Tag Archives: Victoria Wood

Robin - singing

15 Minutes

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The title is the time I have allotted myself to write this post. I have been using my time to sit with Julia in the evenings rather than sit in the dining room typing. It seems a slightly better use of my time at the moment. After 33 years of marriage you start to think (I do anyway) about the barren wasteland that would stretch out in front of you if you didn’t have a wife. So, as I’d like to stay married I am being a caring and solicitous husband. It will pass, but until it does I am finding it difficult to fit blogging in. Sorry about that, I will answer all comments by tonight.

I watched a programme about Victoria Wood last night. I’ve seen it before, but it was better than most things that were on, and it finished at the same time as Forged in Fire began.

In the old days we had two Channels. They were in black and white and apart from Watch with Mother at lunch time the only daytime Tv was school programmes. Somehow it seems, looking back, to have been far more enjoyable and better quality than the multitude of stations and repeats and “reality TV” we have today. Personally, I’d be happy to spend much of the evening with it witched off but Julia puts it on for background noise and we never seem to switch off. Some of my best days recently were the ones in out early married days when the aerial was struck by lightning and the TV blew up. We did without one for 18 months (endured a number of letters from the Licensing Agency about not having a TV) and only got one for the start of Julia’s maternity leave.

I’ll leave it there as my time is up and the shop beckons.

 

Meanderings

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I started the day with a clear plan. So far I have had a bacon sandwich and three cups of tea, replied to comments, written a haibun prose section (which came to me as I was outing my socks on) and caught with paosoren, a wide-ranging blog relating to Australia. I now know a lot more about poisonous caterpillars and slouch hats than I used to. The plan had also encompassed reading more blogs, but I’ve had to shelve that. It’s mid-day already and it doesn’t seem to be much to show for a morning’s work. Of course, as the “morning” started at 9.45, I can’t expect too much. It could have started at 6.45, but after looking at the clock and thinking for a few minutes I decided that 6.45 was too early to start on Sunday.  Even if I had got up at that time I would probably have fallen asleep later in the day, so I wouldn’t have gained much.

I didn’t exactly cover myself in glory regarding the wakefulness front last night. After posting, I went and watched the last half of a programme about Victoria Wood. As Julia decided to go to bed when it finished, I used the “plus one” channel to watch it from the beginning again. Unfortunately I only manged to get part way through before falling asleep. As a consequence, the middle years of her career are still a mystery to me.

It was interesting to find that she was a hard-working perfectionist who said that lots of people could do what she did. This reinforces my belief in hard work and determination being the way forward. It’s a shame I wasted most of my life thinking you needed talent to be successful. That, it appears, is just the icing on the cake. The ability to be successful without having talent certainly explains a lot of things I have seen on TV over the years.

Daffodils in Nottingham

Nearly 1.00 now and time to make lunch. I’m not entirely sure what it’s going to be, but I have a few minutes to think. After my disastrous failure to order the groceries online, we are a little short of provisions this week.  However, we have beans. We have bread. If I was in the habit of representing my menu choices diagrammatically the intersection would be beans on toast.

The picture of a Herring Gull perching on the head of the Cook statue at Whitby can be taken as a metaphor for our history of colonialism. Or it might just be that I was looking for a bird photograph that didn’t have a robin in it.

That was taken in April 2017. The daffodils are from April 2018 and the Magpie from April 2019. \by April 2020 the photos are all downloaded from the Library, or feature food and eBay purchases. I haven’t been getting out much.

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