Ukrainian Festival

Today there was a Ukrainian Festival in Potters Fields.   It started at mid-day, but I had a reading group meeting that morning, so didn't arrive till later. 

I arranged to meet a friend at Southwark Cathedral, which was one of the few landmarks we both knew and could be certain hadn't changed - with so much being pulled down and rebuilt these days, you can never be certain that something that used to be there still is.    But Southwark Cathedral is unlikely to be pulled down for quite a while yet!

As we wanted to have something to eat, we had a look in their restaurant, and it was, as I remembered it to be, rather like a gastropub, with a limited menu aimed at the sort of people who like gastropubs.  I don't.

So we set off to find somewhere else that we both liked.   I'm fairly easy to please, providing it's vegetarian, but my friend is much more fussy - she likes roasts and English breakfasts, and will occasionally try Chinese, but everything else tends to be dismissed.   We passed one cafe where they did English breakfasts, but she declared it was too small and clautrophobic, so we went on, until we reached Potters Fields.   As one would expect, there were plenty of food stalls, selling what looked like delicious Ukrainian food, including things like potato pancakes with onions, but they were £6, and my friend declared whe wasn't paying £6 for cheap things like potato.    So it was back to the little cafe we'd passed previously, as there didn't appear to be anything else around that was open on a Saturday. 

There was a stage, with continuous music, and an area where a group of men in Ukrainian costume  gave displays of acrobatics, sword fighting, etc, although it was a far from ideal day for that sort of thing.   It wasn't actually raining, but the ground was sodden, and they must have got everything rather dirty, including themselves - half the time they were bare from the waist up.

I wasn't terribly keen on a lot of the music, although I enjoyed the dancing.   It was largely modern Ukrainian music rather than folk, with a lot of scruffy looking performers.  Maybe they were good if hyou liked that sort of music, but in the case of much of it, I didn't.   Pop groups tend to be much the same everywhere, and they were obviously aping western pop music which could originate from anywhere, and had nothing specifically Ukrainian about it.   The folk music, on the other hand, was very enjoyable.

There were a few stands selling rather expensive Ukrainian good, such as peasant blouses and wall hangins, but nothing very exciting.   One got the impression that the Ukrainians in London, in contrast to the Russians, were rather poor.   Few furs and expensive clothes were in evidence, and many of them wouldn't have looked out of place in the East End.    It definitely wasn't the Russian New Year in Trafalgar Square.

My friend left about four o'clock, but I stayed on a bit longer, in case there was anything interesting coming up on the stage.   But when it looked as if the rest of the programme would be Ukrainian pop, I decided to leave.   Apart from that, it was getting a bit cold, and the crowds of Ukrainians were also thinning out.

Captain Phillips

Another free ticket from the Daily Telegraph, this time for the new film Captain Phillips, which is based on a true story of an American ship hijacked by Somali pirates off the coast of Africa.

With Tom Hanks as Captian Phillips, the quiet, confident American Captain, and an asortment of Somalis as the pirates, it was a tense thriller, well-acted, well-scripted and very plausible to anyone who reads the news - unsurprising, since it was based on a true story, although I'm not sure what bits were fact and what were fiction.   Suffice to say that the fact that Captain Phillips' ship was hijacked and that he survived was fact, but what went on in between may have owed a lot to poetic licence.

It did, however, raise some intersting questions.   Should ransoms ever be paid to Somali "Mr. Bigs", who will used the millions extracted from Western countries to purchase arms to be used against them?   Should merchant ships travelling in East African waters be armed, so that they can defend themselves?   Should they travel in a convoy or with and armed escort?    Who should be prosecuted - the actual pirates, who get very little out of it, or the warlords/gangsgters who make millions but never do the actual dirty work?    

The film didn't seek to answer any of these questions, but they were obvious things that would occur to anyone watching it.

Samuel & Elizabeth Pepys

A very interesting lecture at St.Olave's Church in Hart Street in the City, on the marriage of Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys.  

They were an interesting couple; he married her when she was very young, and they had no children.   He liked other women, though it would appear that his relationship with them, for whatever reason,  went no further than just liking them.   But that did noty stop him constantly chasing them.

Elizabeth Pepys was an intelligent, forceful woman - today she would probably have had a successful career, but in those days her life revolved around little but looking after the house and keeping her husband happy.