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

  A medical student waiting tables at a Christmas corporate removed two of the cover settings from a table near the stage.  A couple (it was the woman's birthday) were shown to the table to find a festive centre piece and nothing else.  Certainly not the glasses of champagne that ought to have been just poured.  The woman demanded an explanation.  The waiter explained that the most up to date dinner service print out had said D.O.A. next to the woman's name.   'Yes, indeed it does,' the maitre d' confirmed.  'Drinks On Arrival...'   'Oh, but in a hospital D.O.A. means something different.'

...said somebody who's never had a St John's Donut.

                                              I would visualise and visualise Madame Galina on tour: London and Blackpool: wearing a fur, dragging a trunk, staying in old-school theatrical digs, being partnered by either Michael Nunn or William Trevitt.    About  to move back to London from Aldeburgh, I was walking past the Sue Ryder shop when volunteer Janet banged on the window.     She dragged a blue trunk out of the stockroom.  'Don't  open it till you get home.  Inside's for you to wear as Madame Galina. Thrilled you've got yourself that London residency.'  At Murray's Cabaret Club. 'My aunt forbade us girls ever to go on to Murray's in the sixties. "Filth goes in there!  The Krays, that Keeler monstrosity. Filth!".'   At home I opened the trunk.  Inside was a  rabbit skin fur.  ...

I'll be lone for Christmas You can count on that! 

In Coffee Link, Solar, Leiston. WOMAN 1.  And he's petite.  WOMAN 2.  Never used to be.  I saw some photos of him in the past and he was ever so tall! 

2.  Get to the work towards your main goal.   Oh, a couple of the people I researched go for cryotherapy or kiting on the sea before this.  I thought I might smash a crate of frozen lemonade bottles on the floor and stand naked in the gas that escaped.  Or hang over the Meare by a rope round my waist hooked over the boathouse clock tower.   I remembered early this morning that goal setting has been around for longer than you might think. Amelita Galli-Curci, the great nineteenth century prima donna, talked about putting on horse blinkers and positively moving forward to a goal, taking them off, waiting for her critics and rivals to start the carping, putting them on again. Less positively she said that when one of her rivals, Dame Nellie Melba, sang for example “Lo, Hear the Gentle Lark” you would think it was about a deafening, bloody big turkey.   I have more than one main goal at the moment, so I have a pad and a fountain pen with my plans for each go...

1.  Get up two hours before your first appointment. Immediately express gratitude.  Spend half an hour reading something inspiring, half an hour doing physical exercise...   I was woken up four hours before my first appointment today.  There is no soundproofing to speak of where I live.  When I first looked at this studio, number 8, number 9 was also empty.  I asked the letting agent to let herself into next door and sing, cough, shout, clap her hands, whatever.   Which she duly said she did.   Hm...   I was woken by the Sizewell engineer next door, who suffers with sleep apnea and who bellows at early dawn from within his Cpap-mask.  I reached for my Gratitude Diary: 'The Sizewell engineer goes home to Ramsbottom at the weekends.'   I read the Book of Job for inspiration.  In Out of Africa Karen Blixen wrote that her farm workers saw God in terms of both Job and Tales of the Arabian Nights - as a richly   ima...

   Classic FM will start to play Christmas music tomorrow.  I remember sitting writing years ago, listening to the station, and noticing the silence before a piece was played; the piece being Jesus Christ the Apple Tree. I'd never heard it before and it was immediately one of my favourite pieces of music.  Here it is: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iPJBFYuUWvY   I hope you like it.

A Polish crib similar to this one is displayed in St Mary's the Virgin, Grundisburgh. It was made in Kraków.  Responding to being told this, a local woman said,  'Yeah, looks like it!'

An elderly lady on the abandoned railway today tilted her head up and said, to nobody, 'Look at that crow sitting on that branch, like it thinks it's some kind of omen!'

  Nan was sitting in the Solar cafe with granddaughter.  Both wore slacks and fleeces and had the same nose: fleshy, the colour of nictotine- stained cornice and appearing triangular viewed from any angle.  No, nan was saying, she wasn't going to let go of the responsibility for the Christmas biscuits and cakes, even though the process of laying hands on them changed from year to year. No, she certainly wouldn't be disturbed in her usual run up to the Festive season to go all the way to Halesworth...what for?  She didn't care that she would only have to go all that way (quite the whole hour and a quarter) in just the one direction, as Jean would be finishing in Beccles just at the right time and could drive them back.  She might think about going after Christmas, when she could concentrate on it.  What?  No, she would not enjoy toasting marshmallows over the fire with the guard moved when they got back from uncle Peter's on Christmas Day.  Since...

  One woman said, 'Rhonda's become a pescetorian.'   The other asked, 'Is that where they sing those hymns like "The Lord of the Dance"?'

  Apart from the discovery that red toadstools aren't just something from fairy tale illustrations, one of the best things about having found the disused railway line to Leiston is Coopers Hardware. I went there for fly papers.  You can buy the spray next door at Solar, but I want to watch the buzzers die.   'The fly papers are upstairs, sir.  End of the aisle just before the chemicals,' said just the right person to be running a hardware shop - lined, weary, cheery and giving off that air that would make you trust him to know about everything from building a retro-but-Eco-privy; through the correct whisking consistency for carpet shampoo; to not, for the love of God, trying to cut costs by using varnished flour and water mixed to regrout along the side of the bath. (My nan knows who she is...well, she would except she's long gone to the Eternally Wednesday Bingo Club in the sky)   I found the fly papers and then - as you do - decided I needed a sieve, a set o...

 At the till in Solar today a woman refused to buy a daffodil broach for breast cancer awareness. 'Thank you, but my mother died from cancer of the bowel.'

Remember this:  Poshness in Aldeburgh... ?    Well, there was a follow up today in the library foyer. Two kapok stuffed ladies of Aldeburgh were going through the boxes of charity Christmas cards, and one said how pleased she was that the various labels on the boxes made clear which specific charity one would be supporting. 'Then one can avoid those that are just that little bit too overseas oriented. It was their own look out: those undeveloped countries choosing to throw our help back in our faces by leaving the Empire.'

  My aunt remembers toddler me shouting about them being a bloody rubbish episode of The Clangers.

  Finally I found my way, after eight fails, along the disused railway from Thorpeness to  Leiston. I've failed mainly because people have to show off. Not the nice man yesterday who pulled his cowering, floppy eared dog close to heel while he carefully explained where I'd been going wrong - mainly that never in all my eight previous tries had I actually been on the disused railway line at all.  'No, you see, there you'd have been on the common.  No, that's the shell pits. Where?  Oh.  Did you not notice the bunkers and flagpoles and blue signs warning about balls from your right? Yes, the people in the funny trousers. Not walkers exactly, you see. Ah, now, there you were nearly on the old line: all depends on from which direction you approach the pigsties.  What you wanted to do was, where the road forks, trust yourself to take the track that don't look like nothing at all, just after you'll have seen what's left of the old platform at Thorpeness Halt...

  The president of the Musical Association asked me to sing two serious, non-denominational Christmas songs, one Ivor Novello, two comic numbers, all linked by comically festive patter.   I agreed.   She then said, 'There's no money for you, apparently. Do you perform for free?  I'm sure you must at times.'   I said, 'As I'm sure at times your husband must manage hedge funds for free...'

  My dad has been saving anecdotes for me to use in my act. In Norwich Market he met Geoff, who used to make sound effects for radio. Geoff wants to include in a Radio 4 quiz a round where contestants must tell the difference between a home made sound effect and a computer generated one.  He suggests as a test piece one he created in the sixties.  A goat running amok into a cottage, up the stairs and into the parlour where it knocks seven bells out of the fireside brass. The goat Geoff had planned to use turned out to be about to kid, so he made the bleating sounds himself and created the goatish running up the stairs sounds by wearing pairs of gloves and socks made out of halved and slightly charred cricket balls.    Dad empathised with Geoff's goat stopping play because his second ever Country and Western gig, at RAF St Asaph, was cancelled after the squadron mascot, a billy goat, refused to get out of the bath. 

  I did notice, apropos the BBC not being able to afford to keep the show, that Radio 3's afternoon programming on Saturday included random people playing their Grade Eight piano pieces.

  When I go back to opera, I must make sure that my programme headshot these days doesn't look exactly like the mortuary photo of Annie Chapman, second canonical Jack the Ripper victim.   Yes, I really must.

  I passed a small lorry being loaded with a child's stuff to take away to halls. Pillow and plants went in last.  A mother got on the 29, making sure her son knew where he was going. 'It's near the college itself, but the roads all seem too small.'   Everyone involved in the migrations was smiling their bravest and not fooling anyone.  

  A hyphenated, body warmer old lady once referred to me as a catamite. It reminded me of my dad referring to sex as twanging .  My singing teacher once had to remind me that in Down by the Sally Gardens, the poet's love is just a flibbertigibbet of a girl wandering around in her bare feet.  'The tone you're using sounds like it's all a bit muckily Freudian.'   

  In the street just now, two women catching sight of a late teen boy coming out of college stopped dead. A scowling, kipper footed much older woman clocked this, looked at him, said, 'Get a bloody job, no hoper!' and looked around for approbations.   One of the woman explained to her that, no, actually their reaction to  him - he was now gesturing What the fuck?  - had been one of delight at how handsome he was. 'Like a young Brando!'    The old lady snapped back, 'What the fuck are you involving me in all that for?' 

  Eleanor, who'd been a River's Bend resident since the spring of Princess Anne's divorce, didn't think that a psychic evening there would be quite the thing.     ' But, Caspar,' she remonstrated with the landlord, 'think where this might end.  Remember the thin end of the wedge over the switching off of the heated towel rail at the height of summer? Clothes pegs?  The Danish organist?  If Serena is allowed to have her peripatetic witches’ coven, there’ll follow peripatetic harpists, cake decorators, walk-in bath demonstrations, magicians, life-drawing classes, stair lift uprisings, tax advisors, taxidermists, computer experts, actuaries, string quartets, retro-nit nurses, One is Fun cookery demonstrations, lecturers on molluscs, sales of defunct library stock, cashers-in on mis-sold PPI, An Evening with Noel Coward with the inevitable three Nicaraguan lesbians dressed as the Lygon sisters who render the verses of “Matelot”, “Mrs Worthington and Co...

Gerard has been at it again.  One of his young cousins, Noah, has adopted a yak. And the yak sends Noah letters.  Gerard has started sending Noah letters from the yak.      Dear Noah,   I skip around coffee plantation clippy-cloppy today and sit now under tree to writing at you.  I have yesterday minus some days collect from post office box your lovely present, which I have eated.  Would you like some of it as dried droppings sent back to you, keep-safe?   Send more money immediate right now for yak-butted injury orphans.  I have made quite many of those. As for photo you asking for, I need know you are genuine because many yaks adopted here have send photo, and then get letters back from people say they lie down on settee with photo and dirty touch theyselves.   Love (but not in dirty-touch way) Yan Yak.    PS  Up the Red Cross!       

...will eventually undermine your yeses. 

  Reading the Edinburgh Fringe  oh, how exciting for poor little me reviews posted on social media reminds me of the quite rightly disciplined pilot flying troops back from Iraq. ' And this is one for the ladies on board,' he announced.  ' Now that we’re back in blighty, your attractiveness rating will adjust itself back down in accordance with reality.'

  Oh, I thought, nice mix of sweet and camp: the binmen have their names on the windscreen.   I had a closer look.    Apparently they're called 'Caution' and 'Reversing'...

                                  Abby Borden, murdered while she was emailing.                                      The psychic went into a trance and picked up a strong smell of Windolene.  She said she had no idea why this should be.   Well you're the only one that hasn't, dearie.     In that voice of barely suppressed excitement the fact-checker said, 'At the time when Abby Borden was killed the maid was cleaning windows.'   She was indeed!  But with plain old soap and water.  Windolene wasn't around then. 

  Before posting yet another and another photograph of yourself on social media, ask yourself who it's intended for. And nicely think on this...     In the 1960s writer Nancy Mitford was the subject of a BBC documentary. She said to Marie, her housekeeper: 'I'm going to Madame Trefussis to watch my television programme, would you like to?'    And Marie wondered: 'But why Madame, when I see you every day?'   Talking, at the early stages, of which.   Outside the cafe downstairs a six-year-old said to his slightly older sister, 'At breakfast daddy listened to at least fifteen of the things I said.  But only, like, six of yours.'

           Irrelevant but so pretty...Bard looking like a face swap of Brad Pitt and Mark Wahlberg   Overheard in the village shop:  'Marian, you really must go to Clemmie's funeral - or she mightn't bother going to yours!' 

                        Copyright: Alarmy Stock Photographs - did you guess?    A quick question for parents of toddlers.   When you crouch down and put your arms out and encourage your child to run to you from a way away, do they ever not fall  down? 

    Carol answered the phone in the Thorpeness Village Stores. 'Hello Mr Pearson!  Two dozen of the Grrr Lady's chunky?'   She made a note and said she'd see Mr Pearson as usual on the twenty-sixth.   'Stays here the same dates every year,' she told me. Takes the same amount of marmalade home.'    The Grrr Lady is Thorpeness resident Olga. She's only ever referred to by her first name, as with Madonna,  Cher or Emu. Her selection of fudges and preserves may just be the next locally produced range to follow Suffolk Mud and Purely Pesto into the likes of the Co-Op, Waitrose and Fortnum's. When t old that her Aldeburgh Festival show had sold out as fast as the latest Apple product, Prima Ballerina Madame Galina, another Thorpeness resident, wondered: 'I-phone 6S or Olga's chutney...?'   I've tried and love all her prize-winning preserves - perhaps my favourite being the Pink Peppercorn Marmalade. Olga's Mince Pie Fudge, a gl...

                                         Me and my shadow, apparently...   You know how when someone doesn't get a role it always seems to be in spite of the fact that the director said he loved them, as did the producer, the stage manager, the actor they read with, the understudy to the actor they read with, the head of running wardrobe, box office, chief usherette, foyer book stall attendant and the two Guildhall freshers watching the auditions for experience? Well...   Years ago, before my voice finally sank to bass-baritone, I was being considered for the role of Albert Herring.  I didn't get it. The director thought that it would have suited me vocally, but Albert is a virginal innocent.     'You're too apparently the lived in, been round the block a number of times, tart with a heart, Iestyn.'   Actually, I was relieved -  Al...

                                              CAN you imagine?    I read somewhere that the accent David Suchet used for Poirot wasn't pure Belgian, but a hybrid of Belgian and French. The actor made this choice knowing that the pure accent would sound unconvincing to the casual listener.  I can't really explain this, but have an example of my own.  The daughter of an exiled Russian princess came to watch my Madame Galina show and said that my accent was accurate to the point of indicating social strata and where precisely Galina lived in Moscow. Other members of the audience thought that the accent had travelled from Cardiff via Crete to Bavaria and back again.     When Hercule Ease, part-time male stripper, performed his squaddie themed act in Chelmsford, he was advised to get a much more realistic looking soldier's outfit. H...

  In 'miscellaneous' downstairs in the Emporium: Trinkets, Ephemera and Masks, were the most elegant blue china cup and saucer.  I was imagining myself as Linda Radlett having afternoon tea with Fabrice at the Ritz; Dame Margot in the intervals of Swan Lake  drinking darjeeling in dressing room five; Maria Callas unable to sleep before she'd read the reviews of her Berlin Lucia, sitting up in bed in her her woolen nightgown, drinking cocoa.   I took my treasures to Lorna at the counter.     'Morning, Iestyn - old maid crockery for one?!'

     I went to my piano lesson the morning after the Guildhall Rag Week Revue.  I'd sung "The Stately Homes of England" in black tie, and danced Swan Lake Act Two in sequins and feathers glued onto forty-six doilies. Professor Peppin said how she'd enjoyed me singing the Noel Coward, but who on earth had that pudding of a girl been doing the ballet?    She refused to believe it had been me until I stopped playing Schumann and did lame ducks round the Bechstein...

  At drinks I heard that someone in Cartwright Mansions had sought help during a heart-attack by banging on a party wall with the base of a stuffed owl. Hamish, apparently, got that little nugget into the Reader's' Digest . Tom, youngish, asked me what the Reader's Digest was, please. I said it was a magazine/book hybrid that taught people to give a tracheotomy with a bic biro and to say "Christmas bauble" in Serbo-Croat.    'Oh, and it condenses books down into happy endings,' I over-egged the pudding. 'Jane Eyre ended in five and a half chapters, with Mr Rochester's partially severed arm growing back.'   Gin does that to me...

  The editor of My Tute Went AWOL! just reminded me:    'Only tell the reader what they need to know. If you want them to particularly notice or remember something, repeat it three times. In your book's prologue, why don't need to know any more than that we're in Camp Bastion outside the NAAFI, you're in a tutu and the nurse gives you some news. The rest of it needs to go: fast food prefabs, the Garrison Sergeant Major and the anecdote about someone castrating themselves with a pull-along Dyson.      'Think of the Prologue to The Sleeping Beauty . We learn that the fairies are coming to the christening - and are alerted to the fact that something is potentially amiss when the Master of Ceremonies insists  three times -  yes, your majesty, yes, your majesty, yes you halberdiers - that he has remembered to invite all the fairies. We get the arrival of the good fairies, then of the forgotten bad fairy, the curse, ...

My Tutu Went AWOL! the show... Actually, it's a deconstructed, bookless book launch! Fancy!   

  My singing teacher, Pamela, joined a book club that met at the library. During the first meeting she was ticked off for an opinion. She said that she was so entitled to any opinion she chose to have, she would repeat that unpopular one right now: here we go...   The organiser of the club found it tricky to commit to a second meeting. 'The week in question my wife and I have a concert, preceded by the concert insight afternoon - with tea. The following day we're watching a masterclass. There'll be drinks after that, possibly some nibbles. Then there's another concert, preceded again by the insight afternoon - also with tea. The next night we have drinks at the Simpson's and dinner at the Lighthouse. The following day we have lunch with the Minsmere wardens, tea with the Giles's and dinner with the Bishop of Dunwich. Actually, I've just seen I might be able to make the next evening...'   'I can't,' Pamela said. 'I've got brunch with...

...I would have missed overhearing this, from an elderly woman on the bus to the station.    'What was that ambulance doing going up your track, Bernard?  It were a car-ambulance, not a ambulance-ambulance. A ambulance-ambulance wouldn't be able to get down your track, Bernard, it's all so overgrown! I know you've not lived there long, but what would they have done in the past? I'd not have wanted the council to ever move me down there if I knew I might be vulnerable to needing taking away in an ambulance. Just as well developments in industry mean ambulances are getting smaller and smaller. I expect the day will come when we go in and out of hospital in a computer controlled, hovercraft hip-bath.'

  One woman in Aldeburgh, in a cotton dress, pumps and and editor's green visor, said that she really hadn't used Europe in such a long time. There had been that Easter when she and Rima - did I know Rima? - were eighteen and hitchhiked through Italy. Oh, no, nothing to worry about: two experienced Catholic girls were always going to have an instinct about getting into a car. She supposed they'd seen a lot of beautiful things. But, really, since meeting her late husband - had I known her late husband? - she'd been more of a West Indies girl and hadn't really found much further use for Europe. So she voted 'leave'.   To adapt an old gag: more St Barts than St Ockholm.    The second leaver is a house-keeper who tells me that the various landlords she works for will now have to pay her a decent wage.  Access will dry up to all the Lithuanian cheap labour coming over to work as cleaners - so called - and who  will insist on bleaching eve...

                             Copyright: Luke Casey-Browne, House of Black  The Swan Queen, Odette, has been bewitched by Baron Von Rothbart. By day she is a swan, at night she can retain her human form.  Unless Prince Siegfried happens to be swan-hunting nearby, might it not be a bit dull: this night time, lakeside existence in human form? What can she, the big swans, cygnets and the rest find to do all night? There's no library, internet cafe or 24/7 Mcdonald's. Do they even have a television? How long can it take each night to clean up the molted feathers and swan shit...   I wonder if at times Odette simply doesn't bother with her swan to human transformation.   Not to mention that she'd actually look a bit daft in the now far too tiny tiara.

  Lorna, from ephemera, trinkets and masks downstairs in the Emporium, told me that her father would treat himself to a first class ticket going home at Christmas to Leeds from university in London.    'It was in the days of having the whole first class service on sleepers. Dad said he often wondered what would happen if he'd missed getting out at Leeds, the worse for wear with the meal served in first class, and ended up in Inverness. The train would have divided by then and that would surely wake you?  He said you could spread yourself out in those seats. Waiters in livery. Course after course. He said they'd sing carols. There'd be plum pudding. Brandy. Seasons greetings passed around the carriage. A real treat for the psyche - something we just don't do enough for ourselves these days.'  She paused, then asked, 'How did we get onto the subject of trains?'   I didn't have the heart to remind her that I'm editing my book and had just men...

  A woman at the back end of middle age, with wiry, flicked hair, in a pink vinyl mac, and gingham pedal pushers came through from Thorpeness Meare, leaving her jack russell off the lead as she continued past the pond. Three pairs of nesting swans and the egyptian geese were grazing there. The woman turned as people remonstrated with her, then stood in a beveled pose, like the central figure in The Three Graces statue, and indicated that she was happy for her jack russell to run to and fro barking by the water's edge. The goose nosed the tiny gosling into the pond and jumped in after it followed by the gander. The swans stood absolutely still, feathers up all around, in front of their cygnets.    The woman stayed in her pose, smirking indulgently at the jack russell, until a man picked the dog up by the collar, walked over to her and thrust it into her arms.   'Take this back to wherever it is you're from!' he told her.    After a stunned ...

                         I haven't posted anything recently. Two self-proclaimed critics wouldn't take their telling off and argued with me about it, which wasted my time, ink and rage - more of that at some point in the future.  And I've been working with editor Mike Jones on the book My Tutu Went AWOL!        And now the UK has left the EU.    The housekeeper of the flats where I live said thai leaving the EU would mean that the landlord would have to pay her properly. 'The cheap labour Lithuanians - who just want to bleach everything - will dry up.'   And my muscle-boy mate, who does semi-nude posing shows on Skype, believed that a similar thing would happen in his world to boost his earnings. 'Leaving will get rid of these fucking Romanians showing actual bumhole for a fiver.'   Tragically, both these people could vote.    

 By the carpark opposite the Scallop Shell on Aldeburgh beach I overheard a man on his phone.     He was saying, 'But it gets her out, there's air, and I'm taking her to see an interesting landmark.  It's just that  she'll be ungrateful.  Always is.'    Walking about ten yards behind him was an elderly lady, leaning heavily on a stick and watching the ground. Just then she  looked up and across the shingle at the Scallop Shell and demanded to know, 'What's that bloody thing?'    Hurriedly winding up his call he answered, 'It's the famous Scallop Shell. It's what I've brought to all this way to see, mum.'   She leant slightly away from her stick to look him in the face. 'All this way - and there's this wind - and you think I'm going to enjoy looking at something like that?  I  may be totally alone indoors, and I may feel that at times and get a bit down.  But really - '   He said, 'Well, we can go...

  Because Muhammad Ali was the epitome of a world champion, it's annoying me that the PT wannabe combatant brigade is sharing one his quotes to get attention and to kid on that they could possibly emulate him. Here's the quote:     'I hated every minute of training.  But I said: "Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion".'    Interesting that he admits to hating the training.  According to the Russian adage, quoted at many a ballerina over the years, there can be no hate. 'If you love to toboggan, then you must love to carry the toboggan to the top of the hill.'    My nan had an inspirational adage all of her own. 'If you want to keep the chronic family flatulence under control, you'll have to suffer licking the carbon straight off the coal as it is untouched in nan's scuttle.'    But, now, let's welcome the humility of knowing that an Ali, like a Ponselle, a Pavlova, or a Tolstoy...

  A new vicar in Aldeburgh was approached by Lady Davies and Daisy Williams-Smythe, among others, hoping that he would abandon the shaking of hands when the Peace was given. He thought their request reflected a worry about the Church becoming too happy-clappy. Actually, Lady Davies and co were worried that they might be shaking hands with a fisherman or their daily or that ghastly unfrocked monk from the bric-a-brac shop.    

  When I bumped into Carol from the shop today she said she'd seen me yesterday passing her bungalow going onto the heath. 'Bet you didn't expect to have to wear your wellies this time of year going your favourite way to the piggery and back, did you?'    'I know!  The pigs were surprised at it. Staring at me...'   Carol has a slow smile, but it's worth waiting for. 

   Sign that automatically turns to face the wrong way so that people aren't encouraged to venture into Thorpeness during a power-cut, where they'll have to listen to the inevitable person described below...   There was a power cut yesterday.  From eight-fifteen until eleven forty-five. Irritating for everyone to a greater or lesser degree.    And then there was the inevitable person walking around volunteering information about a previous power cut that lasted three weeks and started right in the middle of their dialysis. Apparently, they had to resort to the petrol-syphoning method through the tube from their freshwater aquarium pump.    I may have made up that last bit. 

  A stooped, watery eyed New Yorker used to buy his programmes from me at Covent Garden in the early eighties. I asked if he would be coming to the new production of Norma .    He looked alarmed as he answered, 'Oh, no. I saw Ponselle as Norma at the Met in nineteen twenty-seven.   That woman's glory ruined opera for me forever, just when I was getting started with it.'   

   There was a classic car rally in Aldeburgh today. Down where the ice-cream van is parked during the summer.  The one Coochie Maltman used to deal from. I thought at first he might be a freemason, noticing the sideways-on handshakes going across the Mr Whippy counter. But, no, as Gerard explained, Coochie was your man if you wanted something buzzier with your cornet than a flake. 'And whatever the working class versions are of chopped pistachios or raspberry coulis, sweets.'   There was a Vauxhall Zephyr among the cars, like the one my dad used to own before his driving was legal, insured and under the limit. I thought how compact it was.  Dad's had looked vast to my six-year-old self. And how primly it seemed to be sitting up on its wheels. Dad's had brooded languorously.    Car owners milled around thanking each other for coming and saying not to forget such and such a date in such and such a place for the next meet up. The numerical br...

  Link to my nicely book, again...   Mendelssohn had his Songs without Words , so I can I have book launches without books  - events at which I read from my forthcoming e-book, natch.    The first for M y Tutu Went AWOL! was on Thursday at Metrodeco in Brighton. My rider included eats and drinks from the exceptional Metrodeco menu.  Nicely!  The event was well attended and people listened closely while I read, gamely following me wherever I went off-piste.    'One minute we're in Iraq, the next you're at a convent bun fight being ticked off by the Mother Superior for telling her the facts of life,' heckled Metrodeco co-owner Maggie Morgan. She then truly made my evening by requesting an encore of the off-piste material.  Do you remember the time I circumvented Therese, soprano, giving encores at our shared recital?   Read that little story again here...   For those of you not wishing to follow t...

  The letting agent asked me did I mind if the landlord put the rent up.       

  My Proper Nan Silcox  would use the line of Kipling quoted above when any of us complained of being lonely.    'Have you lost your library card? Lonely, indeed! Lonely having tea with Miss Bates? Lonely on travels with the Pickwick Club? Lonely at the Horse of the Year Show with Rupert Campbell-Black? And furthermore, let's remember that the banding together mentality is all lovely when it leads to The Huddersfield Choral, or the Massed Bands of the Coldstream Guards or those monkeys with the typewriters who are one day going to finish Timon of Athens - but not when it means the Gestapo or the WI, or when it leads to an epidemic of the illness of the moment...'    Serious illness was her thing - we had regular bulletins about complete strangers dying in lingering agony up at the Forty Houses  in Gelligaer - and she had contempt for what she called illnesses of the moment.    'Fevers of the faddy!'    In her time she calle...

   My brother couldn't stand the skin on custard or hot chocolate and would sit and cry until my mother scraped it off for him. My great aunt Blodwyn, when we went to stay with her, refused to allow  in her house  for the good skin to be scooped off and wasted.   'Oh, stop your snivelling. Has nobody told you about the witch who comes in the night and searches for that skin you've shamefully wasted each time? She goes back to her house down where the mine used to be and stitches the skin to the other skins she's taken. Night after night stitching - and measuring to see from time to time. Singing hymns to herself. And when that patchwork skin is big enough she'll bring it back while everyone's sleeping and lay it over you - as your shroud, because you'll be found dead underneath it in the morning.'   So easily my favourite relative.