Some Nearly Wordless Pics of Languedoc Until the Keyboard's Fixed

  

 

 

 

 Click to embiggen. And spot the dog.

Is it a loud man getting things wrong?

 Here, ol' Unattendees, to celebrate my love for you all, is a tree giving a little house a hug. Sorry I haven't been posting more, but I am once again between keyboards (in case you were wondering, this post has been compiled entirely from copying and pasting parts OF ITSELF) but this hardware situation should be resolved when I get back from France, pictured above – where I have, as always, been spending Christmas with my folks – and below is the advert that will pay for it:

 

 I might even have enough left over after to take a show to Edinburgh, something I haven't dared do since 2001. Guess which show. "I don't know, Simon. How many shows have you made?" Well exactly, that one. Although, thinking on the previous post, I am growing obsessed (again*) with how abysmal a part of real world, far right economic discourse beloved, old sci-fi tropes such as space exploration and Ai have become, so maybe it will be two shows! Maybe it will be none! No, I've written it down now (or pains-takingly pieced it together from individual characters torn from THIS VERY POST) and 2025 is likely to frighten a lot of us anyway, so nits like me, who are sitting pretty pretty, should give courage a go too! Happy... changing things, then. Yeah. No. Franceuck it. Happy 2025, readers. Happy Change. 

 

Vancouver last August, where this ad was filmed – along with many futuristic sci-fi shows from the noughties, meaning I'd wanted to visit this city for decades. But when I finally get there, everywhere else had caught up, and the biggest thing distinguishing this Pacific shoreline now from, say, Leeds or Chelsea Wharf is just the number of people to a canoe.

 

* Did you get that that was what "Time Spanner" was about? I mean, it was about other stuff too.

Uncle Alec

 Dad asked Susy and me to go through the big box of photographs under the spare bed I'm sleeping in. Here's our first Christmas on the Isle of Wight.

 

 That's my other sister, Alice, on the right. I think for some reason there were Tarot cards in that box on top of the telly. To the left of Alice, in the yellow, is "Uncle" Alec. Not an actual blood relative, he was Dad's first agent in the sixties, but by the time this was taken I think he'd given that up, and was a chef somewhere on the island. "Cor-dong bloody blur, darling." Alec came every Christmas.

 

 He'd come over in the morning for the unwrapping of the presents and help Mum with the vegetables, long after we'd left the Isle of Wight. As his obituary in the Telegraph from 2001 put it "he never married." He was the only one allowed to smoke in the house. I don't think even Dad's real dad was allowed, but Grandad hardly ever came down. Alec Grahame is why Christmas always smelt of cigarettes.

 

 We still have that tree. Also from the Telegraph obituary: "in the 1970s show business became a much more serious industry. Much to Grahame's dismay, the liquid lunch was replaced by the working lunch and first night parties always seemed to end much too soon."

 

 Alec was gorgeous. Here's what must be his last Christmas with us. My hair was now black to audition for The Pianist.

 

 

 

 It's only researching him today I found out that Uncle Alec's original name had been James Alexander Patchett, that he'd been a lyricist in the early fifties, had turned an art gallery into a venue for evening cabarets called "Intimacy at 8" ten years before the satire boom, and had taken the first ever late night revue up to the Edinburgh Fringe, After the Show, arguably inventing the Comedy Festival.

 "Aww," Susy noted yesterday, "the tree's nearly stopped smelling of fags." 

 (But Susy still has Covid. I'll have a sniff.)

Christmas Quiz!

 Thanks for playing! Just the one question: I have always been a song and dance machine. But who am I dressed as in this picture?

You have the entirety of Kate Bush's Christmas Special from 1979 to leave your answer in the comments. Go!

 

 

 (Tangentially: after hearing Paul Putner and Joel Morris discuss the "Divine Madness" VHS on Joel's brilliant podcast Comfort Blanket, I realise I've always been drawn to piano-playing singer-songwriters more than guitar-playing ones, not a distinction I'd previously noticed. Okay, NOW go!)

 

Your Christmas Viewing or a better title to be decided later

 

 Let's catch up. 

 On Monday I joined friends to catch The Wind in the Willows Wiltons at Wilton's Music Hall, chiefly to see Darrell Brockis as Toad; it's amazing what a really high-waisted pair of trousers can do to a man's shape. The weasels were sort of bankers now, as was the book's original author Kenneth Grahame, who resigned as Secretary of the Bank of England in 1908 after either being nearly shot in the face during an anarchist raid, or – depending on which motive you ascribe to the enforced retirement – accusing the Bank's future Governor of being "no gentleman", so I've no idea whose side he'd be on here.

 

 (I have only my parents word for it that, many Christmases ago, "Toad of Toad Hall" was the first show they ever took me to. It was the biggest room I'd ever been in. They tell me the sheer scale of the room made me whimper, then the lights lowered, and I didn't like that at all, and then old man dressed as a mole stuck his head out of a trap door and shouted "Hang white-washing!" and I howled and we left and that was it.)

 

 Pleasingly concurrent with the fortunes of Toad Hall in this production were that of the baby otter puppet, Portly: It's always nice to see the inclusion of Pan, and "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" made a lot more sense as subplot here rather than just interlude. A lovely, lively, warm evening, and Wilton's Music Hall is an exciting space to explore during an interval. Do these photographs convey that? I don't know. Badphone finally expired on Sunday, alas, but I appear to have found a replacement with just as MySpace-era a camera, which was not my intention. I'll have to start hanging around more light.

 

 On Tuesday I caught up for drinks with an old friend who told me that she can get married in Saint Paul's Cathedral, a thrilling possible future theatre project. I also found the following extraordinary performace on youtube while searching for video essays on "Brimstone and Treacle". I'd never made the connection before between Dennis Potter's fable of Satanic Home Invasion, and Mary Poppins (OR HAD I?) 

 

 

 I just wanted to write a good part for Olivia Colman.

 

 And the TKA Smith Family Conservatory of the Art's family production of Poppins sheds little light on the banned seventies teleplay. But it does throw up a blisteringly confident turn from an uncredited singer in a role I don't remember as a rival nanny with a bun of grey hair fastened inexplicably to the top of her head, which the Conservatory has liked so much they've posted twice. In case you didn't manage to catch a Christmas show yourself this year I share both versions here, not for comparison, but to be played simultaneously to see if the resulting reason-shredding resonances open a portal to anywhere.

 On Wednesday evening we performed the ante-penultimate Love Goddess at the Cockpit Theatre. The weather was milder now. The snow had gone. I didn't walk home directly. Badphone's replacement took what it could.

 

On Thursday, well, I wrote last Sunday's post, but I also learnt that that ante-penultimate show had actually been our penultimate as one of the cast had fallen ill, although testing negative for Covid. We'd planned our cast drinks for that evening however as some people had to rush off on Friday, including myself, who would have to be up early to catch a flight from Gatwick on a day of border control and train strikes. Our producer Laura had booked a table at a pub called the Pereseverance, and I hadn't left the flat all day.

 As with the long walk home on Wednesday I found a refreshing solitude in that place. The barman gave me a Guiness in a weird glass, free nuts and sample of an unnamed Christmas cocktail he'd worked on. A lot was ending. Enjoying the uniterrupted ambience, it occured to me I could just try and go straight to Gatwick after the final show though and not worry about sleeping Friday night.

 

 

 I woke at midday, feeling finally Christmassy. The last night went ahead and everything felt new, which may not be unusual for a last night. As I said from the start, everyone's lovely, and while I may not have tried so much towards the end not to be too weird, it's only because that's what happens when you get to know people.

 

 Then that stops, and there's no getting used to it. The show's over. Almog's on another continent now, and I took the Thameslink to Gatwick however many hours ago it was and found a nice, small copy of "Pinocchio" at the airport bookshop. Its tone is very Vic and Bob. In fact Bob Mortimer would make a brilliant Pinocchio. I woke on the plane surprised to see the land up at the top. 

 

 Mum met me at Montpellier just as I received the message that the cast member had now tested positive for covid after all, but that was okay because Susy's tested positive for Covid too. We made it down. That's the main thing. Dad showed us "Creature Comforts" in the cinema (because it's important to be reminded just how perfect Aardman can be...)

 

 

 Tom put on the "Bottom" Christmas special. I'm about to put the presents out. I was meant to be cacting up on sleep but appear to haev written this instead. I hope you get everything you want this Christmas, ole unatendees. 

 Here, one more time, is Orson Welles. 

 

 Big ball to stick your head in by Arthur Handy.

Meeting Your Heroes

The way to the bottom of my heart might be windy... prononunced wine-dy (I wish there were a way to disambiguate that as I've mentioned before)... but it's down there somewhere, and from that bottom I heartily recommend making one's friends one's heroes. 

 Look how many turned up to the show on Saturday night (Tickets here!) Some I hadn't seen offline since before the pandemic. Some I'd seen out Ripper Walking in the Summer. Two are getting married. One's just been confirmed as the new voice of Wallace. One's working on the fourth and final series of The Monster Hunters. One's going to be working at Heathrow Airport on Christmas Eve as a mime. One really liked Del Toro's "Pinocchio", and thought I would too – Sorry, Kevin. So I haven't witten more about that copy of the Daily Mail from 1946, Sorry. But of course you don't just stave off the darkness of this season by putting lights up, you also get busy reuniting.

 (I will let you read that story a little closer though, in case yesterday's image was too small. It's stunning to see how little time following the end of the actual Second World War it took some papers to see things from the fascists' point of view again... Also, an odd choice of defense of tactic from Goring on the right there...)

Sometimes this blog will just be Japan's Bob McGrath.

 

 The beautiful Bob McGrath died today, which is also the day I learnt from an old American panel show that a couple of years before becoming Sesame Street's whitest human he'd had a successful career as a singer of Irish ballads in Japan. Telling me facts like this seems exactly what the internet was meant for. I've done my thing of dropping you into this clip at the good bit...

 

 

 

 There's a lot of Bob's Japanese crooning on youtube – is it still "crooning" if you don't have the raw, genital energy of Rudy Vallée? It's very hard to be unhappy listening to him, whatever it is – And it's not all Irish standards. There are Japanese songs sung in Japanese as well...

 

 Here Bob sings something a little more festive, in both English and Japanese. Merry December, everyone! But can we agree "Jingle Bells" maybe has more verses than it needs? It's a simple enough situation; you're in a sleigh; you're not Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts...

 

 Here is the song I know Bob best for. I love how much trouble Jim Henson's giving him here in the preamble, and how unphased Bob is by it. Water off a duck's back to Bob. He was ninety when he died. That's good. As Oscar the Grouch might say, fare forward, Bright Eyes.

"Rita, take a deep breath."

  That apparently was the instruction given to Rita Hayworth when Bob Landry took the above photograph for LIFE magazine in 1941. This photograph of Hayworth holding her breath would go on to sell over five million copies by the end of World War Two. It was this photograph Orson Welles saw while filming in Brazil which led him to famously declare the actress "the biggest electric train set a boy ever had!" Okay no, that's how he described RKO. What he actually said upon seeing Hayworth's picture was: "When I come back, that's what I'm going to do!" Which isn't far off. And reader, he did.

 

 I'll be playing Rita Hayworth's second husband in Almog Pail's new musical The Love Goddess at the Cockpit Theatre in a month's time. It's a wonderful script – the whole cheating-on-the-wife-you're-sawing-in-half side of Welles is not one we often see – and I'm really looking forward to starting rehearsals next week. I'll also be playing Hayworth's boss, Harry Cohn, the monstrous, Weinstein-ian head of Columbia Pictures. And at least four other Americans, so I'm also really nervous. But I love being part of a labour of love, and Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a musical. Get yer tickets HERE!

 

Christmas just wouldn't be Christmas without Lembit Opik...

 

 O HOU, everyone! Happy First of Leo! Let's all celebrate One Humanity, One Unity – but not necessarily in that order – with Asgardia's plucky "Chair of Parliament" Lembit Opik, an uncredited Lena DeWinne, and their tiny "Head of Legal Affairs", none of whom outstay their welcome. If that wasn't enought to make this a Unity Day to remember, joining them is a computer-generated woman from 2005: "All Asgardians will be awarded celebrating in all corners!" Imagine that!

 

 

  Speaking of all corners, I see Dennis Shoemaker has found the perfect place for his map of the US. Okay, so it turns out that Unity Day was actually six months ago, but that's my fault, not theirs. I wasn't going to let the year go by without sharing the latest from Asgardia with you anyway, and every day's Unity Day here at Unattended Articles, so let's hear now from their Head of Information and Communications. Take it away, Dennis!

 

 

 

 Of course, Asgardia won't just be about law and information and recruiting women to give birth in outer space. There will also be a strong cultural element. But what will the Art of Earth's First Space Nation look like? It will look like Hell. O hou, Cheryl!

 Oh, who's this at the door now, but Asgardia's Minister for Trade and Commerce, Ben Dell, who maybe hasn't had that much to do this past year? I don't know. That's just a guess. Maybe sloppily photoshopping the Starship Enterprise onto pictures of himself sitting on a space swing was exactly how Ben was meant to be spending his time. It certainly wasn't wasted anyway. That's one tasty vision. Here's still to the future, guys. O HOU!

 

 

Deck the Stars!

 Season's Merries to all of you, ol' Unatendees! From the tasteful opulence of this Notting Hill window display, to the simple star atop the town down the tracks, below. I hope – however you spend this day, and whomever you spend it with – that incorporated into it at some point will be your idea of fun, and I hope you're all doing tremendously!

Miracle On Rue De L'Audacieuse

 On Monday night I slept solidly for twelve hours. 

 A lateral flow test taken when I woke with a dry cough on Tuesday afternoon showed, as usual, the strong line against the C... (for "Covid or not Covid, let's see if you have it!")... but also, unusually this time, a faint line as well against the T... (for "Turns out you might actually have it, huh!") Above is a completely unphotoshopped picture of the tent behind the chemist's in the town along the train tracks where, on the longest night of the year, I walked in to get my PCR... (for "Polymerase Chain Reaction")... test, to see whether or not I had indeed brought Omicron into France. Everyone in London seemed to be coming down with the new variant, but to my surprise, twenty minutes after the swabbing, a text came through to tell me that the result was negative. I didn't have it. And now my cough's gone.

 To quote the title song of a childrens' opera written by my Dad: "Christmas is a Time of Miracles!" 

 

 Incidentally, it was only when he came to rewatch "Die Hard" that Dad realised, to his delight, he'd nicked that line from Hans Gruber.

Lighting Candles in the Cloud

 Monday was shrouded in mist, or cloud (I don't know how high up we are, here in Languedoc). Sat around Mum's computer on three chairs, we attended her brother Francis' funeral online, then drove carefully to the abbey in the next village, to light a candle for him. 

 

  The abbey's been here less time than Mum and Dad, only completed in 2018. I don't know who designs sanctuaries these days, but they understood the assignment. The small chapel we were taken to by the monk, where the candles were lit, was bright with stained glass, even in this weather, but the palette of the surrounding cloisters is far calmer, almost prehistoric, the colour of water and bone. And the windows of the main church aren't stained, but grooved like the sand in a karesansui garden, which my camera doesn't pick up.

 

 The earliest Christmas I remember, I was six or seven: I received a robot that broadcast a panorama of Saturn across its chest and fired missiles from its forehead (this one, in fact), and a beautifully illiminated boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia, which I still own. I remember Mum conveying the excitement with which she and her brothers and sister would look forward to the next story coming out, but I'm only now realising the more personal connection: that its author had actually taught one of them. Apparently, C.S. Lewis considered Francis "the best mannered man of his generation I have ever met." I loved that box, but it would be decades before I got beyond The Horse and His Boy, although I still remember, vividly, its description of how surpisingly damp and grey it is to be inside a cloud. 

 Francis' service, if you wish, can be viewed here.

 

Lights Up.

 Let's take a quick interval from all the film quizzes, just to catch up. How are you? Where are you? In case you didn't know, I'm here now, suddenly.

 That's the moon on the left, and that's the village I'm staying in on the right: a white knight bringing plague to the medieval village! Only joking. No "major incidents" here, yet – Oh, hang on...

 No. Just a cyclist.

 

 Please forgive my relief. I managed to book tickets out of King's Cross as soon as my sister phoned on Thursday to tell me France would be doing the Big Lockdown the following midnight. I got down yesterday. Susy's stuck in London, but I hope cosy.

 

 It's colder here than in London, surprisingly. The roadside raspberries are inedible.

 

   But the light hangs around for longer.

 

  By the end of my walk this evening, the moon was the only light I had. But it cast a sharp shadow. I'll be staying here long enough to see the moon wane, and to see the stars come out. Mum and Dad tell me the village has started turning its street lights off at midnight, to save power.

 

 Dad's put new Christmas lights up in the cinema. He put them up in June in fact. He's been waiting six months for family to come down so he could finally turn them on. They're beautiful.

 Again, please forgive my relief. I hope you're all doing tremendously.