Thursday, 22 June 2023

Wednesday June 21st 2023

Hurrah - it's midsummer's day at last, which means 16 hours and 38 minutes of daylight in the UK. What a strange thing it is, and what a crazy planet we live on. The radio says the sun rose at 4: 38 am this morning right up in the extreme north of the UK, in Lerwick, Shetlands. 

sunrise at Mousa, Shetlands

Yikes!

And as Lois and I remember well, midsummer's day is a particularly big deal in Denmark, where our daughter Alison and her family spent 6 years from 2012 to 2018. Lois and I visited them several times during their stay in Copenhagen, and ever since I've tried to keep up with the latest news from Gentofte, the suburb where they lived. 


flashback to June 2015: in sunny Denmark of the blue skies and blue sea, 
Lois with our daughter Alison and our 3 grandchildren, 
Josie, Rosalind and Isaac  - awwwww, how little they were in those days!!!

Every June 21st, the Danes light bonfires and burn witches on them - not real ones, though, which is probably wise haha! 

However, in some parts of Denmark the authorities have been considering whether to ban bonfires this year because of the risk of wildfires - the weather has been predominantly dry of late. But in Gentofte, at least, it looks like the celebration of "Sankhansaften" (Midsummer Night, literally St John's Night), complete with the midsummer night bonfires ("Sankthansbål"), will go ahead as normal, which is nice!


Here's a picture of a previous year's Midsummer Bonfire at Gentofte:


13:00 After a sausage-dominated lunch, Lois and I relax on the sofa with a cup of tea, and I look at my smartphone. There's an email that's come in from Steve, our American brother-in-law, with two items of bad news for the UK from The Guardian website today. 
Oh dear! And Lois and I aren't sure, to tell the truth, which of these 2 items is the worse news: and it may be that it depends on whether you're going to attend the Glastonbury Music Festival or not - that could be the crucial decider here. But what do YOU think? Answers on a postcard, needless to say!

I don't think Lois and I will be going, but I know that 2 of my "new" second-cousins will definitely be going: and they've been trying out their new tent in the back garden of their house in Woodstock, Oxfordshire. They are the sons of my "new" cousin David, who was discovered to be a cousin of mine only a couple of years ago, after results of his DNA test showed him to be a close relative of my sister Gill. He was actually the son of our Auntie Joan, and adopted at an early age.

my 2 "new" second-cousins try out their Glastonbury tent this week 
in their back garden at Woodstock, helped by their mum, David's wife Zanne

Some concerned friends and relatives of the family have messaged David to ask if he and Zanne are going to be going to be with their sons at Glastonbury, but David has replied to the effect that "I don't think that would be go down too well!". Oh dear - but I can imagine!

NB: Me (born 1946) and David (born 1959), the boys' father: how we are related -
I'm not sure if Lois and I could contemplate sleeping in a tent at Glastonbury. We've never ever experienced it in a tent, although we did sleep in the back of my Morris Oxford estate car a few times when I was just a poor student. The British weather isn't always suitable for sleeping under canvas, to put it mildly. 

However I did sleep in a tent a few times during my student year in Japan (1971), in a wood and even on a beach.


me by the beach where I once slept in a tent - yikes!!!!

flashback to 1971: my crazy camping days in Japan

To sum up [Thank you, I thought we'd never get to this point! - Ed] Lois and I may not be going to Glastonbury this year, so it's possible we won't necessarily be able to keep an eye on my cousin David's two sons either - but if we do go, we're planning to try and buy our way into the deluxe sound-proof tent, unveiled in Chicago the other day by the Lollapalooza people, according to a story on the influential American news website, Onion News. 

CHICAGO—Saying the new pass offered the perfect option for those looking to attend the festival in comfort and style, Lollapalooza organizers unveiled a new air-conditioned, soundproof tent expressly catering to people who definitely shouldn’t have come to this.

“Our new Platinum Lux Pass allows individuals who have absolutely no place in a hot, crowded music festival like Lollapalooza to come here anyway without ever having to deal with the hassle of hearing music or getting anywhere close to the crowd,” said Charlie Jones, co-owner of the festival, noting that, for only £5,000 per day, attendees would be able to skip the entry lines entirely and instead be whisked directly into a climate-controlled, insulated room that had been expressly designed for people who don’t want to hear live music and almost certainly should not be here.

“Whether you’re too sensitive to sound to conceivably enjoy the experience of listening to music for hours on end or you’re a new parent who realizes taking their overheated child to the festival was an enormous mistake, the Platinum Lux Pass makes sure you can come to Lollapalooza without once hearing a band or encountering anything resembling a music festival experience.”

Jones added that an add-on for £500 would allow guests to have a Lollapalooza volunteer drape a 'tarp' over them the moment they entered the venue so they would never have to interact, even with any of the other people who've also booked the Platinum Lux Tent.

What do YOU think? It's definitely the way to go for us, we believe! And if we do "take the plunge", we've already got our choice of Glastonbury festival "gear" worked out - particularly with the showers that Steve says are forecast today in the Guardian.

We've decided to go with the yellow plastic mac and the natty, blue rain hat "look" favoured by one determined elderly festival-goer spotted by the TV cameras on Saturday, on the final evening of the Isle of Wight Festival, during Blondie's "set" (see picture below).


Summer pop festivals are also a big deal in Denmark, as you can imagine, and each year the Danish press is full of articles about some of the high jinks that go on there. I won't tell my cousin David about these - there's no point in worrying him and Zanne unnecessarily, now,  is there haha!


festival tents at a typical Danish campsite
during the famous annual pop festival at Roskilde

19:00 After dinner, we watch the latest programme in Michael Portillo's new series of "Great British Railway Journeys".


Tonight, Michael is travelling from Manchester to Oldham and from there to Sheffield and Wakefield, crossing the Pennine Mountains from Lancashire, through Derbyshire, and into Yorkshire.


In Oldham, Michael visits the town's Coliseum Theatre, built in 1885. It's one of the oldest theatres still operating in the UK. where he talks to the one-time Theatre Manager, David Rustidge.


I had forgotten that, incredibly, until 1968, all stage performances in the UK had to be passed through a "decency" check by the Lord Chamberlain's Office, part of the Royal Household, in a centuries old legal, and pretty arbitrary, process. Plays were never censored for political content, I'm glad to say - they just had any sexual explicitness cut out. But what a madness it all was!

Lois and I certainly ought to have remembered about all that, because in 1969, in the heady days after Parliament's passing of the Theatres Act, which abolished the censorship, I was invited to a job interview at ICI in London. 

Lois came with me to London on the train, and in the evening we went to a performance of the musical "Hair" at the Shaftesbury Theatre - a show that the Lord Chamberlain would have "had kittens about", if he had had the chance to see it, that's for sure!



In tonight's programme, Michael talks to the Coliseum Theatre's former manager, David Rustidge about the days when censorship was still operating. Rustidge says the theatre had great difficulties putting on a couple of plays in particular, Arthur Miller's "A View from the Bridge" (1955), and also Robert Anderson's "Tea and Sympathy" (1953).







I don't know - what a crazy world they lived in, back in the 1950's and 60's !!!!

And Rustidge recalls that, at the Coliseum, Oldham, they celebrated the passing of the Act with a performance of "Suddenly Last Summer" by Tennessee Williams, for which the theatre was "absolutely packed" - they had managed to get the then star of the TV soap "Coronation Street", Pat Phoenix to play the lead part that Liz Taylor had played in the film. 

The dangers to free expression aren't over, though, and nowadays the danger of censorship comes from the so-called "Cancel Culture". 

Oh dear! Chris Lawson, the Theatre's Artistic Director, tells Michael that the lack of the old "morality" censorship has given way to a kind of self-editing, when you're looking at older texts, where perhaps the content and the language, and society's perspective on it all, has changed.




I know that Lois and I prefer to see plays as they were written, however, warts and all, because we are interested in history and the way ideas change. And we don't mind the inevitable "health warnings" - we put up with those - as long as they keep the play the way it was conceived, so that we can find out exactly what was in the writer's mind, thank you very much! 

Call us old fuddy-duddies if you like haha!!!!

20:00 Lois disappears into the kitchen to take part in her church's weekly Bible Class on zoom.

Lois disappears into the kitchen to take part in
her church's weekly Bible Class on zoom

I settle down on the couch and watch the first few minutes of a bunch of films that have been on TV in the last week or two - I'm actually "road-testing" them for Lois and me to watch in full later, if I decide that they're any good.

It's always nice to see films about slightly older people isn't it! [Speak for yourself! - Ed]. And this one's a possible for us to watch later, I think. 

It's all about an older woman (in her early 50's?), Gloria, who likes dancing and disco music,  who's recently got divorced, and has a son and daughter in their early 20's maybe, both with their own problems. And guess what - she's looking for love, which is always a nice theme, isn't it!

On the minus side, a lot of the film's scenes are poorly lit - which is a particular bugbear of Lois and of me too. Still, you can't have everything, can you.





What can I say? The film is all really believable, with its successions of short-sequence scenes depicting divorcee Gloria's busy life working for a car insurance company, dealing with claims and phone-calls during the day, then going to discos on her own in the evenings looking out for possible future husbands or partners, plus her unsatisfactory attempts to stay close to her grown-up son Peter and daughter Annie, who have other preoccupations and are always looking at their phones when she's talking to them.

her son Peter is always looking at his phone, when Gloria
visits him and tries to talk to him about his love life

I can see that for people in Gloria's position, new affairs are always slightly hampered by their old lives - the sons and daughters from their previous relationship and the ex-partners themselves, of course. 

Gloria meets a guy called Arnold and they really hit it off, both on the dance-floor and in bed. And they have great conversations in bed. In this one, Gloria tells him what she read in the science section of her newspaper about cell renewal. 


She tells him, "Our bodies, even middle-aged bodies, are less than 10 years old. And with our skin, the epidermis is recycled every 2 weeks. With our bones, the human skeleton is replaced every 10 years, and each organ renews itself at a separate rate!" 

Memo to self: I must remember to tell Lois all that. Although, sometimes I think we both feel we are in urgent need of a FACTORY REBOOT, and quickly!

Things don't go 100% smoothly between Gloria and Arnold, however, needless to say. Arnold decides to keep his affair with Gloria a secret from his ex-wife and children, which makes Gloria feel like they're doing something "dirty".




Gloria, however, takes the opposite approach,  trying to involve Arnold with her dealings with her son and daughter. This inevitably brings Arnold also into contact with Gloria's ex-husband, and though Arnold agrees to come along to Gloria's son's birthday party, he feels out of it when everybody starts talking about their memories of their lives when they were all together as a family. 

Oh dear, it's hard to get it right, isn't it!

At the party, Gloria and her ex-husband start looking at old family photos of the kids growing up, and Arnold just sits there in silence looking completely out of it.

Birthday party for Gloria's son Peter (centre): Gloria and her ex-husband
looking at old photos, while her new love, Arnold (right) watches her in silence 

Poor Arnold !!!!!

21:30 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we decide to make it an early night, and go up to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!


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