wendy house

The rain it never stops and I’ve no particular place to go…   …for me this song captures profound sadness so beautifully. 

Japan sang Ghosts

A paper printed sign in the groundfloor window of a small redbrick terraced house who’s door opens directly onto the street. The house has probably beeen reposessed, the people who lived there evicted. The notice probably fulfills a legal requirement. 

The notice says that there are things in the house that will be chucked out if their owners don’t pick them up within 7 days of the date on the notice.   It says this in a language that is no longer spoken by lay people in England – using words like chattels and herein. If I suspect that the people evicted from this house have a literacy level below average then the wording is difficult, if not impossible, to understand. Almost as if the ‘Agent’ doesn’t care whether the person who’s belonging are in the house understands that they need to promptly pick-up their stuff.

Sad.

When  a large glass of  warm red wine laced with honey  steams in my hand as I sit infront of a flickering open fire listening to the gentle dreaming of my kitties

When I can pay the heating bills and buy food -

Winter is wonderful

The imaginarium of Dr Parnassus    is a wonderful modern faerie tale.   It  mixes classic structures and characters (Old Nick) with modern settings, language, and characters.  

review ratings explained

Plot:    Very good.   A classic style of storytelling,   a new story.   A bet with the devil.   Souls to be won or lost.   The classic framework provides the structure that makes the plot easy to follow.   Easy to follow but not overly  predictable.    Cunning plans and twists.   There is  uncertainty about the virtue and honesty of some characters.   Who is working with, for,  Nick?   The film holds  a cheeky mirror to modern values as it portrays our dreams.      

Gilliam does not write his  female characterisations  in as much depth as his male characters.  There is only one noteable  female character in the film.    Her contribution is central to the plot while the role is  hardly touched and seems superficial.    Lets call her a token women.   A pretty girl that needs rescuing.  Sigh.  A blot on an otherwise wonderful film.  

A related disappointment was the pedestrian ending to the main storyline.    The final scenes  felt a bit anemic.    The scenes  tied-up the damsel’s storyline quickly and neatly.   This felt forced and out-of-keeping with the plucky playing in the other, mainly male,  storylines.   There are many wonderful ways that Terry could have ended the film.   I suspect Gilliam’s creative freedom was somehow compromised.  

Cast: Excellent.    Performances that had the kind of depth that comes from allowing talented actors to develop, improvise and extend their characters.   Apparently Heath Ledger’s last line  before he died was  ‘Don’t shoot the Messenger’ and Jonny Depp improvised the same line when playing Ledger’s character in the imaginarium.  

Sets. Excellent.   Physical locations included some of my favourite places,  such as  Ledenhall market in London and the Public Library in Vancouver BC.   The contrast between the architecture in these two locations was used well as a visual clue to different tones, temperaments, stages  of the plot.

The animated sets were breath taking.   Apparantly breathtaking animated sets are the norm for widely distributed films by famous directors with excellent casts.   Jolly good.  Thoroughly enjoyable.   Lots of ooOOOooooze and aaAAARRRRSSSssse.

Within the imaginarium these fantasy sets had the beauty, unpredictability and the  ominousness of real dreams.    

Audience:   one thing that  interferred with my  total immersion in this fabulous film  was the audience.   Specifically,   the lady sat next to me.    She insisted on sniffing loudly at 1spm (1 sniff per minute).   Every  few minutes there was a cough, sneeze, or other substantial air movement in her facial regions.   She did have some props for this activity, tissues, but  the noise and potential infection kept drawing me out of  the film into an unpleasant reality.   Ick.  

I will be watching this film again.

The Wendy House has a novel coil-spring doorbell circa 1960′s. For some reason  it isn’t working.   WD-40 and a bit of fiddling hasn’t yet fixed it.  I do enjoy a personally relevant, memorable, chorus delivered with passion.   Ring my bell!

White Stripes sang Doorbell

My parents took the family on a day trip to London, to the Tate gallery.   At 7 yrs I was not well equipped to appreciate the treasures on display.   Mum and Dad seemed to spend ages looking at dull boring pictures of clouds (Turner).   I asked permission to explore the galleries at my own pace and was allowed to wander off.   I walked briskly,   errr ran,  around the building capturing impressions browsing for literally seconds at vaguely interesting paintings that I’ve long since forgotten.  

Then.   I turned the corner of a gallery to be confronted by the death of Chatterton.  

His vibrant orange hair glowing,   his purple velvet breaches full of warm lively texture in the daylight.   The torn paper on the floor.   His face white as marble.   Clearly dead.   I was captivated,   I stood studying the painting for what seemed, to a 7 year old, like eons.   I fell intrigued.   Who was this beautiful man?   Why was anyone that beautiful, dead before being old and wrinkly?  

He became my first love.   He was a local Bristol boy,   I was a local Bristol girl.   Later I read Peter Ackroyd’s book ‘Chatterton’ and wondered whether his death was an accident or deliberate. I visit St. Mary’s Redcliffe  occassionally,   the place where Chatterton reportedly discovered the manuscripts on which he forged his texts.   He has remained young, beautful, and with my thoughts.  

From AElla

O! Synge untoe mie roundelaie,
O! droppe the brynie teare wythe mee,
Daunce ne moe atte hallie daie,
Lycke a reynynge ryver bee;

Mie love ys dedde,
Gon to hys death-bedde,
Al under the wyllowe tree.

A couple of friends are in the process of selling one and purchasing another gorgeous home in downtown Reading, near the Wendy House.  

There’s one slight hitch in the plan

In 1998 the local council placed an access  restriction on the to-be-purchased property.   Pedestrians and vehicles cannot access the house from …     …the public highway.   There is no other obvious route to the house.   The current resident ignores this restriction.    How can my friends get from the roadway to the house without breaking the law?   Without:

• using a Vehicle:   A device or structure for transporting persons or things; a conveyance?
• being a Pedestrian: A person traveling on foot; a walker?
• accessing   the property from the  Road?

For all your wedding-guest transportation from church to reception veunue needs.    A red London bus wedding special.   As you can imagine,   this was the highlight of the wedding for me.  

The reception venue in a cricket pavilion, while a match was in progress,  was also so wonderfully English that soppiness abounded.

Thomas swirls  along roads built to bounce him and give me lots of   steering opportunities, through violently yellow  rapeseed fields, between hedges who’s vaulting arms meet above us.  

Thomas purrs and whirrs

Wendy  curls and twirls

First love was a roller coaster.  

The highs involved lashings of peanut butter sandwiches, outlandish hairstyles and jewellery,   singing and dancing in the streets, railway stations, buses, bedrooms, and on beaches.     We could  harmonise with each other and sing every  track by EBTG.      

He had a penchant for spontaneous immitations of  Jack Russel terriers.

My  perfromance fruit was, and still is,    uniquely engaging (and available for appropriate inducements and parties).    

Love on a shoestring budget with a wealth of imagination was bright, distracting, and fulfilling  if  haunted by rumours, potential lies and deceipts.  

Everything But The Girl (EBTG) sang when alls well

When the grief burst in.   Always a suprise.   Always dramatic.    Tracey, alone with her guitar  sang  New Opened Eyes

In 1984 I fell in luuurrrrrrve,   surruptiticously,   with such stealth that I didn’t notice.   For the first six months   I couldn’t understand a word he said with his northern near-Geordie  brogue.   The oscillations of his intonation, arms, facial expressions and dangly earings together told fascianting stories without the need for the precision, or ambiguity, of actual words.   We relied on songs and dancing  to communicate.  During our early courtship he would wrap-up his DJ shifts by  playing this song  for us

Lloyd Cole and the Commotions sang Perfect Skin

In the early 1980′s student’s didn’t have mobile phones.  

I lived in downtown Birmingham on the 18th floor of a towerblock full of students.   The towerblock  had one,    ONE,  public phone in the entrance way.   Always a long queue  and no soundproof surround.     I rarely phoned mumsie.   Only when I was near a phone booth that didn’t have half a dozen people queuing  to use it.   Normally this would be  in the early hours of the morning at gig’s.     I would use the change I had saved for the bus home to call mumzie.     She wasn’t always best-pleased by my sense of timing.   The calls went something like

Wendy:   Helllllloooooooo mumsie!

Mumsie: do you know what time it is?

Wendy: It’s TIME to call mumzie!

Mumsie:   Have you been drinking?

Wendy:   could well be!

Mumsie:   Oh Gwendolyn!   Are you eating properly?

Wendy:   Chips and curry sauce fresh, ahem,  from the van,   YUMMY!

Mumsie:   we worry about you darling

Wendy:   ARRRRR!   You’re so sweet,   there’s no need to worry mum,   I’m nearly all grown up but I’m fast running out of change…

beep-beep-beeep-beep-beep-beep

Mumsie:   goodnight dear, take care…

One such call happened  after listening to the live version of this little gem…

Spear of Destiny sing They’ll never take me alive

I remember the early 1980′s

• not understanding the Falklands war.
• the recession.
• living off root vegetables, tea, and hope that unemployment would reduce.  
• Being mistaken for a ho when walking home alone…. …any time of day.
• Mortgages requiring a 10% minimum deposit and being a maximum of 3x your annual income in a job you’d demonstrated committment for  at least a year.

Everthing considered,   I thought The Beat put it quite politely.   An understatement.   I cried everytime Thatcher was re-elected.   It was personal.

The (English) Beat sang ‘Stand down Margaret’

(Warning:   contains Sax)

Wendy: do your eyelids sweat before you cry?

Wendy: Yes! they do, how did you know?

Wendy: I felt it

Wendy: bizarre

The Hexagon Theatre in Reading is running its annual pantomime, Dick Wittington.  

Interactive theatre where the audience, predominatly under 4ft tall, get to shout out ‘He’s behind you’, and “BOO!” and hisssssszzzzzz as loud as they want when the clearly marked  baddie comes on the stage.   The baddie in this case was dressed in black leather with a huge fake furry chest,   long tail,   and the name ‘King Rat’.  

The pantomime  hero, the principle boy,  is played by a girl wearing tights, no trousers, and thigh length leather boots  who enjoys repeatedly slapping her outer-thigh with her hand and falling in love with the leading lady who is a lady.   A man in outrageous, colourful  costumes plays an unmarried woman,    the ‘Dame’.    A young chap coordinates audience participation, facilitates the storyline and everyone’s happiness.   I’d quite like one of those.

In Dick Wittington there were doses of singing competitions, where volume supercedes musicality,  between the two halves of the auditorium.   Some songs required rather tricky accompanying hand-actions,  during which  I accidently whacked the  lady sitting next to me and generally got everything all topsy turvy.   There  are also some slow,   soppy,   songs in a pantomime.   Luckily, watching the shorter contingent of the audience wave brightly coloured lit-wands around made the soppy songs  entertaining.

For those who enjoy a heated debate, like myself, there were many opportunities to argue with the cast ‘Oh no he isn’t'….’oh yes he is’….      The occassional slap stick humour, outstandingly bad jokes and the Dames costumes that beggar belief ensured the tone of the event stayed firmly in the realm of the fantastically ridiculous.    At one point the Dame wore a dress in the form of what looked like the Tower of London.    

Audience  birthdays on the performance day were announced in the penulitmate scene. I’m thinking of relocating my Brithday to mid December.  

Plot spoiler (look below the next paragraph)

The plot invariably ends with the leading man (woman) and lady (woman) getting together,   the baddy being converted (normally by magic), and the dame continuing to be a dame.

Plot spoiler over (start reading here)

It was all jolly good fun.   Happy  holiday season.

Hoorah!

<soppiness warning>

Just a few of the too numerous to enumerate highlights:

• Gift registry:   www.epilepsy.org.uk  & www.simoncommunity.org.uk  
• The bride wasn’t ‘given away’ like chattles,   bride and groom walked down the isle together.
• Isle-walk accompanying  music:   You only live twice
• Readings including multiple references to Pooh in A.A.Milne’s  ‘us two’   (read by AfH)
• Outstanding vows because they acknowledged each others strenghts and weaknesses and showed love, respect, knowledge of what it takes to make a relationship work and be  fun too.   I particularly liked this one:

I promise to allow myself to be silly around you and to enjoy you being silly around me as well.

• 7 Henchman subtly and actively coordinating the smooth running of the  event: Oddjob, Mr. Wint, Mr. Kidd, Nick Nack, May Day, Xenia Onatopp, Jaws
• Red wedding dress
• No ‘maids’
• A photobased childrens TV themed Quiz organized by table at the wedding breakfast.
• Bride’s speech toplining the other speeches.  
• Creatively quirky photographer:   http://www.vikmartin.co.uk/
• Local bands at the reception were friends of the Bride and Groom,   some included the Bride or Groom and all played at least one cover version of Bond theme tune,   compared by AFH.
• My yellow-red shot silk  hat,    however, the relative lack of hats on other guests  was actually a tad disturbing.

Tables were decorated in childrens TV themes,  with models and soft toys, and each guest  as a character,   I was Soo.   As you can see, even  Bagpuss joined the fun.

<soppiness temporarily suspended>

Since moving to Reading I’ve found lots of familiar strangers,   I see them on the bus everyday during my commute,   in the local cooperative store when I’m picking up milk for my tea,   behind the counters in Jacksons,   in the local internet cafe.

During my 1986 final year degree course Environmental Psychology classes I  learned that people are more likely to exhibit altruistic behaviours to familiar strangers (than complete strangers)  when meeting those familiar strangers outside of the normal context.   Each will recognise the other easily but have difficulty placing the source of this familiarity.  

This means that when I meet someone who normally rides on the  same  bus as me everyday,   in Jacksons,   I will think I know them and be nicer than I would be to someone totally unrecognisable.    

Excellent.  

More familiar strangers means more oportunities to be squishy.   Given  my natural  curmudgeonist tendencies this can only be a good thang.  

”’bring”’ ””’bring””:   Hello…   …Wendy House speaking,   how can I help you?

American friend:   Wendy?   Is that you?

Wendy:   Yes

American friend:   OH MY GOD,  Wendy,   your accent has gotten so English that I didn’t even recognise you! So,   how are you liking being back in England

Wendy:   It’s the little things that you didn’t realise that you missed or thought were over romantised like the sound of leather on willow during a cricket game in a park,   followed by a brief silence then clapping as the players on both sides applaud a good shot,   the smell of freshly mown, damp, grass in the morning, the diversity of nose shapes, the plethera of watery blue eyes and men wearing shoulderbags.

American friend:   are you reading one of your blog posts?

Wendy:   I’m not sure,   I’ll check and get back to you on that one

sixty-eighth post  in a series attempting to explain the subtle complexities of my singleness

Reason #68:   Teddy bears picnic

The chorus to this well known childrens song is turning-up as auditory hallucinations in my day today.    

Once I’d manage to throttle the teddybears into silence Marc Bolan turned up singing Debora,   a much more desirable intrusive thought,    you’ll find me attempting to harmonise with the  Marc in my head,   its enough to put-off even the most soppy of suitors and definitely a downer for T.Rex fans.

March 15th 1984

It  will take several months to read the varied  scrawl of miss-spelt ramblings in my early diaries.    Mumzie recently  discovered these diaries in a  dark corner of her home.    The diaries stop in 1984 when I switched to letter writing…

A second sheet was added to this  1984 entry during my first year at University.     The day went something like this:  

A morning of contemplating whether  a fascinating but somewhat screwed-up boy  should have the benefit of my influence in his life.    

An  afternoon  sketching portraits of 2 handsome boys while they supplied me with lots of tea.   The tea taking isn’t explicitly mentioned because it is  understood as a part of  the ‘spending an afternoon with a handsome fellow’ process.   The boys  had the afrontary to  keep the sketches.   Sadly,   I don’t actually have copies of any of the portraits I used to produce.   I was fairly prolific with my sketch-book as well as in my diaries.    

The evening involved drinking ‘side cars’ in a disco and  helping a girl-friend disrupt the dancefloor during some of those slow girl-boy cuddling dances by jumping around between the soppy-people.    

A  fabulous day indeed.

I saw a Leyland doubledecker  bus in Seattle.  Whooopie!!!

Instant over-excitement.  

I shouldn’t read the branding on bus-grills while driving.   It’s one of my naughty habits.   I think it was a Leyland “Olympian“.   An Olympian bus with views of the Olympic mountains imported from Britain built by the British National motor  industry with engineering specialism from Bristol.  

I’m getting all soppy again.     Time for more Tea.

Pathetic Person Advisory (PPA):   look away now if you can’t bare soppiness  ⁽¹⁾  

When I get home-sick ⁽²⁾ I take a trip to ScanDesign and look at the furniture.   The wood is mainly an orange shade with simple lines.   My parents home is packed with co-ordinated Scandinavian teak furniture.   In the 1990′s, when I had no furniture,  I begged them to leave thier front room to a Museum as an intact example of 1970′s Chic.   It still is 1970′s Chic.  Only now it’s really cool and I’d rather they left it to me,   not that I could afford to ship it to the US.    

Now,   my front  room looks frighteningly similar to theirs.   I am becoming my parents. I have exactly the same dining table.  When buying it  I didn’t think,   ‘oh my parents will like that I must buy it’,   I thought wow that’s beautiful, cheap and I need a  round table.   The English cultural icon King Arthur made the need and value of a round table quite clear.    My current table was oblong and identical to my parents’ table.   Buying a round table marked my  independence.   Later,   when I visited the biddies,  I discovered  they had  replaced their oblong table with one identical to mine.   The good news is that my parents will feel very ‘at home’ next time they visit.          

Notice the blue glass grail-like challice on the shelf?   It’s Marimekko,   I have grown into  a scandinavian design adict.  I’m not looking for a cure.   It just is.   I’ll live with it.  On a related note,   I’ve noticed some Ikea products sneaking into my bothers home.   Nothing sinister,   just a chair and a bed….

1. I gather from this Times Online article that soppiness may well be a British trait
2. In this case, home = living with my parents.   I have way too many ‘homes’,   different cities,   houses,   countries….  

my world traveller friend is moving to NY this weekend.   In the 6 years I’ve known her she’s lived in:

• Seattle
• China
• Madrid (Spain)
• A private yaught (Alaska, Mexico, the Pacific coast)
• Ellensburgh (urgh?!!!)

She’s a special friend.   We met during my first week in Seattle at a pub quiz.   Hardly knowing each other arranged to runaway to  Mardi Gras, a  weekend in New Orleans.  

Travelling separately.   I sat on the porch of our 2 star hotel with a bottle of wine I’d corked by forcing the cork into the bottle.   In the heat of the evening I drank the wine and waited for the stranger,   my room companion,   to turn up.   An asian guy arrived at midnight.   The hotel staff had gone home.   He’d booked a room,  had no-where else to stay.  World traveller  turned up with a tiny back-pack and all the enthusiasm of a toddler.   Of course she didnt mind him staying in our room.   We looked after him for a a couple of days,  expored the city,   had our fortunes read,   met strangers and lived stories that warrant thier own blog entries.    She’s so easy to be with,   so bright in many ways.   I’ll miss her presence in this State painfully because friends like her are rare.   Friends like her  are usually somewhere else.   My friends are usually somewhere else….    I’m not often a soppy bugger, but for tonight  there will be BIG

BLUBBING

in the Wendy house this weekend.   Actually there will be blubbing in a sleeping-bag on the floor of her packed apartment,   but you get my drift….

This photograph made gray, rain and carparks feel romantic. The single street lamp seems courageous. Having felt the cold and seen the snow drifts so unfamiliar to me adds something special to this picture.

No puking, I get soppy, get used to it.

I’ve made this picture my ‘desktop background’ it compliments the XP ‘silver’ theme quite well.