(no subject)
The day was beautiful and the way was beautiful. Ha! You have to have a certain kind of misspent youth to know where that comes from. But Spring! I'm writing this in one of those rare moments where the sunlight hits my bedroom wall, watching a bumblebee meandering through the blossom. A blue-tit is feasting on the fat ball that hangs from my window, all fluffy and yellow in the evening sunshine.
I have become an anxious plant mother, hurrying home from work each day to check on the progress of my seedlings. I am not a hundred per cent sure that some of them aren't in fact weedlings, but really, anything green and shoot-like is in.
My two shows are back, back-to-back, which is like, a starter and dessert. Or olives and a cheese course, with superior crackers.
Ashes to Ashes is the best thing to happen to Friday night scheduling since Thunderbirds and the Man from UNCLE. Did 1983 have the best music ever? I am slightly in denial about all the references to the truth being revealed (I'm not here for the answers. I'm here mostly for the choreographed door-entering. Friday night, that's my excuse) but wherever we're headed, I am up for the ride. I love how much Alex has bought into the banter; it isn't about protesting or points scoring any more, but playing along because she can. She does it with a deftness that is the perfect foil to Gene's bludgeoning: "You can't have five times nothing." "I am young, you rude git." Plus, the adorable parallel body language while the two of them were filling in their forms for the dating agency is up there with last series' coloured marker all-nighter.
Doctor Who threw me off at the start: the new music upsets me. But I find myself not inconsolable. I had a wobbly moment or two early on in Episode 1 (I am too much a fan of food to see it spurned) but fell quite deeply in love with both Amy and Eleven not very long afterwards, which kind of sold it for me. He appeals to me in the way Jack Sparrow does, all that oddness concealing a steely, solid core. There is a lovely, childlike seriousness to the way he wraps himself around a sentence, but there is also something very grown-up at the heart of him. And I'm fascinated by the way clothes hang on him. Ten had style, but Eleven has...well, shoulders.
And then there's Amy, a life force in her village, set to shine undimmed in the universe at large. The girl who lives with a crack in her wall, metaphorically as well as literally: a fissure between worlds that etches itself through her reality. Time doesn't seal it over, this suggestion that somewhere out there is a life beyond her own. And then the Doctor returns and tears it open.
When he lets her down for the second time she tries to patch the crack over but it's been prised too far open; even on the eve of her wedding his world overspills into hers, the tell-tale trail across her room. She asks if she can be back by tomorrow morning, and she goes with him, knowing more about his timekeeping than he does, and knowing, I think, exactly how that one's going to turn out.
Episode 2 is her story as much as his. "All that pain and misery and loneliness and it just made it kind." It is a hug of bright, unfuzzy love they share at the end. I love the way he buries his head into her shoulder. Theirs should be such a loaded dynamic: the lifetime he owes her; the centuries they stand apart, her lifespan barely touching his. But here it feels like they are equals.
Last week I went to see the spring flowers in Cambridge, which were everything they should be, and on the way home went to see Wicked, which I adored. At last, a musical where the girls have all the best songs! Louise Dearman, who I loved in Guys and Dolls, was a gleaming, glimmering, glorious Glinda, and Rachel Tucker, who I didn't warm to in I'd Do Anything was sensational as Elphaba. She powers right through all those great big lines not just with strength but with a wonderful richness, and she is a mesmerising, effervescent stage presence, and she won me over completely.
Eleven-style, I am finishing this an age after I began. I have to run, as I am leaving for Durham in half an hour, but just wanted to squeeze in a late but nonetheless resounding Happy Birthday to mistakency! The peppers have grown new leaves in your honour. And Happy Birthdays to dear poshcat and moscow_watcher tomorrow!
I must run! I'll be back in "five minutes". :)
I have become an anxious plant mother, hurrying home from work each day to check on the progress of my seedlings. I am not a hundred per cent sure that some of them aren't in fact weedlings, but really, anything green and shoot-like is in.
My two shows are back, back-to-back, which is like, a starter and dessert. Or olives and a cheese course, with superior crackers.
Ashes to Ashes is the best thing to happen to Friday night scheduling since Thunderbirds and the Man from UNCLE. Did 1983 have the best music ever? I am slightly in denial about all the references to the truth being revealed (I'm not here for the answers. I'm here mostly for the choreographed door-entering. Friday night, that's my excuse) but wherever we're headed, I am up for the ride. I love how much Alex has bought into the banter; it isn't about protesting or points scoring any more, but playing along because she can. She does it with a deftness that is the perfect foil to Gene's bludgeoning: "You can't have five times nothing." "I am young, you rude git." Plus, the adorable parallel body language while the two of them were filling in their forms for the dating agency is up there with last series' coloured marker all-nighter.
Doctor Who threw me off at the start: the new music upsets me. But I find myself not inconsolable. I had a wobbly moment or two early on in Episode 1 (I am too much a fan of food to see it spurned) but fell quite deeply in love with both Amy and Eleven not very long afterwards, which kind of sold it for me. He appeals to me in the way Jack Sparrow does, all that oddness concealing a steely, solid core. There is a lovely, childlike seriousness to the way he wraps himself around a sentence, but there is also something very grown-up at the heart of him. And I'm fascinated by the way clothes hang on him. Ten had style, but Eleven has...well, shoulders.
And then there's Amy, a life force in her village, set to shine undimmed in the universe at large. The girl who lives with a crack in her wall, metaphorically as well as literally: a fissure between worlds that etches itself through her reality. Time doesn't seal it over, this suggestion that somewhere out there is a life beyond her own. And then the Doctor returns and tears it open.
When he lets her down for the second time she tries to patch the crack over but it's been prised too far open; even on the eve of her wedding his world overspills into hers, the tell-tale trail across her room. She asks if she can be back by tomorrow morning, and she goes with him, knowing more about his timekeeping than he does, and knowing, I think, exactly how that one's going to turn out.
Episode 2 is her story as much as his. "All that pain and misery and loneliness and it just made it kind." It is a hug of bright, unfuzzy love they share at the end. I love the way he buries his head into her shoulder. Theirs should be such a loaded dynamic: the lifetime he owes her; the centuries they stand apart, her lifespan barely touching his. But here it feels like they are equals.
Last week I went to see the spring flowers in Cambridge, which were everything they should be, and on the way home went to see Wicked, which I adored. At last, a musical where the girls have all the best songs! Louise Dearman, who I loved in Guys and Dolls, was a gleaming, glimmering, glorious Glinda, and Rachel Tucker, who I didn't warm to in I'd Do Anything was sensational as Elphaba. She powers right through all those great big lines not just with strength but with a wonderful richness, and she is a mesmerising, effervescent stage presence, and she won me over completely.
Eleven-style, I am finishing this an age after I began. I have to run, as I am leaving for Durham in half an hour, but just wanted to squeeze in a late but nonetheless resounding Happy Birthday to mistakency! The peppers have grown new leaves in your honour. And Happy Birthdays to dear poshcat and moscow_watcher tomorrow!
I must run! I'll be back in "five minutes". :)