December 2021 – ARKS, ADAM AND AXARQUIA

Occasionally, our teachers at my boarding school would give us projects to do during the holidays, and although these were never arduous tasks, I always resented them as intrusions into our precious time at home. Nevertheless, being the conscientious little chap I was, I always did them as best I could, as the one presented here bears testimony.

As far as I recall, this was the very first such project I was assigned, back in the Christmas new year break of 1971/72, making me 11 at the time. Certainly, my use of felt tip pens would be consistent with that dating, making these pictures exactly, an incredible 50 years old.

Looking at them now raises a mixture of emotions; of nostalgia for a happy and safe childhood on the one hand, and a reminder of the sense of relief I felt a few years later at escaping from dreary, peripheral suburbia into the city itself.

In any event, for better or for worse, here is Edgware; famous for it’s eponymous Roman road; boasting one of the oldest avenues of sequoias in Europe, being the home of George Fredrick Handel, and indisputably, “My Home Town…”

*The closest Edgware had to a cooperate skyscraper was the UK Green Shield HQ*.

*Edgware had one of the UK’s biggest Jewish communities, and consequently, several synagogues, including this – The United Synagogue – the largest synagogue in Europe at the time.*

*The parish church of Saint Margaret’s is one of the few reminders of Edgware’s picturesque village past.*

*My old primary school, Rosh Pinah, since moved to a new site, and more evidence of Edgware’s then-thriving Jewish community.*

Most of houses in Edgware (in common with several other outer-London suburbs) were built to one of two architectural “formulae” laid down in the 1930’s. This was a typical “mock Tudor” house by the building company Curtain…

*…and this, more appropriately deco style house by the Laing company.*

AND WHEN LONG-HAUL FLYING WAS ALMOST FUN

Not wishing to bore anyone with all the tedious whys and wherefores (which will be pretty obvious to many), suffice to say here, that long-haul travel – even when “turning left” onto a brand new 787c Dreamliner is something we will not do again until normal/normal returns – which probably means never.

Our recent flights, to and from the United States, to scatter my mother-in-law’s ashes, among many other essential tasks related to her passing 13 months ago would have been a sombre experience in any event, but with the added maelstrom of Covid-19 related dos and don’ts, a sad business was transformed into a sinister taste of dystopia.

But never mind all of that; these posts were never intended as platforms for my views on anything more serious than daubs of paint, poor grammar and the correct way to render chicken fat. Although, over the past two years I have hinted at my opinion on Covid, and our various governments attempts at dealing with it, I realised by the first April of the crisis, that my views were at odds with the consensus, and thus I risked being regarded as a hopeless heretic – at best! So, not wishing to alienate or offend many of the readers of these pages, I have thus far kept my feelings more or less to myself, and this post will be no different.

One of the things many of us can agree upon, is what a miracle of modern life long haul air travel used to be BC, especially if one was fortunate enough to travel at the front of the aircraft, when the getting to wherever, could be almost as much fun as the destinations themselves. However, nothing epitomises for me what we are missing from our lives more starkly now – from a UK perspective at least – than the current inaccessibility of the extraordinary lands of the Antipodes. Hence this offering of a series of my favourite scenes of Australia (Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia, to be precise), which either offer longing for a return to a normal future, or images of a golden past, lost forever…who knows?