Very excited! I was hoping to find a composer group in London and this one does – it sounds – pretty much what I want: meetups to talk through new works and problems and occasional special events focusing on a particular topic. Yay!
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Yup. Oil tanks. They’re going to be part of the new development there and this was the last chance to see them before building starts. One of them’s going to be an auditorium – will be interesting to see how that turns out – interesting acoustics! We weren’t allowed to take any photos but I took some hopefully nice shots of St Paul’s etc from the balcony of the members’ loung afterwards. Also went to see the Pop Life exhibition which was pretty interesting.
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at lunchtime. I went the other way along Brick Lane, back towards Spitalfields Market, then turned off and looked at the church close up. They do a lunchtime service on a Tuesday. Maybe I’ll go along someday.
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Djeli’s got all excited and wants to do some bookbinding, so we went off to Shepherd’s bookbinding supplies in Holborn where I actually managed to not buy anything at all – but could easily have walked out with pretty much everything in the shop – so many delicious papers! Djeli got a heap of stuff – self-healing mat, bone folder, two types of glue, paper, all sorts of things. Next stop was Blade’s Rubber Stamps, where I enquired about a Stravinsky-esque rolling manuscript stamp, but alas they don’t seem to exist and they can’t make rolling stamps to order – something about it being very difficult to get the rolling bits. Then on to Cornelissen’s art shop near the British Museum, which I’ve wanted to visit for a very long time. Yum! Again, I could have bought out the shop, but contented myself with a nib holder, a special music manuscript nib (which works better than the one I had in Sydney which blopped on everything – given that music is all about blops on lines, it’s more helpful if the lines don’t provide their own blops!), a calligraphy nib (cos I was already buying the holder and I’ve been wanting to get back into calligraphy but all my equipment’s in Sydney) and – of course – a bottle of ink. I managed to find some waterproof calligraphy ink, which I consider a bit of an achievement 
Oh – and a daylight simulation bulb too. Then we moved on to John Lewis where I bought knitting needles with which to knit up my mama’s chenille yarn into a scarf, and looked at Anglepoise lamps for future (not-too-distant-future) reference. All in all, a very successful day!
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They conveniently just transferred by SPNM site login and just sent me my new login details, so I went for a wander around the place. Found a few interesting-looking opportunities and sent off a few emails for more detail
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I’ve heard a lot about Tumblr floating round on the internet and it sounded quite interesting as a place for accumulating all one’s assorted randomness in one place. I’m not sure what the potential audience for it would be. I suspect it might be more useful as a way for me to keep an eye on how dull I’m being, but chi.mp didn’t turn out to be particularly interesting or useful and I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with that. Tumblr seems to cover more ground and results in more of a native feel when combining streams from various services, so we’ll see. http://caitlinrowley.tumblr.com.
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After a productive morning’s work and my friend’s physiotherapy appointment, we drove out to Abroath where we had a spectacular afternoon tea at Sugar and Spice – a teapot full of tea, little sandwiches (I had chicken, my friend had ham), simply enormous and amazing scones with superb raspberry jam and cream, plus a small strawberry tart, a raspberry/white chocolate/caramel slice and two shortbread biscuits. We finished our scones and then declared ourselves stuffed to puss’s bow so we had to ask for a doggy bag for the cakes – they looked too good to waste!
And of course a walk was in order to deal with the aftermath, so after buying a few small treats from the sweetshop section for djelibeybi, we wandered along the seafront and up into Arbroath before buying some Arbroath smokies (smoked fish – mackeral maybe? very tasty) for tea and heading home. Lovely!
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I’m staying with a friend and collaborator of mine and she was going to this seminar, Who’s Afraid of Artistic Research?, on practice-based research, at Dundee Contemporary Arts, so I decided to tag along. Some interesting presentations, lots of notes taken. Brain is now some sort of soft, smelly cheese.
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Went to the Shropshire Hills Discovery Centre to see their mammoth, then to the Museum of the Gorge. Both pretty good. I think the Shropshire Hills one was probably a bit more interesting. It had a fair bit on the geology and earlier history of the area. And, of course, a mammoth!
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Today we visited Boscobel House and the Royal Oak (yes, the one Charles II hid in from the Parliamentarian troops, although what’s there now is actually a descendent of the original tree. You can even buy your own Royal Oak sapling! Ah, the initiative of English Heritage ) and then went on to Moseley Old Hall in Staffordshire, which is where he went after leaving Boscobel. Both were totally fascinating. And wonderful to see proper priest’s holes!
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