There have been some deaths this week. I know there are deaths every week, indeed every second of every day, but these were significant. Dear Eric Sykes...a comedian of the old school who always felt like my favourite uncle. And Sergio Pininfarina...who will be unfamiliar to you unless you are a petrol head. He designed some of the most beautiful cars on the road, not the least of which was the Lancia Monte Carlo - a car that I've mentioned here before. The sad end to the tale of my beautiful Lancia is that after thirteen years of storage, it had been badly mauled by the rust beetle, and would have cost some £30,000 to restore...it would have been worth about £9,000 fully restored, so the maths didn't add up and I let it go sadly.
I slightly mis-timed my post about That Face yesterday...only because they did a 'workshop' production last night at the school. Remarkably, it was sold out...in fact they had to bring in more seating to accommodate all comers...not bad as they were charging £5 a ticket. The Cat and The Boy put in quite breath-taking performances..even with my obvious bias, they achieved an incredible performance, full of the raw, passionate, heart-wrenching emotion that the play demands. So much so that The Cat's Mother was in tears by the end, and that in turn gave me the collywobbles. This was far from the average school-play...in many ways as good as a professional performance - which I guess they need to achieve for it to be a success at the Edinburgh Fringe - you can buy tickets here. It was a triumph.
So it was more than doubly upsetting that the celebrations afterwards resulted in an outbreak of hostilities at half-past midnight, which then developed into something that makes the Battle of the Somme seem like a chimpanzees tea-party this morning. When we should all have been basking in the afterglow of glorious success, we were instead mithered in conflict and anger. We're all out tonight for dinner before a performance of Henry V (I may have mentioned that The Cat's Mother is on a mission to get Up and me to see a performance of everyone of our 'A' and 'O' level texts) at The Globe. It will be interesting to see whether any more than half a dozen words will pass between us, or indeed whether we'll have a version of a UN-brokered Syrian ceasefire over our steak. Just so long as there's no finger pointing, we may get away with it.
