Weekend in Leicester

I spent the weekend from Thursday 29 September to Monday 2 October in Leicester, playing in the Chess Congress and attending meetings at Secular Hall. The weather was very hot and sunny, not what I had expected for this time of year, and not ideal for playing chess. However I suppose I can't really blame the weather for my poor results, just two draws (in the first and fifth games) and one of those was against a junior.

At Secular Hall there was a lecture on 29 September about the situation in Libya, though the speaker was a supported of the Gaddaffi regime, who described his 40-year rule as a type of socialist utopia! What is going to happen there in future is of course difficult to predict. On Sunday there was a meeting of a new History Group in the afternoon, and in the evening a most interesting talk on Thomas Babbington and his friends and family and their work for the abolition of the Slave Trade. They did a lot of the work in preparing evidence for William Wilberforce to use in his speeches in Parliament (from which Quakers and nonconformists were excluded).

I travelled to London by train, and to Leicester by coach. On the return journey, also by coach from Leicester I thought I would try the coach to Hastings. This proved to be a mistake, as the so-called 'Express' took nearly 4 hours! It began by going south-west to Mitcham, and so on to Coulsdon and East Grinstead. Then it went on a grand round tour of East Sussex, stopping at Uckfield, Hailsham, Eastbourne, Pevensey, Bexhill and other places.

Outing to London and Leicester

On Saturday morning I decided on something of an impulse to combine a trip to London to attend the Conway Hall talk by Jim Moore on "Darwin and the Sin of Slavery", with a trip to Leicester to attend the lecture by Ken MacLeod on "Darwin Dawkins and the Left". This was just about possible in the time by using booking.com to locate a Hotel and the National Rail Enquiries to book the trains, using a debit card and collecting the tickets from the machine at Hastings station. The machine was a bit recalcitrant but finally came up with the tickets.

One of the interesting points from the Moore lecture that I'd not been aware of was the role of Louis Agassiz (now best known for his work on ice ages) in diverting Darwin's efforts into countering Agassiz's strange theory of multiple 'creations' of separate human races known as polygenism.

Ken McLeod's thesis was that many people on the political Left have deliberately misunderstood Richard Dawkins, or the implications of his "Selfish Gene" idea, though it seems to me that many of other persuasions have been equally free in criticising Dawkins without having apparently read his books.

I was hoping also to fit in a Gresham Lecture by Christopher Hogwood, given at the Museum of London at 1pm today (Tuesday). But this was scuppered since my train was over half an hour late arriving at St Pancras, due apparently to signaling problems. It was also raining, so I used my bus pass to get the No.17 to London Bridge, but managed to get there just in time to miss the first Hastings train.

Weekend in Leicester

On Saturday 11 September I took the train to Charing Cross, walked to Victoria and bought a single National Express coach ticket to Leicester, where I had booked to stay two nights at self-catering apartments by the Grand Union Canal, as illustrated here, although my apartment in fact proved to be on the other side, overlooking the road. The attraction was to revisit my old haunts in Leicester where I lived for nine years, meet some old friends, and to attend the Secular Hall Open Day on the Sunday. (See Hastings Humanists for a brief report).

The idea of buying a single ticket was that I might decide to stay a little longer, but in the event I returned on the Monday. The 11:45 am coach I booked on was about half an hour late, but I wasn't really in any hurry. I sat next to a lady who said nothing, and busied myself mostly with doing the puzzles in the Times. At Victoria Coach Station the lady seemed rather agitated to find her connection on to Portsmouth, and I did my best to direct her, but now feel somewhat guilty that I didn't actually see her to the right bay, or converse with her on the trip.

There didn't seem to be any trains scheduled from Victoria to Hastings so I walked again to Charing Cross. This is quite a pleasant walk, via Buckingham Palace, St James' Park, Admiralty Arch and Trafalgar Square, though I was carrying too much in the form of provisions I had bought, but over-estimated, for self-catering purposes in Leicester. The next day I felt quite tired. I don't suppose I will be going back to Leicester again for some time; there is the AGM of the Society in November, but I don't think I want to get involved in their politics again.