The Past

Finally getting around to watching Barry Manilow at the BBC ... I first recorded it about 14 months ago when it was first shown ... Never got around to looking at it. Then it was repeated this June and I've finally felt, perhaps I should at least look at it ...

(It's from the 'clip' format that the Beeb seem to have taken to their hearts, cheap programming created by splicing together pieces from their archives)

My initial reaction?

As I sit here watching Barry's first Top Of The Pops performance (1976, Tryin' To Get The Feeling) the first thought is 'it's so clear', then, finally! After all these years! I get to see it! When that clip is rapidly followed by the fabled 'first Parkinson' (1978, Can't Smile Without You) and some chat with Michael, it all feels a bit surreal!

These were the clips people talked about but had never seen! Hard to imagine these days where the Internet and YouTube mean anything can be found, these shows predate personal  video recorders.

Then we have Somewhere In The Night (1978, Albert Hall). I can tell you about every moment of this song, every raise of an eyebrow, every bead of sweat ...

The Old Songs, Albert Hall 1982

The crispness of all the film ... We'd all copied and recopied the precious few tapes that we had, I was used to watching these shows through a slight fog of distance from the original ... 

Parkinson 1980 ... The velvet jacket ... By now I'm in the TV audience, my first time, but not my last!

More pinkness from the Albert Hall 1982, Made it Thru the Rain/Beautiful Music, filmed the Thursday and Friday night of a week of shows there. I was there ... Of course ... Jane's in the front row on the Friday, Pauline on the Thursday.

Brooklyn to Blenheim ... BBC News ... (Watched with the sound down ... Can't stand fans being talked to ..  They only want the idiots)

I Write The Songs at Blenheim (1983) was down the front for that as well!

(If I had my hands on the archives it would be a very different show, I'd pick completely different songs)

More Blenheim ... One Voice - a sea of candles, he reckons that was the point when he finally realised how large the audience was ... 

The Late Late Breakfast Show (I Wanna Do It With You 1982) Lordy! The excitement! Jeans and a rude sounding song :-) another piece of footage that has been poured over ... Got to number 8 in the charts :-)

Sixty Minutes in 1984 ... Hemsby! Bloody hell, I don't remember this! Mollie and Lynn being interviewed on the beach ... Why did we let the cameras in?! Another one watched with the sound down ... I would so have made this a music clips only show!

Ooh! Wogan 1986! Pretty boy :-) just a few words, shame, that was a good outfit.

Parkinson 1998 Could It Be Magic can't remember if I was at that one ... Shameful, I used to be able to reel off dates, times and places ... Amazing performance, just him and the piano.  I must've been there ... I think I remember the angles in the studio ... 

National Lottery (I'd Really Love To See You Tonight 1998) I seem to have blanked this one from my mind ... Still cute, certainly wasn't there!

Royal Variety Performance (Mandy 1992) I know I did a lot of RVP's over the years ... I would assume I was there ;-)

(Nervous they'll have the more recent post surgery stuff towards the end)

Parkinson 2002. Looks like the set and Barry's suit haven't changed from 1998!

It's A Miracle 1985 the BBC programme was called 'Decade of Hits', I can't quite place where it was filmed .. Just wondering if it was the NEC in Birmingham - that would make sense.

Oh my god! Back to Parkinson 1978 and Copa!  That's a relief! Much better than  very current! 

Well that was a very strange evening.  Makes me a tiny bit nostalgic for the past, a little bit thrilled to have seen the old footage and not surprised that the more distant past is clearer.

I couldn't get the widget thing from Betty's site to work, so as a reminder to myself I've nabbed the basic points to the challenge - 22nd September to 20th October.

I'm curious to see if this will prompt me to get a little more serious about a bit of blogging ... typically I'm out of the country for day one (not typically that I'm always out of the country - more that 'wouldn't you know it, the first time in four years I'm out of the country and I'd quite like to be here'!) so I'll be making notes and writing a proper blog on the Tuesday ... if anyone else who knows me decides to do this - do make a comment!

Every day:

·         Read something

·         Meditate, write morning pages or make time for a good think

·         Look at the sky

·         Get out of breath

Once during the month:

·         Watch a film you’ve always wanted to see

·         Visit an exhibition or a historical site

·         Cook something wonderful from scratch

·         Spend a whole evening listening to music that you love

·         Take a long walk

·         Do one crazy, spontaneous thing.

I seem to have been quiet for ages ... most unlike me!  I've decided this is a great opportunity to revive the blog as a useful space/place to keep the notes encouraged by this lovely idea - pending getting a super slick way of linking to it - follow this regular link to Betty's website - starting point to be Sunday 22nd September:

http://www.bettyherbert.com/autumn-brain-detox/

My last post was actually from two weeks ago and I'd not got round to finishing it.

Since then I can add some sort of bug/head cold/hay fever/temperature/sore throat/shit to my list of moans, resulting in headaches, runny nose, huge amounts of snot, a cough and other generalised low grade complaints.

Am I really only going to blog when I feel miserable? That could get very tedious!

And my hormones may be going a bit haywire ... I've just sat and cried for five minutes having read the abortion chapter in Caitlin Moran's brilliant How To Be A Woman - and I have no idea why! Well, I do have an idea, but I'm not sure I want to explore it at the moment. I should point out I've never had an abortion, never needed to and have had no children. And I think I'm perimenopausal... I guess that's as good a reason as any to cry!

I have just paused to google perimenopausal and okay perhaps I’ve not got all the symptoms, but I know there’s something up with the bits of me that run my emotions!

Not a great start to the week

I'm not a frequent blogger - as you may have noticed! But I've been meaning to use this as a place to get some of my thoughts out of my head and down onto paper ... well ... the technological equivalent at least!

Monday morning started really well - hopeful about a recent second interview, a nice buzz from lovely customers in the shop, even the sun had come out!

By 3.30 I'd had my handbag stolen with all the annoying stuff that entails - cancel bank, credit, oyster cards (talking to each of those customer service departments was lovely and easy ... even if none of them will arrive back with me for about a week ..) my statement taken by a lovely policewoman; quite satisfying to realise how good my short term memory is.

6.30 I was waiting for my friend with spare keys so the locksmith could just swap the locsks out, so much easier than having to have them drilled out!

This wasn't a great day ... then I checked the spam box for my email - and tucked away in there is the rejection notice for a job I'd really felt I was a good match for and that I could have made a real difference for the company.

As someone who fundamentally looks for the good (habit, not some ghastly belief process) I will admit that these circumstances meant that I have now had proper conversations with both my upstairs and downstairs neighbours – the first in eleven years – which can only be a good thing.

But I really don’t think that much good is going to come from losing my handbag. My key ring was one I’d bought in Tiffany’s in New York fifteen years ago when I’d first made the decision to look for somewhere to live in London – I wanted my keys on a special key ring. My purse was a fantastic bargain from Liberty’s the sort that is a proper bargain because it’s actually an item that I adored and others coveted, not just something cheap and in the sale bin.

I won't list everything, I had to do that for the police. But I will say I'm upset. Really upset.

Family Food

I spent last Thursday evening with my parents and as the result of a series of random conversations ended up being given a tiny recipe book that is such a part of my childhood.

My Mother and I share a bit of a passion for Emma Bridgewater crockery. It started with the odd mug, I bought her the one with the black and white cat (Dad got the ginger kitten); then the flower ones started coming out ... last year we discovered the pieces you can buy as seconds so the odd pie dish has started to arrive, Dad got me the butter dish I'd been coveting and at Christmas we all got mugs with our names on.

Anyway - I'd noticed in the background of The Hairy Bikers - Mum Knows Best, that at the end of each session when there's a big feast with all the cooks and family sat eating off proper plates rather than the paper bits and pieces the visitors have been using, all the crockery seemed to be Emma B's! I was sadly excited and told Mother - who had never seen the show.

So Thursday just gone we sat watching it together. Watching TV the way we always watch TV, with other conversations going on, people coming and going, me knowing she's not really watching it, me drinking too much wine. This time there were some Swiss recipes, Dad had a year at school in Switzerland (he's one of the generation sent away to boarding school at 7 ... horrendous to consider now) I think when in his early teens so melted cheese over strange pickled items triggered the odd memory for him, which lead me to start retelling some of the stories that had really affected me on this series. I'd not thought about it before, but one of the main themes of the series has really got to me, the recipes passed down through generations, and cooking as a link to the past, or as a balm while coping with agony - it was the woman who cooked her Mother's curry in the weeks after her Mother had died, filling the house with the familiar spicy smells, that had really got to me - and I don't even like curry!

Scones must have appeared in the programme as inevitably they came up as one of our childhood memories - and I passed comment that no one on the Great British Bake Off had made scones even close to Mum's amazing ones. She recalled that even at school her scones had been perfect, even if she was marked down in her exam by a miserable visiting teacher who had taken against her.

The rambling, layered conversation included the reminiscing about those teatimes, often put on to show off to school friends, nothing like as frequent as we would have liked - they consisted of fresh scotch pancakes (drop scones) served in batches straight from pan to plate (if the numbers were uneven we'd take turns in who got the extra) where they were covered in butter and fresh homemade lemon curd (no one makes lemon curd like my Mother, properly lemony, sharp yet sweet enough to eat out of the jar with a spoon) then once the batter was used up we'd move to the proper scones - made with fruit in them (sultanas that is) for preference, split open, heavily buttered, whipped cream, fresh homemade strawberry jam (Jam and Marmalade are the things that will always taste best made by my Mother - and that's not a childish attachment to the past or my Mother, anyone who's tasted the best of Mother's jam is ruined for life!). I remember experimenting with the order in which you'd have the jam and cream, and you'd always load up each half separately, no point in trying to sandwich the two parts together, what a wasted opportunity for jam and cream!

One of the most amazing of her jams was the Blackcurrant, partly because the time from bush to jam was about two hours (pick your own, not even from the garden, we'd just race back as soon as we had enough and start the process of boiling up the black fruit, that distinctive smell of cat pee telling us that it really was fresh) and partly because the recipe was just perfect. Which lead to another of our endless "where on earth is the book with the recipe in?" we all know what it looks like, tiny, green, hard backed, lost for ages somewhere in the house.

"Jams, Jellies And Preserves" - I did what anyone would do these days and start with Amazon. Actually I think we went straight to Alibris as it's long out of print. No luck. Mother came up with the name of the author, but Father remembered it as subtly different, and it turned out he was right! Once we had the name of the author we found something that looked like it might be right, but it also looked like what is basically a photocopy of the original - I'm sure that's not the actual technical method, but it doesn't appeal and it's quite expensive. Then Mother noticed an entry listing "unknown binding 1953" - that's the one! £6! Perfect! We'd been sitting playing with our iTouch's to find the book so she was able to just click and buy! The excitement!

Despite having just ordered the book Mother decided to go out into the kitchen for that "if I look often enough surely it will just appear", I decided to climb up to the top of the shelves in the living room, which is where I'd always instinctively looked for it. And blow me down! There it was! As had been predicted, as soon as we'd bought another copy, the original turned up! I was actually so excited that I was making a noise like a fog horn (terrified the cat and might have been fueled by wine ... ) while I carried the tiny volume into the kitchen to demonstrate that we had finally found it.

And Mother then gave it to me! I wanted her to wait until the new copy arrived just so we could be 100% certain that we'd got it right, but she said that if it's not right all I have to do is type out the blackcurrant jam details for her.

I'm hoping she'll type out the lemon curd and her marmalade recipes. I'm not sure that we have a lot of food memories to pass up and down the family line, but afternoon tea is definitely one of them!

Oh and I got to point out the bits of Emma B crockery the Hairy Bikers were using - you could see a few of the flower mugs.

And the name of the author? Ethelind Fearon

Great blog on why it's good to keep it simple! http://ping.fm/IfTez