Plants at the Savill Gardens

One day in the Savill gardens I noticed this tree with unusual cone structures, like teasels. It comes from Asia.

Platycarya Strobilacae

One of the largest and most impressive trees is called Podocarpus Salignus. It looks like a huge yew tree but the leaves are more feathery.

At this time of year at Virginia Water they feed all the trees with compost; it's very impressive how the gardeners take care of everything. Some camellias are in flower already.

Succulents and mosses on a slate roof.

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

This is about the Whitshank family, which is not an old or professional family - but has an ambitious streak which sees them living in a very good quality house in a good area.

We have their view of themselves as a family, and we are also given some history which they don't know themselves. At the beginning, we are given Abby's point of view as she thinks about her most difficult son, Denny. Abby is in her seventies and her four children are grown up with families of their own - although she and her husband, Red, don't know much about what Denny is up to, and this lack of knowledge worries them a lot. The rest of their children live not far away from their childhood home in Baltimore.

When Abby starts to get slips in her memory the siblings decide that something must be done, and so one son, nicknamed Stem, the youngest, moves into his parents' house with his wife and children. So the house is full again, and shortly afterwards, Denny moves in too. Denny is a person who is permanently outside, looking in and feeling resentful, because he can't feel comfortable "at home". It's just a quality he's born with. (One of his "friends" calls him," Oy, Shitwank!" so Anne Tyler got there first with that joke.)

The thing about the book is that you get so quickly drawn in to this family and their conversations and you feel close to them.

Abby is the person who holds her family together. She has amazing skill at peace-making and smoothing over, and her love for her husband is very strong. Anne Tyler is always examining the woman's role - not just in the family, but also in the neighbourhood or community, and also in shaping American life, in making the tone of it kind, inclusive and pleasant, which capitalism in the raw is not.  In this book, Abby is a retired social worker, which is a perfect vocation for a Tyler woman - she used to spread her energetic kindness through the neighbourhood in a formalised way while many of the Tyler "moms" do this unofficially.

The daughters in the novel are career women - and one has a hands-on role in the family constructions business - so feminism has not passed Anne Tyler by - but we never see the world through Jeannie's eyes as we do through Abby's.

Anne Tyler's mother was a social worker! and her father was a Chemistry professor.

It looks as though the Duchess of Cornwall is a fan.

Her stories help readers to feel less alone, because she depicts her characters in all kinds of difficult circumstances; sudden bereavements and accidents, for example, feeling a sense of displacement, or walking away from the family in order to see if anything better can be found. Sometimes she seems not to know where to end a novel, but other Tyler readers disagree with me and find her endings perfect.

One fan is Craig Brown: this is from his review in the Mail on Sunday:

How does she do it? How does she construct such a complex narrative out of such simple sentences? 

How does she manage to give her readers the impression they have actually been living in a given household, overhearing her characters talk? 

How does she capture so accurately the peculiar ebbs and flows of married life, of family life, of life itself?

Her writing style seems close to styleless. She writes ‘he said’ and ‘she said’. She eschews fancy words like ‘eschew’. She doesn’t go in for adverbs or ornament.

Her books are full of families talking about humdrum things like doing the washing-up, or going shopping or what’s for lunch, yet they are somehow more gripping than the paciest transcontinental thriller.

*****

Tyler has always been interested in misfits, and the effect they have on the rest of their family. Here the misfit is their third child, Denny, who should, by rights, be the most fortunate. 

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‘Teachers phoned Abby repeatedly. “Could you come in for a talk about Denny as soon as possible, please.”’ As an adult, Denny disappears for months on end, and harbours obscure resentments. 

‘It seemed jobs kept disappointing him, as did business partners and girlfriends and entire geographical regions.’

******

There are many other themes in this novel – themes of old age and decrepitude, sibling rivalry, the consequences of a sudden death, the tales that define families and echo down generations, the basic human tension between security and anxiety, moving on and staying put. 

Yet these themes are never underlined, emerging naturally from the interaction of the characters.

And Tyler is the most natural of novelists. Gore Vidal once claimed that he could read any modern novel and tell you which films the novelist had watched in his youth. But I’m quite sure he would have drawn a blank with Tyler. 

I know of no other novelist who draws so directly from real life, and whose work remains so uncontaminated by the shortcuts and clichés of television and Hollywood.

A Spool Of Blue Thread may be her best yet, though, to be honest, this is what I always tend to say after reading the latest Anne Tyler. 

I’ve now read it twice, and I may well read it again. But still the question remains: how does she do it?
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2941112/Anne-Tyler-Spool-Blue-Thread-review-Craig-Brown.html#ixzz3yYsttF8v
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Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

The original bleak existential philosopher.

His masterwork "The World as Will and Representation" commented on the theories of his fellow German, Immanuel Kant.

Kant said it was impossible to grasp anything about the real or "noumenal" world because we are trapped in our perceptions. Not so, Schopenhauer retorted. We can sense within our every mental action the workings of our will, which he termed "the will to live", and conceived as a constant struggle to survive and reproduce - life was "a constantly prevented dying" just as walking is "a constantly prevented falling".

The will that drives us makes us unhappy. The good news is we can escape A respite is possible in aesthetic contemplation: as we gaze at a painting, we forget ourselves and are briefly happy (or at least not unhappy). A more permanent solution is a quasi-Buddhist withdrawal from the daily struggle, living like a hermit. Schopenhauer was one of the first Western philosophers to pay attention to the traditions of Eastern religions.

 

 

 

But Schopenhauer despised women and Jews. He thought women were like children. However, he did say this. I wonder which woman so impressed him with her capacity to "grow"? I don't think I understand what is meant by "grow".

Austerlitz Part 3

Austerlitz, having had a nervous breakdown, is now in a state of mind where he can begin to remember his life before he came to Wales. Prior to this time he had gone to some lengths to keep away from contemporary history, to remain ignorant of it.

He becomes endearingly obsessed with a longing to see an image of his mother.

Austerlitz himself is almost the embodiment of post-Holocaust trauma.  So affected is he by the fate of his parents and family that he lives an isolated life, unable to turn from his acquired memories – for his parents fate has become his own.  His alienation from other people is now so complete that he is unable to form relationships with other people.  

The Common Reader blog

It seems that Sebald may be saying that we must not deliberately forget something that happened, not long ago, in Europe, and if we do, it will give us a collective nervous breakdown like that which  Austerlitz suffers in this novel. Is this something he aims particularly at the German nation, or at everyone? In Nuremberg, Austerlitz says: "I was troubled to realize I could not see a crooked line anywhere, not at the corners of the houses or on the gables, the window frames of the sills, not was there any other trace of past history."!! In the Germans' defence this town was bombed to rubble in the war and they could hardly put destroyed medieval timbers back again, and also, there is a massive memorial and museum just a bus ride away.

The account of the Theresienstadt Ghetto/camp we are given, in one long sentence, contains no adjectives as the facts speak for themselves. The evil of the intent and the thoroughness put into ensuring its enactment are bewildering.

At the end of the book Austerlitz is in Paris looking for evidence that his father was there. At one time he decides to do some research in the Biblioteque nationale de France.

This is it. All four of those towers form the Grande Biblioteque.

Inside the box framed by the four towers are fully-grown trees.

Austerlitz describes how difficult it is to get in to this building and how unfit for purpose it seems. Once again, the grand scheme defeats and humiliates the individual and doesn't respond to his/ her needs. We seem to have learned nothing.

"The new library building, which in both its entire layout and its near ludicrous internal regulation seeks to exclude the reader as a potential enemy, might be described, so Lemoine thought, said Austerlitz, as the official manifestation of the increasingly importunate urge to break with everything which still has some living connection to the past."

And there commences an account of the theft of all the belongings of the Parisian Jews who were interned prior to their transport to the east - and on the site of the warehouses used to store all their stolen cutlery and clothes - stands this biblioteque.

Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald, Part 2

This book is presented as one long paragraph of writing, and this is cleverly contrived. One thing leads to another so that most of the time one can't find a place where a paragraph break should go. On the other hand, Sebald occasionally cheats by using a  dash - to show a new thought. Just as one sentence slides onto the next, the narrator and Austerlitz slide into one another, because we get Austerlitz's narrative always at second hand, and the narrator seems to have no particular personality of his own. He is more like a shadow. Perhaps he is a ghost?

Time, said Austerlitz in the observation room in Greenwich, was by far the most artificial of all our inventions, and in being bound to the planet turning on its own axis was no less arbitrary than would be, say, a calculation based on the growth of trees or the duration required for a piece of limestone to disintegrate, quite apart from the face that the solar day which we take as our guideline does not provide any precise measurement, so that in order to reckon time we have to devise an imaginary, average sun which has an invariable speed of movement and does not incline towards the equator in its orbit. If Newton really thought that time was a river like the Thames, then were is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? ...

...

Even in a metropolis ruled by time like London, said Austerlitz, it is still possible to be outside time, a state of affairs which until recently was almost as common in backward and forgotten areas of our own country as it used to be in the undiscovered continents overseas. The dead are outside time, the dying and all the sick at home or in hospitals, and they are not the only ones, for a certain degree of personal misfortune is enough to cut us off from the past and the future... I have never owned a clock of any kind...perhaps because I have always resisted the power of time out of some internal compulsion which I myself have never understood, keeping myself apart from so called current events in the hope, and I now think, said Austerlitz, that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments of time have co-existed simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us would be true, past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them, although that, of course, opens up the bleak prospect of ever-lasting misery and never-ending anguish.

In Austerlitz's stories it seems always to be twilight, there is dust in the air, a sense of unreality. So one ponders for a while when reading: " Only at Liverpool Street station, where he waited with me in McDonald's until my train left..." because it seems that neither of these characters could be seen in such a uniform,  utilitarian place as McDonald's! even if they were casually remarking on the "glaring light".

It turns out that Austerlitz lives in Alderney Road, (near Queen Mary's University) in the Mile End. Naturally, when the narrator goes to visit him it is dusk. "This room too contained hardly any furniture; there were just the grey floorboards and the walls in which the light of the flickering blue flames was now cast in the gathering dusk. I can still hear the faint hiss of the gas, I remember that while Austerlitz was making tea in the kitchen I sat entranced by the reflection of the little fire....."

After he gives up teaching, which had been his profession for thirty years, Austerlitz intends to write his book. He has been collecting material about various aspects of architecture for many years, but when he comes to write the book, he can't do it.

Now and then a train of thought did succeed in emerging with wonderful clarity inside my head, but I knew even as it formed that I was in no position to record it, for as soon as I so much as picked up my pencil the endless possibilities of language, to which I could once safely abandon myself, became a conglomeration of the most inane phrases. There was not an expression in the sentence but it proved to be a miserable crutch, not a word but it sounded false and hollow. And in this dreadful state of mind I sat for hours..." 

And then this malaise spreads itself so that he can no longer read.

If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleaned up and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who has been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl any more, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, an avenue or a bridge. The entire structure of language, the syntactical arrangement of parts of speech, punctuation, conjunctions and finally even the nouns denoting ordinary objects were all enveloped in impenetrable fog. I could not even understand what I myself had written in the past - perhaps I could understand that least of all. All I could think was that such a sentence only appears to mean something, but in truth is at best a makeshift expedient, a kind of unhealthy growth issuing from our ignorance, something which we use, in the same way as many sea plants and animals use their tentacles to grope blindly through the darkness enveloping us.

Austerlitz is haunted by the past in Liverpool Street station.

Whenever I was in the station, said Austerlitz, I kept almost obsessively trying to imagine - through the ever-changing maze of walls - the location in that huge space of the rooms where the asylum inmates were confined, and I often wondered whether the pain and suffering accumulated on this site over the centuries had every really ebbed away, or whether they might not still, as I sometimes thought when I felt a cold breath of air on my forehead, be sensed as we pass through them on our way through the station halls and up and down the flights of steps.

On this station Austerlitz has a vision which has the greatest significance for him, and this is the end of the first part of the book; for the rest of the book deals with his journey to find out his origins. This he has delayed for too long, for at this point he is soul-sick and he has to, needs to go to find some kind of healing.

Austerlitz by W G Sebald, Part 1

If I said that I had been very cast down by reading these gloomy ramblings, it would be true, but I do want to see that this book is worth reading and thinking about. Firstly, the tone is never at all jocular or witty, which is difficult for me, but it is always neutral, and if I find the style gloomy it is my personal response to the prose. The book is translated from the German and it may be that even in German the style is old-fashioned and "high". And the story could best be described as discursive, so for example, when we have Austerlitz's friend's uncle telling us about the life cycle of moths one sighs a bit and feels led up the garden path. However:

The narrator, and the Austerlitz of the title, travel to several European cities in the course of this narrative, and the story is an international one, about the history of Europe in the age of capitalism. The writer describes a number of buildings and engineering works that illustrate the idea that history is all around us (just as the Rings of Saturn are decayed and destroyed moons of Saturn.)

The narrator is interested in buildings and the first pages he describes his visit to the fort at Breendonk in Belgium. In WWII the Nazis used it as a prison camp and it is preserved - as a memorial - as it was when the Germans vacated it in 1944. It includes a torture chamber.

Having read the book and understanding a little about what it is about - it is about the mass-murder of the Jews by the Nazis but it is also about the history of Europe - I am going back through it again to try to understand what is meant by the buildings that are featured in the novel. We start with the beautiful railway station in Antwerp and its grandiose ambitions . This is where the narrator first meets Austerlitz, an architectural historian who studies in London.

Exterior of station

Interior. Really, it's so beautiful I don't care how sinister are the implications of its monumentalism.

Austerlitz then talks about his explorations of the labyrinth inside the Palais de Justice in Brussels, a building in which there are so many corridors and storeys, so many stairways and doorways, that  many rooms are mysteriously half furnished and unused.

Palais de Justice in Brussels
"contains corridors and stairways leading nowhere"

Inside the Palais de Justice

"the architectural style of the capitalist era, a subject which he said had fascinated him since his own student days, speaking in particular of the compulsive sense of order and the tendency towards monumentalism evident..."

Then the narrator meets Austerlitz again in the Great Eastern Hotel, near Liverpool Street Station. I don't have any personal experience of this station or this hotel, but perhaps I should! Here is the station:

 And here is the hotel:

Great Eastern Hotel

And here  is the Masonic Temple inside the hotel - is this significant, I wonder, in Austerlitz's thesis of monumental architecture?

Austerlitz describes this: "a hall with walls panelled in sand-coloured marble and red Moroccan onyx, a black and white chequered floor, and vaulted ceiling with a single golden star at the centre emitting its rays into the dark clouds all around it."

Austerlitz had been brought up in a very gloomy and silent home by Lake Bala in Wales.

Lake Bala. As Austerlitz's childhood was grey and silent I have chosen this grey evening photo.

His adoptive father was a fire and brimstone preacher whose own family home was a village called Llanwddyn, which was drowned when the valley was flooded to create an enormous reservoir needed to supply water to Liverpool. So the creation of the lake Vyrnwy , like the buildings described earlier, sacrificed small scale domestic lives to the greater good - or rather, of very large conurbations created by the forces of capitalism.

Have a look at these wonderful pictures of Victorian engineering.

Lake Vyrnwy

When he was told about his father's lost home, Austerlitz felt something approaching empathy with his adoptive father, because he knew nothing about his own early years: they too were buried, but buried in his mind. The father's childhood places were deeply submerged in water but sometimes he can see his village through the water - as we can sometimes see the past in what is existent.

Luckily Austerlitz makes friends with another boy at his boarding school with whom he can spend his holidays as his "mother" dies of a mysterious fading away, and his father ends his days in an asylum.

View of Arthog Estuary near the house where Austerlitz spent his holidays.

On this bridge Austerlitz, Adela and Gerald sat at twilight, looking out to sea.

After this Austerlitz discourses on the subject of time, and I shall write about that in the next post.

NOTE: by using these illustrations I have made Sebald's book more attractive. The illustrations he himself chose are black and white, and lend themselves to historical meditation about time and place more than admiration for the places he describes.

The Enchanted April

This is very well-written.

It swings along confidently, telling you all you need to know about the inner lives and outer circumstances of the women protagonists, and seems light-hearted, even frothy, on the surface, which is deceptive, as the author takes a perceptive look at the condition of middle-class women in the 1920s.

Firstly we meet Mrs Wilkins, who knows absolutely that she is not happy, even though her circumstances are quite easy.

"Nobody took any notice of Mrs Wilkins. She was the kind of person who is not noticed at parties. Her clothes, infested by thrift, made her practically invisible; her face was non-arresting; her conversation was reluctant; she was shy. And if one's clothes and face and conversation are all negligible, thought Mrs Wilkins, who recognized her disabilities, what, at  parties, is there left of one?"

Mr Wilkins feels dissatisfied with her, which also makes her depressed. But Mrs Wilkins actually has vision and a longing for something more than Hampstead in the rain, and it is because of her spirit, an Ariel quality, that the party of four women, who have not previously met, go to a beautiful castle in Italy for a month's holiday.

Here is Mrs Arbuthnot: "Steadfast as the points of the compass to Mrs Arbuthnot were the great four facts of life: God, Husband, Home, Duty. "

But her husband is a cheerful soul who makes money writing about the lives of the Grandes Horizontales, and Mrs A is so embarrassed and confused by the source of their money that she lives for the Betterment of the Poor.

"whereupon Mrs Arbuthnot, her mind being used to getting people into lists and division, from habit considered, as she gazed thoughtfully at Mrs Wilkins, under what heading , supposing she had to classify her, she could most properly be put."
...
"..she decided pro tem, as the vicar said at meetings to put her under the heading Nerves. It was just possible that she ought to go straight into the category Hysteria, which was often only the antechamber to Lunacy, but Mrs Arbuthnot had learned not to hurry people into their final categories, having on more than one occasion discovered with dismay that she had made a mistake; and how difficult it had been to get them out again, and how crushed she had been with the most terrible remorse."

Mrs Arbuthnot seems like an old lady and we find to our surprise (and in my case, horror) that she is 33 years old. She seems far too young to be the voluntary parish assistant (which is what she is). And more, she gives to the poor of the parish the money her husband makes on his biographies.

"The parish flourished because, to take a handful at random, of the ill-behaviour of the ladies Du Barri, Montespan, Pompadour, Ninon de L'Enclos, and even of learned Maintenon. "

"Mrs Arbuthnot .. was obliged to live on the proceeds. He gave her a dreadful sofa once, after the success of his Du Barri memoir, with swollen cushions and soft, receptive lap, and it seemed to her a miserable thing that there, in her very home, should flaunt this reincarnation of a dead old French sinner."

This is how von Arnim manages to tell us about sex without being explicit. Somehow, these two have failed in their sex life. He likes it, she does not - it makes her feel guilty. There is more...

"She didn't dare think of him as he used to be, as he had seemed to her to be in those marvellous first days of their lovemaking, of their marriage. Her child had died; she had nothing, nobody of her own to lavish herself on. The poor became her children, and God the object of her love. What could be happier than such a life, she sometimes asked herself but her face, and particularly her eyes, continued sad."

Mrs Wilkins is the first of the two to feel the enchantment of Italy, which von Arnim explains in a sexy way.  "Now she had taken off her goodness and left it behind her like a heap of rain-sodden clothes, and she only felt joy. She was naked of goodness, and was rejoicing in being naked. She was stripped and exulting. And there, away in the dim mugginess of Hampstead, was Mellersh being angry." [Mellersh is her husband, and Mrs W immediately asks him to come out to Italy.]

Lotty, full of generosity of spirit, feels remorse. "I've been a mean dog."

Mellersh arrives, and all is well, as he is thrilled to meet Lady Caroline, another of the party, and Mrs Fisher, who is the fourth, because he knows he can charm them into getting their legal business (he's a solicitor.) So he is very pleased with his wife for extending his circle in this way, which enables von Arnim to be very amusing about the Wilkins' relationship blossoming in the sun.

Altogether it is a very charming read. When von Arnim wrote this book she was 56 - quite elderly, at that time, but the book reads like a young woman's book, I thought.

Salley Vickers writes: "The novel has a fairy-tale ending. But fairy tales are more realistic than is often believed. Joy, mirth, sympathy and kindness are magical in their effects, and it does no harm in our cynical and materialistic age to be reminded that we have it in us to enjoy these states of mind and exercise these powers - and that this might have modestly miraculous consequences. "

Mum at Savill Gardens: I am depressed again

Yesterday I started by reading and searching for facts online, and then I went to see my mum. I offered her a walk, lunch and a trip to the supermarket, and I wasn't bothered when she said that she only wanted to buy milk, bread, bacon and sherry at the shops. If that's what she wants, that's what she wants. I have tried coaxing her to eat tomatoes and fruit, but she just leaves them. She leaves everything in the fridge except those easy things she likes.

I told her to change her clothes as she was wearing pink socks, turquoise trousers, a green shirt and a sad-looking aqua green cardy that has seen better days. She wears this outfit all the time, because it's "comfy" and "no-one is going to see me" but in fact her neighbours (in sheltered housing) see her dressed like this most of the time. While she was getting changed I took the car down the road where there is a bevy of men (and a woman) from Bulgaria with their own car-cleaning business. I wanted the inside of the car cleaned. It hasn't been cleaned inside, properly, since it was new in 2009. Yes, of course, I had taken the vacuum cleaner to it once or twice, but it hadn't been properly cleaned. For Christmas I had promised my car an "In and Out" £12 treat. I thought this remarkably cheap, but then you would expect everything to be cheaper in Addlestone. It is a sad road of curry houses and strange old shops, but you can get some useful things there. For example, you can buy a sports trophy there, and you can get it engraved. You can buy books that have got lost in the post and been auctioned off. You can buy dog food and modelling glue. The fish and chip shop is very good. And in the shop that was my target you can buy wool and knitting needles, tapestry wools and canvases, fabric and dress patterns. It's true that there is a hole in the ceiling and the water is coming in, but that part of the shop is screened a little by a carefully-placed step-ladder with a polythene sheet wrapped around it. I bought a 6 inch embroidery hoop and a reel of black button thread. I was really pleased to get my hands on some button thread (extra strong thread), and I told the old lady who keeps the shop so, but these days she doesn't converse much.

I went back to the car-cleaning business and the chief Bulgarian told me that he could clean my car far, far better if I went for the £18 option - if I did this they would clean all the doors, plastic dashboard and the seats for me. So I went for that. I was feeling extravagant, but also I liked the look of my wild Bulgarian with his gypsy energy and his long hair and ear-rings. So they spent another 10 minutes on my car and then I went back to my mother.

We drove to the Savill Gardens, where I have a season ticket for the car park, and I took her out for lunch. Most of the dishes on the menu were foreign and she doesn't do foreign. She doesn't do pasta, she doesn't do curry. Luckily they were doing fish pie, with nice chunks of salmon in it, and we agreed she would try that. Hooray, she loved it! I did enjoy seeing her eat something that you can call real food. I was planning to do fish pie for dinner, so I chose something else for lunch - quiche with cheese pastry, and some rocket leaves. It was all annoyingly expensive and the restaurant was too cold for an old lady. We kept our coats on.

After lunch I coaxed her out into the garden and I have to say, she loved it. She can really see the beauty of a garden, though I don't know how as she has cataracts. The stems of the dogwood moved her very much, as did the trunks of the white trees. There were bees out on the unseasonal flowers. Crazy for January.

Hellebores

So then I took her to the shop where the novelties caused her quite a bit of excitement and she asked me what things were - e.g. a model of a bicycle "What is that for?" and I explained it was an ornament. She played all the musical boxes, trying to recognise the tunes. She finally bought a greetings card but is very puzzled by her new purse - mainly because it didn't have much money in it!

I knew she would be complaining soon, that her back was hurting, so we must go off to a supermarket and get her shopping, but she didn't like me hurrying away from the artwork, and went into a bit of a sulk  I now realise that this is because she had drunk a full glass of wine whereas she usually shares it with me. So she sat in the car and started to tell me all the things that are wrong with me - that I lack joy, that I am no fun, etc, and I refused to be annoyed with her (but I was annoyed with her secretly, because this was the way she so often found fault with me when I was a child, and when I was growing up). We went to a Sainsbury's and we bought her the milk and bacon and sliced white but also some cakes as mainly, she eats cakes.

Took her home and carried her shopping up, and I also sorted out her pills into a container, and gave her ones for that evening, and made sure she took them and then I went home to make fish pie for a good -bye supper for the lovely F, whose friend A has been staying for the last few nights. It was their last night before they go back to uni so we had Cava to wish them a happy term. But afterwards we had the most terrible choice of film - Amy - a documentary about  Amy Winehouse. What a gruelling watch. Amy who had had bulimia for years, and nobody had done anything about it, because basically, her family was quite ignorant about the dangers. She had so much spirit and so much intelligence - how terrible that she was so badly guarded as a girl, and so unready to be cast adrift as an adult! But in the end, after seeing her friends and her family and her manager and her bodyguard - all of whom she relied on - you concluded that the most intelligent person she knew was her doctor, who seemed to be a very cold fish. The doctor told her that the consumption of alcohol had damaged her badly, and drinking too much again could give her a heart attack. Amy did that to herself, even though she'd been warned.

I saw her perform once. She was terrific. But before the song, she stared at us -  the audience - I could see how she felt - She was scared. I liked Amy and I never laughed at all the horrible, jeering jokes people made about her addictions. The paparazzi should be ashamed of their part in making her life a misery. But do vultures feel shame?

Oh dear You Tube binge on Roger Allam

First video (actually an audio) was necessary because I have Les Miserables on the brain - and why not - it is such an extravagantly wonderful piece of work and this is my favourite song. The song describes the ideology of the character Javert : his mission in life is to apply the law to impose some order on the chaos, and the failure of his ideology is a tragedy. Here he aspires to the stars. 

Then a few funny things from Cabin Pressure, a few minutes long. Roger Allam plays the First Officer who knows everything and is a tiny bit arrogant, and John Finnemore plays the not-bright but always cheerful steward, Arthur.

Here is the smartarse First Officer played by Roger Allam, alleviating the boredom.

Mary Margaret O'Hara, - What are you doing New Year's eve?

 

 

Yeah, I listen to it every year, the last 5 years or so. There's other versions but nothing to beat this one.

 

While we're thinking of Mary Margaret here she is being very Gothic.