Matilda

Matilda
Matilda2

We ventured down to the Smoke during the big freeze for a night at the theatre. Surprisingly, our train ride both to and from London was untroubled by the threat of snow drifts wafting across the frozen flatlands. Our West End treat was Matilda, the RSC musical adapted from Roald Dahl’s dark parable of good and evil. The gong-drenched pantomime was a slick, visually stunning, superbly staged, brilliantly choreographed, foot-tapping extravaganza that left a warm glow like a vintage brandy on a chilly night. The performance was only slightly marred by the quartet of ladies sitting immediately behind us who provided a running commentary while rustling their way through a hundredweight of Maltesers. Every appearance of a cute child on stage was greeted with an “aah” and, since much of the cast is made up of cute kiddies, there were a lot of aahs to sit through. A word of caution, the deafening crescendo of pre-pubescent sopranos singing in perfect harmony might crack your glasses and make your ears bleed.

Matilda1

Beating the Bishop

mitreThe Church of England continues to get its collective cassock in a twirl attempting to respond to the social changes beating down the cathedral door. The result is a dog’s breakfast of compromise and fudge that appears to please nobody. Female vicars are not allowed to be bishops but gay male priests can be if they promise to keep the Devil in their drawers, even those in a civil partnerships. God knows what they’ll say when marriage equality is introduced (and it will be). How is this to be monitored? Spy cameras in the boudoir of the bishop’s palace? Lie detectors at the altar? Early-morning electrodes for the lazy lob? The Old Testament evangelicals are spitting fire and brimstone, the traditionalists are defecting to the holier-than-thou papists and the lame liberals are tut-tutting all the way to the gay pub. The Church’s continuing self-flagellation over rumpy-bumpy between consenting males is laughable and yet the subject of girl-on-girl goings on is strangely absent from the debate. Lesbianism, it seems, doesn’t exist in Canon Law. You’d think that a church established out of political expediency would be more politically astute in these more egalitarian times. Surely they must know that few people care that much anymore?

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Les Misérables

Les misThe advantages of joining the club at Cinema City are free tickets and 10% off at the bar, both of which are guaranteed to drag us out into the drizzle. Our latest freebie at the flicks was the musical blockbuster, ‘Les Misérables,’ adapted from the all-conquering stage musical. Les Mis follows the fortunes of on-the-run ex-con, Jean Valjean, ducking and diving his way to redemption from the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815 to the abortive Paris uprisings of 1832. Anyone who is familiar with the Victor Hugo tale will know the misery of the revolting masses is relentless. The film slaps on the despair with a technicolor trowel from the epic opening act right through to the desperate insurrection of the final scenes. The historic ex-Royal Naval College (now university) at Greenwich is used to great effect as the grand backdrop to the bloody revolution. I presume the lofty burghers of Paris didn’t provide the right tax breaks to the production company.

The complicated score of Les Mis requires pipes of semi-operatic quality and it was entertaining watching various Hollywood divas straining to hold a tune. Apart from Russell Crowe’s flat notes, on the whole it wasn’t half bad, and Anne Hathaway’s exquisite performance as the luckless Fantine was a tear-jerking revelation. The film is 2 ½ hours long which befits one of the longest novels ever penned. The Glums canters the distance well enough. Misery was never so much fun.

Turkey, Surviving the Expats – Out Now!

Turkey, Surviving the Expats – Out Now!

PtP Episode 2

After a few weeks of tweaking, fixing and buffing, Turkey, Surviving the Expats is off the blocks. Episode Two of the best of the blog contains all the juicy bits from the Turkey years. Here’s the blurb:

In 2009, Jack Scott and his civil partner, Liam, sold off the family silver and jumped the good ship Blighty for Muslim Turkey. They parachuted into paradise with eyes firmly shut and hoped for the best. When the blindfolds were removed, what they saw wasn’t pretty. They found themselves peering over the rim of a Byzantine bear pit. Bitching and pretension ruled the emigrey roost. The white-washed ghettoes were populated by neo-colonial bar-room bores who hated the country they’d come from, hated the country they’d come to and were obsessed with property prices, pork products and street dogs. Expat life was village life where your business was everyone’s business. For Liam, it was the barren badlands of the lost and lonely. For Jack it was the last stand of the charmless Raj – ‘Tenko’ without the guards, the guns and the barbed wire. It took them a while to find their feet and separate the wheat from the chavs but, determined to stay the course, eventually they found diamonds in the rough and roses among the weeds.

Welcome to Part Two of the mini-series which includes previously unpublished material together with Jack’s personal recommendations of the must-sees that Turkey has to offer visitors and residents alike.

Buy a Kindle edition from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and from all other Amazon stores worldwide. Don’t have a Kindle? No problem. Download the Kindle app from Amazon and read the book on your PC, smartphone or tablet. Alternatively, buy an e-Pub version from me directly and I get to keep all the dosh. The e-Pub format can be read on most non-Kindle readers (Nook, Kobo, Sony, Apple). The e-books are priced at just £2.99, $3.99 and €3.50 – cheaper than a frozen pizza from Iceland (the shop, not the country).

PtP Episode 1 (313 x 500)Don’t forget to pick up Episode One – Turkey, the Raw Guide. Like Jack and Liam, they come as a pair.

The Big Thaw

The Big Thaw

After the big freeze comes the inevitable big thaw as temperatures rise to their seasonal norm. The glaciers of Norwich are gently melting to a sloppy slush of dirty grey and iced water gently trickles away into sewers. My bruised back is gradually recovering from my big trip and I can venture out once more without fear of slippage and indignity. Before the cold snap becomes yesterday’s news, I give one last cold snap of my own – our patio table looking like a giant iced sponge on a silver cake stand.

The Big Thaw

The Hazards of Duke Street

Tombland on Better Days
Tombland on Better Days

Norwich City Council in its municipal wisdom has decided that gritting pavements isn’t their bag. While city streets are generally clear, the continuing arctic snap means that unsuspecting pedestrians risk their dignities and their coccyxes attempting to skate along the glacial footpaths. People are dropping like nine pins judging by the amateur footage taken by a voyeuristic resident of Duke Street. Yesterday, I was gingery trying to navigate the Tombland icecap. My thick-tread winter boots did not save me from an arse-over-tit, ice scream tumble that nearly put me into an early grave. It hurt. I think I’ll sue. It’s all the rage these days.

Winter Wonderland

Winter Wonderland

It didn’t take the power of the Delphic Oracle to predict the chaos that would result from yesterday’s whiteout. Even a light dusting of snow generally brings the nation to a shuddering halt. East Anglia has been particularly badly hit by the avalanche. It’s been the talk of BBC Radio Norfolk all day with a litany of cancelled events hitting the airwaves – whist drives, netball practice, line dancing, am dram, bowls and bingo. The county is littered with abandoned cars, parish halls have shut up shop, the brownies will not be dib-dib-dob-dobbing any time soon and the oven’s gone cold at the WI. Hundreds of schools have called time and thousands of kids are playing in the snow before it turns to dirty slush. Trains are cancelled and planes are grounded at Norwich International Airport (Yes, Norwich does have an international airport, not that you can fly to anywhere particularly exciting). The Dunkirk spirit has been rekindled and tales of random acts of kindness are flooding in. Plummeting temperatures and a sharp frost will guarantee that the show will run and run for a few days more. This all pales into insignificance when compared to the drama and tragedy that unfolded on the streets of South London this morning when a helicopter crashed into a crane, killing two people and injuring twelve more. You would never know it from the coverage on local radio here in the frozen east.

A sparkling blue sky enticed me out of the warmth for a hot drink and an iced bun. I took these snaps along the way.

Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow

I was going to pop out for an Americano,  but when I peered up from the laptop, I noticed that Norwich was enveloped in an instant blizzard. I thought better of it and decided to stay inside all warm and cosy instead. I can’t afford to break a hip at my age. Naturally, the county came to a standstill with jack-knifed trucks bringing gridlock to the highways and byways. Liam arrived home from his rural office two hours late. “Bugger the dinner,” he said. “Let’s go out for a pizza.” So that’s what we did.

Cue the home video…

Quartet

QuartetAnything Maggie Smith does is alright with me. She could break wind on screen and I’d give her a standing ovation. She’s just my kind of actress, like Judi Dench and Joan Plowright. No wonder I have multiple orgasms when I watch ‘Tea with Mussolini’ – Maggie, Judi, Joan AND Cher. It’s a gay boy’s wet dream. Liam didn’t have to ask me twice when he suggested we see ‘Quartet,’ Maggie’s latest flick. Adapted from the original play, Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut  is set in a retirement home for classical musicians and singers. Maggie stars alongside Tom Courtney, Pauline Collins, Billy Connolly and Michael Gambon with a supporting chorus of real-life former divas, fiddlers, and ivory ticklers. We took our seats at Cinema City, our local picture house. The auditorium was crammed with half-cut old folk of Norfolk spending their winter fuel allowance on buckets of booze, illustrating that not every pensioner in the land is living on the edge of malnutrition and hypothermia. The film is a sweet tale of long-lost love reignited in old age. It brought back fine memories of an old friend’s mother who moved into sheltered housing and married the boy next door. At the time, they were both in their eighties and found a little companionship and happiness towards the end of their lives. I was honoured to be invited to their wedding. It gave me hope for the future, something I’ve clung onto ever since.

Naturally, Maggie as a crabby old opera singer was magnificent but, for me, Pauline Collins stole the show. Her touching performance of someone suffering from the onset of dementia, slipping in and out of cognisance, was delicately and beautifully played. Dementia is a subject Liam and I know only too well.

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Roving Jay

Roving Jay

Santa sent me a bumper prize this year: globe-trotting local lass Roving Jay paid me a whistle-stop visit. Jay currently lives in Los Angeles but grew up in the flatlands and big skies of East Anglia – she’s a Norfolk broad at heart. She parachuted in from La-la-land to spend Christmas with family but took precious time away from the rellies to join me for a natter over an Americano. Dedicated Turkophile, Jay, owns a house near glorious Gümüslük, on the Bodrum Peninsula. Readers may be familiar with her own blog, Roving Jay.  Jay has been a faithful pansyfan from the beginning and very kindly wrote a stunning review of Perking the Pansies, Jack and Liam move to Turkey when it was first released. I have to say, it made me blush (really) and I shall be forever in her debt. Because of the vagaries of the rural bus schedule in these parts, we only got to chew the cud for a couple of hours and didn’t get around to hitting the sauce. We still managed to pack a lot into the chat. Meeting cyber friends in the real world can be a nerve-shredding experience and I was a tad anxious. I needn’t have worried. Jay was a delightful coffee companion. Anatolia aside, it turned out we have a lot in common – for a start, we were both forces brats of more or less the same generation (though Jay is younger and so much prettier).

This spring, Jay is publishing her first guidebook, just in time for the summer scrum. It’s Jay’s unique take on the Bodrum Peninsula. Unlike so many guidebooks these days, it’s a first-hand account and covers the small corner of Turkey that Jay intends to call home one day. The book is stuffed with must-sees and must-dos and is a literary and factual treat. For more information click here. Very highly recommended.