A trip to the Farne Islands

The Farnes are a group of small islands off the coast of north Northumberland.  There are 28 islands and about 16 can be viewed at high tide.  They are in the care of the National Trust and are well known as being used by St Cuthbert for meditation in the 7th century.

Inner Farne from Bamburgh beach

Longstone lighthouse on one of the Staple islands was home to local heroine Grace Darling.  She was the daughter of the lighthousekeeper at Longstone and helped saved 7 people from a shipwreck in the early nineteenth century.  She died from tuberculosis only 4 years later aged 27 and is buried at nearby Bamburgh.

The Farnes can be seen from the coast near Bamburgh and boat crossings leave from nearby Seahouses harbour.

Despite being born in Northumberland I had never visited the Farne islands until this week.  My sister Ann is a keen birder and had been to the Farnes for the first time last year and was very keen for me to go with her.

Our boat was the 'Glad Tidings' and we left Seahouses harbour at 9.30 am on a beautiful sunny day which considering the almost autumnal weather we've had in June was a lovely surprise.  The boat holds 65 people and was pretty packed.  Most of the passengers were photographers and there was some serious kit on display!

Grey seals

The first thing of note that we saw was some grey seals on the rocks approaching Staple island.  There is a colony of 3-4000 seals on the Farne islands and around 1000 pups are born each autumn.  The Farnes is one of the best places in the UK to see these seals and underwater diving trips are available.

The main reason why most people visit the Farnes during early summer is to see the colonies of nesting seabirds which come to the islands to breed each year.  There are thousands of puffins, kittiwakes, razorbills, guillemots and shags.

Longstone lighthouse from Staple Island

Our first stop was on Staple island.  The red and white Longstone lighthouse is visible from here.  The lichen covered rocks make up the bulk of the terrain and every inch of the cliffs are colonised by the birds.

There are no terns on Staple island - they were to come on Inner Farne.  We saw thousands of guillemots and kittiwakes including numerous chicks.  The shag young were almost as big as their parents.  Puffin burrows were everywhere.

After a trip around Staple island to see the impressive Pinnacle rock stacks we then headed for Inner Farne which is the largest island.  There is a chapel, information centre, Pele tower and lighthouse with cottage.  Inner Farne also has more vegetation, including docks and bladder campion.

Inner Farne lighthouse with flowering dock and terns

The highlight of the trip for me were the puffins.  You couldn't see these birds other than here during the breeding season as they simply don't come onto land.  They seemed unfazed by all the visitors and just went about their business going back and forward collecting sand eels which they take back to the burrows to feed their chicks.

Puffin

The shags similarly were nesting very close to where people were walking by.  The terns on the other hand were very aggressive and a hat was essential!  The birds had eggs and chicks very close to the boardwalk path and were dive-bombing visitors constantly.

We decided to stay on Inner Farne for an extra hour and got back to Seahouses at 5 pm.  It really was an unforgettable day!

West Indies in the summer of 76

I was 15 in 1976.  One of the hottest summers in living memory in Britain, the temperature hit 90F four days in a row in June.

I vividly remember the summer holidays that year, my twin sister & I were from a coal mining town and our parents didn't have a car so we were used to being around the house most of the time.  What kept me indoors that year was the West Indian cricket tour of England.

How wonderful it is these days to have Youtube and DVDs of films like Fire In Babylon.  I've been reliving that summer of cricket and reading a book called Grovel by David Tossell, named after Tony Greig's infamous remark that he would make the West Indians grovel.  By the end of the series which West Indies won 3-0 it was the England batsmen who were doing the grovelling.

This Test series began my life long love of Test match cricket.  I started with the best, I don't think I'll see the likes of Gordon Greenidge, Vivian Richards and Michael Holding again.

The Conformist

I rented Il Conformista from Lovefilm recently. 

It's the story of Clerici (played by the wonderful Jean Louis Trintignant), a repressed official who agrees to assassinate his former anti-fascist professor to conform in the Fascist society he belongs to.  The story is told in a series of flashbacks depicting Marcello's memories which have led him to the journey he takes towards the assassination of the dissident professor and his wife Anna.  From his morphine addicted mother to his father who is in an asylum to his relationship with a blind friend and his vacuous fiancee who he uses to plan a honeymoon in Paris so he can carry out his assignment under the watchful eye of Manganiello who is played by Gastone Moschin who Coppola would later use as Fanucci in The Godfather Part II.

The Conformist has just been released on DVD and I was looking forward to seeing it again.  I first saw it in June 1979 when I was 18 years old. Watching it again (several times), I'm amazed at how much it has influenced a generation of filmmakers.  Coppola and Scorsese and particularly the Coen brothers.

Miller's Crossing has long been one of my top ten films and the influence that Bertolucci's film has on it is really remarkable.  Not merely the 30's setting, but the costumes, set decoration, lighting and in some cases direct lifts from the film are referenced by the Coens. They surely are heavily influenced by 'the hat' here!

The cinematography in this film is simply fabulous, the huge buildings with cavernous interiors, the room in Guila's house  where the light through venetian blinds is copied in the various stripes in the scene, Guila's dress, the radiator, the sofa.  The use of colour is notable too - the warm tones and bright colours in the scenes with Quadri the professor and his wife (played with assurance by the 18 year old Dominique Sanda) which contrast with the cold blue tones of Marcello's memories of his honeymoon in Paris.

There is so much to admire in this film and it's brilliantly directed by Bertolucci.  The performances are first class, Trintignant plays the repellent Marcello with a coldness but also with touches of surreal comedy.  The two women in his life, his "all bed and kitchen" wife Guila played by Stefania Sandrelli, and the Professor's sexually ambiguous wife Anna played by Sanda are both equally as good.  The themes of identity, conformism, blindness and betrayal have never been portrayed better than here.  A masterpiece.

Tulip festival at Alnwick Garden

DeJager the bulb merchant is doing a series of Spring tulip festivals at gardens around the country including Alnwick Garden.  As a friend of the garden I try to visit once a month, and was pleased to go today to see the tulips.  The garden has recently planted thousands of tulips in the new Cherry Orchard and are appealing for sponsors to get more of the 'Mistress' bulbs planted.

The display of tulips was lovely, in a room in the courtyard.  Unfortunately the varieties on display were not named which I found rather bizarre, as DeJager had leaflets and order forms so that you could order bulbs.  How could you decide on which bulbs you wanted if the ones on display weren't named?!

Today was the first day of the festival and most of the tulips were freshly picked and tightly in bud.  Nevertheless they still made a wonderful display.

Rediscovering Karl Richter

My mother loved classical music. My sisters and I grew up listening to her LP record collection of Bach, Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart and various opera recordings including her beloved Pavarotti. I don't know where she got this love of music from, but it was always around us and we never questioned it.

I can still visualise the covers of some of the albums she had. I think my sister has most of them stored in her loft as LPs are pretty much obsolete now.

My sister excitedly emailed me recently about a programme she'd watched on Sky Arts about organ works of Bach by Karl Richter. The name was incredibly familiar to me, I remember vividly the record our Mam had of his Bach recordings. "How wonderful" my sister said, "to be able to see Richter playing the Toccata & Fuge in D Minor", which we both knew by heart. I don't have a TV, and the programme wasn't listed in the Sky Arts iplayer menu.

A couple of weeks later while surfing around on Youtube, I thought, why not search for Richter? Straightaway I found the Toccata recording. Seeing it was almost indescribable and full of emotion. By the end I was in floods of tears, remembering my mother, the beauty of the piece, and the absolutely wonderful discovery of this amazing man.

I had a week off work and in that time I've scoured the internet for anything to do with this remarkable musician. What a tragedy that he was taken from us so early at aged only 54, but he will live on forever in what he left behind. I've so enjoyed my discovery of the man and his incredible work. Long live Karl Richter!

Many thanks to Johannes Martin for his wonderful blog on Richter http://karlrichtermunich.blogspot.com/

A birthday in Newcastle

March 31 was my 49th birthday. My twin sister and I haven't spent the day together for some years, mainly because I was living in Maine for 10 years between 1997 and 2007. We decided to spend the day together this year. The weather wasn't conducive to a garden visit, which is how we tend to spend the majority of our time together these days, so we decided to go to Newcastle.

It's a couple of years since I've been to the city, despite living only 10 miles away. Our first stop was the Hancock museum which has been transformed from the old dusty and rather frightening museum of my childhood. I enjoyed the exhibits, particularly the Roman and Egyptian galleries.

On our way to lunch we stopped to look inside the church of St Thomas the Martyr which occupies a prominent position in the Haymarket and which has some very nice stained glass windows which are becoming something of a passion of mine.

We then went to the Laing art gallery and I'm ashamed to say I've never been there before. Holman Hunt's magnificent and poignant 'Isabella and the Pot of Basil' was wonderful to see, as was a gorgeous Turner, "Snow Storm Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps". I so want to go to the Tate again!

We had a nice Italian meal for lunch with a free glass of champagne in honour of our birthday. Fortunately the rain just about held off, we were lucky as the day before had been truly foul.

To end our day we visited the marvellous cathedral church of St Nicholas, again a building I'd never been inside before. Although I'm an atheist, I absolutely love these historical buildings. I chatted to a helpful guide about Charles Kempe and some of the other windows in the church. I would like to go again and spend longer looking at them. A magnificent wooden screen and reredos in the centre of the church certainly warrant more study.

Winter is holding on!

After an icy January with weeks of snow cover which is very unusual for Northumberland I have woken up today to another white blanket of snow.