All this stuff about long walks and theatre: just self delusion?
A few of them put “sexy lady” in the printed pages of the broadsheet where – unlike the web version there are no photos- what does sexy mean? Do they share Nigella Lawson’s view that you should never overestimate man’s desires: it’s just food and sex, stupid. Tempt you in with the weasly words about sex then it’s Twelve Night, cocoa and
Dartmoor into life’s far distance.
What exactly defines a break point Tom wondered? When is the moment of conclusion that the nadir of unbearable relationships has been attained? Is it something about the decibel level or conversely the days of silence? Is it something of an intellectual analysis that no shared values in fact exist? Or the minutiae of annoyance: the ill-chosen top, the untidy room?
Possibly you should read the psycho-babble stuff about the inception of contempt, the sulphuric acid in your partner’s armoury. Disdain, lack of respect: if you can describe it, categorise it, does that sanitise it? What makes the most complete break point- the mundane or the cataclysmic?
We think we know the Romans. Countless books, films, plays and pieces of music have been inspired by an empire that, at its height, in AD117, stretched from the site of modern
Glasgow
in the north to the Sahara desert in the south, and from the Atlantic to
Basra
. Hollywood sword-and-sandal epics from Quo Vadis to Gladiator, as well as the BBC’s Rome, give us the impression of an empire at once brutal and noble, heroic and corrupt, bloody and decadent - an empire of slavery but also of many freedoms, of multiple identities, all drawn together in the service of Rome and its emperors. But how much do we know? It can be hard to glimpse the real empire through the histories that have survived the centuries, histories that are invariably biased depending on who wrote them, when and, above all, for whom.
Maritime
Greenwich
is a World Heritage Site. It incorporates a remarkable assemblage of buildings and objects which have great significance to British history.
By the 15th century a small palace had been built by the River Thames. A century later King Henry VIII enlarged it, and established his armoury. Of this, nothing remains above ground, but at the edge of the royal hunting grounds King James I started to construct the first building in
England
in a pure Renaissance style. The charming Queen’s House was completed for Henrietta Maria, and it will be visited on our tour - it currently contains a very rich collection of paintings belonging to the
National
Maritime
Museum
When Philip a founder chum, invited us to
Windsor
Castle
a few years ago to hear him play second fiddle with the Windsor and Maidenhead Orchestra in front of the Queen, my abiding memory of that evening was of her Majesty taking her seat a few rows in front of us. It came over me to wander up afterwards and thank her for her role in keeping
Britain
a stable democracy for fifty years. This is no light claim to fame: our fellow EU members of
Greece
,
Spain
,
Portugal
,
Cyprus
,
Croatia
and the
Baltic states
had no such fortune. Even
France
maintained a conscript army to avoid too much power in the hands of the generals.
Sleeping and dreaming is the subject of the latest exhibition at Wellcome Collection. Designed, one would think, for those who prefer going to bed with the proverbial lark to rising with it. In fact an alarming number of the exhibits are for the insomniac and relate to the dangers of sleep deprivation, about which we know more than sleep itself. The exhibition features the salutary tale of the
New York
DJ who stayed awake for over 200 hours broadcasting from a booth in
Times Square
. It was a high price to pay for fame. His life and career went into freefall and friends said that after the stunt he was never the same again.
Founded in 1968, NADFAS is an arts-based charity whose aim is the advancement of arts education and appreciation and the preservation of our artistic heritage. There are over 340 local Decorative and Fine Arts Societies in the
UK
and mainland
Europe
.
Local societies promote these aims through lectures on the fine and decorative arts in their widest sense, through study days, visits and tours and through volunteering activities, such as Church Recorders, Heritage Volunteers and Young Arts and the giving of grants.
The
London
contemporary art world – until recently a poor relative of
New York
,
Paris
and almost every other major capital – found a new internationalism following the inauguration of Tate Modern in 2000. Now that the building has been deemed inadequate to deal with its 5million annual visitors, planning permission was given earlier this year for a massive extension by Herzog and de Meuron, the architects behind the original transformation from power station to top
London
tourist destination. Like all
London
architectural projects, it is due to be completed in time for the 2012 Olympics.
A strange event took place on 15 November 1996 when a three hundredweight lump of sandstone, under escort from a detachment of Coldstream Guards, was piped across a Borders stream by a band of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. The Stone of Scone had, at least for many Scots, been happily repatriated. (Never mind that legend tells that the stone originated in Egypt and was brought to Scotland in the baggage of ‘Princess Scota’, daughter of Ramses II. The Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities is currently not, as far as is known, demanding to have it back.)
Nicholas Barber is one of our members. He is chairman of the Ashmolean museum. Founded in 1683, the Ashmolean is the oldest museum in
Britain
. The collections include the largest and most important selection of Raphael drawings in the world, the greatest collection of Egyptian pre-Dynastic material outside
Cairo
, the finest Anglo-Saxon treasures beyond the
British
Museum
and the only great Minoan collection outside Heraklion. It is located in the centre of
Oxford
and is part of the university
Arts 
