The day after our visit to our old home, my brother and I drove to Suffolk. (Well, he drove. He's the one with the car.) This wasn't a random trip: our grandparents lived in Suffolk, and it being a while - years in my case - since we had visited their and my father's graves, it seemed like something we wanted to do, and something we should do together.

Perhaps bizarrely - though it seemed perfectly normal to me - we took with us our mother's ashes. My brother had brought them from Oxford and they had sat in my dining room overnight; the cat had played with plastic bag containing the urn.

We had thought we might scatter a handful of the ashes over father's grave, but in the end we didn't: it was a wet, gloomy day and it didn't feel right. (I believe it is also illegal, though that wasn't actually part of our consideration.) We hadn't wanted a ceremony, but in the event it felt so unceremonial and gloomy we decided to do this at some other time, if at all.

I was surprised how unemotional I felt looking at the graves - I think I was expecting more of a reaction.

We didn't stay long, driving a short way up the lane to look at the house that had been my grandparents', which had changed very little. Of Tudor origins (I think), there is probably very little that could be changed from the outside. It was tempting to walk up the drive and peak through the windows, but it is a long drive to have to run down once the natives have been annoyed...

We had lunch at a nearby pub. Not the nearest - surprising, since it was the pub that our father used to escape to. Whilst I know I must have been there before as a child - and knowing the pub's name very well - I had absolutely no recollection of the building or its location at all. I had a couple of pints of beer (I wasn't driving, after all) and steak and ale pie for lunch - suitably stodgy pub grub. The pub was very busy for Monday lunchtime and its rural location: the carpark was nearly full, and the kitchen overwhelmed with lunch orders, so our food took ages to come.

After lunch we went on a wild railway chase. My brother wanted to explore a local railway museum: the "Middy" - the Mid-Suffolk Light Railway. Curiously, the railway didn't seem to run near any large villages or towns, which may be why it closed in the early 1950s (more than a decade before Beeching. It cut across country, a branch line from the London to Norwich mainline, without going anywhere. During the war it was used to supply ad hoc airfields with armaments.

The museum was closed - it is only open on holidays and weekends. (Curiously, every event they list includes a real ale bar. They take their railways seriously in Suffolk.) We poked about on the platforms, and I saw a sign advertising Hadfield's fertiliser in the waiting room (the railway's traffic was largely agricultural). Another old family business we knew nothing about.

There is also a family connection to this railway: our grandfather used it as the model for a branch line in a novel.

One of the railway volunteers saw us and came over; I was expecting to be told to go away, but he couldn't have been more hospitable. He had a broad, rustic Suffolk accent which I hadn't heard for years. He opened up the shop and my brother bought some stuff.

A successful day. I slept off the lunchtime beer as my brother drove back to London.

On Sunday my brother and I walked across Hampstead Heath to have lunch with an old family friend, and we walked past the house in which we grew up.

Around the corner is a blue plaque which I hadn’t noticed before, denoting that John Constable had lived there. I knew he had lived in Hampstead – there are a lot of sketches and paintings – but I had believed he lived on the top of the hill, near Fenton House. Clearly not.

Some years ago, when I returned to London after my first period in Edinburgh, I was exploring a bit of the V&A that I didn’t know – a picture collection – when I saw this picture by Constable.

I hadn’t seen the picture before, but I recognised it instantly: it was the scene across the road when I was growing up. Three tall elms on a little pocket of Hampstead Heath, cut off from the bulk of the heath by a busy main road. It hadn’t changed much since Constable’s time, though the elms had grown old. My brother and I played cricket beneath their boughs.

The trees were damaged and fell – or were felled – after the “hurricane” of 1987: now, without their shade, the area is covered by low scrub.

What is still there is the tall beech tree opposite our old house. This was the first thing I photographed when I got my first SLR in 1974. (I think I still have the negative, somewhere, in a box full of old negatives...) The new owners, whom we chatted to, were worried that bits of this tree would fall off and hurt someone. (Or, as my brother pointed out as being more likely, their Range Rover.) They want to get the council to lop some of its branches off. I think it is a beautiful tree, and I hope they don't succeed.

(I could be wrong, of course: maybe the elms Constable painted weren't the same ones I played beneath. But I am pretty certain.)

It occurs to me that there are people who read my journal who may be interested in going to this meeting at the House of Lords.

From an email from Unlock Decomcracy:

With the House of Lords Reform Bill announced in the Queen's Speech yesterday, the campaign for a democratic second chamber passes yet another hurdle.

We've never had a better chance to sort out this medieval anachronism; and the defenders of the status quo have never been more desperate. So please come to our meeting in Parliament on 23 May to show your support:

Elect the Lords - The Next Step
23rd May 5.45pm - 8pm
Committee Room 10 - House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA

http://action.unlockdemocracy.org.uk/page/event/detail/publicmeeting/jt5

I'm planning on being there.

At a recent talk at the RSA, Matthew Taylor told a story of going to his first meeting of his local Labour party. There were lots of boring procedural discussions; under AOB, he asked if they could discuss ways to attract new members to the party. "Oh," he was told by the old hands, "we tried that, but new people only come for one or two meetings and then we never see them again, so we don't bother any more." Taylor didn't go back either.

It is nearly a week since the GLA and London Mayor elections, the only contests which were held in my area (elsewhere, there were lots of local council elections).

I have campaigned before - in the last general election, and for last year's referendum (not a party matter, and I put in quite a bit of work).

I don't like campaigning, but I made a promise to my local GLA candidate last summer that I would help her campaign. (I think political parties have social events in the summer just so they can nab unwary volunteers when the weather is good.) When she sent out an email asking for volunteers,

Dawn will be knocking on doors in Wood Green, alongside Bridget Fox, another of our London Assembly candidates

I thought it was time to keep my promise.

And so I spent an evening campaigning for the local LibDems in early April. It was a couple of days after the London conference, where I has been impressed by many of the speakers (keep an eye open for Yahaya Kiyingi - I hope he goes very far!), so I was feeling pretty fired up, and it was the day that the London manifesto had been published.

Campaigning was a truly unrewarding experience. The main purpose was putting leaflets - "surveys" - through voters’ doors on behalf of the sitting MP. The survey was badly written with leading questions: I was shocked at the quality of the material. And whilst Dawn and Bridget, the GLA candidates, might have been doing something to do with the London election, but I wasn't. I felt I had been conned.

There was little interaction with voters, though this may have been a good thing: the first person I spoke to spent ten minutes ranting about the coalition. A Labour voter who had voted LibDem in the general election (so not much of a Labour voter, then), he called our MP a "cunt who's fucking George Osborne”, and he wouldn't accept that any good at all had come out of coalition - not even that the LibDems ameliorated the effects of a pure Tory government.

The other people I spoke with - and there weren't many of them - were polite, even friendly - but frankly not bothered about politics on a cold, damp Monday night.

Afterwards, all the volunteers went our for a meal. I chatted to the very youthful local party office manager, who was looking for people to help with the campaign for the GLA elections (ironic since that's what I thought we were meant to be doing that evening). He said they needed lots of volunteers; I said I'd happily help, but leafletting seemed a waste of time and knocking up (calling on voters on the day of the election) was worse than useless - I was sure there were more productive ways to use my time and skills. He told me to look out for the emails asking for volunteers.

Which I did. They were all asking for people to go leafletting and knocking up. Worse, they were all very much last minute. It all felt very haphazard and disorganised.

I didn't do any more campaigning.

It may be that I shouldn't bother campaigning; or maybe I should only campaign for things that I really feel are important, like last year's referendum. The London mayor and GLA I don't really feel are important. At least, I didn't think there was any chance at all that Brian Paddick - who I thought was excellent - would be able to break the two party mayoral contest, however important it might be. And I am still not really sure what the GLA does other than hold the mayor to account.

Or perhaps - perhaps I should wait for post-politics - Politics2.0 - to kick in: post-partisan. We live in hope.

Via Liberal Conspiracy...

Just follow the instructions!

There's a debate about photography at jazz gigs over on LondonJazz. A lot of people don't like it - understandably. It is a topic that has been on my list to write about for a while...

Here was my comment:

It is not professional v amateur photographers: it is people who show consideration to others in the audience against those who believe they have a right to disturb others.

I frequently take photographs at gigs. I believe I am sufficiently sensitive to the music to minimise disturbance to those around me: my camera's screen is switched off so there is no light pollution, the autofocus aid is switched off so there are no red dots illuminating musicians, I don't hold my camera above my head to get in the way of those behind me, nor do I stand (unless it's a standing gig!).

I don't take photographs in quiet passages with my SLR, I NEVER use flash (musicians hate it - it momentarily blinds them, dreadful if they are reading the music), I try to time my photograph to the beat and, most importantly, if I feel I will disturb anyone, I don't take don't take the picture. If it is apparent I am disturbing those around me, I stop.

If possible (ie small gigs!), I ask the musicians if they mind me taking pictures - I have only once been asked not to, because the musician in question wanted to control copyright of his image, and I happily complied.

Several musicians have told me how much they appreciate the photos I have taken: several have used them on their websites or CD covers.

I have frequently been disturbed at gigs by those given official sanction to take photographs - you may call them professional, but their attitude to the audience is one of disdain: they move around during numbers, get in people's way and make a lot of noise. They often appear uninterested in the music.

I could - maybe should - have added that if anyone asks me to stop, I do. It has only happened once. Years ago, using my old (non-digital, heavy, loud) SLR, I was taking pictures at a gig. The stranger next to me asked if I was actually going to take any - I had taken about 30, but she hadn't been aware of the shutter at all.

There is a certain hypocrisy about venues asking people not to take pictures and then letting "professional" photographers wander around taking pictures.

The fourth Jazz in the Round was last week - the third of the series I've been to (here're the first and second...).

Another three diverse bands. The first, World Service Project were loud, contrived and really not my cup of tea.

The second act was John Russell, apparently a stalwart of the free guitar scene. I'm not a fan of free guitar - I once walked out of a Derek Bailey gig (I found it completely unlistenable to!) - so I wasn't expecting to enjoy this set. I was wrong - it was completely engrossing. It was pretty melodic and rhythmic, though completely improvised.

The headline act were the Arun Ghosh Quintet. I saw them back in November, where they were pretty lively and fun. In the more intimate surrounding of the Cockpit, their energy made them really powerful.

Mixing jazz, rock and south Asian rhythms, with an electric drone running much of the time, this was immensely engaging and enjoyable. The band worked really hard - Ghosh said he was exhausted after the gig.

The energy and power came from the music, too: at one point, Ghosh had the quintet play acoustically, and proved they didn't really need amplification in this space. This was wonderful music - a great gig.

It is just over a year since Talisker moved in. He remains incredibly cute. His claws remain resolutely sharp. My scars remain.

Since I reorganised the tv and electrical stuff, he has had a new place to sit: on a piece of electrical kit. He occasionally tries to play with things on tv, too. This is simulataneously cute and annoying.

I think I may have posted this before, but it is such a good cover I had to do so again...

I can't quite get my head around the Conservatives' right-wing and their "alternative Queen's speech".

If they persuade their leadership to dump the coalition agreement, what do they hope to achieve?

Are they really seeing signs of a desire of the electorate for a shift to the right? That would explain why the Conservatives were trounced in the local elections by the Labour Party.

Or perhaps they are hoping to piss the LibDems off so much by going back on their agreed agenda that the coalition will fall. Leading to a general election. Which, on current views, Labour would walk.

Do they actually want to be in power?!