Skip to main content

Why?

 A poet, a cellist and I were asked on radio at the Hay-on-Wye Festival to quote our favourite lines of poetry.  The poet's was, Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. The cellist's: For god's sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.  MIne: Buy one, get one free.
  In the Aldeburgh Pumphouse I took part in a round-table discussion of great masterpieces that are in some way flawed. A musicologist in sandals and an egg-stained smock put forward the Joy is drunk by every creature section of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, saying it was unapproachable music, more so in the joyous and immediate light of what had gone before. A unpublished writer wearing Laura Ashley and Lily of the Valley sighed over the clunky exposure of Mr. Elliot by Mrs. Smith in Austen's Persuasion. I, in my Sue Ryder jeans and Primark black v-neck, thought that the Bend and Snap scene should have been cut from Legally Blonde. 
  I haven't been asked to contribute clever since. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some Favourite Books - But Please don't Lesbify Dame Agatha's Denouements

  I'm too tired to read anything new so have been round the libraries taking out my default-setting books to read over Christmas. These include:    The Pursuit of Love , Nancy Mitford.   The blood-stained entrenching tool displayed above the fireplace, child-hunting over Shenley Common, Jassy traumatising the local children telling them the facts of life.  The scene at the Gare du Nord where Linda sits on her luggage to cry and meets Fabrice always takes me back to the first reading of the novel, sitting wrapped in my Welsh Tweed shawl, in a tiny bedroom on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise in Kennington.   The Pursuit of Love is romantic, hilarious and bleakly eccentric.    Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady , Florence King. When I entertained troops on the American base in Kandahar, four South Carolina army captains made me an Honorary Southern Belle. Madame Galina, they said, in all her unreasonable, high-blooded,...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Mate Jamie-Ray Hartshorne

     I've been noticing that alongside photos of Jamie-Ray being a lead in Altar Boys , creating Change My Body UK TM , working the door at Freedom - and clearly asking people passing by wherever that rockpool may be to snap a double-bicep - this sort of thing is cropping up on his social media:   We're in The Diner, Jamestown Road, Camden.  He's between tour dates of  The Bodyguard,  and meetings to discuss sportswear and creatine endorsements.  The latter, he says, being all about making his product better.   Between sips of his peanut butter milkshake (he's allowing himself dairy today in my honour - I don't quite know how to take that) he says in his soft Brum, 'I've signed up for a major Muay Thai event in Thailand next February.  I'm going up against one of the Thai fighters.  That's the only real way to gain any respect in the fighting world.  That's why you've been noticing the combat photos.  I...
1 comment
Read more

Where do Babies Come From? How we Learn about Sex...Book Just Launched on Amazon Kindle

                                                                      Click to buy the book 'My spoken material is about the facts of life,'  I was explaining to the Mother Superior.  'I've been asking people what they were told, how they were told it and did they ask questions. Terribly funny...'    During my Where do Babies Come From? talk at the Metrodeco Café, Brighton, a  superfluity of nuns stopped at the window to listen.  In the street later that week one of them glided up and said how much they had enjoyed hearing me sing.  ' And we wonder, might you please sing something for our charity evening?' I said, of course, sister.   The nun nodded.  'That's very good to hear.  But just to correct you: not sister - but  Mother  Superior.' She then ...
Post a Comment
Read more