Funny Valentine
14 February

I had a funny sort of a Valentine's Day.

And I think that it was mostly down to the fact that my body is still re-adjusting to running of its own resources without the aid of happy pills.

In the run up to the day itself, I felt that I couldn't get any sense out of Ross as to what his intentions were.

Initially, his plans were to be over on the East Coast with his family for that weekend, sorting out arrangements for his sister, Megan's, wedding in July. Then that got cancelled. But, although he was going to be around, there was nothing about anything that we might do together. I got trapped at that point into my three-year-old self of not knowing what to do or what was expected of me.

Come the morning, again, there was initial silence. I was in a turmoil of hurt. I hadn't bought a card because I'd not picked up on any signs that we were going to go down that route. Part of me felt justified that my judgement had been correct. Elsewhere, I felt horribly wronged that life was so empty of celebration.

Then Ross appeared with a card and I simply burst into wracking sobs of relief and anguish and anger. Things calmed down eventually.

But still, I feel vulnerable. I know intellectually that a part of this is to do with the seratonin and all. But I also know that I need some more verbal clues. And, though I can talk with Ross and tell him these things and see that he nods in agreement and understanding, nine years of experience have taught me not to be confident that this will translate into any future action. I expect that, if I ask him about any of this in a fortnight's time, he will not be able to convince me that he remembers any of it.

And that doesn't feel good.

Our path to the Monday was cleared by a visit to the Liverpool Playhouse on the Saturday night to see Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe.

I have long wanted to see this work on stage to see how it would stand up and I rather enjoyed it. The production, an all male cast set (appropriately) inside a academic library, admirably set up the proposition voiced by Mephistopheles (an excellent Jamie Bamber) that this is hell, nor am I out of it.

It was a sober evening, much enlivened by the diversions offered to John Faustus (a less than engaging assumption by Nicholas Tennant). I liked Michael Brown's various cameos and have to say that he looked very fetching in a frock. The fires of hell at the end were a little paltry by comparison to the conflagration offered by De Nederlandse Opera for Boito's Mefistofele but that's the difference in budgets for you.

My main gripe was the cast's inability to cope with the verse speaking. They were excellent in the more prosaic, intimate passages. There, television and film work really aided a sense of ebb and flow and play with the language. When the rhetoric became more inflamed, there was a general tendency to produce the sound from the throat with a more rasping and strained timbre. and it all sounded artificial and unconvincing.

I guess that this is a modern tendency. Forty years ago, actors could have done the high passions well enough but would have struggled to make the more intimate passages sound unaffected. Swings and roundabouts. All in all then, a game attempt worth three stars.

I'd been going to offer five stars to Audrey Niffeneger's The Time Traveller's Wife which I have been reading. I was fascinated by the notion of a relationship between two people being conducted outside of the usual time frame.

The novel is a tour de force of intellectual control remembering who knows what at any given stage of the narrative and exploring the emotional stresses and strains of necessary secrets kept and sudden retrospective explanations.

However, I found the ending very unsatisfactory. So, an exellent four stars then.