Women’s Rugby World Cup awards 2025

Raquel Kochhann’s brilliant barnet
  • Best Performance by a South African:
    • Aimee Barrett-Theron’s consistently excellent refereeing, especially her clear communication
  • Best hair:
    • Raquel Kochhann of Brazil
  • Worst hair:
    • Pauline Bourdon-Sansus of France, for deliberately having hair like The Predator
  • Try of the tournament:
    • South Africa, against New Zealand. Starting with all their players – all of them! – in a lineout, from which a maul, and then 15 phases of pick and go from the forwards. Beautiful!
  • Worst name:
    • “Jorja” Miller of New Zealand. What a tragedeigh!
  • Is that all?
    • Ilona Maher, the over-hyped American with the lipstick off of tiktok who thinks WWE is something worthy of her time.
  • Best minnow:
    • I was impressed by all of the minnows. Despite some massive blow-out scores all the games were entertaining. But if I have to single out one team it has to be Spain, especially for their performance against New Zealand.
  • Beef On The Hoof Award for a forward thundering down the pitch:
    • This could have gone to any number of large South African ladies, but in the end it had to go to DaLeaka Menin of Canada.
  • Award for Deserving An Award Despite Being French:
    • Madoussou Fall Raclot, who refused to play basketball despite being 6’2″. Like Morwenna Talling she is just involved all the time and without her hard work her team mates wouldn’t have the opportunities they had.
  • New Player of the tournament:
    • Braxton Sorenson-McGee of New Zealand, a complete unknown with no significant international experience before the tournament.
  • Player of the tournament:
    • Morwenna Talling of England. I first noticed her during the WXV this time last year, where she didn’t do anything flashy but she was just a work-horse that enabled everyone around her. That continued in the Six Nations and again throughout the World Cup.

Dr. Strangelove – the play!

If I’d seen who was involved in this I would never have chosen to go – Steve Coogan, mostly known for some tedious television thing, played Peter Sellers. Thankfully I didn’t buy the tickets so had no idea.

Stage adaptations of films are always hard. It was partly adapted by Armando Iannucci, mostly known for being hard to spell. Iannucci is a good writer, his other recent well-known work being The Death Of Stalin, and while it’s a great many years since I last saw the original film of Dr. Strangelove, what he’s done with it does, I think, a good job of adapting it to the stage.

The only real let-down was the fake guffaws from some in the audience. Yes, it’s a funny show, but learn to laugh like a normal human. It’s on at least until the end of January, and I recommend that you go.

Overground – the Great Renaming

Everyone has been saying for years that the current Overground map is terrible because the lines are not made visually distinct, unlike the Underground lines. TfL themselves agree, and there was an earlier proposal to improve this, but in 2015 mayor Boris Johnson allegedly nixed the idea.

Well, today some new names and colours have been announced, a mere 9 years later! Hurrah! But oh boy they’ve done a bad job of it.

The first complaint I saw was that they are not very distinctive for those who are colour blind. I’m not terribly convinced by this argument though. There are only a few colours that are sufficiently distinctive even for people with normal vision, and when you take into account the multiple different types of colour blindness there’s hardly anything left. As it is, for those with normal vision the “Weaver line” and “Windrush line” are hard to tell apart. Thankfully there are no stations shared between them.

I’m more concerned by the names. Only one of them is even slightly descriptive of where the line is or what places it connects. This is of course a sin perpetrated by many of the existing Underground lines, but just because you’ve got it wrong in the past doesn’t mean that you should continue to get it wrong in the future.

The “Liberty line” not only doesn’t tell you anything useful, it sounds like a dreadful Americanism.

The “Lioness line” is especially awful, partly because it makes a special celebratory case out of association football, partly because the “lionesses” moniker is just a bit of temporary marketing nonsense. And of course it doesn’t tell you anything useful.

The “Mildmay line” is named after a small hospital that hardly anyone has heard of. The name is actively misleading, as the two Overground stations closest to the Mildmay hospital are not on the Mildmay line!

The “Suffragette line” is, of course, named after a famous and worthy political campaigning movement. However, it doesn’t tell us anything useful about where the line is. Furthermore, the line already has a well-known name – it is the Goblin, so-called because it is the Gospel Oak to Barking LINe.

The “Weaver line” does at least have a vaguely descriptive name, in that it serves places historically associated with the weaving and cloth trade. But that association is not particularly well known so it still fails to be a useful name.

Finally, the only one that I like is the “Windrush line”. Named after the Empire Windrush ship which brought many of the first major wave of Caribbean immigrants to the UK, the line is quite nicely descriptive in that it serves an area that is well-known to have been settled by those immigrants.

Rugby World Cup awards 2023, part 1

In previous years I have waited until the end of the tournament to give my Rugby World Cup awards. But this year I feel confident that I can make my first two awards before we’ve even finished the pool stages. Indeed, before I’ve even seen all the teams play.

I am pleased to announce that Esteban Inostroza of Chile wins the Worst Hair award for his utter abomination of a skullet, and Shalva Mamukashvili of Georgia wins Best Facial Hair.

The Handmaid’s Tale

Many years ago I read Margaret Atwood’s book “The Handmaid’s Tale”. No matter what Atwood calls it, I remember it being a very good work of science fiction (Atwood says it’s speculative fiction, her dismissal of science fiction as just “monsters and space ships” is ignorant and wrong). That was, however, many years ago. While I remember the broad outline of the plot and the themes explored, I don’t remember much of the detail.

Last night I went to see the English National Opera’s version. From what I remember it stuck to the plot fairly well but I can’t tell what details were left out – not that it matters, the necessarily stripped down libretto covers everything that needs covering. The book ends with the revelation that it has been pieced together from cassette tapes left by a Handmaid and that the dystopian Republic of Gilead is now just an object of historical study. This is extended in the opera with an expository prelude from a professor of history which is, I think, necessary so that those unfamiliar with the book could understand what is going on. Unfortunately this isn’t just left as a prelude, it frames the entire production, with more exposition by the professor which comes right after the highly emotionally charged and ambiguous ending of the second act. That epilogue is frankly a couple of minutes of let-down.

Kate Lindsey (as Offred) does a very good job in what must be an extremely demanding role, on stage practically full-time, and the supporting cast and the technical departments all do exactly what is needed and no more. Poul Ruders’s score complements the libretto perfectly, with some unusual instrumentation but without disappearing up its arse into atonality like some other modern composers do. My only quibble is that The Wall – practically the only major piece of scenery, and it appears briefly several times – was, in the book, a place where enemies of the state were hanged and left to rot. It is turned into a sentimental wall of remembrance. Perhaps it was thought that the audience would react poorly to a line of hanging corpses, but that seems an odd decision to make in a production were we see not just hanged corpses but the very act of execution by hanging, execution by beating, and repeated rapes.

Those two very minor issues aside, it was a stunning production. As I write this there are three more performances left in its short run, and at least some cheap tickets available if you don’t mind being up in the gods.

Singin’ In The Rain

Not Gene Kelly

Almost a year ago I wrote about how I was supposed to have seen this on stage but it got cancelled, and so I watched the film instead.

Well, the stage show was rescheduled, that rescheduled performance was – mirabile dictu! – not cancelled (another show I’ve got tickets for at Sadler’s Wells has been re-scheduled twice now), and I saw it on Saturday. The singing and dancing was not quite up to the standard of the original – how could it be? Gene Kelly has been busy with another engagement for over 20 years, and of course in a live show everything has to be done in one take so of necessity some of the more spectacular numbers have to be tamed down a bit. But even so, it was fun. The title piece was spectacular.

It’s on for a few more weeks at Sadler’s Wells and tickets are still available. I recommend avoiding the front few rows in the stalls unless you want a good soaking.

Modernist Embroidery

If the Bauhaus did embroidery …

“Dave? Are you feeling alright?” I can hear you all thinking. Yes! Embroidery!

One of the good things about the Pestilence is that vast numbers of lectures went online. London has always had a thriving lecture scene, but actually getting to most of them was always a pain as they weren’t well advertised and were in out-of-the-way places. The Pestilence pushed them online, and because you can’t rely on on-site advertising at cultural venues any more promotion of them has also gone online. The Royal School of Needlework is one of the many institutions that has moved some of its output intended for non-specialists online. Embroidery is well outside my normal range of interests, which tend towards the industrial and scientific, but nevertheless this lecture caught my eye when it was advertised (alongside talks on subjects such as “Regional Museums of Space Exploration in Russia” and “The Strange History of London’s Loos”) in the Ian Visits newsletter, to which all Londoners should subscribe.

The talk “Hand Embroidery in the 20th Century: Modernism in the RSN’s Collection” covered both art embroidery, original work by extremely talented creatives, but also, and more interesting to me, craft embroidery, largely in the form of kits and mass-market printed patterns for people to make up at home. I was mostly interested because home decoration and ordinary peoples’ clothing, how they’re made, marketed and purchased, is a window into real history, into how normal people live and how that changes over time. The sort of history that is far more important than minor details of which aristo scum killed which royal tyrant when. The lecture clearly brought out the rise of the suburban middle class, changing patterns of home ownership, and even teenage music fandom.

Much of the work we were shown, especially from the first half of the 20th century, was not what I would call modernist. The manufacture and marketing of it was modern, but the craft itself was not, being a quite conservative, nostalgic re-re-re-rendering of old themes. Much was “arts & crafts“, a movement that is explicitly anti-modern, although I did note that practically all the work depended heavily on modern industrial chemistry for the mass production of brightly coloured threads! Modernism really first appeared on the fabric in large quantities in the 50s and 60s, with perhaps some fore-shadowing in 1940s austerity. But really, whether the design was modernist isn’t as important as the infrastructure behind it of how designs are promulgated. So you see, this wasn’t so far removed from my normal interests after all.

Transport Archaeology

Yesterday and today I went on tours about abandoned transport infrastructure.

First, yesterday, was one of the London Transport Museum‘s “Hidden London” online tours, of the Kingsway tram tunnel and the nearby Holborn and Aldwych stations. “Hidden London” has been running for several years, until recently as in-person tours of some parts of closed stations. This year they are instead running online tours with slides and videos, mostly about parts of London’s transport history which could not normally be made accessible to the public because they are in poor repair. This particularly applies at Aldwych. Some parts of Aldwych are, in normal times, open for occasional guided tours, but there are parts that those tours don’t cover. The tour I went on, and which I recommend, explores parts of the station which aren’t just not open to the public, they were never opened at all! The station was built on a rather large scale than was ever needed, which became apparent even as it was being built, but construction continued in the hope that the Aldwych branch line would be extended to Waterloo justifying it. That never happened, and so the extra lift shafts and circulating areas have never been used for anything except utility tunnels. The history of the Kingsway tram tunnel was also interesting, in particular how, unlike Aldwych station, it was dramatically under-designed and so needed a rebuild after 20 years to cope with the amount of traffic.

And then today was to the world’s first air traffic control centre and the first purpose-built airport terminal, in Britain’s first international airport: Croydon! I must have driven past the old airport, which closed in the 1950s and has now been mostly built on with a mixture of housing and light industry, thousands of times, and aside from the De Havilland Heron mounted outside the old terminal building there’s no visible sign at all of an airport. It was only quite recently, within the last few months, that I learned that the terminal building was still there, and not just converted into offices, that it is still accessible. The passenger-handling side of the building is very well preserved (the freight part has been converted into offices) and the only significant changes from when it was Britain’s most important airport to today are that the departures board has gone, and there’s no longer a W.H.Smiths in the departure lounge.

Airside doors for arrivals (left) and departures (right); control tower far left

After a brief tour of the passenger-facing side of the building, both inside and out, we went up into the control tower – the first dedicated control tower anywhere in the world, home to the first organised air traffic control, and where the first licensed ATC officers worked – where there is a small museum. The museum is mostly what you would expect at any small airfield museum, although the addition of the ATC section is a nice extra.

The building is open on the first Sunday of every month and staffed by volunteers, all of whom were friendly and knowledgeable. If you’re in the area I recommend a visit.

Dalton E-6B (?) navigational computor

One particular item on display particular grabbed my attention. This “navigational computor” (note the spelling – in the 1930s when these were invented a “computer” was a person who did computations and a “computator” was a mechanical device to aid them. “Computer” only really settled on its modern meaning in the 1940s, so this is quite a revolutionary device for its time, for both its function and its naming!) appears to be (the museum guide for that room didn’t know anything about it) appears to be a Dalton E-6B, a device for quickly working out one’s true heading based upon what direction you’re pointing the aircraft, your air speed, and wind conditions.

Enigma Variations

This evening I watched the Royal Opera House’s 2019 production of the Enigma Variations. I don’t think I’ll ever listen to it the same again.

There’s nothing terribly flashy about it, it’s just a joyful portrait of the characters Elgar portrayed in his music. And it cost only £3. It’s available to stream for the next few weeks and I recommend it.

The Society of Strange and Ancient Instruments

A couple of weeks ago it was the Brighton Early Music Festival. Most years I go to at least a couple of their events, but this year it was online on Youtube. I was especially struck by the Society of Strange and Ancient Instruments‘ talk interspersed with performances on the Trumpet Marine, which is neither a trumpet nor marine. It is a large single-string instrument played with a bow, but instead of the player pressing strings against a fingerboard to change their length and hence change the pitch to anything within its range, they gently touch the string at one of the harmonic nodes, changing the pitch to one of the overtones of the string’s natural pitch. Unfortunately it’s too late for you to watch the whole thing but there is a short clip on BREMF’s Youtube channel that you can see below.

Playing only the harmonics means that not all the notes of the chromatic scale used in the modern west are available, and that some of the available notes are slightly out-of-tune compared to the equal temperament we are used to. The notes available are exactly those available on a natural trumpet without any valves. And the instrument has a timbre somewhere in between that of the violin family and the trumpet family, with some degree of control for the player. This is achieved by having an asymmetric bridge, with one foot held firmly to the body and the other somewhat free to move, where it knocks on the body producing harsher trumpet tones.

Some instruments have sympathetic strings inside the instrument which can be set vibrating along with the main string, and one of the Society’s modern instruments has, experimentally, two main strings – you can see this instrument on the right in the video.

The Society has several recordings available to purchase – none yet featuring the trumpet marine, sadly, but I wait with baited breath for an announcement on their mailing list – which you can preview on Bandcamp with CDs of some of them available on their web site. My copy of “Nine Daies Wonder” arrived in the post this afternoon and is an excellent listen.