![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Canny fettle
Mar. 20th, 2008 10:24 pmSo the annual leave has come and gone, two blocks of seven days. The first week just felt as if I'd come to a stop ; it seemed quite unnatural not to be getting up at 7.30 in the morning to go in and stress about the shop.
I'm a year older, alas, and was thrilled to get these goodies for my birthday:
A sandwich toaster in the shape of a cow
An upgraded computer
A desk lamp
Amy MacDonald - "This is the Life" which is absolutely fantastic. She sounds like K T Tunstall's funkier, folkier younger sister, and there isn't a duff track on the album.
I was enthralled by the touring production of "Our Friends in the North", which I saw at the Oxford Playhouse with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
parrot_knight. The ambition of the script, the depth of quality of the cast and the ingenuity of the scene changes meant that the four hours just flew by. It's not fair to pick out individual actors from the ensemble, but I was particularly impressed by Paul McCleary as Roy Johnson, the incorruptible copper leading the doomed corruption investigation - I've met a fair number of senior policemen, and he had the bearing and (especially) the ramrod posture spot on. Neil Phillips as Donahue, the charismatic PR man, Sonia Beinroth's good girl/bad girl double role as Rusty/Mary, Christian Bradley as a hulking CID heavy/David Walliams-esque Parliamentary aide and Craig Conway's magnetic leading turn as Geordie (reminiscent of a young Tim Healy) were well worth the four hour train journey to Oxford and back.
Other cultural interests - I'm reading John Le Carre's books for the first time, and I'm up to "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy". The early stuff is fascinating; "Call for the Dead" and "A Murder of Quality" are almost "Inspector Morse" ten years before Colin Dexter gets there. "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold", "The Looking Glass War" and "A Small Town in Germany" are more austere, and the double/triple bluff plotting of "Spy" is still startling. The other two are heart-felt, populist, downbeat entertainments ; I'd say he was the Sebastian Faulks of the mid 1960s. It's also striking to think that he was only in his mid-thirties when he created George Smiley, as archetypal a fictional Englishman as James Bond or Sherlock Holmes.
I'm a year older, alas, and was thrilled to get these goodies for my birthday:
A sandwich toaster in the shape of a cow
An upgraded computer
A desk lamp
Amy MacDonald - "This is the Life" which is absolutely fantastic. She sounds like K T Tunstall's funkier, folkier younger sister, and there isn't a duff track on the album.
I was enthralled by the touring production of "Our Friends in the North", which I saw at the Oxford Playhouse with
parrot_knight. The ambition of the script, the depth of quality of the cast and the ingenuity of the scene changes meant that the four hours just flew by. It's not fair to pick out individual actors from the ensemble, but I was particularly impressed by Paul McCleary as Roy Johnson, the incorruptible copper leading the doomed corruption investigation - I've met a fair number of senior policemen, and he had the bearing and (especially) the ramrod posture spot on. Neil Phillips as Donahue, the charismatic PR man, Sonia Beinroth's good girl/bad girl double role as Rusty/Mary, Christian Bradley as a hulking CID heavy/David Walliams-esque Parliamentary aide and Craig Conway's magnetic leading turn as Geordie (reminiscent of a young Tim Healy) were well worth the four hour train journey to Oxford and back.Other cultural interests - I'm reading John Le Carre's books for the first time, and I'm up to "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy". The early stuff is fascinating; "Call for the Dead" and "A Murder of Quality" are almost "Inspector Morse" ten years before Colin Dexter gets there. "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold", "The Looking Glass War" and "A Small Town in Germany" are more austere, and the double/triple bluff plotting of "Spy" is still startling. The other two are heart-felt, populist, downbeat entertainments ; I'd say he was the Sebastian Faulks of the mid 1960s. It's also striking to think that he was only in his mid-thirties when he created George Smiley, as archetypal a fictional Englishman as James Bond or Sherlock Holmes.
