PreBirthday Birthday Treats

Big Birthday Tighter Lockdown

I live in an area that has had an increasing Covid infection rate so, with tighter lockdown restrictions, my plans for celebrating my 60th birthday in the middle of October are well and truly on hold. Which explains why my favourite walk on the moors to Top Withins (scheduled for my birthday weekend) happened early. And a trip to the Harvey Nichols restaurant in Leeds was also tacked onto a trip that was meant to be just doing chores. Blowing the cobwebs away and putting the world to rights with a picnic at the Brontë Falls; and savouring the time and tastes over a delicious meal – I already feel I’ve been well and truly treated. (Happy Early Birthday To Me!) As a bonus I visited for the first time the Tiled Hall Café at Leeds Art Gallery.

Seasons Mingling

On Friday, I meandered along the River Aire and bathed in forest light feeling like the luckiest man alive. The day before, on Thursday, marble-sized hailstones battered Saltaire, crushing plants and battering berries off the weeping cotoneaster in our back garden. Is it Summer or Autumn or has Winter sneaked in? Sometime in October I’ll record (I hope) a RETURN TO LIVE THEATRE – I’ll be attending 3 x 45minute performances at Leeds Playhouse…. But yesterday, after the river walk and Tai Chi in the park (who guessed I would ever be doing Tai Chi?) I made a RETURN TO THE CINEMA…. So, in Pictureville, I was one of five masked punters who was glued to The Perfect Candidate.

No urgent justification to fund this project

I may have been so cinema-deprived that The Perfect Candidate felt like the best thing I’ve seen in ages – and that’s because it’s the ONLY thing I’ve seen at the cinema since the beginning of lockdown. There were a couple of moments in the film that felt formulaic – though other parts that were not formulaic and I was definitely transported out of my self and my immediate concerns into a different world. So here’s what I thought about my first cinema film in six months:

• I felt safe and comfortable in Pictureville cinema
• One of my favourite films of 2012 was Wajdja about a girl and her desire to ride a bike, made in secretive conditions in Saudi Arabia by the same director as The Perfect Candidate, Haifaa Al-Mounsour – this new film has a bigger budget, seems more obviously “cinematic” but has the same sensibilities and attention to human detail as Wadjda
• As soon as you see Dr Maryam (Mila Al Zahrani) driving her car, you know this is a 21st century Saudi Arabia. Maryam is an ordinary woman, observant and devout, and with extraordinary determination and enough temper to cut through some of the bullshit she encounters in her life as a trained doctor in a remote clinic and, later, accidentally, as a candidate for the local Municipal Council
• Helping Maryam (at first reluctantly) are her two sisters: Sara (a teenage eye-roller) and Selma (a confident wedding planner, played by Dhay who is, apparently, for those who know these things, a real-life social media influencer)
• The three sisters are left home alone by their patriarchal father who, against stereotype, wants to go “on tour” with his band of musicians, partly to recover from the grief over the loss of his unconventional wife a year before. He is prepared to defy extremist threats to censor his musical talents and states that he wants his daughters to live fulfilled lives.
• The authorities want Dr Maryam to concentrate on treating patients who are prepared to let a female doctor touch them and, later, to focus her political efforts on playgrounds for children and gardens. But there’s a more urgent priority in Maryam’s mind and her rival male candidate has no interest in…. repairing the road to her local clinic
• The Perfect Candidate made me laugh, feel angry, feel nervous, opened new vistas in my mind – and gave me hope

 

A (Yorkshire) lass unparallel'd

Boast thee, Death…. Downy windows close

In Antony and Cleopatra, Charmian closes the eyes of her asp-poisoned mistress with the following words:

So, fare thee well.
Now boast thee, Death. In thy possession lies
A lass unparallel'd. Downy windows, close;
And golden Phoebus never be beheld
Of eyes again so royal!

And thus spake Jenny Michelmore to Diana Rigg at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 1985. Thirty-five years later, on September 10th 2020, that same majestic Cleopatra, Dame Diana, took her last bow. Born in Doncaster, Diana Rigg always paid tribute to her Yorkshire roots. Her father was a railway engineer who was transferred to work on the railways in India where Diana learned Hindi as a second language. In later years, when an interviewer expected her to cite India when asking “where did you develop your ingrained sense of justice?”  Diana’s answer was “Yorkshire.” Although feeling she didn’t fit in when she returned to school in Leeds, Diana’s drama teacher at Fulneck, Sylvia Greenwood, instilled a love of Shakespeare and performing and Dame Diana returned to Leeds to receive an honorary degree and visit her old school.

Mistress of Theatre, TV, Cinema

At school Diana appeared as Orlando in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Emily Brontë in The Brontës. She went on to be crowned with plaudits, winning BAFTA, Emmy, Tony and Evening Standard Awards in her time. (And striking out – successfully – for equal pay with her co-star in The Avengers at a time when it was rare for women to highlight inequality.) Highlights included:

• In Theatre: Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and Mother Courage, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Twelfth Night, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra (as Cordelia, Viola, Lady M and Cleopatra), Ronald Millar’s Abelard and Helouise, Stoppard’s plays Jumpers and Night and Day, both Eliza Dolittle and Mrs Higgins (twice) in My Fair Lady, Sondheim’s Follies, Euripides’ Medea, Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard
• On TV: Shakespeare’s King Lear (as Regan), The Morecambe and Wise Show, Clytemnestra in The Oresteia, Ibsens’s Hedda Gabler, the 1985 Bleak House, her BAFTA-winning turn in Mother Love, Moll Flanders, Mrs Danvers in 1997’s Rebecca, Oleanna Tyrell in Game of Thrones, and cameos in popular programmes like Victoria, Detectorists, Doctor Who and the forthcoming Black Narcissus. But she will always be associated with her groundbreaking performance as Emma Peel in 51 episodes of The Avengers
• On film: Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Julius Caesar (as Helena and Portia), Mrs Tracey Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Theatre of Blood, A Little Night Music, The Great Muppet Caper, Evil Under The Sun, The Painted Veil and the forthcoming Last Night in Soho

As well as her Shakespeare roles, I was most affected by (on TV) her performances in The Avengers, Mother Love, Moll Flanders, Game of Thrones and Detectorists; on film the shock of her fate in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; but I was lucky enough to see her grimy, cackling, pipe-smoking, funny, grotesque Mother Courage on stage at the National Theatre in 1995 – a character full of grim energy at the beginning, dragging her enormous cart around the stage, quipping, dominating, manipulating; and, by the end of the production, a zombified hollowed-out shell of a woman, emblematic of all people shattered by the effects of needless war. An extremely un-vain performance. An acting legend.

Twilight Garden Tour at Harewood

Life starts all over again…. 

As Summer hovers, clinging on, and Autumn looms, about to spread, I think about Jordan Baker’s line in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

I wrote about that idea in the last post. A potent activity that reflected the idea was also our recent evening visit to Harewood House grounds. For many years, it was a place to take children to go wild on the adventure playground; and in recent times the Christmas decorations have been a highlight. Now, it’s all about the grounds….

Trevor and Sam

Head Gardener, Trevor Nicholson, led a small Covid-secure group on an exclusive tour of the site as the day visitors left and the sun went down. Accompanying Trevor was super-enthusiastic volunteer, Sam. We spent most of our time in the Himalayan garden and heard about the challenges of developing a great garden space and keeping it fresh each season. Many changes have happened over the centuries and in recent years, the mix of conservation, climate change, visitor experiences and the personal whims of gardeners and family alike have kept the team busy and scratching their heads and scrabbling in the soil to make the place spectacular for now but secure for the future. The Buddhist Stupa in the Himalayan Garden at Harewood is the only one of its kind in the UK and has been built and blessed by monks from Bhutan.

Walled Garden and Terrace View

The Walled Garden at Harewood currently has twelve large borders, all useful, many growing fruits and vegetables that are used on the estate or sold in local farm shops. It too has taken many forms over the decades and access to pictures of its development were fascinating, including a surreal period when it housed a maze. We ended our tour on the famous Charles Barry terrace with a glass of Prosecco and a meet-up with our “rival” twilight tour of people who had been round the Bird Garden.

September Song

Rossini's in Shipley, Happy Anniversary to Our House, Outdoor dining in Tollerton

September Song

Sally and I went out for a meal, ostensibly to celebrate 25 years living in the house we do, but mainly to try out a new restaurant within walking distance: Rossini’s in Shipley. An Italian family ran a restaurant (D’Atonino’s) in the same building for many decades and the relaunched place has a similar menu but fancy new décor and of course plenty of Covid safety arrangements. It was lovely. And it was good to be out and about in the evening as summer begins to fade. Time to trim the beech hedge, put a fancy new number on our gatepost and get in some final walks before the weather turns too cold….

New (Academic) Year, New Term, New Start

For nigh on 33 years, September was always the beginning of a New Term in my teaching career. Time to check the stapler, Sellotape, hole punch, paper supplies, exercise books…. I can imagine this year’s New Start excitement will be complicated by feelings of uncertainty and nervousness as many pupils will be returning to school for the first time in weeks…. Bear in mind that some pupils (children of key workers) and many teachers have been working throughout the whole period of lockdown/semi-lockdown/are-we-locked-down-or-not…. I know from experience, though, that all teachers, all support staff, all the many adults who contribute to the UK education system and all students (from the age of 4 to 19) will do their very best to make something happen. Children will arrive with something in their brains and hearts and they will leave at the end of each day with more.  (PS I don’t believe anyone needs to “catch up” – they just carry on from where they are – “catching up” is a media-constructed myth that presupposes education is a straightforward one-size-fits-all-linear experience. Spoiler alert – it ain’t.) Here’s to Autumn and the Falling Leaves of Golden-Brown-Wisdom and the Harvest season….. and the season of my Birth Day….

Walk to Gilstead, Steps in Northcliffe woods, Tai Chi in Roberts Park (I hesitate to identify me)