Blossoms Galore

My week in blossoms .......

 

Completely enchanted this week, as I resume some walking in the Abbey Gardens as the energy begins to return, by the multiplicity of blossoms to be seen. And not just numerous but so many different varieties. The Great Graveyard is totally submerged beneath the green billowing cow parsley rampant, now as tall as I! It is all just delightful and reminds me of how lucky I am to be here. After the sadness in leaving Brugge when I didn't want to though could  see that I should, I do count my blessings to have landed in Bury St Edmunds with so many facets of life, perfect for my age and stage. 

The Theatre Royal auditorium showing the Dress Circle

William Wilkins 1778-1839

This last week I have been twice to the historic and charming Theatre Royal. Built in 1819 by William Wilkins [1778-1839] architect of the National Gallery in London and Downing College in Cambridge. With many of its period features still intact it is the last remaining Regency playhouse still open in the country and one of the most beautiful, intimate and historic theatres in the world. I love to sit in the first floor Dress Circle  which comprises a large curved section divided into boxes, each containing eight seats, maximum, and requiring some friendly co-operation between theatre-goers to facilitate the availability of the eight seats. Once the necessary manoeuvres have been accomplished, the view of the stage is perfect for all eight people, ready for the music or the drama to begin. 

My first lunchtime visit was to listen to the talented Champagne Quartet, all leading members of the Music in Felixstowe group of professional musicians, formed over 40 years ago. They performed an hour of light classical and enduring pop classics ranging from Mozart, through Vivaldi and Elgar to Borodin and Bernstein and finishing, unexpectedly, with Rod Stewart's lilting 'We are sailing, ..' In addition to the high standard of performance, a given, the whole atmosphere was one of Fun and Enjoyment in the musical moment as the audience almost managed to dance their way out of the concert as directed by Harriet Bennett, the cellist and group leader.  

The second visit was to see a musical version of Noel Coward's Brief Encounter; each  actor, nine in all, played a musical instrument, and most sang too. It was a completely unexpected version and so charming to witness, as it re-told the familiar story of the woman on her weekly shopping trip to town who has grit in her eye at the railway station and is helped by a passing doctor just off duty in the local hospital. Their unexpected romance which blossoms, cannot endure but the relationship was beautifully sketched in this production from Ipswich.

Sir Peter  Hall 1930-2017

Akenfield 
Garrow Shand as Tom

And today, Bank Holiday Sunday, has completed my cultural week with a visit to the nearby cinema to see Akenfield on a rare outing. Made by Peter Hall, the then Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and titan of British theatre, in 1974 from a 1969 acclaimed oral history book by Ronald Blythe, it is like an overheard familial chat over three generations of a rural Suffolk family. The film was also celebrated at the time for the way that Peter Hall used, almost exclusively, ordinary local people being themselves rather than professional actors. The result was stunning though the raw rural Suffolk accents in voluble groups often proved incomprehensible to this cinema-goer! But the feelings of Suffolkian rural poverty and otherness; of lives utterly centred on family, farm and village over generations, was strongly portrayed, demonstrating this classic film's place in the international table of acclaim.

                                                                                

                                                                     Late  postscript

Basset Hound, Blossom.
The only floral dog in Bury!

 

Morsels of Mini-News

Number One news item has to be the wandering peacock which just appeared from the empty blue sky in a tree in someone’s garden in the village of Chedburgh, near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. Replies to the announcement on the Neighbourhood What’s App included lots of ‘fingers crossed’ plus the pointer that the Beautiful Bird is normally seen around Church Road, Chevington plus an invitation that if he, afore-mentioned B.B. needed a home, ‘just give us a shout’ in Ickingham. As a newcomer to Suffolk, all these names mean little to me but I suspect the handsome peacock knows his way around.

Jacob Rees Mogg denigrating the photo ID rule change
as 'gerrymandering.'

I had thought to mention, in this blog, minor news items that had caught my eye, like the wandering peacock, but find it impossible to ignore the current National Conservativism [Nat-C] Conference, a sort of very right wing congregation

Suella in full flow at the Nat-C Conference

sieved from the current Tory party, which has been meeting and opining, often in a rather baffling way! Non-Conservative media people seem to have been outlawed from the proceedings, while Jacob Rees-Mogg reckoned that the voter photo ID rule change, introduced by the Government, had proved to be gerrymandering. However the most incomprehensible representative has continued to be Suella Braverman, the current Home Secretary, seemingly obsessed with reducing the numbers of immigrants, no matter how they get into the country but especially if they arrive in small boats which have miraculously, desperately, survived the Channel crossing. She is determined to “bring overall numbers down” but a recent Home Office analysis suggests that there will be more ‘spikes’ via work and study applications which may well increase by up to 40%. There are various Govt. proposals to reduce the appeal of studying for a Masters or a PhD in Britain such as time limits for students to remain, or the outlawing of family members accompanying students during their study period. Obviously, we wouldn’t seek to make students feel at home during their stay; who wants really bright people to like it here? It is these proposals which have particularly baffled me; increases in applications for bona fide students seem to be seen as threatening somehow instead of complimentary; tributes to the positives of choosing to study at Britain’s universities or colleges. Increasing student applications are surely A Good Thing not a furtive back door manoeuvre to smuggle foreigners in and

Andrew Marr

surreptitiously add to immigration numbers. As Andrew Marr observes of Suella's diatribe, in the current New Statesman, "there  is no Tory space to the right," Suella, in thinly-disguised bid for the Tory Party leadership, also denigrated “the unexamined drive to multiculturalism” when we have already become a multicultural society.

 I sometimes compare that narrow little English world of my childhood when a black person in town was An Event. During WW2 even the American G.Is stationed near where we lived, were regarded as exotic! It was a small and narrow white world as colonialism was beginning to fade and with it, the shaky platform of British exceptionalism.

Yesterday to a U3A talk on the Sortition Foundation by Rich Rippin which was fascinating. The Sortition Foundation is a not-for-profit social enterprise whose mission is to promote sortition in specific assemblies. Sortition means ‘random selection’ and contributes to the idea of Citizens’ Assemblies to run a variety of public/community enterprises. Started by a small group of like-minded people in discussion, in London in 2015, it eventually revved into formal action in 2017 [March 2^nd] after which an almost endless series of talks by the founders to publicise the idea, began. These introductory talks were widely dispersed and were included at festivals, in the Scottish Parliament, Brighton, Ted Talks, and a range of European countries and cities like Belgium, Paris, Italy, Australia. The huge effort was to plant the idea of random selection of representative citizens as a solution to organising public/community affairs; the ‘random selection’ is also carefully controlled in its attempts to result in a balance of social class, education, careers and jobs, financial income and status etc. These organising bodies are christened Citizens’ Assemblies or House of Citizens and they envision a world free of partisan politicking where representative samples of everyday people, selected by lottery, make decisions in informed, deliberative and fair 

House of Lords

environments. It is a very seductive idea for the many people tired of politics and politicians.

The Sortition Foundation has produced a thoughtful booklet with coherent arguments for abolishing the anachronistic House of Lords and substituting a House of Citizens. It reads well with its very attractive proposals to remove the Lords and establish a House of Citizens as a Second Chamber, selected by democratic lottery to represent a microcosm of the U.K. The idea is a-political [how attractive is that?] and would place the U.K. at the forefront of democratic innovation as a global leader in citizen empowerment and engagement.

An example of this approach already up and running is given as a case study. It is the Second Chamber in the Ostbelgien [East Belgian] Parliament. This relates to the small German-speaking community which voted to establish a permanent Citizens’ Council of 24 people meeting for 1.5 year terms in early 2019. This group can propose up to three topics for consideration by separate Citizens’ Panels whose recommendations are submitted to the elected Parliament which must then consider and publicly respond to them. This does sound more democratic [and attractive] than the House of Lords composed of hereditary peers and chiefly political allies rewarded for services by their political friends and masters. ***

Permanent Citizen's Council
"The Oosbelgien-Model"

***

There are some examples of Citizens' Councils in England.

Dudley People's Panel

Romsey Citizens' Assembly

Brent Climate Assembly

Kingston Citizens' Assembly on Air Quality

and, of course, there may be more. This could be an idea whose time has come!

Cow Parsley Rampant

 

Two shots of the Great Graveyard  with gravestones
peeping out from, or totally hidden by.
Cow Parsley Rampant.

I am starting to taper off my self-imposed house arrest as I await the return of a fugitive energy and for the last two mornings I have done part of what was my usual early morning walk in the Abbey Gardens. I was amazed at the extraordinary growth of the ubiquitous cow parsley during my modest absence. It is particularly impressive in much of the Great Graveyard where ancient headstones are either totally submerged in the rampant white and green glory, or simply craning their necks to show the tips of their memorials. It is actually a glorious sight, relatively short-lived but concentrated and almost giddy in its display!! I meet few walkers, mainly with their dogs, but almost everyone this morning, for example, made some joyful comment on the plethora of white bobbing floral heads. Even an ebullient mood can shift up a gear apparently when witnessing a minor floral miracle!!

More pleasing colours in the fabled Abbey Gardens.

The chestnut and the lilac, the latter 
rather paler in this photo.

The other touch of Nature I noticed this morning was as I returned towards the North exit to the gardens, leading to Angel Hill. A tall chestnut tree is in abundant flower and to its left, a dark purple lilac. I was suddenly and irresistibly reminded of a poem I used when I trained a speech choir in a secondary school, for some local cultural competition, about sixty years ago. I could remember brief snatches but when I consulted Google, I was amazed at the sheer length and breadth of the poem, by Alfred Noyes, none of which I could recall! Here is the appropriate extract from what appears to be a hundred other stanzas!

                                     For Noah hardly knew a bird of any kind that isn't heard

 At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to London!

               

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Fine bone china mug with lilac design. £14.

                                 And when the rose begins to pout and all the chestnut spires are out

                                      You'll hear the rest without a doubt, all chorusing for London: --

Come down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time;

Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)

And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer's wonderland;

Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)

The human memory is a thing of wonder even in old age when it is less efficient, to put it kindly. I do not know how it is that I have such a strong memory of a small portion of what is a long, long poem, though I do bow to the wisdom of Marcel Proust who wrote, among many, many bons mots: “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” The tiny extract I have recalled obviously appealed to me perhaps both because of the strong images and also because of the insistent rhythm. Perhaps the fact, that only now I recall, is that my choir, from a lowly-rated secondary modern school with absolutely no history of experience, much less success, in Performance, won its particular niche verse-speaking competition which must have rewarded us for the unduly long, frequent and much-resented rehearsals! A result which, I now recall, also delighted the Head and caused  a very  brief moment in the sun for me. Now, there’s an echo from another time, another place and all courtesy of two trees in annual Spring-time bloom in Bury's Abbey Gardens.

The complexity of memory

                                  Strangely, perhaps in instinctive celebration, I feel a haiku coming on:

                                                               Cow blossom dances/

                                                        Ancient graves recall echoes/

                                                                  Of faded voices.

Faded voices

                                                          

N.B. Haiku is an old Japanese poetic form, conveying a strict syllabic, three line picture or emotion.  [5/7/5]The object for the writer is to convey multum in parvo. Much in little, but implying a richness beyond the strict limits of the form.

 

4

 

 

0

 

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Also labelled
Myalgic Encephalomyelitis

 To the cinema for a welcome respite from long and mainly empty days! I am in self-imposed purdah in an attempt to coax back my normal energy which went AWOL at the end of Easter after I managed to do in one week that which would normally take three weeks! Chiefly, it must be said, by happenstance and coincidence but also plus a lack of personal judgement I suppose. I had quite forgotten that there is an outside chance of the M.E. fatigue returning if I seriously overdo things. Obviously, now I remember!

Anyway the Abbeygate Cinema is perhaps a 2/3 minute stroll/stagger from where I live and it is one of my most admired buildings in Bury, it having a curved and authentic Art Deco frontage which warms the heart and lifts the eye each time I go past. Built in 1920 and over 100 years later, it is still effortlessly elegant and stylish. One of the many pluses to living here. I hadn’t immediately heard of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry but, after I decided A Treat was needed, I looked at the film list online and as it happens, I only needed to read that Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton were the leads for me to acquire a ticket. No further recommendation required!

I since happen to have read two reviews of ‘Harold’, one in Friday’s Times [28/04/2023] by Kevin Maher who judged the film, ‘superb’ and one in the New Statesman [28/04//4/05/2023] by David Sexton who decided it was ‘suitably plodding’.] So off this Sunday morning to view it for myself. Harold Fry is a man who has never, knowingly, left the sidelines of life, but who, en route to post a letter to a former colleague, Queenie, in response to hers bidding him farewell as she is dying from cancer, chats to a girl with blue hair in a garage shop who tells him, “If you have faith, you can do anything.” Untypically, Harold is inspired and decides, on the spot, to set off immediately from Kingsbridge, in Devon, to walk to Berwick-on-Tweed in the sudden firm belief that while he walks, Queenie will live, waiting for him to arrive. It is thus that he decides he is going to prolong her life. 

Harold's long, cathartic walk

“I’ve spent my life not doing anything. And now, at last, I am.” One of the characters he meets briefly on his extraordinary walk, is a cancer surgeon who tells Harold bluntly that it is only medicine, not faith, that can cure cancer but Harold merely nods amiably and ignores the message. Here is a true pilgrim who believes.

During his 627 mile walk [this is a man who generally only walks to the car, as his wife forcefully points out] we learn of the many regrets and mistakes of his past 65 years while he trudges on meeting, by happenstance, a random cast of characters both kind and well-intentioned as well as damaged and dishonest. As he chats to strangers in cafes or coffee shops, innocently telling passers-by of his quest to help his old friend, Queenie, so his quiet confidences are unexpectedly spread and he becomes, mysteriously [to him], famous with a noisy growing group of disparate fellow travellers apparently wanting to support him, who deepen his understanding of others and, critically, of himself, but who also slow him down and with whom he does not travel in comfort.

Some of the unlikely fellow travellers Harold attracts

Harold Fry and wife Maureen, the unlikely
survivors of an arid marriage

Harold deciding not to post the letter
but to walk

Pilgrimage is the perfect word for Harold’s odyssey; he is hoping for personal salvation, without consciously realising that, and he is subconsciously seeking a miracle as recompense for Queenie whom he wronged by default many years ago. He neglects to inform Maureen, his wife, of his suddenly-intended, epic journey, [he had just popped out to post a letter]; their sterile, frigid relationship, effectively ended 25 years before when their only son, gifted but disturbed, hung himself, and here portrayed in simple relentless dialogue. Maureen tells him in one phone call, “I hardly notice you’re gone.” To a supportive neighbour, she says, “It would be easier if he were dead; at least, I’d know where I stand.” Maureen is repressed and cannot tolerate uncertainty but barely registers the austerity and emotional indifference of the Fry everyday life. Its sheer barren predictability is of comfort to her. This wasteland is beautifully conveyed through her endless, unnecessary vacuuming and polishing of already immaculate surfaces plus the sight of the net curtains blowing in profusion to ensure privacy, and the white walls of their home, bare of any paintings or photos.

Jim Broadbent as Harold Fry.
Perhaps his finest performance.

Both Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton are, as ever, superb. Broadbent is wretchedly sad as Harold, increasingly depressed as he looks over his past life and yet mutely resilient in an unknowing, poignant way. He doesn’t exactly blunder through life but he does continue, in the face of insuperable odds, to keep on, keeping on, as Alan Bennett might say. His face becomes more weathered, more lined, more bearded and be-whiskered as he journeys on and his gradual realisation of things not said, or done, in the past, is slyly portrayed in a way that suggests this could ultimately be, a story of redemption. Penelope Wilton as Maureen is repressed and repressive, never forgiving Harold for past errors, resigned to her grief over her son David and for Harold’s shortcomings in that relationship. The ending with the pair speaking honestly about the past and their conflicted remorse, suggests the dignity and endurance that old age can possess ….. and the regret.

Penelope Wilton as Maureen Fry.
Another magical portrayal.

A pilgrim contemplates

The original book by 
Rachel Joyce.
First edition available, signed, for £120.