Well, Christmas has come and gone and it will soon be 2009. Let’s hope it turns out to be a better year than this that has been a disaster in so many ways. One’s heart goes out to the people of Zimbabwe suffering under that maniac and his thugs, the families that are going to lose their homes due to the recession, all the animals suffering human cruelty, children suffering under cruel parents. The Somali pirates still seem to be getting away with it but now that China has decided to intervene maybe that curse will come to an end, hopefully before there are disastrous oil spillages. Israel and Palestine are still at each other’s throats and I seriously doubt whether that will change in 2009 though in conjunction with Popie boy I sincerely wish it would. What is al-Qaeda planning for the New Year? What is the Taliban planning in Afghanistan? What is Iran up to? And North Korea? Militant Pakistanis? The world is full of fanatics who could spell disaster. Could it be possible that the fundamentalists, creationists, and other assorted religious fanatics in America might learn to love or at least to be tolerant rather than hating and believing in the vengeful god of the Old Testament? I am led to believe there is a xenophobic neo-fascist element in Greece (which is surprising considering the Nazi atrocities in Greece during World War Two. No, maybe not so surprising, there are neo-fascists all over the place) who are part of the Greek problem and I have been meaning to write about Athens ever since our return to Crete but other subjects keep popping up. Like …
Eartha Kitt, that fantastic sex kitten (!) has died at the age of 81. I first saw her in the film “New Faces” in the early fifties in which she sang the songs for which she would always be known C’est si bon, Just an old-fashioned girl, Monotonous, Santa Baby. I remember I thought the whole movie terrific and years later when I watched it again with friends to whom I had enthused over it, we watched it with rather glum faces and no little embarrassment on my part. Had the same reaction to “M. Hulot’s Holiday” which I think I might already have mentioned. I wonder if I would now find the Japanese film “The Burmese Harp” not nearly as moving as I originally found it. I remember at the time seeing it in a cinema in Hampstead and for a long while afterwards nobody being able to say a word, everyone so wrapped up in the film and the emotions the film had caused.
Harold Pinter, the Nobel Prize winning playwright, doyen and grand old man of the British theatre, has also died, at the age of 78. I’m afraid, although I thought his screenplays terrific, I could never be doing with his theatre work. This despite the fact that I once played Mick in “The Caretaker” when the actors had a ball and the audiences stayed away in droves; and I used a speech of Davies from the same play as part of my audition for the National Theatre, successfully I may add except I couldn’t take up the offered contract because at the time I was a busy busy bee out at Elstree Studios writing The Double Deckers.
A cub scout in England has won all 33, the maximum number, activity badges on offer. It evidently took him two years and he says he enjoyed the adventure badge the most because it taught him how to camp out with his friends.