Kent

Up bright'n'early champing-at-our-collective-bit after formal hall at Corpus, Iggy, Ben & I embarked on our cultural tour to Kent for the weekend. Our excitement wasn't the sightest bit diminished three hours later when we'd progressed 800m from the M11 on-ramp.

Made it past the Medway to Upnor Castle. Which we didn't visit. But we took some snaps in case we didn't get around to visiting anything else cultural and had to pretend in retrospect that we had.

Here the envoy poses in forest near the fine medwayside village of Upnor, just outside Rochester:

This is the garden of the Seven Traveller's Inn, from the book of the same name by Dickens. He lived in Rochester for a significant period of his life, and a number of buildings around town featured in his works.

Checked out Rochester Cathedral, the second oldest in England,

Then to Rochester Castle, a Norman keep.

Ben bought a bow-and-arrow set from the giftshop; predictably wacky antics ensued.

Hit the road again to Canterbury, found our hostel then headed coastward to Whitstable, the centre of the Kentish Riviera:

A remarkably civilised evening, like seriously amazingly, like, unbelievably civilised, i don't think i've made it clear to you how civilised it was: we only had two cocktails each at a bar in Canterbury AND we engaged in a conversation. No shouting "That's what I'm talking about" whatsoever. An appropriately abstemious preparation for a pious day of tourism to follow.

Checked out the ruins of St Augustine Abbey

then St Martin's church, the oldest Church in England, started by St Augustine (not the St Augustine of Hippo, this one was an abbot in Rome, sent to England by Pope Gregory the Great in AD597 to convert Ethelbert, king of Kent). He also started the abbey, and Canterbury Cathedral, of which he was the first archbishop:

That was pretty speccy, cool to see the Thomas Beckett murder spot and wander round the grounds.

With Canterbury done-and-dusted, we travelled on to Leeds Castle:

They have a cool maze in the garden which, having made it through to the middle, eventually, one exits through an underground tunnel.

Ben had a pretty clever idea of, whilst we were posing for a photo, knocking me off a wall into a briar patch.

To be honest, there were less half-eaten ice-cream cones in the bin than I'd hoped.

Bidding the famed Leeds swans farewell, we headed into Tunbridge Wells for dinner. Royal Tunbridge Wells is supposed to be full of Georgian elegance, natural beauty: "In Georgian times this popular spa town gained a reputation as the place to see and be seen amongst royalty and fashionable members of the aristocracy." In modern times it seems to warrant a reputation as the place to see and be seen amongst drunk chavs staggering about on the footpaths, barely able to push their strollers in a straight line (and pretentious, cynical visitors from Cambridge).

Rounded out the bank holiday weekend with a trip to London to the BBC Proms with KnA. Gershwin "Rhapsody in Blue" = great.
Bernstein "Fancy free" = fab.
Fujikara "Crushing Twister" = dismal.

And it wasn't just us that thought that.

The Telegraph said:
"Before Bernstein's Fancy Free, Fujikura's Crushing Twister sought to translate the disco DJ's arcane principles of "scratching'' to the realms of the symphony orchestra, resulting in a piece that showed how easily an unusual idea can fall flat."

and the Times:
"Crushing Twister, by the 29-year-old Anglo-Japanese composer Dai Fujikura. Hazlewood's excitable introduction about DJs, scratching, and how material would be bounced, slightly out of sync, between three ensembles, led one to expect a wild meshing of disparate sonic worlds. But Fujikura's language seems mired in the usual boring, post-serial modernist complexity, and the three ensembles were so densely undifferentiated in instrumentation that any sense of interplay was lost."

Ouch. DJ Spooky - Subliminal Strings carried off the concept infinitely better.