Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

We got up at around 08:30 and got dressed ready to walk to the park and watch the start of Coventry parkrun. As we were leaving we noticed some huge helium balloons in the drawing room — a big 4 and a 0 and unicorn with a rainbow mane — clearly the results of a dawn visit from my niece!

The park was lovely but cold and we arrived at the monument in good time. As we were walking there — A walking a bit slowly but unaided — we were overtaken by someone on crutches, who then, at the start, asked someone to take a photo of him for posterity, while A noted sagely that he was going to pay for it later. We watched the start and waited for the leading runners to complete their required two laps of the course, noting the first woman, first dog, and first pushchair. With the weather positively baltic, we didn't wait for all the finishers — we didn't even stay long enough to see the man on crutches complete his first lap — but instead headed home for a shower and tea and hot cross buns for breakfast.

Once my parents had put the lunch on — the carnivores were having slow-cooked lamb — we pottered until my sister and family arrived at half-past eleven, with my niece and her family arriving shortly after. There was much cooing over the balloons — the children loved them and the unicorn was a particular hit with my sister — before a round of blinis and prosecco.

Lunch, when it came, was excellent: I had cauliflower cheese, spanakopita, and lemon potatoes cooked with the lamb while the others had the same, just with added meat. For pudding we had an amazing croquembouche made by my dad. He hadn't made the profiteroles himself, but he had done everything else, filling them with cream, making the caramel, and constructing the cone of piled pastries — the whole thing was really impressive and capped off the meal perfectly.

After lunch, A&I went for a walk round Earlsdon, both to stretch our legs and, in my case, to escape from the slightly overwhelming number of children. The wind was still very cold, but we were largely sheltered by houses and it wasn't too awful. We got back in time for tea and cake — A is off chocolate until Easter and I passed on it out of solidarity — and a fun time was had by all, with much discussion of my sister's forthcoming celebratory holiday to Cosa Rica.

With SM heading back to Paris at midday, we decided on a gentle morning in Coventry. We went the back way, along Greyfriars and past the Goldern Cross, where our next-door neighbour hid in the cellar 75 years ago on the night the centre was firebombed. Walking past the old cathedral, we noticed that St Mary's Guildhall was open to the public and we went inside for a look around. It was fascinating: I don't think I'd ever been there before.

After checking out Coventry's medieval roots, we moved to the Herbert where we went to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition. The photos were all outstanding and the sheer dedication required to get some of the shots was inspiring; some of them took hundreds of hours of patient waiting to capture, but the results more than rewarded the investment.

Once SM had left for the airport, the rest of us went to the Farmhouse for lunch: VY was determined to have curried okra before he left, so we dropped in on the way home for an Indian. The food was excellent — the tarka dhal was particularly noteworthy — and we had a very nice time, baring a minor glitch when VY got charged in dollars rather than euros — or possibly the other way round, I'm not sure — when the credit card machine defaulted to the wrong setting.

Escaping early from a post-xmas party, pater took a phone message from someone who seemed to be looking for a person whose first name was Al. After eventually determining the person was looking for mater, he took a message and rang off. I asked whether the call had been local. He said it was from the physio. Amused, I pointed out that he hadn't accounted for the Coventry accent where the name of the letter L is prounouced a bit like al and more like aow, as in the last syllable of miaow. A bit unfortunate, given that he's lived here for the last 40+ years...

Its the fiftieth anniversary of the consecration of Coventry Cathedral and R3 have been marking it with a series of programmes. Giles Frazer presented a piece on the history, reconstruction and legacy of the rebuilding, while tonight's concert was a live relay of Britten's War Requiem from the cathedral.

(The R3 web site mentions that the concert was broadcast live on the radio and simultaneously on European television. I wonder if this means broadcast as a sound only signal or whether it means televised with actual pictures and everything?

ETA: It seems there is a televised version, available here to UK viewers)

Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Coventry that destroyed the centre and the ruined the cathedral.

I really liked the first episode of Home Time, Emma Fryer's sitcom about a young woman's traumatic return to Coventry to live with her parents. It was like a comedy version of one of my recurring nightmares...

Having had the foresight to ask the concierge for a map and some running routes last night, I got up early and went out to take a better look at Sidmouth by daylight. Following the advice of the woman on the desk, I took a spin through the Byes — a lovely riverside park — up to Sidford and back before taking in a few long, leisurely loops around the town. All in all, I ran a little over 7 miles in a slightly disappointing 45 minutes, although in my defence, I was held off slightly on my pace because I wasn't familiar the route and didn't want to run out of juice before getting back to the hotel.

Grabbing a shower, I caught breakfast with my colleagues before we all trooped off to the hotel dining room for a morning of team coaching, which confounded my initial expectations. While a couple of people came out with what seemed to be very much the party line, there was a refreshing candor and lack of cynicism to most people's contributions. Yes, some people expounded on their pet peeves somewhat interminably, but most people seemed to have a common consensus of what was wrong with the organisation at present and useful suggestions about the sorts of things that could be done to improve it.

In the end, I came away with positive feelings about the whole event. Yesterday's stuff, which might have been just a fun day out, was actually structured to get us all talking to each other — not something that usually happens in the office, where everyone tends to focus on the things that happen within their own little silo — and to get us all trusting each other. Without that, I'm not sure that we'd have been half so candid as we were during today's seminar session. But equally, I don't think the fun day out would have worked without the seminar to reinforce it and to give us the feeling that we have a commonality of purpose, that management were willing to listen, at least, to some of our shared concerns, and that we might possibly be able to make things better by doing small things for ourselves to improve the situation. So, while I might not have drunk the Kool-Aid, I rather more convinced than I was beforehand that the whole thing was worth doing.

Plus, rather to my amusement, most of the Brandscape people — the company who arranged all the events — were fellow Midlanders and one was even a Coventrian, born and bred. Not that this in any way biases my judgement...

I've just noticed something very cool in my current comic, God Save the Queen by Mike Carey and John Bolton. The way Oberon is posed in Mab's boudoir exactly mirrors the pose of Satan in Epstein's St Michael's Victory over the Devil, right down to the position of chains. A nod to Carey's Lucifer perhaps? Whatever. It's a wonderful little detail.

After my sister decided to cry off, we abandoned our plans to go Easter egg hunting at Charlcote Park and went for a country walk instead. We had a pretty good time, despite pater's poor map reading skills and my getting mildly sunburnt, and I managed to take a few photos of the local wildlife, including this fine looking creature:

Very elegant.

Why is it that Coventry has thousands of branches of Pound Kingdom and Hyper-mega-value-mart but nowhere with a decent selection of classical CDs?

Of the various music stores, HMV has a token classical section which seems to sell nothing but compilations of the best adagios ever of all time, and while Virgin claims to stock music by a variety of composers, each section only seems to contain ten copies of the same CD — fine if you want to buy Mozart's Requiem, not so good if you want to buy the Jupiter symphony.

In the end, I accepted defeat and went to Birmingham, which proved to rather more catholic in it's musical tastes.