Gold Mother

A happy event in Stationers Park: a mother duck and no less than 14 happy ducklings were seen waddling towards Weston Park primary school last week. That’s one hell of a multiple birth (and as a York University graduate, I’m quite a duck expert). A welcome and cheering stress relief from the recent weeks of living at the mercy of estate agents and getting nowhere.

Gold Mother – one of many wonderful songs performed by James at Brixton Academy on Friday night. After calling in at our friend Barry’s book launch party, we headed off for the night of our lives. How amazing that something you think you have lost forever can suddenly reappear in your life, even more beautiful than before.

But also how amazing that just when you think you have subtitled your worst ever programme, something even more extraordinary comes your way. This week it was live surgery. On the internet. Is this what the world has come to? So peed off with the appalling state of the NHS in Britain or too poor to have health insurance in the US that your only solution is to learn how to perform operations yourself from webcasts? Actually, it wasn’t quite as bad as I feared – it was a piece showing surgeons how to use a new-fangled type of stent in repairing aneurysms (to give it its full mouthful of a title: Replay of Thoracic Aortic Aneurysm Repair Featuring Cook Zenith TX2 Endovascular Graft and New Z-Trak Plus Introduction System) and so crushingly dull that you’d have switched off at the first angiogram. Learn more at www.or-live.com, but for God’s sake don’t try this at home.

REBECCA

The Big Brecht Fest

Our first trip to the Young Vic since it reopened after its rebuild and it did not disappoint - a double bill of early and virtually unknown Brecht plays. Rory Bremner's hilarious translation of bourgeois farce A Respectable Wedding was brilliantly played out by a stellar cast confined to a minuscule self-collapsing set, and The Jewish Wife, showing a woman packing her belongings to escape from Berlin in a menacing political climate in the 1930s, was so subtly tragic that it was simultaneously utterly compelling and almost unbearable. This was not the Brecht that I studied for German A-Level and it was so, so much the better for it.

REBECCA

Four exhibitions

..and four very contrasting views of London. Over the past fortnight (spurred on by the knowledge that soon we shall no longer be living on the doorstep of several world-class galleries), we’ve been to see the Hogarth at Tate Britain, Gilbert & George’s Major Exhibition at Tate Modern, Canaletto In London at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Unknown Monet pastels and drawings show at the Royal Academy.

Being more or less contemporaries with each other, I expected there to be interesting parallels to be drawn between the Hogarth and the Canaletto. Canaletto’s original wide-angle lens viewpoints of the city were perfect, fascinating and visually delightful, whilst Hogarth concentrated on the characters living within this architectural skyline, the harlots, rakes and social-climbing couples. What I hadn’t anticipated were the links between Hogarth’s witty, mildly anarchic sketches and parodies of London life in the 18th century and the massive photographic works of the oddball duo of Gilbert & George. Both use religious symbolism in their work and both have a determination that their work should be designed to reach mass audiences. Both have a fascination with the East End underworld, with sex and death and disease and bodily fluids. Whereas Hogarth stuck mostly to painting giant boils on the faces of syphilitic whores and philanderers, Gilbert & George take bodily fluids to whole new levels, examining them under microscopes and filling walls with humungous turds.

Can you make sense of what Gilbert & George have tried to achieve over the past 40 years from this colossal retrospective of their work at Tate Modern? I’m not entirely sure, but I definitely feel closer to understanding them than I ever have before. There is a bleakness and isolation in their Dusty Corners series that many Londoners experience on a daily basis. The Dirty Words images of ‘70s graffiti, with the vibrant scarlet lashed onto the black and white palate, hit you more directly in the gut than punk music. There is poignant loss and grief in the homage to their friends who fell like flies to AIDS in the ‘80s. Their recent focus on the symbols of religious extremism is chilling and thought-provoking to the point that you felt bereft that their final Six Bomb Pictures, produced specifically for this exhibition and partly as a response to the July 7th attacks, was consigned to a corridor outside the exit, as it just seemed so important, so now, so in-your-face relevant, that you wanted it to blast at you from all sides of a giant room.

The Monet exhibition contains only a few pastels of London but I mention here simply because whenever London life has got me down, one walk over Waterloo Bridge at sunset, looking at the views which have changed immeasurably since Monet painted them yet retain his sense of openness and light, reminds me of what makes this city great.

REBECCA

Yorkshire bound

Finally, finally, Dave has found the secret skeleton key that allows people into the impenetrable fortress that is senior management in local government. The excruciatingly gruelling recruitment processes he has been through over the past year is something that only he can write about. Suffice to say, what can you do when time and time again you’ve been told that you gave the best interview on the day, did the best verbal and numerical reasoning tests and gave the best presentation, but still haven’t got the job because another candidate already did the same job for a different council?

He has been appointed as Performance and Outcomes Manager for North Yorkshire County Council, based in Northallerton, which means that we are going to move to York, the city where I did my undergraduate degree, and which has a giant soft spot in my heart. A strange step back in time to cake in Café Concerto, matinees at City Screen, snoozing in the Museum Gardens by the river, ale and folk music at the Maltings and dodgy ska bands at Fibbers.

Soon, we shall no longer be CrouchEnders. Soon, we shall be able to live in a three-bedroom house with a garden and two kittens of our own, rather than a one-bedroom flat looking out at Fluffy the cat playing in the park. Our flat, incidentally, has just been valued at 310,000 pounds, which means that it would be completely beyond our budget to buy now and that the London property market has finally gone completely insane. But to our advantage at last.

I am desperate to leave London, but sad to leave London. By the time we move, I will have lived here for eight years, first in Clapham, then Tooting, then Earlsfield, before marrying Dave and settling in Crouch End. I love Crouch End. If we could have afforded a house here and had the lifestyle that we were continuously reminded we could not afford, I might have stayed forever. I get a kick out of being bohemian, of anonymously rubbing shoulders with celebrities, of Indian tapas, bento boxes, Lupa pizzas and badly named Thai restaurants, of simply enjoying that indescribable London buzz whilst feeling you're in a green and leafy village. But I also need to have a garden I can grow vegetables in, to have enough space to have the piano that has sat idle in Bishop’s Stortford for over 15 years, to have the option to have pets and children and a guest bedroom. I need to not go on the Tube on a sweltering summer’s day. I can’t procrastinate my life any longer. I have to give it a go.

Two years on...

Flowers in memory of Mum at the Bishop's Stortford Methodist Church yesterday.

None of us can quite believe it's been two years since we lost her. Grieving is a process that never leaves you; it lurks beneath the surface whilst you put a brave face on your daily life.

A rare appearance in church for me, but it was nice to catch up with some of Mum's old friends, who were all pleased to see me. One couple lived in Crouch End many, many years ago on Weston Park and Ferme Park Road and seemed entirely shocked when I said that houses on Weston Park now sold for well over a million pounds. They remember it being somewhat less desirable. I bet they almost wished they'd stayed now. Weston Park is one of my favourite streets in London; I love the trees, the semi-Dutch style gabled roofs, the colourful tiles in the porches and the fact that each house has original painted stained glass windows in its front doors. If I had the time and the permission, I'd photograph them all and publish a book of the prints.

Mum, wherever you are, we all still miss you so much.

REBECCA