A fitting tribute after 80 years

On the end wall of our barn hang three watercolour impressions of French scenes, two are of Caen in Normandy and the other is the Place d'Armes in Calais. They are accurate, well-rendered and warm pictures. Not outstanding art perhaps but very competently painted.

The 1931 painting of Caen Cathedral (which was entirely destroyed during Operation Overlord after the D-Day landings) was bought by a young Barbara at a jumble sale for 2s 6d, the other two I purchased at auction in 2008 for Barbara's birthday.

They were painted by a British artist from North Shields near Newcastle called Victor Noble Rainbird and I've been interested in his life and work since I first came across his pictures. He was a prolific artist and lots of people in his local area seem to have a "Rainbird" on the wall.

Impression Caen 1931 - Victor Noble Rainbird
Hanging at La Basse Cour

Rainbird was talented artist before the Great War and joined up and served in the Northumberland Fusiliers, there's an excellent article about his war service produced by Tyne and Wear Museums at this link.

After the war Rainbird picked up his artistic career and his pictures were exhibited at the Laing Museum in Newcastle, the Walker in Liverpool and the RA in London. He visited Holland and, several times, France and our trio are from his French trips.

It appears that Rainbird used his paintings to pay his way through life and often seems to have produced paintings to settle bar bills or pay for his supper. He died in 1936 at the age of 49 and was buried in an unmarked grave, his estate having insufficient money for a memorial. And there his story rested for 77 years.

Impression of Caen Normandy undated - Victor Noble Rainbird
Hanging at La Basse Cour

Inspired by Rainbird's work a small group led by Dave Young set up the Friends of Victor Noble Rainbird to attempt to provide a permanent memorial to the artist at his burial place in Preston Cemetery. I made a small donation early on to this group but the breakthrough came in 2015 with a popular and successful exhibition of Rainbird's paintings at the Old Low Light Heritage centre in North Shields, donations and profits from sales of prints took the fund past the £5000 target. So, on a cold but sunny day on 8th March, 2016 - eighty years to the day after his death - the permanent memorial to Victor Noble Rainbird was unveiled with appropriate military pomp including the playing of The Last Post.

The Last Post

Chapeau Mr Young! - A good job well done.

All photos credited to Linda M. Kay

Read more here:

The Friends of Victor Noble Rainbird: http://www.victornoblerainbird.com/ 

Victor Noble Rainbird Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Noble_Rainbird

From Dark to Light, VNR exhibition at the Old Low Light: http://oldlowlight.co.uk/from-dark-to-light-victor-noble-rainbird/

More about the production of the memorial on Alison Spedding Photography's page: https://speddinga.wordpress.com/

New York - 15 of the best

..... pictures from our visit:

Ground Zero - The base of one of the Twin Towers is now a perpetual waterfall

Snow on the walkway by the Hudson River

Hot pretzels in the snow in Central Park

The entrance hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

View from the Empire State Building - Hudson River and the West Midtown area of Manhattan

Night view from the Empire State Building looking south to Manhattan

Cable tracery on the Brooklyn Bridge

Central Park and North Manhattan from the Rockefellar Plaza Building

Adam and Charlotte at the top of the Rockefeller Plaza

Walking the HighLine path in Greenwich Village

No caption needed!

The Manhattan skyline from the water

Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges on the East River

The atrium at Grand Central Station

Central Park Zoo

In a New York State of Mind

I'm not really one for in-flight films, the poor sound quality, small screen and uncomfortable environment don't add to the enjoyment for me. I do like to read the paper, preferably it's a weekend flight as the volume of readable print is much bigger. The Saturday Daily Telegraph used to be good for about 6 hours on the flight to Tokyo (now with it's advertising pull-outs and shrinking news content I doubt it would get past a trip to Athens .....).

So newspapers and music work best for me.

On a recent trip to New York - on a Sunday - I thought it would be a good idea to put together a New York playlist of songs and so as the BA 747-400 rolled down the runway on takeoff I had the opening jazz chords of Billy Joel's New York State of Mind for company.

Other songs on the playlist included:

An Englishman in New York - Sting
First we take Manhattan - Leonard Cohen
Bleeker Street - Simon and Garfunkel
New York, New York - Gerard Kenney
Fairytale of New York - Pogues/ Kirsty McColl
Downtown - Petula Clark
Ellis Island - Mary Black
Honky Tonk Women - Rolling Stones
Leaving New York -REM

Now, here's the strange thing. During the week I repeatedly found myself somewhere in a song title or lyric from my youth. Plenty of Simon and Garfunkel of course (they came from Queens - just over the Brooklyn River) but other stuff as well. In no particular order:

Bleecker Street (Passing through Bleecker Street on the subway)
59th Street Bridge Song (walking along 59th Street at the bottom of Central Park)
At the Zoo (taking the subway to the Zoo in Central Park)
The Boxer (walking up 7th Avenue - listen to the Lyrics)

It was also a pleasure to mentally re-acquaint myself with the music of Steve Forbert whilst standing in the amazing architectural space of Grand Central Station: Steve Forbert - "Grand Central Station, March 18, 1977

I could go on and on; during the week songs from Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Bernstein, The Ramones, Suzanne Vega, Lou Reid, George Gershwin all crossed my path.

Remarkable how one city has inspired so much creative energy.

Linguistic Labours

I'm not sure that some of the guys at the hockey club would agree but my French language has improved in the six years we've been here. I'm past the "what did they say in French; what's that in English; what do I want to say in reply; what's that in French; how do I say that without using the word in French I can't remember?"

One thing that wasn't taught on my language course was how to argue in French. I'm not proficient yet but sometimes I get a good run-up at a row.

After the voltage surge damage we had a company out to assess if the expensive items were repairable. Things didn't look good when it took the repairman 20 minutes to work out how to get into the fridge electronics. He then disappeared with a scrap of paper with part and serial numbers written down. And then nothing .....

So I called his boss who told me he couldn't get the part because the fridge had been bought in the UK: 

"Have you tried Electrolux France, they have the same product with a different part number?"

"I don't get my parts from Electrolux"

"Perhaps that's why you can't find the part then. Britain is in Europe you know, it's not Australia"

I did of course find the part from Electrolux and fitted it myself, the fridge works fine now.

And, of course, Britain is still in Europe as I write this ......

In between the rain .....

January has been pretty horrible here, dark cloudy skies and several rain days have battered the garden. Blessed with our really free draining soil means that we can get onto the soil pretty quickly after the rain stops.

And in between the rain the daffodils have burst into flower:

 

Lightning doesn't strike twice ...... or does it ..?

When I'm travelling I have two mobiles with me, the U.K. Vodafone one and one on the French Orange Network. Ironically the Vodafone one costs less than the Orange one to send texts in France ......

The French phone is only used to give a contact number to delivery companies, artisans and so on. So messages to it are comparatively rare. The one the weekend before Christmas from Orange was ominous as well as rare - "Due to storms in your area we recommend that you disconnect your Livebox modem". After our experience last summer, when a lightning strike fried our Livebox, our one had been disconnected before we left - so all OK there then. The email I received the next day from Nicole was a bit more worrying: "Did you leave the lights on in your house? They weren't on last night and I seem to remember they were on before." 

Kindly Nicole went in and reset the EDF breaker to restore power, checked our freezers were working and locked up again (in France one subscribes to the supply of a maximum number of kilowatts and there is a main electricity switch in the EDF supply board which trips out if too much power is drawn or there's a major fault somewhere - like a lightning strike).

When we got home ten days later the fridge was a disgusting shade of green and we soon found a number of inoperative electrical devices - fridge, hob extractor, one of the underfloor thermostats, a printer - nine in all. None of the neighbours recall a thunderstorm but some sort of voltage surge had trashed nearly fifteen hundred euros of our electrical equipment.

The insurance company were remarkably sanguine about things, after the June event we knew the drill and had all the purchase receipts ready for sending on to them. As unfortunately one of the damaged items was our printer we had to call in some favours from neighbours to get invoices scanned. As it was the second claim in six months AXA sent in an expert electrical assessor to view the items, and here's where things started to get very - shall we say - French. 

M. Zug the assessor arrived from Lorient 45 minutes early for the appointment, we had all the faulty items laid out ready for inspection with the invoices and receipts. He first spent 20 minutes reading our policy documents and trying to tell me we weren't covered for voltage surge damage; in exasperation I called Karine at the insurance agency. "Pwthhhh - what does he know? Put him on the phone and I'll put him right." was her response. Five minutes of rapid fire French later and M. Zug turned to the matter at hand and consulted our claim list - "Ah yes, a built-in fridge, that's why it's so expensive" was the sum total of his assessment of our claim. He then proceeded to type out the information on our list on his computerised assessment software (with help from me when he couldn't work out euro/pound exchange rates), asked me to agree the final total, told me what I already knew that we had a policy excess and asked me to agree the amount we would receive. No assessment of any kind of the damage, no request to assess if the items were repairable, no questioning of the value of our six year old obsolete printer and no consideration of finding out if the cheap power supply or the actual equipment had failed. Good for us but not sure what value our insurers got from this exercise, 250 kilometres travel and half a day of an electrical expert can't be cheap.

I've more to say about the repair process in a future post or two but, for now and for anyone who doesn't know what a voltage surge can do, here are a couple of pictures of blown components and burnt tracks on the circuit board from the extractor hood:

Getting a bit fitter with a Fit Bit

Walking Monday 28 December: 3.2 km (Tynemouth Long Sands)

Walking Tuesday: 11.9km

Swimming Wednesday: 1.1km

Walking Wednesday:  9.0km

Swimming Thursday: 1.30km

Walking Thursday (New Year's Eve) 13.1km

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. 

This is the first post since New Year, during 2015 I recorded manually all the walking, swimming and cycling activities I performed. Unfortunately, being a manual process, I'm a bit backlogged at present so the 2015 cumulative totals will have to wait a little longer.

At Christmas I was given a Fitbit - it's a wearable bracelet like this in case you haven't seen one: 

It's basically an electronic pedometer - a stepcounter - and it uses some data about you to calculate the distance walked and calories consumed throughout the day. It also - rather spookily - measures how long you have slept for and assesses the quality of that sleep. Of course the whole thing operates through an App which enables recording and analysis over time.

So, in the future I'll be relaying FitBit data in the blog. Not sure yet exactly what info I'll track. Here's my  weekly calorie analysis for example: 

I'm also monitoring weight and blood pressure weekly - not a hypochondriac yet but I do believe in getting as sensible amounts of information about the state of my health.