I took Wednesday off to take part in the protest against Trump’s visit. I avoided the milling around at the start and took a direct route to join the head of the march around Piccadilly Circus, so I didn’t really get a good sense of how many people were behind. It felt smaller than last time, but it was in the middle of a working day, so you wouldn’t expect a huge turnout. The Met deployed 1600 police, which seems rather a lot for a peaceful march and rally.

A crowd of people in Parliament Square. There is a Palestinian flag and, high above everything, a large bouncy ball with a photo of JD Vance's face on it.

The huge JD Vance bouncy ball that Nish Kumar threw into the crowd. I was bonked on the head by it a couple of times

Did it achieve anything? Maybe: the threat of protests forced them to skip London entirely while fawning over the despot.

Friday was an unseasonally warm day so I took a train to Flitwick (the w is silent) in Bedfordshire and spent many hours walking 25 km in a big circle.

The open countryside, mostly clear blue skies above, bisected by a gravel path.

Not bad for a few days before the autumn equinox

I stopped off at the 15th century church of St John the Baptist at Flitton – delightfully cool inside thanks to the thick stone walls – and took a peek through the grille at the De Grey Mausoleum that abuts the chancel.

I feel as if I’ve wasted most of this summer indoors on Teams calls, so I was especially glad to get out on a sunny day. In fact, it was almost too hot for me, and my black T-shirt looked like a photographic negative of the Turin Shroud when I finally took it off.

I saw cows, sheep, alpacas, a hare, and many birds including dozens of corncrakes.

A few sheep in a field. One appears to be looking at me with concern.

Wary sheep

I foraged about 1.5 kg of sloes along the way, so it was useful as well. I’ve already laid down 2 litres of sloe gin to infuse for the rest of the year.

I bought a new Network Railcard at the station before leaving. This time, I went for an actual paper one, as part of my effort to reduce the number of things in my life that require me to have a mobile phone. Unfortunately, the person who sold it to me fat-fingered my name, so I briefly had a card in the name of “Mr P Nbattley” until I stopped back in on my journey home and had them reissue it with the correct name. (A curious side-effect of this is that my railcard now says that it cost £0.00.)

The Network Railcard is great value: for £35 you get ⅓ off most journeys in the “south east”, an area that includes places as far away as Weymouth and Lincoln. You have to leave after 10 o’clock, but I’m not a morning person anyway and would generally struggle to take a train any earlier. I’ve already saved £8.50 on day one.

We attended the latest Musica Antica concert – a collection of madrigals, arie, and lute music in the first half, and a bawdy madrigal comedy by Banchieri in the second – on Saturday night.

One sentence from the programme fed my imagination:

The passage of time is generally unkind to musical sources; it isn’t uncommon to find pages of music considered outmoded being reused in bookbinding during the middle ages and renaissance, and what is saved is always at the mercy of natural and man-made disasters.

After the demise of our technological civilisation, what of our current era will be left to future musicologists? Will a scholar in 2525 be picking over a book of simple guitar arrangements of late 90s pop, attempting to reconstruct a performance with correct period instruments, and ending up with a consort of spiky heavy metal guitars playing a selection of works by Max Martin (fl. 1997–203?), a prolific composer writing around the turn of the 21st century about whom little is now known?

A not-very-cheery selection of links: