Vota laetae Nativitatis Domini de Sanatorio de Viride apud Mistley!
Dear Friends!
2024 draws to a close and it is time to wish you all a very Happy Christmas and, in these quite astonishingly tortured times, a Healthy and Peaceful 2025. Something that may not happen on the World Stage but which we can only hope might : and trust in the care and love of friends and family – after all, the most important thing at this time.
After a wildly hectic year of travels all over the world by every mode, July brought a dramatic and sudden end to our peripatetic adventures when we were both struck with a variety of annoying ailments that have stayed our journeyings and turned Mistley into Domini de Sanatorio!
I’ll not bore you with the details as I sent a series of updated reports during the height of the siege on our health when you were kind enough to ask. Travel to Albania and Venice were abandoned; theatre outings cancelled and strings of medical appointments attach themselves to our calendar like lights on a Christmas tree – threatening plans into next year.
Someone said, “Ageing is not for cissies!” How right they were and so, best not complain since most of it comes with the territory and we are all moving in the same direction besides which, next to the horrors confronting the world and our beautiful planet at this time, our aches and pains shrink in significance!
The family have been spectacular. It’s been a treat. Sarah flew specially from Canada to stay and Zac & Julie were able to join in our crowded cottage for a really lovely and joyous week. Thank you all so, so, so much – and you, Friends, for your attentions and help too, goes almost without saying.
Many of you may be sighing with relief that these events have meant no long travelogues peppered with badly taken photographs and scarcely believable anecdotes! No written or oral tests for you to sit for a change.
Ha! I jest you lovelies!
Enforced house staying has meant oodles of television streaming, a lot of it pretty drekk but some of it worthwhile. A few movies and theatre outings have been achieved though Tony finds it difficult at present with the continued discomfort of nappies and incontinence, and things have to be timed quite carefully.
One of the treats of the Christmas Season was Prokofiev’s Cinderella at Covent Garden – a revisit really as we have both seen it before – though I gave up my seat this year when Sarah joined from Canada and went instead to see Robert Icke’s brilliant adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus.
I think I may have had the better deal there as Tony & Sarah were rather underwhelmed by their show whereas, seat-of-your-pants, Mark Strong and Lesley Manville wowed with passion and desperation. I am glad to say that it was not “a re-imagining” – which we get a lot of these days and which usually don’t inspire – but an “adaptation”. Modern, yes, but all the original ingredients definitely there.
Fight for a ticket!
Modern ballet/dance isn’t really my “thing”. I can often be mesmerised by shape, form, movement and dazzled by the commitment and talent of the dancers but unless the music speaks to me, the dance has lost me I’m afraid. Maddaddam is one such. A single ticket only and Tony was unable to go so rather than waste it I went along instead.
Now, Max Richter’s music in Woolf Works which we saw at The Met in July, was lovely. It spoke to me and in Maddaddam it simply didn’t. Also, the complexity of the ideas expressed in Attwood’s trilogy, here 3 Acts called Castaway, Extinctathon and Dawn make dance a completely unsuitable mode for the niceties and complexities of the story – if I can call it that. It all looked gorgeous but sounded awful and, to me, seemed meaningless. Better to read her book!
We’ve had some lovely reunions. Janine MacKeown (aka Mrs. Jonathan Coe) arranged such a one, inviting us to a concert performance of Handel’s Messiah given by one of her (sic) choirs, the West London Chorus – she is a member of many! – and afterwards a really wonderful gathering at the local Côte round the corner from the beautiful Arts & Crafts St Michael & All Angels Church, Chiswick where a lot of warmth was generated by all: Friends Jonathan, Gina, Andreas, et al in glittering form.
Road Show at the Highgate Gatehouse Theatre, one of our ‘locals’ when in London, was a brave attempt at possibly one of Sondheim’s most difficult works. Friend Robert Finlayson, playing Papa Mizner was in it and astonished us when he told us how very little time this talented cast had to put such a complex musical together – and on a shoestring budget too. The program slightly scores an ‘own goal’ by announcing details of the fraught process of its inception and its many incarnations over fourteen years via three names, three directors and different venues with book by John Weideman (any relation Theo? Rene?) to arrive at what we saw. Anyone who knows Florida would be fascinated by this story of the schemes and scams of the Mizner Brothers circa 1920’s and the boom and bust of the real estate world as the orange groves gave way to a playground for the rich.
Complex and not quite successful it may have been but we enjoyed it very much and there was no doubt about the talent and commitment of the ensemble.
And what about books? I don’t know…..I am just having such a bad time concentrating on them at present; nothing to do with the books; everything to do with attention span and a mind that flips about between cooking pots, ironing boards, supermarkets and other domestic exigencies – not any excuse at all for this lapse in discipline!
But we have had a “South African Year” if you will, though there have been others of course, but at the forefront have been Anthony Akerman’s fascinating and moving memoir, mentioned in an earlier blog, Lucky Bastard.
Now Friend Yvonne “Vonnie” Ray Spain has committed her memories to a fascinating account of her life committed to the injustices of Apartheid and in the New South Africa too, with the publication of the Time of My Life : South Africa 1951 – 2021. “ Despite being softly spoken (Vonnie) believes that by being silent we are complicit in injustice” and it is true that in a very noisy world there is an awful lot of silence. I love the ‘scrapbook’ approach she has adopted which makes the book very accessible.
There is no doubt what it is about!
Also from South Africa is Jonty Driver’s memoir C.J.Driver : Dayspring, edited and with a forward by J.M.Coetzee, his brother-in-law, which Tony is reading with enormous pleasure at present. So I can’t rightly say that it is on my mantelpiece! We were both saddened by Jonty’s sudden death last year in May.
Tony has been much involved, despite illness, in the reprinting and re-issuing of his Derek Jarman biography, Jarman to be republished and launched in Spring. Allison & Busby have been extremely enthusiastic and supportive as you can see from the trailer that has just gone out (see below).
Derek died over thirty years ago but interest in him has never waned. Little, Brown published first time round over twenty years ago but for some reason allowed the rights to lapse; all this while later Allison & Busby have taken up the cudgels!
Tony’s new book If It’s Tuesday comes out next year too, in the Autumn. He has been at it for several years and now it is heading for the book shops. He is very pleased. So am I of course. He has worked hard.
Time to ice the Christmas cake. For the first time in our nearly forty-year partnership Tony and I are alone this Christmas. And at home. In fact this is the first Autumn/Winter that we have remained completely in England and are finding it a rather enjoyable experience. There have been firsts: Christmas Pudding, made two months ago maturing in brandies and other elixirs; Christmas Cake drowned in rum and other things the Puritans would freak over; Duck! Friends Nigel, Deidre and ‘Barney’ came for dinner just last night. I was a nervous wreck but the duck passed muster, stuffed and sauced in traditional prunes, apples and cranberries, we were pleased.
So – alone at Christmas means stretching the culinary imagination and that is something I willingly do. So do the bathroom scales.
While the family sun themselves in Mauritius! Or freeze in Ottawa.
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Just before I let you go – that’s if you’ve not left already – let me list some of the slightly more worthwhile screen experiences, for the record:
On the actual big screen front Concave, based on Robert Harris’ meticulously researched novel of the same name, dazzled us. Beautifully shot – that they did not use the actual Sistine Chapel and apparently built a copy in the studios seemed to us miraculous, it was so realistic. All the acting was excellent particularly Ralph Fiennes and I’ll say nothing of the twisty ending. So…..out of 10? 9.
Next Heretic, with Hugh Grant in uncharacteristic mode as a serial killer of women, we found flawed but fascinating: like looking into the eyes of a cobra!
“ Heretic is gruesome and bizarre and preposterous, the third aspect made palatable by Grant’s dapper performance of evil.”
Rotten Tomatoes gave it 90%. So for me…….out of 10? Probably 8.
And what of dear old Gladiator 2?
Hmm. I went alone! At two hours twenty-eight minutes and not his scene anyway, no way could Tony have come.
“Gladiator 2 : A dreadful, pointless sequel that never should have seen the light of day. It’s all style and no substance, the kind of film you are consciously aware of from one scene to the next. A good film transports you into another world. A bad one keeps reminding you that you’re watching a movie. (It) is a bad movie, top to bottom.”
Dazzling CGI; Ridley Scott was being Ridley Scott and it isn’t nearly as good as the 2001 Russell Crowe story which won five Oscars. But I still enjoyed it for what it was, pure escapism – and anyway, Denzel Washington was gloriously evil!
Rotten Tomatoes gave it 72%. For me……? Out of 10? 5.
Conclave led us to a look at the excellent BBC Documentary, still available, Renaissance – The Blood and The Beauty, the kind of thing the Beeb does beautifully. Epic Drama Documentary it is , with Charles Dance as a plausible, irascible Michaelangelo narrating the harrowing events of his time. In three episodes, it is riveting stuff. 9 out 10 straight away.
And what of Day of the Jackal? Weekly episodes. Very frustrating. We enjoyed it but thought Eddy Redmayne not ideal casting. You knew from the first moment that the story was going to be stretched almost to breaking point – why do they do that? Television is so…..lax. Far too much time to tell what should be a tight story with unimpeachable moral closure. But you can see him getting away with it and at least another series on its way. Interesting that we had son Zack staying and he had been
following the weekly trail and consternated us by disclosing he had never seen the original Edward Fox movie which is altogether a tighter ball game, disciplined by the demands of the cinema. We watched it together and Zac said he thought it better than the series too. What gives the 1971 movie its clout is the fact that we know Charles de Gaulle does not get
shot making the whole story all about finding out why! Far more intriguing. Eddie Redmayne is after a fictitious someone we have never heard of and couldn’t care less about. I think this is the main difference.
7 out of 10.
Have you ever heard of Emilia Estevez? No? It’s a French musical crime comedy film which was showered with awards at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Set in Mexico and all in Spanish, it deals with female empowerment, cartel violence and the epidemic levels of disappearances in the country, as well as gender reassignment surgery and transitioning – all explored with endearingly shoddy song and dance numbers.
Sound horrendous? It wasn’t. It was absolutely riveting, darkly funny and very unlikely!
Rotten Tomatoes gave it 75%. Me? Out of 10? Definitely 9.
Two to go and then to the kitchen I must go. Briefly then:
We have persevered with Disclaimer the Cate Blanchett, Sacha Baron Cohen and Kevin Kline vehicle, and are glad we did. We weren’t sure about it at the beginning and then discouraged by others saying they had abandoned it but we have steadied the raft and are now on course. It is a very intriguing piece of television – another series that could be much improved with the discipline of film.
“Alfonso Cuarón’s new drama about a wife whose secrets are exposed looks beautiful. Sadly, it’s also slow, turgid and – despite stars like Kevin Kline – so bad it needs to be pureed into mush. Only Cate Blanchett could deal with a script this abominable.”
It has had mixed reviews to say the least. Rotten Tomatoes gives it 76% but out of 10 I give it 7. It’s intriguing and passes the time in front of the fire!
After the Party then.
Wow!
A New Zealand six-part drama TV series co-created byRobyn Malcolm and Dianne Taylor, directed by Peter Salmon, and starring Robyn Malcolm and Peter Mullan.
“Hands down the best acting on TV all year as Peter Mullan is perfectly cast and Robyn Malcolm delivers the performance of 2024 in this dark, provocative drama about a woman who accuses her husband of a sex act with a minor.”
Rotten Tomatoes gives it 100%. And so do I……10 out of 10.
A very Happy Christmas to you All
Dear Friends
Pedro
Click on the link for a little song!
Dear both:
Glad to read your news. Thank you for film and TV mentions which I will certainly follow up over the dog days of January.
But before rushing away from the execrable 2024, all I can say is WE’RE STILL HERE, which is something if a miracle.
Onwards and upwards to 2025. Sending love, as ever, Lindsay
Happy Christmas chaps. We are wining and dining with our families in Ilkley and Scotland. Despite being immobilised you have managed to pack in a mountain of stuff!! Bravos all round. Good pointers and reviews.
Hugs from me and joy.
And a very merry and culinarily satisfying Christmas to both of you and only good wishes for a happy, healthier year to come.
Lots of love.
Dearest Bulgy and Peaklet wishing you the happiest of “Home Alone ” Christmas’s . Totally concur with your critique of Conclave , incidentally the first time I have seen a film with more than 10 people present (totally packed at a 3.30 screening) since covid and Renaissance Mr Dance totally inhabiting Michaelangelo to the life and may I add the performance of the year Mark Rylance in Wolfhall – the last episode of which was heartbreakingly beautiful – those eyes have a depth of pathos and inner torment the like of which I have never experienced in an actor in over 60 years of theatre going! Xx
Merry Christmas to you both & a Healthier, Regenerative 2025!
Merry Christmas to you both & a Healthier, Regenerative 2025!
Loved that Peter,
10 out of 10 for all your personal family and cultural news.
Conclave supurb
Gladiator 2 , not as brilliant as the first, only reason that I loved it was sexy Paul Mescal, but he was too nice to play the vengeful son. R Scott didn’t have good content and went wild with over the top cgi.
Queer not a great film , but Daniel Craig, unchained from his Bond does great as a needy alcoholic Mad About the beautiful boy.
Wishing you and Tony better health 2025.
Thank you for all your inspiration. Have a good Christmas and a Happy, Healthy New Year 2025.
Hope you have plenty of travel again and write up about the exciting visits you make.
I loved Disclaimer. True it becomes a bit unbelievable halfway through, but when you realise that it is actually about the suppositions of people who were not there at the time, it all becomes credible, and the final episode puts it all into place. So you have to watch to the end to fully enjoy it.
Congratulations on all your achievements in 2024, Tony’s book and Jarman biography and especially Peter’s generous blog: a flow of insights piqued by cultural and travel adventures which tantalise and enthuse the followers of such very personal accounts. Wishing you both a continuing richesse of excitements and valour in 2025.
Lillywhite.
I think Margaret Attwood far too didactic.
Do you know what happened to Astley Driver?
Enjoyed Conclave but the ending was v silly and utterly improbable. It did however remind me of Jeffrey Eugenides wonderful Middlesex more than 20 years ago.
So sorry you boys have had a rotten time of it. I hope to be well enough to travel to the UK in about May.
Praise be you will be able to travel a bit. Lots of love and thanks for other recommendations.
Great epistle as always! Thanks for the recommendations and totally agree about After the party though I have to say I couldn’t cope with Heretic — first film we’ve walked out of for years!!!
Happiness and many reunions in 2025, dear Pete and Tony!