Black Comedy

I was at a performance of Black Comedy by Peter Schaefer last night. In fact I was at it on Thursday as well because I was helping Front of House.

The play takes place in the 1960s and is a typical farce of people being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The unusual thing about it, or it was for me as I haven't seen it done before in my limited theatrical experience, is that it takes place during a power cut. Well, the main fuse goes. This means that, in order to facilitate the audience, the lighting is in reverse. The ensemble starts in stage darkness and they are thrust into light when the fuse goes. Acting in full light very warily but at the beginning when all is meant to be well, striding round a cluttered stage as though they can see perfectly, seems to be quite difficult acting to keep going for 90 minutes plus. There are times when people strike a match or shine a torch and they go into semi-light. Well done the lighting man who kept pace perfectly.

If you get the chance to see it sometime I'd take it. It's funnier than those comedies that that Shakespeare wrote.

Oh God, It's a Camel.

So, as of a few minutes ago it is a hung Parliament.

Get ready to re-run this in about 6 months time.

Here comes the disappointment for all those who think that a hung Parliament means everyone works alongside each other in harmony and the world gets better and the fairies come out at night and do the housework.

The good news for us though is that Ann Keen has been ousted as our MP. She and her MP husband Alan have been known as Mr & Mrs Expenses for years. He however has held on to his seat in Feltham.

This election has turned out to be a rather unsatisfying feast.

Knife crime.

Just had Hospital Heroes on BBC1. 25% of all trauma admissions at The London Hospital are for knife wounds. Probably a more worrying but more accurate statistic than anything put out by the politicians this week on crime.

Why Stars and Celebrities Aren't The Same Thing.

Last night in Brentford there was a special concert. It was a fund raiser for the local church. These things are normally sparsely attended but last night it was packed. 400 local people came to watch plus a few from further away.

The person performing lives nearby and has done for 25 years. He wanders around the area and drinks in his local and is pretty much left alone, partly because most people are too young to remember him. The age group there last night were the key. Mainly around the 50 mark as his heyday was the late 70s. In fact his three major singles were all in 1979.

The reason so many came out was that just a couple of years later he stopped touring. For 20 years! And he only started touring when he started recording once more a few years back.

For those who remember that era, it was Nick Lowe. (Cruel to be kind : I Love The Sound of Breaking Glass).

And the reason for the title?

He obviously gave his time for free and in return set a few conditions. Not ones you'd normally expect though.
1) Because he knows his concerts have a high demand he only wanted publicity to be kept locally and by word of mouth pretty much. (The tickets still sold out with two weeks to go).
2) The only people to get in free were himself and his wife and kid if they wanted to come. Everyone else in his entourage, manager, two band members and technical people plus close friends, had to buy a ticket. And they did.
4) Tickets were to be kept at an affordable price. They were. Just £12.
3) It was pouring down with rain but 40 minutes before he was due to appear he walked through the door, shook off his umbrella, shook hands with the doorman said hello to the people on the ticket desk and quietly slipped in whilst the support act were playing. No fuss, no melodrama.

He played for just over the hour, a mixture of mainly "new era" songs and a couple of older ones. You could have heard a pin drop. I spoke with the vicar who I know and asked was he working out how to get the church this full on a Sunday? He reckoned he would have to get him to lead the worship. He was doing. Every member of that audience was there to marvel at the man, talented, quiet, unassuming, gentlemanly and a throughly good bloke.

And becaue of this thoroughly nice bloke we reckon the total raised will be about £8000 to keep a couple of the churches community projects running.

Now, that's the difference between a star and a celebrity.

Newark, Newark.

Spending this weekend in Sunny Newark. No, not the New York one, that which is about 130 miles north of here.

Newark holds a place in my heart from my travel as a young child. When we went home to Leeds by tain Newark was one of the landmarks even though it didn't stop there. The Yorkshire Pullman would leave Kings Cross, (books and games out), 1st Stop Peterborough, (The end of the beginning of the journey), pass through Newark slowly, (Well on the way now), stop at Wakefield, (Pack up stuff we're almost there), and finally arrive at the now defunct Leeds Central.

Who knows, I might even do a Diamond Geezer and report on it. But it won't be as good as his are and actually I'm going for Marjs sort of family reunion so I won't see most of Newark anyway. I can almost hear that collective sigh of relief!

All Clear

Come Monday I am going back to work. Gently at first but I need to do something before I die of boredom. Hopefully then there'll be something of interest to blog about as well although I decided I wouldn't bother with "the volcano" and certainly not the election.

So no more medical bulletins unless there's something worth saying.

POSH & BECKS = 22

Perhaps if young people spent more time reading books instead of celebrity magazines they might be able to play Scrabble by the traditional rules.

Little Thing Mean A Lot

We all take our bodies for granted. We do hundreds of little things each day that our bodies carry out and they're gone in a second without a thought. This all changes when anything affects your body be it a stiff neck ot a cut on the finger. An operation just brings more of them.

Each day brings a recovery in an everyday task which has been lost to me over the last few weeks. There have been many in the early days which I won't recount here as I'm sure you won't want to hear about them and their asociated bodily functions but this weekend has seen two milestones restoring comfort to my days and nights.

For three weeks I have had to sleep on my back as it has been too painful to lie on my side. Either of them. But as of Friday it has been possible to finally get 90 degrees round and lie there. It feels a bit funny but it isn't painful and I'll settle for that. The other breakthrough is tht I can now sneeze and cough without it hurting my "war wounds". No longer do I have to try and suppress the tickling in my nose or throat.

Every day now my body is healing faster. Mustn't overdo it. But I quite like keeping a detached eye on it and marvel at what our bodies can do. I sometimes moan about new aches and pains that happen as I get older but it's done a pretty good job for 50+ years and it certainly looks as though it's planning to keep going pretty much on top form for a good number of years yet.

Maybe I won't take my body for granted quite so much in the future. And perhaps I'll give it a helping hand by losing a bit of weight.

Call Me Scarface!

Well, Scartummy actually, but that's hardly the most threatening name.

The staples came out with a bit of a tweak yesterday morning. By the afternoon I was starting to come apart at the seam and the district nurse had to come back and steristrip part of the wound tht had decided to open a bit. At least there's no pain.

Still got a drain in but think that will be out in the next 24 hours or so.

So, on the mend. Although no work for another 4 weeks. And I'm still clutching the physiotherapists list of do's and don'ts which include no housework for 6 weeks!

The Road to Recovery.

Hi all. Surgery went well. Hurrah for mobiles!

T - 7

I've hasd my pre-op assessment and apprently I'm well enough to have my major op. Actually, I'm well enough to do anything so next Wednesday I go into hospital for a week or week and a half. You'll not notice cos I only post every fortnight anyway.

The discussion of my op has somewhat disconcerted me. Not the actual procedure itself but the possible side effects.

Due to the fact someone at some time might get an operation related in-growing toenauil and sue them for millions, you have to be told everything and the odds on it happening. I would rather they hadn't. The cancer I had was 1 in 50,000,000. Rare, but I got it. The chance of death under a general anaesthetic is about 1 in 5,000,000. Very rare, but 10 times more likely than the cancer I did get. I know that's not how it works but just being told on a scale of probable/possible/unlikely/rare would have been enough for me.

Luckily I haven't won the Euromillions otherwise it would be 15 times more likely that the anaesthetic would kill me. For the first time ever I'm glad my numbers haven't come up.

You don't have to be privileged.

There was a report in the papers last week that still 1/3 of our winter olympic team went to private schools. No mention that 2/3rds don't. However, and remember this is nothing to do with jealousy or anything like that, the government want changes made to reduce that 1/3rd even further. I'm not sure that introducing the luge as a sport to the youth of Brixton is going to make much difference though.

Then I was thinking, there is one sport where the government have done bugger all to try and open it up to the other class. Football. How many Premiership footballers went to private school? Why does the Government not do something about that?

It's 2010, and still the Labour party are hung up on "toffs" and the class war.

Now that's what I call snow!

I was watching The Making of Britain or whatever Andrew Marrs programme is called. They were showing the winter of, I think 1947 or 49 when the country ground to a halt. But it was proper snow. Feet of it.

And there were people, out and trying to clear roads, pavements and paths with shovels. making sure life could go on as best as possible even though there were power cuts. And rationing. And still having to go to school. And work.

No Health and Safety there, advising that they would be liable if anyone fell over where they had cleared a path, or that the school would be sued if a child slipped on ice and hurt themselves.

The other week, whilst Brentford laboured under the 1" of snow that fell, at two schools I know all the teachers were in but many pupils were missing. Two of the excuses that came up were;

from 1 girls parent : I didn't know the school was open because you didn't ring to tell us.

From a boy who lives within sight of the playground : I couldn't come in because there was black ice on the pavement.

Meanwhile, my niece flew out of Finland with 5 ft of snow on time, to get to Geneva. Unfortunatley the flight was via Gatwick where they were delayed for 2 hours because there was slush on the runway.

I can't help feeling that we've lost a bit of backbone in the past 60 years. And if we have, who can we sue?

Twisted.

I meant to write about this earlier last year biut I don't think I did. If I did please feel free to ignore, or roundly abuse me, whichever you see fit to do.

I was at my prospective niece-in-laws house and her son had a poster on the wall. It was, I think, a Roy Keane poster from his playing days. The message on it was, "I expect respect and try to give it".

Now, that seems the total opposite to the way I was brought up but does seem to sum up the attitude of many young people. Apart from the fact I think it is worded particularly badly if not ungrammatically, I was brought up to show respect and try to earn it. But that, in general, goes against the grain today, where everyone has the right to everything and no responsibility unless it isn't too much effort.

So expecting everyone to treat you as though you are Gods gift whilst you only need to attempt to give someone else the time of day gives you some idea why teachers have a hard time. And it doesn't help when parents back the kids point of view rather than the teachers.

The Old Routine.

I've been away this last week in the sunny town of Stevenage. Well, actually, not in the town but in the Novotel inches off the A1 junction at Stevenage.

It was a good induction course, partly becuase I remembered quite a lot of it which made me look good, but also because many of the changes the company have made in the way we are meant to work actually suit me.

So i went off this morning on my first appointment. I didn't sell it. It's like I never went away.

Help Your Neighbour.

As we know, during the current cold snowy spell, as the government have told us, it is increasingly important to keep an eye on your neighbours.

Well, the 87 year old woman next door hasn't called on me once to see if I'm alright, and the lazy cow hasn't even taken her milk in for the last 3 days! So much for neighbourliness.

I've Seen The Future and It's The Past

I never lost a company under a Conservative government but have now lost 2 under this Labour lot. In reality, I haven't lost the second but it isn't worth me struggling on. I can't make the income I need as things are.

So, I have made a decision and a couple of phone calls. I have a meeting wih my ex area manager and divisional manager tomorrow, weather permitting. If all goes well, I'm heading back to Everest!

It's 8 years since I left. I took this decision over the weekend and although in general I never ever go backwards this feel right. I'm taking the pressure off myself, going back solely to selling, and, in acknowledgement of my age, realise this is going to be the run in to my retirement if all goes well. Admittedly another 12-15 years but all the same.

So, back to the future!

Lasers at the Ready

Marj was very brave today and went to see about having laser eye surgery. I'm lucky that, apart from starting to need reading glasses for small print my eyesight is pretty good. Or at least I haven't noticed it isn't.

It takes about an hour for various tests to be done and then they have a chat and give you a bit of counselling.

So, what did we learn.

They can correct the need for wearing glasses for long distance and also astigmatism. They can't do anything to help with reading. The former being to do with your eye lenses and the latter to do with your eye muscles.

The actual time with the surgeon is only about 10 minutes, the lasering part only being a matter of a minute or so. And that's for both eyes.

The worst case scenario if things don't go according to plan is that you get an eye infection.

Not as expensive as we thought. For the cost of £1400, bar some loose change, she can expect to have perfect vision except for reading when she will just need over the counter reading glasses. Although as she doesn't need them now she may get away with even that.

Now all she has to do is decide whther she's brave enough to have the procedure.

End of 2009

Well, unless anything momentous happens in the next 24 hours that's another year done and dusted. It's been a strange one. Most people seem to want to see the back of it. If there's something I wish I could have next year, apart from the obvious "lots of money" answer, it's energy.

I feel always to be tired. Don't know whether it's been worse since my op or I've just noticed it more. I went for 15 years without a proper holiday and survived it, but not going on one this year seems to have taken it's toll.

So whilst I'm on handing our gifts here's a few for my most loyal readers.

Elle - To have some respite from her illness so she can have a sustained period of feeling good.

Graybo - continued success with his business plus some of those items he's been coveting over the last 12 months.

Masher - The chance to fit another holiday in to his work schedule. I reckon you only got 15 trips away this year and that left you with a fortnight without going away at all at one point! :)

AJ - To manage to find a way to go back to University yet again. This working lark has never really suited you. :)

DG - And probably the biggest wish of all. That he could have his mum back.

Enjoy your plans for the New Year. I wonder what it has in store?

The Child In All Of Us

I am organising a concert for one of my opera groups. It's non-opera and one of the songs I have chosen is "Teddy Bears Picnic".

All amateur arts groups have those who take themselves too seriously and there is a great deal of pleasure in wathching them sing childrens songs whilst trying to remain aloof.

In general though, there are few amongst us who aren't cheered by a chorus or two of Teddy Bear. Reliving our youth is an important thing to do. Particularly at times of stress. They say that you can reduce a roomfull of 50 year old men to tears by playing the theme from Listen With Mother.

I suggest you stop whatever you are doing right now and sing s song from your childhood, perhaps Nellie the Elephant? And if your boss complains make them join in too!