The Sandman and I enjoyed ‘Skyfall.’  Who wouldn’t! ( Probably my ex, who would have found the volume reprehensibly high. I love it when the seats vibrate!) The motorbike chase at the outset, across the rooftops of the Grand Bazaar somewhere in Turkey (Istanbul?) was excellent, although my old-wifey personality deplored the waste of good fruit as stalls crumbled and melons rolled. Sandy says I jumped noticeably several times in the course of the film; I probably did. The mark of a good movie IMO is  if it gets my gut reacting.

The funny bits, nicely timed, were the best of course, and there were plenty, though distressingly often mixed up with killing moments, of which there were far too many.  Bond may not have shown (as much) callousness over his female conquests, but he does take corpses in his stride. (except one, but to name that would be a spoiler). Best moment, if I have to pick one,  was Judi Dench’s cultured voice ordering, with lady-like asperity , an operative to  ‘Take the bloody shot.’  

JD is my favourite ever actress. (Spell-check is very proper and doesn’t like that. I should have put ‘actor. ‘ Get stuffed Sp-ch.) I talent-spotted her in the early 70’s when she was in a TV production ( forgotten the name of it of course.)* It was a family drama, each episode being the same event through the eyes of one of the main characters. She shone then, and has shone ever since. 

I also enjoyed the new Q,  a boffin-geek, barely out of teenage acne, who cheerfully shows Bond up for being outdated and possibly obsolete.

Location shots were highly enjoyable too, especially as they came up the A9 to the Highlands - almost home!

S and I played air-hockey in the cinema foyer whilst we waited for the pop-corn to be mucked out from the last showing.  Now there’s a game I could get enthusiastic about. Does it count as a sport? I almost broke a sweat.  

* Thanks to Google: It was 'Talking to a Stranger' by John Hopkins and was in 4 episodes!

Four Quartets.

With nothing much to read (except Stephen King’s ‘11.22.63’ which is so far rather good) I felt in a mood for some poetry. ‘The Four Quartets’ is always my first choice when I get into that mood and I always find some salient wisdom.

From:    Burnt Norton:

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus in your mind.

                             But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

.......

Go, go, go said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

...........

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

From:   East Coker

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after.

--------

Trying to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure.

Because one has only learned to get the better of words.

from:  Little Gidding.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started. 

-------

And all shall be well and

All manner of things shall be well

by the purification of the motive

In the ground of our beseechings.

(these first two lines, quoted from Julien of Norwich, always make me tearful.)

10 days into the South Beach Diet (similar to Atkins but fat-free-ish with less steak and bacon) I have developed a radical, nausea-driven, dislike of eggs that will follow me through the rest of my life, so breakfast has had to include carbs in the form of these devilish crispbreads that have virtually nothing of anything in them but fibre. They taste like heaven. The spread is Benecol. the cheese is reduced fat. 

Last week I felt extremely ill, getting lots of those moments when the world goes white. I checked with the new medication and read: ‘Should not be taken by those on a diet of less than 1000 calories a day.”  I wasn’t eating anywhere near that amount. Anyway, it’s settled down now and with a bit of adaptation (no more fecking eggs for breakfast) I should be able to keep it up for a while. It has been a problem because I’m lazy about cooking for myself and when I get home from the shop at 2.30 I want something instant which has usually meant fish (quick dry-fried) or organic tinned tomato soup which has, distressingly, got sugar in it!  The fish is OK (there has been some wonderful Dover sole on sale ) but there’s only so much fish I can eat in a week. The diet encourages steak (the man’s an American after all) which I don’t normally eat but by the end of last week all the customers were beginning to look like steaks so I bought a couple of slices of sirloins, then had beef at the  carvery  with Sanders on Sunday. The customers are safe.

A couple of inches have gone from where my waist should be and where the ‘Cushon Syndrome’ from the prednisilone has settled. I still won’t be asked onto the catwalk but I suppose it’s a result. No idea if I’ve lost weight - it’ll just be water so far anyway. My BMI was fine before but 12 yr olds have to tell you to do something in order to feel they have the power. Huff!

I can’t help feeling proud of myself as I baked the required 4 Christmas cakes and three pudding whilst in the early days of starvation without stealing so much as a single current.That’s will-power for you - or the need to outwit the 12yr old who wanted to double the dose of medication without even a second blood test. 

I’m too much of a coward to ditch the doctors altogether as two of my friends with high prostate scores for cancer have done. Both seem to have found alternative ways of dealing with the disease, one including marijuana. Now, hearing about the other, the second is off to Amsterdam tomorrow to go that happy route.

The big news is that the shop will close on 15th December and I will finally be put out to grass. I can't wait.

The customers are sad (I'm getting weary of fielding cries of woe) but C's health has suffered from stress over the years and managing two businesses has proved too much. There are possibilities in the offing, for instance the stock might be taken over and it move to another premises to be run by others. I hope this happens. Ours is a very health-conscious town.

No plans yet for my own next steps but I do have some unfinished projects, and people to visit (finances willing.)

Of course we may all come to an end in December, as the Mayan calendar suggests. My theory is they ran out of rock.... or patience...

It’s been a while since I felt like adding to this diary. Life is what happens when you’re not writing about it. Someone didn’t say that, I think it was a Beatle. Looking back the time has all been coloured by this newly diagnosed disease. I hope that diabetes type 2, will become just another minor annoyance and fade into the background, but at the moment it still feels like a signal from my body that time is getting shorter. In other words it’s making me morbid!

Also it’s making me grumpy. 

‘Wolf Hall’ didn’t help. I knew I wouldn’t like it but felt obliged to give it a hearing. The plot is old - A level history covered it well enough, and the characters were no more real than the history text books made them at the time. I can’t believe the research was particularly arduous.  The narrative skipped around, the cast was too large, the politics as boring as today’s, and the discomfort of living in Tudor times definitely didn’t raise my spirits. She does write very well; it’s not her fault I didn’t enjoy it. I should have known better than to try it.

Iain Rankin’s ‘Standing in a Dead Man’s Grave’ brought Rebus back and was all the better for it. I find the other chap - Fox? - very upright and dull. A Philip Pullman children’s book  ‘Count Karlstein’ caught my eye whilst I was away and proved quite amusing, but not in the same league as the Northern Lights trilogy. Less amusing was a book given to me by a much valued friend who lived on various west coast islands. It was written by a man who took up sharking for a living and met Gavin Maxwell at the time Gavin was in the middle of one of his many, usually abortive, schemes for making money, this time sharking. My friend bought it for me because he knows I like anything that touches on the life of Gavin Maxwell, who I consider an interesting character.  (His biography by Douglas Botting was excellent. Read at a time that I had a special interest in bipolar people and their problems, I found it very touching.) This particular book, on the other hand, wasn’t very well written, didn’t have much about Gavin, and had far too much about shark fishing, catching, gutting etc. etc. in bloody detail.

That about covers the reading I’ve been doing. 

The trip to the opera was amusing. More amusing than my purist ex felt it should have been. 'The Magic Flute' was written as a fairy tale and turning it into a quasi pantomime seems to me a valid way to go; not so to those who have seen more serious productions apparently. The same purists also complained about the amount of speaking; the recitative was spoken rather than half sung and the lyrics had been translated into English (they still had those supra-titles theatres have nowadays to make sure we didn’t miss the plot.) I sat, with my artist friend Jo (also a purist sadly) in a ‘reduced view’ seat from whence we had a brilliant view of the orchestra and, more importantly, the audience. Even though the theatre is in a town 25 miles from the one in which we live, the number of people that we knew was impressive. 

We missed this extra entertainment; an elderly lady - even older than me at a guess - slept through the first act, was woken for her glass of white wine in the interval and returned to sleep comfortably through the second act until near the end when she woke shouting: ‘Turn it down will you! You know I don’t like it that loud!’

First love.

I got home to a very surprising, very welcome, contact with the boy I was strongly attached to for three years from the Lower Sixth, through A levels, through a year working in the County Library (he in a bank) and into our first year at separate Teacher's Training Colleges. 50 years have passed since the last phone conversation and exchange of letters, but when I picked up the phone on Tuesday I immediately recognised his voice.

The contact has helped me throw away a script I wrote for myself many years back which had him relieved to be free of me. Not so. He even looked for me in various ways, including talking to my father (who didn't pass the conversation on) and to some girls hitch-hiking from college into Cambridge (as we did frequently!) They didn't pass it on either. I wonder who they were. Possibly I had already left and was married.

It's quite difficult to say how much this has meant to me. He is still happily married to the girl who was hovering in the background the last time I visited him at his college in Sheffield; I am happily unmarried with a varied life behind me. We both have children and grandchildren. We've both had ups, and both had serious downs. All the difference it actually makes is in my mind, and, it seems, in his. My life story has changed. 

I looked out photographs, could find none of him except on the long curly school photo, and he found none either, but maybe  the memory is enough. I've always liked smartly dressed men - he looked wonderfully lean and handsome  in his school blazer, as did most of the Sixth Form boys. I also remember his kindness, tenderness, and good humour. I'm happy to be sentimental about my first love.

A good trip.

It's so nice to find I can still travel, at least to the ends of the British Isles if not the Earth. Walking for a sustained length of time is a problem and getting to the taxi rank at Euston with a case full of 2 very heavy fruit cakes felt like trekking in Nepal (as I imagine that to be) but everything went smoothly once I'd had time to gasp for oxygen.  I saw Oxford again, the above photo is an alternative view to the gleaming spires), my daughter's pretty flat, Brown's (delicious fishcake, best ever!) and - oh joy - a real bookshop! It's so long since I have seen thousands of books on shelves; I nearly swooned. Browsing Amazon just isn't the same.

In Cornwall the temperatures where so different to Scotland I thought I'd really gone abroad, until the last day, which was when it snowed on Dartmoor. Bit chilly that morning. Intense family time watching the boys swim, the family dress up for a Hallowe'en party, then the two birthdays I had gone to celebrate.  Both birthday boys behaved nicely and didn't get to over-excited (one of then is 33 so didn't yell when his balloon popped.) Lots of cake which I baked then tried to eschew! The Hadji household is a veritable petting park with three puppies and three adult dogs vying to be cuddled. Exhausting.