My monthlydiaryday entry
12th November 2015.
I spent longer than I'd planned in bed. The husband usually brings me a coffee before leaving for work, to make me more awake, but this time there was the ever-excellent Melvyn Bragg on the radio to counteract the beverage, so I enjoyed listening to academics discussing the Ottoman presence in the Mediterranean leading up to the battle of Lepanto, and then there was a fifteen-minute reading of a biography of Gore Vidal.
So then I did haul myself out of bed and pottered a bit, doing mundane tasks in the kitchen and sitting room. I have paperwork everywhere, so I sorted the Shakespeare stuff into two files and separated out the things intended as Christmas presents from other clutter. This weekend I have to attack the Sewing Mountain in the dining room.
Around one o'clock I left the house and headed down to Stratford, doing a quick detour through the outskirts of Warwick to avoid a traffic jam. More Radio 4 en route - Lenny Henry on the history of black performers in Britain. On Wednesday he did Ira Aldridge, which was fascinating (the first black Othello to perform in Britain) and this time it was the Windrush generation and the 50s vogue for calypso.
I found parking in Chestnut Walk, so was hardly late at all for the seminar. The Shakespeare Institute has a regular feature on Thursdays of a guest lecture followed by a Q&A. All staff and full-time students are required to attend; it's optional for part-timers like me, but too good to miss. (Three weeks ago it as a film studies expert on the eroticisation of the male military body in post-9/11 Shakespeare, with special reference to Tom Hiddleston as Henry V. Could you resist?) This time it was an argument that Shakespeare's concept of Justice suggests a proleptic (forward-looking) social justice warrior/utopian. It was a fascinating argument, though I rather felt it left out the crucial religious element - fallen man is never going to be just or merciful by definition. There was tea/coffee after, and discussion and a catch-up with a fellow part-time student I hadn't seen for a few weeks.
Then I popped out to move the car - two hours is the maximum for parking where I had left it. I went round to Rothermarket to the Shakespeare Hospice charity bookshop, where I failed to find a copy of Cymbeline, as I'd hoped, but did bag several books for small children for future use. Then up to the retail park to buy my evening meal from M&S, and a pizza for Friday.
I got back to the Shakespeare Institute about four thirty and spent an hour and a half or so reading in the library, polishing off the first act of Cymbeline and succeeding in borrowing a copy. (It's one of the plays I need for the weekend of the 20th, hence the emphasis.) I went on into the conservatory, which is the communal student area to eat and chatted for a while with one of the students about our courses.
Then at 7.00 we went into the Lounge, a very Edwardian pseudo-Tudor room, for the play-reading group. We meet each week in term-time and read a play from the early-modern period, usually with great hilarity. This time it was The Insatiate Countess, by John Marston and probably others. It's an utterly bonkers play of around 1609, about a sex-mad widowed countess who is executed for plotting the killing of her second husband, with a subplot about two virtuous Venetian ladies who each tricks her husband into thinking he's committing adultery with the other by the simple expedient of swapping houses and enjoining darkness and silence. Yes, it's just as loony as it sounds. One role, as always, was played by Martin Wiggins, a senior Fellow and world expert on his field, who also thoroughly enjoys ham acting, thus when he played the role of a character who tried to climb to a lady's bedroom for sexual purposes but fell off his rope ladder he fell on the floor and played the rest of the scene from a prone position.
Yes, that's me watching him.
After Act Three there's always a glass of wine and chatter, then we read the last two acts and moved on home.
When I got home Daughter R was on the phone to her father, so I took over and chatted to her for a while. She's doing an MA at Central School of Drama (be impressed. I am.) and she is so excited about it, despite undergoing an existential crisis because she's reading far too much philosophy, most of it by people in the Pythons' Philosophers' Song. She's absolutely in love with the process of learning, with ideas exploding from her almost uncontrollably. It's lovely to have that sense of intellectual excitement from my girl, who fifteen years ago thought she was stupid.
A quick scan of LJ and FB to finish the evening, and the sad news that Liz Candy, the head of the school where I worked in the 80s, died earlier in the week. She was only a decade older than me. She wasn't always right, and I don't think she even liked me, but she was the best Head I ever worked for, an enthusiastic leader who always put the wellbeing of the girls first. RIP.
I spent longer than I'd planned in bed. The husband usually brings me a coffee before leaving for work, to make me more awake, but this time there was the ever-excellent Melvyn Bragg on the radio to counteract the beverage, so I enjoyed listening to academics discussing the Ottoman presence in the Mediterranean leading up to the battle of Lepanto, and then there was a fifteen-minute reading of a biography of Gore Vidal.
So then I did haul myself out of bed and pottered a bit, doing mundane tasks in the kitchen and sitting room. I have paperwork everywhere, so I sorted the Shakespeare stuff into two files and separated out the things intended as Christmas presents from other clutter. This weekend I have to attack the Sewing Mountain in the dining room.
Around one o'clock I left the house and headed down to Stratford, doing a quick detour through the outskirts of Warwick to avoid a traffic jam. More Radio 4 en route - Lenny Henry on the history of black performers in Britain. On Wednesday he did Ira Aldridge, which was fascinating (the first black Othello to perform in Britain) and this time it was the Windrush generation and the 50s vogue for calypso.
I found parking in Chestnut Walk, so was hardly late at all for the seminar. The Shakespeare Institute has a regular feature on Thursdays of a guest lecture followed by a Q&A. All staff and full-time students are required to attend; it's optional for part-timers like me, but too good to miss. (Three weeks ago it as a film studies expert on the eroticisation of the male military body in post-9/11 Shakespeare, with special reference to Tom Hiddleston as Henry V. Could you resist?) This time it was an argument that Shakespeare's concept of Justice suggests a proleptic (forward-looking) social justice warrior/utopian. It was a fascinating argument, though I rather felt it left out the crucial religious element - fallen man is never going to be just or merciful by definition. There was tea/coffee after, and discussion and a catch-up with a fellow part-time student I hadn't seen for a few weeks.
Then I popped out to move the car - two hours is the maximum for parking where I had left it. I went round to Rothermarket to the Shakespeare Hospice charity bookshop, where I failed to find a copy of Cymbeline, as I'd hoped, but did bag several books for small children for future use. Then up to the retail park to buy my evening meal from M&S, and a pizza for Friday.
I got back to the Shakespeare Institute about four thirty and spent an hour and a half or so reading in the library, polishing off the first act of Cymbeline and succeeding in borrowing a copy. (It's one of the plays I need for the weekend of the 20th, hence the emphasis.) I went on into the conservatory, which is the communal student area to eat and chatted for a while with one of the students about our courses.
Then at 7.00 we went into the Lounge, a very Edwardian pseudo-Tudor room, for the play-reading group. We meet each week in term-time and read a play from the early-modern period, usually with great hilarity. This time it was The Insatiate Countess, by John Marston and probably others. It's an utterly bonkers play of around 1609, about a sex-mad widowed countess who is executed for plotting the killing of her second husband, with a subplot about two virtuous Venetian ladies who each tricks her husband into thinking he's committing adultery with the other by the simple expedient of swapping houses and enjoining darkness and silence. Yes, it's just as loony as it sounds. One role, as always, was played by Martin Wiggins, a senior Fellow and world expert on his field, who also thoroughly enjoys ham acting, thus when he played the role of a character who tried to climb to a lady's bedroom for sexual purposes but fell off his rope ladder he fell on the floor and played the rest of the scene from a prone position.
Yes, that's me watching him.
After Act Three there's always a glass of wine and chatter, then we read the last two acts and moved on home.
When I got home Daughter R was on the phone to her father, so I took over and chatted to her for a while. She's doing an MA at Central School of Drama (be impressed. I am.) and she is so excited about it, despite undergoing an existential crisis because she's reading far too much philosophy, most of it by people in the Pythons' Philosophers' Song. She's absolutely in love with the process of learning, with ideas exploding from her almost uncontrollably. It's lovely to have that sense of intellectual excitement from my girl, who fifteen years ago thought she was stupid.
A quick scan of LJ and FB to finish the evening, and the sad news that Liz Candy, the head of the school where I worked in the 80s, died earlier in the week. She was only a decade older than me. She wasn't always right, and I don't think she even liked me, but she was the best Head I ever worked for, an enthusiastic leader who always put the wellbeing of the girls first. RIP.