New Growth
27 March

After a dry spell, it has suddenly come over all grey and misty with a generous sprinkling of rain.

The result is that the garden has put on a spurt of new growth and there's a real sense of green about the place. Last Monday, Ross and I went over to Lady Green Nursery and bought some Cottage Pinks (small carnations) for the front garden. In the back, the rhibes have blossomed and the primroses are in full purple flower. The hellebores and the lilies are coming on well and we've planted out a new rosemary to replace the one that died off last autumn. It's all very satisfying.

The onset of spring has had its effect on Nutkin. He's moulting for Britain and the house is full of little tufts of pussy fur. He's been enjoying the longer evenings and spending more and more time outside.

I'm just over halfway through my six month course of seratonin inducing tablets now. It's hard to remember what it was like when I first started taking them. It's just become part of a background routine that encompasses my anti-hayfever tablets and my anti-asthma inhaler. I've started taking some mega-vitamins for people over fifty. They seem to be well over quota for the daily intake. Certainly, there's a high dose of vitamin B in there as they paint my piss the colour of sunflowers.

I'm not sure whether or not I've said this before but it bears repeating even if I have. The best thing to have come out of my illness of the past few months is the effect it has had upon Ross. We were lying in bed talking last week and he told me that he now felt that he could make a contribution and that he could do things for me. He always could, of course, but it's important that he now thinks that he can.

However, I also feel an unease in all of this. I find it very easy to slip back and let go of all of the changes that I introduced when I was down. Now that I have more energy, it feels as though I don't have to work so hard to conserve it and I don't have to be so disposed to make sure that I have protected time to relax. I can smoke; I can drink; I can stay up late; I can buy CDs; I can go to events; I can do all those things which I do to distract myself from the task of change. I have stopped doing extra yoga; I have stopped resting in front of the light box; I have stopped meditating; I have stopped applying for new jobs; in short I have stopped doing all those things which might have sustained me through the task of change.

I've finally finished off His Dark Materials. The final book really was a struggle to get through - just too much plot and too many climaxes. It should really have been two books. The best that can be said is that the length of time I took to read it gave me a good space before I came to read the fifth book in the No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, The Full Cupboard of Life. I can easily give this three stars because it was a good read but it suffered from being the fifth book. Although the vision is still true, it is no longer the special thing it was when I read the first book. I can imagine that I would have been very disappointed if I had read all five books at a sitting.

I've also continued with my listening to audio books and renewed an acquaintance with Orwell's Animal Farm (fabulous), Lawrence's The Rainbow (absolute unmitigated twaddle) and Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (astonishing writing but completely confusing given that everyone has at least three names and I completely lost track of who was whom and who and how they were related to each other).

Ross and I watched Love Actually last Friday night. Much heralded as the best Brit comedy for years, it was - well alright. The first third was probably the best as you got to know the characters and all the interweaving stories. In the middle, things got bogged down a bit and I kept wondering how it was all going to end up. The end was problematic and was probably always going to be. What do you do with a dozen or so narrative threads? The solution of tying some up and leaving others dangling was unsatisfactory.

Saturday passed quietly and it was good to spend a little time with Roland at Smolensky's for a morning coffee.

Then, in the evening, it was off the the Lowry for a performance of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer. This was pretty stunning. From the moment the set opened up onto a walled garden in the Garden District of New Orleans, we all knew that we were in for a large and juicy slice of Grand Guignol. We weren't disappointed.

Diana Rigg as Mrs Venable and Victoria Hamilton as Catharine Holly fairly chewed up the set as they fought for the memory of Sebastian who died/was killed suddenly last summer. The rest of the Holly clan and the other bit parts were effectively nasty. But the heart of the show, the play's most difficult rôle, was Mark Bazeley's performance as Dr Cukrowicz, the psychiatrist who is being asked to lobotomise Catharine to prevent her from recounting her story of what really happened to Sebastian and why. His final line "We must at least allow for the fact that she might be telling the truth" was chilling. It was an excellent evening in the theatre.

The programme contains an essay with the following sentence "...the act of cannibalism appears to be a central metaphor for living in a cruel world where, as Williams told David Frost in 1970, 'we all devour each other, in our fashion'." This is the sort of thing which I would have read as gospel in my youth. I now think that it is crap. It goes back to the codes of honour and good name in The Mayor of Zalamea. If you are brought up in a rigidly coded society from which you derive many privileges and into which you fit perfectly apart from one facet of your character (your homosexuality) which you have to suppress in order to survive, then you will become a predatory individual incapable of love who cannibalises their own soul.

A little television in the week included E.R. (Ross loves medical dramas and revels in this, Casualty and Holby City) and Hustle. We had our first cheeky nudity. Marc Warren got his kit off.

This was warmly to be welcomed but, looking at the images above, they don't do the moment justice. Marc is certainly no supermodel but you can't tell how sexy he is. He really needs to be animated with the rough and ready persona he emanates.

Come this current Friday, I took the day off work and, after a relaxed day, we took ourselves off to see Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Buxton Opera House given by English Touring Opera. The last time we saw the company, we journeyed over the tops in thick fog. We had fog again both there and back.

This, however, didn't detract from a really good night. It was a more serious reading of the work than I have experienced before but it worked. It wasn't a light a frivolous dream but one with erotic and dangerous undertones. There were strains of Turn of the Screw in the music of the faery folk and elements of Peter Grimes in the passions of the mortals. The set was a simple affair and the costumes were effective. The stage was left for the performers to own it and they did. I liked Jonathan Peter Kenny's countertenor Oberon, Hal Cazalet's Lysander and Douglas Bowen's Demetrius. Best of the women was Elizabeth Atherton's Helena. Michael Rosewell conducted well and drew more parodies of Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini out of the mechanicals play than I have ever heard before. After the horrors of Aida, this was a four star event in no mistake.

It was midnight before we were home and so it was not surprise that we both slept in this Saturday morning. In fact, we've done very little all day. The sort of highlight has been watching Young Adam. I say sort of because it didn't really match up to the pre-publicity I had read which seemed to hail it as a new and great British film.

It was a fairly gritty tale set (mostly) on a coal barge in the Glasgow area during the 1950s. The hero (Ewan McGregor), during the course of the film, managed to give up trying to be a writer, get a young woman pregnant, accidentally be the cause of her falling into a dock and drowning, allow an innocent man to go to the gallows for her murder, sleep with the bargee's wife and break up their marriage, engage in sundry other acts of casual fornication and generally be an engaging, amoral drifter.

It felt very French somehow. It felt like something Zola or Maupassant would have written about. It felt like a different take on Puccini's Il tabarro which is set on a barge on the Seine in Paris. What it didn't have, which all of those others would aspire to, is a little more context for the central character. We got to know nothing of his background or motivation in all of this. He remained a complete cipher without class or family or creed. He was just an amiable, engaging young man who completely destroyed the lives of everyone he came into contact with.

That aside, Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton were excellent in the lead rôles. The direction was taught and atmospheric. It was nice to see Ewan's nob again. It just didn't add up to a coherent and satisfying experience. Just two stars I'm afraid.

It's also worth reflecting on Ewan McGregor's versatility. During the time that he would have been making this, he would have been working on his third Star Wars movie as well as making Down With Love and Big Fish. Now you don't get many people who can work in four such different films in such a short space of time.