I've gradually been doing more social stuff as the month has progressed.
Linda and Ian came up on a special journey to see mum. Linda has not spent time with her this past year and has been feeling very cut off. They stayed in their usual B&B and took mum for a meal at the The Royal Hotel in Waterloo. I deliberately did not join them feeling that three people all at once would just be too much for mum to take in at present.
Since the last time we were all at The Royal, a giant stuffed bear has appeared in the lobby of the hotel. Mum and Linda took the opportunity of acting out one of Shakespeare's most famous stage directions "Exit pursued by a bear".
I'm currently looking at more support for mum to help extend her time at the Old Vicarage. I was not happy with the state of the bathroom when I entered her rooms after lockdown. So, we've organised for someone to come in once a week to clean the bathroom. That hurdle surmounted and accepted, we've now got her to agree to an extension whereby the kitchenette area is also cleaned so as to reduce the chances of botulism.
Linda and I are gradually consolidating mum's finances. When she moved in the Old Vicarage, we sorted out some ISAs for her. One was a fixed rate ISA held for over two years. It's about to mature which is not something we expected to happen at the time. Once the interest is paid in, Linda will then merge the two accounts using our Power of Attorney. We've also cashed in her National Savings Premium Bonds and put the money into her regular cash account.
I've also found unequivocal evidence that mum has been missing her medication big time. I'm going to have to find a way to sort that out before I go on holiday to Devon with Ross. Not taking your blood pressure tablets in your 90s is a good way to damage your health without ensuring that you check out early.
Sam and Tom, young men of an outdoor cast of mind, have been stretching their legs at the Mallyan Spout Waterfall near Goatland in North Yorkshire.
It all seemed very spectacular and conducive to lung fulls of fresh air.
No-one, however, is very sure as to what is going on in the second photograph and the two men are at variance in their stories.
I favour the notion that Tom is inserting a live frog down the back of Sam's Calvin Klein's.
To the Phil with Roland for the first concert I've attended which has been conducted by Domingo Hindoyan, Vassily Petrenko's successor. Overall, I enjoyed it enormously and will be more than happy to follow him on the post-Petrenko journey. I like his sense of fun and elegance and control of feather-light dynamics.
A performance of Prokofiev's Symphony No1 Classical gave me an opportunity for comparison's. I'd very much disliked Vassily's approach back in 2009: Domingo's just allowed the music to be spritely and jokey on its own terms. Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin was perfumed with exotic chromaticism while hazy atmospheres shimmered around it. Very delicately textured work from the whole ensemble of the orchestra. And the afternoon concluded with the burst of colour, light, sound and cheerful joy that is Mendelssohn's Symphony No4 Italian.
None of these works is a challenge. I would like to see next season's programme to see where Hindoyan is going to take his players over the next few years. We have had a very Russian time of it over the past fifteen years. Out of the greats of the past, there hasn't been a lot of Richard Strauss, Bruckner, Nielsen, Schumann, Mendelssohn. It would be good to hear more of them and less (inevitable) Mahler.
Courtesy of the Met's nightly opera broadcasts, I took the opportunity to avail myself of Thomas Adès's most recent opera, The Exterminating Angel. Based on the screenplay for Luis Buñuel's 1962 surrealist film, the plot is that one where a group of wealthy people become trapped in a house that they cannot leave and gradually the veneers of civilised behaviour are pealed away.
As ever with Adès, there are many different styles of music contained in the score with some that is very approachable and other parts that remain too challenging for my ear. I enjoyed Adès's The Tempest when I caught parts of the broadcast from Covent Garden in 2004 and in another Met cinecast in 2012. This was much more of a conversation piece, a bit like Richard Strauss's Capriccio. Both feel very long. I'm not sure that I feel much moved to want to reacquaint myself with either.
My penultimate concert of this odd Phil season brought a happy concert of Haydn and Mozart from Andrew Manze and the news that he will continue as the Phil's Principal Guest Conductor for a further two years providing some useful continuity during the regime change.
Steven Osborne was the soloist for Mozart's Piano Concerto No23 and gave us a caressing tone from the Phil's stalwart Steinway. Excellent rapport between soloist, conductor and orchestra and some marvellously blended chords between piano and wind instruments.
Programming Mozart's Overture to Die Entführung aus dem Seralio alongside Haydn's Symphony No100 Military gave a chance to hear two sets of percussive innovation from the late eighteenth century - a middle Eastern jangling pastiche from Mozart and robust martial calls for attention and celebrations from Haydn.
Again, the reduced forces spread over a large stage were used by Manze to allow layers of texturing and colouring to co-exist. Glorious performances both. And ones I would not have attended under normal circumstances in a usual season. Maybe I should be re-thinking my focus.
A complete change of pace took me to the Everyman with my friend Nigel to see Y'MAM a one-man show exploring themes around the idea of toxic masculinity. Written by and performed by Majid Mehdizadeh (stage and screen name Luke Jerdy), Young Man's Angry Movements is an examination of one man's triggers behind the triggers behind the triggers which lead him to experience a red mist descending.
It's an autobiographical piece which uses speech, rap, song, physical theatre, video installation and lighting. We start with six key moments in the chronology and then weave backwards and forwards knitting together those snapshots with ideas, incidents and people until Majid/Luke reaches a point where he can either continue on a self-destructive spiral and lose all that he holds dear or seek help. The fact that the show exists tells you that he followed the latter course.
I think that the show works on its own terms and doesn't become maudlin or self-congratulatory. There is a dense patterning to the language which helps support the pin-ball movements of the narrative very cleverly. However, I was also interested in what he chose not to talk about. Sex in general. Violence towards women. Maybe those areas were unproblematic for him but, given the rest of the story, I doubt it. I can accept that he made a conscious decision to restrict his material to the male-to-male interactions in his life and that, still wanting people to love him, was unwilling to put himself right out there. Maybe there will be another show when it's ready to be written.
While Twitter is certainly a source of gossip, information and free thinking as well as being full of self-righteous bilge and venom, it also hosts bouts of communal silliness. Yesterday's went under the hashtag of #AwfullyBritishFakeHistory.
Among my favourite responses were:-
My own effort is captured here.
I'm chuffed that 58 people have taken the trouble to click Like. If I have made 58 people smile or laugh in the last 24 hours, then my living has not been in vain.