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[28 Oct 2009|03:04pm] |
Haworth in heavy rain: depressing history, now with a side of gloomy! (Also interesting, pretty, and dangerous in a slippery-cobbles-on-one-in-four-hill sort of way.)
Visitors: lovely. (Hey, they brought me Hotel Chocolat truffles. I'm not going to complain.)
House to myself again: lovely.
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[23 Oct 2009|01:33pm] |
Oh! Oh yes! Went to see Jeremy Hardy last weekend, at a livestock auction ring where they occasionally hose away the shit and have a band or a comedian in. ("All this disinfectant is bringing on my asthma", he said.) Had one of those meals beforehand where one person eats realllly slowly and everybody else is going "we can be on time if we LEAVE NOW" and they go "yes yes" and take a second bite of their starter... thank goodness there were two carsworths so the more-nervous half of the group could get going.
Anyway, he was good, as you'd expect, but political comedy at the moment was bound to be a bit depressing! (I was interested to note that M., who usually doesn't enjoy comedy nights out as much as I do, had a terrific time. Maybe she just likes being depressed.) The second half, which was more personal, was a lot more fun.
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[22 Oct 2009|01:21pm] |
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Pssst. (Commentary <3. "Watching this back, I can see why people found it infuriating...")
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[15 Oct 2009|01:11pm] |
Autumn crocuses and Michaelmas daisies, nasturtiums, sweet peas, chives, lobelias, cyclamens and geraniums flowering like mad, and a dozen raspberries for breakfast.
I like my garden.
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[12 Oct 2009|12:16pm] |
Went to see The Caucasian Chalk Circle last week; a new translation, but it still kept bringing back memories of when I was in it. It was excellent. Well staged, about 12 actor/singers, with intelligent doubling- one guy played all the would-be rapists and one all the bureaucrats and so on- and a large chorus. One of the people I went with had seen a lot of Brecht and was slightly baffled that it has a happy ending, also, this group did the music quite melodically and didn't do much in the way of audience-startling like flashing the script up on projectors; she felt it was a bit un-Brechtian to have a nice evening out. It's more difficult these days, of course- just the back-and-forth switching of frame story, acting, narrating etc was shocking in the 30s but is pretty routine today. But it's an interesting one. Given that the author was all about forcing the audience to see a play as a fictional construct and not sink in to the experience, and the polemic was the most important thing, to what extent should you still be trying to do that 70 years later? (Bloody hell. 70 years. How come it still feels modern??)
Also there was a MancAfpMeet on Saturday, which was a lot of fun. We seemed to spend quite a bit of time talking about slash for how few women were thre, but there you go. (I was in a food stupor for most of it as I'd eaten practically my own bodyweight in congee for lunch- you know the sort of Mr Creosote/3pm on Christmas Day feeling? But it was amusing listening.)
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[05 Oct 2009|11:04am] |
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mood |
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This weekend I've mostly been reading Barry Cryer's reminiscences, listening to Round the Horne and I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, and watching Morecambe and Wise, At Last The 1948 Show and Do Not Adjust Your Set, which has a) left me feeling a bit timelagged, b) given me the conviction that the reason Michael Palin and Tim Brooke-Taylor never did any TV together was not a happenstance of schedules but a deliberate move by David Frost to prevent the country being brought to a halt by sheer force of adorableness, and c) left me playing Six Degrees Of Barry Cryer. [1]
Also I realise I forgot to tell y'all about the rats; not long ago I was at the train station and a family of rats (at least 8 adults and 4 young) was frolicking around in a planted area; they were really playing quite charmingly and being generally sweet, if you could forget that they were, you know, RATS. (Look at him woffling his little nose! ... His RATTY nose.... And the adult giving the baby an apple core!... RATS EATING RUBBISH IN THE STATION OH GOD WHEN WILL MY TRAIN COME.)
[1]The only people this is even slightly challenging for are stand-ups and sketch groups who've started up in the last five years and haven't done much collaboration, but even then I haven't been stumped so far- there are a couple of benefit gigs that connect most people to Phill Jupitus in less than 4, and from there it's mate in two: Phill's done Buzzcocks with Stephen Fry who's done ISIHAC with Baz. You might think it'd be less easy for theatre and film, but as Barry wrote for Morecambe and Wise, which gives him at most 2 to any Shakespearean actor you care to name, and used to write with John Junkin who was in A Hard Day's Night...
One could also do Six Degrees of David Frost, of course, but who'd want to?
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[01 Oct 2009|11:22am] |
C'mon, the SFO; and the Attorney General had better show some spine.
I reckoned the new Shooting Stars was bound to be rubbish but it's not been bad; the Hartlepool Puppet Film Re-enactors have been very amusing, and last night it was a pure joy seeing Noel Fielding being comprehensively upstaged and out-wierded by a burger van owner and a balding man from Middlesborough.
Also rewatched the Saturday Night Grease ep of the Goodies. If you forward past the first ten minutes and get to the sketch where Tim does an update of the Chartered Accountant and Graeme's dressed as a ballet dancer, and the dance chase scene at the end, it's very good.
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| ISIHAC! |
[28 Sep 2009|05:03pm] |
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mood |
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 my feet hurt |
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sigmonster and I saw the Clue tour on Friday, and it was fun all the way from beginning to end- you miss Humph, of course, but Jack Dee wasn't bad. Particular highlights for me: a longer game of Mornington Crescent than you get on the radio- and Jack pulling out an impressive pile of rulebooks when Graeme started nitpicking; a Cheddar Gorge where the inexorable logic of the sentence got Tim and Jeremy [1] to go "You-" "-fat-" "-bastard" and giggle; a Ning [2] peeking out of Hamish's sporran; and some virtuoso swanee-whistling. (The audience got to kazoo along with several songs at the end; Tequila! worked very well. Jeremy conducted and sternly said "Music is my life. Don't fuck this up.")
[1]Not that Jeremy
[2]Not that sort of Ning
(We also picked blackberries, ate blackberry crumble, watched some Morecambe and Wise- and the DVD of the previous tour, which is excellent- and generally had a nice weekend.)
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[14 Sep 2009|12:13pm] |
Sweet god WHAT? Vampire Diaries synopses, discussed.
(My policy of not reading a book that looks as if it might be a supernatural romance unless I already trust the author has just paid off bigtime, because I had not even heard of these books. Tree penis WHAT.)
(Can I say, because I don't think I commented in my last book post, how good Brennan's Demon's Lexicon was? She did not pull any shit like blood-vomiting crows, and if she HAD, it would not have been funny unless she meant it to be.)
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[11 Sep 2009|02:08pm] |
I just went over to our canteen and the World Powerlifting Championships were going on in the Atrium. Fish and chips acompanied by the odd *"HUUAAARRRGGGH!"* *ripple of polite applause* was a tad surreal.
(I don't really understand sporting subcultures. It must take an awful lot of effort, money and pain for these men to get to the point where their thighs are wider than their heads and they can lift heavy things over their heads for an audience of about 30 fellow competitors and 23 people pausing on their way back from lunch. Ah well.)
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| Some unsolicited advice |
[11 Sep 2009|11:26am] |
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mood |
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 accomplished |
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If you're planning to drop a box of something highly staining (say, blackberries) mixed with a mordant (say, vodka) onto the floor (say, from the top shelf of the fridge to get a really good explosion), I highly recommend that you actively dislike your floor covering. I mean, you'll dislike it even more with a massive purple blodge on it, but it cuts down on the angst.
(What nurk chooses grey carpet tiles for a kitchen anyway?)
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[08 Sep 2009|05:11pm] |
I AM BECOME DEATH DESTROYER OF MOUSES
(Poison, traps and wire wool bought. Hm, maybe I can let next-door's bloody cat that always tries to get in the house have its blasted way, and then trap it in the cellar so it'll smell all catly? No, that would not be kind. Also it would probably get too catly unless I remembered to let it out again quite quickly.)
(Also many thanks for the well-wishes in reply to the last post, which I can't reply to because I'm an idiot and deleted the notifications before remembering they were screened.)
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[31 Aug 2009|03:32pm] |
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 relaxed |
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Some things that I have done recently, in no particular order: read a lot of books, sneered at a castle, helped make pear bread and chutney, gone through someone else's wardrobe, grunted at a pig called Chipolata, picked apples, seen an amazing water-powered trip-hammer (beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, v. cool.) I know you were wondering.
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[26 Aug 2009|02:57pm] |
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(Oh yes and I finally saw the Harry Potter film yesterday, at the IMAX- envy me- and so I can read Sarah's parody of it, and it is an amusing one, so all I really have to say other than yes, it was enjoyable is TINY RUFFLED BANGS OF WOE, or to put it another way, I would not have been too unhappy if the film had been called "Draco Malfoy And The Photogenic Angst".)
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[11 Aug 2009|03:48pm] |
Hello folks.
A. and I went for a pub lunch in a village called Goose Eye, and had a walk up a stream which used to be channeled for a wool mill; it was cool. I saw a frog.
Saw The Travelling Improv Troupe Who Aren't Allowed To Call Themselves The Comedy Store Players, But That's Pretty Much Who They Are, last night; despite having to do the first half mikeless, they were very good. (They come to the area as part of an outdoor Shakespeare festival, so they improvise a Shakespeare play; Romeo and Bob had a sad lack of actual Romeo/Bob content, but was very funny. Plus, it had cross-class tensions, in that Bob was a sturdy man of the people- "Bob, a builder thou art, cans't fix my roof?" "Aye, marry can I.") Also, during a Theatre Styles, getting the suggestion ballet ("fuck you"); a sketch about the Antarctic getting derailed into a load of one-liners ("they're a right bunch of comedians, this lot"); and Richard Vranch impersonating a kebab.
Interview in two days.
Blackberries have started; must finish off the ones in the freezer from last year!
Finally got round to getting the gutter fixed (now just need to get the plumber in, and a carpenter, oh and replace a window), and also pried some plywood off the banisters on the hall, so the stairs get much more light. So I need to do a spot of painting... at least the place is only Victorian, so I don't get quite the, um, interesting layers left by 300 years' worth of of botched-up jobs that the parental unit's house has.
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