I have just spent an evening at the Tabernacle in the depths of Notting Hill. The Tabernacle is a disused church which has been repurposed as a community centre and I was there for a session of 5×15. This is an organisation that gets together 5 interesting people who are given 15 minutes to talk about a subject they are passionate about, without notes. Usually of course these speakers have a new book to sell!
On the walk there, just passed Portobello Road, we popped into the Notting Hill Bookshop, as in the film, except it is not just a travel bookshop! They obviously have a good trade, still, based on the film. There are postcards for sale that reference the film but definitely no sign of Hugh Grant.
The first speaker was Jonathan Sumption, who on occasion was standing in line with Boris Johnson during Covid times. He was talking about the fragile and dangerous state which democracy finds itself in at the moment. The Challenges of Democracy is the name of his book.
We then had Suzanne O’Sullivan talking about her writing on the dangers of over diagnosis, with particular focus on ADHD. Carole Cadwalladr was the journalist who exposed the scandal of Cambridge Analytica; the political manipulation that took place etc. Nick Makoha is a Ugandan poet whose latest work looks at the Entebbe incident from an African point of view, instead of from that of Israel or America.
Lastly was the polymath author Katherine Rundell; the writer of a seminal work on John Donne as well as prize winning books for children. She was indeed a passionate speaker, talking about climate change, democracy, endangered animals and more. It had been quite a heavy evening in some ways but she finished on an optimistic, affirmative note by saying that we should never give up hope.
At the end of the session Katherine Rundell signed one of her books for my granddaughter who is a great fan. Altogether an extremely interesting evening.