Pumpkin Trail to Bolsover

The Pumpkin Trail
It’s Autumn:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.…

(sonnet 73)
People who know me, know I love Autumn: a fresh start for the new academic term (still feel it even after retiring from teaching); birthday month; ravishing colours in the world outside; wearing jumpers; lighting fires; wandering along the atmospheric Pumpkin Trail at Bolton Abbey estate (pictures above and below)

Metaphor of Autumn
The traditional poetic view of Autumn is that it represents the dying of the year, the Autumn of life, the descent into decay and transition towards Death…. Winter is coming.  I agree there’s something in the metaphor, though my Libran Pollyanna rose-tinted specs also sees and feels the following:

• Autumn leads to Advent to Winter to Christmas to New Year and it finally leads to Spring = good;
• the Autumn colours red, burgundy, purple, gold, orange, yellow, green, brown and beige scattered across a landscape = good;
• falling leaves like nature’s confetti = good;
• warmth of a real (controlled) fire = good;
• Bonfire Night and fireworks = good;
• cosy knitwear = good;
• snuggled up indoors, hunkering down with food, drink and TV = good 

Golden Age of TV?
Everybody has an opinion about pinpointing the golden age of TV. In the 1960s I was breathless with excitement at the cliffhangers at the end of each Batman episode and had many a dream of Cathy Gale and Emma Peel in The Avengers. Was anybody as thrilled as me in the 1970s at being allowed to (once a week) stay up and watch Glenda Jackson in Elizabeth R or Derek Jacobi in I, Claudius? Or the camp excesses of Dynasty or the stately poignancy of Brideshead Revisited in the 1980s? Was the 1990s the Golden Age with the first run of (weekly) showings of Friends or the weird compulsive cult of (the first season of) Twin Peaks? I could keep going, but it’s clear to me that this Autumn, in Covid Full-Semi-or-Partial-Lockdown, I’m grateful that there is so much choice on TV that it is easy to find something to while away the hours, conversing with the flowers, consulting with the bees. No such thing as a Golden Age since creative talents have always produced good stuff, but today there is a (happy) glut of choice.

How can all these things happen to just one person? 
My “birthday season” viewing has included the glorious 1938 Bringing Up Baby (from which the sub-heading above is one of a hundred quotable lines) with the astonishing Katherine Hepburn at the top of her game, and Cary Grant in one of his finest unfettered performances. I also chose to watch Tom & Kelly & Val & Anthony & Tom taking breaths away in the retro jetplane-porn of 1986’s Top Gun. And for binge-watching I'm watching Goose from Top Gun (that’s Anthony Edwards aka Mark Greene) leading the ensemble cast of the early seasons of ahead-of-its-time ER; but as a bedtime digestif, to reassure myself that everyone can adapt to change, I like to visit Schitt’s Creek, where Moira is proving to be my touchstone of taste and dignity….

Jigsaws, Meals out, Walks
I continue to puzzle through Autumn. For me, jigsaws have been a lifelong activity, not just a lockdown one. And Katherine Hepburn appears on my current jigsaw with Peter O’Toole in The Lion in Winter along with my own face and snapshots of selected loved ones from “The Harry Potter Film Club” and beyond. Above also features snaps of The Terrace in Saltaire, another local venue for lovely grub. And below our socially distanced birthday walk with our adopted family from Badby, this time meeting at Bolsover Castle for a wet and misty meander through muddy Derbyshire.

Out of the sky

Up The Shard, as you do....

Saltaire to London

Yorkshire is the bees’ knees to me! Stratford-upon-Avon, Badby, Northumbria, Scotland and Manchester are the bees’ knees’ best friends. So I suppose London can be seen as the bees’ knees’ mother. There are other places that could shiver my timbers and tickle my fancy that I haven’t yet visited: I suspect there are places in Ireland and Wales that will do it and I have abiding memories of English Heritage and National Trust properties throughout the land, not to mention formative times in Bath, Plymouth, Winchester, the Peak District, Cornwall, Devon and Kent. Dorset and the Isle of Harris are on my bucket list and I want to know more about East Anglia and Northern Ireland. And that’s without even leaving the British Isles. It’s a big planet, a huge continent, an enormous country, a gigantic city and visiting London gives me the feeling of the human race’s capacity for imagination, creativity, survival and endeavour, as well as the same capacity for greed, ruthlessness, destruction and conquest. London is the best of worlds and the worst of worlds. I sometimes feel like a frightened country mouse when I’m there and I sometimes feel like I own the place. Samuel Johnson was famously quoted by his biographer, Boswell:

Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

New and old, London brashness and London antiquity - the Monument, the Shard, a coffee house

Glenda and friends

I’ve blogged about the prime reason for going to London earlier this month (to see Glenda Jackson in Shakespeare’s King Lear at the Old Vic.) It was also a good time to catch up with friends: Dud, John, Mary, Michele and Meera in different venues on different days. We were evacuated from the British Library by a fire alarm, gawped at the spoils of Empire at the British Museum, ate like royalty in the Oxo brasserie overlooking the Thames, visited Christopher Wren’s Monument to the Great Fire of London, witnessed artisan glass blowing in Bermondsey, went Up The Shard (mind-boggling and something to do again, I hope) and generally pounded the pavements admiring the soaring, tumbling, peculiar mix of architecture, slum, luxury, confusion, hope, culture, history, grief and joy. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by London so the friendly and calming oases in cafés, pubs and in London homes were a welcome relief from the onslaught of the city’s dynamism.

The 606 Club

In a dingy basement club, packed to the rafters with appreciative punters, we were privileged to hear John Etheridge play with singer Vimala Rowe, accompanied by old pal, Dudley Phillips on bass and Mark Fletcher on drums. Our proximity to the performers was sometimes a bit un-nerving but the evening contained some extraordinary and evocative sounds, rhythms and songs. Catch them by searching for the albums in the collages below.

Dud's first album, Life Without Trousers and Rowe/Etheridge album (featuring Dud) Out of the Sky contains tracks we heard that night in the 606 Club

Stephen Fry riff

One of my favourite books about poetry is Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled and he explains London as similar in a way to the English Language:

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.

That’s “shameless whore” in a positive sense. Like London.

Top left is a mushroom starter by Betti and rest are at the Oxo tower

Like a scurvy politician

London

Recently returned from five days in London (which I’ll blog about soon) but the prime motivation for going at this time of year was to witness Glenda Jackson in Shakespeare’s King Lear at the Old Vic Theatre. I saw her last onstage in Peter Brook’s production of Antony and Cleopatra in Stratford-upon-Avon at the RSC in 1978 (aware that she was a double-Oscar winner for 1969’s Women in Love and 1973’s A Touch of Class. Since retiring from acting at the top of her game, she has been a member of the UK Parliament from 1992 to 2015 (23 years of honorably serving Hampstead and Highgate/Kilburn.) I am a fan of her film performances. As well as her Oscar-winning films and the TV series Elizabeth R, I thought she was equally brilliant in Hedda, Stevie, Triple Echo, Sunday Bloody Sunday, The Rainbow, The Music Lovers, Mary Queen of Scots {with Vanessa Redgrave} and The Patricia Neal Story.

Glenda Jackson from parliament to King Lear with Rhys Ifans as The Fool, Sargon Yelda as Kent and Morfydd Clark as Cordelia. Production photo credits: Manuel Harlan

Script as blueprint

Having seen King Lear with Sir Antony Sher recently, and blogged about it here, it was with some trepidation that I approached the play again so soon. I needn’t have worried – it was like a different play entirely, shorn of sentimentality, riven with intellectual decisions and riddled with disturbing and upsetting truths. Both productions were well worth seeing, in my view, though felt like entirely divergent works of art (as per Shakespeare’s genius and the way that any drama script is only a blueprint for theatrical interpretation.)

Lear: Glenda Jackson, Edmund: Simon Manyonda, Edgar: Harry Melling, Regan: Jane Horrocks, Cornwall: Danny Webb, Albany: William Chubb, Goneril: Celia Imrie, The Fool: Rhys Ifans, Ensemble/France: Matt Gavan, Gloucester: Karl Johnson. Production photo credits: Manuel Harlan

Like a scurvy politician

Any line in King Lear about power, ruling and politics had an extra resonance, given Glenda Jackson’s recent parliamentary career:

    Get thee glass eyes;    
And like a scurvy politician, seem    
To see the things thou dost not.

And the play’s devastating critique of the gap between rich and poor was fully potent in the mouths of actors like Glenda Jackson and Karl Johnson who played Gloucester:

So distribution should undo excess
And each man have enough.

Through tattered clothes great vices do appear;
Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks:
Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw does pierce it.

Harry Melling and Karl Johnson as Edgar and Gloucester; "I stumbled when I saw." Production photo credits: Manuel Harlan

Rage rage against the dying of the light

The Greg Doran production probably moved me more than this one by Deborah Warner, but this production made me think more angrily about the issues in the play. There were some theatrical and design decisions that were unsettling (probably intentionally so) and some performance moments that challenged my ideas about the play but as an experience it remained compelling to watch, probably intensified by sitting on the front row! The rest of the company all had their moments of stage glory but the abiding memory is of the towering performance by Glenda Jackson. This was a father raging against the dying of the light; a man who was frustrated that he was not being afforded the luxuries he expected to receive in his retirement; a king who discovered, alas too late, that his wilful rule had led to the most abject poverty (literal and metaphorical) in his kingdom. Glenda’s voice soared, swooped, growled, howled and machine-gunned every Shakespearean image and still left room for the soft caress of lines like

We two alone will sing like birds in the cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness; so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we'll talk with them too –
Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out
And take upon us the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies….

Unforgettable.

Rhys Ifans as The Fool and Glenda Jackson as Lear. Production photo credits: Manuel Harl