Windy City

 Sunday. 7.40 a.m. The wind seems to have dropped, and it is bright and sunny. I just hope it remains that way, so the church picnic can take place outside.

Monday. 5.45 a.m. Yesterday the wind dropped considerably, but the arrangements for the church picnic had to be modified. A tent arrangement was set up in the courtyard area, and the musicians set up within this and played a range of music during the time after the service, which started at 11 o'clock and was for an hour. 

There was supposed to be a bouncy castle for the children, but, because of the wind, the rental company that was going to supply it, didn't bring it, basically because of safety concerns.

Plenty of cake (probably too much!) which I had and there was a quiz, both of which raised money for the church building fund.

I have a subscription to National Theatre At Home, which has 'live' recordings of first and foremost National Theatre productions, but there are also productions from theatres and companies which aren't actually National Theatre productions. Some come from the Bridge Theatre and Donmar Warehouse. Over the weekend I watched 'The Wife of Willesden', an adaptation of the 'Wife of Bath Prologue and Tale' by Zadie Smith, from 'The Canterbury Tales' by Geoffrey Chaucer. A bawdy, loud and thoroughly engaging show, staged at The Kiln Theatre, formerly Tricycle Theatre. I have had an interest in 'The Canterbury Tales', from the time I had to study the General Prologue for A-Level English Literature in the late 1960s. I was somewhat frustrated that we didn't study the rest, or even a part, of the main body of this work of fiction, although I did read a modern translation of it more recently and in the late 1960s, well after I had left college (not having completed my A Levels.) I went with my mother to see the musical version in the West End, done in collaboration with Nevill Coghill, who had done a modern translation of the text. I have to say, the teaching of this work (and the other texts we had to study.) was so BORING, I'm not really surprised I wasn't that interested at the time and would have rather been elsewhere than stuck in a classroom. The same could be said of A Level History, which covered most of 19th-century history, and I have more or less forgotten what I was supposed to have learnt. It just goes to show that, if you have poor teaching, how it will affect your relationship with the subject taught, which might explain why, for example, the works of William Shakespeare can be a total turn-off for some people, because his plays are really supposed to be performed, not analysed in minute detail in a classroom.