Feliz Navidad

 

Since summer 2022, together with fellow volunteers and friends Glen Couper, Judith Curry and Karin Sartorius, I have helped to organize events in our tiny public library, the main objective being to forestall any further attempts by our borough to close it (boo, hiss!).

 

On 5 December we held our 27^th event, a Christmas, bring your own bottle, bingo called by two characters from the Quince Players pantomime, Dame Gertie Dollop and villain Ringmaster Roger Heinkel, who also performed a short extract from the panto. They worked the audience with flair and the usual slightly risqué pantomime jokes. There were three styles of Bingo: Christmas images, Santa, mistletoe etc; Goldilocks; Christmas songs. Prizes were panto tickets and books supplied by friends at Macmillan, Thames & Hudson, Chicago University press, and by other friends who are authors. The evening ended with an enthusiastic and mildly tipsy sing-along to José Feliciano’s corny but catchy “Feliz Navidad, Próspero año y Felicidad.”

 

Here are a few photos to give a flavour of the evening.

 

 

 

I have discovered that library events require the same skills I developed as a publisher: talking somebody into doing something useful/enlightening/educational/or just plain fun in return for no reward, except perhaps a round of applause and a bottle of wine.

 

Big hits this year have included an exhibition of Spanish Islamic architecture (photos and text courtesy of Jonathan Bloom, a friend from Macmillan Dictionary of Art days) with a recital of Spanish guitar music by the inimitable Vincent Lindsey-Clark (he will return in March 2025 with a Latin American programme); local historian Christine Weightman’s spellbinding history of our village; neighbour Major Brian Rogers’ “Who won the Battle of Waterloo?” (the Prussians, complete with a rub of rhubarb, gin and vodka for injured Prussians); Jo Walton (a friend from Thames & Hudson) on Victorian Narrative Painting, a subject which did not sound exciting, but which Jo made fascinating; and Tracy Chevalier (another Dictionary of Art friend) presenting her new novel.

 

If any of you feel like joining our roster of fine performers in return for a lunch at the Dog and Partridge, get in touch! Be warned: our standards are cheap but of the highest.

 

Feliz Navidad, Feliza Navidad, Próspero año y Felicidad a todos.