The Day grew small, surrounded tight
By early, stooping Night —
The Afternoon in Evening deep
Its Yellow shortness dropt —
The Winds went out their martial ways
The Leaves obtained excuse –
November hung his Granite Hat
Upon a nail of Plush –
Emily Dickinson
The parish magazine is always touch and go – will I get the material, any material, in time? Will I get too much? Will the photocopier work? Or the duplicator? This month total breakdown of my own computer nearly scuppered it. And its absence set me thinking:
If you ask the question “Who invented the computer?” inevitably someone will reply with “It depends what you mean by a computer” and equally inevitably it’ll turn out to have been the ancient Greeks – with the Antikythera, a mechanism used to predict astronomical events and the years when the Olympic Games would occur. Or you could put forward the Abacus, though some would argue that’s more of a calculator. But the father and mother of modern computing are probably Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace in the mid-19th century. I won’t bore you with any more details – it’s all available online. But how did we progress from those early machines, early HUGE machines, to tiny electronic monsters without which most of us can’t live our lives? Who’s the slave and who’s the master? It felt a little like being on holiday, not feeling obliged to “log in”, to check emails every so often, to see who’s doing what on facebook – I seemed to have more time for other things. How did this come about? If you feel computers are taking over your life, or your children’s lives, I recommend “The Winter of our Disconnect” by Susan Maushart (available on Amazon, provided you have the means of getting online!) in which she describes the changes that ocurred in her family when she pulled the plug.
But, of course, I couldn’t stay disconnected for ever – there’d really have been no parish magazine for one thing, and without it I wouldn’t be able to tell you about all the exciting things happening this month.
Saturday November 10th sees our annual “Come and Sing” Requiem to mark the Remembrance weekend – this year it’s Brahms – and on 11th we have, as well as our Remembrance Eucharist, an evening Remembrance Sequence at 4.30pm
The following weekend, the 17th, is the Christmas Market AND the Verdi Requiem – this one part of the Hampstead Arts Festival; on 21st we have an evening of Silent Movies and Improvisations; on 24th another HAF concert – this time the Elgar Cello Concerto and Vaughan Williams’ Dona Nobis Pacem. But we’re not finished yet for the Hampstead Players are working tirelessly on Gogol’s “The Government Inspector” which they’ll be performing from 29th Nov to 1st Dec. Four of these events feature in our now yearly “colour supplement”, the others will be found further on in this issue. And to make it easier to read, for this month only, the Diary follows immediately on this article.
So now you’re either thinking hurrah, dreary November isn’t going to be dreary at all, or feeling quite exhausted – and I haven’t even mentioned the C4WS Night Shelter which starts on 10th and runs through to mid-January, rubbing shoulders with no less than 3 concerts along the way.
Our charity reps have been busy too and throwing the rota out of the window three of them have come up with reports this month – CARIS Haringey, PSALM and Island Hospice. All worth a read – after all these are the charities who benefit from our fund-raising and at a time when the list’s due for reconsideration, it’s good to know what they’re all doing.
A final thought – did you know November was Peanut Butter-lovers month?