Not a very productive day, to put it mildly - I cancel our dental check-up and hygienist appointment at the dentist's, and get a new date in January 2021 : we're cowards, basically, let's face it! The new appointment for January makes us realise we haven't got a calendar for next year yet, so I quickly put one together from our photos of our family taken this year and last year.
On the cover we celebrate our 7-year-old granddaughter Jessie's winning of the school spelling bee over in Western Australia - spelling is a field of endeavour that Lois and I really understand: we were both good spellers ourselves, whereas our five grandchildren's other achievements, particularly those in the sporting arena, are totally incomprehensible to us - my god!
the front cover of the 14 x 22 inch wall calendar I order today from snapfish.co.uk
12:45 Lois and I are sitting in the front window having pilchards for lunch when Mark the Gardener comes to fertilize our lawns - the filthy beast! He charges £35, but we think it's worth it: we tend to get lots of moss otherwise.
16:00 Over our afternoon cup of tea and biscuits, Lois tells me she has heard on the radio that all the other countries in Europe are making a mess of the pandemic, just like us. Worried about rising infections, they are all uncertain whether to have a strict lockdown or continue to keep some things open or have some sort of mixture of the two. They are also finding out that their own "track and trace" programs don't work either, just like ours doesn't.
To listen to our radio sometimes you'd think it was just us that are screwing up - what madness!!!!
We decide, on balance, that it's good news that we Brits don't have a monopoly on incompetence and lack-of-direction, although we're not 100% sure - the jury's still out on that one. Steve, our brother-in-law in Pennsylvania USA recently sent us a story that similarly looks like bad news and good news at the same time:
It's a bit like the old classic problem: is the glass half full or half empty?
20:00 We watch a bit of TV, a documentary about Agatha Christie, and two of her most famous creations, Inspector Poirot and Miss Marple, to mark 100 years since Poirot's original appearance in her first novel, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" in 1920.
It's always interesting to find out about writers' lives, although Agatha Christie whodunnits are not really my cup of tea. It's more Lois who likes detective fiction, although not particularly Agatha Christie - she prefers Dorothy L Sayers, who has more interesting characters. We always feel that Christie's characters are just there for the purposes of taking the plot forward rather than anything else.
I think I'm too lazy to look carefully for all the clues in whodunnits, many of them red herrings, and I think "What's the point?". But then I remember my best friend at college, Paul, used to ask me why I did crosswords: he couldn't see the point of those. So it's just about what you enjoy really isn't it!
There are, however, some interesting nuggets of facts about Christie's life in this programme. Who knew that she was a nurse at a local hospital in World War I and got to be in charge of the pharmacy cupboard. This is why so many of the murder victims in her books were poisoned, apparently - makes sense!!!
It was Christie who invented a lot of what later became clichés of detective fiction: the spooky use of rhymes from children's stories to heighten the horror: "And Then There Were None", ""Five Little Pigs" etc. She also pioneered the use of 'closed environments', where the detective, the murderer and all the suspects or potential victims are stuck somewhere with no escape: an island, a train stuck in heavy snow, on a boat on the Nile etc.
Her most influential creation of all was the drawing-room scene at the end of the mystery, where all the suspects are gathered, and where the detective slowly uncovers what he believes to be the truth of what has happened, ending with the unmasking of the murderer.
I thank her for that invention - if only for the numerous amusing versions of the idea seen in the Clouseau films and elsewhere.
Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers) gives his version of the classic drawing-room "unmasking scene" in "The Pink Panther Strikes Again" (1976)
In this scene, watch out for Clouseau's classic opening gambit -
Clouseau: "I expect you're all wondering why I asked you here".
[...pause....]
(to white-haired old man) " What is your name?
White-haired old man: "I'm Chalk the gardener".
Clouseau: "And what is it that you do?"
White-haired old man, "I'm the gardener."
Clouseau: "Well, why didn't you tell me that in the first place?"
No wonder they used to call him the master detective!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment