09:45 Anyway, finally, still skirtless, we drive over to Cleeve Picture Framing to pick up another framed print of one of the abstracts painted by Lois's great-niece Molly.
We're not sure which way up the picture is supposed to be, so for this second print, we've done it the opposite way, just to cover all the bases haha!
an artist's impression of what Molly's picture might look like,
it it was turned the other way up
Then we go home - dodging the first signs of the race traffic. Unfortunately there's a 2-day race meeting starting today at Cheltenham Racecourse - damn !!!!!
10:30 It's really cold, but the sky is pretty blue and the sun is shining. We have a walk on the local football field and buy an orange-flavoured hot chocolate and flapjack at the Whiskers Coffee Stand from Monica, the blonde Polish waitress.
I reserve a seat on the so-called "Pirie Bench", while Lois
orders 2 hot-chocolates and a flapjack from Monica, the Polish waitress
we enjoy a hot-chocolate and flapjack on the so-called "Pirie Bench"
We've brought along our reusable "e-mugs", as usual, in order to "save the planet" - we carry the mugs around in our stylish "Ostsee" tote-bag, which we bought when on holiday, with our daughters at Weissenhauser Strand, Germany, in the early 1990's, which is on the Germany's Baltic coast - our daughters were learning German at the local grammar school at the time.
our Ostsee tote bag, a souvenir from the early 1990's
"Ostsee" is what the Germans call the Baltic Sea. So Lois asks Monica what the Poles call it. She says they call it the Baltic, which is a big relief - one less word to memorise if I ever decide to learn Polish haha!!!
Weissenhauser Strand, Germany, on the "Ostsee" coast
flashback to summer 1992: me having a drink on our North German holiday
summer 1992: Lois playing mini-golf in North Germany
- how young she looks!
16:00 We sit on the sofa and enjoy a snail-bun with our extra-strong Earl Grey teas and discuss our meal strategy. We're "sitting on" (not literally) too many ready-meals. We bought 16 of them in October, thinking that our daughter Alison and family were going to be visiting us for a couple of days, but they had to cancel. And we've still got 4 Thai Curry meals and 8 lasagne meals that we haven't got round to yet.
This surplus of ready meals - what we call an EU-style "Ready-meal Mountain" - is now becoming a big liability because they're taking up too much space in our freezer. And we've got more meals being delivered on Monday - the Christmas food we've ordered for ourselves, in case we're not able to travel to Alison's for Christmas.
Anyway it's going to be Thai curry again tonight and then lasagne for the foreseeable future.
What madness!!
16:15 I look at my smartphone. Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, has sent me a Blikk Magazine article containing a video of actress Judi Dench - described as James Bond's boss - reciting a Hungarian poem - "Nem tudhatom" or "I cannot know", written by Miklós Radnóti, who died during World War II.
It's wartime and the poet is thinking about the district where he was born and grew up, and thinking how different it appears to an enemy bomber pilot. Here's the text in an English version:
I
cannot know…
I cannot know what this land means to other people.
For me, it is my birthplace, this little nation embraced
by flames, the world of my childhood rocking in the distance.
I grew out of her like a tender branch from a tree
and I hope one day my body will sink into her.
I am at home. And if a shrub happens to kneel down
beside my foot, I know both its name and its flower;
I know who walks on the road and where they are going,
and what it might mean when in the summer sunset
the house-walls shimmer and drip with crimson-agony.
For one who flies above, this land is merely a map,
and does not know where lived Vörösmarty Mihály,
what does this map hold for him? factories and wild barracks;
but for me crickets, oxen, steeples, peaceful homesteads;
he sees factories in his lenses and cultivated meadows,
while I see the worker too, who for his work trembles.
Forests, singing orchards, grapes and cemeteries,
among the graves an old woman who quietly weeps.
And what seem from above train tracks to destroy
is a conductor's house and he stands outside and signals;
many kids surround him, a red flag in his hand,
and in the courtyard a komondor rolls in the sand;
and there's the park, the footsteps of long-lost loves,
the kisses on my mouth both honey and cranberry.
And walking off to school on the edge of the road,
to avoid being called on, I stepped on a stone;
look, here's the stone, but from above, this cannot be seen,
there is no machine with which all this can be revealed.
For we are guilty too, as other peoples are,
knowing full-well when and how and why we've sinned so far,
but workers live here too, and poets, without sin
and tiny babies in whom intellect will flourish;
it shines in them and they guard it, hiding in dark cellars
until the finger of peace once again marks our nation,
and with fresh voices they will answer our muffled words.
Cover us with your big wings, vigil-keeping evening
cloud.
Gina Gönczi
What a moving poem - it's really quite striking - no wonder Judi took a shine to it.
flashback to 1971: a young Judi Dench reciting
Miklós Radnóti's poem "Nem tudhatom" ("I cannot know")
It's actually one of the more trivial elements in the poem about "walking off to school on the edge of the road, to avoid being called on, I stepped on a stone", which resonates with me. I remember that before walking into the woodwork room at school I always used to touch the radiator outside the door at a particular spot, so as to "ensure" that I wouldn't be shouted at by our terrifying woodwork teacher, who typically didn't seem to like my tenon joints, for example. And I used to touch the same spot on the radiator again at the end of the lesson, when we all trooped out.
A powerful spell - and it worked (almost) every time haha!!!
flashback to 1958: me at my "woodwork" year at grammar school
(back row, 2nd from right) - happy days !!!!!!
20:00 We watch an interesting documentary on the Sky Arts channel, all about film-star Buster Keaton (1895-1966).
Who knew that Buster Keaton started his show-biz life as a toddler, as part of his parents' vaudeville act The Three Keatons? And who knew that he got his nickname "Buster" at an incredibly early age, after Harry Houdini, no less, saw the young lad being thrown about by his father, both on and off stage? Apparently, in those far-off days, a "buster" was a fall or accident that could really damage you. My god!!!!
Lois and I mainly think of Buster as the stony-faced guy in the silent movie where the front wall of a house falls on him, but he stays standing because there happens to be an open window on the exact part of the house that hits him.
We didn't realise he was such an inventive guy, who was into directing as well as acting, and who invented most of today's camera-tricks singlehandedly.
We see excerpts from his 1921 film "The Playhouse", where he plays all the parts in a show and even in the audience (apart from the women). That would be old hat today but it was ground-breaking at the time, that's for sure.
We see probably hundreds of pictures of Buster during this documentary, and he's got his "stony face" on in every single one. How did they manage that? Lois wonders if he was even stony-faced at home with his 3 successive wives, and was he stony-faced in bed?
And who knew that he was one of the few silent movie stars to make it unscathed into the talkies era? Apparently he had a good, strong, if stony, voice that seemed to match his stony face.
Here we see him in an early talkie, playing a seated professor talking to a young blonde dancer who's been showing him her stuff -
Tremendous fun !!!!
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