Warm and Sunny Weather

(Wednesday)The weather is continuing to be warm and sunny. But lets enjoy it and not find any negatives. As I've mentioned in earlier posts, when you have the window open, you have to endure all manner of annoying sounds, people running the engines of their cars immediately below my window, children screaming, chatting people (actually quite good for someone who writes as there's dialogue and story ideas from this, so in some respects i'm not complaining. Alan Bennett has said that he used a few of his parents choice saying in his plays, so who knows what's going to come out of an over-heard conversation. I must learn to take my notebook and pencil out when I'm walking Alfie. I was following a couple down Strudwick Avenue and they were having quite a heated conversation, which, unfortunately, I didn't quite catch and then a couple, he dragging along one of those wheeled suitcases that people take with them on holiday and which you see on television when they show footage of airports, people about to board their planes or railway station concourses. It looked to me as if she' just thrown him out of the house, she walking ahead and him walking along behind. Another bit of over-heard conversation, again, quite heated. So, what was the reason? What storyline could I get out of it? What had he done wrong? Were they splitting up? Had she thrown him out of the house? Where was he/they going? To another house? To the station to catch a train? All these ideas stirring up my imagination. Could lead to a story somewhere along the line. You can't make these things up.)

Later. I had wondered what had happened to the appointment I was supposed to have had at Milton Keynes Hospital. I have mentioned this in a previous post. I had a blood test done when I moved from the hopeless Ashfield Medical Centre to Central Milton Keynes Medical Centre in Bradville Common. The doctor suggested I have a blood test, just to check my normal functions, which included cholesterol. It turned out that I needed to have a hospital appointment to have a test to check my liver, as the blood test had shown something not quite right (don't ask me what) which would have been caused by one of the medications I take for my heart condition. Typical that you get side effects caused by the medication. I have to take one tablet which protects my stomach because one of them can hard the lining or something. Anyway, I hadn't heard anything and it was some time ago, I this morning I decided to ring the surgery. I couldn't remember the telephone number, so I went to their website to discover you can leave messages on the website, giving your basic details such as date of birth. I gave a brief description of what I wanted to know, making sure it was clear that it wasn't urgent. I didn't expect to get a response for a couple of day, but this afternoon I had an email and it connected to a reply, saying that the original appointment had been cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic, which is what I had imagined had happened, but I was never informed of this. Regardless of the pandemic, I still need to have this test and they will attempt to arrange a new appointment.

Later still. I have picked up the writing, having got somewhat stuck with where things were going. I had a vague idea where it was going, but not how. I find that, when I go out with Alfie for our walks around Oldbrook Green that I suddenly get ideas for plots and story arcs. The actual writing itself isn't always too difficult, but unless you have what I suppose you could call tent poles, which, if you like, hold up the 'canvas' of the story. Apparently Charles Dickens is supposed to have gone on long walks, sometime going for 20 miles around London, and he got ideas for his novels during these walks, so I can say I am just following his technique for writing. I think it's probably because your mind is allowed to run free when I'm in the open air. I don't know wether the current lockdown situation is actually increasing my creativity but it would seem that might be the case. I suppose another way to describe story creation is to describe the basics as a bit like scaffolding. When builders start work on a house or other construction, they put up scaffolding and work on that as the bricks go up which is perhaps the best description. Without the basic scaffolding in place you can't 'build' your story. Or perhaps it's similar to a journey. You have to know where you going when you start, following a map of a satnav does help.

Current Reading and Viewing

I'm currently reading 'The Story of Lucy Gault' by William Trevor. I studied another of his books for G.C.E. 'O'Level English Literature over 30 years ago. In fact it was the last year of G.C.E. 'O' Levels before they became G.C.S.E. The book was 'The Children of Dynmouth.' It's a good novel, I think I'll have to reread it. I have a volume of his short stories. I occasionally dip into it if I have nothing else to read (which is rarer, as I always have a stack of books to read. Not just novels, but also history books. Both Carol and I read a great deal and if we're passing either branches of Waterstone's in Milton Keynes shopping centre, it takes all our effort to not enter and browse and then come out laden with a load of books. Those tables they have near the entrance with 'Buy one, get one half price' or even 'Buy two, get one free' are far too tempting. We probably have more books than most people, also, more than we really have space for. Why cares? Reading is good for you. Expands your vocabulary, you learn something (generally) and it's often better than cinema or television. Adaptations of books as films or television series don't always meet expectations. They often fiddle around with plots and characters. ITV's series 'The Durrell's is good up to a point, but the latest series, which ended a few weeks ago, has veered off the track, away from the original Gerald Durrell books to such an extent I don't really recognise it. They have expanded the whole thing, no doubt so that they can extract as much as they can from the original material so as to allow more storylines and so develop as many series as possible.

We've had a good batch of television dramas on all channels. I've mentioned 'The Woman In White' in an earlier post. Then there's been 'A Very English Scandal,' about the Jeremy Thorpe scandal of the 1970's. Extremely well done. Hugh Grant showing a very different side to his acting ability from his usual 'floppy-haired' persona. Make-up and costume very convincing and no doubt he'll be in the running for a Best Actor award when the BAFTA nominations are announced.

We're not 'Poldark' fans. We've never seen it, so it's no good writing about something we haven't seen. Probably very good, but I for one am not a great fan of historic fiction, so a series based on such a series of novels doesn't really appeal.

'Car Share,' the comedy series written, directed and performed by Peter Kay has been a great success on BBC1. I for one have really enjoyed it. It's such a simple idea for comedy. A manager of a supermarket drives to and from work and the company he works for sets up a car-sharing scheme and the manager (played by Kay) takes an employee called Kayleigh (Sian Gibson), to work and then takes her home each day. Nothing like it has been attempted before. They chat as they travel. Very little happens, but it's done so well you can't fail to find the characters likeable. They build up a very close relationship. We never see their work-place. We hear about others they work with, but never get to meet them. Technically it must have been extremely difficult to film inside a car. It seems so natural. This simple show has taken traditional sitcom to new heights. There's no audience on the soundtrack. It doesn't need one. It's not 'laugh out loud' comedy. It doesn't need to be. It's about a really mundane subject, a lot like so much comedy, for example, the stuff the late great Victoria Wood wrote and performed. It's the sort of subject-matter we can all identify with, the every-day things that we all go through, the basics of life, getting to and from work. Think of what Alan Bennett wrote about. I remember with great affection his wonderful television plays. One-offs which we don't get anymore, unless you think of the daytime drama series which has run for several seasons on BBC1 at 2.15 during the winter months called 'Moving On.' There have been very few episodes of 'Car Share.' Much the same amount as 'Fawlty Towers.' Only two series and 12 episodes. It seems like there must have been more. It didn't over-stay it's welcome and then just limp along. Episode well-written and acted. So with 'Car Share.' The BBC even had the first series on iPlayer so you could watch the series in it's entirety if you so desired. I personally can't see the attraction of 'binge viewing.' If you wait for each weekly episode, as we would have done in the early days of television, it would be like enjoying something, savouring each episode as it was aired. Before we had V.H.S. cassette recorders, and the only way you could see something was when it was broadcast.

More N.H.S. Waiting Rooms-2

Carol had another appointment at Milton Keynes Hospital on Thursday at the endoscopy department. The time we had to be there was 8.30 a.m. We left in the car, preferring not to walk, and got there in good time. Difficult at times to judge how long it would take, especially if the traffic is going to be heavy as well as finding the department within the hospital. We parked in the multi-storey car park and then walked across to the main entrance. Carol saw a couple of her pupils from the Academy and she had to explain why she wasn't at work. We entered the hospital through the main entrance but then discovered that the endoscopy department was actually reached without that long haul along that (seemingly)endless corridor. You could get to it from the outside without going through the main entrance. We reported to the reception desk and Carol had to fill in a form to give details of any medications she was on and other health-related details. A fairly long wait in the waiting area then followed.

People were being called through to be ready for their treatments/therapies or whatever you want to call them. Carol was eventually called in and got ready by being processed (for want of a better word) by one of the nurses, going through a list to make sure she had no allergic reactions to mediations as well as having a blood-sugar test as she's diabetic.

I waited with her until she went through for the endoscopy. I then went back to sit in the waiting room. Oh dear. So depressing. Well, I suppose it would be. Lots of people making sure they didn't make eye-contact with anyone else. People coming and going. The place decorated to a sort of bland N.H.S. standard. Too many posters all over the place. Far too much information and most of it likely to be forgotten as soon as you walked out of the place. 'Information over-load' I think you could say. A baby making odd gurgling noises. The young woman sitting next to me seemed more interested in her mobile phone than making any sort of conversation or even living in the 'real world.' A woman came into the reception area in a wheelchair and she began a very loud conversation with the woman behind the counter. She said she was deaf so she couldn't hear everything and then proceeded to regail the entire waiting room about how she'd had such-and-such procedure and how was it that she'd put up with some pain for 20-odd years and the doctors could find nothing wrong, so why did they do the procedure three times and then she repeated it several more times, at the top of her voice. It was a bit like one of Alan Bennett's characters, or one of his monologues, the one's done on television, called 'Talking Heads.' She could be played by either Thora Hird or Maggie Smith.

Then Carol reappeared. There were two ladies she knew, from another church in Milton Keynes, Loughton Baptist Church or somewhere. I didn't know who they were. They chatted for a while and then we left. The procedure Carol had had only took a few minutes and we walked out of the unit and back towards the entrance of the hospital and bought some pastries in Costa and then went back to the car and home.