The Trains Were Cancelled

[poliphilo]

We turned up at the station to find all the trains had been cancelled. Instead they were laying on coaches. Our driver complained that he hadn't been issued with a map.

We were supposed to stop at various stations on the way, but we sailed past most of them because the driver didn't know they were there. "I'm not worrying about it," he said.

The baby sitting behind us was sick.

The tutorial was mainly about Great Expectations. We were discussing whether Dickens is a realist or not. In a literary context "realist" means something like "unsensational", "uneventful", "unexciting"- and what that has to do with Reality I really don't know.

We had lunch at the Indian restaurant where we are now greeted as regulars. I had a vegetable Bhuna, Ailz had a huge plate of meat- half of which she wrapped in a napkin and put away in her handbag. "See you next week," said the owner as we were leaving- thus creating a sense of obligation.

The driver for the return trip (also map-less) managed to find all but one of the stations.

We walked home from Oldham Mumps. There was pigeon lying in the road. A car swung round the corner and ran it over. I tried not to look. "Oh well," said Ailz, "at least it died with a full crop."

At the bottom of our road there's a house called Arnhem. I've always imagined it as the home of an old soldier with fond memories of World War II, but this afternoon, as we passed, we noticed it had a huge Irish tricolor draped from the bedroom window.

So I guess the old soldier has gone.

Comments

[currawong.livejournal.com]

PS: The mesmerising performance of Kathleen Byron as Sister Ruth in "Black Narcissus." has granted her some sort of immortality. Perhaps too individual looking and intense for mainstream stardom. She was unforgettable in that role. The scene where she puts on her lipstick is more erotically charged than any in your face American sex-fick could ever hope to be.

...and wasn't David Farrar cute in shorts?...come on, pretend you're gay for a minute or two.

...and Sabu was far too exquisitely beautiful to be sexy. He had quite a career for a mahout from the jungle.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes that film is perfectly cast.

It's odd that Byron and Farrar didn't go further.

What I particualrly marvel at is how Powell and his crew created that Himalayan light without ever going out of the studio.

There's a rarely seen Powell called Gone To Earth (a vanity project for Jennifer Jones- which Powell later disowned) in which Farrar plays a lecherous, villainous Squire- right out of Victorian melodrama- and he's pretty good in that as well.

[currawong.livejournal.com]

The majority of Australians did, and still do, want a republic but our crapulous little PM, a genius at playing on fear and greed and the lowest common denominator, presented an arch-conservative model as the only option in the referendum...an option acceptable to precisely no-one.

When the torpid, sport obsessed, philistine Australian public finally gets sick of him, we may have a chance.Howard has never been seen at an opera, a gallery, a play or a concert. He was brought up the narrowest of Methodists but converted to low-church Anglicanism for his domineering wife, Jeanette.He is at present courting the happy-clappy, prosperity theology spouting, Americanised Hillsong Church Community...thus introducing the religious-right as a force in Oz politics.

The fact that big art shows and libraries have repeatedly been proven to be more popular than cricket or football here, has never been able to influence either our politicians or our trashy, witless media.

The Deborah/ Vivien sories can be found in an earlier entry on my blog about brushes with fame

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've just been reading an article by Tony Benn about the disjunction between the politicians in Westminster and the electorate.

Politicians accuse the electorate of apathy. In fact people are simply cheesed off with the way politics is played by the power elite. People feel passionately about all sorts of grass-roots political issues, but, when- as with the war on Iraq- they take to the streets to make their views known- they find they are simply ignored.

Benn says that public opinion is now way to the left of our Labour government and this gives him hope.