Things we’ve been doing

Aline writes: We’ve been doing lots of things lately, but haven’t been blogging as much as usual, so I thought I would catch everyone up on a few of our recent activities.

We happen to have a BBC studio right around the corner from our flat, so we got tickets to attend a radio show taping of “With Great Pleasure,” a show that focuses on one person who talks about their life using favorite pieces of prose and poetry. The literary excerpts are read by an actor and actress. Our show featured John Simpson, a BBC commentator who is quite well known here. He picked an interesting array of literature, from Alice in Wonderland to the poem "Digging"
by Seamus Heaney. Other choices included non-fiction from war correspondent Martha Gellhorn and a favourite novel of journalists, Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh, as well as a song from the Marx Brothers. Simpson has led quite an exciting life as a war correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he had some interesting stories (plus a few withering remarks about BBC management) to tell. Our instructions, as the audience, were to act naturally – make noise where we wanted to, as they wanted the broadcast to sound like a live audience had been there. There were only a few mistakes made by the readers, who simply corrected themselves so it could be edited later on. We were told by a fellow audience member who was much more experienced in attending these events that the radio shows were the best to attend, as the television show tapings are quite long and repetitive with multiple camera angles and takes – our radio show, which will be broadcast as a ½ hour show, only took about 45-50 minutes! We will certainly go again.

We went to another lecture at the Museum of London yesterday on their
latest archeological dig at Shoreditch Park in London. This dig is part of the WWII anniversary celebrations, as Shoreditch Park is a blitz bomb site of 19th century houses. It’s a special dig since they have invited the community to participate, and lots of the work is being done by schoolchildren and volunteer adults. There has been a lot of publicity about the dig, and so they are able to also collect oral histories from people who lived in the area, who have stopped by the dig. I thought the most interesting part of the lecture were the questions and comments by the audience, many of whom had lived through the Blitz as children, and had really interesting comments about the V1 and V2 bombs (such as how much worse the V2 bombs were since they didn’t make any noise coming down), and other bombs which were exploded above the ground which were also devastating. The amount of archeology being done in and around London is phenomenal!