Colin's brief stop over was a pleasant affair. We had good long chats about a range of subjects. He mentioned that he doesn't have same the same sort of conversations with his young friends. Much the same conclusion as I arrived at some months ago. I like spending time in among people of my own age.
I've also finished listening to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World and was struck by a sudden burst of homoeroticism at the end. You know the way most boys' adventure stories end up with our hero, having had all his adventures with his male chums, graduates into an adult world by taking up with the (marginal) female love interest. Well, in Lost World our hero, Ed Malone, decides to go on the adventure to impress his beloved, Gladys. However, at the end, she has taken up with someone else and he decides to continue adventuring with his contemporary, the romantic and swashbuckling aristocrat, Lord John Roxton. He returns to the world of male-bonding and the final image is of them shaking hands on the idea of a future together. Doesn't it continue you to make you wonder about Holmes and Watson in their Baker Street bachelorhood?
In its place, I spent Saturday listening to Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey
which I hadn't expected to like as (apart from Jane Eyre) I tend not to
like much Brontë stuff at all. When it came to it, it wasn't too bad. Even so,
I missed the tartness of social observation of a Jane Austen. Still it provided
a welcome backdrop to working in the garden, grass cutting, watering and weeding
- laced with a liberal amount of lying around on my lounger, of course. The lying
around was the most satisfying thing as I haven't had too many opportunities of
using it since I bought it back in May. Which
goes to show what shocking weather we've been having over the past two months -
oh, bugger, I've mentioned the weather.
My Tesco's bill this week was over £50. Now you'd think that I would have been walking out of the place with bags groaning with produce for that amount of money. Far from it. I can't think that I'd bought much more than I regularly do. It's just that prices are gradually increasing and the usual summer glut of vegetables hasn't reduced costs. It's back to that weather thing again.
Apparently, the wet conditions have brought on potato blight in the Midlands and some crops have completely failed. Mind you, my next door neighbour, Simon, tells me that wheat crops around the Ridge Way, where he has been walking, are healthy and upstanding rather than beaten down by the rain as I was imagining. Mind you, Alistair Cook in his weekly Letter from America tells us that, over in the States, crops are broiling in excessive heatwaves. So, goodness knows where that'll lead.
I've never known food shortages in my lifetime - or, at least, not to the point of public disquiet. I wonder when the last food shortages in this country happened. I mean apart from those caused by War. When was the last time food was scarce in the shops because the crops failed? I suppose we see less of it nowadays because we simply buy in from the Third World and thus move any shortage elsewhere.
Much of this I've gleaned from conversation, thought and the radio. Very little
from that natural organ of news information - the newspaper. In fact, I've spent
this spent this my first week without a daily newspaper not noticing any difference.
My only disadvantage appears to have been not understanding some satirical comments
about Cheri Blair wearing a new age pendant. I think I can live with this.
I bought a Sunday
newspaper and that wasn't much better.
Saturday night I spent with the other Colin. He's still pretty low about his gammy knee. Lowestoft Colin's gammy back is healing nicely, by the way. We had a good cackle together and sat listening to the Prom's performance of Verdi's Falstaff given by L'Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique under John Eliot Gardiner. It was fascinating. Though there was a lot of rhythmic punch to the interpretation, the gut strings never drowned the singers. It became a real conversation piece rather than a battle between orchestra and voices. I liked the tangy woodwind and the buccolic horn at the start of the final scene. It was also very autumnal in feel unlike the othewise excellent ENO performance that I saw last November which set the piece in a very cold winter landscape. This was all very well (and in fact the conducting brought out many icy glints in the score) but some of the inside scenes were dressed far more for summer and so it was annoyingly inconsistent in that respect.
Two bottles of wine were opened. One was drunk. The other remained half finished.
Hmmm. Another good sign of middling years. Not many years ago and I would have felt
compelled to down the lot. So, no hangover. And all's well with the world.