The Sunday Papers Live, 2 April 2022
April 4, 2022
Absolutely wonderful to be at a live event again – after more than two years! For The Sunday Papers Live, Cecil Sharp House, near London’s Regent’s Park, is decked out like a living room, with sofas and rugs and standard lamps, and everyone is encouraged to treat it like their home and even wear slippers. The roast dinner they do in the basement is great. But most of all it’s the live entertainment that is so fab. Poetry, music, politics, medicine, cookery… all the things you get in the Sunday papers. The most mind-blowing thing I learnt was that, when slavery was abolished in 1833, the government compensated the slave owners to the astonishing tune of £20 million. It sold bonds to raise the money and the interest on those bonds was paid by UK taxpayers until 2015! So the descendants of slaves had for 182 being been paying the slave owners. Unbelievable.
My part in all this was that I did two Space Walks up nearby Primrose Hill. The idea was to walk a scale model of the Solar System. At the foot of the hill, I held up an orange to represent the Sun – Earth was a peppercorn – and we walked up to the summit, where my wife had earlier chalked a picture of the outermost planet, Neptune, on the path. In fact, she’d chalked all the planets as I paced out the distances. When we got to the top, I asked everyone how far away is the nearest star? 2 kilometres? someone said. Birmingham? The actual answer was Beijing. An orange in London represents the Sun while an orange in Beijing represents the nearest star. It’s a vast and empty universe!
Miming a clue to the crossword we’re doing. No idea what the answer was!
On the way to Primrose Hill for my Space Walk
Scale model of the Solar System: Here I am at the bottom of the Primrose with an orange, representing the Sun! We walked to Neptune, the outermost planet, at the top of the hill. My wife had kindly chalked the planets on the path. Thank goodness it didn’t rain and wash them off!
“So what is a planet?” someone asked. The definition keeps changing, was my answer!
Time for some stand-up poetry as the lights dim in Cecil Sharp House (where they rehearse for Strictly Come Dancing)