I remember reading all my Shakespeare at school and being taken to Stratford to see two plays and watching videos of various productions and being struck by the whole ‘ethos’ that has arisen around the plays. Every generation must realise them anew, and some new productions are startlingly good though most are drab and uninventive…
Month: January 2011
Men’s Fashion
So today I bought online pair of jeans for the princely sum of £120. probably the most expensive trousers I have ever bought but I plead the rip I didn’t know about in my old trousers, which I have been walking around in for a few days. Wearing the same clothes for three days in…
Where Stories Come From
For generations there was a strongly held belief in the Music of the Spheres. In Hindu beliefs there are states of mind when one can actually hear the music, but in the original Pythagorean concept there was an order to the planets that was mystical. There is an allied belief in Judaism about the states…
Too Much
I remember when I was around eleven years old I used to come in from school and put on the TV and watch the young children’s programmes, then mine, and not get up until the news came on. I was a year away from exams and I came home one day and the TV had…
Queenie-Colleen
During my mother’s illness she was constantly asking for a puppy she could look after and hold whilst she was bed bound and she particularly wanted a rough collie, because one of the first dogs she ever knew had been a rough collie called Scottie. The first one we found we lost because I couldn’t…
Laugh For Twenty-Five Minutes
I remember when mum was homeless for six months and she took a chalet over the winter to live in. She had an old black and white TV on which every week she watched a British sitcom called It Aint Half Hot Mum. There were times when it was very funny. This was years after…
The Roadmender
This is a short book written by Michael Fairless who supposedly lived rough in the early 1900s. One of the stories in it is about a young Irish couple, poor but happy and how the man sits beneath an autumn tree with his future wife and promises her a wedding dress and throws all around…
2,000 Years Ago
I remember many years ago waxing lyrical as a student about the glories of Greece and the lesser glories of Rome when someone turned and said they couldn’t have much respect for slave cultures. As someone who had loved the story of Spartacus and thought the two lines he was given in the syllabus a…
Junk History
I have not written a large amount of historical work but the scripts and plays I have done have been guided by my adherence to known history. Having just watched 300 and seen the ludicrous computer generated battles I smiled, but the speeches were next to awful in as far as they made the Spartans…
Fame
When communities are small there is hardly room for fame because everyone knows everyone else anyway. And as communities grow from valley to valley or place to place names may be well known of people who are special in some way or of use, but the kind of fame we accept as fame today would…