My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.

I kept seeing Cleaver come out when Gogo got going, I said. Oh, many times, affirmed Himself.

Despite a stupid week/month and stupid weather, we were off to see Godot. in what was, frankly, the best production I've seen, and will probably ever see of it.

It had everything I could ever want, including, and especially, a cast of four absolute faves: Hugo Weaving, Richard Roxburgh, Luke Mullins and Philip Quast. Quast was a most theatrical Pozzo, and Luke's aptly named Lucky entirely stole the show from Hugo and Rox, which is no mean feat, as the two boys were on top form, clowning about, completely owning the stage while portraying such lost, almost ghostly souls, and there was a real affection there, which I think make for the best Didi and Gogos. The history the actors can draw on really helps sell the sady adorable co-dependence of our two heroes.

Despite the much reported troubles with the production, I think, personally, it was all the better of it, the cast having been made to wait for a director that never arrived (that particular irony not lost on anyone), I think, saved them from overthinking it and filling the blank empty spaces with too much trickery. (I know I'm not normally one for bare empty spaces, but it's Beckett, it's required - what I object to is staging high Victorian drama as post-Beckett bleakness, it's not appropriate and not clever).
( more: in like flynn )

Even cranky one eyed parrots get the blues. Or maybe he was all sooky and wanting to snuggle because I had the blues. Big time. It's work. I know I'm not meant to talk about it, but to end up with the stuff I was trained at and liked to do given to others, and back with the deadening filing and errand running I used to do when I was 17, it's just destroying. Utterly destroying.

That said, wasn't Ripper Street a treat last night?
( more: enterprises that were service for all mankind )

Ripper Street is one of those shows that frequently feature real people, and real people who have only just passed from living memory (that is, not like the War of the Roses, which is as now as much myth as documentary and archaelogical evidence, though they've made some great and surprising strides of late). Usually, stuff like that is cute and gimmicky, like on Murdoch Mysteries, usually featuring people who've been fictionalised before, but still, where is the cut off point between real people and real lives and fiction? A hundred years? Less?

Because while the Titanic and WWI pass into myth, they were making absolutely nothing to do with reality American films about WWII, pretty much before those Yanks even got into the war, and, well, I'll spare you the usual rant about American forces claiming Australian battles as their own, ditto the Brits claiming Oz victories and the Yanks claiming Brit battles, and so on and so forth. But the point is, turning recent history into fanciful myths is nothing new. Some might even call it propaganda or merchandising.

So where do you draw the line? And are the famous and infamous fair game, while the little people are incidental to anything going on anyway (chances of them featuring that guy in the same class as Doyle, or that guy firing one of the first shots at Gettysburg, have, so far, been slim to none, even in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer).

Do people care? Do relatives care? Does the Doyle estate bother about Doyle turning up in Murdoch Mysteries? Do Winston Churchill's descendants care that he apparently greenlit Daleks for the war effort? What's tongue in cheek, and what's completely tasteless? What's too soon?
( more: hey babe, take a walk on the wild side )

I'm wearing my boots today, the ones I cursed and cursed myself for impulse buying and having to awkwardly lug all the way back from Canberra. I love them so, and they've hardly been off my feet since. I know what I like. Deep down, I do.

Had to go re-buy a book I'd reluctantly been made to relinquish earlier (why is it always my stuff that has to go in the skip), which I'm re-aquainting myself with (it's From Hell by Mr Alan Moore, if you're curious, a rather topical read for me right now, while I'm carrying Poe on the bus/train). I miss my older (more valuable) copy though.
( more: the speckled spinster )

'Let's get gay', decided the erstwhile hero of the book I'm reading right now. It's page 162 and I'm thinking, well, you know what I'm thinking.

It isn't just the lashings of Edwardian slang that makes it almost feel like one is ploughing through a novel in some devilish version of Polari or Nadsat (and there's an episode of Doctor Who where the aliens are actually speaking Polari, and the Tardis doesn't translate it. What up with that, then?).

It's just that these jolly old boys own adventures, which I picked up for v.cheap at a remainder bookshop, well, they're jolly fun, but man, do they lend themselves to a certain reading, with the whole chaps only all boys together thing. I'm sure you understand, my dear old bean.

That minor eyebrow raise aside, they're still rollicking fun (so long as one takes all the king and country larks with lashings of salt and ginger beer) and have brightened my mornings on the bus (because sometimes I'm not in the mood to struggle through a homework text before dawn). And they'd never be printed in Russia anyway, if the rabidly tory opinions of the protagonists are anything to go by (not a fan of the ragged trousered radical, by any stretch, for his lack of style as much as his politics, old bean).
( more: tiddlywinks )

Apparently I can walk out of the house in anything but a Hello Kitty onesie, according to Himself. Good to know.

There was some chick wearing a painfully bright orange Tigger onesie with bright pink hair and matching bright pink heels on the bus down to Canberra, and, frankly, nursing a massive migraine, I simply wasn't in the mood. Apparently 47% of respondendents polled by the Sydney Morning Herald agree with my curmudgeonly view that animal themed onsies, worn in public, on public transport, are a sure sign that the end of civilisation is nigh.

Oh dear, having more and more of those grumpy old 'you left the house looking like that?' moments. Especially those girls who got on the train at some podunk stop, heading into Newcastle (UK) on a Friday night. Now I grew up in a place so reknown for its skanks and moles people still always raise an eyebrow when I admit to my geographic origins, so imagine what these girls must have looked like to set me back in my seat.

Another one of those wrist slitting I am turning into my mother moments (please, no).

Anyways, today I am dressed like I'm off to join Department S, and it was entirely unintentional. The only tops to hand (in the dark) were my powder blue top, the one that screams 'please slime me', and my ochre turtle neck, so, easy choice. Next I fumbled further and found my black cardy with the white piping, and yes okay, it is stupidly retro, but comfy, and, as it was raining at the time (blue skies everywhere now), I picked my pencil skirt and leggings and those new silly lace up boots with the chunky heels I bought and lugged clumsily all the way back from Canberra because they were on special and I am insane, just 'cause I didn't want my long skirts dragging through knee high wet grass on the trek to the bus stop. Put the hair up in a bun because I forgot to wash it and now I look like I'm ready to chase after naughty men in silver space suits. Oh dear. And yet I strangely don't care.

So, yes, Canberra. Went off to see the Turner exhibition, not because I'm wild about Turner, but because it was all the way from the UK and I figured I ought to go and get myself educated (as though I'd never frogmarched myself around the Turner Gallery at the Tate because I knew I had to).

Still wouldn't walk across broken glass to see a Turner (though catching a bus down to Canberra with a mighty migraine must count) but it wasn't too bad. Near the end of the exhibition period, so not too crowded, and, being a piddling little show for the colonies, featuring, as always, just the early stuff and the late stuff (never the good stuff with the artist at the height of his powers).
( more: Peace through chemistry )