letters of condolence and sympathy, for which they and all members of the family are deeply grateful. The Chaplain from the deceased’s battalion wrote: “Bv the time this letter gets to you you will have heard the sad news of your boy. Pte. A. E. Joiner. He was killed by a machine gun bullet on the night Sept. 3rd. and the next day we buried him in a British cemetery. We put flowers on his grave, and intend to erect a cross. The news will have come as a cruel blow to you. May God help you to bear it. You must always be proud of your boy. He died bravely doing his duty. Now he is away from the hardship and horror of war, and, I know, would not have you grieve too much for him. His comrades join with me in this sincere expression of sympathy with you."

Thanks to the https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk and Surrey Mirror for this tribute. All Rights reserved