Britain From Above seems to be more than usually focused on cross-platform consumption, divided into two minute chunks with pictures and extras online as well as being available on HDTV. Alas two minutes isn’t enough to really dig into any one item but some are interesting - I was intrigued by this glimpse of Lord Abercrombie’s well-meaning but disastrously ill-conceived vision for post-war London:

An extraordinary untold story unearthed from the archives by BBC Radio 4 - how British fascists released from internment after WWII started up again and were fought in the streets of Dalston (near where I used to live) and elsewhere by Jewish militants who styled themselves the 43 Group. The initial group included (mostly) ex-servicemen, five women, and a 17-year-old Vidal Sassoon. That fascists in Britain continued to spout poisonous anti-semitism (extracts were included on the program) even after the details of the holocaust began to be revealed is truly shocking to me.

I’m in the Crouch End Festival Chorus and our upcoming concert - on a Saturday in the evening and repeated on a Sunday at 15:00 in the afternoon - promises to be particularly good. It’s a series of a cappella pieces including the rather tricky Spem in Alium by Tallis which involves splitting the chorus into eight choirs dotted around the church we are performing in.

If you want to hear the kind of singing we are capable of there are several clips of recent performances on the chorus’ MySpace page.
Hope you can make it!

I am rather amused by my local paper’s story about it with the headline Earthquake Shakes Haringey too which went on to indicate nothing was damaged, nobody hurt and that almost nobody even noticed it happened. For more on the quake from where it was noticed check this out.

I bought a freeview box (UK digital TV across the airwaves) a few years ago to act as a backup to my cable TV. Within a year it had broken. Since then I moved house and thought I would try again. I bought a pretty cheap set top box (the Philips DTR 220) and an even cheaper antenna but I didn’t anticipate any problems. We’re close to the centre of London and on top of a hill, 87m above sea level. By sheer coincidence we are also just over 2Km away from Alexandra Palace where the first British TV signals were broadcast from (the antenna is there still but it doesn’t broadcast TV any more I don’t think). However, when I plugged everything in I could barely get any channels at all (and that by wandering around the room clutching the antenna).

I’m kind of stuck with Sky in any case as I get my broadband cheap from them as well, but it would have been nice to have had an alternative. I might be able to get Freeview properly with a roof antenna but I don’t much feel like spending significant sums on something that is just meant as a way of watching one channel while recording another without investing in Sky+ (another £100-£150).

Will things get any better once we go digital TV-only in 2012? Guess I’ll have to wait and find out…

I recently got five free tracks from iTunes (Londoners with Oystercards see here) and thought I would buy Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Unfortunately, on some CDs it is divided into lots of tracks < 1 minute long, each costing £.79, while on other discs it is on a single track… but because of its length you can only download it if you buy the whole album (£7.99). Bah!

as my ‘Facebook friends’ will know already, I am going to be singing in a revival of John Foulds’ A War Requiem at the Royal Albert Hall, 81 years after its last performance there. Lots more about the composer and his music is available from the links below. Personally I wouldn’t say it is a masterpiece and there are some odd touches in its 90 minute length but I think it would be worth a listen, particularly live so you would get the full impact of the five (!) choruses plus orchestra.

It is probably not too late to get tickets if you are so inclined but if you can’t or won’t make it, it will be on BBC Radio 3 from 18:30 to 20:00 (local time) and streamed live on the Internet. Chandos is also releasing a two CD concert recording (in SACD format in fact if you have a very fancy CD player).

More links than you probably need or want about Foulds follow:

BBC Radio 3 (to hear the concert live)

Telegraph Foulds profile inc. interview with Patrick Foulds (the composer’s son):

Profile of Foulds and his work in the Independent – it’s more colourful and plays up Foulds’ eccentricities.

The head of Radio 3 on Foulds

Simon Heffer (a Telegraph columnist) on Foulds

BBC news short video item about Foulds inc interview with conductor and a very brief clip of the assembled choruses singing.

Thanks to the rather handy Edwin C Bolles collection of historical and topographical London documents I just read this rather cheering quotation about my neighborhood (Highgate) from a 129 year old guide:

[John] Norden, whom we have quoted above, bears testimony to the healthiness of this locality. He writes: “Upon this hill is most pleasant dwelling, yet not so pleasant as healthful; for the expert inhabitants there report that divers who have long been visited by sickness not curable by ` physicke ‘ have in a short time repaired their health by that sweet salutary air.” Indeed, the place is still proverbially healthy, and therefore has been chosen from time immemorial as the site of hospitals and other charitable institutions. It is worthy of note that Defoe, in his “History of the Plague,” records not a single death from that fearful visitation having happened here, though it extended its ravages into and beyond the northern suburbs, and even as far as Watford and St. Albans; and his silence is corroborated by the fact that during the continuance of the plague only sixteen deaths are recorded in the register.

This is the last Google Ad I ever expected to see - and it doesn’t seem to have been sent to me because of any particular email as I didn’t have any emails open at the time I read (or does Google Mail present ads based as well on some kind of aggregate of all of your mail?)

Alas the only languages other than English of which I have a useful knowledge are French and a smattering of Latin so I may not be much use to them. Then again, perhaps if you believe Yes Minister the French are our real enemies all along?

It’sa pity - I was a big James Bond fan when I was a kid…

London Walks for your MP3 Player is what it says - there 15 areas of central London covered (so far). So much more handy than carrying around a guidebook. For an alternative - a single downloadable package of 15 sites plus a map - see iaudioguide (which covers a number of other European cities as well). I heard about it via a roundup of such guides at Londonist - a (rather patchy) commercial blog about all things London.