Enjoying retirement
In The Red Rose County
Chetham's School is an amazing place. It was the collegiate foundation for the parish church (now the Cathedral), and together thr church and college buildings represent one of the largest and most complete examples of a late medieval collegiate foundation in the country - of national importance both architecturally and historically. If the Cathedral were in an archetypal historic town like Lincoln or York we would rave about it. Because it is in the archetypal industrial city we tend to overlook its magnificence. But we were here today not to admire the buildings and library which itself is of international importance (the oldest public Library in the English speaking world). We were here for a talk on some of the diaries held by the Library. The talk was by the archivist Jane Muskett, and she had pulled out some of the diaries which she regarded fondly. Some old and very precious (not to be touched) and some more contemporary ones (still not to be touched!). The talk was fascinating and given by someone who has great enthusiasm for her work, and probably doesn't get the chance very often to show it. The first diary (which was right under my nose) was an anonymous diary of someone who went with the Earl of Sandwich on his extraordinary embassy to Spain in 1666, which contains an early day by day account in the back of the fire of London. A rare survivor. The next, Edmund Harrold’s early eighteenth-century diary, is well known for its record of the writer’s sex life, his bouts of drunkenness and his often comically fumbling attempts at courtship, but is also full of religious meditation on his sins. Fascinating, and beautiful in its way, was the diary of Dora Turnor, a sickly teenager who documented her privileged life in Lincolnshire and in Belgravia in the 1870s. She was mostly confined to her room and therefore had plenty of time to write and sketch. We then have a collection of over two hundred diaries produced by four generations of the Leech family of Manchester. This is one of the largest collections of diaries ever produced by a single family, beginning with a childhood journal from 1815 and ending with a series of journals and notebooks from the early twenty-first century. One of the 'diaries' was that of the family car which recorded every trip, every repair, every last thing you could imagine about the car. It runs from 1926 to 1935. An absorbing hour and a half. Our evening proved just as good. We were treated to a wonderful rendering of Rachmaninov's famous second piano concerto, a modern piece by the astonishingly named Missy Mazzoli (very good) and, to end, a swaggering Dvorak's Eigth Symphony. All brilliant.
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August 2023
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