Brief Encounters: frisbee

Plateau Mont-Royal is Montreal's bohemian quarter, full of bagel stores, coffee shops, bakeries, and young guys strumming guitars on their stoops. At the foot of the small mountain after which the city is named, is a park: tennis courts, a small baseball pitch with wooden bleachers, and best of all, shade. 
It was here I took shelter while I finished my book – by 11am, it was heading quickly towards 30 degrees and the sun was searing my shoulders. 
It was only when I stopped reading that I noticed the small group next to me: a cheery guy about my age, three boys aged between around seven and 12, and a tall teenage Indian girl and her father. They had a frisbee, rugby ball, football, kite, and a large cooler filled with snacks. They were clearly settled in for the day. 
After watching them for a few minutes, I wandered over and asked if I could play. For the next hour or so, we frisbeed, ate homemade egg mayonnaise sandwiches, and talked. 
The father and daughter were from Mumbai, on holiday, just the two of them. They, like me, had gatecrashed the frisbee. He was divorced, and this was his way of spending quality time with his daughter. They were headed, via Toronto and Buffalo, to New York in ten days' time. "I am soooo excited," said the daughter. I loved their company – they were intellectual, curious and sparky. He read the Guardian online back home, and she was filled with plans for her life. 
The guy was playing Dad to his friend's three boys for the day – "I love them to bits," he said. He threw them over his shoulders, wrestled them to the ground and flung rugby balls in their direction, shouting encouragement. He has travelled all over the world, but grew up a block from where we were, and used to play in the park as a boy. He had lovely brown eyes. 
A couple of hours later, as I packed up to leave and catch my plane home, I felt a tug of emotion in my chest. From three continents, seven strangers had converged on a park and enjoyed an unexpectedly happy morning together. These intense, but fleeting, friendships are both the best and worst side of travel. You taste the start of a friendship and then leave, too soon. But the best leave a strong impression. 

The Portuguese Pepperpot

As long as I've known my adored, talented writer/English professor/DJ friend Jason Tougaw (we met in Mexico six years ago under extremely funny circumstances and have remained friends ever since), I've known about his grandfather, Ralph Neves. 

Neves was a jockey, 4'9" and "dominated any room he inhabited". Hot-blooded and fast-living – nicknamed the Portuguese Pepperpot – he hung out with all the Hollywood celebrities of the day. 

He started riding at 13, after he ran away from a Catholic school for orphans, where he landed when his father was institutionalised for schizophrenia, and found his way to a horse ranch in Oregon. He was ruthless on the track. In life, he was as charming as he was callous, writes Tougaw. 

One day in 1936, he came back from the dead. You can read Jason's piece about that amazing day here. Enjoy. 

Less pomp, more circumstance

When you've done something so often it becomes routine, it takes someone pretty special to lift that experience out of the ordinary. Adrian Brown is that man. 

Brown is a conductor who recently started working with my orchestra. I met him for the first time a few weeks ago. He is twinkly-eyed, charming, quick-witted and sounds a lot like Michael Caine – Carry On humour his speciality. But more importantly, he has a deep, spiritual passion for music, and knows instinctively how to convey this to an orchestra full of people like me who have been playing long enough to have heard it all before. 

A conductor will tell you how he – and sadly, he is usually a he – wants something played: shorter, faster, quieter. A good conductor will try to explain why. Brown did both, using language not usually associated with music, while also exploring the more interesting idea of why the composer might have written what he – and sadly, he is usually a he – did. 

An example. A passage in Edward Elgar's magnificent First Symphony sees the strings surging forward in a crescendo and then stopping, abruptly, to play almost inaudibly quietly. Brown told us he believed this was a musical manifestation of Elgar's passion pouring out of him, before he remembers where he is – prudish, Edwardian England – and pulls back, keeping his emotion in check. 

"This is autobiographical stuff!" he told us, more than once. "People think Elgar is all Pomp and Circumstance, but he was actually incredibly fragile." In an interview before the concert, he said: "I am deeply, emotionally attached to Elgar: his foibles, his moods, his difficulties, and his inferiority complex."

He also encouraged us to try to forget the last century of history and imagine we were hearing this music for the first time – not easy. "That key change would have been incredibly radical back then," he said. Later, sitting down to play Beethoven's fifth piano concerto, he stopped us after the first note, as he thought we weren't giving it our all. "This was written for an Emperor!" he said. And thus, without telling us how to play, he conveyed so much more. 

For me, I responded more than I ever have to a conductor, caring deeply about how I played and coming away with a more profound understanding of what I was playing. "Go to the tenderest place in your heart," he told us when we were rehearsing the symphony's exquisite slow movement. We did, and our performance on Monday was all the better for it. 

"I didn't think I'd ever recover"

In February 1964, Angela Patrick was a happy, carefree 19 year-old living outside London, working in the city, and having fun with her girlfriends. One Saturday night in Essex, she did what most teenagers that age do – went to a party, got a bit merry, and slept with her new boyfriend.

The consequences of that night are still being felt by Angela and her loved-ones nearly 50 years later. She found herself pregnant, and was forced to do something almost unimaginable – give up her baby son for adoption.

We met a few weeks ago over coffee in the National Gallery and she told me her story, published in yesterday's Guardian. Nearly 50 years on, re-telling it still makes her cry. She was beautiful – less polished than above, pictured left with her daughter – intelligent and warm.

What impressed me most is how she survived her ordeal and went on to live a happy life. And how one tiny event can affect you for life. For once, the platitude "what doesn't kill us..." seems apt.

Photograph: Sarah Lee

Drawing inspiration

Quentin Blake was ten minutes into a chirpy monologue about who inspires him as an illustrator when something occurred to me: with his small, bird-like features, wispy hair and lively eyebrows, he looked not a little like the people he draws (self-portrait, above; portrait, below by Eamonn McCabe).

I cast my eyes across the rest of the panel taking part in the talk at the British Library –illustrators and cartoonists, Posy Simmonds, Martin Rowson and Jamie Hewlett. Simmonds had the soft, open features and grace of her Tamara Drewe and Gemma Bovary characters; Hewlett, the cheeky, boyish grin of the Gorillaz crew, below (and see him speak briefly here).

Do people who spend their lives creating other people turn to the most obvious person for inspiration – themselves – even if it's subconscious?

My theory, of course, ended with Rowson, a brilliant "visual journalist" whose intricate, political cartoons resemble modern-day Hogarth but look nothing like him. Hey ho.

I adored Blake as a child, never sure if it was his drawings, or Roald Dahl's words, that I loved best. So it was fascinating to discover who inspired him: turns out, he was not alone in his idolatry of Ronald Searle, who died last December (below). "The Godfather," said Blake. "He had the best line," said Rowson (it's a drawing thing). "The greatest illustrator of all time," said Hewlett. "He has completely inspired me all my life."

Hewlett, Blake, Simmonds and Rowson were intelligent, funny and generous, and gave the impression that being an illustrator is an extremely rewarding way to spend your life. It worked for Searle, too: he lived in France, with the woman he loved, and drank champagne every day. As Hewlett said: "What's not to admire?"

Encounters: concert

It sounded like a skit from a Woody Allen film:

First man: Are you ready for the next instalment of the tragedy on Sunday?

Second man: Götterdämmerung?

First man: No, Tottenham.

Half the fun in going to a big classical concert – and with André Previn and Anne-Sophie Mutter playing (at the Barbican on Monday) they don't come much bigger – is people watching. It's a great tradition: they did it in all the grand opera houses in Europe.

The people in our row didn't disappoint. The conversation above was between a well-heeled man a few seats down, and a well-heeled friend he met in the aisle. One, fittingly, had a touch of Alan Sugar about him, only with a German accent. The other seemed to know everyone.

But it was their women-folk who were the most jaw-dropping. Hair was expensive, dyed just the right tawny shade, tonged and set with so much hairspray it shimmered. Clothes were showy and tight; jewellery, ostentatious. Faces were taut with Botox, but captivating. And best of all were the accents: exotic Anglo-Euro-German, the voice of a 60s Bond girl.

I don't doubt they were enjoying the music. But as they settled into their seats for the second half, dinner plans were already being urgently discussed. I thought of the sandwich I'd wolfed down before the concert, and vowed, one day, to be this glamorous.

Encounters: loss

The cheese straws I manufactured yesterday morning in catering quantities – for a Christmas soiree – were a little saltier than they should have been. I was listening to journalist Eve Pollard on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, and moved to tears more than once.

Her parents fled Vienna in the 1930s, but her grandparents died in a concentration camp. Her mother could never speak about them. When the war was over, she had the chance to visit Vienna, but couldn't do it. Jews' houses were routinely looted when they were deported, and she told her daughter she couldn't bear to see another woman wearing her jewellery. It was a small personal detail – a story I'd never heard before – that revealed so much about the lives of ordinary people at the time.

Pollard dedicated one of her songs, the beautiful aria "O mio babbino caro" ("Oh my beloved Father") by Puccini, to her mother, who would listen to it quietly, lost in memories of her Dad.

Like I said, salty cheese straws.