Remembering Carol- Part 2

There's not enough room in one blog post for me to really write all I want to say about my late lovely wife Carol. So here's the second instalment. 

We found that we had plenty in common. We enjoyed each other's company. I went to her home in Crownhill for the first time and her little dog, Poppy, a West/Shitsu cross, must have taken to me, because she peed on my leg! Was that a sign that Carol and I had a future? Possibly. But it was a start. We went out together on quite a few occasions. She drove me all the way to Leicestershire in her Hyaundai Matrix and we visited the village of Thornton, where she lived up until 1979 when her family moved to Bournemouth. I saw the house where she lived and the infamous reservoir, or 'resize' as it was better known. I even saw the school which she attended. We went back more recently and also went into the newest town to Thornton, Coalville. 

Another day out we had together was to London. We went to Tate Modern, which I had never visited before but had always wanted to, since it was opened in 2000 by H.M. Queen. It was here that she thought she'd made a slight fool of herself, by her own admission. We were looking at a painting by the artist Monet, and she turned to me and said 'is it a real Monet?' To which I said that it was, and it seemed unlikely that the Tate gallery would have a fake. I wasn't in the least bit fazed by this remark, because anyone could have made that statement. Well, at least she appreciated art in the same way that i did. We spent some time in Tate Modern and then walked along the Thames embankment and past another place I was keen to visit, the Shakespeare Globe Theatre. I would very much like to see a performance but have, up until now, not done so.

We had other outings, which included a trip to Stowe Landscape Gardens near Buckingham. I think it was here that we decided because we loved visiting the properties managed by the National Trust that we'd join as members, which meant that we could gain free admission. We had several more visits to Stowe as well as to other NT sites, such as Waddesdon Manor, Anglesey Abbey, Wimple Hall and Home Farm and many other places. We also went on holiday together to Yorkshire, staying in a rented property in a village called Cowling. We visited Bradford, which is only a relatively short drive from Cowling, as well as nearby NT properties and also Saltaire, which is a World Heritage site. We saw a permanent exhibition of paintings and other material by David Hockney, one of my favourite modern painters. When, several years later, we went on holiday to Flamborough Head, we went into Bridlington, which is a few miles away, and we leant that Hockney had a house there and spent quite a lot of time in the town. Then he produced a series of paintings and  a sort of video installation which featured the landscape around Bridlington and within the Yorkshire Wolds and there was an exhibition of these paintings at the Royal Academy, of which David Hockney is a member. So, we had a shared interest in art and artists.

Carol was very spontaneous. She was always eager to get out and about. During the long summer holidays from her job at Milton Keynes Academy, we would we out virtually every week, going to different places. We very rarely sat indoors when the sun was out. We went to one of my favourite places, Whipsnade Zoo, which is no more than a 30-minute car journey down the A5 near Dunstable. We went on several occasions and had joint membership, which meant that once we were members we could visit as many times as we liked without having to pay. Then Carol discovered that, because she was a science teacher and also had a degree, she could become a Fellow of Z.S.L., the Zoological Society of London. I could go with her, as her guest! We could no only get free entry, but we could also take the car in, so in effect we saved something like £75-£80 each time we went into the zoo. We had many happy times visiting, loving the lemur walk-through exhibit, the butterfly house, as well as the meerkats and other animals.

So, we decided that we got on with one another. Our relationship blossomed and we decided that we should marry. So, exactly a year to the day I left hospital, on the 26th May 2007, we were married, at Rutland Road Church, which I was a member of when I lived in Bedford. A beautiful day, made even more beautiful by the fact that everyone at Rutland Road pitched in and made it what it was, providing all the music and the food for the reception. I was imagining that only a few people would attend, but it turned out the entire membership attended and made the day unbelievable, along with the whole church band.

Another time, on the way back from somewhere, I'm not exactly sure where we'd been, we stopped at Stonehenge. I had never visited before, had passed by, but never stopped. It's an interesting and quite amazing place and it was here we decided to join English Heritage, the organisation which co-manages the site along with the National Trust. So we were able to visit their sites, free, as we could with the National Trust membership.

It's no good. I still have lots more to say, so I'll end this post there and continue with a third blog post. Who knows? This might even stretch to a fourth.

Something Of Nothing

So, I'm short of things to talk about in this blog post. Which is unlike me. I can usually manage to find plenty to waffle on about. Just staring at a blank screen or sheet of paper can produce writer's block. Many writers have managed to create something out of nothing. When I'm out and about I always attempt to start conversations. If we're in a waiting room for example, as we've been doing for the last few months in N.H.S. facilities, it's always a stress-reliever if you can start a conversation. Even at the supermarket check-out, I always feel sorry for the staff who have to put up with grumpy customers who don't like waiting for any length of time. Whenever I've done any television walk-on work and I arrived early on location and have to sit and wait (a great deal of that when doing that sort of work.) I always manage to strike up conversations with all and sundry who I sit next to, usually on a bus or whatever. As a result, in some cases, I've managed to get more work, or find out such things like other agencies taking on people which has lead to me getting cast in other shows, or going for auditions for things I would have otherwise known about.

There have been quite a few instances of television shows which have had complete episodes which  utilise 'nothing much happens' for an entire 30 minutes running time. 'EastEnders' have done several complete episodes which have just a single character or only a handful of characters in a sort of one-act style storyline. Well, like most television soaps, not a lot happens, or if it does, it's very, very slowly over months and months. Then, just think of the famous 'Sunday Afternoon' episode of the classic 'Hancock's Half-Hour' where all that happens is Hancock, Sid and Bill discuss how boring things are and nothing much happens. There's an episode of 'One Foot in The Grave' where Victor, Margaret and Mrs Warboys are stuck together in their car in a traffic-jam  on the way to some Bank Holiday destination and, again, nothing much happens, except, of course, that Victor gets on everyone's nerves with his constant moaning and upsets several people who are in other cars in the jam.

Taking of traffic jams, I get annoyed when we get stuck in them on the motorway, usually when we go north on the M1 and it's caused by roadworks and they cone off one of the lanes and, as we pass by at a crawl, I look over and there's miles and miles of these roadworks and nothing going on that would possibly warrant coning this section of motorway, no sign of workmen digging holes, laying tarmac or otherwise being busy. 

Of  course, Hancock was created during the 1950's and 1960's when Sundays were boring, nothing was open, no cinemas or theatres and shops had very restricted opening hours, so sitting at home doing nothing except watching the rain-drops running down the window pains would have had resonances with most of the audience who were listening at home.

Perhaps the most famous instances of nothing happening must of course be 'Waiting For Godot' written by Samuel Beckett, where the main characters spend the entire play doing virtually nothing as they wait for Godot who never appears. It's a lot of almost gibberish dialogue.

Then there's works of art. We've been to Tate Modern and seen art which can, as best, be blank canvasses or have nothing in the way of a 'picture' on their canvasses, just canvas with a few slits in or a couple of blocks of coloured paint (think of Marc Rothco.) I won't go into the artistic value or otherwise of these pieces of 'art.' A few artists work in what's called 'conceptual art,' perhaps filling a space with  - nothing. Which is supposed to make a statement. But don't ask we what. Not actually my idea of art. Supposed to make you think.

John Cage, the composer, created a piece of music called 4'33", which consists of silence for 4 minutes 33 seconds. Quite frankly it can hardly be described as 'music,' but being a minimalist composer it couldn't be much more minimal if it consists of nothing. Not sure whether this is considered a serious piece or whether he was having a joke on the audience.

So, at the end of this blog post, where I started off with nothing, I have quite successfully managed to write about something.

"Sunflower Seeds" at Tate Modern

 I have discovered the following piece about the "Sunflower Seeds" sculpture at Tate Modern, whilst surfing the internet:

When an installation by the Chinese conceptual artist Ai Weiwei opened on Tuesday at Turbine Hall, the cavernous entrance space of the Tate Modern in London, visitors were encouraged to touch and even walk on the 100 million hand-crafted porcelain sunflower seeds that gave the piece its name. But on Thursday this kind of intimate interaction stopped. Officials at the museum closed off access to “Sunflower Seeds,” and is now only allowing visitors to see it from a walkway above the hall. 

The movement of the crowds released a “greater than expected level” of ceramic dust, according to a statement released by the Tate, which added that it had “been advised that this dust could be damaging to health following repeated inhalation over a long period of time.” As a result, the museum, in consultation with the artist, “decided not to allow visitors to walk across the sculpture.’’

Day Trip To London- Part 2

We had brought rolls and crisps and drink in Asda. We have learned from experience that if you have a snack, or indeed, any kind of food in London it's going to cost the proverbial arm and a leg. So, before we entered the Tate we sat on some benches, conveniently placed nearby, and ate our rolls, or at least, half of them. Then we went into the building. This was opened by H.M. Queen ten years ago, and was converted from it's former use as a power station which supplied the London Underground.

We'd seen an item on The Culture Show on BBC 2 the other week about the installation by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, called "Sunflower Seeds" which is in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. We walked through the main entrance and saw a crowd gathered around one end of the massive space that is the Turbine Hall, and an area that was sectioned off. Carol thought, because the presenter of the television show had stood on the sunflower seeds, that we would be able to also, but it would appear that was not the case.  This is how it is described on the Tate Modern website:

'Sunflower Seeds is made up of millions of small works, each apparently identical, but actually unique. However realistic they may seem, these life-sized sunflower seed husks are in fact intricately hand-crafted in porcelain. 

Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Far from being industrially produced, they are the effort of hundreds of skilled hands. Poured into the interior of the Turbine Hall’s vast industrial space, the 100 million seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape.'

Like a great deal of art, and particularly modern, it is open to interpretation, and this particular piece is no different. You don't get any idea of the scale of it, from seeing it on television, so it was quite interesting to see it for real. I'm also interested to see, and hear, how people react to bits of art, which makes visiting somewhere like the tate so interesting.

We had to go up to the various floors via escalator, and it is quite a good way up to the top of the galleries. You could see down into the Turbine Hall, but, the truth be told, I didn't really like it because it was so high up. I do prefer to keep my feet firmly on the ground.

We spent quite a long time walking through the galleries and looking at the artwork. We spent some time on a digital display doing a quiz on various art movements and individual artists, and we got a fairly good score. We began to come down on the escalators and went in one of the shops which had a really good selection of things to buy and then we left Tate Modern and decided to then go to Covent Garden.

If you want to visit the website here is the link: www.tate.org.uk

We got on the Underground at the nearest station which was over on the opposite side of the Thames and we had to cross over on Southwark Bridge and caught a    train at Mansion House as far as Leicester Square and then walked the rest of the way to Covent Garden.

It was really crowded in the Piazza, where the old flower, fruit and vegetable markets were. I have never seen it so busy. As we walked through the Piazza we saw quite a few street performers and large crowds gathering to watch, one was a tightrope walker who had taken  a young boy out of the audience and was attempting to get him to throw a hat at him as he stood on the wire which was set up in the portico of St Paul's church (incidentally, not the Wren St Paul's. If you know either "My Fair Lady" or the George Bernard Shaw play "Pygmalion", on which it is based,  you will no doubt know that this was the setting for the opening scene of that play when Professor Higgins first meets Eliza Doolittle.)

We wandered about the market, looking at the stalls. There was a lot of really good quality things for sale, such as pottery, some nice candles set in really nice wooden containers and things like scarves, a great place to come to for some extra-special Christmas presents.

We had tea in a central restaurant area, and it was nice by this time to just sit down as we'd spent a lot of time walking. We went into a branch of Accessorize, as Carol wanted to have a browse. As we walked in, a member of staff barged into the shop and ran into Carol. It was really a shock to think that a member of staff could be so rude. She had no apology. We could easily have been secret shoppers or even management of the company for all she knew. We left the shop and then went into Pollock's Toyshop. I've been there before, but I'm not sure whether they have another branch in London, because I was certain that it was on far more floors. I love model theatres and puppets and it was great to look at what they had for sale, although we didn't buy anything.

As it was by now getting late we decided to start to make our way back to Euston Station to catch our train home.

The platform at   Leicester Square was really busy and we eventually got on board an Underground train and soon got to Euston. We couldn't leave immediately and the only train we could get home was one that terminated one station before Milton Keynes, at Bletchley, but we decided to take it and to get a taxi home from there, rather than waiting for a train on to Milton Keynes. As we didn't have the car waiting at Milton Keynes there was no urgency to get back to the car.

By the time we got home we were really tired, but our day out in London had been well worth it.