Have you ever thought how difficult it is to be on a panel of judges, on something like the Best-Dressed Victorian Engineers Award, an event held in Paris in 1858?
(1) the Justices of the US Supreme Court, showing their sense of humour by
dressing up as the panel of judges for the Best-dressed
Victorian Engineers Awards for the 1858 contest, held in Paris...
....and (2) the 1858 winner, Isambard Kingdom Brunel,
played here by Brunel himself
But stop and think! It's a thankless task being a judge on one of these panels, though, isn't it. Come on, be honest!
And if you don't agree, well, just think back to 1999, and those controversial Tri-County Agribusiness Awards in Oklahoma City, the ones that created such a storm of protest. Do you remember local man Deak Cumberland's hard-hitting assessment, as reported in Onion News. Yes? Well, now I think you'll see what I mean!
Yes, it's hard being a judge, no doubt about that - there's always somebody who thinks you've made the wrong choice.
No wonder that when I wake up this morning in our cosy bed in Malvern, before we do anything else, I have to share with Lois the feeling of utter, utter, imminent doom in my head.
You see, I've been selected to be the sole judge [my italics and bold format] on a one-person panel for an important world contest today, the World's Best-Dressed Barbie Contest: both of our twin granddaughters Lily and Jessica are finalists, together with their besties from their recent 7 years in Australia (2015-2023) - Samara and Gianna.
flashback to yesterday: mine and Lois's twin granddaughters,
Jessica (left) and Lily, working on their entries for the final
How can I possibly choose the winner today, without leading to one little girl being ecstatic but leaving three other little girls sobbing - that's my dilemma!
After chewing it over in bed with Lois, my solution is to avoid declaring an overall winner, and instead to substitute four so-called "categories": awards for (1) Best Beach-chic (2) Overall elegance (3) Cutting-edge Design and (4) Sophistication.
See? And strangely, each of the four finalists gets an award in one or other of the categories.
And that's... how you do it. Not exactly "Solomon-level" difficulty. "Simples", really, isn't it!
flashback to June 2021: the twins (centre), still living in Perth,
Western Australia, photographed here with their "besties"
- Samara (right) and her Samara's little sister, Gianna (left)
how the results were flashed out to a waiting world
via our daughter Sarah's smartphone: picture
also shows Gianna's winning entry in the "Best Beach-chic" category
10:00 Today turns out to be easier than anticipated after that. I usually drive Lois to her church's Sunday Morning Meeting at Ashchurch Village Hall on Sunday mornings, but Lois's back isn't in a good state - probably all that work as a sewing coach yesterday, so she wants to give the meeting a miss this week.
flashback to yesterday: Lois (right) and our daughter Sarah,
passing on some seamstress "wrinkles" to our twin granddaughters
Instead, we can see the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph in London. It's nice to see all the surviving Prime Ministers again, and the royals of course; but I have to say I still find it weird that the late Queen isn't there. I think it's going to take time "for the penny to really drop" - both Lois and I are old enough to remember watching her coronation on tiny 9 inch screen black-and-white TV, back in 1953. Oh yes, let me tell you haha!
Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson, Theresa May, David Cameron,
Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and John Major at the cenotaph this morning
13:00 Then comes lunch - ragu with spaghetti followed by a home-made nectarine and blueberry galette for dessert.
flashback to earlier this morning - Lois's galette
What a woman I married! Despite her incipient backache, she spent most of yesterday helping the twins with their sewing, and today she's been busy in the kitchen, producing this delicious nectarine and blueberry galette.
[Nigella Lawson writes: a galette is just a fancy way of saying, "This is a pie, but don't get your hopes up!" Here, it's all thrown together. Suits me! ]
14:00 No wonder Lois wants to go to bed this afternoon and have a nap. All of us adults are totally exhausted, in fact, so for an hour or two, we leave the inexhaustibly inventive twins to their own devices - their endless fascination with arts and crafts, and with reading books.
Lois is a member of the local Malvern County Library, which gives her the right to take out 12 books at any one time. In practice all 12 titles are always taken up by books for the twins - no surprise there. Just look at the recent email we got from the library, if you're sceptical.
But we're pleased that the twins are so into reading. It's helped them in a lot of ways, we think. It helped them when they were being home-schooled out in the sticks or "out in the boonies", for their last couple of years in Australia (2021-3), and it's helped again during the upheaval of adjusting to an English school last month and coping with all the different ways of doing things etc.
flashback to the beginning of September: the twins
prepare to go to their first ever English school
in their new school uniforms
16:00 Time to say goodbye to Sarah and the twins till next weekend. The family is having to get used to a lot about England and latitude 52 (north) in a very short time; the big thing at the moment is the cold and damp, and the shortening days. Days don't vary much in length in Perth - it's pretty much the same all year round. They don't have to bother with "daylight saving" and all that kind of malarkey, which is nice!
And the Australian "winter" is pretty much like our summer, so it's quite a challenge for them to watch the weather slowly deteriorating in November, like it always does here.
Sarah wants to leave here by 4 pm, but even so, she tells us later that it's already dark by the time they get home to Alcester.
goodbye to Sarah and the twins till next weekend
21:00 Lois and I, on our own again, wind down for bed with the first in a series of 3 programmes about the Bard of Avon.
But he was very "driven", determined about what he wanted to do, and so, at the age of 23, he felt he had to leave his beloved wife Anne and their 3 children behind in quiet little Stratford-upon-Avon, to go to what must have been the very frightening world of 16th century London, with its filth and squalor, its recurrent plagues, and its crime and disorder - no police force, and a murder rate ten times what it is today.
As to leaving his wife and children to cope as best they could, tonight's pundits are relatively tolerant of his decision to just "go for it".
Irish actress Jessie Buckley is particularly vehement in his defence:
Serving his apprenticeship as a stage hand and occasional "extra" (non-speaking or speaking), Shakespeare took his first steps in learning the trade of playwright. When he started writing, he was up against the much better-educated "University Wits" like Cambridge-educated pair Christopher Marlowe and Robert Greene.
Nevertheless, as soon as Shakespeare started writing actual plays he immediately "knocked all his rivals out of the park" with his very first plays, Titus Andronicus and then Henry VI. Greene in particular was a "bad loser", jealously lampooning Shakespeare, and calling him "the upstart crow".
To Greene's chagrin, the provincial grammar-school dropout Shakespeare was quickly astonishing his audiences both with the skill and the feeling that he put into his use of the English language, and with his understanding of the human psyche.
It's the eternal mystery of DNA really, though isn't it, how these great men sometimes emerge from what seem to be the lowliest of parents and from the lowliest of places.
'Henry VI', with its subject taken from comparatively recent history and proving fascinating to audiences, "grossed" (as we say today) 8 times the average takings for a Christopher Marlowe play, and was a record at the time. The first performance of Henry VI raised £3-16-8 (three pounds, sixteen shillings and eightpence) from prices that were typically a penny for standing, tuppence for sitting, and threepence if you wanted a cushion.
What madness !!!!
And we're told tonight that it was from all this that we got the expression "box office" which we still use today:
[Steve, my American brother-in-law, writes: [according to both Rinni Suna and Wikipedia] the term "box office" originated in Elizabethan times when affluent people would sit in private 'boxes' to watch theatre. Ticket for boxes were sold at an office, called the 'box office'. A significant portion of revenue would come from these tickets, as they were costlier."]
This is less fascinating, but true, it seems, and it proves the worth of the old saying, "Sometimes the truth is less strange than fiction".
Less strange stuff !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzz!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment