Self-isolation has given me time to reflect on the importance of Terence Conran and how his influence has changed and developed over time. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was Habitat: food bricks, duvets and woks. There was a branch near us outside Didcot and we arranged our wedding list there in 1979. In the early 1980s, it was the Boilerhouse Project, now perhaps not as well remembered as it deserves to be – a catalyst of changing attitudes to design and modernism in the basement of the V&A, funded by the Conran Foundation. In 1989, it was the Design Museum in Butler’s Wharf – more formal, perhaps a bit less adventurous than the Boilerhouse. In the early 1990s, it was the move into restaurants – Pont de la Tour and the Blueprint Café. Always important in influencing public taste, not least Cool Britannia, which was hatched in Pont de la Tour and celebrated in Canary Wharf with catering supplied by Conran. Nor should one forget the Conran Shop. A figure of immense importance in moulding public taste, including mine.

Only a week to go.

The days stretch out, curiously shapeless, as I look out of the window at the sun and at my bicycle unused in the garden. I was due to go on a trip to Woolwich today which has had to be cancelled. I communicate with Romilly by telephone or email or by shouting outside her office window. There must be hundreds of us, if not millions, receiving daily bulletins from the test-and-trace machine telling us how much our self-isolation is valued, encouraging us to act responsibly in the collective interest. I wish this had been the message throughout. But a machine seems more easily able to state it than the Prime Minister because he does not believe in the collective interest, nor show evidence of acting responsibly.

I have been sent a link to a useful article in today’s New York Times about the terrible fires in California, following my post about them yesterday. So, the answer is that they occur as a result of human error and negligence and climate change is only one amongst a number of contributory factors. But they are still devastating to those who have to live with them and they seem, as in Australia, to be happening more often:-

https://www.nytimes.com/article/wildfires-california-oregon-washington.html?action=click&algo=bandit-all-surfaces&block=more_in_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=340457413&impression_id=9e392ac3-f402-11ea-ac41-09d4e5655ee8&index=4&pgtype=Article&region=footer&req_id=776189977&surface=more-in-us-news

We have been following with the utmost alarm what has been happening in California – houses burnt down, forest fires close to San Francisco, photographs of fires near the national park at Point Reyes, friends on stand-by to vacate their houses: it’s beginning to look like the end of the world. No doubt climate change deniers will claim as in Australia that it’s just a normal occurrence and the way that nature renews itself, but it doesn’t look that way:-

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/10/us-west-fire-season-california-oregon-climate-action?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

It is, by my calculation, my third day of Self-isolation, since it is the third day since I discovered that I had had lunch with someone who subsequently developed Covid, but I have just received an encouraging note from a Robot telling me that I have only nine days to go. It reminded me of an item on the news yesterday that people in Care Homes are encouraged to talk to Robots, who they find friendly and helpful. Mine has given me advice as to how to lead my life, when to get up in the morning and go to bed (as normal) and that I should organise social activities with others in the house, which is particularly tricky, as I am doing everything in my power to avoid all contact with them, only making a cup of tea in the morning wearing rubber gloves.

Anyway, my life of leisure talking to robots enabled me to listen to Prime Minister’s Question Time. The Prime Minister was theatrically appalled that Keir Starmer might be in any way critical of the glories of Track and Trace, which requires a small child to travel to Inverness to get a test. Of course, he omitted to mention that the Track and Trace programme is run not by the NHS, but, without competitive tender, by Serco who have so far been paid £108M for organising drive-in tests in Inverness and other places. Its chief executive turns out to be Rupert Soames, Winston Churchill’s grandson. Nice work if you can get it.

I am re-posting the attached article in this morning’s Guardian because it is the most worrying thing that I have read in a while – so ostensibly matter-of-fact in its tone, but so much the more effective and brutal as a result, just a statement of what it feels like to be a university academic in an environment where internationalism is contracting and there is a loss of understanding of the real value of education, not just as a passport to a career:-

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/sep/08/higher-education-in-the-uk-is-morally-bankrupt-im-taking-my-family-and-my-research-millions-and-im-off

It’s my second day of Self-isolation, now compulsory, as I have been officially notified that I must by someone who asked if she could speak about it to my father. I explained that he had died in April 1994, so that was not going to be possible. She then proceeded to explain everything that I must do to avoid infecting anyone, which I was pleased to explain that I was already doing. She has half restored my faith that there is now a system for track and trace, although I still look back fondly to reading about Barry Rees, the corporate director of Ceredigion, who was trained as a scientist and who when he first heard of Covid-19, implemented a very straightforward system of track-and-trace which involved finding out who might have been infected and stopping them infecting others. This seems like a much better system than paying friends of Dominic Cummings billions of pounds to develop fancy computer systems and has meant that Ceredigion has had by far the lowest rate of infection in Wales.

I am immeasurably grateful to one of my blog followers who has supplied me with the relevant information about the television film made in 1977 about the Whitechapel Bell Foundry:-

In the Making: Bells 

first tx: 8 June 1977, 23 mins

part of a series of 13 films made for Jubilee Year

the film editor was the great Allan Tyrer (who edited Civilisation)

film cameraman Derek Banks

producer Anne James

series producer John Read

There was apparently another significant programme made by the BBC at the foundry in 1951.

The Festival Bell

first tx: 4 April 1951

This was a 45-minute live outside broadcast from the foundry to watch the Festival Bell being cast; only 1 minute of related footage apparently exists. It was shot on 35mm film, presumably alongside the live outside broadcast.

The foundry has also been featured in at least five radio features:

John Snagge’s London, 24 October 1976, Radio London

It’s Just Like Playing with Sand, 26 December 1980, Radio 4

The Peterborough Bells, 14 December 1986, Radio 4

Between the Ears, 14 November 2004, Radio 3

The Bell Boys, 3 November 2009, Radio 4

All of this information is absolutely invaluable, not just because it makes it potentially relatively straightforward to reconstruct the look and feel of the Bell Foundry as it was, but also because it demonstrates how important the Bell Foundry has been in national life: part of the Festival of Britain; celebrated during the Silver Jubilee; the subject of repeated study and celebration on the radio and television.

Historic England has taken the view that it is just another workshop which can be turned into another boutique hotel (do we really need another boutique hotel ?), not of sufficiently obvious architectural significance to be worth preserving. But it is the workshop which made the bells of Big Ben. It is the workshop which rang in the Festival of Britain. It is a set of workshops which John Summerson described as ‘the most remarkable group of its kind in London’.

Are we really going to allow it to be destroyed ?

Having had lunch with someone on Friday who has since developed Covid-19, I have put myself into voluntary self-isolation because I am obviously at some level at risk of developing it myself. No-one can know what the level of risk it is. It’s an odd sensation: the disease which had developed a degree of unreality as a result of living with its presence (or absence) for six months suddenly becomes a much more real threat again; and the life I have been leading of reading and writing becomes much more lonely by being imposed, if only self-imposed. I feel a bit like the man who was out on the mud flats yesterday in the far distance:-