A beautiful sunny morning. After days of sunshine the last two saw a complete change in the weather. Thursday morning I managed to get a fair amount of weeding done and then decided to take Merrill for a walk but we only managed a hundred yards or so before it started to spit so turned and went back inside. That was fortunate because seconds later the heavens opened and it bucketed down and it went on bucketing down for the rest of the day. Yesterday it continued to rain so all April’s showers came in one go. It also turned a mite chilly, enough to light the zompa and in the evening turn on the central heating.
Coincidence is a strange phenomenon. I read in Kenneth Williams diaries of an actor named Scott Hylands and couldn’t think I had ever seen him in anything so went to the internet to find out. His impressive list of credits right up to the present day is so long I didn’t bother to read them and I didn’t recognise him from his photograph, an old man now of course, but that same evening we watched again a two part TV special called “To Catch A Killer” with that marvellous actor Brian Dennehy giving a simply superb performance as a homosexual serial killer (evidently based on a true story) and who should be featured “As Paxton” but Scott Hylands? Last night we watched again “The Elephant Man” made in 1980 and showing its age a little but still fascinating for the most part. I could have done without the fantasy elephant sequences and the ending and I’m not too sure I actually believe the theatre scene; did that really happen? Some of it is reminiscent of early German cinema. There are performers who have received honours, knighthoods and so forth and I can’t really see why but I would dearly like to know why John Hurt hasn’t been honoured, one of the finest actors Britain has produced. Just think of his performance in “The naked Civil Servant” for a start.
I have enough reading to last me the entire summer if not beyond. Having finished Joe Orton’s I am now half way through the Kenneth Williams diaries, both of which I would like to come back to, our friend Wolf Kern sent me a hefty thriller called “City of Ice”, I started on Sebastian Faulks’ “On Green Dolphin Street” and gave up on page 90. It’s not that the writing is bad, it was just that I had absolutely no sympathy with any of the characters in consequence of which I found it rather boring, the kind of book that once you put it down you’re reluctant to pick up again hence my giving up altogether on page 90. Now I am engrossed in his “Human Traces” a weighty tome of 615 pages and which gripped me from the very first page so that will be bedtime reading for some time to come. I also have the Erast Fandorin, my favourite detective, number 6 and Chris tells me he has ordered number 7 from Amazon. Number 6 came courtesy of William and Susan Foote as a birthday present. Yes, next time I sit down to write this blog it will be on my seventy-eighth birthday.
On Friday’s we usually get “The Athens News” and “The Daily Mail”, the latter for the film, theatre, and book reviews. Chris and Douglas both went into town yesterdays and both forgot to get the papers, one because he thought it was Saturday, the other because he simply forgot. There’s harebrained for you.