Letting Go

I managed to lose my black notebook the other day, the one I'm reliant upon to remind myself of all the stuff I've got to get done. I've often thought that I would go into complete meltdown if ever I lost it, but that hasn't really happened. Somehow I've contrived to remember enough to keep going without a complete disaster. So far.

The experience is a good reminder that if it's important enough to forget, it can't be that important.

For Your Entertainment

Simon Armitage's Seeing Stars is without any doubt the most entertaining book of poetry I've read for quite some time. That might sound a bit like faint praise, but I'm not implying that the volume is without other sterling qualities. It's just that I've come to regard the provision of entertainment as a quality that should rank very high in our assessment of any work.

It's rare to come across a collection of poems in which you are guaranteed to laugh out loud at least once on every page, but this is the one.

Questions Of Quality

After enjoying a great afternoon with our drama guys I came home to find myself hijacked by The Godfather Part 2 on the goggle box. I caught most of Part 1 by accident last week and just couldn't resist the greatest sequel ever made, astonishingly greater than its astonishing initiator, even though I didn't really have time to watch it. Anyway I made time. What else could I do when Duvall, Cazale, De Niro and Pacino at their giddy, stellar finest beckoned, just to mention four utterly beguiling features of a movie that offers so many other good reasons to watch?

And now I'm thinking, how do we make connections between great art and the kind of thing we do, involving, I hope, a great deal of pleasure for all of us who try to make things up at the level of our personal endeavours? Is it just plain foolish to suggest there may be any connection at all? I don't think it is, but I'm not entirely sure why I think so.

More anon, of something I believe to be worth thinking about, when I have time to think.

Not Getting Any Younger

 

 

 

 

 

Let's face it, we're none of us getting any younger, and for some of us that's particularly obvious. But then again, who really wants to? Not the old geezer above, that's for sure. He's enjoying things just as they are, thank you very much.

Nervous Energy

I've been weighing-in these last few days at under my fighting weight. Very gratifying, especially considering my resolution for the New Year. And even more gratifying considering that I've not exactly been stinting on the grub. So, what's the secret?

Well, being heavily involved in matters of the stage, with a performance deadline looming for Monday has helped considerably. Coming back late from rehearsal I've sort of known that when I step on the scales the results are likely to be positive. It's really quite extraordinary just how much I seem to move around in rehearsal and how physically taxing it is to tell performers what you want them to do on a stage, and to arrange circumstances such that they are able to do it.

And then there's the energy that goes into maintaining the state of being hyper that is required just to function as things move to fruition. I could feel it this morning, even before we got started: a kind of inability to settle down and keep still so that even before anyone had arrived I'd covered quite a bit of ground just collecting keys and checking everything was in order. I sometimes think that I may be burning a considerable number of calories simply standing around impatiently waiting to get started.

There's an odd picture of me the Missus unearthed a few months back, I mean a real picture dating from the early 1990s, in which I look positively emaciated. I'm pretty sure it was taken at East Coast Park and I suspect it was just after some show we had done back in those days of the big musicals. I reckon I'd probably just lost something like a stone in the week we put the show on - and I'm guessing I regained the weight very quickly, as soon as the high was over.

The downside of all this is the certain knowledge that I'll be facing that strange and very familiar feeling of complete lethargic shut-down when the energy-bunny batteries run out by the end of the week ahead.

The Blame

I once worked in an institution of which I noted, The thing that travels fastest in this place is the blame. I thought it was a clever thing to say, and had about it the virtue of truth.

I still think that, but I now know that one of the most corrosive aspects of my personality is an automatic impulse to blame others for anything that goes wrong for me. Fortunately I don't, or at least I think I don't, make this public. And fortunately I generally keep the impulse in check. But it's still there, and it's still automatic.

No wonder I could see it so clearly in others.

Keep Making It Up

The most important thing I've learned in the course of my career - indeed, some might say the only thing - is that our species has a deeply seated need to create and to deny that need is not a good idea. In contrast, making an environment in which such creativity flourishes, as it should, naturally, is not simply a good idea, it's pretty much top of the list of excellent wheezes.

I was heartened to find my finding verified by one of the few writers I can think of who manifests that curious quality one might term wisdom. A letter he sent expressing the sentiment of the previous paragraph, but doing so a lot better than I managed, a lot more wisely, can be viewed at Open Culture and my heart sings when I read it. I hope yours does too.

Getting It Spectacularly Wrong

I've been assuring anyone who cared to listen for quite a few months that there was no way on this planet that Man U would dispense with the services of one David Moyes until at least he'd had a couple of seasons in charge. My logic was simple. The club had learnt from experience. Managers needed time to manage. A revolving door policy will end in disaster, as seen at the likes of Spurs, to name but one.

How did I go so wrong? The commentators tell us that it isn't the 1980s anymore and it's impossible to give someone in charge the six seasons allowed to SAF to get it absolutely right. The bottom line is the share price, it seems, and American owners don't have the time to let something grow. And suddenly a guy who just a season ago knew an awful lot about getting it right, and managed to do so on a shoe-string at the highest level for many years, now simply doesn't know how to win things, in the eyes of guys who've never won a trophy in their lives, and never will.

O tempora, o mores, oh Moyes!

Changing Fortunes

Read a few of Chesterton's Father Brown stories over the weekend, in between marking scripts and falling asleep. Surely the oddest stories in the genre, with story-telling that is mannered in the extreme. Can't imagine they'd be published today, more's the pity, though it's interesting to note that some of them have been dramatized recently for the telly. Actually the edition I was reading from has good old Kenneth More's mug on the front cover, he having essayed the role for the goggle box some time back in the 70's, which is when I bought my paperbacks. I suppose they're seen as providing a sort of safe period charm in that context. The gothic weirdness sort of evaporates in the cold light of a script to be enacted.

I wonder if Chesterton will ever come back into fashion. Strange to think he was something of a best-seller in his day. So the worlds turn.

Caught Napping

I've managed an impressive three naps per day for each of the last three days. This is an indication of something, I suppose, if only a profound laziness. Imagine what I could do given a whole month off work.