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ROGER
& FRANS PAGES |
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OLD DIARY ENTRY
WEEK ENDING 6th APRIL 2008
MY WEEK
HAPPY BIRTHDAY FRAN - 6th APRIL
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The weather improved this week and I even managed to get in a little gardening after work now the evenings are a bit longer. Sadly the prospect for next week is snow ! I spent two days in London and managed to visit Stevenage, Northampton and Cambridge - and surprisingly even spent one whole morning in my local office at Bracknell ! During the course of the week I also managed to visit my Mum twice, she is rapidly improving and apart from the sling you wouldn't know she had been so poorly. When I called in on Monday my cousin Helen was there, up from deepest Devon to see her auntie. Another piece of good news this week was the return of my 18-135 camera lens from the repairers - so now I can go snap happy again. Apart from the travelling it was a fairly quiet week overall, until Friday when a gang of us went out to lunch from work - to Black & White, a steak restaurant in Wigmore Street (London). We stayed too long, drank too much wine and didn't get back to work afterwards ! I did make it home in good time though because Friday night was Fran's Christmas Present ! |
Matthew Bourne - Nutcracker |
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James, Liz, Rich and Matthew |
For Christmas I had bought Fran tickets for a box at The Theatre Royal, Woking to see Matthew Bourne's version of The Nutcracker. The box had four seats so we met up with Jacky & Colin for a glass of wine before going in (more wine!).
The ballet was fantastic. Matthew Bourne seems to have a magic touch when
he re-writes classic ballets. They turn out so vibrant, busy, spectacular and
beautiful. This was no exception. The twists to the plot were fairly
minor by his standards - it was still a young girls Christmas evening dream sequence about a toy soldier
nutcracker. The twists were that it was sited in an
orphanage run by a clearly evil couple who had two spoiled and rather nasty
children. The Christmas tree scene almost happened, but was much more
macabre than the popular classic choreography. The nutcracker soldier was hijacked by the
daughter of the evil couple, making it an unpleasant dream for the poor young
girl - but it all came right in the end. The dances
of the sweets were brilliant - particularly the liquorice allsorts and the sugar plum fairies who strutted
about looking like lost flamingo's. Colin and I spiced up the
break for the girls by laying on vintage champagne in the box - but on top of a
bottle of Rioja at lunch time and a large glass of Shiraz before the performance
this tipped the scales for me and by the time I got home I had a splitting headache - rare
for me but clearly a mix of too much and too many different types of wine.
Luckily I slept like a log and it was better in the morning. |
| Saturday morning we up an about quite early and I
managed to clean out the interior of my car, which had been in danger of
resembling a shed on wheels. We did our good neighbourly
deed for the week when Catherine from next door declared that her
washing machined was deceased. She and David came and used our
facilities while they awaited delivery of a new machine.
Rich, Liz, James and Matthew arrived mid morning and stayed through till mid afternoon. Rich brought food and cooked us lunch - a birthday treat for his Mum. The kids had great fun and the cats still haven't come out of hiding ! The evening was quiet, reading and making cakes. Sunday was Fran's birthday - we woke at 7 to a roll of thunder outside. It was blitzing it down with snow and at it's peak it was well over an inch deep - but by 10am it was showing clear signs of disappearing fast. Luckily Fran had persuaded me on Saturday night to move our little Star Magnolia (which lives in a big pot) under cover. It has been beautiful this year and still has loads of buds - so I hope that saving it from the snow will preserve it's show this Spring. Luckily the snow melted really quickly and by
11am we had collected Jacky & Colin and were motoring Northward around
the M25 heading for La Bella Vista restaurant in Hitchin.
We arrived at Giorgio's restaurant just about half past noon - a
wonderful place, which we have used intermittently for the last twenty
five years. |
Sunday morning |
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Jenn, Fran, Jacky and Colin |
Today's event was Frans Birthday Lunch - which her sister Jenn had organised. We sat and ate olives and drank gently for half an hour or so until the Munjee Bunch arrived. When they did come Jenn & Suj brought Gillian, Becca,
Tommy and Marley. (Becca and the kids are here on a short break
from their home in Lanzarotte) We all settled down to sumptuous
and well wined lunch. Unfortunately Frans other sister, Christine,
was unwell so she and her husband David were unable to join us for
lunch. |
Tommy, Matthew and James playing |
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 Tommy Marley and James helping Fran blow out her candles |
We finished about half past three and wandered back to
Jenn & Suj's home for coffee and Fran's birthday cake. We were
soon joined there by Rich & Liz with James and Matthew.
Matty was very shy of all the adults and kept fairly quiet while in
their company; but James was off with Tommy and Marley and roaring round
upstairs with them before most of us had a chance to say hallo to him !
Matthew opened up to his normal boisterous self when I eventually
carried him upstairs to see what his brother was doing. The
four kids had a wonderful time playing together while the adults had an
amiable chat downstairs. All too soon it was time for us to leave. Rich, Liz, James and Matthew stayed for tea with their cousins (I'm sure they are not technically all cousins, but Becca and Richard certainly are). We bade them farewell and set our course back to Chertsey with Jax & Col. The M25 was in a fairly awful state so we diverted off it and had a nice country jaunt through Middlesex with lovely views of The Thames before we arrived. Then Fran and I drove on to Bracknell for a quiet evening in. Next week has several commitments scheduled into the diary, the saddest of which is likely to be Grahame White's funeral on Monday. |
THE WORLD'S WEEK
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The Ugly Duckling - now a swan |
Art Nice
surprise for 74 year old Valerie Tarantolo who was re-visiting our fair
shores from her adopted home in America. While browsing through an
art gallery in Cheltenham she came across one of the final pictures
painted by Frank Cadogan Cowper -
the last of the pre-Raphaelite painters. It was a picture called
"The Ugly Duckling", which she had last seen when she modelled for it at
the age of sixteen - almost sixty years ago. She said that she had
been disappointed with the picture at the time, but I can now see that
he had caught a good likeness. A Way With Words The Bulwer-Lytton competition is attracting lots of great entries. Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton was a nineteenth century writer famous for his awful plots and bad cliché's. One of his best known openings is the famous "It was a dark and stormy night...." Now there is an annual competition for clichéd opening sentences to imaginary novels named after him. I reproduce at the bottom of this page some of last years crop which I culled from The Metro newspaper. Only in America Thomas Beatie of Bend in Oregon claims to be five months pregnant. Most of the media suspects that he will probably be exposed as a publicity seeking fake, but his claim isn't totally beyond the realms of possibility because Tom was until recently known as Tracy Lagondino, and is currently undergoing gender reassignment therapy. He has still retained his female organs, and although In theory the heavy doses of testosterone should have prevented a pregnancy, he is still biologically a woman. |
Roger 06/04/08
EDWARD GEORGE EARL BULWER-LYTTON - R.I.P.
Vile Puns - Winner: I was in a back alley in Fiji, fighting desperately and silently for my life, fighting desperately for oxygen, clawing at the calm and almost gentle pressure of the fabric held over my face by implacable ebony thighs when I realised - he was killing me softly with his sarong.
Science Fiction runner up : Racing through space at unimaginable speeds, Capt Dimwell could only imagine how fast his spaceship was going
Historical Fiction Winner: Samson looked in the mirror and, when he saw what a fantastic haircut Delilah had given him, he went weak at the knees.
Another Science Fiction runner up: "So that was your Earth emotion 'love'," gasped Zyxwlyxgwr Noopar, third in line to the holo-throne of S-6, as he hosed down his trunk and removed the shallots.
General fiction : The small boat pitched violently upon the heaving bosom of the ocean, causing Johnson to reflect that although he generally liked bosoms, he was getting really tired of the ocean's bosom and wished that it would at least drop from a 44D to a 34B.
And finally - Detective Fiction : I'd been tailing this guy for over an hour while he tried every trick in the book to lose me: going down side streets, doubling back, suddenly veering into shop doorways, jumping out again, crossing the street, looking for somewhere to make the drop, and I was going to be there when he did it because his disguise as a postman didn't have me fooled for a minute.
