It's been a while since I last posted. Sometimes, I break these retrospective postings into bite sized chunks. This one is a long one.
Quick mention of the weather before we get started. Though blowy and rainy, it is much milder of late. But temperatures are difficult to gauge at this time of the year. Clouts are being cast and donned with alacrity.
The most pleasant personal thing of the past few weeks has been wiring up an aerial for my stereo system and, from there, wiring up secondary speakers to the system so that I can have music with good sound quality as I cook, eat and have breakfast.
The worst thing was last Tuesday when Ross learnt that his Disability Living Allowance (DLA) was being stopped.
So, Tuesday night was a sleepless one. Well, actually I did my usual trick. I got off to sleep fine but I woke up at 2:30am with a head full of ideas, thoughts, plans, stratagems, etc. Unlike the past, however, I got up and had a cup of tea, swallowed a couple of paracetamol, watched a little video (hem hem) and then went back to bed. When I still couldn't sleep, I listened to some talking books. For your information, the dawn chorus starts at about 5:30m and the light starts kicking in by 6am.
I didn't sleep but I least I wasn't lying there fretting about things I couldn't resolve at that hour of the morning.
In the event, it's not all as horrible as the two of us both thought. We shall contest the decision. It is more than likely that it will be over-turned. It is just more work that should have been unnecessary.
Good things have emerged. Unlike Ross's experience in Tower Hamlets, Social Services here in Sefton do seem to talk with one another. Support has been forthcoming from a number of agencies. I'm now in contact with Sefton Carers and Ross's Care Worker, Paula, has pushed for the OT section to get a move on and contact Ross. Also we didn't capitulate. We asked for help and we got it. We weren't alone.
There have been some less good things. Part of the reason why there has been so much response was that Ross had said that his initial response to the news was to think of doing damage to himself. He's now on the At Risk register. He didn't do anything. However, he's been rewarded by lots of attention. I just hope that this doesn't become a tactic of choice for this household.
Also, last year, when we were discussing Ross's move here, I asked for him to be candid with me about the nature of his illness. I said that I wanted to be clear about what I was getting into. Depression and communication difficulties were not among the symptoms he identified. I feel cheated by this. And Ross should too. He will never know whether or not I would have accepted him if I had been armed with this information.
Anyhow, this DLA business proves how resilient we are. It is that we bounce back not that nothing bad ever happens to us. I just wonder slightly about it being the end of the financial year. Someone more cynical that I might feel that it was a way of meeting targets for year end. But then the agency would need to be clever for that to happen and I believe far more in the cock-up rather than the conspiracy theory of everything.
And the rest of this entry is the sort of gossip, tittle tattle, extended thought processes and event reviews that document the life of a middle aged arts buff.
I've just re-read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and it has given me much pleasure. There is a degree of consolation to be had from young people's literature. Ross is currently re-reading the whole Potter cannon. I've bought him Artemis Fowl as well. The nice man in the local bookshop tells me that book two in the series is due out this summer and that Prot III will be with us after Easter. I shall read both.
Ross and I have now caught up with Pratchett's The Thief of Time. The man is a certain genius. He has to have formal qualifications in logic or know someone who does. Access to higher level mathematical, scientific and moral thinking would also be an asset given the content of his work.
Most novelists write in one genre. They are crime writers, horror writers, artful writers. Often, if they want to write in a new genre, they adopt a pseudonym as in Julian Barnes/Dan Kavanagh. Or, like Graham Greene, they adopt a common genre (in his case the thriller) and use the format as a way of producing artful books. Like 15th and 16th century poets using the form of the sonnet to produce poems about whatever they chose.
Pratchett does something akin. He is labelled as a fantasist because of his invention of the Diskworld. However, this alternative universe (or multiverse) now gives him the opportunity to write many types of novel - satires, philosophies, comedies, social critiques, thrillers, etc.
I like his work.
I've been listening to the BBC's tapes of Sceptered Isle Twentieth Century with great interest. With a sudden insight during one of them, I realised that I was born only 40 years after the start of the Great War. This is no time at all and in between there was another world-wide cataclysm. It is almost like the further I go forward in time, the further I can reach back.
The narrative also reminded me that I have known incredible stability - unlike my father who was a fire watcher during the Liverpool Blitz before he was called up to serve in the RAF in the Far East. As I was listening to the section on the 70s, there seemed to be so much violence and yet in memory it does not feel that it was like that in the living. I guess we all just got on with things. Bombs happened elsewhere even when I lived in London. It is like this journal. It does not necessarily reflect all major world events. Recently, I've said nothing about the war in Afghanistan, the Zimbabwean elections, events in Palestine, etc. The journal reflects an individual's not a nation's or an historian's concerns.
I've written before about what I consider were two very 20th century obsessions - speed and choice. I'd like to add a third - information and the assumption of the power of the datum. It interweaves with the previous two as there is a current desire for the speedy delivery of datum and for choice of datum and sources of datum through conspicuous quantity.
BUT all of this loses sight of the big picture. It's why I think I have enjoyed so much the BBC's Sceptered Isle tapes and the Oxford Press Short Introductions. Both formats are short on detail but great on meta-context and interestingly have the initials SI. I'm convinced that a greater concern for context is where we shall find ourselves in 20 years time.
As a postscript to this thought line, I should note that, on my trip down to London (see later), my train was held up for 30 mins at Wolverhampton because there was no Train Manager to hand as they were short staffed. Yet Virgin Trains promises major investment in high speed trains to move us more quickly from A to B. I should rather that trains were more regular and more reliable than they were faster.
Television has picked up. Ross and I like Smallville. Or rather we like the looks of the cast. Tom Welling takes his top off far too seldom for our liking and Michael Rosenbaum could do with an occasional shower scene. But it is reasonable teen pap. 24 is much better. Quite class. Teachers is back and still a good laugh. ER is still exemplary drama but the format is starting to look tired.
Footballers Wives is not being recommissioned. It was not the hoped-for mega success in the ratings. I rather suspect that those who make up the intended mass market got wind that middle class types like me were laughing our socks off at it. Now it was OK for us all to laugh at Dynasty and Dallas in the 80s because that was the make-believe super-rich. Footballers Wives was set in the dreamed for socio-economic bracket of the mass market. Basically the proles didn't like the snobs laughing at what they aspired to be.
So, instead, they took to voting for Will Young.
Now I know that this will come as a surprise to you but Will is gay. Last weekend's tabloids were full of this er... revelation. There is still no word of his torrid nights with Gareth and/or Darius. The Pop Idol tour is big sell out. Meanwhile Hear'say are yesterday's news and are busy cancelling gigs left, right and centre. Maybe Kim did the right thing leaving when she did.
There's been a number of event type things.
For starters, a Philharmonic concert starring Jane Eaglen who was our Turandot last year. The following review was posted to the opera-l newsgroup.
Last night Jane Eaglen sang in an all-Richard Strauss concert with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Gerard Schwarz. After a very well played suite from Die Frau ohne Schatten, Ms Eaglen in a black gown, sang the Four Last Songs. It seemed a while before she warmed up, and her breathing could be heard more clearly than her sometimes un-projected middle register. There was little relishing of the words and hardly any nuance of expression or articulation of consonants but the tone was clean and clear as she ascended to higher notes.
After a set of four interludes from Intermezzo, the programme ended with the Dance of the Seven Veils and the final scene of Salome. Again the orchestral playing was of a very high standard. Ms Eaglen, now gowned in emerald green, sang the scene with great power and strength. Her voice was not always heard above the huge orchestra and the heavy orchestration but no singer could ever compete with so many decibels when they are generated on stage beside her; with the band in an orchestra pit, it would be more of a contest. I thought she sang this scene well, the voice secure and attractive in tone, not screeching the high notes as can sometimes be heard from more 'desperate' sopranos. One might perhaps have hoped for more interpretive skills but I am afraid, since Salome is not one of the roles we are likely to see Ms Eaglen in on stage, these are probably not going to happen in this piece. Never mind, I thought she sang this scene very well and the whole audience was enthusiastic in its applause.
Posted by Roger D Bell of Skelmersdale, Lancashire.
I think that this is mostly fair. Jane did take a while to warm up. But I do think that he's missed the point about the breath. She was taking phrases in one breath that other sopranos take in two or three. However, it is true that the voice has lost much of the initial beauty that I heard when she sang Mimi, and Norma and Donna Anna back in the late 1980s and early 1990s - too much Wagner really. Look at Ben Heppner her many times tenor. Voice is coming apart.
Moulin Rouge was fab. Baz Luhrman is the first director
I've encountered since early Ken Russell who can invest film with the visceral
immediacy of live theatre. Nicole and Ewan were fine but it was Jim Broadbent
who stole the show with his rendition of Like a Virgin. One for video
purchase when the widescreen is in the sales. Ross seemed mildly impassive
during the film. Quite good. Only later did the undisguised enjoyment seep out.
Difficult to know what he thinks some times.
Pleasant enough was A Knight's Tale. It featured Heath Ledger who was among
the eye candy in 10 Things I Hate About You.
Not the greatest nor the worst film of all time, it was much more enjoyable and
inventive than any of the critics had given it credit for. It could have done
with 15 minutes shaving off the third quarter to pick the pace up.
This production of Romeo and Juliet dates back to Nureyev Festivals at the
London Coliseum during my student summers in the 70s - when all those bombs were
exploding. I didn't see it then but enjoyed seeing it now. Most enjoyable and
fanciable dancer was Yosvani Ramos as Mercutio. Fwar.
The enterprise was badly let down by the lacklustre performance in the pit. It did not give the dancers much to work with.
And finally a trip to London, complete with 30 minute stop over in Wolverhampton (see above), gave me time with James and a trip to Covent Garden for Bellini's La sonnambula.
Juan Diego Florez was great, Elena Kelesidi was very good. The cast in general
sounded wonderful. I was very pleased to have been there to hear it. The
orchestra did not do much but then the score does not ask that much of them.
The production was pants and I'm not going to waste space talking about it.
This has been typed up on St Patrick's Day whilst supping on a little Bushmills.