Lancashire Lads

Seeing Eric Sykes as a cadaver in 'The Others' (above) got me all nostalgic.

I lived in St Anne’s, Lancashire for a couple of years when I was a young kid. I always knew that my affection for Morecambe and Wise partly sprang from their north country personae, especially Eric's. (Although it obviously mainly sprang from how bloody funny they were).

It wasn’t until I picked up Eric Sykes’ memoirs in a remaindered bookshop this week that I realised that he too is Lancashire born. There is a funny mixture of innocence and jack-the-lad about both the Lancashire Erics. They make me feel sentimental.

Eric Sykes, like many of the comics of his generation, got his confidence and honed his sense of the absurd in the forces. There has always been a whiff of sadness or resignation about him and when you read that he didn't realise his real mother died giving birth to him until he was five and that he went through his entire childhood cold and hungry, un-hugged and un-kissed, you're surprised it isn't a full blown stench of despair.

I am only up to 1944 and Eric has just experienced fleshly passion for the first time and liberated Germany but the lovely mix of mischief and naivety is there on every page.

The Oestro Weekend

The ultimate depiction of the crucifixion as sheer human suffering - Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece

Well, of course, Easter is a weird conglomeration of Christian martyrdom/sacrifice mythology cobbled together with pagan fertility rites and CHOCOLATE! So basically something for everyone! Chocolate will never be irrelevant but reproduction (at a personal level) is for me now. The Christian story still has the power to move me amazingly. Last night I listened to something sublime called Gesualdo's Responsoria Feria Sexta and today I heard music by 7 different composers interspersed with texts by 7 different poets read by Sir Peter Peers all based on the 7 purported last statements uttered by Christ on the cross (known as the "seven last words"). Donne and Sitwell were standouts but I loved it all. I found myself in (very rare) agreement with Peter Jensen that creeping (I think he used a different word) secularism means it is somehow these days not quite proper to be familiar with biblical stories or to absorb the dignity and beauty of such images and messages. I am a card carrying atheist but I would never deny the poignancy and nobility of the Christian myth and the rich emotions of betrayal, sacrifice, suffering and transcendence the Easter story embodies. It has also inspired some pretty good tunes and pomes!

Our rabbit Waldorf appears to have been doing quite a bit of freelance modelling behind our backs. He is in Natalie Ambruglia's arms on page 16 of this weekend's Good Weekend magazine and was in DJ's Easter Treats feature in last weekend's edition of the same magazine! It is quite nice owning a cute bunny at Easter - feels like it gives you some inside running! We have enjoyed our fair share of chocolate already as my sister gave my husband a box of Adora's handmade choccies for his birthday last weekend and we have been steadily nibbling our way through them.

I have just read that the ever irreverent and politically flamboyant John Saffran had himself nailed to a cross in the Philippines yesterday for an upcoming ABC TV series. It is his prerogative as a Jew, a satirist and a curious human being to do so. I am keen to see how he uses the experience in his program.

Catch 22, subsection 3A

Well my claim has been rejected - I am not crazy enough to get Workers' Compensation! Like Yossarian (Catch 22), if I was truly crazy I would want to fly missions er, work with the moronic misfit yoyo I have been shackled to for 3 years! I can feel an anti-public service rant coming on but 'Jonestown' (which I have just finished) reminds me that insanity & manipulation are a given in most arenas of life. Why should my place of employment be any exception?

I have just seen a raw, poignant exploration of our need to love and to experience loss and pain, 'Elegy' Isabel Coixet's film based on Philip Roth's novel 'The Dying Animal'. Exquisite performances from Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz and a support cast including Dennis Hopper and Patricia Clarkson. Thank goodness that there is always art to upstage tawdry old reality!

Not feeling particularly inspired this Monday night. It looks like the only escape will be for me to relinquish my current job, hard won after 5 years of insecurity and freelancing, because the public sector's commitment to 'due process'* (which admittedly I've always championed) for one needy, squeaky wheel trumps its commitment to my well being and the contribution I could make untrammelled by the lunatic saboteur!

Well hush my mouth. I am living up to the epithet 'Queen of Indiscretion', conferred upon me in another life when I had a bit more to be discreet about. But honestly, I am a tad FRUSTRATED.

* 3 years is a bit overdue for any process to bear fruit in my opinion!

Need a good old fashioned larf? See Dustin Hoffman tell The Flea Joke - a complete joy!

Leader and the (dying) Swan

CAPTION CONTEST - Boolomo wins with his tribute to Eric Morecambe: 'Gottle o'geer'

Get Peter Costello! Is he going to hang about endlessly on the whiff of a chance that a delegation of desperate Liberals will come to him one day soon and simply beg him to stand as leader? How much credibility is he going to have any way after frittering away the time and opportunities he has over the past few years? I thought he had some well heeled consultancy role or Board membership to go to in the private sector but here he is still clogging up the newspaper pages over a year after he eschewed the Howard anointing! The picture above appeared in the SMH on Saturday (I can't say in what connection as domestic issues - and I mean really domestic issues - prevented me from reading the paper this weekend, as they do most). Is it an old picture or has he been Jenny Craiging? Any way it has his hallmark smirk albeit mediated through some rather unsubtle dental enhancement. Suggested captions please!

I never used to mind Malcolm Turnbull all that much. He was never warm or profound but he seemed reasonably sensible and intelligent, his current reactionary populist posturing is just cringeworthy!

I have to go now because 'Lie To Me' is on, but watch this space for more musings on telly, shopping, raising teenagers and the wonderful workings of the bureaucracy soon!

POST SCRIPT: He's ahead of Malcolm in the polls, looks like he is waiting to be cast in the role of selfless saviour!

Antacid

I've covered a bit of territory in the past 3 days! Berrima for 'Prisoners in Arcady', Canberra for 'Degas' and some of his contemporaries, Target in Civic for suitable clothing* for my daughter to wear in Canberra climes, Yass for bric-a-brac, the AGNSW for the Archibald and Art Express and the psychologiost for my workers' comp assessment! I was not disappointed by any of them.


While Grosset's 'La Vitrioleuse' / 'The Acid Thrower' (above)
may depict my mood for many of the past few weeks, even months, I am feeling a little more positive today. Suffice to say I am optimistic that the unbearable situation at work is over.

'Prisoners in Arcady' is a wonderful exhibition at the neat as a pin Berima Museum complete with archival photographs, newspaper clippings and propaganda footage about German mariners and farmers interned in Berrima gaol during WWI. These men - who were only confined during the night hours - created their own idyll on the banks of the Wingecaribee River by day raising crops, keeping ducks, canoeing & kayaking (one of their craft is on display!), building Bavarian-style chalets and even opening a playhouse and performing touching melodramas! The exhibition was a revelation and the volunteer guide a well informed and engaging man. The Southern Highlands On-line site states that 'Sadly there are currently no reviews for Berrima Museum' - I will be rectifying that!

I had forgotten, or perhaps not really ever fully appreciated, what a very versatile and adventurous artist Edgar Degas was. We (and 3,997 others according to an ABC news report I heard later) visited the National Gallery exhibition yesterday (Sunday 15th March) and encountered his etchings and other prints for the first time. The images of Mary Cassatt and her sister at the Louvre particularly captivated me. The caption writer got it right. Mary is depicted as a thoroughly modern and self assured woman inspecting antiquity with an artist's eye & mind - all suggested just by her posture and the angle of her parasol.

Got home in time to see the concluding part of 'Lost In Austen' which has been a sheer delight and, to borrow from its script, a very witty and sophisticated 'post-modern moment' (or series of) moments from start to finish. Can't heap enough praise on all the performances!

*Neglectful mother that I am I let her pack shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt for the trip. She now has a purple hoodie to match her fringe and various other pertinent additions to her wardrobe including a T-shirt depicting Degas' Little Dancer.

The best of weeks, the worst of weeks

My Graduation Ceremony

What a wag that Winston Churchill was! It is Friday night and the interminable series "I Was Winston Churchill's Bodyguard" is on SBS again (must be the 90-somethingth episode) bringing us Dennis Waterman's unmistakable cheeky tones recounting Walter H. Thompson's tedious, humorless reminiscences in all their stupefying detail once more! Mr Thompson, whom one suspects was not an irreverent cockney of the Dennis Waterman stamp, loves to quote his adored charge on subjects from traffic to communism. We have just been regaled with Winston's droll observation, upon visiting Niagara Falls for the second time and being asked how the experience differed from his earlier visit, that not much had changed and the 'waterfall continues to fall downwards'. Add 'physics genius' to this Renaissance man's other credentials. It really is the most agonisingly protracted and dull series!

Still, nice to have something to bitch about that doesn't affect me personally (I don't much care what trash Robert Powell and Dennis Waterman will do for a buck). It hasn't been a good week in my career, despite my graduation (see picture - guess which is me). I have submitted a workers' comp claim for a situation at work that has been even more drawn out and painful than Walter H. Thompson's serialised memoirs. I have been working around, working in spite of and doing the work of a seriously maladjusted and incompetent colleague for over 3 years now and the arrival of two new people in our team threw a blinding spotlight on how deleterious my various accommodations to the situation had become. My blog is probably not the place to describe the toll this has taken on my health, it's not really entertaining reading. Suffice to say I have been taking solace in food and drink and it shows (check the picture again).

Any way, enough of self loathing or self pity or an unpleasant blend of the two. I hate feeling like a victim and I have to steel myself for a psychological assessment next week. But first I am escaping to the pool and then to Degas at the National Gallery!

International Women's Day

Happy IWD! My employer held a celebratory function for us at lunch time with Mary Jerram, first female State Coroner of New South Wales, as guest speaker. A product of 70s/80s feminism like me, she was easy listening, confirming and validating the stuff I had lived and believe in. Interestingly my gen Y geek girl friend - the one who go me started on this blog - questioned the very notion of a day exclusively for women and was irritated by the cosy bourgeois nature of the event. It is important not to get complacent!

Channel 7 is celebrating IWD by screening Casino Royale with the post feminist casting of Judi Dench as 'M'. I have appreciated Daniel Craig for quite some time and Judi forever but I still can't bring myself to take a seat on the sofa and watch it. It is a genre thing. I think Matt Damon put it quite succinctly when he told The Miami Herald recently: "Bond is an imperialist, misogynist sociopath who goes around bedding women and swilling martinis and killing people. He's repulsive".

So even the lovely Daniel is rendered unmagnetic for me by that fact. And as for Judi, she has been so very wonderful in 'Cranford' the past 4 Sunday evenings that her jaunt as 'M', while a stylist's triumph and performed with her usual aplomb, is dispensable. Another issue is commercial breaks. Having decided I want to see 'Lie To Me' and the US version of 'Life on Mars' I am condemned to telly peppered with advertising and I am not hardened to it yet. It is intrinsically irritating and blows my time management/preferred week night early bed time regime out of the water.

Any way, Friday night seems to have become BLOG night! To say nothing of red wine and chocolate night (oh, let's face it, that's pretty much every night!) I graduate on Thursday. Some sort of account or imagery will grace this blog, I promise!