Bad and Good
30 June

The problem with having a really good holiday is that it makes coming down to earth again really difficult.

We made a good decision to stop in London overnight rather than pressing on with our journey home. We could have been back in Crosby on the Sunday night but we would have been completely wacked out.

Instead, we arrived by Monday lunchtime and had time to settle in and greet the cats.

I took another good decision by taking the Tuesday as holiday as well so that, by the time I was back in work on the Wednesday, we had already sorted out all of the holiday washing and had stowed everything back where it should be.

However, both Ross and I have confessed to the other that we are finding it incredibly difficult to settle to doing anything - me to my work and he to all the project work that he has to complete before the end of the academic year.

There's been bad news in the locality in our absence in that a lad got shot outside a pub near the Plaza cinema. The signs are that it was a drugs-related incident.

There was bad news in our street as well. While we've been away, there was a drugs raid next door and Jay has been done for possession and dealing. Apparently, he had a little cannabis farm going in the back room. He thinks that he can argue for personal use and get off. I think he's whistling in the dark.

That makes three drugs arrests at that property in the last three years. Firstly the hombre we knew only as Donkey Dick and then later that same year the top flat crew went down. We noted at the time that John (as we knew him then) had bouts of skunk-induced paranoia. Well, Jay, as we now know him, obviously thought that he could get away with what he was doing in the neighbourhood because it is quiet. What he didn't seem to notice was that the quietness simply made his activities stick out even further.

On the Tuesday that I was back off holiday, I was supposed to go to a Rodewald concert which included Schubert's Octet. But I was too tired to go so that was a bad decision to make the booking.

So as not to wimp out completely, I made myself drive over to Salford to see Opera North at the Lowry because I had booked to see Maria Stuarda by Donizetti. Actually, I should have cut my losses and not bothered as it wasn't really all that good. I've had better nights out in this sort of repertory at Buxton or Holland Park.

I thought that Guido Johannes Rumstadt's conducting was pants. He may have a reputation for this sort of work on mainland Europe but I didn't like his sense of style at all. Antonia Cifrone, our Elizabeth, bunked off for the last act. An announcement from the stage begged our indulgence as she had had some sort of vocal problems during the interval but I suspect that she was throwing a hissy fit about the musical standards as she and the band kept getting out of synch.

It's probably not a good idea to judge Sarah Connolly (Maria) on this performance therefore. However, I don't think that I can join the fan club. I just don't like the sound of her voice. Bülent Bedüz was a pleasant, if light-weight, tenor.

I didn't boo at the end. I don't boo. But I did leave without applauding.

Radio 4's dramatisations of John leCarré's Smiley novels have just come to and end. It's been a long haul since Call For The Dead over a year ago but it has been well worth it. Excellent listening.

The other series to have finished recently was the latest Dr Who. I think that the jury must remain out but I don't think that, following all the departues and changes that the show has yet found its proper level again. Really the whole thing has just been too eager and so has come across as merely average.

Streets ahead in all directions was the latest live relay from the National Theatre to FACT in Liverpool. I went with Roland to see London Assurance by Dion Boucicault. It's a Restoration-style romp written in the middle of the nineteenth century by an actor-playwright-manager who was famous on both sides of the Atlantic in his time. We both needed a good laugh and we got one.

The whole thing was full throttle with Simon Russell Beale (yes, him again moving well away from Smiley territory) and Fiona Shaw leading the way. Yet what was remarkable about the whole was, despite the obvious charicature of the writing, every person on stage was also given a spark of humanity.

This came at exactly the right time for both of us - an excellent evening's entertainment.

And, at 5am the following morning, I was up with the lark to drive to Darlington to deliver a business seminar. At 7am I was on the M6 north of Preston driving through a monsoon. Still, I made it to base camp in time to set up for a 9:30 start as requested. Well done that man for making the best of a bad situation. Just no-one at work actually said that. So, things have gone from good to bad to worse there at present.

A different but ongoing bad thing has been this Journal.

I did a lot of writing whilst we were away on holiday using Ross's laptop. That machine uses Linux as its core operating system. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with the fact that I have used Windows operating systms for over twenty years. The upshot is that I am intuitively used to using a Microsoft methodology much as I am used to driving on te left hand side of the road. Intuitive, in this sense, merely means "that which I am used to".

The upshot is that procedures which take me moments to implement in Windows find me screaming at the laptop in a fury of frustration after twenty minutes of not achieving a simple task.

When I returned from holiday, I attempted to copy all my Journal files from the laptop to my own computer and, in the process, destroyed half of what I'd written - inutterably lost, irretrievable, not just mis-filed, gone.

It's taken me a long time to re-constitute all of those facts, thoughts, impressions. But it's done.

Composing and compiling on the wing, in hotel rooms, on trains, on café terraces, I hadn't realised how much time I had invested in downloading and re-sizing photographs, researching facts, checking the spelling of names and places, cross-referencing with the Journal not to mention the simple arduous task of typing up all those words.

The bad thing has been having to do it all again. The good thing has been realising that I can remember the outline of most of the things that I wanted to say. I've also been able to add in other things that I can now see with a little greater distance.

However, I can also reflect back on a warm evening, a meal in the back garden, home-made chicken and ham pie, potatoes from Ormskirk, asparagus from Formby, a glass of white wine and the sounds of the swifts shrieking overhead. And those, I think, are the moments to treasure.

So.

Cloud   A   Lining   Has   Every   Silver

Re-arrange the words to make a well known phrase or saying.