Trip to Edinburgh for the Festival

My neighbour Amanda and I spent one evening and two days at the Edinburgh Festival, staying in a Budget Backpackers and seeing mainly Fringe shows. We had a private room at the Backpackers and it was very decent - well decorated inside - modern bathrooms, clean. Good communal areas, services and very kind staff. A brief resume of our trip follows:-

Free show - 4 comedians taking turns at poking their heads through a sheet and going into their spiels  to make us laugh - 2 stars.

Day One
Free show in Royal Mile - Knife Juggler up a ladder - he was quite clever and amusing as well as good at balancing and juggling, but these guys spin out their shows for too long - 3 stars
Scottish National Gallery. Lovely: to see the paintings I am familiar with - like members of your family that I don't often see. - 5 stars
Drag Act with miming - downstairs in a pub - very interesting as the face had lots of black plastic needles sticking out of a stockingnette cover, while the hair part of the head was covered in plain stockingnette. I think needles all over the head would look better. Fun. - 2 stars
Nina Conti - Ventriloquism - big theatre at the Edinburgh Conference Centre - I don't know why she does her act with the monkey, as the act with the people from the audience is so much funnier. - 5 stars
Free show - 3 magicians in a downstairs room - all good. 4 stars
Paid for show at the Underbelly  - Your Ever Loving by Martin McNamara - this was on during the day and did well, but the cast hung on for another week and did a midnight show for tiny audiences - It was about Paul Hill whose "confession" got the Guildford Four and the Maguire family banged up. Poor bloke. He speaks aloud the letters he wrote to his mum from prison as well as telling his whole story. This play is fast and furious and the two actors (Stefan McCusker and James Elmes) were excellent. and the Director had done a great job. (Sarah Chapleo).- 5 stars -

Your Ever Loving uses Paul Hill’s letters, mostly sent to his mother from prisons up and down the country. They’re brought simply and charmingly to life by Stefan McCusker. He is a man enduring crippling restriction and loneliness and yet we see him for the most part in his element, attempting to keep his mother’s spirits up and arranging presents for a daughter he has never met. His situation is rendered sympathetically, but McNamara’s play doesn’t gloss over the faults of the man himself, made violent, taut and spiky by years in prison.   https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/2016/your-ever-loving-review-at-theatre-n16-london/

Day Two
Climbed Arthur's seat. 5 stars for the view.

Amanda

Free Show - Joe Wells, stand up comedian. He is really good and I predict he will be well-known one day. He did a routine about someone's attitudes changing with the passing of time. He took the audience into his world and took us on a journey. We were in a safe pair of hands. He also wore a T-shirt that said YOKO WAS THE BEST BEATLE. You gotta respect that. - 5 stars.
Expensive ventriloquism show at the Pleasance - Nina Conti supposedly talking to a psychiatrist. Very disappointing as the ideas led nowhere. Dull. - 2 stars
Free show at the Cowshed on Cowgate - Scottish Blues band - these old boys (and one of them, who played guitar and harmonica, was really old) knew their stuff and they were amazing. Enjoyed it so much. - 5 stars
Free show comedians - somewhere on Cowgate - forgettable. 2 stars

Expensive show - Room 29 - Jarvis Cocker and Chilly Gonzales at the Proper Festival, King's Theatre. We got the tickets at the last minute so the seats were awful - we were actually higher than the ceiling and I could only feel "connected" to the show by leaning very far forward - the music was lovely - piano music written by Chilly, and lyrics by Jarvis. It would work better in a cabaret venue than in a practically vertical theatre. The idea is that we are entertained by Jarvis in his Hotel Room. "Help yourself to pretzels" he says, in his dark and intimate voice. "Room 29 is where I'll face myself alone", he sings, in a croaky but affecting voice. You can hear this track on Youtube  It is a very confessional piece. He castigates himself for not being able to hold down a real relationship with a girlfriend, preferring something less personal. (Tearjerker.) It looks at the allure of Hollywood, and it considers what the habit of staring of screens has had on us. It considers Hollywood's preoccupation with sex and what effect that might have had on Jean Harlow and Howard Hughes. There is a strange song about Mark Twain's daughter - mocking her because she became an alcoholic. (Why mock her? She was not a talented writer or player but - is that a reason to mock someone?) Jarvis considers the wonderful allure of film and latterly, TV, and how it turns out to be a sham god, an illusion. One song about this disillusion with TV is called "The Other Side". (Unfortunately he went off stage for this bit and appeared in a telly on stage - which was not original and was too static to hold the attention.)

Then he becomes quite distressed with a song called "Trick of the Light" how he fell in love with "life with the boring bits taken out" -  "I wasted my life on a trick of the light" - Then there was a dancer in red who twirled around to a strobe light - this was simply beautiful and we were in the best place to see it - from way up high. There was a string quartet to fill out the music - whirling around to fade out in sadness.

I thought - "Oh this is a work of art" - because it was a considered work that didn't hang together quite right, but it united a number of elements - music, dancing, speech, a screen with pictures and some film, even some audience participation - this wasn't very good either -  in a way that hasn't been done before. I was very glad I was there.

Then another song about how the stars of the thirties were genuinely cool and how the people of today don't compare - no class. The stars of the thirties mixed with genuinely cultured people - refugees from Europe. This is called "Ice Cream as Main Course" and was more resolved - a salute to the past.

After this Jarvis and co did an encore - a Leonard Cohen song called "Paper Thin Hotel" which was very affecting and a high point of the evening.

A Guardian review is here and the album review is here
And that was Edinburgh, which was looking lovely.

This is not my first Book Group

I think my first Book Group was in Stamford, which is taking us back to circa 1996, when I was a member of 2 book groups, and eventually I dropped the one I found most peculiar. It was held in the houses of the members in turn and it was OK if your house was a large one - plenty of space to sit, etc, but difficult (and possibly embarrassing) if your house was small. After discussing the book - and possibly before discussing the book - we talked about the children, moving house, career moves (the menfolk were involved in education, medicine, dentistry etc. so there were regular moves) holidays and decorating - all those things. I could never understand who had chosen the book. There was something cloak and dagger about it. Eventually I found a book group where the discussion was mainly about books and we all got on well. Everything was open and easy. We could agree to disagree too. There were 5-8 of us, which is enough to be a group and be fairly friendly with everyone. We even went on a book group jolly - to Howarth.

But we moved up North and I missed the book group and I did feel very lucky when we moved again, to London, because the librarian at my husband's (posh) school formed a book group for the staff and I was allowed to join! Basically, the librarian ran it and I think she decided on the books and the guests. We had Dylan Thomas's daughter at one of the meetings, a Foreign Correspondent at another, when we discussed "Scoop" by Evelyn Waugh, and Sophie Kinsella (author) came along to another. We also had the publisher of the Harry Potter series. Yes, we really had some interesting meetings and discussions, because many of the staff were very well-up in the arts, and the wonderful thing was how we rarely went completely off the topic. The staff there were an impressive bunch.

In Weybridge I was invited to join a book group fairly early on, and I left deliberately, when I started to work on my Open University course, saying I didn't have time to read off the course. It was because there was so much boring talk about things like neighbourhood crime and tax law (we had a tax accountant amongst our members). I also didn't like the sort of books we read - I often felt like saying - this is the sort of nonsense my daughter reads. It was quite a friendly book group but when my children stopped going to private schools I really felt I didn't belong.

One of my neighbours wanted to start a book group and my neighbour Amanda got me involved. This was such a good idea, apart from they would only meet on Sunday at 4 p.m. (what a weird time to do anything!!) and the neighbour whose idea it was is a complete loony. All she wants to do is talk about herself. She seems like someone with PTSD. And indeed, she had had a horrible shock. She and her husband used to be extremely rich and live in Mayfair, but somehow they lost all their money. So she talks about the old days all the time and hardly draws breath for anyone else to get a word in. Also, Amanda, who is a friend, never joined! She just got me to join! Anyway, the book group in our close fizzled out in a few months.

So after a long time of looking I went to the one at the Riverside Barn because it seemed to be for anyone who wanted to go, and there would not be the usual difficulty about not being from the right social/economic stratum,  and in a way it's the right kind of book group - picks a range of the right kind of books - but the problem is that the membership is so OLD and the level of discussion can be really SAD. when I am old, will I have such a closed mind?  I can't believe that, out of ten, "How to be Both " got 3. I gave it eight - some people gave it one, and our leader gave it zero.

Our next book is a Kate Atkinson which I am sure to enjoy.

Today I took my mother out. She has Alzheimer's. She has been in a lot of pain with her back, and she has been eating almost nothing, sitting in a chair doing nothing for about three weeks, so her muscles have shrunk. I have been feeding her soup and making her take her pills. She is a tiny old lady in enormous clothes. Anyway, I decided what she should wear, got her up and into the car, took her to an old favourite riverside pub and she ate a decent lunch. Also took her to a little supermarket where she wandered dottily about only wanting to buy cakes and milk. She asked a tall young man how tall he was, and he said he didn't know.

Allotment part 2

The idea we have with the allotment is to divide it into 4 quarters, use 3 of them for crop rotation and 1 for a permanent crop. However, one of the apple trees that came with the plot is in the wrong place and will have to stay with a succession of other crops. The other apple tree has started off the fruit quarter and we have also put in 2 gooseberry bushes, and 2 raspberry canes. We want to put in some rhubarb crowns next.

Most of the ground is still covered with grass which is covered with black sheeting to kill it off. We have inherited a bench so we will place it in the area with the proper turf (the previous occupant put down some turf for his children to play on).

We have cleared enough earth in one quarter to grow curly kale, cauliflower and (out of their place) onion seedlings. Apparently, we are not supposed to grow onion seedlings; we are supposed to grow onions from sets. (But we bought the seedlings in trays because we were away in Australia and couldn't grow from seed.) The "supposed to" ideas come from our fellow allotmenteers, who are very forward in giving advice. Anne tells us what "we all" do, inferring we should do the same, e.g. build compost heaps out of pallets.... Anne has 2 half plots near the back of her house and keeps an eye on the allotments all the time and knows who everyone is.

We also get lots of advice from Nick, who used to be a professional gardener and has a very full allotment with lots of cloches and things. He gave me some gorgeous french beans last week. All the allotmenteers make comments about each other's doings, e.g. Anne thinks Nick has used the wrong material to cover his lettuce cloche and that he will find the foxes tear it.  Nick saved lots of big cardboard boxes for us to cover our ground with under the black sheeting, so that the grass dies back over the winter. He is really kind.

Today I went with a hoe to cut down some grass seedlings that were coming through around the fruit bushes and encouraged by Anne, I also cut back an enormous overgrown rosemary bush, which I will cut back side after side so as not to kill it. She thinks I should dig the whole thing out, especially as there are grass weeds and bindweed roots growing between its roots. But I kind of like it as a hedge between us and the main path.

Other allotmenteers introduce themselves from time to time; the American lady gave me marigold seeds when I admired her marigolds, deaf Anne came to introduce herself and tell me that she had disturbed a lot of mice in her shed and put her hand down to pick up what appeared to be a piece of wire and turned out to be a mouse's tail! A live one, thank God.

Today I was listening to Dezzy Disks on my headphones and didn't hear Anne shouting at me. I didn't water as rain is forecast for tomorrow. We have had such an amazing fine spell. I have been for 3 5 mile walks this week, two of them with Amanda (my friend and neighbour) to Virginia Water. It was incredibly beautiful but I did not take my phone so I sadly didn't take any pictures.

About Time: a Richard Curtis film

Time Travel is a great motif in a film. It makes whatever it's about into a fairy tale of transformation and possibility. Supposing your life is privileged but not grand, full of ordinary family happiness, and time travel seems to be giving you the ability to make it even better: and then ... but I don't want to spoil it. Because the theme is love and loss.

It makes London look such fun! And London is fun if you can cope with it, so that's true. We went to our friend Amanda's to watch this film because F is going soon, so Amanda invited us for a bon voyage dinner. My contribution was a Victoria sponge (I'm not very good at them) but I filled it with blackcurrant curd, cream and raspberries. Loulou and Maddie and Stan were there, but A was not there because he was at an AGM. It was a shame that he wasn't there because the film was a bonding experience - S & F wanted to share it - and it was about (to tell the truth) loving one's dad. If you love your dad, it's a must-see. If you're not sure, it's still a must-see.

In Richard Curtis films the pretty girl always seems to be American! Why is this? Are British girls not interesting enough - and what's wrong with European girls, or far Eastern girls, hey?

When we went home A. was in bed but not asleep. I couldn't relax at all and then the storm started! It was the noisiest thunder I have ever heard - it sounded like jet engines and it went on and on, and the rain was fierce. And I left the washing out.

The children said they too couldn't sleep after they first watched this Richard Curtis film. Interesting.

Under Water to get out of the Rain: concluding :Why oh why oh why did I not become a marine biologist?

It is such a cool thing to be. You get to scuba dive in varied locations collecting data; it involves looking at beautiful things in a beautiful environment, you design great experiments for changing ecosystems to see what works and what doesn't work, and you meet other people who love the same things as you!

It is all the fault of Miss Johns, who taught us Biology. She was a large, toothy woman who was quite diffident. She must have hated her ungrateful, giggling pupils, and she never showed us anything from the real world of nature. We copied the text book and diagrams on the board. I remember that ferns (or mosses) do something quite interesting in their life cycle and I hoped she would bring in an example of the thing that they became, but nope! I am still trying to become less ignorant. I collected my O Level.  But was that education? I believe children are taught better now, that there is some connection between the student and the life form studied.

History was taught and tested in the same way. You learned a story and you wrote it out in grammatically correct sentences. No wonder I preferred English Lit. You actually dealt with the book which contained its own world. It was not a step away from the actual subject under investigation.

My father was a keen gardener and I liked being in the garden with him. I was very fond of worms and used to collect them while he was digging. He told me how important the worms were for the soil. He was also keen on making compost heaps and enjoyed seeing them break down into compost as much as he enjoyed seeing the plants grow. (I am a bit like that now) One day I inspected the roses and I pointed out to him that some were covered with blackfly. I asked him if there was some kind of poison for the blackfly to get rid of them. "Yes," he said. "They tried that. They got some DDT and sprayed it and killed all the pests." "So that's a good idea then?" "Well. Then the birds started to die..." He didn't need to say any more. He had just explained ecology in 2 sentences.

But back to marine biology:" Under Water to get out of the Rain" includes so many interesting stories about things like, why did the Californian giant kelp forests start to diminish? they are vital to the food industry. Who was put on the case and what experiments did he do to solve the puzzle?

What happened to Cannery Row? Who was "Doc" the marine biologist that John Steinbeck wrote about? Now I know the answers I have to read "Cannery Row" again.(What an unlikely place for literature - a row of smelly factories for fish processing.)

I picked up this book by serendipity - my friend Amanda asked us round for a Christmas quiz and gave me this book to rest my answer paper on. I flicked through and I was intrigued. It's a terrific read, and unlike our  bad role-model Professor Steve Jones, Professor Trevor Norton lists at the end all the books he has consulted : A long, long list, and credits everyone, especially those who died at sea.