Goodbye summer, goodbye.

Everyone I know has complained about this summer but it has been just perfect for me. It hardly rained at all, though that did necessitate some garden and allotment watering and my rain butts ran dry quite early. More importantly, it was often bright and sunny without being hot. In Sheffield anyway. Apparently Scotland didn’t suffer our drought. I acquired a gardener’s tan; my arms and neck are brown, my hands not so much and my legs are fish belly white. Lots of nettles and brambles on the allotment. Summer came to an abrupt end mid last week, the first week of October. It’s really quite cool and damp now.

Ian has been commenting for some time that there has been no blog update since August. I have excuses but I can’t remember them. It really seems too late now to write about our last weekend at the fringe with the kids although it was jolly good fun.

The biggest excitement since then has been getting Sally packed off to the University of Salford. There had been a slow but steady accumulation of stuff to go. Oxfam in Broomhill yielded a decent haul of pans, plates etc, a huge suitcase was purchased from one of the charity shops in Hamilton, I purchased yet another copy of Rose Elliot’s ‘Cheap and Easy’ and her father contributed yet another copy of the ‘Cranks Cookbook’.  She seems to have taken to student life with panache, only complaining a little about the mice already in residence in the kitchen. Unlike the radio silence from Jack I have a regular if perfunctory contact with Sally and already have an idea of who she spends her time with and what she’s doing. I’ve been away so much and so busy that I haven’t really had time to miss her. All I need is a week at home going nowhere to work up to being a bit lonely. I guess I’ll cope.

More sadly we are losing my colleague, Amanda, from work. She is so delightful that I forgive her for her slender and energetic youth. In the time that I have worked at the company I have always warned that times were too unstable to take new people on. In Mandy’s case she is probably better off for having spent the year with us but I will miss her terribly. She has decided, very sensibly, to get a visa and spend six months in Australia, working where she can. I’m hoping she keeps in touch without me having to join Facebook.

I’d write more but I have been stricken with a very time consuming affliction. I’m reading about all the Hugo winners over the years. I rather enjoyed Sam Jordison’s attempt to read and blog about past winners but he keeps going off on Booker winner tangents so that I’ve virtually given up on him. I’ve recently fallen into a Making Light dwam and having read 1002 comments on wearing seatbelts (no really!) I was looking for some light relief and ended up on the Tor site reading Jo Walton’s ‘Revisiting the Hugos’.  Starting in 1953 I have read each year and any linked reviews all the way to 1974. I was only peripherally aware of Jo until recently. I find her to be an excellent reviewer, in that I can pretty much trust her judgement to align with mine. She doesn’t like PK Dick for example. Earlier on today I finally unstacked Ian’s pile of banana boxes filled with SF paperbacks looking for two of the Simak books she wrote favourably about. They have teetered  there for over six years, though the comedy books made it to shelves with days of him moving in. I’ve located ‘Way Station’ but no sign was found of ‘City’.  I’ve got an audit tomorrow, a report writing day on Tuesday and training courses Wednesday and Thursday so on Friday I’m thinking of staying in bed all day and reading ‘Way Station’.

Incidentally, having watched a lot of seatbelt adverts, this is still the very best!    

Belated second fringe day

OK, I should have written up on the day but I didn't and now I'm trying to remember what we did. Keeping it short we went to the GRV to see Oompah Brass which was pretty fabulous and extremely loud. One, tuba, one French horn, one trombone and two trumpets (or cornets or something small and brass an loud). It was funny and the music was just amazing and I was glad we were sat at the back. The lederhosen was also jolly fine. But then from the back I couldn't see the knees. The A to Z spelled out, eventually, CDs only ten pounds. I didn't buy one guessing that my Macbook would be able to provide the same experience. I'd happily see them again though.


The next show was Axis of Awesome at the Teviot. We saw them last year on Lilian's recommendation and really liked them. This time we thought we'd give the kids a treat. Jack pointed out that this was the third music based show in two days but seemed happy enough at the end. You don't have to have any musical ability to appreciate the AofA. I sort of wonder why these Aussie musical comedy acts are so very good. Who could forget Eddie Perfect (yummy) or the Scared Weird Little Guys? We check for the SWLGs every year but they never come back. Sigh. AofA are not a replacement but splendid in their own way. Their four chord song has gone viral, as well it should. It's a fairly common idea, the hit songs are very simple and the music is interchangeable. I saw Pete Atkin do something very similar. AofA do it very well.


The final show was John Bishop with his show, Sunshine at the McEwan Hall. This was a very large venue and was sold out, unsurprisingly. Last time we saw him was last year in the Cocktail Bar at the Pleasance. It was the last Sunday, he'd just missed getting whatever the award was called last year and was just a little bit the worse for drink. Never mind, he was wonderful in that little venue and pretty damn good in this huge one. Ian and I were on the front row this time; the kids were too sensible to put themselves in such a vulnerable position but it wasn't a problem. John seems to be a very nice man, not prone to making people miserable. He asked who had seen him on TV. Everyone! Who had seen him at the Fringe before? About 20 people and our party was five of those.
Whether it translates into real life or not, John has a warm and friendly stage persona and you can't help but like him. He has suddenly become an overnight success after only six years of struggling and he deals with it with all the grace and comedy you would expect of a first rate comedian, how you would hope to behave if you suddenly met all the celebrities you had idolised over the years. He has a lovely turn of phrase and you completely buy in to his stories. We were sold the first time we saw him and he referred to a drive back from holiday where some hour in he realised his wife had been 'leaking sound' for the entire journey without it impinging on his consciousness at all. If you get the chance, go see John Bishop.  

First day of the Fringe (with kids)

We travelled up to Motherwell on Thursday evening. Sally and I met Jack at Sheffield station (he having travelled up from Oxford) and took the train up. Callum, my sister's son,  joined us at Leeds and we settled in for a fairly dull trip, sat at a table for four. I got out the jacket I am knitting and sewed up the raglan sleeve seams then picked up the stitches around the neck to knit the collar. All was relatively quiet until Darlington when the boys got on and sat at the table across the aisle from us. The problem with knitting on a train, apart from making me look like a granny according to Ian, is that people talk to you. What are you knitting? How long have you been making that? And so on. The boys were three men, Gaz, Gary and Dave, going up to Edinburgh for a weekend of male bonding. Apparently they've been doing this in various cities since they were 30ish. They started with a trip to Blackpool. After that the only way was up. They're in their forties now and still doing this once a year. This year they were going to join the rest of their party of eight in Edinburgh. 
It's amazingly expensive for an apartment in Edinburgh, they complained. 
That'll be because of the Fringe. 
The what? 
You don't know about the Fringe?
No.
So the fact that huge numbers of performers, students and audiences pack into Edinburgh for the month of August had passed them by. As Jack commented, in a couple of weeks they could probably have got the same apartment for half the cost. Never mind. They were halfway through a hefty number of cans of lager and they didn't care. They'd each got £200 for the weekend, they said, £20 for food and the rest for booze. Each of them teased and was teased about their wives and kids and each, sooner or later, wandered off to tell their wife they loved her and to say 'night night' to their kids. They entertained us all the way up to Haymarket where we kicked them off the train. Their bags were much lighter and they left a stack of empty cans, despite a regular search for a bin to put their rubbish in.


So, on Friday, an early lunch at Equi's then Ian drove us over to Edinburgh. I'd booked an additional show, Out of the Blue, on Alex's recommendation so we had four shows. The first thing we did was book another show for Saturday (an Oompah band at the GRV) then we parked up and made our way through a lovely little public garden to the C Plaza where we had a coffee and waited for our show.


I love a cappella music. Much as I like other types of music, the human voice, particularly in harmony, is what moves me. Alex is always recommending a cappella shows, and flamenco and generally culture sort of stuff, but Ian cleaves to comedy passionately, stubbornly. Never mind, I'd got him a ticket and he was prepared to give it a go. The show was put on by Oxford undergraduates, all male and with lovely voices. The choreography was amusing and energetic although, to be honest, they could have stood perfectly still for me and allowed me to concentrate on the music. They started with 'Don't You Want Me Baby' and bounced through a familiar songbook to finish with an encore of Pokerface. Callum identified it. Good job we had someone along who has some idea of the Zeitgeist. Ian had had to leave to save the car from predatory traffic wardens or I'm sure he'd have known Pokerface too. 


My favourite arrangement was Billy Joel's Lullaby. They didn't allow themselves to be distracted by the traditional mobile phone ring in the quietest section. They're good! Later we wondered how you fall into this sort of thing. We guess they were all choir boys in a previous life. That would explain the sometimes over pure tones and unconvincing sensuality in the dances to the 'raunchy' songs. On the way out I bought a CD. It's lovely but a cappella loses something in electronic format. They're just songs; the wonder of the performance is lost.


We dashed from there to Rainer Hersch being Victor Borge. I very much like Rainer and I have fond memories of Victor Borge. The story of his life was interesting and engaging and I think that these snippets of classical music are ideal for me. I love them when surrounded by anecdotes but I don't generally have the concentration or appreciation for an entire piece. 


After Rainer we split up. Callum wanted to see Rhod Gilbert but Ian, Sally and I had seen his show, 'The Cat that Looked Like Nicholas Lyndhurst', at Nottingham Playhouse relatively recently so we sent him and Jack to see Rhod and we headed over to the Underbelly to see Susan Calman.  (The picture at the top of this piece is Sally, already exhausted by the culture, waiting in the Underbelly bar for the show.) We first saw Susan a couple of years ago when she seemed promising. Since then she has appeared on the News Quiz and was sufficiently amusing that we thought we'd have another look. She's much improved, even in the dank warmth of the Underbelly.  Sally loved the show, laughing all the way through. I like Scottish women comedians, especially those from Glasgow. Susan used to be a lawyer but gave up the glamour and money for a dank cavern in the Underbelly and a life of semi-poverty. Good! I'm glad she's turned from the dark side. 


In the same way, Mickey Flanagan has recently come to our attention through Radio 4. Having moved up from the East End of London through a social science degree into teaching he has also turned away from a career of horror into comedy. Susan is very short and Glaswegian, Mickey is tall and cockney. It seems like a theme. The stories were very funny. I loved his definition of doing fuck all and his assertion that the 'Chicken Children' of today have completely lost the art. They may be wasting time but they have lost the ability for complete indolence. This was a show very much based in his own life and experience, a man who has made the transition from working class to rather smart middle class, marrying a long suffering multitasking woman who perfectly complements his persona of idleness. This was a splendid finish to the day. Ian complained that he'd heard most of the material on the radio show. Luckily I'd been too lazy to iPlayer it so it was suitably fresh and funny for me.   

The etiquette of nakidity

Given that it's summer holiday time with lots of non-regulars in my home, we have issues of etiquette. 


Generally it's quite easy. I am allowed see Sally without clothes, she can see me in the same condition without embarrassment. Similarly, I can see Ian in all his natural glory. The permissions are not transferrable, however, which means that I am the only one of the three who does not need to worry about clothing for nocturnal loo excursions, which is rather relaxing (for me).


However, in the last few days there has been a plethora of young people in the house. Jack, my son, and Sally's friends, Amy and Jess. It's required being awake enough in the middle of the night to find my big purple dressing gown to avoid levels of young-person-horror that would lead to the destruction of all life on earth due to the intensity of blush levels. This has required a level of consciousness I usually try to avoid. I'd like to have an open discussion about the misguided prejudice for apparel (where it inconveniences me) but my concern for the continuation of the biosphere is such that I think their delicate consciousness requires me to be discreet. Never mind. They've all gone and I can revert to massive unconcern and semi-consciousness in the night. Hurrah!