New Year Blog, 2020

After nearly three weeks’ blog silence, including two weeks for Christmas and family time in the UK and nearly a whole week back home catching up, at last I can think over how much I have enjoyed the break.Two weeks is a little too long to remain untethered, as it were, wandering from bed to settee, but it was SO worth it to see the whole family, at different times and in different locations. Christmas Day itself was Awesome as I believe they say in Arkansas. Great fun and food were enjoyed by quite a crowd and we managed to wander down to the pub before we ate, which is the usual bonus. The conviviality during the festive season never ceases to amaze and hearten. 

 Mah Jongg delight spans the centuries and continents.

And another, Christmas Eve delight, was that I was able to play Mah Jongg with Cait AND 

introduce the game to two grandsons, Dan and Connor, who just loved it. We played for hours and the boys, unfairly I thought, picked up the basics in double quick time, unlike me and my more mature friends. I am now busy finding Mah Jongg sets and books online to dispatch to the junior branch of the family. I am really building a Mah Jongg Empire which I hope will entertain and delight future players. Amusing really as I could hardly

describe myself as a World Class Player. It goes back perhaps to the saying about not being able to take teaching out of the girl! I like to think it is because of my joy in playing, both for intellectual and social reasons, that I have this strong urge to introduce Mah Jongg to others. It helps of course, that the boys do love to play games; apparently a popular tendency among Millennials!! Whatever! As an aside, I have decided to adopt the spelling of Mah Jongg with the double ‘g’ as it appears so often and I rather like it! It feels rather more Chinese, which is a ridiculous thing to write!!

I enjoyed a super surprise on Christmas Day; my son and his wife had had the lovely idea [for me] of having my entire output of blogs printed online. Unbelievable! SO Volume 1 and Volume 2 duly appeared on Christmas morning to add an extra lustre to my day. Of course, David had got carried away and had had printed 10 x2 books. So the poor grandchildren and offspring, including the lovely Californian branch, had to accept this gift-from-the-heart. I think I picked up the vague notion from the younger set that their volumes will be interesting to read after I have departed for the Great Classroom in the Sky!! However, a marvellous surprise, not to say, a stunner, for me!

We seemed to indulge in quite a few interesting events during my British stay and, apart from the fun we had which lingers in the memory, there were several high-spots. Chief of which was the trip to Pupo in Covent Garden for a great lunch, Venetian style, attended also by my lovely nephew and his gorgeous family. His children are small, around 5 and 6, and one of my grown-up grandsons wondered later how people managed to have children who were so well-behaved and great to know. I explained how important upbringing is and commented that the two little ones had managed to make their good first decision in choosing the right parents. Think he understood my point!! After lunch to the Apollo, that golden, curlicued, intimate Victorian theatre to see ‘Everyone’s Talking About Jamie’, a total humdinger of a production with energy, superb choreography, singing and dancing da morire, as the Italians say. It was a truly engrossing, energising production, direct from the original season in the Crucible in Sheffield and already performing in London for two years!!

The original Jamie [Campbell] who wanted to go to the
school Prom in a dress.

 Jamie's alter ego, Fifi La True.

But what I discovered, later, when I read the programme notes, was the most inspiring story of the real Jamie and of the tortuous road taken for the show to materialise into its fabulous self! A sixteen year old boy, Jamie, whom everyone knew to be gay, had a burning ambition to be a drag queen when he left school. He and his Mum lived in a small former mining village in County Durham, a long way from Drag Queen country but, at 15, desperately wanting to wear a dress to the school Prom., he wrote a detailed, explanatory email and circulated it to all the groups he thought might be interested in making a documentary about him and his dreams. The format he used, like a film script, caught the eye of the Creative Director of Firecracker who followed it up, presented it to BBC 3 and a T.V. documentary was eventually the result. In turn, by chance, this was spotted and in a series of fits and starts, humps and hollows, chance and coincidence, quite a convoluted narrative emerged, between the screening of the documentary on BBC 3 and the Sheffield Crucible Theatre commissioning of a script for a musical about Jamie. But a musical was eventually born, and booked for a three week period in February 2017.where it sold out every evening with nightly standing ovations. And thus, to the Apollo in London's West End.

 An earlier, haunting portrait.

And I can't omit mention of another special treat when I met my stepson and his super son from New York; I  had seen neither for at least two years so it was with real pleasure that we met up at the Royal Academy to see the Lucian Freud Self- Portraits.  On arrival we chatted for ages in the foyer to Mick, Head of Security I think, who had distinctive echoes of a lovely Irish accent. He was charming and informative and said Goodbye to us by presenting us with free tickets to the Freud exhibition. Amazing. AND the exhibition was brilliant, tracing as it did, Freud's extraordinary artistic progress through his life. His searing, not to say brutal, honesty was a constant.

 Perhaps the most famous and accomplished of
Lucian Freud's self portraits.
Wonderful.