(no subject)

Gave my talk "An Introduction to Masorti Judaism" at Newcastle Day Limmud on Sunday. It went down well (and I got positive feedback from various people afterwards), and there were not any difficult questions asked I could not answer... despite one audience member (an Assifnik, of all things) threatening to sit at the back and ask difficult questions. :o)

There were eighteen present in the audience, of whom no more than four were related to me even using a highly extended definition of "family".^* Which is similar to that attendance at my last talk at Newcastle Limmud; it's actually two down on it, but numbers in general were down this time. My mother blames this on putting it on in summer; she's also narked that I got put up against audience puller Sir Jeremy Beecham for the second time, but that's always the danger at any conference. (I had a 40% chance of being put on against him or Clive Lawton, and I haven't even checked if there were big-name speakers in the other slots.) There was at least one person I know of who had said in advance she would come to my talk, but ended up going to another one at the same time; and all of the AMS glossy brochures which didn't go during the talk got taken afterwards.

* Two of the attendees were the widower of my mother's late cousin, and his second wife.

Newcastle in "Get Carter" and now

In my review of Get Carter, I talked about how much more industrial the city looked then compared to today. Having now been to Newcastle since, I can present you with before and after images of the same location:

( before )

( after )

(Strictly speaking, the "after" image is from above the location of the "before" image; but taking the photo from below the Edward VIII bridge led to the (new) Queen Elizabeth II (Metro) bridge being even more in the way.)

In summary, there's more old buildings left from before than I had expected, but there's no factories with chimneys there any longer. There's also many modern buildings now, and much more greenery (including alongside the river, where Carter is, where there's a scrapyard in the film).

And now I need to get the film out of the library again, as I have discovered a distant relative is an extra on it.