Pausing for Pinter...

Sometimes you say yes to something because you think it will be good for you. When, in March this year, Dearest suggested going to see "No Man's Land", I didn't hear Pinter, I heard Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart. Besides, it is over thirty years since I 'd seen and had been left bemused by a Pinter play. Surely I had become older, wiser and educated by the School of Life during that time?

We had already seen "Godot" played by McKellan and Stuart, together with Simon Callow and Ronald Pickup (a divine cast), and relished an opportunity to see McKellan and Stewart once more.
In that we were not disappointed: these two grandees of the theatre justified the not inconsiderable cost of the seats. Ah, but the play's the thing whereupon I caught Dearest 'King napping ten minutes in.
By the interval he awoke, saying, "Did I miss anything?"
I summed it up as succinctly as I could: "I am bewitched, buggered, and bewildered."
The second Act was more of the same, but the power nap had done him good. It was either that or the handsaw laugh of the woman behind that kept him awake.
So I am not going to pretend that I could make sense of it; it will be many different things to different people. But what I will say to you is that in future I will most likely avoid Pinter.
Make mine a Pinta Gin tonight, and go easy on the tonic.

Bye bye Bake Off, Don't Cry....

Well I did.
Not copious, plump tears. More of a genteel sniff. What a very grand finale. So sorry to say goodbye to them all. And very pleased for the finalists that deservedly won their places. A life-changer for Candice, a turbo-charge for Jane, and maybe a game-changer for Andrew. Who knows, but briefly last night, I cared.  No more Great British Bake Off as we know and love it. It has been a great big Linus Blanket for our unquiet nation. Marvellous displacement therapy.
The irony of following a programme that is promoting every calorie combination invented whilst re-educating my life-style habits is not lost on me. Watching the talent of others does not, astoundingly, make me reach for the biscuit barrel.
I can even withstand Dearest scoffing his way through a large bag of Heroes as he watched intently the culinary extravaganzas which will never reach him in this house. His own waist displacement therapy, obviously.

Husbands being heroic?

She Nose You Know...

No, I am not tapping my proboscis as I write. Or anyone else's before you make the suggestion. You mean that's not a proboscis? Dear me.

The husband of a friend of mine recently told me that he said he could no longer smell and that my friend could no longer hear properly but that together they made a fully functioning human being. He drily commented, "She smells and I listen". Foundation of a very happy marriage. We have obviously reached a stage in our lives where we are reconciled to a  deterioration of our working parts.

But noses are in the news this past week. Kicking off with The Nose, an opera -the first by Shostakovich.  Based on a short story by Gogol, concerning a St Petersburg official whose nose is stolen and goes on to develop a life of its own. It sounds an absolute hoot(er).
Audiences at The Royal Opera  laughing uproariously? We missed a trick here.

But what a treat to read about the latest device invented to foil bicycle thieves. Skunklock may soon be coming on the market, if the crowd-funding exercise is successful. When a thief attempts to saw through the lock, such vile and putrid gas is released it induces vomiting. It almost makes me wish I had a bike.

And finally we learn that the Lynx effect has some scientific credibility. Who'd have thought that there was a documented basis for women preferring men to smell of something other than themselves. Though I have been fortunate enough to be married to a man who puts showering high on his list of trivial pursuits, I have nevertheless ensured that he has always been well-fragranced. This might have been an own goal, if there were any truth in the science.
What he doesn't know is that Le Labo's  Thé  Noir smells of leather and tobacco. I love it. If he but knew it (or read my Blog) it reminds me of my Grandfather who smoked "Baby's Bottom"
Trust me, my nose has a remarkable memory.

And you thought I was joking...

Razzle Dazzle through the Autumn Mists..

There is a smell of woodsmoke in the air. You could imagine, if you shut your eyes and stoppered your ears, that you were in an arboreal setting, not North London or South Herts. Whichever way the wind is blowing: rural it ain't. From my window, I can see my small Japanese Acer biblically turning into a burning bush. And my potted pansies and cyclamen are a reminder that this aching back of mine, is actually worth the effort. But the nights are fair drawing in, and the day seems to be over by five-thirty.
The autumn brings with it many joys but the ever diminishing daylight is not one of them. Too soon for Christmas lights, and a long-time avoider of illuminated pumpkins and ghastly Halloween trimmings, I turn to Strictly Come Dancing for my quota of glitter and glisten to offset the incipient gloam. I never like to follow the crowd, but here I am, with ten million others sucking up the sequinned sequences. I can happily read a newspaper through it, so that I miss the unmitigated tosh with which they pad it out, and tune in for the actual dancing.
I can't stand the most overworked word on this show: journey. If ever I refer to my Slimming journey then send in the trolls. (It is a bumpy, pot-holed ride in a Street Car Named Desire-for-chocolate, if you're asking..)
I am always amazed and enthralled by the contestants' progress - that, is the true pleasure.
It does, however, become increasingly irksome when the obvious stooge (this year ex-politician, Ed Balls) is kept in by the public vote. What it says to me is that, as a nation, we have not yet got over our primitive and abhorrent pleasure in watching dancing bears.

Sorry, Would you Mind Repeating That?

Auditory processing?  I'm rubbish at it. Always have been. When The Two Ronnies made a joke about fork handles: four candles, all those years ago, that was me. Or rather, a small problem of mine. Not often mentioned, but sometimes getting me into hot water such as when a friend once referred to "wide diverging views," I heard, "Wide-eyed virgin views".

It is hard to imagine this now, when song lyrics are a click away on the keyboard, but in the Seventies when I worked for BBC TV Light Entertainment, part of my job, as Assistant Floor Manager, was to write out the lyrics for guest artists on large idiot boards and stand to the side of the camera so that they could follow them. In those days getting hold of lyrics meant paying for a copy of the music and the budget of the show I happened to be working on in BBC Glasgow at the time, could not afford to do that. So I was sent into a room with a recording of the song on a tape cassette deck and told to transcribe. No matter how many times I played Saturday Night Fever I came up with the same thing:
"I got air in my pants/I get higher in my walking/And I glow in the dark/Without warning".
I played it to loads of different people and they too could only hear my lyrics and not the official,
"I've got fire in my mind/I get higher in my walking/ And I glow in the dark/I give you warning". Mine was windier, but quite close, I thought.

So hats off to Microsoft, that claims to have developed a voice recognition programme that is as good as humans at transcribing a conversation. Let's hope they've modelled it on a You Man with accurate auditory processing. Apparently, we are a long way off from computers being able to understand what is being said.
That's a relief. I thought I could hear the sound of robots marching.
Happening more often. Must get that checked.
                                      

Mother Already Ruined...

I am off the gin. Well, I was hardly, what one would call ever on the gin. But now with my new slimming regime, I have to watch liquid calories  as well as those cake-shaped.  Yes, I can count alcohol amongst my daily syn quota but after the losses in the early weeks I am now down to the hard lard. This will be weight that is more difficult to shift because it's been there longer.
I was rifling through my food cupboard the other day, as one is wont to do, in idle Pooh Bear-type moments, when at the back I spotted a jar of Boozy Berries. Raspberries soaked in something pink. I didn't put my glasses on, and sampled them with some 0%fat Yoghurt. They were exquisite. They really hit the mark. In fact, so well, that I went back for another small helping without the yoghurt. As I fumbled for a pair of specs after the third helping, I read that they had been soaked in Pinksters Gin.
Very acceptable. So another alcohol-free week passes. What? Raspberries soaked in gin don't count as one of my five a day? You've got to be joking!


                                                                 +                                      =     Dietary Happiness

Gadgetry Gone Bonkers.... I believe

Call me old-fashioned.  A fuddy-duddy. Come on, bring it on. I actually feel older than Methuselah, having just read about the Feed and Swipe, or is it the Swipe and Feed?  Which are you going to do first? Feed your baby or swipe your phone? But hey, you are spared decision-making because a new device has been invented which enables you to do both simultaneously. I am not going to stand on my dog-eared and much-loved tome of Penelope Leach to rant and rave. The ridiculousness of it is blindingly apparent.
It made me think back to the piles of baby equipment we bought for our own babies, seduced by the glossy lure of advertising. So much stuff, that my Grandmother remarked that when she'd had her babies she simply cleared out a drawer from from her chest of drawers for the baby to sleep in and scoffed at the sprig-printed fabric of my new Moses basket. Babies ever since have been big business.

But as we wait for the daughter of a very dear friend to give birth to her first child we are reminded that the most important delivery of of all, will not come via Amazon.

Do not try to take photograph while bottle still attached.....

Marmite - a Country Divided....

I bought my first pot of Marmite in twenty odd years, last week.
Ridiculously, I felt that this purchase was in someway responsible for the ensuing brouhaha. Just to make sure that my place in the universe is actually where I left it, I will do an experiment to see if the same thing happens when I buy Bisto Gravy granules which I last bought thirty six years ago when, as a newly-wed, I'd failed to equal my mother's gravy.

But boy, have we gone to town over this business with Unilever's stand-off with Tesco? Two Goliaths flexing their Marketmight. Unilever, using Brexit as reason for jacking up the price of that little bottle of yeast extract. What delightful irony that a company called Unilever should be fuelling the ongoing feud between the Leavers and the Remainers.
Marmite's advertising slogan is "You love it or you hate it".  Peter Brookes, cartoonist in The Times has a ball today with a large jar of MayMite, featuring a caricature of Theresa May "Rich in Hard Brexit. 100% Disastrous".  Oh yes, we may look across at America and sympathise with what is taking place in their elections, but it is not that we are sitting comfortably this side of the Atlantic. Not at all.

Spreading Discontent?

Do Not Spare Me....

What do I know about Opera? If you have been reading me a while you will know that I am a bit of a virginette as far as opera is concerned.  I think I am a probably a pleb with lofty aspirations who, left to her own devices, would most likely have gravitated towards "Kinky Boots" rather than Don Giovanni at The Coliseum in London last Friday. However, my personal Cultural attache is determined to expand my vistas, and so who am I to protest?
I resolutely avoided reading reviews before I went. This was on the basis tickets were already bought months ago, and I thought I might be influenced.
Shades of Grey. What does that make you conjure up ? A Farrow and Ball colour chart or that book? Well, I tell you that the opening of Richard Jones' Don Giovanni was a study in both F&B and S&M. Modern setting, corridors of featureless grey doors, and lots of robotic sex. I suppose every director seeks to provide a new unique vision but, if I am honest, this is fundamentally at odds with my preconception of opera being grand, colourful and joyful. I emerged sadly underwelmed by it all.
I read two reviews:

Richard Morrison in The Times called it "Sexy, surreal and shocking" ; while he only needed to see it once, it had been the most gripping Giovanni staged by ENO in years. A view shared by Hugh Canning in The Sunday Times. He said that Don Giovanni was the sex addict he had been waiting for.
It made me re-evaluate. Why had  I been looking for grand, colourful and joyful when the subject was the darker side of murky? What was I thinking of?

Christopher Purves as Giovanni and Caitlin Lynch as Anna
Picture by Robert Workman 

But What Fine Deniers You Have, Grandmama....

I hate tights. I hate tights with a passion that I reserve for very few things in life. (Apart from slugs. And maybe the persistent little fruit flies in my kitchen that are driving me nuts. Driven to keeping bananas in the fridge, for goodness sake, but still the pesky little critters emerge out of new spud peelings. Where is the fast-breeder in my kitchen? No, not you darling.)

Now, tights, while I hate them,  I do, of course, possess the ultimate sanction. I abandon them in favour of trousers. When I was at a wedding in the summer I noticed that nobody, but nobody was wearing tights. Bare legs were definitely in, regardless of age, leg-mottling or varicose various. I was truly resplendent in a pair of harem silk pants and was also happily tights-free. 

The various alterations upstairs involved a total clearing and wardrobe rationalisation which left me with a huge pile of tights.  Having studiously ignored them  until now, I started to inspect them more closely. Some of these barely worn, some looking almost new. What was I going to do with these? How could I recycle them? Research showed that an African women's charity that had once happily recycled them, had shut down. Disappointing. But I read on and found that various suggestions included keeping your onions suspended in them over the winter! I am not too sure I ever am blessed with so many onions that they need to be stored in the winter, but I loved the image, nevertheless.

However, yesterday there was an article in The Times fashion pages to suggest that tights are back in vogue. They are making an appearance again on the catwalks. Hooray! In the very knicker elastic of time, my tights have been spared a stay of execution.

Maybe I could offer them to my begonia tubers; after all, one don't want one's begonias to catch pnuemonia.  I might be prepared to share. But only if the drop in temperatures forces me back into the age-old battle with the crotch-defying ankle-wrinklers that I hate so well.

Forget Black Opaques, it's Bare or Sheer apparently...

I know my onions. And my bunions, naturally.
                                             

Pas Ce Soir, Mon Cher...

My eleven year old granddaughter has opted to learn French in secondary school. A very bonne idee, I think, as it gives her Grandmother the chance to shine. Or more precisely, shine-up her rusty old French that is only brought out  not even on high days, but purely on holidays. And then only when all else has failed, and gesticulation, a poor substitute for the lingua Franca, is about to cause an international incident. I have a wonderful French accent and I talk absolute bilge. (Come to think of it, I could possibly be bi-lingual in Bilge.) This has never stopped me. Slowed me down, maybe.

So I was quite excited to be present when the first lot of French homework came home. Raring to stick in my oar, as soon as I was required. Let this be entre-nous, but I was a little disappointed to be of so little help, because my dear granddaughter was doing rather well on her own. In fact, I learnt something entirely new: Quoi de neuf? What's up? How neat is that? So things have moved on from the Zut alors exclamations of my youth. She also was practising her French on an app. I was most intrigued. This looked like fun. So she downloaded Duolingo for me so that I could practise daily.

I have done this dutifully each day, but yesterday I was going up to bed when I realised that I had not done my practice. It drives me mad when my Dearest husband produces his ipad at 11 o'clock at night when to me, the day is done.  So I thought it a whizz idea if I did my French lesson while he played upon his ipad.

I chose the topic Animals. Une abeille ... no problemo.. a bee. Un loup: wolf. Une mouche: a fly. Boy, I'm good after all these years, I thought as I typed away on my phone.
Je suis une baleine, said the woman on the programme, loudly.
"Jeez, what the bloody hell was that?" came a voice from my side.
"Just my French programme which wants me to say I am a whale (Yes, a whale, for goodness sake! I didn't know that. At least it wasn't a beached whale...)
"Well, would you mind doing that tomorrow when I'm at work?"

I could tell you what I said to that, but you would have to pardon my French.
                                                    

Saving the Geraniums...

It's October; it's autumn, but the gorgeous sunshine is lulling us into a false complacency. It is time to pull out the geraniums and attempt to save them. If you're not interested in gardening, then go and have a cup of coffee, and a bun, if you so wish.
I have had mixed results with saving geraniums over the years. I have tried keeping them in bedrooms on window sills and almost asphyxiated the occasional guest with their heady scent. I have kept them in the porch where they have looked increasingly bereft and straggly by Christmas. They do not look any better decked with tinsel either. I have kept them in the windowless shed with only the merest squish of water for four months and in each instance they look straggly, etiolated, and sick.
The year I did what many gardeners do, ripped them from the soil and binned them, I felt such profound guilt that it was as if I'd been putting my own children in the green bin.

So, I decided this year I would purchase a small greenhouse from Wilco. Ten quid. Marvellous. It sat in the shed for eight months. But today was the day. Yesterday I cleared an area and lay down a paving stone. Not quite as Fatima Whitbread as it sounds. We had a large floor tile left over from recent renovations which was quite manoeuvrable.
This morning I emptied the contents of the box on the living room floor.
Normally, I would wait until my son-in-law was around because he can do this kind of thing blindfolded, being an aerodynamicist and all, which we all know requires an awful lot of small greenhouse erection. But he was at work, designing racing cars, and nowhere near.
Normally I would study the picture  on the box, get the general idea and proceed, only stopping when I had got in a pickle. But today, I channelled my son-in-law. I read the instructions. I arranged all the working parts in order, and yes, dear readers, I actually counted them. A total anathema to someone like me, but today I counted them and do you know what? They were all there. Result!
I had been expecting:


But instead, it went together like a dream. Obviously those early years spent assembling Quadro, the children's climbing frame, had not been wasted. So now I have an airy, frost-free home for my dear geraniums this winter. I am aglow with achievement.
I warned you, Mrs Lovely Bun-eater, only gardeners understand.









Yes, the shed needs some attention. One step at a time.

Don't Let Them Eat Cake....

Where's the dessert? I, aged 6, asked my mother sotto voce when we went for Sunday lunch at Uncle Sid and Aunty Lyn's. I was shushed as it became apparent that every sinew had been strained in producing a main course. The pudding had proved a step too far for the recalcitrant cook. Too well- trained to make a fuss, over fifty years later, I can still remember the sense of disappointment. What sort of meal did not end with a dessert?

In primary school they were referred to as puddings. It was there I experienced treacle tart, steamed ginger sponge, Spotted Dick ( a sponge containing currants), and Dead Man's Leg (A length of flesh- coloured suet with a seam of jam running down the middle). All of which were served with a steaming ladleful of custard, vanilla or chocolate flavoured, from a huge bucket-like vessel. Joyous times and clean plates always. Even rice pudding or semolina, served with a blob of raspberry jam in the middle, would be devoured, but not before some creative souls had spun the raspberry so that the pudding resembled a pink melange. Happy, healthy, calorific times without any hint of remonstration or censure.

According to our hallowed Health Minister, Jeremy Hunt, last week, eating out is no longer a treat.. (he needs to speak to my husband, obviously). It has become the norm for most families, it seems. He is intent on getting restaurants to reduce their pudding size and sugar content. This is his way of reducing obesity. Obesity which is such a complex issue and begs so many pertinent social questions is hardly likely to be solved by this feeble plan. Why doesn't he go the whole hog and ban puddings altogether? As any junior doctor will tell you, it is yet another ill-formed, half-baked plan with a very soggy bottom.
If I leave any pudding behind, it will be my choice, and not as the result of a government directive.

Of course, if they gave out Green Shield stamps as an incentive, I could be persuaded to leave a little more behind: for a little less behind, so to speak.
   
    Here's one I didn't make earlier