R's rue

  It’s my sister Ann’s birthday tomorrow . The family met up today for a long lunch in her garden which was lovely Both my sisters have a talent for gardening. We shared our respective news over baby lamb chops I didn’t tell them about the tattoo. Oh, I haven’t told you lot either have I ?  Well I’m having a tattoo…. You can blame Gorgeous Dave if you like, for after a night out with him, during which he shared with me his recent booking for his tattoo, I hatched my plan to have one myself. And all in a good cause I will be having a tattoo in a fund raiser for my hospice. I will publish details of how to sponsor me ( if anyone is interested) at a later date  But I will leave you with an illustration of what the tattoo will look like Yes it’s classy and very small…it’s one of the Llandudno goats..an emblem that saved the hospice this year Yes, it’s of one of the famous Llandudno goats from Going Gently https://ift.tt/3qBGegb

 Please pray For Surfside from R's rue https://ift.tt/3gW4lTI

Michael Stipe Like many people, the music that still haunts me is the music of my youth. In a way it is as if my musical tastes are more or less frozen in time. I still like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, Free and Jackson Browne, The Incredible String Band and Leonard Cohen. I associate much of "my" music with the time before adult responsibilities arrived - climbing up onto the conveyor belt of work and paying a mortgage and marriage and children. As a consequence, I kind of missed out on a lot of great music that came along afterwards. Recently, more or less by accident, I have been paying more attention to the music of R.E.M. . For instance, there was a late night programme on the television called "R.E.M. at the BBC" and I was entranced by it. Formed in 1980 at university in Georgia, they were a very tight band. They sought to be true to themselves and to their ideas. As most readers will know, the frontman was a wiry, elf-like fellow called Michael Stipe and...

  It grew in me, but I wasn’t blown away by it This just about underlined what I thought about Lin Manual Miranda’s intensely personal production of  In The Heights.  Now you could tell from the get go that this sprawling depiction of Miranda’s home “town” of Washington Heights , the Latina quarter of New York, was going to be a nostalgic homage to a diverse community which is longing for home or indeed desperate to escape it but, for me despite the colour, the huge flamboyant set pieces and the rhythms, it was all a bit too much.  Anthony Ramos Having said this, the cast was impeccable. Anthony Ramos is an instantly lovable leading man and Melissa  Barrera and Leslie Grace stand out as two twenty something women who are both trying to forge themselves a place in a city who still view latina women as nothing more than waitresses and maids and   Olga Merediz also shines as the quarter’s gentle natured matriarch Abuela , an old lady who ha...