I mentioned in a recent post that this is a time of year for tradition. The context when I wrote it was that I found myself, not for the first time, suffering a dental problem at a time of year when one can't get an appointment with a dentist. That has been swiftly followed by my central heating playing up at a time of year when one can't get hold of a plumber, again not without precedent. So, in order to try to keep warm by typing frantically I am going to revive the annual review of the year, which I couldn't be bothered to do last year. There has certainly been a little bit more to look back over this year, and thankfully quality was mostly high even where quantity was not.

Opera: I saw nine, plus a ballet, and I'm going to give top spot to Opera North's socially distanced 'Fidelio', in large part because it was the first that I had seen for a long time and because it's about freedom. I must give an honourable mention to 'A Little Night Music' in the year that Sondheim died, plus Mahler's 2nd Symphony. I know that's not an opera, but it's my list.

Theatre: I only saw four plays, and the best was 'Wuthering Heights' by the Wise Children company. I note that I also rated them the best in 2019. This production is transferring to the National Theatre in February; you should go. Incidentally, had I bothered to give my views for 2020 the top spot would have been shared between 'Kneehigh's Ubu' and 'Pride and Prejudice* (*Sort of)'. The former starred the wonderful Katy Owen as Pere Ubu, and she also featured prominently in 'Wuthering Heights'; the latter is also just about to open in London's West End and, once gain, I would urge anyone within striking distance to go and see it.

Music: A paltry two gigs to choose from, and I'm going with Martin Simpson, again largely because it was the first in a long time for him as well as me. There might be more of that line of thought in these lists.

Film: A mere three films in the cinema, and the jury has decided to withhold the prize for this year. One of the three was the Bond film: what a load of old tosh, although I did rather enjoy the action sequence in the Italian village near the beginning.

Talks: Talks mainly moved online, and I moved with them. I saw twenty nine, only two of which were in person. The best I think was one on building ventilation given by a member of the government's SAGE advisory committee; I may live the rest of my life outdoors. On a less gloomy note, I very much enjoyed the Royal Armouries talk on 'The Life and Career of Captain William Dawson RN'. The worst talk by some way was 'The Jewellery of Downton Abbey'; what was I thinking?

Books: I read 118 books, it clearly being something that one can do without leaving home. Books of the year were: for fiction 'The Good Soldier Švejk'; and for non-fiction David Hepworth's '1971' about rock music's greatest year.

Boardgames: Apart from the expansion to 'Maquis' - where I'm sorry to say that the French Resistance is not prospering under my leadership - I have only played two-player games. Of those I played 14 different games 84 times. I think I might do a separate post about which of those I would recommend. The local boardgaming club has resumed weekly sessions, and I trust that at some point in 2022 circumstances will be such that I feel comfortable in joining them.

Wargames: I think there were ten wargames played or umpired, although this seems to be the one area where my compulsion to keep records doesn't apply. They were mainly Piquet and its variants except for one game of To the Strongest! and one of X-wing. I enjoyed them all but probably for me the siege games had the edge; possibly because the rules gave a much more enjoyable game for the defender than I thought they would when I read them. During lockdown I have built up a mighty pile of new, unplayed rules and would hope that: a) I can get one or more of them to table in 2022; and b) they work half as well as these did. It was good to see Mark back on a regular basis as well.

Event of the Year: I am very tempted by the time I saw armed police intervening in a queue jumping dispute in a branch of Greggs, which for some reason I neglected to post about at the time. However, really it has to be the first wargame after a hiatus of more than a year. Just because.

I wish you all love in a peaceful world.

It's the fifteen hundredth post of the blog. I did consider doing something special to celebrate this milestone, but after 1,499 resolutely unspecial posts there didn't seem much point. Having said that, one post in particular seems to have caught someone's imagination. For the last couple of weeks this report from four years ago featuring nothing but photos of farm animals and, oh yes, some ladies tug-of-war has been getting a dozen or so views every day. There are some strange people out there.  

In common with the great majority of those previous editions, I have no wargaming related activity on which to report. The excuse this time is that the Casa Epictetus has been undergoing some roofing work. 

Colourful, but somehow still tasteful

I am very pleased, however, to be able to report that I have been to the opera, and indoors to boot. Opera North returned to live performance after more than a year with a special production of Fidelio, chosen because it is, of course, about freedom, and so would suitably mark the end of restrictions. 

Obviously they had more faith in the government than I did. Be that as it may, it was excellent. And if opera is back, can wargaming be far behind?

 "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life" - Oscar Wilde

Lockdown has so far consisted of nothing much more than sitting around eating Heston Blumenthal's Spiced Mince Pies with a Lemon Twist, perfectly pleasant without being remotely worth the money, and chuntering about Windows 10, the October update of which has disabled a number of features on my laptop. You would not believe how many tickets I had booked for events in November: ranging from Beethoven to Buster Keaton via Alan Bennett. I was even going to see 'Citizen Kane' on the big screen to mark the 75th anniversary of its release. Coincidentally, the following clip has been forwarded to me more than once over the last couple of days; people seem to think it captures the zeitgeist.

One of the minor, incidental pleasures of going to the theatre is watching the contrast as separate audiences for shows in different performance spaces converge and mingle; indeed I have written about it before here. It was with some amusement therefore that I watched the young man trying to sell copies of the Socialist Worker (a) to bemused parties of ladies arriving to see 'Thoroughly Modern Millie' at The Grand in Leeds whilst at the same time shouting (him, not them) "May must go, Corbyn must stay" (b). The reason for this was not some unexpected political message to be found in the musical (although like most love stories it is really about money and the power that goes with it - if you don't believe me then go and watch it again), but because Tariq Ali was speaking on Lenin in the Howard Assembly Rooms, which are attached to the Grand. It was naturally to the latter that I was headed.




The rooms are owned and managed by Opera North and there was a Steinway on stage. I did wonder idly whether the Russian revolution was going to be explained by means of comic song in the style of Richard Stilgoe or, even better, Victoria Wood. However the truth was equally unexpected and just as pleasurable. A pianist appeared and played the first movement from Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata as a sort of warm up, an approach to public speaking of which I heartily approve. Ali was introduced as a public intellectual (no definition of this term was provided) and much of his talk seemed to me to be spent justifying the importance of the intelligentsia in early twentieth century Russia and, by extension, to the modern world as a whole, so perhaps there was an element of theatricality in all this; convincing the audience that we were in the elite because we had listened to a bit of classical music. It worked for me.




Ali's talk was interesting and very wide ranging; indeed it wandered off the advertised subject for long periods. There was a substantial section on Operation Barbarossa for example, with the confident claim made that had Tukhachevsky not been purged by Stalin in 1937 that the German invasion would have been defeated quite quickly. I have no idea on whether that hypothesis has any substance, but I do know that it has bugger all to do with Lenin. Nonetheless, as I say, it was all rather stimulating and thought provoking.




The question and answer session afterwards was, however, a whole different thing. There was a sizeable audience, perhaps a couple of hundred people, many of whom seemed still to be living in the 1970s. The chap who put out the water for the speaker and interlocutor was even wearing a beret in what appeared to be a Wolfie Smith homage. I can't believe that those who spoke from the floor had not seen the famous satire on British Trotskyism in the 'Life of Brian', but they certainly hadn't learned from it. As far as I could make out, in their opinion, all of the world's current problems were caused by Ali's joining the International Marxist Group in 1968, only to be made worse by him leaving the IMG some years later, or possibly it was the other way round. Only two things were clear: I was the only one there who had not come with an agenda to slag off the speaker, and that everything - and I mean everything - was his fault. It was all truly bizarre, although I must say that it was also somewhat nostalgic for anyone with first hand experience of how far left groups carried on back in the day .




Wolfie was of course prone to shouting 'power to the the people' at inappropriate times. John Lennon's 1971 song of the same name was inspired by a meeting with Tariq Ali. Everything is connected.





(a) It has been a long, long time since a photograph of your bloggist last featured in the pages of the Socialist Worker. For those suffering withdrawal symptoms I can be found in the current spring edition of the One Traveller newsletter, New Horizons; less hair is involved on this occasion.

(b) With a bit more imagination he could have made that slogan rhyme.