Was a busy week last week. Because of a colleague's illness I went to work on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, instead of just the first 2 days of the week. On Wednesday I took Albina to Hammersmith Hospital to have her metal stitches removed after her double operation on her kidneys.
On Friday, a sad and extraordinary event, as I attended the funeral of 28 year old Bartek Wlodarczyk-Sroka, who died suddenly at Berkely, California, as a result of an epileptic fit. Didn't know him personally, but have cooperated for a couple of years with his mother, Magda Wlodarczyk, one of the leading actresses of the Polish Stage Company. It was a sublime event with over 400 attending, mostly young people who knew him from his Polish background or his amateur dramatics as a child, but also his university colleagues, and those who shared his music. The cemetery in Sewardstone Park, near Waltham Abbey, was set in beautiful rolling countryside, surrounded by meadows and forests, which was reached after a long 15 minute drive through a dirt track, surrounded by fields and trees. The cemetery is so new it is not marked on any map, and all its current occupants appear to lie under beautifully carved wooden headstones. Bartek's ashes were laid to rest to the accompaniment of poetry, music and reminiscenses from his professor and his colleagues. Then we had a wake at the King Oak hostelry set in the Epping Forest and reached only by narrow roads under the darkened canopies of Epping's majestic trees.
An then on Saturday at the invitation of the indefatigable Joanna Dudzinska I attended a cultural event at the ActOne cinema in Acton. It was the site of the former Acton Reference Library. She had laid on a talk by George Szlachetko about his mother who was in the Warsaw Uprising as a girl. Then we saw the singular sculpture by Oskar Krajewski, who makes extraordinary mobile sculptures from recycled materials, and particulary from plastic and electronic gadgets. It is lit up by LED lights and puctuated by sound effects. I felt that I was looking at a dystopian future in which the nightmare in our hallucinating brain is detached from its umbilical cord and allowed to float up into a reality we can all share.
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