Iestyn Edwards Wonders...is it Lumpy or Runny?

  I challenged myself to write my blog today about the first New Year's Eve related Facebook status that came up on my feed.   This turned out to be  PumpinShark's, quoting people who tell him that he was clearly born with an ideal genetic make-up for bodybuilding.  He  refutes this, saying that it was work that got him his physique.     PumpinShark's Page                                                                      @zAKPIX   'Work is the panacea for all ills,' said Dr Johnson.    Tell that to the shoulda, woulda, coulda brigade.    There were always a number of the brigade's members working front of house at Covent Garden.    Michael, for example, the Central School trained actor.  He never did his g...

    Between 2002 and 2008 the house next door to my in St Pancras bedsit had three tenants. Each of them gutted the house from roof to basement. The work each time took at least six months, the third rebuild lasting well over a year.   The third tenants had the drilling and stone-blasting done at skewed intervals and not nicely all at once to get it over with. I asked their nanny (in  Sainsbury's) why they were choosing to timetable the work this way.  She was sixteen, with wispy dark hair falling in front of her face, rouge with no foundation, shoes with no socks, twin set with no pearls.  She said it was because back home in Eastern Europe the builders had all been nuclear fissionists (or some such) and found menial work dull.     'We're staggering the different kinds of work to give them a bit of variety,' she clarified. ' Surely you understand the concept of renewed and renewing novelty, being a performer?' She put quinoa ...

    It's always the same this time of the year. We've overspent and need to retrench. Government bodies along with the rest of us.    The tears were hardly dry from the annual sob-along to "Feed the Birds" and a local council was seeking to cut its benefit payments to Sally Kerridge.   Sally had two part-time jobs. She was an usherette at the Royal Opera House and a TV extra. I once saw her lurch down a corridor in Holby City with the papers about to fall out of the patient's file she was not quite holding. During takes in the  Eastenders greasy spoon she would actually eat the fry-up.    'Have to reset, everyone, sorry - the girl behind Letitia has eaten her egg and her beans again!'   Sally clarified, 'I was leaving my bacon til last as it's my favourite.'   She took a case to Equity. She was jostled getting out of carriage, wide shot  in the first series of Downtown Abbey . She insisted that Dame Maggie Smith had...

  Just joining in with this survey...      By accidentally playing my 45  RPM of Pinky and Perky singing "The Holly and the Ivy" at 33 1/3 RPM I learned how their voices were done.     

 Oscar Wilde said, 'Every woman becomes their mother.  That's their tragedy.  And no man becomes his.  That's his tragedy.'   I went through a stage of being my mother around the age of thirteen.  My French teacher, Noel Picarda-Kemp, would often remind me that conjugating irregular verbs really didn't require me to low like a menopausal cow.     By now I've turned into Terry Allen, who worked in the Royal Opera House box office and then, when he was sacked for one curmudgeonly queeny outburst too many, in the china department in Harrods. I was lucky that he liked me and did nothing worse than send me up generally and nickname me Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.    'It was how you came down the main staircase carrying that box of programmes, dear.' Bifocals tilted above his receding hairline, rheumy suspicious gaze, beige spiv-suit.  'All lopsided intent, little face screwed up, sleeves past your elbows, hips swinging like an elderly wash...

                             The Simpson's annual pop up Christmas bistro went vegan the year Francis Quentin-Curnow was six.      Francis had apparently been born gluten and lactose intolerant and with IBS. His wasn't cradle cap so much as Intensive Care Baby Incubator cap. By the time he was four he was asthmatic, eczmatic, diabetic and rivalled pure violet light for taking up space on the spectrum. Aged five he asked to go in the carnival procession as Anne Frank. The following year he announced that he was now vegan, please.    On the QT that winter Gerard  (remember Gerard?)   encouraged Francis to adopt a yak. Daphne, Gerard's mother, was Francis's godmother. It was Gerard's year for getting village girls to adopt yaks; and to sponsor water purifiers in Somalia, or Zimbabwean rebels  who were plotting to overthrow Mugabe. The BACS  details given for all the v...

  Yesterday I watched - and loved - the live broadcast of The Sound and Music.    'Finally!' Rukan al Daher commented when I told her. 'I've been waiting to chew it over with you. Surely you didn't love the simplified performance of "The Lonely Goatherd" ? You were so strict with us studying that song at Guildford.'   I remember...   'Your yodeling isn't nearly specific enough, Rukan,' I had begun by saying, sometime in the summer term, nineteen ninety-three. 'The goatherd is lonely . You just sound poised. Beautifully poised, but not lonely .'   Rukan was a friend of the Saudi Arabian royal family and these days can be seen introducing the Jordanian Eurovision entry. She had another go at sounding lonely in her yodeling.    'Excellent.  Real sense of isolation,' I said, vamping along on the damp-ridden piano in the Founder's Studio. 'Er... why are you sounding upper-class now?'   ' Princ...

  Jane Farquharson was asking me about the acrobat who did the Christmas show with me at the Hurlingham Club in 2012.   'Munchie's never recovered from his dance with you, by the way,' she said. 'But the hyper-muscled chap who didn't shave his chest - well done him - and could balance on his forefingers?  Who might he be? Sue Thompson thinks he might be right for Henley. You're also being put up for Henley.' But more for the cabaret tent indoors with fairy lights than outdoors framed by the flotilla on a plinth. 'The chap from the Hurlingham with you would be more for the outdoorsy display, wouldn't he? If he was insistent on colour and shine he could put glitter spray paint on or something?'   Ah, Dougy Edwards, she meant. And he would be right for outdoors and for the display. But as for the glitter spray aspect...      ...I don't think so.   Doug has been away from the variety circuit for a while. So on Jane's behalf ...

 54a Cragpath, the house I used to rent in Aldeburgh, looked onto the kitchen window of Tuckaway,  Ethel Keane's cottage. Ethel moved to Aldeburgh after she was widowed at the end of the second world war and died there in 2012. I sang "On Wings of Song" at her funeral.    When I arrived in Aldeburgh on around the sixth or seventh of December each year Ethel would be pinning string across the kitchen window to hang her Christmas cards. She would have four or five cards to go up then. Half way through the month cards would cover half the window; and by Christmas Eve, a pottering Ethel could be barely glimpsed.   After the Christmas corporate this week for the Four Front Group at the Cafe de Paris, I talked to Tom, my warrior of choice, about Ethel. Posing for photos taken by his boss and mine, a pair of Keiths, we were chatting about Christmas coming, and specifically the religious as opposed to commercial aspect of the season. Tom said he was an atheist....

  Talking of Regimental Sergeant Major 'Tina' Turner, at the end of the Iraq tour he said, 'That tutu of yours is beyond the help even of a lick and a promise with an antiseptic wet wipe. Maybe for the next tour you should bring two?'   I said, 'Actually, my other tutu's a classic and hardly fits in its IKEA bag! Let alone that it wasn't quite finished to bring out here this time. The delivery of the beading was delayed by Sorrel and Sage.'   'Parcel delivery company?'   'Nanny goats.'   Katy Lonsdale made the other tutu, in a three feet square workroom on her family's farm in Yorkshire. I went up there for the final fittings and stayed on the farm with Katy, her parents Dilys and Tom, five Aberdeen Angus cows, two mares, four cats, a sheep, a sheepdog, Sorrel and Sage.    The Lonsdales hate Sorrel and Sage.   'Even more so now they've bloody delayed the finishing of your tutu,' Dilys told me. Under greying ha...

      Regimental Sergeant Major 'Tina' Turner emailed me when I was just back from performing in Iraq.   Iestyn my mate, you are truly barking as a turn and I don’t know how you do it, particularly where you’ve just been.  I was surprised to say the least when I heard what you were to be about in the wilds of Iraq.  But I suppose you have little choice but to carry on with it because of the scarcity of Rest Homes for Retired Sugar Plums.  Perhaps you could find one, however, and have a little lie down over Christmas?   Thank you for your kind information that I have been mentioned in interviews you’ve given to the Mail on Sunday, The Times and whatever Full House Magazine may be.  I would, however… RATHER  READ THE FUCKING BEANO !!! Take care, kid.  Best...Tina.   '...whatever Full House Magazine may be...'    Therein lies a tail...   My article came out in Full House when I w...