sheldrake

Are there any objections to me staying in bed for the rest of my life? Good.

My moods are like the shipping forecast. Good. Good. Moderate becoming good. Moderate becoming variable. Complex low, slow-moving and filling. Stay in bed forever, veering westerly. Rockall, Malin, occasional rain. Hebrides, Bailey, Fair Isle, Faeroes, Southeast Iceland. Severe gale 8, decreasing 4 or 5. And now, The Archers.

Blah.

Things I have done this weekend: chocolate brownies - bit overdone but nice. Finished knitting a shawl which has mutated over the months from Christmas present to Mother's Day present to birthday present to... something that will one day be finished. And now it is... nearly. We finally watched that Pete & Dud documentary, Not Only But Always, which was good. Rhys Ifans was scarily like Peter Cook. I wrote a sort of Pete & Dud fic in 2002. Doesn't time fly, eh? Now I feel all sad and nostalgic about lots of things. Sad stories...

I'm still on an Alan Bennett thing, it seems. There was an article about him and The History Boys in last month's Sight and Sound -- interesting. There was one bit that particularly struck me:

In Bennett's work, it's the innocent who get it in the neck. Or if not the innocent, the timid: those who fail to grab the main chance and get shafted for their reticence [...] "The biggest handicap for a writer is to have had a decent upbringing," Bennett muses; raised not to fib or brag, he has been thrown back on modesty and his disabling scruples. One of those scruples involves his determination to distinguish between timidity and virtue. "Shy is a gentle word," he reflects, "soft, blurred but sometimes murderous." Shy is usually trampled by swagger on the cinema screen, but Bennett insists that we pay it attention.

I really like that - 'soft, blurred but sometimes murderous'. And again:

Alan Bennett is loved by his public, occasionally to a disconcerting degree. His voice, spoken and written, has woven itself into a certain strand of British culture, yet his status as national uncle doesn't quite square with the scalding anger that courses through his autobiographical writing and inflects his other work. His diaries rage at crassness and unkindness. Ignored by a receptionist while making a hospital appointment: "I long to drag her across the counter and shake her till her dentures drop out" and exhort her to "Be nice, you cow!"

So there you go - some reasons I like Alan Bennett. Gah, anyway. I'm sick of myself ... who has fun stuff? Anyone?