Hearing pieces of music that triggered distant memories

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IT IS CURIOUS how hearing certain pieces of music can sometimes revive memories hidden away in the back of one’s head.

Last night, I attended a concert by a percussion ensemble held at London’s Royal College of Music in South Kensington.  The first work performed was a rendering of the overture to Rossini’s opera “The Thieving Magpie”. It had been arranged for percussion (including marimbas) by Clara Smith, and sounded remarkably similar to the original orchestral version. Hearing it, reminded me of the Academy cinemas in Oxford Street, which, sadly, closed forever in April 1986. In the 1970s, I used to attend these art-house film theatres regularly, seeing films that were too obscure to go out on general release in the UK. Before the main film started, it was preceded by a screening of a cartoon, usually one made in one of the Soviet Block countries in Eastern Europe. One of these cartoons, which I remember seeing many times, had as its background music, the overture to “The Thieving Magpie”. Hearing the overture last night at the concert, revived pleasant memories of attending screenings at the Academy.

After the concert interval, we were treated to a performance of “Six Marimbas”, a piece by the minimalist composer Steve Reich (born 1936). I love his compositions, and have attended several concert performances of his music. Hearing the “Six Marimbas” reminded me of my first encounter with Reich’s music. That was in June 1986 at the Union Chapel in London’s Islington. For some reason that I cannot recall, I attended a concert held there as part of Reich’s fiftieth birthday celebrations. And the composer was there, and performed. I remember watching him performing his “Clapping Music” (first performed in 1973). He was one of the duet making this music. I had not thought about this concert until the marimbas began playing his music last night.

That hearing music can trigger memories is not unusual. Much has been written about music and memory, but how it is that a particular tune can unlock memories is far from having been satisfactorily explained.

Above and below the ground in London’s Guildhall

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THE GUILDHALL ART Gallery is one of London’s many excellent places to view paintings, often by well-known artists. Until 20 September 2026, it is holding an exhibition of paintings by Jock McFadyen, who was born in Scotland in 1950. He studied art first at the Glasgow School of art, then at Chelsea School of Art.

The exhibition at the Guildhall is called “Underground (and Surface)”, and is displayed in three rooms. One of them, the first you enter, has McFadyen’s large scale paintings of Underground (‘Tube’) stations. These works transform the mundane aspects of these everyday sights into dramatic works of art. The views and details that so many commuters see twice a day, and probably hardly notice, become strangely significant when viewed in McFadyen’s pictures. The room housing these pictures is not silent. Recordings of Underground train sounds, collected and recorded by Jem Finer of The Pogues (a popular music ensemble) provide a background to the paintings.

Another large room contain McFadyen’s images of London above ground. Like the Underground paintings, the overground ones are large. They depict views of London in ways that make ordinary scenes become extraordinarily beautiful. One picture is curious because it shows a line of buildings in Bethnal Green standing beneath a portrait of Mont Blanc covered with snow.

The third and smallest room contains some of McFadyen’s portraits. They are competently executed but not nearly as visually exciting as the works in the other two rooms. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, the exhibition is worth a visit.

Pelicans in the park in London

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THREE HUNDRED AND sixty-two years ago, the Russian Ambassador to King Charles II donated some pelicans, which were put into St James Park, an open space redeveloped by the king. Before that, during the reign of King James I (he was on the throne of England from 1603 to 1625), the land, which is now the park, was home to exotic animals, including camels, crocodiles, an elephant and birds (kept in aviaries). These animals can no longer be found in the park, but the pelicans remain.

Since their introduction in 1664, over 40 pelicans have resided in St James Park, but none of them produced any offspring until this year, 2026. The first of four chicks hatched on 17 May. The park authorities have no idea which of the pelicans is or are the parents.

Today, 6 July 2026, we visited the park, and were lucky enough to find one pelican taking a stroll near a footpath. As for the other adults, which can often be spotted on a rocky island in the park’s lake, there were none to be seen. The chicks were also out of sight.

The exciting birth of pelicans occurred within a stone’s throw of The Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. Apart from spotting pelicans, St James Park is a fine place to see a wide variety of other waterfowl.

Art aspiring to unite and liberate people of African descent

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THE BARBICAN ART Gallery is holding an exhibition, “Project a Black Planet”, until 6 September 2026. Filled with a variety of superb artworks by a range of artists, it is well worth seeing. It also includes artistic videos, photographs and documentary material,

The exhibition’s theme is the art of Pan-Africanism. The gallery’s website describes Pan-Africanism as:

“… a broad spectrum of political and philosophical movements advocating anti-colonial resistance and transnational solidarity amongst peoples of African descent.”

Wikipedia has an article on Pan-Africanism, which noted:

“As a philosophy, Pan-Africanism represents the aggregation of the historical, cultural, spiritual, artistic, scientific, and philosophical legacies of Africans from past times to the present. Pan-Africanism as an ethical system traces its origins from ancient times, and promotes values that are the product of the African civilisations and the struggles against slavery, racism, colonialism, and neocolonialism … Modern Pan-Africanism began around the start of the 20th century. The African Association, later renamed the Pan-African Association, was established around 1897 by Henry Sylvester Williams, who organized the First Pan-African Conference in London in 1900 … Pan-Africanism is a movement that aims to encourage and strengthen bonds of solidarity between all indigenous peoples of Africa along with all peoples of African descent. The belief extends beyond continental Africans with a substantial support base among the African diaspora in the Americas and Europe.”

The works on display illustrate the ideas and realities of this movement well in a variety of visually intriguing ways.

The artists whose works are being shown come from Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, North America and Western Europe. Some, such as Chris Ofili, Marlene Dumas, El Anatsui, William Kentridge, Wilfredo Lam, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Lubaina Himid, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye are artists whose works I have seen before. The other artists were new to me, but most of their works are highly accomplished and visually fascinating. Oddly, the well-known artists Yinka Shonibare and Hurvin Anderson were not represented.

The exhibits were wonderfully displayed in the well-designed Barbican Gallery, which I feel is a better place to display modern art than the Tate Modern. Each of the rooms on the first floor were dedicated to artworks relating to some of the many aspects of Pan-Africanism, and in each space, there was an information panel explaining how the artworks fitted into the Pan-African scheme of things. Even without the explanations, what was on display at this show is a satisfying feast for the eyes.

A female artist at a gallery near London’s Smithfield

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REGULARLY, WE PAY visits to London’s commercial art galleries, often to view contemporary art. Many of the galleries are in Mayfair, but one of our favourites, Beers, is near to Smithfield Market and the Barbican. Run by Kurt Beers, a retired Canadian Mountie, the gallery often has exhibitions of works by lesser known, but up-and-coming creators. The current show is a collection of paintings by Georgia Dymock, who was born in Derbyshire in 1998.

Georgia studied art at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, and was awarded a Master’s degree in painting. Since then, she has exhibited her works in the UK, USA, Turkey, Mexico, Dubai, and China. Her current show at Beers continues until 11 July 2026.

The paintings at Beers are figurative, and painted in muted colours. They depict intimacy with great sensitivity, and in some cases, humorously. One of them, which includes an apple, is a modern depiction of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Somewhat dreamlike, Dymock, to quote the gallery’s press release, often:

“… constructs scenes that resist fixed interpretation”

Additionally, the gallery’s text points out:

“Beneath the sweetness of the paintings lies a quieter instability where affection shifts uneasily between nourishment and surrender.”

Regardless of how the paintings are interpreted, they are pleasing to look at, and refreshingly different from much other art that I have seen in London’s commercial galleries.

A Chinese nationalist and a village in Hertfordshire

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IT IS ONE hundred years since Sir James Cantlie (1851-1926), a medical man, died. He was the inventor of what we now call ‘first aid’, and one of the founders of The London School of Tropical Medicine. Also, he founded Chinese Medical College in Hong Kong in 1887. One of his students in Hong Kong was Sun Deming, better known as Sun Yat Sen (1866-1925).

In 1896, poor health forced Cantlie to return to London. That year, Sun came to England to visit him. Already out of favour with the Imperial Chinese government because of his revolutionary activities, private agents employed by the Chinese were sent to Liverpool, where he landed, to follow his movements. The first person that Sun visited after arriving in London was his old teacher Cantlie, whose London residence was close to the Chinese embassy, which was, and still is, in Portland Place. On his way there, Sun was kidnapped and held captive in the embassy. He would have faced death had not he persuaded the embassy’s English housekeeper, a Mrs Howe, to smuggle a note to Dr Cantlie. What happened next is related in my book “An Alphabetical Tour of England”.

Cantlie had a country abode in the village of Cottered in Hertfordshire. His house bears a plaque commemorating its connection with the Chinese nationalist Sun Yat Sen. When Cantlie died, he was buried close to the church of St John the Baptist in Cottered. His pink granite gravestone is next to the church’s southern entrance. It includes some carved Chinese writing (characters). These are a Chinese translation of the Bible’s gospel verse Matthew 5:7 (‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy’). Within the church, there is a wall mounted plaque, commemorating Sir James Cantlie. What makes it interesting in connection with his former student, Sun Yat Sen, is that the plaque was placed in the church by Sao-Ke Alfred Sze (1877-1958), who was Chinese Minister to Great Britain twice: 1914-1921 and 1929-1932.

Until we got stuck in slow-moving traffic in Cottered in 2021, I had no idea that this charming little village had a link with modern China. We were moving so slowly that I was able to catch a glimpse of the plaque on Cantlie’s former home as we passed it, and having seen that, my interest was aroused. We have returned to Cottered several times since that first fleeting visit, and had time to look at the church and his grave.

PS If you wish to read more of my book, it is available from Amazon:https://www.amazon.co.uk/ALPHABETICAL-TOUR-ENGLAND-Adam-Yamey/dp/B0FVV6JLZ7

A novel by an author from South Africa: Damon Galgut

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MRS SWART IS DYING, lying on her bed in a farmhouse in South Africa during the last years of the apartheid regime. Her husband and three children are close by. One of her daughters, Amor, hears, or believes she has heard, her mother promising that Salome, the family’s African maid, will be bequeathed the small outhouse in which she lives. Mrs Swart dies. Nobody else remembers hearing that Salome has been promised that she could own her humble abode, and she is not given possession of it. Many years go by, apartheid ends, and one by one Amor’s father, her brother, and her sister die. Yet, still Salome has not been given ownership of her residence on the farm. Amor, who has largely dissociated herself from her family, becomes the sole inheritor of the family’s farm after her father and siblings have died. Without giving away too much of the story, she honours the promise that her mother made, but what should have been a straightforward happy ending turns out not to be. In between the events I have mentioned, much more takes place, as is revealed in “The Promise”, an excellently written novel published in 2021 by South African author Damon Galgut.

Galgut’s novel contains vivid descriptions of peoples’ lives and their difficulties in South Africa before and after the apartheid regime ended in 1993. In his novel, the personalities of the various people in it are described brilliantly. In addition, he portrays the troubles, physical and psychological, that South Africans must face daily even after the end of apartheid. Reading this book has reinforced what I had already heard about South Africa being a country filled with its own distinctive range of problems.

I believe that Galgut’s novel is a metaphor for what has happened to South Africa after the death of apartheid, a regime that severely suppressed the non-white majority of South Africans. When apartheid eventually ended, many South Africans must have believed and hoped that they had been promised, and could expect, a better life, one from which each person would derive benefit. Sadly, for many, just as Mrs Swart’s promise to Salome was fulfilled but unsatisfactorily, the assumed promise of an improved life post-apartheid has not been fulfilled entirely satisfactorily (if at all) for most of the country’s population.

“The Promise” is the third of Galgut’s novels that I have read to date. Each of the three is beautifully written, interesting, compelling, and moving. Of the three, “The Promise” has appealed to me most, but only a little bit more than the other two (“The Good Doctor” and “Arctic Summer”).

Larger than life. Traditional yet contemporary.

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INDIA FASCINATES ME. One aspect of this fascination is the ever-present fusion of the present and the past. Almost every Indian I have met embraces at any one moment both unscientific ideas and beliefs, which date back many millennia, and the concepts of today’s world. As the writer Pavan K Varma put it in his book ‘Becoming Indian’:

“The mistake one should never make is to accept the amiable Indian as a monolith. He is a most well-adjusted split personality, capable of living simultaneously and effortlessly on two mutually opposed planes. He can make a quantum leap from one epoch to another without showing any strain.”

This ability to decompartmentalise the past and the present is well exemplified in some artworks I saw at an exhibition organised by Bombay’s Sakshi Gallery, and showing at London’s Mall Gallery until 8 July 2026.

The works to which I am referring are sculptures by Ravinder Reddy, who was born in 1956 at Suryapet, Andhra Pradesh (southern India). Each of his sculptures on display at the Mall Gallery are larger than life sized female heads. Each of them is stunningly attractive and although not completely lifelike, very engaging. They are adorned with what recalls traditional south Indian decoration. They look like traditional images, yet at the same time, there is something contemporary about them. As an article (www.astaguru.com/blogs/legacy-of-artist-ravinder-reddy-influencing-future-generations-257)  by Yungming Wong noted aptly:

“Reddy’s work is a rare phenomenon because it fuses tradition and innovation together … [His] sculptures often contain strikingly modern interpretations of traditional forms … His famous busts, for instance, advance classical portraiture to new heights by super-sizing the heads to monumental proportions. This exaggeration gives the sculptures grandeur and presence and leads the viewers’ eyes to the face that is the ultimate icon of humanity. In this sense, he connects the timelessly traditional approach of portraiture to the contemporary sensitivities for his works to be relevant in their local and global contexts.”

Although the show at the Mall Gallery contains excellent paintings and sculpture by other Indian artists, all of them well worth seeing, it was Reddy’s work that kept engaging my eyes. It was not merely the great size of his works, but their alluring presence, which grabbed my attention. Although products of the present, they suggest age old traditions of southern India. More than anything else on display at the exhibition, Reddy’s artworks exemplified what fascinates me about life in India: it occupies a space in which the past and present overlap, in which one exists inseparable from the other.

A sculpture through which you are invited to walk

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NEXT TO THE 2026 Serpentine Pavilion, a wonderful structure that makes creative use of brickwork, there is another creation, an artwork by Jesus Rafael Soto (born in Venezuela in 1923, and died in 2005). It consists of a rectangular frame filled with a grid of finely spaced rectangles and supported by three pairs of vertical pillars. 4000 identical, 10 metre long, thin, yellow PVC tubes hang down from the frame, almost reaching the ground beneath it.  This work, first made in 1999 and then recreated in 2023, is called “Pénétrable BBL Jaune”.

The structure is an example of kinetic art. As the Serpentine’s website explained:

“From a distance, the closely spaced strands seem to shimmer and shift due to a moiré effect. Visitors are invited to walk through the work, allowing their movement to activate and transform the space around them.”

And many visitors, including me, were tempted to enter the sculpture and make one’s way through the forest of plastic fibres, which, although they look as light as feathers, offer some resistance to one’s passage.

Soto’s sculpture is is both intriguing to enter and to observe from outside it. The seemingly simple array of yellow tubes provides an interesting spectacle as it is disturbed both by breezes and people wandering through it. It will remain on view until 26 October 2026.