A good radio programme, and other entertainments

Michael Frayn's Matchbox theatre  LISTEN NOW!!

Very funny - and beautiful - dialogue between Joanna Lumley and Roger Allam. Also enjoyed David Attenborough as himself.

The Lady in the Van

Miss Shepherd was very unreasonable.

Maggie Smith is actually still very soignee

Alan Bennett makes London look like a village.

Took my mother to see this yesterday - she is a long-time admirer of Alan Bennett. She really likes his Northern accent, his modest demeanour, his down-homeliness. Maggie Smith was amazingly good. She is an old lady playing an old lady - but there is a lot of physicality involved - and a lot of mixed and confused emotion for her to convey - and she is brilliant. I like the post-modern Alan Bennetts talking to each other, and the street of arty people (including the afore-mentioned Roger Allam. I'm afraid I thought it went on too long.

Spectre

this is an excellent Bond with all the usual elements: a car chase, a shoot out, a fist fight, a torture scene, a woman (who is far too young for him; Daniel Craig seems to be embarrassed by his own un-avuncular intentions), an aerial chase, a race against the clock, a life-saving gadget, some humour and a tense visit to the secret headquarters of an evil empire. It takes place in some wonderful locations and, of course, London. It has one unusual element: that is:  Q, M, another scrabble letter and Miss Moneypenny all come out and help Bond when the chips are down. There is something a bit political about it but it is quite subtle: something about not trusting the new just because it's new. A new technology may look slick but have a sly purpose we do not want - very post Edward Snowden.

Suffragettes

This was another script by the amazing Abi Morgan. It showed that women were powerless when they fought for the vote. They had no rights over their own children, they were subject to abuse and couldn't fight back. The vote didn't do everything for them but it gave them a start in winning equal rights. And hoorah for Meryl Streep who came on and showed what a bit of (actually a lot of) charisma can do for a cause.

HBC doesn't often play intelligent and earnest - it suits her.

There are too many people without hats in this film. At this time, everyone wore a hat.

I miss Nicola Walker

In "River"she was friendly and funny and always made River smile. In "Unforgotten" she was thorough, thoughtful and kind. Twice a week for 5 weeks she was unmissable.

I wrote about "River" before - in the end it turned out to be about motherhood as much as anything - a mother's dilemma about working/ not working. Probably Abi Morgan would say she wasn't commenting, just observing what goes on in the world of working mothers with highly demanding careers. But the whole thing - looking at what his mother's desertion had done to River, what it had done to another character - did add up to a comment on this. If you want a healthy society, you need mothers (or fathers) who will commit a fair amount of themselves - their time AND their attention and their intelligence - to parenting. This means part-time working and lousy pay and probably ruining your career. I did it, and what's more I think it was worth it, but I'm not a greedy person. I don't expect much.

I have got a fab new computer

Although I am, of course, pleased with my new computer, which has fast processing and good sound, for example, which my last one (an HP) didn't have (the old Toshiba was better), there are so many teething troubles with it.

1. I can't authorise it for iTunes - this is a real pest. There is no option on iTunes accounts to do this. It's greyed out.

2. It has put all my photos on my phone!! All of them!! I never wanted that!

3. I put Google Chrome on and immediately it got a nuisance file attached to it - Mysearchdial - and the only way to get rid of it was to get rid of Google Chrome.  I am supposed to be using Edge, the new MS browser which is apparently very good, but a little message came up that this wasn't working at the moment and I would have to go back to IE. So I spent quite a bit of time adapting IE to suit me. I'm still doing it. I just adapted the zoom size.

These are some troubles but there have been far more. The main problem is that it wants to work with my phone and that seems like a good idea but it just ends up confusing me. I hate my phone.

How to be both by Ali Smith

This book is a like a fugue; with patterns to it popping up here and there and you don't notice how the themes work together until you've finished it and flick back.... I thought I would try to finish it this morning and then write something about it but I discover it's more complicated than I thought so I will have to read it again. And what could be better than that?

No, it's not so much a fugue as a crossword puzzle, where the across clues and the down clues are both part of the whole making something that interlocks. It's the interlocking that is fun.

I thought I liked the part with the modern girls best - I love Georgia - but then I started to love the Renaissance Italy part too : the monologue of a self-taught painter who is expert at being both male and female.

A taste:

"In the making of pictures and love -both - time itself changes its shape : the hours pass without being hours, they become their own opposite, they become timelessness, they become no time at all. "

A larger taste:

"cause nobody knows us : except our mothers, and they hardly do (and also tend disappointingly to die before they ought).

Or our fathers, whose failings while they're alive (and absences after they're dead) infuriate.

Or our siblings, who want us dead too cause what they know about us is that somehow we got away with not having to carry the bricks and stones like they did all those years.

Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves

- except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends.

Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineering of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark."

All that is so good!

and another bit:

"but in all honesty, when I looked at my own pictures they surprised even me with their knowledge : ....cause the life of painting and making is a matter of double knowledge so that your own hands will reveal a world to you to which your mind's eye, your conscious eye, is often blind."

 What I didn't know until I finished it and explored online is that the painter is based on a real painter in that the paintings which are described are real, and gosh, they are gorgeous. I'm afraid Ali Smith may have started a flood of tourism to the place, Ferrara, which is described in the book. And while the girls in one story need to write something about the difference between empathy and sympathy, Ali Smith shows us the great writerly quality of empathy in her ability to look at the pictures and find/create a personality for the painter behind them - an extraordinary person, a person, in a way, rather like Ali Smith!! I guess that's what empathy does, it only can go as far as the imagination can go.

I hoped at one point that we were going to get a spy story, a story where a mysterious death is explained, but that didn't happen.

But here is art passing itself on: one artist inspiring another to imagine places, people, conversations, a way of life; in all its brightness, vigour, meannesses and horror.  And when that inspiration has had its day, it goes underground, down into the earth.

But it hasn't quite gone.

The girl, Georgia, in How to be Both, does something profoundly weird, out of grief and a sense of loss.  She patiently spends time in tracking down her mother's mysterious (but beautiful) friend, follows her to her house, and then sits outside her house day after day. This is very strange. I can see she does it out of a longing to be connected with her mother. And I can see that this is demented behaviour but I now realise that I have done almost exactly the same thing, in a way. Georgia seems OK. She goes to counselling but this seems to have very limited effect. Georgia is NOT letting go. She is thinking "I will hold on to my thoughts of my mother at all costs because my mother was my most precious thing." Whilst reading I didn't even notice that I have been just as crazy, given the situation.

Too many books

Yesterday I felt ill. 2 sleepless  nights, pouring rain, upset stomach, and the feeling that the day was meant to be fun and productive, and that I was failing myself by wasting my time. Also, the news from Paris was too much to take in, and yet I felt I should work to take it in and feel something about it.

But today I did feel tearful about Paris, as the sound of young people singing French songs from Trafalgar Square got to me. The victims of the attacks were mainly young people who generally feel no animosity to others on the grounds of their origins, whose creed is that of John Lennon's Imagine. "No religion... the brotherhood of man..." All their suppositions about the world are crawling away after a massacre. (I was reminded of this song because some French guy played it on a piano in Paris as a response to the killings.)

I would like to do something in my lessons this week to mark our feelings at this massacre, and I don't know what.

I have too many books on the go. One of the books is very embarrassing, a collection of Art Spiegelman "comix" drawn after the 9/11 atrocities. I had to pay quite a bit for them (2nd hand of course) and I haven't looked at them properly yet, but ended up hiding them under F's bed as it seemed that they were Old Hat and what's more a luxurious Old Hat. But now it seems to me that this event is part of the same thing as the 9/11 enormity, and the horror of City Terrorism is, maybe, only just starting.

(The trouble with John Lennon's Imagine, is his casual waving away of religion - "no religion too"..."no god above us". If you truly depend on the thought of your God being there for you and your being a part of God's being, then John's dreams, and his words, are horrific. Like saying: "imagine you are only a gorilla, or a pig". You need to be religious to understand why it's not a positive idea. John dreams of one world on his own terms, which are essentially communist. Daesh dreams of one world on terms that are the polar opposite. John's words seem wise to our young people but they are actually incendiary.)

Hugh's War on Waste

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is looking into the way we waste food - not just we consumers, but also the supermarkets. At present this campaign isn't very popular. People don't like to be told to make a bit more effort rather than throw things away.

Have a look at his website for his top tips. Reduce - Re-use - recycle!  But especially reduce.

Here is a link to a petition asking supermarkets to account for their waste.Sign the petition

Hugh honestly believes that when he exposes the truth about waste, people will start to reform their behaviour. Actually, they say to him, "oh, that's terrible, I had no idea" because it's easier than saying they know perfectly well but they don't really care. But he demonstrates persuasiveness.

I love his sense of purpose and his understated confidence.

Envious of his garden achievements

My cookbook

What is interesting about Hugh is his assumption that he has a voice that people will listen to. This is an example of an Eton education  being used for something that isn't propping up the established way of doing business. But let us look at other Eton alumni who do the same thing. There is Jonathan Porritt, founder of Friends of the Earth. There are Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sir Ranulph Feinnes, explorer, Perry Anderson, editor of New Left Review (never heard of him), Patrick Hennessy, Deputy Director of Communications for the Labour Party, Nicky Gumbel, founder of the Alpha movement in the C of E, and many others.

 Zac Goldsmith was not at Eton for long, (can't help but wonder why) but he is a good example of someone who campaigns on alternative ideas despite having a vested interest in the status quo, in that he inherited hundreds of millions of pounds. He is a campaigner for sustainability and a longtime donor to the Soil Association, and he welcomes Direct Democracy (getting people to vote on specific issues). (I'm a pushover for Zac, who is handsome and civilised.

There are many, many old Etonians who have a voice, and many of them are actors. Why is Eton producing so many actors? It used to produce writers, journalists and politicians as well as lawyers and businessmen. Actors are all very well but we don't need them all, Nicholas Rowe, Dominic West, Damian Lewis, Tom Hiddleston, Eddie Redmayne and many more whom we haven't yet heard of. Some of them are even becoming comedians, again, this shows that they believe that when they speak, people will listen, and they probably do.

14 ways the UK has backtracked on climate Pledges this year: From the New Scientist.

It’s been an annus horribilis for the UK’s environmental efforts. A whole series of green policies have been cut or cancelled, shaking investor confidence in renewable schemes and taking the UK further off course for meeting its climate goals.

Below we summarise the main events of 2015 so far. For a full analysis, including why the UK could now face legal action, see British government could face lawsuit over climate failures.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28299-14-ways-the-uk-has-backtracked-on-climate-pledges-this-year/Click here

Bristol Central Library

We went to Bristol last week. My favourite thing about it was the Central Library, on College Green. As it is a public building and has a lovely window that I wanted to see from inside the upper floor, we went in. Upstairs there are old wooden desks like booths,with separate reading lights and matching chairs. I didn't have a camera but here are some photos from the Internet.

This is a most beautiful room - it has wifi and you can work with your computer. Many of the books are out of date, but few people want books now so that doesn't matter. Note the filing cabinets.

This picture shows the large window and the interesting shapes of the upper windows.

The rear elevation

KEY FACTS

• By a major architect of the London Underground
• Has been described as a masterpiece of early modern design
• Cleverly designed to fit in with historical remains next door [haha the Cathedral!]
• Look out for Tudor-style features and 21 literary sculptures on the main frontage

The present Bristol Central Library opened in 1906 in a building designed by Charles Holden (1875–1960). Holden is well known for his later designs of London underground stations, war cemeteries and memorials. His library used the latest techniques but also featured a style he called Neo-Tudor (especially on the main entrance frontage). This style echoed the Norman Abbey Gatehouse next door and includes tower and spire forms, Tudor-style windows and Tudor-rose decorations.

 The main frontage also includes 21 sculptures of English literary figures (by Bristol-born Charles Pibworth), from Chaucer to St Augustine. Holden’s attractive interior uses styles ranging from Byzantine to Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts and Classical. There is a striking Classical Reading Room, while the Bristol Room contains fittings brought from King Street’s 1740 library building and includes fine oak panelling. An extension to the right of the main entrance was added in 1966–8. In 2000 a glass-canopied access ramp and entrance lobby was added on the right and the interior was extensively modernized.

Bristol was actually one of England’s first cities to have a public library, having had one since 1613. When Charles Holden worked on the 1906 library building he was an assistant at the firm of H. Percy Adams. He was made a partner in the firm as the result of this design. The approach Holden has used is often described as Edwardian Freestyle. It is easy to see here the many influences on his work. For example, the façade at the back is totally different to the entrance frontage. It is less decorated and more minimal in style, similar to Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s design for the Glasgow School of Art, which was designed around the same time. The library’s variety of styles is even more clearly seen inside.

- See more at: http://bristolopeningdoors.org/bristol-central-library/#sthash.xCVWVAHv.dpuf