Afternoon music
It’s a small world
I was just perusing the online newspapers, looking at a few current crimes and trials. While doing that, I noticed the continuing trial (in fact, retrial) of one Constance Marten, whose retrial has been in progress for a month or so (the original trial stopped in summer 2024).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78e1yq6d2eo
Obviously, the present retrial is in progress and so I cannot say anything by way of comment about the material facts or subject-matter. In any case, I do not know anything of the case, beyond what little I have read in newspapers or seen on TV news from time to time.
No, what struck me was something peripheral to the case.
On reading some accounts of the trial and retrial, I saw the photograph of one of the accused:
I happen to have very good facial recognition skills. The picture reminded me slightly of someone I encountered a few times in the mid-1980s.
At the relevant time, about 40 years ago, I had a girlfriend who worked as an interpreter at a high level, working —inter alia— with people such as the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (eg when Gorbachev visited the UK), and with organizations such as the U.N. Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) and various Soviet dance groups, including the Bolshoi.
Thus it was that I encountered a young woman, 20-something, who was also interpreting, but on a lower technical level. More general or social interpreting.
The Bolshoi touring ensemble was, appropriately, large, well over 300 in all, everything from dancers to costume people and even a few persons from the U.S.S.R. Ministry of Culture, i.e, KGB minders etc. The job of the last group was not really, or primarily, to prevent defections of the kind seen in the 1960s and 1970s, but to guard against anti-Soviet (mostly Jew-Zionist) protestors (re. Shcharansky and other refuseniki) and to stop people getting into trouble. For example, the famous choreographer, Grigorovitch [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yury_Grigorovich] once got into a lift in Dublin (I was already there and just about to push a button) when a harassed fat bully KGB type stormed into the lift and rudely took over, pushing the button required to get his (well-drunk) charge back to the right floor.
Such a large ensemble required several interpreters.
Incidentally, I never met Grigorovitch (as such), but always used his wife’s laminated Bolshoi Ballet clip-on lapel pass to get past the security lines and get in to see the shows (fortunately, the individual name was on the other side of the pass, and there was no photograph!). His wife was the prima ballerina, Natalia Bessmertnova [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalia_Bessmertnova]. She was too grand to actually wear or carry her laminated pass.
Incidentally, and incredibly, Grigorovitch is still alive at age 98, despite the abuse his liver must have suffered over nearly a century.
So I met that young woman mentioned, who had the unusual name Amabel (apparently one more common in both the Middle Ages and the Victorian period). I cannot now be sure, but thinking back, I think her surname was Marten or Martin; I had forgotten that until now.
Amabel was a pleasant young woman, I think probably quite a nice person generally, and was from, I was told, a wealthy landowning family who had houses, including large country houses, here and there, both in England and Ireland. In fact she and her —I was told, rather socially unacceptable to her family— boyfriend spent much of their time “looking after” (as she told me) a family-owned country house in some obscure part of the Irish countryside. My own girlfriend’s take on that was that it kept the boozy Irish boyfriend away from the family’s social circle.
I met the boyfriend once, in the large hotel in Dublin where the Bolshoi were all quartered, and where I was (unofficially) also staying (in my case for free). He was all right, and bought me a pint of Guinness, but I could see why her family may have preferred to keep him at arm’s length. I am not good at guessing ages, but anyway some years, several years at least, older than Amabel, with heavy black spectacles, and plainly drunk at three o’clock in the afternoon. In his thirties, maybe late thirties.
I was told that Amabel had told my girlfriend that when she, Amabel, was in St. Petersburg (then still Leningrad), she had been touring the Hermitage [https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/?lng=en; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermitage_Museum] when she saw some old English china. Some pieces had a representation of a large country house on them and, as she excitedly recounted to my girlfriend “...it was our house!” (pronounced “ower hice“…), referring to the family’s main seat, in rural Dorset.
Well, I got on rather well with Amabel on the very few times we met (I think only on that tour), and may have occasionally gently mocked her “upper class” background and social circle. Her (I think younger) sister, whom I met once somewhere, in England, I think, was a rather cold formal person (I thought), supposedly a one-time girlfriend of Prince Andrew (she eventually married a merchant banker).
When the Bolshoi ballerinas were relaxing, some were taken to Stratfield Saye, the seat of the Dukes of Wellington, halfway between Reading and Basingstoke, where a former schoolfriend of Amabel happened to be either the Duchess or the wife of the son of the then Duke, and who later succeeded to the title. I think the latter, thinking about it. A favoured few were allowed to ride some of the horses from the stables there.
After 1985 or 1986, I never saw Amabel again, and I have no idea at all how her life went. The only time I even heard of her was when she and her sister were mentioned (c.1989) by a forthright and wealthy lady who was helping (with others) to save the Rudolf Steiner Bookshop in Museum Street, near the British Museum, in London (that bookshop had to close, but the Rudolf Steiner Book Trust, which I established, and of which I was an unpaid director (with anthroposophist Nelson Willby and his American wife Melissa) for a couple of years, established Wellspring Books, which had premises in New Oxford Street for many years, and which still exists online. https://www.wellspringbookshop.co.uk/.
I remember that forthright lady partly because she would refer to her husband, a Jewish businessman, as “a six-pointer“, as if he had been bred from an unusual breed of animal.
Even that was 35 or 36 years ago now.
It was only today that I thought to see whether Amabel was related to that defendant. Turns out that she almost certainly was or is. The Dorset “hice” seems to be Crichel House (or “hice”):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crichel_House
The house was owned by one Napier Marten or Napier Sturt Marten [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Marten], born about 2-3 years after me, in 1959. He has or had no fewer than five sisters, one of which is or was Amabel Marten. He also has four children, one of whom is Constance Marten.
The house and 400 acres of the estate land was sold in 2013 for £34M to an American billionaire hedge-fund operator, one Richard L. Chilton.
Chinese artworks were also sold, for over £12M.
See also: https://laracon0.blogspot.com/2015/10/crichel-house.html.
Well, there it is. Looks like the Amabel I encountered a few times in the mid-1980s is or was (I assume she is still around, but who knows?) the aunt of the accused, Constance Marten. Small world.
Latest trial news: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/constance-marten-old-bailey-trial-manslaughter-baby-b1224018.html.
Update, 14 July 2005
(scroll down until you reach the bit about Amabel Marten and her husband, one Kieran (or Ciaran) Clarke etc; he apparently died in 2004 at the age of 52, and may or may not have been the person I met in Dublin in or about 1985 or 1986. It seems that the above house was only bought in 1990 or 1991).
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/man-of-harmony-in-music-and-in-landscape-1.1142634
“Diverse” Britain
https://www.mylondon.news/news/transport/man-punched-piccadilly-line-after-31491200
“A man was punched in the face on the Piccadilly line after asking a fellow passenger to move his bags from a seat and a buggy blocking the aisle. British Transport Police are now appealing for witnesses following the attack on board the carriage between 8.20am and 8.40am on Monday, March 31.
The attacker is described as black, with dreadlock hair, wearing a grey tracksuit and was accompanied by a woman with a buggy and suitcase.”
[My London]
“Diverse” Britain
“A terrified woman woke up to find a rapist licking her feet. Ahmed Fahmy, 46, raped and sexually assaulted women in hotels where he worked for over 16 years between 2008 and 2024.
Other reports also heard Fahmy fondled women’s toes. Cops first investigated him in January last year after reports of rape and sexual assault by two women who had been staying at the hotel in West Heath Drive, Barnet, where he worked.“
[My London]
“Diverse” Britain
https://www.mylondon.news/news/south-london-news/croydon-machete-gang-brought-knives-31495746
“A Croydon machete gang, who ‘brought knives to a gun fight’, got more than they bargained for during a raid on an Albanian cannabis farm, a court heard. Seven men and one boy – aged between 17 and 32 – were were armed with knives and machetes, while wearing balaclavas and construction gloves, when they faced off with gun-toting Balkan weed farmers, it is alleged.“
[My London]
Late tweets seen
Note that Labour, even then, would still have 119 MPs, because the vast majority of non-whites in the UK vote Labour. There must come a point at which this form of “democracy” ceases to be legitimate.
See my previous comment…
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 