Blog entry Friday 11th October
Positive thinking is the way forward!
Forward thinking is the way forward!
And Glucosamine Sulphate is the way backwards. I met a neighbour on the train the other day who told me that if you take it regularly for about two million years, it replaces knee cartilage, turns back the clock to when you were able to do girl power kicks, play badminton without looking like a demented ballet dancer, ride horses and ski down red and black runs. That was the sort of thing I used to do, when Izzy was young. When I was younger. Now a flight of stairs is a major challenge. Could glucosamine sulphate be the Knee Fairy in disguise? I am off to Holland and Barrett tomorrow.
The knees are getting better, thanks for asking, getting used to this new active student life. Sometimes I can hear them singing ‘I will Survive’ very faintly.
Last week we went to see Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Noel Coward, with David Walliams as Bottom and Sheridan Smith as Tit. Fab production, very pagan-hippie, (as if the play wasn’t pagan enough already), all the fairies styled as festival goers from the 70s, crustie dreads, the lot. In the last production I saw the fairies were punks with shaved heads and Doc Martens. How times change. And OMG, why did I not notice that whole bestiality thing before? I must be really thick. Oberon had a West country accent, which seemed to change to an Irish one when he doubled as the Duke of Athens. The sets were superb, a massive moon against which David Walliams’s ass ears were silhouetted to great effect. He camped it up to the hilt, played it bi-sexual. Towards the end he lapsed into the Scottish hotelier in Little Britain mode. David Walliams was being David Walliams.
I love Shakespeare. Who doesn’t? If you want to see this production, hurry before it closes on October 16th
I got to walk across the fields at the back of my house the other day, after a 15 year gap, or is it 13 years? It was a beautiful Sunday evening with the sunlight slanting in that Autumnal way across the empty fields and the ring of trees all around us. The farmyard is deserted now, not a cattle grid in sight and looking very forlorn. Unless our farmer friends get the tenancy soon, these beautiful fields, that I look out at from my bathroom window, will go to pot, full of thistles and weeds. That scrubby ‘set-aside’ look.
Izzy obligingly accompanied me and all the old memories came back.
So Izzy and I recalled silly antics we did when she was a child and she went along with it, indulging her Mum. But then she had to get back to drive back home to Twickenham. Home. Her new home.
I was going through the shoe baskets the other day and realised it was much emptier than it used to be. She and Dan have left home properly now. The shoes have gone with them. I do miss them. Them, not the shoes. Offspring do have to fly the nest eventually. And the birds do keep coming home to roost. If you’ve got a good relationship with your kids you will never lose them.
And this MA course is keeping me busy. It's getting interestinger and interestinger. There’s been a lot in our recent Critical Challenges reading about declining literary standards. It’s true, there is a lot of crap out there, but still some good stuff. And I do think that commercial success and literary quality can co-exist.
Our neighbouring farmer, has just delivered a trailer load of manure. You wouldn’t give it to someone as a Christmas present. But it’ll help me grow some spectacular vegetables next year. Not all shit is bad.