The Best of the Catalyst Club with Lynne Murphy, Sachi Kimura and Ron Geesin

2019 marks the 15th year of the Catalyst Club which is hard for me to believe. Barely out of my school shorts (ok, I was 35) I hosted our first event in the basement of a wine bar on Queen’s Road in the summer of 2004, with talks on the history of the Martini, author Max Beerbohm and a candid tale of an American road trip with the band Clearlake. Little has changed.
To mark the club being halfway through its life this ‘best of’ features 3 talks that audiences have particularly enjoyed in recent years. Breaking from tradition on this rare occasion, I can reveal the topics for this night are:

Lynne Murphy – How America Saved the English Language
Lynne Murphy, an American immigrant to England (and professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex) has been listening closely to what people say about American and British English, and noticing that most of it is (to turn an American phrase) bull hockey. She makes the case that the English of England isn’t all that English—and certainly not more English than what’s spoken on the other side of the Atlantic.
Lynne’s book The Prodigal Tongue: the love–hate relationship between British and American English (OneWorld) was one of The Economist’s ‘Best books of 2018’ and began life as this Catalyst Club talk!

Ron Geesin: Adjustable Spanners
Ron is a musician and composer best known for his collaborations with Pink Floyd and Roger Waters, orchestrating the title track from Atom Heart Mother in 1970. Less well known is that he is also the author of ‘The Adjustable Spanner: History, Origins and Development to 1970’, said to be the finest book ever written on the theme of adjustable spanners. Ron will be talking about his spanner collection and may bring a few along to show to the audience if he’s feeling in the mood. He promises to keep to 15 minutes.

Sachi Kimura: Bottom Reading 
Many people are gifted with psychic ability and in Sachi’s case, it’s through gazing at peoples’ bottoms. She has read numerous bottoms since 2002, and this talk is about her passion in meeting many people’s back side to help/assist their inside. 
Sachi is also a movement teacher and director, theatre maker, with performing experiences. Along side her career in theatre, she has worked as bottom reader (Rumpologist) as well as a medium. Website:https://bottomreading.wixsite.com/info