Tuesday 26 May 2015

There`s been a lot going on in Ditchling the last few days:  There was a play in the village hall:The Lady Killers based on the Ealing comedy which has always been one of my favourite films, about the dotty old lady and her elderly crook lodgers pretending to play string quartets while planning a bank robbery.   It was a coincidence that there was a real robbery in the news, also done by a group of aged criminals who were eventually caught. Apparently they had trouble hearing the charges read out to them in court. It must have been upsetting for the people who lost all their jewels but there is something comic about those elderly blokes getting it all slightly wrong.
On Thursday we had our monthly film show also in the village hall and this was a brilliant film:Blue Jasmine directed by Woody Allen  and that was a tale of a woman (Kate Blanchet) who also got it wrong all the time.
Then the next night we had a concert with our Ditchling resident old jazz musician Herbie Flowers plus some other great jazz players also  past their first youth (plus a wonderful singer) performed to a  hugely appreciative audience of villagers.   As I`ve said before, there is never a dull moment in Ditchling.

Last weekend it was grand daughter M`s birthday so with daughter J and grand daughter T, we went to Hampstead Heath where J and I went the day before M was born twenty three years ago. They had an icy swim in the Ladies Pond as we did then, though I felt it might finish me off if I did it too, but we all walked and walked and it was simply beautiful, completely unspoiled, just as it used to be.

I`m getting ready for the trip up north for Julia Darling`s Anniversary Event with poetry and  plays at Live Theatre on Quayside and a general get together for family and friends. I am a bit worried that we will all spend our time racing round Newcastle losing each other.   

Tuesday 12 May 2015

Greens are good for you.

I quite miss all the excitement of the election and though it seemed totally disastrous, I was pleased that the Greens did so well all over the country and our candidate, Alf Stirling, in Lewes did not lose his deposit.    And I was glad too that lovely Caroline Lucas kept her seat in Brighton. 

My brother, sister and I who were aged eighteen, nine and fourteen respectively in May 1945 on VE Day, have no recollection of it whatsoever.   Brother P said he thought there could have been a street party but surely I would have remembered it too. Did we have the day off school?  Who knows. It is very strange, as we were living in North London and it was only a short bus and tube ride up to join the crowds outside Buckingham Palace.   P and I can remember the Jubilee in 1936 when we were given a pencil, a book and a mug.

I went to an exhibition in a darkened church in Brighton for the Festival called Dawn Chorus.   Apparently if you slow down bird song it sounds just like human speech.   There were recordings of singers who imitated birds and then it was speeded up and this was accompanied by huge images of these people lying in the bath or reading or lying in bed. It was all very peculiar but it made you wonder what  ordinary garden birds are really saying when they are twittering away.
I think I heard a nightingale yesterday as I walked up Lodge Hill with BW.  It is just heavenly up there at the moment with all the birds and spring flowers.
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