Victoria & Abdul

The Twinkly Eyed Fazal

The " true" story of the 81 year old monarch's "friendship" with her Indian man servant/teacher Abdul Karin is perhaps less well known than her attachment to the brash John Brown but under director Steven Frears' guiding hand the film is a gently comic romp into the absurdities of the Victorian British Royal family and their horror at having a matriarch who is suddenly dependent on a Muslim of lowly birth.
Frears hints that Victoria ( Judi Dench) had a roving eye for the magnificent Karin (Ali Fazal) but he bottles it slightly bigging up the sweetness and the intellectual nature of their friendship rather than to acknowledge the possible fact that the handsome clerk come Guru was in fact an opportunistic manipulator who landed on his feet before a lonely, silly old Queen sick of an arse licking court.
Personally I thought that the real story story lay more with the more pessimistic version of the truth rather than the sanitized take  and the whole thing left me with rather a sour taste in my mouth, which was disappointing.
Dench is wonderful as Victoria and I must say that the whole film builds to a classic Judi moment , when the old Queen faces off her son Berti ( Eddie Izzard) with a bravura speech that she is indeed not insane in befriending a native! ... , so much so that I can see another Oscar nomination on the cards.
Fazal is cute as a button in his, slightly more difficult role but the cuteness does fade when one questions that the friendship was one less wholesome than originally portrayed.
6/10

Technology

Mary is fucked off- she's still waiting for her walk
I am all tech-ed out!
I now have my Fitbit in situ. 
( I've walked seven steps)
My mobile phone is up and running.
And I now have all of eleven contacts in my inbox and actually managed to send an emoji to my nephew without blowing a gasket
Yesterday's shenanigans  reinforced my need to have a phone. The Prof was pulling what little hair he still has after suffering my silence for 7 hours!  So I now accept that it's foolish of me to have kept away from my own smart phone for so long....
Jonney Graybags is now up to date
And that's a first in 55 years!

Knackered

Euston shut
No trains running North
Walk to St Pancras ,
Packed train to Nottingham,
Packed train then to Derby
Stood in train to Crewe ( helped stop fight between two men)
Stood in Train to Chester
Stood in train to Prestatyn
7 hours to get home

I'll leave you with the delectable Alec Secareanu to cheer me up

A Grand Day Out

What could be better? an opening night play with an outstanding actress, a long satisfying gossip and catch up with an old friend, and some Gay Yorkshire rumpy pumpy !

As Wallace would say " a cracking day out there Grommit!" 

I met Nu in Soho and we went to the Curzon to see God's Own Country which is a film of great beauty and some soul. 

It tells the story of a young moorland farmer Jonney Saxby ( Josh O'Connor) who deals with his frustrations of life with a disabled dad and emotionally distant grandmother on a failing upland farm by casual gay sex and binge drinking. 

When the emotionally more mature  Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu) turns up to help with the spring lambing, Jonney is forced to deal with his demons as the pair embark on an intense love affair against the backdrop of a Harsh lifestyle in decline.

God's Own Country has been described rather unfairly as the Yorkshire Brokeback mountain.  This is misleading as this movie has a sort of harsh charm all of it's own with the Bleak Moorlands echoing the empty hardness of Jonney's life. Filmed with minimal dialogue   O'Connor shines as the unsympathetic and at times downright unlikable Jonney whilst the painfully attractive Secareanu underplays his role as the emotionally warmer Gheorghe rather beautifully and although the narrative of Jonney's emotional journey from " fuck up" to manhood isn't particularly original, the film does pack a bit of a punch emotionally.

8/10

I wish the play was as good as the movie. Unfortunately Wings at the Young Vic was a bit of a mess! 

Wings is more or less a monologue by an aging stroke victim Emily ( The glorious Juliet Stevenson) who tries to make some sort of sense of a sudden and catastrophic brain injury . Confused and disorientated with motor and intellectual deficits , Emily tries and fails to make real her unreal world where nurses are seen as captors and where her body feels weightless and not her own.

For an hour, Stevenson remains suspended in a body harness and spins impressively around the darkened stage as she she shares a stream of consciousness of her experiences within the fugue state of a CVA and although she is undoubtedly a wonderful actress  the play fails to impress

It was the opening night and it was sad to see Stevenson looking so upset at the lacklustre applause as the play ended. 

We finished the day chatting and catching up. Touching base with old friends  is a tonic for the soul

Accident And Emergency 1990

" And what do you do for a living?" 
I'm on the train to London and the question came from a woman sitting opposite me half an hour ago.
She is middle aged and is dressed well. She is going to visit her son who lives in Chiswick .
I already know that his name is Harry, that he is a successful urban landscaper and that he has a partner called Luis.
She's a chatter, so I am now pretending to work on my tablet. We have already covered a great deal of mutual information swapping and we are only at Crewe!
" I'm a retired nurse" I told her, and the phrase suddenly felt rather odd being spoken out loud.
My companion wanted to hear some nursing stories and I was happy to oblige her.
I, as you know, love an audience.
I told her about Finlay pulling a patient's tracheostomy tube out. The amusing tale of how we nurses used to take our spinal injury patients out to the pub in their wheelchairs to get pissed and the story of how an elderly senile patient died on a minibus outing to Delamere forest without any of us noticing.
Stock stories all well rehearsed .
She then asked me what my saddest memory of nursing was and this brief memory popped into my head out of the blue.
I shared it as we drank our coffee.
My father died in 1990, just as I was in the middle of my accident and emergency placement as a post  registered student nurse. He had a sudden heart attack, so when I returned to work after his funeral I was rostered to work in the minor injuries department as it was thought that " majors" was a little too stressful.
One morning a junior sister from majors rang down to see if there was a nurse free to help her with a job and so I volunteered myself to go. The job, as it tuned out was the "laying out" of an elderly lady who had been brought in dead after collapsing in the city centre whilst out shopping.
I remember that the sister had an incredibly strong Scottish accent.
Anyhow, Our job was to tidy her up before her husband arrived from home.
The husband, who was in his eighties duly arrived and I left the sister to take him behind the curtains to see his wife.
I had only been gone fifteen minutes or so, before the Scottish sister sought me out again.She looked upset but was composed. " I need you to help me ! The husband wants us to do something for him!" 
She explained the husband's request and asked if I was up to it.
I nodded.
We returned to the cubical where the man sat quietly with his wife.
He was dressed neatly in a shirt, tie and pullover I remember
I stood on one side of the bed and the Scottish sister stood on the other and after a nod, the old man climbed awkwardly onto the bed and lay almost on top of his wife, with his head over her shoulder.
The sister motioned to me and we each took one of the woman's arms and gently wrapped them around the man's back as he started to cry.

He had asked us to help him have a last moment in his wife's arms

Dog's Day Dream

The new kitchen!

I''ve been running around all day
I've taken the car to the garage, dropped sausages, shopped, played badminton ( and won) organised more new kitchen stuff, cooked supper, walked dogs, cleaned cottage,  supported neighbour, visited old friend.
Tomorrow I am off to London to see Nuala. We have gossip, a film and a play to fit in!
I snapped this photo halfway through my day.
Mary, is sitting on the arm of my arm chair.
She is day dreaming about something........and looks serene and just a bit pensive
Sigh
She sat here for nearly an hour

The flowers are from the garden

Slipping Myself A Sneaky Sausage

As I sneaked one cocktail sausage out of the pack I somehow caught the packaging on the lip of my carrier bag and dropped 39 miniature sausages onto the floor.
It would have been fine if I was home, after all the sausages were bought as treats for the dogs, but I was stood at our local ATS Euromaster waiting for a tyre to be changed, and the waiting room was almost full of people.
Now if you drop money all sorts of people will come out of the woodwork to your aid, but I have to say, drop 39 mini bangers in front of 7 people in a grotty garage waiting room and no fucker comes to help! 
I could have died of shame

"Do you flour your finger Paul?"

Tuesday nights are Bake Off nights.
Pru Leith , the lady who had the unenvious job of filling Mary Berry's sensible shoes , seems, in my mind to be doing rather nicely indeed .
Unlike Mary, Pru has a somewhat naughty twinkle in her eye and tonight when Paul droned on about how to make a cottage loaf by sliding a finger between the two bits of dough she playfully dropped in
a comment of " missing the finger treatment" at a sunken entry.
I bet she was a right naughty cougar in her time!
The  contestants, as usual are a sweet bunch. Steven and Tom are fighting for top gay pin up status whilst  stunt woman Sophie and the Russian Julia are the dark horse bakers. Stacey cries easily and Liam, Flo and Yan are the comics.
Perhaps baking brings the best out in people!
Good job I bake well!