Strangely fine times

...and still it rains...  It’s enough to depress even me and I’m not an outside person or even a person who enjoys sitting in the sun but the constant grey skies are a definite downer.

The shop is without its bosslady as  daughter, partner and the g’son are in Cornwall, also getting rained on by the sounds of it but I hope they are managing to have some fun. The sense of responsibility being left in charge is huge! Mainly I worry about the rabbit. When I am her carer I fret about her. She is really old now but still able to show her displeasure and the weather has been annoying her too. She likes to get out for a few hours each day, but not if she’s going to get her paws wet. 

Anther theatre company - the National Theatre of Scotland no less - put on a highly enjoyable performance called ‘The Strange Undoing of Prudentia Hart’. The venue was the Visitors Centre at one of our small local distilleries. It was turned into a pub for the evening and the audience sat at small tables with glasses of complimentary whisky or champagne (or orange juice!) The action took place around (and on) the tables. It did mean rather a lot of screwing ones neck around to follow them. The cast of five began the evening with loud ceildih music, very spirited, with an excellent singer,  until the story took over in cheeky rhyming couplets. Miss Prudentia Hart is a buttoned-up but romantic young librarian who has been asked to speak at a dry academic conference on: ‘The Border Ballad: Neither Border nor Ballad.’ Her special interest is the many depictions of the Devil and Hell in the ballads. She is the only speaker who still feels the soul of the people expressed through them but her audience grow bored, more interested by new theories such as that proposed by the   the feminist professor who sees the ballads as separatist and an example of the male assault on the vagina!

 To cut the tale to the bones, (which is a shame because it was so well done and so atmospheric, one cast member being an amazing singer in the Celtic tradition who just opened her mouth and the songs came flooding out)  Prudentia falls from the stage into hell where she spends many thousand years studying the ballads in the devil’s library, learning about her own nature as she does so and slowly coming unbuttoned, losing a few garments now and then till she is in her underslip when she realises that the way out of hell is to seduce Old Nick himself. This she sets to do, steals the keys whilst he is in a (post coital?) daze and her hands emerges through the cracks in the asphalt of Asda car park back into 2012 where she is caught and held by the obligatory knight in shining armour (motorbike helmeted young professor) who helps her finally escape. 

I get so caught up in these things and love being part of the action! It reminds me of the Roundhouse days only better. I’m still enjoying it!

The rain has  made this sort of entertainment extra important somehow since we are deprived of summer and a proper solstice feel. Something else I saw, at the private cinema, a Japanese film called ‘Afterlife’ made me think about memories and though the story-line was a bit daft it has stayed with me. Haunted me, wouldn’t be too strong a phrase. The film begins with preparations being made in some sort of run-down sorting house for ‘the next group’ to arrive. As they walk out of a bright light and are sent to their find their guides for the week ahead it is clear that the  group is made up of people coming through death into a between stage before eternity. They are given three days in which to decide on the most important memory from the life they had just left.  In an unemotional, matter-of-fact atmosphere the newly dead accept unquestioningly these instructions, sitting in their rooms watching video tapes of their lives or talking it through with their advisors as they try to decide on a memory. When decisions have been reached the work begins to reconstruct that memory and film them in the scene again. much plywood and paint is used. When the films have been made they sit in a cinema to watch and as their memory comes up they are taken by it into and eternity where that memory is all they experience. Very worrying. I said it was daft, and it was, but I fretted all the way through about which  memories of my life were the most important and came at the end to the surprising conclusion that the time when the children where very young and I was often ill with asthma, wen I had thought myself to be quite miserable in many ways, there were the moments of pure happiness spent with the babes and my husband; only the world outside my family was too hard to for me to handle.