Danskcolin: Thursday August 31st 2023

We wake up and realise we were so eager to get to bed last night that we forgot to look out the window to maybe see the so-called "Blue Moon". Damn! And tonight looks like it's going to be cloudy, so no chance then either - damn (again) !!!

Will Lois and I be around in 2037 when the next one comes round? Well, the jury's still out on that one! [I wouldn't call it as uncertain as all that haha! - Ed]

And all in all it's been a yucky day today weather-wise with the cold rainy weather set to continue into the evening.

Nothing for it for Lois and me but to skulk inside. Lois makes a start on answering her mountain of emails she hasn't replied to, while I work a bit more on my so-called presentation on Elizabethan English that I'm supposed to be giving to Lynda's local U3A "Making of English" group in just over a month's time.

Yikes, that date keeps getting nearer !!!! [Well, it's hardly likely to be getting further away now, is it! Be fair!!! - Ed]

I keep finding it more interesting facts, though, even though I'm not making much progress overall with my talk [I'll be the judge of how interesting these so-called "facts" are! - Ed]

Originally, when people saw a cherry on top of a little cake, they said "Ooh look, there's 'a cherries' on top. Yum yum!" - because our English word comes from the French word "cerise", but then, as the word 'cherries' ends in the letter 's' which normally indicates a plural, they eventually decided to invent a new "singular" form: "a cherry".

a typical cake with a cherry on top,

or should it be "a cherries" ???

And it was the same thing with a few other words like this, for example "a sherries" (a drink of sherry, from the Spanish place-name Jerez). People would originally say, in a pub or bar, "Can I have/get a sherries please?", but eventually they decided it sounded more sensible just to ask for "a sherry", meaning one glass of sherry.

a young woman drinking a typical sherry,

or should it be "a typical sherries"???

What a madness it all was! Thank goodness those days are over, don't you agree! It must have been a complete nightmare haha!

16:00 A text comes in from our daughter Sarah who's on a nostalgic holiday by Lake Coniston with husband Francis, and their 10-year-old twins Lily and Jessica. Today they've been reliving their wedding day by taking a trip on the lake on board the vintage steam yacht "The Gondola" - the same trip they took immediately after getting married at Brantwood House, the former home of Victorian artist John Ruskin.

Our daughter Sarah with husband Francis and the twins

take a rid on "The Gondola"

It's not only nostalgic for Sarah and Francis, but particularly thrilling also for Jessica, who recently finished reading Arthur Ransome's classic children's 1930's novel "Swallows and Amazons", which revolves round a group of children and their sailing holiday around this very same lake. I knows how she feels because I read the book myself when I was about her age.

Jessica revels in imagining the lakeside scenes from the classic

children's 1930's novel "Swallows and Amazons", set around this lake

Flashback to June 2010, and Sarah and Francis's wedding, followed by a ride on "The Gondola".

Happy days !!!!!

20:00 Lois and I unwind on the couch with an interesting documentary about the making of the classic post-World War II film, "The Third Man", starring Orson Welles as the shady American racketeer Harry Lime working in the grim Vienna of 1949. The film also stars Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins, a writer of Western fiction, who comes to Vienna to see his friend Harry.

A lot of people had a hand in this film, something which can ruin a film, but somehow the film managed to survive all the differences of opinion, luckily! It was directed by Carol Reed and Hungarian emigré Alexander Korda, script by British author Graham Greene, with producer David O. Selznick trying to control things remotely, from Hollywood, and actor Orson Welles monkeying with the script. My goodness - what a mess it could have been!

Luckily they had a ready-made film set: Vienna as it actually was in 1949 - all dark, shadowy and thoroughly grim, with unlit alleyways, bombed-out buildings and piles of rubble in the streets etc.

American racketeer in Vienna, Harry Lime (Orson Welles, right)

with his friend, the writer of Western fiction Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten)

opening scenes from the film "The Third Man" (1949)

In the story, American racketeer Harry Lime appears as thoroughly "Europeanized", while his friend Holly Martins, who visits Lime from the US isn't "Europeanized" and doesn't understand how things work in a society and city broken down and degraded, physically, morally and socially - the way many of the Axis countries like Austria, and the former Nazi-occupied countries tended to be, just after the war ended.

In the words of tonight's presenter, Sky Arts Channel film critic Ian Nathan, "People didn't live, they survived".

In this respect Limes' friend in the story, the writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), together with the two British military police officers (played by Trevor Howard and Bernard Lee) together represent "us", the film's Anglosphere audience in Britain and North America, who only knew conventional moral standards, and hadn't experienced at first hand degradation like that of post-war Vienna.

Bernard Lee (later 'M' in the James Bond films), and Trevor Howard,

play the parts of British military policemen serving in post-war Vienna

Orson Welles was a bit of a problem during filming, we hear tonight. He didn't always turn up for scheduled filming sessions, and a production staff member had to "double" for him on occasion - filmed from behind, naturally. And, after trying it once, Welles refused to take part in any more scenes shot in the Viennese sewers, which Welles claimed was "unhygienic", and Lois and I can see what he meant - my goodness yes!

Eventually the directors had to build a "sewer" set in London, just to film the remaining scenes in the sequence. What a madness THAT was !!!!

Welles also liked to put his own little flourishes to the script, and he improvised the famous "cuckoo clock" speech which the director decided to keep in the film's final cut.

Unfortunately, the Swiss didn't like Welles's little improvisation, and they pointed out that no cuckoo clocks were ever made in Switzerland - they were all made in Bavaria, apparently.

What madness (again) !!!!

But fascinating stuff !!!!!

An important element in the film's atmosphere and in its success with audiences, was the haunting "Third Man Theme" played on the zither by Austrian musician, Anton Karas. Unlikely as it may seem, Lois saw a performance by Karas in an English pub in the 1960's, when she was about 20.

And this performance was in Bournemouth, the English seaside resort on the south coast, of all places.

Karas was taking requests from the crowd in the pub, and Lois asked the then 60-year-old performer for a rendition of "Zorba the Greek", she remembers.