Fox. Pictures. Fox.

Map of the Magical Fox Territory

Fox Parkour!

Tom, our Fox Poo Man.

A Young Fox With A Rules Sheet

Fox Tail Construction

Talking To The Magical Fox! Oooooh.

We played a fox game. It was a success. 52 kids played even though it rained heavily for half the time we had. I came home and passed out asleep.

I should mention that the lovely fox costumes in the parkour photo and the one of the girl holding the information sheet came from The Fox Project, a charity devoted to helping and rehabilitating foxes in the area. If you want to go check them out they can be found here.

I went to yoga.

I have never felt so much like a wet noodle. (This is not me. This is just what I did.)

Promenaders

Last week I went to four Proms over the course of seven days. For those that don't know, the Proms are a series of concerts that happen every summer at the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington. They are truly epic with a concert happening every night, sometimes twice an evening and with afternoon concerts on Saturdays. Extraordinary music, extraordinary performances, and the chance to see people you wouldn't normally be able to for a totally reasonable price. (I can't tell you how bummed I am that I missed Steve Reich. Man.) The concerts are broadcast on BBC radio 3 and some of them are filmed for television as well.

Royal Albert Hall is a giant tube of a building, and for the proms the centre circle of seats are taken out and the resulting flat floor space becomes the arena for standing room tickets that you queue up for and then pay £5 for on the day. The proms are named after the standing promenaders that fill up the arena. (Pronunciation Tip: promenAHders not promenAYders)

Last Thursday Meredith played her first ever prom as part of one of her trials. Being the good and dutiful friend that I am, I agreed to come listen and stand for the duration of the concert. I arrived about half an hour before the concert, jumped into the little queue, paid my £5, wandered past a cellist warming up on the staircase ("Nowhere else to sit!")  and then wandered back and forth trying to find the door to the hall (I expected it would be propped open, it wasn't. I felt more than a little stupid when I eventually figured out that just because the doors were closed, that didn't mean that they were locked...), up another small set of stairs and ta-dah! The arena.

Royal Albert Hall is a little overpowering. Ornate and large and filled with people. I hunkered down in my chosen floor spot, but it wasn't long before I realised that I knew the man over there to the left with the little round glasses. Peter conducted the baroque ensemble that I performed with a bit last year and he is a lovely guy. He has a season ticket to the proms and shows up nearly every night over the summer.

Season ticket holders have their own queue and have a guaranteed spot in the arcade as long as they show up at least 20 minutes before the show begins. This is significant when the lines are super long and wrap around the entire block since only about 1,000 people can fit in the arcade. (Or 700? I've heard conflicting accounts of the capacity.) Season ticket holders, it turns out, are their own special breed.

When I went to Peabody my favourite game to play during audition week was, "guess the instrument." It worked best when they weren't carrying their instrument and you had to guess entirely based on looks and how they moved. (Best. Game. EVER.) Sometimes specific instruments were difficult to pick out (harp, flute, and singer have only subtle differences) but I had a 100% success rate with guessing the genre. Jazzers look significantly different to orchestral musicians, and early music geeks have distinctive hair. (I'm so not even kidding about that.) My point with all of this is that Peter claims you can pick out Season Ticket holders. (More or less, some of them are tough if they work in offices and have to wear a suit.) That being said, if the fellow in question has a lengthy beard and is wearing a cycling outfit: that's a season ticket holder.

Being new to this whole environment (Thursday was my second Prom ever, I went to one last year but that is it.) I asked Peter to explain some of the Prommer culture. There's a passel of hardcore prommers who all have season tickets. They stand up at the front, stage left. At the end of the interval they stand up and, with their chests puffed up tio the sky, chant in awkward and weirdly scanning unison: "Arena. to. audience: promenaders. will be. collecting. for. musical. charities. after. the. concert. So far. you have. donAted. over. (Wednesday it was £40,000) pounds.  Thank you."

There are weird little regulars' tics as well:

You can get season tickets or day tickets to stand up at the top of the hall in the gallery as well as in the arena, ("Why would you do that? You can't hear anything from up there!") and whenever the lid of a piano is opened, say for a piano concerto, then the arena hollers, "heave!" and the gallery responds back, "ho!"

If the concertmaster then gets an A from the piano instead of from he oboist- then everyone applauds.

There was, for many many years, a fountain in the middle of the arena. This fountain has been removed this year and there are some people who are not pleased. These people also happen to be season ticket holders of good standing and lengthy service, so they've started a petition. Some even wear T-shirts with the fountain printed on them. Peter, being the crotchety old man he's not old enough to be yet, is stubbornly against signing the petition.

As Peter was explaining the ins and outs of the Proms, another season ticket holder joined in our conversation. Alex is a Classicist. His PhD has something to do with the god Aries and associated war gods. Alex is nocturnal and wakes up in time to come to the concerts, so he talks about getting lunch after the show.



On Wednesday the London Philharmonia was playing, so I went to that as well because I don't pass up opportunities to see Gwen perform. I had been having a lovely picnic with friends in Kensington Gardens (I learned how to bowl for cricket!) and then leisurely walked over to the hall intending to check out what the programme was going to be. Except the line was unexpectedly long and an hour and a half before the concert already went around two corners and halfway up the third side of the block. Did I mention it was raining and I didn't have an umbrella? I was very wet when I made it in, but I still made it.

My first summer in Britain I had the opportunity to play a Handel Opera in a residency programme out in  the countryside somewhere. It was delightful and a powerful learning experience; being completely immersed in baroque recitative meant that for the first time I understood it, and how to play it and how the form of the music seriously affected how the bow needed to be used and where the emphasis of the phrases were and all that. It was fabulous and I got it.


This week of concert going has resulted in a similar realisation- as soon as the Philharmonia started playing the penny dropped- orchestras sound different to each other. I mean, I knew that, but I didn't GET it before that concert started. The basses are amazing and there were all these textures that I could pick out and hear and they were smiling and in to it and it was totally delightful in a way that was unique to that week.

So that's what I've been up to.

Foxes, the game.

Most of Hide & Seek is up in Edinburgh right now for a big project for the fringe, but they've got a game on Saturday for the Hayward Gallery- so I've been brought in to run it. (I can't tell you how thrilled that makes me.) The game is for some unspecified number of families (or adults, but probably families) in the afternoon. I'm preparing for somewhere between 50 and 80 groups with the option to expand significantly if we need to.

The game is a sort of naturalist fox hunt. There is a fox who magically can turn into a human somewhere in the Southbank centre. We know what the boundaries of his territory are, but we're not quite sure where is earth (den) is. Can you help us? Foxes mark their territory with scent and faeces markers. They also mark important landmarks within their territory. Find some poo and dissect it, hopefully what they have been eating will give us some clues as to where they are currently. Oh, and his foot prints look like this...off you go.

Today I needed to pick up quite a lot of odds and ends for what has turned out to be rather a crafty game set up. It was great fun, and quite a lot like a treasure hunt looking for all the things I need. (still don't have fake flowers...will continue to hunt tomorrow.)

Something it would have been good to keep in mind:
Meters and Yards are quite significantly different. I now have three METERS of orangey brown fake fur...This is a ridiculous quantity.

At the end of the game when the earth has been found there will be a craft table with supplies for making fox tails to take home with you. It turns out that construction paper is difficult to find in London, particularly if you want only one specific colour and not a rainbow. So I was delighted when, after dejectedly finding absolutely nothing of use in the craft store, I went to the bookstore next door and found a bin filled with rolled up pieces of thick, brown packing paper. Which is perfect  for what I need. And totally unexpected. Also, they had sidewalk chalk. Best store ever. Also, what? You're a bookstore!  

In addition to making fox tails, players will need to dissect the fox poo that they find. (In order to discover what the fox has been eating to aid in locating them....this totally makes sense. Go with it.) So that means that A) I had to make quite a lot of salt dough to be used as fox poo and B) I had to figure out how to make it brown.

You know what people don't seem to sell? Brown food colouring. So I bought, along with 5 kilos of flour and bunch of salt: cocoa powder, soy sauce, onion gravy granules, and instant coffee. It's been exciting discovering what sorts of weird chemical reactions happen when you try to combine all of that together. So far the best in terms of colour has been cocoa powder mixed with a bit of oil and then kneaded into salt dough which has been made with coffee instead of water. It's a perfect colour, but unfortunately REALLY difficult to knead. Which I'm not particularly interested in considering how much of this I'm making. More experimentation proceeds apace.

My hands are currently covered in the lingering smells of soy sauce and cocoa powder with a just a slight hint of onion gravy.

It's gross.

Best Shopping Trip Ever

I'm in FRANCE

Gwen's family are doing a house swap, just outside Chicago for just outside Paris, and I am the lucky duck who gets to horn in on the vacation. I took the Eurostar this morning (less exciting than I had expected. It's a train. There's a long tunnel. Whatever.) and arrived to smiling faces at Gare du Nord. Today we wandered around a bit and took a bus tour! I loved the bus tour!

The audio guide on the tour suggested that it was possible to purchase video cassettes on the Champs-Élysées. I would like to suggest that perhaps the audio guide has not been updated recently. The narrator was delightfully emphatic and alternated between chatting about things to our left or right (you may notice the Eifel tower in front of you...no, seriously, she said that.) and playing a piece of music that both Gwen and I were certain we'd played but completely failed to identify.

I took some pictures.

I'll share them with you in a moment, but first let me tell you that I declined the offer from a nun to take Gwen's and my picture. In some ways I regret declining that offer from a nun, but on the other hand I was having way too much fun attempting and then failing to take self portraits in front of famous Paris landmarks.

Here, let me show you:

Gwen and I in front of the Arc de Triomphe.
What, you can't see it? Oh, right. Sorry! The zoom was still too far in...

Gwen and I in front of the Arc de Triomphe.
Um, okay, so the angle is a little bit off. 

Gwen and I in front of the Arc de Triomphe
Eh. It's alright. Not the most amazing photograph ever, but all of the principal players are represented.

Some thoughts on the Eifel Tower: 

1. It's brown. Did you know it was brown? 

2. Somehow, in person, it is significantly more industrial looking than I expected. 

3. And less pointy. 

I had gained some skill by the time we actually stopped by the Eifel Tower, and am almost pleased with these ones: 

The zoom! Don't keep it all zoomed in! Also, change the angle, this is never going to be a good picture. Your head is in the way. 

Ze Tower! (Is it rude to write in a fake French accent while sitting in a gorgeous house in Fontainebleu? Probably.)

It worked! A self portrait that worked! With an important landmark!

Some notes about my clothes: I'm wearing a coat. I'm clearly in Paris.  It is mid-July. Pssht. 

And it was a bit windy. 

ps. The spell check on blogger is currently set to French. Currently 98% of this entry is highlighted due to misspellings.

Harrow Suzuki Group

The final Harrow Suzuki school concert was this morning which means that now all of my school year things are finished with. The little ones all wore fancy dress (costumes) and looked adorable. (I'm hoping that one of the group photographs will wend its way to me!) My favourites were the two boys who had substantial plastic helmets as part of their attire, because how do you play the violin with a helmet on??

The younger group sang a princess song with lots of actions and a pirate song with lots of jumping. They were excellent. We've been practicing them a capella because I'm not so great with the piano, but the pianist who was accompanying the violin portions of the concert decided to help us out as well. That was great except that at the beginning of the first song we turned out to have begun in two completely different keys. It took a minute for us all to work that one out and start again. Oops! Embarrassing! Fortunately Suzuki parents (or at the very least THIS group of Suzuki parents) are the nicest people ever so they just chuckled and we carried on.

The older group did a rhythmic vocal warm up that they had written new words for, a dancing song with actions and “ai-yi-yi”-ing, and pease pudding hot in 4ths. Thank goodness for the piano in the pease pudding song; we always get there in the end, but this time they were able to sing the 4ths straight away. A relief since this was, after all, the concert. Phew.

I have a great fondness for any number of these students. They're clever and focused (more or less) and nearly all of them are hilarious goofballs. One of the girls was sat directly in my sight line during the violin pieces and for one song proceeded to follow the line of the music with her face. Does that make any sense? She was squinching her face all up and then popping her eyebrows up to her hairline following the melody that the violins were playing. Now, if I were a responsible adult I probably would have silently shook my head to get her to stop. But I'm not. So I joined in. (And hoped it wasn't *too* obvious!) After the concert her mother laughingly asked what the pair of us monkeys had been doing. (Tum ti tum....nothing, geeze)

I'm keeping this group until I leave because I love them so much.  

Birthday Week!: Mommy Edition

It's birthday week here at londoncasey, and I've just realized that because I've been titling all of these posts with what I actually call my relatives- that means that this one is titled "Mommy" and though I'm not 100% certain that I wanted the internet to know that I call my mom 'Mommy', well, meh. Let's go with it. (She typically gets called "Betsy" by those who know her.) 


I'm leaving London.

My visa is up in mid-November and though I have spent most of this year trying to figure out how to stay, I  couldn't manage to find a method that would both work (you know, legally) and feel right. So I'm heading back to America and I am (ever so tentatively) starting to get in to the idea.

About a month ago, when this decision was really made and I closed the doors on the half options that were still floating around- I talked to Laine and *FREAKED OUT* about things like...phone bills. And health insurance. And the price of food in America. Because I've not really dealt with those things in the US, only in the UK. (She promised me that I would be able to figure it out and then forwarded a link to a freelancers union in NY. She's an excellent sister.)

At the end of this month I will be done with all of my contracted work, though the tykes may continue to pull me in for supply/substitute teaching the first couple months of school. What this means is that though my income drops dramatically come September, I do have this glorious gift of time coming to me. And it feels like a good bookend in a lot of ways- I showed up in London (and, in fact, started this blog) with a whole month of time on my hands, a travel card, and a sense of exploratory adventure. Now I get the chance to leave like that as well.

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I'm done with teaching for now. I'll be moving in the middle of the school year and it's not something I've been particularly excited about for a while (you may have noticed the diminishing number of tyke related posts). It very well may be something that I come back to, but I shouldn't think I would look for classroom teaching positions in America. (For one thing, I really really don't have an education degree.)

I'm done with the bass. I don't think I posted this to the blog, but I don't own a bass any longer- the one I had been playing in London now has a happy home in Norway and my American bass is helping out the Seattle Youth Symphony.

And maybe I'm done with London. (Maybe just for this round.)

Things I still want to do before I move back to America
1. Go punting. Andrew is moving to Oxford in October, this may become his responsibility.
2. Do some more rambling. There's an awful lot of the country I've not tromped through yet, and some more tromping needs to happen.
3. Go to Kew Gardens. I still haven't made it there yet, which is ridiculous given how much I like plant museums.
4. Have a massive birthday party of goodness. I did a bouncy castle last year, this year needs something new.
5. Do some European travelling. I'm going to France (finally) in, oh, a week! I'd forgotten it was so soon! But I want to see Berlin and maybe Hungary too.
6. Go camping! I want to burn things and sleep outdoors and get really, really muddy.
7. Get my English finances in order so I don't worry about having messed something up once I'm far away again.

You know why this list isn't longer? Because I do the things I want to in London. I go to improv class every week and I have a marvellous yoga teacher, and I get to be involved in all of these cool and exciting games and I walk in a London park at least three times a week, and every time I get on a bus I sit on the upper deck (and very often in the front), and I wander over to Trafalgar Square and squee at all of the squee-ing Harry Potter fans just because it is there and goodness me I am blessed. Not least because everywhere I go I am surrounded by some pretty extraordinary people.

Lucky, lucky, lucky me.

I'm going to miss here. But maybe it's time for something else.