I’ll Follow the Son, Part II

Tickets for NYO’s summer tour went on sale in stages, and after difficulties getting a ticket for the Proms last year I bought some to their performances in Birmingham and then in Suffolk in case I couldn’t get one for the Albert Hall. I figured I could always skip one or the other and write them off. Alternatively, I could make a proper road trip of it and follow the orchestra from one performance to the next. Apart from some camping trips, I didn’t have any other travel planned for the summer, and it was my last chance to see W. perform with the NYO. I’d enjoyed seeing two of their concerts in a row in 2023, so this would surely be interesting too.

Once all three were secure, it took me a while to decide what to do. Should I skip Suffolk and just do Birmingham and London by train? Train prices being what they are in the UK, it made more sense to do it all by car, even with driving all the way down south. Once I’d decided on that, it opened up the possibility of a proper road trip, staying in less-familiar places and seeing some parts of England I hadn’t yet. I could at least see Suffolk if I had the car with me, so I booked an Airbnb near Snape for the night of the second concert.

For the Proms, I was looking at accommodation options in the usual area around Kensington, until I realised that staying outside the M25 and catching a train in could offer more possibilities and spare me the congestion charges for driving my diesel car into London. Which is how I ended up booking a B&B in St Albans, a commuter town (city, properly) I’d never previously given much thought. It’s half an hour by train from there to St Pancras, and I could park at the station for a few pounds.

The rest ended up being last-minute, partly because I wasn’t sure if I’d be filling the gap between Birmingham and Suffolk with a visit to some friends in Grantham, but that didn’t pan out. Then we had warnings of a major windstorm on the Monday before I was due to go, and I had visions of having to deal with a damaged roof; but that didn’t eventuate either. In the end I committed to doing the whole trip from Birmingham to London, wind or no wind.

The second concert in Suffolk was two nights after the first, so I now had to decide where to stop in between. Cambridge was one option, but I know it well, even if it’s been years since my last visit. I was more tempted by places I hadn’t seen, but wasn’t convinced that Rugby, Northampton and Peterborough had enough to offer. In the end, I settled on Ely, north of Cambridge, which I’d thought about visiting as a student but had never made it to.

With the trip booked, all that remained was to do it. On the day of the first concert, I set off down the M6 to Birmingham, weaving in and out of lanes at 70 mph past lorries, past Carlisle and the Lakes and the turnoffs to Manchester and Liverpool. I’d left home shortly after 10.30am and got into Birmingham around five, busting. A lunchtime coffee had gone right through me, so I’d pulled into a motorway services an hour before, but when I saw that parking there cost fifteen quid I forced my bladder into submission and drove on.

The hotel I’d booked was a cheap dive in the suburbs, with signs at the desk saying “NO BREAKFAST” to countermand the vacant breakfast room visible through a locked glass door. It had free parking, though, and was a perfectly adequate place to sleep and shower, which was all I wanted. It was also outside Birmingham’s Clean Air Zone, meaning I only had to pay for one day of entering that rather than two, and was half the price of places closer to the concert hall. Once I’d dumped my bags I drove into the city to a prepaid parking spot a few minutes’ walk from Symphony Hall across the Birmingham Canal.

I hadn’t seen this end of Brum in January. Walking around before the concert, I admired the makeshift shrine to the recently-departed Ozzy Osbourne at the Black Sabbath Bridge on Broad St, where a dozen devoted fans were taking selfies and leaving bottles of cheap booze. There was a good Indian restaurant over the road (not a balti one, sadly) for grabbing a meal before the show. Then, after a quick catch-up with W. at the stage door, it was time for the concert. I was in the rear of the stalls, so didn’t have the best close-up view, but could see him throughout, which was the main thing.

The concert started with a bang with the famous 1977 fanfare of John Williams’s Star Wars, its timpanis all the more thrilling for being played by my own flesh and blood. The rest of the accompanying suite was from the prequels and recent sequels, so less familiar, but with callbacks in places to the familiar motifs, and all as well-performed as NYO pieces always are. It was followed by a 2019 piece by American composer Caroline Shaw, “The Observatory”, inspired by Hollywood science fiction movies. I didn’t know it, but it really grew on me over the course of the tour.

After the interval was the main draw, Gustav Holst’s The Planets. My son played snare drum in the opening movement “Mars, Bringer of War”, another thrill; I’ve loved its martial rhythms since hearing it on an LP of classical music from science fiction films that my parents gave me as a kid. “Venus” and “Mercury” were also familiar, as was “Jupiter”, with its famous tune which was later repurposed as a hymn; I’m pretty sure I remembered these from Tomita‘s 1970s synthesizer versions from another LP my parents had owned. I had less memory of “Saturn”, “Uranus” and “Neptune”, but they were all good, particularly “Uranus” in this Birmingham performance. A choir of teenagers from Surrey provided the ethereal voices at the end of “Neptune”.

I saw W. afterwards, but not for long, as he had to head off to the NYO bus to his digs. Dressed up as I was for the concert, I was slightly apprehensive walking back in the dark over the canal to the car, but it was fine. I drove back to the hotel and turned in for the night, looking forward to No Breakfast in the morning.

I didn’t take many photos on this shorter second visit to Birmingham, so have added the best to the end of my gallery from January.

Next: Cromwell country.

← 13 December 2025 · Journal