Posting after a three-week gap, this is an update on what's been happening to keep us so busy as we approach the easing of the lockdown.
"That's the shock: All clichés are true. The years really do speed by. Life really is as short as they tell you it is." So wrote the late rock superstar David Bowie. And, if he were alive today, he would no doubt realise that, for the last few weeks, the passage of time has accelerated further.
It’s several weeks since I posted on here, mainly because – as I’ve remarked here before – the days and then weeks just whizz by at an incredible speed.
Not that I’ve been idle, either – as those of you who follow me on Facebook or Linked In may know. In fact, with promoting my latest transport and fiction works, helping to launch Flash Forward Insight with my fellow Palace fan Alex Warner, there has been precious little time for the sort of reflection necessary to write something sensible on here.
Meanwhile, husband Michael has been busy transforming the gardens, both front and back, clearing old stuff out, planting new and generally doing a great makeover. We’ve also made more progress on the inside of the house, with the installation of the much-delayed shutters to the front windows of the house. Michael has refurbished another of the internal doors and has now turned his attention to the front gate.
The highlights of the last three weeks have been about all the work I’ve mentioned, which has been enjoyable and rewarding, and a few cultural things – including the broadcast by the National Theatre of James Graham’s magnificent play This House in a production first seen in 2013. More On James Graham in this article I wrote a couple of years ago.
There was also the broadcast of NBC’s “as live” studio production of Hairspray, first broadcast in 2016, which we both thought was outstanding. We also tried to watch the recording of the Leicester Curve’s production of Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw, but were defeated by the poor sound quality and the static camera work. Instead, we watched the repeat of the BBC TV 1987 production on YouTube. This featured Prunella Scales, Timothy West and the late great Dinsdale Landen, alongside Tessa Peake Jones and Bryan Pringle. It is an immaculate production of an anarchic farce. It’s not my favourite play, but it was a timely piece of satire about the dangers of bureaucratic bumbling linked to spurious scientific certainty. Sound familiar, anyone?
This week, we also watched the Royal Ballet’s relay of The Cellist, the new ballet premiered earlier this year based on the life of the sixties superstar Jacqueline due Pré whose career was tragically cut short at the age of 27 by the onset of multiple sclerosis. It was a brilliant piece of work (though required a fairly detailed understanding of her life for it all to become clear), with an outstanding performance from Marcelino Sambéas as the cello, alongside Lauren Cuthbertson as the cellist and Matthew Ball as the conductor.
As a rest from writing, I’ve also edited a couple of short videos, one to promote the new novel, Governing Passions, and the other the work done by Passenger Transport Monitor. These are on YouTube, and you can watch them using the links below, if you’d like to. They’re fun to do, though time consuming to try to get right.
With the lockdown beginning to ease, we’ll be faced with some difficult decisions about whether and how we maintain our isolation – age and health suggests that we should, though it’s difficult at times. I had to attend the local medical practice for a routine check the other day and realised that it was the first time since the middle of March that I’d entered a building that wasn’t my home.
There is a balance to be struck – for us, as for everybody else, and the decisions are not going to be easy, at least until treatments become established or a vaccine is available. Until then, there’s plenty to do – more accounts to analyse, reports to write and I’m about halfway through my fifth novel. There are worse ways to spend a summer!