Five on Friday

Hello, thank you so much for dropping in, for your time, your patience and your kind comments.  The sun has been shining on me all week, in Somerset and in Shropshire, and I have been enjoying the great outdoors so today I thought I would join Five On Friday and show you five pictures taken outdoors this week.

 

 

This was the view from our tent, looking across the Somerset Levels to Glastonbury Tor.  I took this one on a warm evening as the rays of the setting sun were turning the clouds pink.  I couldn't think of anywhere I would rather be at that moment.

Next to our tent was a paddock full of sunny buttercups and three resident alpacas.  I am immensely fond of alpacas and I enjoyed their company very much, even at 11pm when they noisily chased each other round the field at high speed, squealing with excitement. 



 

More cloudwatching.  We awoke on Wednesday to leaden skies but the sun really did try to break through. 
 

 

I have been a fan of the Wessex writer Thomas Hardy since I studied his work at school and 2nd June was his birthday so on Thursday I sat in the garden for an hour and read some of his nature-themed poetry.  Around me, the birds were singing and butterflies were fluttering by.  It felt just right.

 

 

As we sat in the summerhouse yesterday enjoying a cup of tea, a pesky and persistent wasp kept flying in and we kept shooing her out.  When the Best Beloved moved my chair outside, her small, rather beautiful nest dropped onto the patio.  No wonder she was so persistent.  Well, fascinating and beautiful as it is, it really couldn't stay - you know what happens when you build without planning permission!

 

A spell with Mother Nature always restores my equilibrium.  This year I am participating in The Wildlife Trusts' 30 Days Wild, trying to engage with nature and do something wild every day during the month of June.  It's going to be challenging but I am determined to make the time.

 

Thank you to Amy at Love Made My Home for organising Five On Friday, if you have time, please hop over there and see what everyone else has been up to this week.

 

See you soon.

 

Love, Mrs Tiggywinkle x

May

Oh May, you have been and gone and we barely spoke!  For many years our relationship was difficult thanks to your henchmen, Revision and Exams, whose menacing behaviour caused anxiety, fear, stress and panic, firstly for me, then for the Best Beloved, then for our children.  Over the last few years they have backed off (although The Mathematician is stoically enduring them still) and your burgeoning, blowsy beauty, with its promise of summer, has been revealed to me.

 

This year I was really looking forward to seeing you.  My expectations were high: on the last evening of April I drove 150 miles home from the South East into the most spectacular sunset, the sky striped with layers of orange from peach to umber, grey from thunder to dove, purple from amethyst to lilac.  "Look at the sky!"  I kept saying to the Best Beloved; "Look at the road!" he kept saying to me.  I was full of wonder, and full of excitement about the month ahead, imagining walks through swathes of bluebells and wild garlic in the woods, cycling along sunny lanes lined with Queen Anne's Lace, gentle evenings spent sitting in the garden listening to the swifts screaming as they wheeled overhead. 

 

Alas, 'twas not to be.  May, you brought with you extended working hours and so every day I have put my head down and got on with the job: up in the morning, cooking and laundry, off to work in the afternoon and home in time to eat, wash up, collapse on the sofa and watch television with the Best Beloved for an hour before staggering up to bed.  Please don't get me wrong, I am grateful for the extra money, really, really grateful, but I would have liked to spend a little time with you.  Of course, there was a little fun: our annual Eurovision party was sparkletastic -

 

The table centrepiece was my Swedish Kosta Boda bowl, filled with appropriate, shiny decorations.

 

 

The food was fab: Swedish meatballs (obviously!) -

 

a creamy potato and asparagus salad -

 

 

Skagenrora, a prawn salad, served with lettuce on rye bread - 

 

 

Gravadlax, served on crispbread with whipped cream cheese with black pepper and some pickled cucumber salad on the side - 

 

I haven't seen any bluebells, any wild garlic or any swifts.  I saw may blossom on the tree outside my bedroom window, and it's scent knocked me out every time I stepped out of the back door, but, May, I didn't see you blossom...

 

...until the last four days of the month, when the Best Beloved and I packed our camping gear into the car and went off to Somerset BY OURSELVES!  And, May, there you were in all your voluptuous beauty.  You were dressed in sunshine, your golden light revealing lanes lined with frothy clouds of delicate Queen Anne's Lace, fields of buttercups, hawthorn hedges with creamy blossoms beginning to blush at their own wantonness, trees in full leaf, the new, soft, sappy growth yellow-green against its darker, stronger kin.  I didn't see swifts but you showed me swallows instead, swooping and dipping low across the fields to gather up insects. 

 

 

Thank you Somerset, and Thank you May.  I hope we can spend more time together next year.

 

See you soon.

 

Love, Mrs Tiggywinkle x

 



Five On Eurovision

Hello, thank you very much for calling in, you are very welcome here on this sunny May Saturday, especially if you have arrived via Love Made My Home.  I am very busy in the kitchen today because tonight we are holding our annual Eurovision Song Contest party, as we have done for more than twenty years now - I wrote about my Eurovision history last year and you can read it here.

 

So, each year we research the food and traditions of the hosting country and prepare an appropriate buffet.  There is plenty of food and drink, we watch the contest and give our own scores and although we are very enthusiastic, we don't really take it seriously; we know that the UK will never win it again.  However, for one evening a year we feel in happy communion with the rest of Europe in this festival of music and spectacle.  So, today I would like to share with you five things which I have learned because of this annual event.

 

Firstly, I like Nordic cuisine.  Over the last ten years we have metaphorically been to Finland, Denmark and Sweden (twice) and the food is fab: gravadlax, cardamom buns, reindeer salami, open sandwiches... I am always happy when a Nordic country wins because I  look forward to next year's buffet immediately.

 

Secondly, Azerbaijan is a fascinating place, geographically speaking, with a great number of different terrains and climates which means that just about anything can grow somewhere there.  Consequently, the cuisine is varied and delicious, influenced by Iran and by Mediterranean Europe.  Who knew?

 

Thirdly, a lot of pork is eaten in Serbia.  Our Serbian buffet was not very varied.

 

Fourthly, a Black Forest Gateau is not really a Black Forest Gateau unless  there is kirsch in the sponge.  The rest of that bottle of kirsch has been in my cupboard for five years now and I really ought to think of something to do with it because I don't really like Black Forest Gateau.

 

Finally, some European countries seem to think that the way to garner votes is to put attractive young women in dresses which reveal an awful lot of cleavage.  This makes them appear backwards to the rest of us and so backfires.  Remember those Polish milkmaids? 

 

So, I must crack on now with preparation of the smorgasbord.  I am sorry there is no photo in this post but I am having technical difficulties (actually, I don't think the problem is with the technology, I rather think it's with the idiot operator).  As ever, thank you to Amy at Love Made My Home for hosting Five on Friday and if you have time, please hop over there and have a look at what everyone else is up to.

 

See you on the other side.

 

Love, Mrs Tiggywinkle x

Eiderdown Love

Hello, thank you for dropping in. Today is a bank holiday so, typically, the weather is cold and wet!  Grrr.  Proposed outings have been dropped in favour of staying indoors and lighting the fire.  IN MAY!  Ridiculous.

 

Our clan gathered on Saturday to celebrate a young man's coming of age, a wonderful day full of family, music, chatter, cake, puddings and love (obviously there was other food as well as pudding, but the puddings were plentiful and exceedingly good).  There was also a great deal of weather: blue skies, sunshine, rain, sleet, wind and hail.  After all, this was England in April. Cardigans were in abundance.  As she greeted me, one of my sisters said, "I am really enjoying your blog but you are not doing it often enough."  I agreed.  I would like to do it more often but I haven't found the right rhythm yet.  So, this post is inspired by her.

 

When we were very young we shared a bedroom.  There were two beds - not twin beds, they didn't match, I am sure of that because when we were both confined to bed with chicken pox, my mother placed a piece of wood across both beds to create a makeshift table and I distinctly remember my bowl of cereal sliding down towards my sister, so her bed must have been lower than mine.  One day, our parents took us out shopping to choose new eiderdowns for those beds and as we didn't have new things very often, this was Very Exciting.  Oh, how we loved those eiderdowns.  The fabric showed rows of Napoleonic soldiers on a white background, their bright jackets red and blue and their tall hats adorned with plumes, their moustaches perfectly waxed and swords hanging from their waists.  They didn't match anything else in our bedroom but that didn't matter in those days and anyway, they matched each other.   

 

When we grew older, we had separate bedrooms but the eiderdowns stayed with me because I had twin beds in my room.  Eventually, I graduated to a double bed, sheets and blankets were replaced with a duvet - and I can't tell you how glamorous that seemed in 1976 - and the eiderdowns were relegated to the airing cupboard.  They came out if any of us was ill enough to need a day off school and a bed on the sofa, snuggly and cosy as they were, and as we grew up they moved airing cupboard twice.  When my elder daughter, The Teacher, was old enough to move out of her cot and into a bed my mother gave me one of the eiderdowns as I like old-fashioned sheets and blankets for tiny tots because you can tuck them in so that they don't fall out of bed.  So our eiderdown was back on a bed, snuggled under every night by a child, doing its job. 

 

Eventually, both The Teacher and The Mathematician graduated to duvets and the eiderdown, by this time very tattered and worn, was again relegated to nursing duties.  It is now more than forty years old and, having snuggled six girls, absolutely falling apart.  It has been retired but my children insist that we must keep it and yes, we all know how ridiculous that is.
 

Recently, The Teacher presented me with a pair of identical cushion covers she had made.  Here's one -

 The clever girl had found the fabric on ebay and recognised it immediately.  Would you like to see the back? -

 

Do you see those lovely button loops?  And the buttons themselves are special too: when the Best Beloved's grandmother died, The Teacher inherited her button tin and she chose these buttons from the tin for my new cushions.  So the cushions are new and old, they are my memories and the Best Beloved's memories, they are our children's memories and our family memories, they are comfort and love and they are brand, spanking new!  I still don't have new things very often, so they are also Very Exciting. 

 

See you soon.

 

Love, Mrs Tiggywinkle x

Five on Shakespeare

Hello, thank you for calling in.  Today I am joining in with Amy at Love Made My Home for Five on Friday, so thank you, Amy, for organising the party and joining us all together.  You are a star.

So, today is 23rd April, England's national day.  To be honest, I find it difficult to get excited about St George.  There, I've said it.  Unpatriotic of me, I know, but I just don't feel any connexion with him.  St David and St Patrick, boys from the British Isles whose feet trod our landscape, yes; a knight from the Middle East who never came within a thousand miles of England and was randomly adopted as our patron saint by a king who spent most of his life in France and barely spoke English?  No.  William Shakespeare, a great Englishman who left a gift for the world, saves the day: 23rd April was the day he died and today is the 400th anniversary of that day.

 

The Best Beloved took this photo in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, in 2008.

 

All British children study Shakespeare's plays at school and there are very good reasons for that.  For a start, many familiar phrases originated in his work: green-eyed monster, eaten out of house and home, a foregone conclusion, brave new world... thank you, Will Shakespeare.  Secondly, the themes are universal and as relevant now as they were in the sixteenth century: both Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate and 10 Things I Hate About You are The Taming of the Shrew, West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet, Forbidden Planet is The Tempest and The Lion King is Hamlet with a happy ending (after all, it is Disney).  The problem for modern children is the language, removed as it is from the English we read and speak today. 

When I was a teenager I was fortunate to live within an hour's drive of the West End of London which meant that there were plenty of opportunities to see the Bard's work performed which, of course, is the key to engaging with Shakespeare: he wrote plays to be performed by actors who understood the meaning of his words and were trained to convey that meaning to the audience, not texts to be read by bewildered first-formers.  My teachers understood that and so off we went to the theatre whenever we could to see those texts come alive.  So today my Five celebrates five of those plays, memories illustrated by the programmes I have kept.

1. The Merchant of Venice

This was the first Shakespeare play I studied and the first I saw on the stage, in this case at the Young Vic.  On the back I have written "School English Trip 15th November 1979" so I was fourteen years old.  Modern setting, Shakespeare's words, no problem.  This one was directed by Michael Attenborough.

2. Othello

Ah, now this one really was something special: Othello at the National Theatre with Paul Scofield and Felicity Kendal, directed by  Sir Peter Hall.  Michael Bryant was a spellbinding Iago.  The programme cost 40p and I have written "School Trip 1st March 1981" on the back, very handy as I sat my O-Levels three months later and this was a set text.

3.  The Taming of The Shrew

On summer evenings all over England you can find hardy souls wrapped in blankets and cagoules, enjoying picnics and watching Shakespeare performed in the open air.  It's a wonderful tradition!  In fact, the first Shakespeare play we took The Mathematician to see was The Tempest, performed in the open air and preceded by...a tempest!  The redoubtable players said that as long as there was an audience, they would perform.  Marvellous!  On 9th June 1982 I was at the Open Air Theatre at Regent's Park in its Golden Jubilee Season watching The Taming of the Shrew. Kate O'Mara was a wonderful and memorable Katherine (although, sssh!, I must say that I really don't like the misogynist theme of this play, despite the fact that I have seen it at least four times!).

4. As You Like It

This was an amateur production - I'm not fussy, as long as it's good I really don't mind if the company is paid or unpaid.  The Chapter Garden of Windsor Castle made a leafy and lovely Forest of Arden and I knew several of the actors including the absolutely wonderful David Thomas, the deputy headteacher at my school, teacher of history, architecture, mathematics and history of art, ardent monarchist, director of ambitious school plays and leader of school trips to Italy, who played Touchstone and produced and designed this performance.  On the back I have written that this was Thursday 23rd July 1981 and that I went with Mum, Dad and my sister. 

5.  Much Ado About Nothing

 

 

I studied Much Ado About Nothing for A-Level English and in this case, familiarity has certainly not bred contempt (I think that's Aesop rather than Shakespeare) for it's my favourite Shakespeare play.  I have seen it five times and this was not only the best of those, it is quite simply the best play I have ever seen.  It was outstanding.  I remember it so well, Sinead Cusack and Derek Jacobi sparkling as Beatrice and Benedick, the mirrored floor of the stage at the newly-opened Barbican Centre, the dancing, the torches... I was wonderfully transported to another world and I still hold the pictures in my head.  To my great annoyance, I haven't written the date on the back but this cast list shows that The Taming of the Shrew and King Lear were also being performed that season and as I went to those too, and did write the dates on the backs, I know that it must have been the spring of 1983.

 

Oh, how I have enjoyed going through my theatre programmes, remembering nights out with friends, with family, with boyfriends and later, with The Best Beloved and our children.  I have known for months that I wanted to commemorate Shakespeare today but I didn't know how I wanted to do that until my last post, when I suddenly realised the way for me to raise my personal metaphorical toast to the great Bard was to share these early experiences with you in this way.  Thank you for indulging me.  Now if you have time, please hop over to Rosie's blog because she is celebrating the day in the same way - except that it's different, because we have seen different productions and she has an absolute WOWSER at number five.  I was a bit stunned when I read her blog yesterday and saw that we were thinking along the same lines, but that's what Shakespeare's about, I think, the universal experience.

 

Today I am off to the Wenlock Poetry Festival for the day to enjoy some contemporary poetry, but I'm sure there will be a nod to Shakespeare.  We can't really get away from him.

So farewell, the elements be kind to thee and make thy spirits all of comfort (Antony and Cleopatra).

 

See you soon.

 

Love, Mrs Tiggywinkle x

Strange Forces At Work

Hello, thank you for dropping in.  My last post was about Dame Judi Dench's inauspicious London theatre debut by way of the 1982 Royal Shakespeare Company's production of The Winter's Tale and having seen this morning's news, I feel I need to write again. 

 

The Olivier Awards are given to recognise excellence in professional theatre in London and they are generally regarded as the highest honour in British theatre.  Last night, Dame Judi Dench received the award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for playing Paulina in.....The Winter's Tale.  In the 1982 production which I saw, the role of Paulina was played by Sheila Hancock, who was also nominated for the Olivier Award that year, although the prize was ultimately awarded to Anna Massey for her performance in The Importance of Being Earnest, a play in which Dame Judi was nominated for Actress of the Year in a Revival for her performance as Lady Bracknell, although she didn't win, either.  Are you still with me?!

 

I am ever-so-slightly reeling.  Now then, I don't believe in coincidence, but I wonder what it was that drew me to choose that particular theatre programme to write about last week and to choose to relate it to my own 1982 theatre visit?  There were many others to choose from.  I didn't know that Dame Judi played in The Winter's Tale last year, or that the Olivier Awards ceremony was this weekend; at least, I don't think I knew.  And when I drew a little-used book from the shelf yesterday, a book which I have had for more than thirty years, a small clutch of theatre tickets fell from the pages, including this one -

 

 

 

As I said, I don't believe in coincidence...

 

See you soon.

 

Love, Mrs Tiggywinkle x

A green girl, unsifted in such perilous circumstance

Hello, thank you for popping in.  I am still thrilled to bits that anyone is reading.  It's Easter holiday time here which means that The Mathematician is home for four weeks and the Best Beloved is off work for a fortnight.  I am still at work but I am off enforced kitchen duties, so that's a rest for me, too.  Everyone in our house is quite relaxed, the pace is slower, we are catching up on lost sleep, the days are sunnier, the evenings are lighter and the birds are building their nests.  Spring has sprung.
 

We spent Easter at my parents' home in South Wales and were thoroughly pampered, which was lovely because I was completely worn out by the time we got there.  There were no bunnies, chicks, pastels or artful table decorations; we had a birthday celebration, a traditional (old-fashioned?) church service, a roast lamb dinner, chocolate, nephews and a niece, family time, the Boat Race on television, a proper rest and a nostalgic peruse through old photographs and theatre programmes.  It was just about perfect.
 

One of the things I like about old theatre programmes is discovering a name in the cast list which has since become extremely well-known.  For example, when I was seventeen years old and saw a young, red-headed Leontes dancing with his son in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale I had no idea that Patrick Stewart would become internationally famous within a decade as the captain of the USS Enterprise.  In 1957/8, my father went on a school trip to the Old Vic in London and saw this production of Hamlet -
 

Now take a close look and see who was playing Ophelia in her London debut -

Yes, a young Dame Judi Dench, straight out of drama school then and now a "national treasure".  However, the reviews of her performance were not good: in The Observer, Kenneth Tynan praised the production but wrote that "The Ophelia, Judi Dench, is a pleasing but terribly sane little thing", a strong sign that something was amiss if you recall that Ophelia is supposed to lose her sanity during the course of the play.  Another well-respected theatre critic, Richard Findlater, wrote "The debut was, in my view, a debacle." 

 

 

In the long term I don't think those notices have impeded her career!

 

See you soon.

 

Love, Mrs Tiggywinkle x