All Fun is CANCELLED!

Good day to you, gentle reader, and I'm sure you're hotly anticipating this instalment of our blog, because frankly, it's about the only fun you're getting for the next few months. As the sporting calendar, arts events, and gatherings of anyone that is still breathing are cancelled globally, what can I say? I really hope you enjoy sitting in your house reading dystopian fiction.

Over here, I'm now working from home and likely to be in that position for the next month or so. To relieve some of the monotony, I "commute": in the mornings I wander down town and get myself a coffee at Verve, then return to start my workday. When I'm done, we go for a short walk round the block to clearly delineate when I'm no longer working. I had at least one day of tremendously poor productivity this week as a result of being at home, but by the end of the week I felt like I was finding my groove and getting stuff done. Let's see how it goes for the next few weeks.

Last weekend, the Bay Choral Guild did their cycle of concerts in the usual three locations: Campbell and Palo Alto down here in the South Bay, and also up in San Francisco. To get up into the city, we drove to the outskirts and got on the delightful Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART. Here's one for our railway fans:

The story of the BART is one of petty politics, questionable engineering decisions, safety issues and cost overruns. Most of the system was built in the early 70s, using old railway alignments in the outskirts of the City, and a large cut-and-cover box tunnel under Market Street in the centre of San Francisco itself. It was controversially extended to the airport in the late 90s (although how joined-up public transport to a major international airport could be controversial is something that as a European I find difficult to understand), and is undergoing another extension in the East Bay right now.

The interesting thing about the BART is how they could have got it so, so wrong. A case in point: the BART uses a non-standard track gauge of 5ft 6in, meaning that everything has to be adapted for use here and thus is massively more expensive as a result. There are various explanations for this: some say it was an intentional attempt to create an incompatible system with a monopoly, others say it was to increase stability during earthquakes. Anyway, this means we've now got 40-50 year old trains here, that haven't seen a refurb in all that time, and they're pretty grim.

Next up is the noise. BART made the interesting decision early on to go against 150 years of established railway engineering practice: instead of using wheels with a gentle conical profile, BART wheels are perfectly cylindrical. This was intended to reduce hunting, but instead just increases screeching as the broader-gauge trains go round relatively tight corners. Obviously, a lot of things were consumed in San Francisco in the late 60s which altered one's state of mind, and that's really the only explanation for the kinds of decisions which threw engineering out of the window and resulted in a system which is broadly the worst inner city metro I've ever experienced. And people, I've been on the Tyne and Wear Metro!

But hey, I love a bit of character, and one neat thing I can say about the BART is if you find one of the original stations, the typography is really cool: they chose to use Univers throughout, which is the typeface Helvetica could have been. OK, it's not Rail Transport Alphabet, but it's distinctive and nice to look at.

And so to the concert. The venue in San Francisco was a Lutheran Church, with beautiful acoustics which really showed off this great small choir and a period instrument orchestra:

As you can see, the Bay Area was an early adopter of "social distancing"

This is quite a different choir to the one Helen's used to in the UK. It's genuinely a chamber choir, really, which fitted the material (Mendelssohn's Elijah) exceptionally well. The period instruments had a distinctive, mellow sound; as I said to Helen, can we always have woodwind that sounds like this, please?

Spring has sprung here in the Bay Area. Whilst it's been a very dry winter (it didn't rain in February), as the days lengthen and we move into Summer Time, it's noticeable that there is blossom and bloom everywhere. We revisited the Elizabeth Gamble garden one evening this week on my "commute home", and were greeted with a host of... tulips, California lilac, poppies and who knows what else. It's been beautiful here the last few weeks. We're very lucky.

So whilst all other fun is cancelled (the choir now isn't rehearsing until Autumn, the schools are closed, sporting events are on hold), we can still go walking in this beautiful weather as the evenings open out. That said - hold the front page - there's a storm coming in this week! It might rain a bit.

So everyone: stay well. Personally I'm all up for a bit of social distancing; I've been practising that for approximately 47 years now. Washing your hands... wait, you weren't doing that already? Anyway, please redouble your efforts, keep a stiff upper lip, and know you're all in our thoughts.