by Admin | 31 Aug 2023 | activities, FRONT PAGE NEWS, gardening
September is a month of golden sun and harvests. A month when the bulbs and perennials planted last year come into their own and cheer up the fading grass. And yet, despite its name, it is not the 7th month of the year. A misconception derived from when the Romans used a solar year which was later converted (not till 1753) into the current Gregorian year – which required the removal of 11 days from September in the year of conversion.
It is the month when grass and wildflowers produce seeds (sticky or blown in the wind often), and is the best time to cut these, and your lawn, to provide food for your wildlife.
Mining bees will often be found in your lawn, and the ants and other grubs will be providing food for birds to stock up for the winter too.In the first talk, I will consider the importance of gardens for wildlife in the UK as so much of our green space has been built on. And how we can support that wildlife in the way that we garden.
In the second talk I will consider the plants we can grow in London and which can be harvested later in the year- now that our climate is changing, and the implications of our changing climate will be considered also in later talks (Feb/Mar 2024). But our last talk of 2023 will look at the plants we use in December to decorate our homes and why we still invest them with myths and religious importance.
by Admin | 30 Aug 2023 | activities, FRONT PAGE NEWS
We’re delighted to welcome local artist Francine to the library, offering a beginners watercolour course, on Mondays at 1500. The classes are suitable for complete beginners and lots of demonstrations will be given. If you’ve always wanted to learn to paint and sketch, here’s your opportunity.
Francine trained as a graphic designer at art college, and has worked in publishing all her life – designing and editing several high profile UK magazines including Country Living. Her idea of relaxation is to sit down in a cafe or a garden and just draw what she sees around her. She says, “I take a small sketchbook wherever I go and use it like a diary to make visual notes almost every day. I love architecture and food – I will often do a quick sketch of my lunch in a restaurant rather than take a photo!”
Places are limited. To avoid disappointment, book yours now by emailing Francine on francine@artsplashlondon.co.uk. Classes cost £15.00 per session.
by Admin | 31 Jul 2023 | activities, children, FRONT PAGE NEWS
Do you help out with weekday childcare for your grandchildren, and take them to Gladstone Park or Cricklewood Library?
If you want to meet other grandparents in the area to arrange play dates in the park and possibly join a regular get-together, please email cricklewood.grandparents@gmail.com, and we’ll email you back with information on how to get involved (don’t worry, you won’t get added to a mailing list).
Great grandparents, nannies, and in fact anyone helping out with daytime childcare who feels part of the Grandparent or older generation are very welcome too.
by Admin | 23 Jul 2023 | Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Read, FRONT PAGE NEWS
September’s book is Stella Maris, the sequel to July’s The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy. The two books are the last works by McCarthy before his death aged 89 in June this year.
1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.
by Admin | 23 Jul 2023 | activities, FRONT PAGE NEWS
We’re super excited to welcome Bow Django, Bow’s finest swing jazz proponents to the library next Friday (28 July) for an evening of latin-infused toe-tapping rhythms.
Bow Django comprises guitarists Ienne and Chris, bassist Casper, clarinettist Jenny, violinist Peter, and vocalist Annie.
The band was formed when a group of friends got together to play gypsy jazz in an African cafe in Bow in about 2018. However, it really got going in the ‘tween and post-Lockdown periods when the group met in Victoria Park each Friday for a couple of hours to play for themselves and a dedicated group of distanced audience.
The natural choice for parks, street parties, cafe culture and libraries, their music – uptempo and infectiously optimistic – can’t fail to get your feet tapping.
Last Fridays will be taking a break in August but will resume again in September. Watch out for details of our new programme shortly.
Tickets on sale now – here. And as ever, pizzas available!
by Admin | 11 Jun 2023 | Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Read
The group has chosen Tennessee-born author Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger for their July meeting.
A sunken jet, a missing body, and a salvage diver entering a conspiracy beyond all understanding. The Passenger is a dark, hallucinogenic novel from Cormac McCarthy, the legendary author of Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men and The Road.
‘What a glorious sunset song . . . It’s rich and it’s strange, mercurial and melancholic’ – Guardian
1980, Mississippi. It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges into the darkness of the ocean. His dive light illuminates a sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box – and the tenth passenger.
Now a collateral witness to this disappearance, Bobby is discouraged from speaking of what he has seen. He is a man haunted: by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima, and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.
Traversing the American South, from the bars of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.
‘The Passenger shows that McCarthy belongs in the company of Melville and Dostoevsky, writers the world will never cease to need’ – New Statesman
