Blindness

 

Dave’s on the right

Gorgeous Dave and I went to the theatre tonight.

We went to see the “ immersive” piece straight from London’s Donmar Warehouse called Blindness.

Based on the novel by Josè Saramago, Simon Stephens has produced a truly unnerving and emotional piece of theatre, where the audience is sat in covid bubbles of two , scattered over the main Anthony  Hopkins main stage in near darkness.

Each one of us were asked to wear headphones over which we heard Juliet Stevenson’s savage narration of a doctor’s wife experience of internment by the authorities after her husband and thousands of other are inexplicably turned blind by a mystery pandemic.

Stephens uses tricks of lighting , heavy darkness and the claustrophobia caused by wearing masks in the theatrical space to great advantage and at times when Juliet Stevenson is urgently whispering her fears and observations into your ear, it actually feels as though she is there!  

Both David and I were quite unnerved by the whole experience, and rather moved by it.

The sign of a good theatre trip is how much the audience talks about the production afterwards.

And we talked about it all the way home . 

from Going Gently https://ift.tt/2TC9oj1

Wisteria

 

My elder sister bought me a wisteria for my birthday with the strict instructions of keeping it well watered  and fed with cold tea.

I planted it today and put in an arch over the front gate as Dorothy watched me carefully. 

Mary lay on the lawn carefully watching her very own rubber chicken with an obsession previously attributed to Winnie

The arch needs securing to the wall but I rather like it’s height and position over the gate and while the wisteria grows, I added some sweet peas to its base which will fill in the gaps this summer.

Mary couldn’t sleep any closer to her rubber chicken

from Going Gently https://ift.tt/2TDHjb3

Thought

 Getting out

Of my head

Is proving hard

Today

from R's rue https://ift.tt/3q0bN39

Tuxford

Cottage in East Markham

Tuxford is a small market town in Nottinghamshire. It is between two larger towns  - Worksop and Newark. Tuxford still sits astride "The Great North Road" but nowadays the settlement is bisected by the A1 motorway. 

In days gone by, The Great North Road provided the main travel link between London and the north of England. In the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries if you wished to go north or south you travelled by stagecoach. Along the way there were several places like Tuxford that provided accommodation, refreshment and more importantly fresh teams of horses and stabling. All of this was of course before railways arrived on the scene.

Ornate signpost in Tuxford

If you look carefully you can still see signs of that old stagecoaching legacy - in the wide main street and in the buildings that hug it. You may choose to close your eyes and listen to the distant thunder of horses' hooves and the cracking of whips. On a good run, it took over three days to travel from London to York.

On yet another hot June day, I parked near Tuxford Primary School where some council workmen were adding flowers to the front borders. With boots on I set off to visit the town's  Grade  I listed church. The door to St Nicholas's was open so I ventured inside. During this bloody pandemic nearly every church has been locked so it was a surprise to find this one open.

Countryside north of Marnham Road

Mr Knowall, the church warden, was inside and he engaged me in a conversation. He asked me where I was heading and I said I was going north to East Markham. "You'll have trouble doing that because it's east of here!" he chortled so I got out my map to wipe the smile from his face. He also boasted about the town's senior "academy" saying it catered for over six thousand pupils when in fact it serves just over one thousand five hundred. There were other blatant gaffes and I was glad to say goodbye to Mr Knowall.

I walked steadily across the undulating Notts landscape for four hours, pausing only once to sit for ten minutes upon a stile near Gibraltar Farm to drink water and consume my meagre lunch of a packet of plain crisps and a couple of small apples.  You may or may not  be pleased to learn that I had no encounters with beds of nettles nor inquisitive cattle.  It felt good to be alive and out there again - simply walking, one foot in front of the other...

Two Grade I listed churches - within a mile of each other

St John the Baptist Church, East Markham

St Nicholas's Church, Tuxford

from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/35sqHp7