" What's that poking out of your trousers?"

With only a month to go until the wedding. Chris is beginning to worry just a little about how I am going to look like on the day!....I can understand the fact.
Yesterday was a case in point.
I was walking across the railway bridge in Prestatyn yesterday morning when I spied two female joggers just about to bounce up the steps in front of me. One of the women was a girl I know well. she is a lively, overactive character called Sharon who I have worked with for the past nine years and as she jogged up to be with her big breasts bouncing she yelled out her usual greeting of " Hello JG!"
She gave me a brief hug and as both girls continued up the stairs Sharon turned and called to her friend
" He's lovely, even if he wears his pyjamas under his trousers !"
I looked down.....and yeah she was right.....a couple of inches of stripy pyjamas were poking out of the legs of my combats.
So I can see where Chris is coming from......on Sunday I will go and get my dinner jacket for the wedding. This is the one I shall be buying

And I am sure that if I was to stand next to this Marks and Spencer's model, we would look like twins
Yeah..................right.........

Shoah

For those that don't know " Shoah" is a 1985 French documentary film which chronicals the memories and experiences of Polish Jews, and  selected Polish and German witnesses of the Holocaust within three areas of Poland during the war,

A mammoth undertaking, the film by Claude Lanzmann, took some eleven years to collate and much of the footage from the German perpetrators was secretly filmed over very long takes.
Lanzmann, who could not speak Hebrew, Yiddish or Polish , had to use translators to capture the smallest detail of the personal experience of those he interviewed, so the subsequent scenes are long, often meandering and invariably painful to hear.
The documentary in its entirety is some ten hours in length.

I had the opportunity to go and see a partial showing of " Shoah" in Sheffield years ago and couldn't quite face the experience , so I was pleased ( was pleased the right word?) when I saw that BBC4 was showing it as part of its tribute to Holocaust Memorial Day ( 27th January)

Last night I sat through two hours of Shoah.
It was a painful and powerful experience.

One interview with Filip Muller of the Jewish  resistance from Auschwitz lingers long in the mind. A physically and psychologically strong man described to camera the final moments of some 1600 Czech Jews from the Auschwitz' " family camp". For some strange reason the Germans had kept these Jews all together and alive and for over a year at the extermination camp, so when they were herded into the gas chambers they had a certain strength to resist the guards.
In a matter of fact voice, the former resistance man described how his fellow Countrymen  refused to undress before their captors . He described how a small group of women begged him to leave them ( he was a worker in the crematorium) so that he could testify to what happened and only broke down  when he remembered how the crowd stood proud and sang the Czech National Anthem before the crematorium doors were closed.

Most documentaries use vintage footage to illustrate the narrative. Shoah used people's faces, and winter scenes of the modern day camp sights to bookend those dreadful stories.

Those living faces , with their dead eyes......their stories need to be heard and heard by every
generation. I wish I had the strength to watch more than two hours of it
I did not.

Sadness

I've just watched well over 2 hours of the holocaust documentary SHOAH
I've cried so much that Winnie came over to give me the once over
I'll blog about it tomorrow
Dreadful

Winnie watching me carefully....with Albert in tow..she never left my side  until I stopped crying

Red

Kathleen Byron's infamous lipstick scene in Black Narcissus 

I have never liked the colour red. I am a yellow or a green person. At a push I will wear blue, brown and anything mucky but as for red , that's a colour that more suits women, young children and the mentally ill.

A decade or so ago , I wrote an academic assignment entitled " The use of the colour Red in five selected feature films" 

I thought it was a pretty profound discussion which covered sex, death,and everything in between, though I did mention Judy Garland's slippers in The Wizard Of Oz, a fact that did receive a  curt green penned comment from my very camp lecturer  which read " They were , in fact RUBY!!!!! Not red"

The killer midget in  Don't Look Now

The ghetto Jewish child in Schindler's List

The Red Shoes

1976 Carrie

I was reminded of this magnificent work of academia today when I was surveying the bleak dirty green brown wreck of the back garden. For, flashing through the drab graveyard, I caught a flash of deep and vibrant red darting between the tombstones .

Was it a Venetian killer midget that I spied?

Or a blood soaked University student?

Hummm...not at all...Just Auntie Glad in her cinematic vibrant woolly coat, who was late for church

Glad centre

Does anyone have any hated colours? And why?

Winnie & Albert

Sometimes I can embroider a good story for dramatic effect

But the relationship between one certain bulldog bitch and a tom cat called Albert

is a perfectly true one

Whist waiting for Chris to get home

( and after cooking a massive lasagne)

I caught the two of them playing in the living room

Sweet

Sorry about the sound

Goslings

I have no news today so I have posted a couple of videos of the geese

when they were little......it's lovely to look back on just how sweet they were

Always Your Mom & Dad

Today I held a married man's hand in public
Don't worry it's not a pre wedding mid life crisis kind of thing that was going on
I'm not the sort
It was, in fact,  a moment of support for someone who is a couple of decades older than I
Who has just lost a dear and very elderly parent.
There seems an unwritten rule in this world which says that if you are of pensionable age, then the loss of your mother or father is somehow cushioned by the fact that they were well past their " three score years and ten" and that the emotions felt are somehow less raw, less important and less valid than those experienced by someone who is bereaved at an earlier age.
In your seventies, you don't want to hear platitudes such as " she was a good age"
You just want validation for the grief that overwhelms you, the presence of which, because of your age, seems to elude most people

Grief  is grief........is.....well.......grief.......it's not rocket science
Even in the animal world
See below....Brutus grieves for his brother Hank who died in his sleep...heartbreaking

Fortitude

Irish actor Richard Dormer as chief Andersen

I was intrigued by the storyline of the new  25 million pound SkyAtlantic thriller series " Fortitude"
For a mystery thriller set is an isolated Norwegian mining community where " every one has a job, everyone is comfortably off so there is no risk of crime" sounds like the start to one of those in vogue Scandinavia noir series we have all come to enjoy and love over the past couple of years
Fortitude  it would seem, is quite, quite different.
Set in a strangely multicultural Arctic town where only four of the cast of around fifteen are supposed to be Scandinavian , the first episode boasts political shenanigans over a proposed " ice Hotel" which will save the town from financial ruin, a killer polar bear, adultery, a mysterious brunette with a gun, a drunk with a secret, a strange research facility , a fair bit of full frontal male nudity and a murder amid a whole lot of ice and snow.
I didn't know just what to make of episode one. It was brooding and ever so slightly confusing, with the majority of  characters , being somewhat unsympathetic if not a little " odd" in nature.
We have the somewhat driven  town Governer (Sophie Grabel) and her odd untrusting relationship with her hospitalized husband. A mysterious police chief ( Richard Dormer) who looks as though he's covered up a crime, an unhappily and bickering married couple (Nicholas Pinnick & Jessica Raine)  with a son with a mystery sickness, and a brusque British doctor ( Phoebe Nicolls) who is something to do with animal testing.
oh and let's not forget a British drunk( Michael Gambon) who cries a lot and Stanley Tucci who has flown in by the Met Police to help solve the murder
Have you got all that mother?
I have a strange feeling the whole series will take a few odd turns away from the tried and tested usual Scandinavian Noir it purports to be........
Watch this space.........