Otherwise occupied

For a couple of days I've had the beginnings of a post simmering away in the back of my mind, but it simply won’t come to the boil. Therefore, having just waved DH goodbye until Monday evening, I’m going to go away and get on with an annual activity I both dread and rather enjoy, until the next post is ready.  You’ll find out what I’m up to if you go back and read my second post, written this time last year.

If only I could snap my fingers and have it all happen as easily as this!

On the west side

On the wall at the top of our staircase in Wales hangs a framed poster, a gift from my next-to-youngest sister. When she spotted it in a shop, she immediately thought of me and my enduring love for the film it advertises – the immortal West Side Story.

I first saw the film itself 47 years ago this month, when I was 18 and had not long left school. I was working for a couple of months in a rather run-down café near the local bus station, earning the money for my fare to Hamburg, where I was about to spend 3 months improving my spoken German by working in what was then known as an old-people’s home. On one side of the bus station stood one of the town’s remaining 3 cinemas, the Palladium, and one day I noticed it was showing the musical about which I had heard so much, but which I had never managed to see.

The following Saturday I went to the afternoon show and nearly 3 hours later left the cinema not quite the same person. As I came out onto the pavement it seemed as though everything was the same, yet not the same, as though I was seeing it all through different eyes. It was my first experience of the transformative power of film and I’ve never forgotten how it felt.

Being such a wide and voracious reader I already knew that books could change the way one looks at the world, but film had always seemed too slight and ephemeral to have the same effect. That was probably due to the kind of films a teenager normally went to see in those days, but it meant that I simply wasn’t prepared for the effect this particular film had on me. 

The combination of music and dance, of drama, pathos and (sometimes savage) humour totally enthralled me and it is still one of my very favourite films. Add to that the way it deals with some really big and difficult subjects such as immigration and discrimination, poverty and gang warfare and the fact that it was filmed on location among the crumbling slums of New York's West Side, just before they were demolished, and you may begin to understand its hold on me.

I’ve seen it several times since that first viewing - in German with my penfriend in Hamburg, in French when I spent some weeks working as an au pair in Bourges and more than once again in English. Each time it has worked its magic and I probably know all the songs off by heart. In case you don’t, here are two which highlight the differences in background and experience between the two groups of young people who clash so tragically in this modern reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet. 

Bedtime reading

Looking back through my posts recently, I was amazed to see that it’s over six months since I last wrote about books. For this particular ex-librarian and lifelong bookworm this is so long a gap that you might be forgiven for thinking that I had completely stopped reading books in favour of blogs. I will admit that my book-reading time is somewhat eaten into by blogs nowadays, but thankfully I possess neither a laptop nor an iPad, so that in bed, at least, books are my sole source of reading matter.

This morning, while drinking the tea which always starts my day, I finished the last tense pages of a really excellent crime novel by a author I first discovered last year.  No Escape is the second novel by Natasha Cooper that I have read, but it won’t be the last. Well characterised and expertly plotted, it gripped me from the first page to the last. That book will go back to the library tomorrow, but I still have a substantial pile of others on my bedside table.

Being nothing if not eclectic in my reading tastes, the next book in the pile is a non-fiction book, published by the National Museum of Wales. Things Of Beauty: what two sisters did for Wales is a fascinatingly illustrated study of the Davies sisters, Margaret and Gwendoline, who used the enormous wealth inherited from their Victorian industrialist father, to build up a wonderful collection of Impressionist and other paintings, which they bequeathed to the National Museum of Wales.

My interest in them is not simply artistic, but comes from the fact that they were local people, born in the village of which I was once vicar, as was their remarkable father, who worked his way out of deep poverty to become one of Wales’ richest and most influential men. It would be difficult to live in Mid-Wales and not be intrigued by the Davies family and their achievements.

Below this in the pile is Louisa May, a biography by Martha Saxton of the 19th century American author, Louisa May Alcott. I was inspired to request this from the library by posts on Lifeonthecutoff's Blog about her life and work. As a girl I read and reread her most famous novel Little Women until my copy almost disintegrated, and having an enduring affection for children's literature, I still return to it and her other novels from time to time.

One of the things I only recently learned about Louisa May Alcott is that, like her heroine Jo in Little Women, in the 1860’s she published a series of sensational Gothic thrillers under a pseudonym in order to make the money for which the Alcott family always had dire need. These were rediscovered and republished in two collections in the 1970s and thanks to our library’s capacious store, one of these collections, entitled Plots & Counterplots, is also in my pile of bedtime reading.

Finally, as one of those books one can dip in and out of when too tired to read a continuous narrative, I have All Wound Up, the latest collection of very funny and perceptive essays on knitting and life, written by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, the inimitable Yarn Harlot.

So, with reading tastes as varied as my taste in music, and all your blogs to read too, I don’t think I’m likely to be bored. And of course I know I can always rely on you for interesting suggestions as to what to read when I've finished my pile. J

Sixty years of service

Sixty years ago today I was 5 years old (well, 5 ¾ actually) and confined to bed, as I gradually recovered from a bad attack of measles. I can still vividly remember that February day when my grandmother, who lived next-door, came into the bedroom to tell me that it had just been announced on the radio that the King had died in the night. An unusual thing to tell a five-year-old, perhaps, but she was genuinely upset and it is my first memory of any event beyond our small family circle.

Fast forward 16 months, to the cold and damp June day of the new Queen’s coronation. This is another indelible memory for me, as it marks my first experience of television. All over Britain people stretched their budgets to buy a set in order to be able to watch this rare event. Among them was a family who lived just up the hill from our cottage. They were the only people we knew who had television and they kindly invited all the children from our cluster of houses to gather round the tiny black and white screen to watch the pageantry unfold.

My third childhood memory of the Queen can’t be dated exactly, but I can’t have been more than 8. By then we had moved out of the town where I was born and lived in a small village on the western fringe of the Pennines. One morning my parents took my younger sisters and me into town on the early bus and we stood for what seemed like hours in the town centre, overlooking the market place and Town Hall, waiting to see the young Queen, who was visiting our part of Lancashire that day. I remember the cavalcade of cars coming down the road from the station amid a forest of waving arms, and then having a tiny figure in a pale coat, on a distant stage outside the Town Hall, pointed out to me as the Queen.

From those childhood memories onward, an awareness of the Queen as our hard-working head of state has been the background to my entire life. So today is, for me at least, not a day to debate the merits of monarchy versus presidency as a system for providing a head of state, nor is it a day to dwell on the inevitable failings of any one individual or family. Rather it is a day to acknowledge with gratitude a lifetime of dedicated service by one woman to her country and its people, and to say that today, as every day, I am glad and proud to be British.

Images via Wikipedia and Google

A little something for the weekend

Life has pottered along gently this week, with Sunday’s snow still lying largely unmelted and our lane now very icy. Today the sun is shining brightly and making the ice crystals on the snow glisten like left-over Christmas glitter. The weekend is almost here, but with the possibility of more snow forecast for tomorrow, we won’t be going anywhere, preferring to hibernate quietly for the time being. DH is busy working on a project for one of his clients (no lazy retirement for him!) and I’m planning to finish the first sock in his new pair and cast on the second.

I usually knit while watching TV, but it mustn’t be anything too demanding, otherwise I will drop stitches (annoying with such fine fabric) or make even worse  mistakes which may entail pulling back my work. L I’m not like DD, able to do the most complex and beautiful knitting while reading or watching TV.  No knitting racehorse here, but instead a plodding donkey, who enjoys her work, but mustn't let herself get distracted.

So when a favourite film comes on TV and I settle down to do a few more inches of DH’s latest sock, I know that when certain scenes come along, the only safe thing to do is to put down my knitting and enjoy them to the full. One such favourite film I watched recently for the umpteenth time is the wonderful classic musical “Singin’ in the Rain”.  I knitted happily along to most of it, but the knitting definitely stopped for what I think is one of the best comic performances I have ever seen. I hope you enjoy it too.

Image via Wylio