Book Review: Blokes Up North

This was one of the books I took as reading material to Greenland. In the end I spent more time out in the freezing cold watching the amazing landscape than sitting in the warm reading.

It tells the story of how Kev Oliver and Tony Lancashire rowed, sailed and (when iced in) dragged their 17 foot open boat through the North West Passage over two summers.

The publisher's web site described them as "relatively ordinary blokes" but they were both serving Royal Marines who are typically made of sterner stuff than us desk bound types. That was probably just as well given it was clearly a spartan and demanding journey.

There were storms, ice and polar bears (of coruse) but they toughed it out, getting to Resolution where they decided that counted as close enough to the eastern end so could stop.

It's clearly written in a way that gives you a good feel for their ups and downs. The boat, a Norseboat 17.5, seemed to be just right if you want to row and sail your way through the NW Passage.

It reminded me a lot of "Ice Bears and Kotick" by Peter Webb about an open boat circumnavigation of Spitzbergen.

But how to compare these two books?

If you're interested in the NW passage then it would of course be this one to pick up though I felt the voyage of the Kotick a better read.

Boats! Boats! Boats! ... on the Thames

There is a reason why I tend to sail yachts rather than dinghies..... to avoid this sort of thing.

When its gusty on the Thames there can be rather a lot of swimming and my memories of getting the Laser upright and me inside involved a lot of bruises. Maybe that was why the sailor swam to shore for a recovery there.

A safety boat was around somewhere but nearer was the Thames lifeboat that happened to be passing by:

Also heading to shore (on another day) was the police boat, showing its flexibility and ability to get close enough to put the old bill on the Thames's muddy banks and then reverse off safely:

And here is one of the police boats in a more iconic location, down past Westminster Bridge with Big Ben in the background:

There you go.

Boats! Boats! Boats! on both Lake Geneva and the Thames.

Boats! Boats! Boats! ... in Geneva

Where are all the boats on this blog? you might well have been asking (or not).

So here are a few from a trip to Lake Geneva a few weeks ago. First up was from the small lakeside town of Morge with two yachts that looked like they thought they were racing but actually just drifting, but in the background something a bit more traditional. A spot of interwebbing suggested it is the Galère la Liberté out for an evening sail.

I spotted something similar off Geneva itself a few days later, in this case La Neptune:

In both cases they were rather a long way off and I didn't have the zoom lens. I could have waited for them to get closer but was hungry so went to get dinner.

After dinner Lake Geneva was generally empty apart from the river-busses shuttling back and forth, though the CGN old paddle steamers looked suitably "Belle Epoch":

Floating Dreams

Totally Thames has a track record of interesting installations on the river, and 2016 was to be no exception.

This time it "Floating Dreams" by South Korean artist Ik-Joong Kang which was moored between the Tate Modern and St. Pauls next to the Millennium Bridge.

Each face was built of elements showing drawings from those that fled North Korea for the South, never to return, of their lost remembered hometowns. At the top a child gazed upwards at the cathedral, lit up on the horizon:

At a time when the world seems awash with refugees, it was a moving and dramatic installation.

Bjork at the Apollo + Bjork Digital at Somerset House

Bjork came to London in September and having just got back from Iceland I was intrigued to experience a bit of that country's most famous artist.

First up was the gig at the Apollo Hammersmith, for which the pic above is the only photo available. While there were flunkies at the Admiralty House to prevent unauthorised photography, at the Bjork gig they were full on secret - or rather not so secret - police, patrolling the isles for anyone daring to pull out their phone. It was rather oppressive. At the door when they found I had actually brought a camera I was pretty much frog-marched to the cloakroom to deposit it.

I wasn't sure about the motivation for this: was it to create a "concert" rather than "gig" atmosphere where the music is the focus or was it to keep the Bjork mystique?

My seat was at the back so it felt a bit remote (in particular compared to the previous night at the Brunel Museum) and the first half was all taken from her Vulnicura album which is about her break-up so was a major downer. Her costume was lit up so in the dark glowed like a luminous jelly-fish, which was cool, though hard to see so far away.

The second half included greater variety of songs and so was more enjoyable (to be honest). All were orchestrated and played by the Aurora Orchestra, who'd I'd seen previously at Kings Place. I found this worked well and part of the growing classic / pop cross-over with lots of interesting layers.

It was good, but more in the interesting way than fun, though the audience seemed prepared to applaud enthusiastically as if at a cult meeting.

The concert was linked into an exhibition at Somerset House called Bjork Digital which I went to on a later weekend. This was "an immersive virtual reality exhibition" and at its heart were four VR pieces. In groups of 25 we were led into rooms in which there were 25 stools each with a VR headset and headphones where we'd simultaneously experience the following:

• Stonemilker: set on a beach in Iceland with between one and three Bjorks singing directly at you
• Mouthmantra: set actually inside Bjork's mouth as she sings this song
• Quicksand: sparks fly from an elf like Bjork creating a magical starscape
• Notget: a shrunken Bjork grows into a goddess

The first three all used Samsung Gear kit where you could look around but not move while the last was HTC Vive where you could move a short way.

The last two were similar and blur together in my memory: the most memorable part was the growth of the virtual Bjork from having to crouch down at the start to later on having to step back to avoid being rammed in the face by her breasts.

The Mouthmantra was deeply disturbing and really not much fun.

My favourite was Stonemilker which you can experience for yourself if you have the right kit as its on YouTube here. It was really immersive: you felt on that beach and I'd often look round to try and work out where it was filmed only to turn back and find myself face to face with Bjork.

At times I wasn't sure what I was doing there, as it felt the artist was singing to, for and at her ex partner, the video artist Matthew Barney. Some of Bjork's videos did indeed remind me of his Cremaster Cycle, which I caught at the Guggenheim NY exhibition many years ago.

There was also a room where Bjork's videos were being played in a loop with full HD and surround sound.

I did wonder if seeing Bjork's VR in an exhibition was a bit like going to an exhibition of pop-videos in the 1970s, and that in the future it will just be pop-VR, which we will experience everywhere.

But if we are heading in that direction there'll be a period of experimentation, to discover what works and what doesn't, and it is artists like Bjork that are taking those first steps.

My take away thought was this was the first time I'd used VR and felt that, yes, this is cool, I'd like to get my own headset. It technically worked and the content was interesting, rewarding even.

In particular, in Stonemilker, technology and music worked together, a sign of things to come.

The Opera Box inside the Thames Tunnel Entrance Shaft

The evening after the concert underneath the Cutty Sark it was off for another in an interesting venue, this time in Rotherhithe.

Previously I'd walked through the Thames Tunnel: constructed between 1825 and 1843 it was the first underneath a navigable river built by the father and son pair of Brunels.

The money kept running out so there wasn't enough for a gently sloping access route and instead the two access shafts were converted into entrances with a narrow ramp around their cylindrical sides. After the tunnel got taken over by the tube (and then the Overground railway (*)) the entrance shaft was disused for over a century.

Recently the tunnel got upgraded and as part of that work the shaft was converted into a performing space adjacent to the Brunel Museum. Here I heard The Opera Box perform a number of works, including:

• Szymanowski's Six Songs of a Fairytale Princess
• Butterworth's Six Songs from a Shropshire Lad
• Debussy Ariettes Oubliees
• Berg's Der Wein
• Menotti's The Telephone

It was an amazing experience. The small size of the space meant you were a few metres from the performers and the acoustics were incredible.

In the interval we had an interesting talk by Robert Hulse, Director of the Brunel Museum, about the tunnel's construction.

The Bergs was particularly memorable as the singer walked round with bottles of wine which she gave to members of the audience (almost me, then she veered to my neighbour).

Most moving was the Butterworth, particularly the last, My Team Ploughing, a conversation between two friends, one alive and the other dead. The performer was dressed as a soldier, like Butterworth himself who was killed in the First World War.

The next evening was to be a third concert in an interesting place, namely the Tower Bridge Bascule Chamber but I got distracted by another...





(*) yes I know, this is an underground bit of overground railway. London transport geeks will of course be aware that there is a place where the Overground railway goes under the Underground railway.

Voyages of the Sea underneath the Cutty Sark

As well as Totally Thames, the weekend of the Estuary Festival was also Open House London (plus Tall Ships in Greenwich - it was a bit of a calendar pile-up) and I went to Admiralty House. Alas there was a no photos under any circumstances rule (and flunkies to enforce it) so will skip that for the next event.

This too mixed an interesting location with something nautical and was a concert by Ensemble Perpetuo called "Voyages of the Sea" held underneath the Cutty Sark (above).

During the boat's controversial restoration it was raised above the dry dock to create a performing space below. I've been wanting to go ever since I heard I'd missed the band British Sea Power playing their From the Sea to the Land Beyond there a few years ago.

The young and enthusiastic Ensemble Perpetuo played pieces themed around the sea, such as Malcolm Arnold's Three Shanties and an arrangement of Debussy's La Mer. There were also three new works with the composers in the audience, the most interesting of which was Panufnik's The Upside Down Sailor which was all about the rescue of Vendee Globe sailor Tony Bullimore.

They were joined by Richard Stilgoe (doing a remarkable impersonation of Jeremy Corbyn) telling Bullimore's story, mostly using his own words. Very enjoyable, though someone should tell them it wasn't part of the Volvo Ocean race as he suggested (I was, of course, too polite).

There was also a chance to look around the Cutty Sark at dusk after it had closed for the general public:

An enjoyable concert and lovely performance space, with another the following evening...

Thames and Estuary Festivals

The nights are drawing in, I'm back in London where there are no icebergs but a backlog of posts.

First up, some pics from September when Totally Thames met the Estuary Festival.

The Totally Thames has been a highlight of the calendar for the last couple of years with a month of activities focused on the great river flowing through London. Previously had an encounter with an enormous hippo and collected some seriously old flints from the Vauxhall foreshore.

This year was only able to see a handful of events as was away for the start of the month (and the Great River Race) and also the end of the month.

In between went down to Tilbury for the complementary Estuary Festival. This celebrates the edge-lands where the Thames merges into the North Sea between banks of mud and grass via various forms of art.

One of the key sites was the Tilbury Passenger Terminal, a Grade 2* listed historic building with that romantic abandoned feel to it:

This was the site of Points of Departure, an arts programme that included talks, video installations, audio installations, the canoe Ghost to take you to the land of the dead, live music with dynamically updated score derived from sounds from an underwater microphone, video of music played on a cockle boat out in the Thames Estuary about the wreck of the London, pictures, photos, found objects and much more.

Offshore there were tugs pumping their impressive arcs of water (top) and a bell you could ring to commemorate something or other (up to you):

One of my favourites was a set of videos with music about Trinity Wharf (another fab place) by the same artist as the 1,000 year Longplayer piece currently being played at that site by Jem Finer. It had the title of 51 31'44"N 0 0'38"E which is of course the coordinates of Trinity Wharf. You can watch some of them here: there's a dream like feeling that means they shouldn't be rushed.

It was the first such Estuary Festival and I think it was a fantastic start, so hope to see it back again in years to come.


Updated: due to return in 2020

Three icebergs

 

Like a snowflake, each iceberg is slightly different.

The "Ooooh! An iceberg!!!" stage melts away like the bergs themselves but then some 'bergs catch the eye of even the most blase, such as when there's a good hole like this one:

Other times there's a fleeting moment when sea, ice and sky all align:

Icebergs are always melting and hence changing. Every now and then one will melt so much that it will become top-heavy and rotate so its best not to get too close, though the sight is very impressive.

All photos taken in Scoresby Sound, Greenland on the schooner Opal or its Zodiac.

The northern lights from deck

 As seen from the deck of Opal in Greenland.