2016 — 16 January: Saturday
Less than a minute of BBC Radio 2's jaunty "news" was enough to send me scurrying back to the calmer waters of BBC Radio 3. In a move somewhat reminiscent of "A Very British Coup" our would-be Socialist leader-in-waiting proposes to warn businesses that he may ban them from paying dividends to their shareholders unless they first pay a living wage to their workers. Talk about seizing the moral higher ground! Meanwhile the hapless $328,000,000 lottery winners in the US will pay off their mortgage and their kids' college fees, but have no plans to move out of their one-storey house in Tennessee.
Browsing Iris's copy...
... of Radio Times told me the production of Stoppard's "Artist descending a staircase"1 was the first new one in 43 years. My Stoppard "phase" (buying and reading six of his plays, so far) only began after watching the effortlessly-wonderful performance by Peter Barkworth as Professor Anderson in the BBC TV play "Professional Foul" in (god help us!) September 1977. As Richard Last put it in the Torygraph:
... Anderson, a somewhat devious academic2 who went to Prague to deliver a lecture on "Ethical Fact in Ethical Fiction" and to see a football match. Politics intruded when a former pupil of Anderson, reduced to working as a lavatory cleaner, begged him to smuggle out a thesis arguing that "the ethics of the State can only be the ethics of the individual writ large". In Communist Czechoslovakia this was "not a safe conclusion"...
I doubt it's safe anywhere. Most States regard their citizens as a tiresome nuisance at best, and as the enemy at worst. (A theme running through "The Caesars", certainly.)
Peter Barkworth was a good writer, so I was utterly delighted to find a copy (first edition, with dust jacket) of his "About acting" in a local charity shop in 2007...
... because it had by then been on my mental "acquire" list since I'd read a library copy in 1980. But (oh, the horror!) my triumphant acquisition missed its proper mention on the ¬blog. Christa and I were doubtless distracted by hosting Big Bro and niece #1 that weekend. [Pause] Time for breakfast. And there's an empty crockpot to be stuffed on this bright, but still frosty, morning...
Hard to disagree...
... with what Clive James says here about the "poem" Secret Recipe 7 by Jaap Blonk here.
Seven hours...
... is just about right to bring my crockpot to the peak of culinary perfection. Or, at least, it had better be... I'm starving and it's very wintery in these here parts. A sweltering 20.2C needs a little something hot for the inner man.
I'm not convinced those organic sweet potatoes brought all that much to the party. I compensated for the disappointment by playing my 3xCD set of "Douglas Adams at the BBC". But it first took me a while to winkle them out of my CaseLogic folder system — now tucked away under the dining room's partial bench seating — mostly because it first took me a while to convince myself that I hadn't ripped them into more convenient MP3 format... And now, having listened to the first 25 minutes without a single smile, I've given up. And moved on to a 4xCD set by Simon Elmes called "And now on Radio 4", read by Nigel Anthony. Fingers crossed.
Meanwhile, I was quite shocked to find that a book I bought (new) for £31.50 in December 2008 is now selling for between £410.20 (new) and over £900 (second hand). Crikey! It fits what I was reading in the rather silly editorial in last week's "Spectator" about the "booming UK economy" I suppose.