Weekending

 

Hello everyone. I come to you from just having spent a fruitless half hour trying to catch the blood moon eclipse or whatever it was. I looked it up, and apparently, Cornwall was only ever going to see it for a couple of minutes, so I could possibly have been indisposed in the bathroom department and missed it. Never mind. I am aware that I live in Devon, not Cornwall, but we are closer to Cornwall in terms of geography and weather and all that. I am very much a Devon person. Cornwall is seen as the glamorous county in the South West, mainly because of the influence of all the London richies who have second homes there and who put up Instagram stories of surfing and sourdough shacks on the beach. I like the greenery of Devon and the way it attracts fewer of these people, although I would like the odd street light along the many five-mile stretches of pitch black winding roads. Anyway, I digress. How was your weekend? Just a quick-ish catch-up because we have been away. 

We are just back from a very quick weekend in London. (What do I sound like? I am annoying myself.) We went to see a play at the Barbican. "Good Night, Oscar" is about the Hollywood musician and concert pianist Oscar Levant, who is probably most famous for being in An American in Paris. He struggled for many years with extreme mental health problems and was committed to a secure mental institution several times. The play covers a period when he was given a four-hour pass to appear on a late-night chat show. Levant was played by Sean Hayes, who you would probably recognise from Will and Grace. Blimey, that sounds like a miserable play, but Levant was famously witty and caustic and often in trouble with the network, so there were lots of laughs. There was a Marilyn Monroe joke that made our audience gasp, so goodness knows how it went down in that time and place. It was all excellent, and then Hayes sits at the piano and plays Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (what isn't made obvious is that before he was an actor, Hayes was a concert-trained pianist). Look, I'm no expert, but it was amazing, hairs on the back of the neck few minutes. Loved it. 

As you know, I love a trip to London, especially with a bit of the old culture. We also wandered around a few record shops. Well, HOH wandered into them. I stood outside keeping a lookout for police raids and gangland shootings. Why are so many record shops in these kinds of areas? After all that, the trip home can be a bit of a jag, but the intention was to get settled on the train, scoff a Pret sandwich, then have a bit of a doze. Ha! Within seventeen seconds of sitting down, two middle-class twonk women settled in the seats next to us. Their main intention, it seemed, was to annoy the whole carriage with tales of their private lives, those years they lived in six-bedroom houses, how one of them ended up spending Christmas on her own because her family had (surprisingly perhaps) not included her in their plans and (oh no) details of their lives in the bedroom department. Good Grief. It was a long trip.

Then, when we reached the railway station at ten pm, there were no taxis, so we spent half an hour standing in the middle of Plymouth's version of the Wild West (It was Saturday night and Plymouth Argyle had won) as the youth ran riot. Mind you - these people were nowhere near as annoying as the women on the train - better manners for sure. I would especially like to thank the young man who helpfully informed me that he had to stop having a wee up the side of the car park because the taxi was here. Thank you for including me in your evening.

So, how has September been for you so far? Lots of people use this month as their New Year rather than January and start new diaries and all that. It's certainly darker, and I need to consider crawling under the bed and having a good look for something to wear that isn't either linen or a T-shirt with a Star Wars logo. One of these years, I will be organised when the seasons start to change. I think, if you are that way inclined, it is a good time to reset and restart. It helps, especially, I think, if you don't do very well as the seasons change and summer fades into the distance. 

However, the schools are back, boxes of Roses are in Sainsbury's, and my brolly is back in my handbag. Autumn is here, and Devon is being monsooned on at regular intervals. Messy Church is back in a week or so, meaning that some poor children will have me, the most cack-handed person in the Western World, teaching them craft. It's all going very well. Well, it's not really. We heard this week that a good chum is very unwell, and, on a national scale, there is a lot to worry about. But, and I assume that you are all way ahead of me on this, I am doing my utmost to hang on to the tiny sentence in Romans.

None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us.

This, hopefully, will help me cut down on the catastrophising and acknowledge that there is indeed a possibility that most, indeed maybe all, things will be well. Have a good week.