WEEKEND ROUNDUP, MARCH 2014

As my entire existence is kind of dull, sometimes it's very likely that this blog will tend towards the dull from time-to-time as well. This is, of course, perfectly natural, given the circumstances, but, on occasion, it is worth reiterating for any newcomers stumbling unexpectedly into the dark pit that is Lesser Blogfordshire who might decide to stick around and see what kind of fun we're having.

"It puts the cream in the basket..."

To tell the truth, it's never all that much, but, as I constantly have to remind myself, part of what a blog is supposed to be is a diary of sorts, and if your diary happens to be a quite empty one, then the postings about it aren't likely to chronicle anything much in the way of great historical events, either, are they?

WYS (as they say) IWYG...

Take last weekend, for example. Now it was never likely to be one of the great vintage weekends of my life, perhaps more of a table wine, or, as is more often the case, a bit of a cooking vinegar of a weekend.

Between finishing work on Friday evening and starting all over again on Monday morning, the tiny sliver of life which vanished away in the blink of an eye, contained much that was nothing much and left me pondering again upon quite where it all goes when I wake up facing the working week feeling as if I really need a bit of a break.

Meanwhile, The England (and Wales) cricket team had managed to lose one and win one in their three-match one-day series against the West Indies, managing to squander a strong position in the first and almost doing the same again in the second. “England in cricket game win shocker” as my Twitterfeed would have it.

Apart from a brief burst of “The Web of Fear”, Friday evening had been given over (with occasional checks on the Kindle to see how the cricketing disaster was unfolding) to a series I’d been fancying for a while but hadn’t yet managed to get access to.

This was “Elementary” the American Sherlock Holmes update starring Benedict Cumberbatch’s opposite number in the Danny Boyle NT production of  “Frankenstein” a certain Johnny Lee Miller, grandson to Bernard Lee and ex-husband to Angelina Jolie, if you want some “Hello” magazine style background gubbins.

Someone at the Beloved’s workplace had downloaded the episodes for us, but only the first twelve had fitted onto the USB memory stick she’d given him to put them on, but we were rather surprised to find that the strange and surprisingly cheap “Blu-Ray” box which I bought on a whim last year when we were having some issues with our online DVD rental company would play them directly off the stick itself.

This, of course, gave me a momentary sense of great satisfaction that it had turned out after all to be a “good buy” (“Goodbye to my good buy” being a line from the Beano which has stuck with me for years…) and then Friday evening was swallowed up by gorging on five entire episodes accompanied by a pleasant but rather heavy Zinfandel.

I’d heard good things about the show but it took me a while to adjust, and I didn’t quite find it as gripping as I thought I would, with constant (probably very irritating) checking on the “tappity-tap” (well, there was a game of cricket still going on…) distracting me from some of the more significant plot developments.

By the same time on Saturday evening, the remaining seven episodes were also consumed, alongside a rather nice bottle of Pinot Grigio and that fifth part of “The Web of Fear” which I mentioned the other day.

Somehow, between all this, we’d finally managed to hunt down my parcel from a rather pleasant Post Office a couple of towns away and done the weekly supermarket run (well, all that wine’s got to come from somewhere…) as well as – we think - completing the last of the claims forms for the policies making up mum’s Estate that we still don’t actually expect to ever see a penny of.

Still, it is rather nice to be able to relax about that. Now there’s only the tax form and the property sale to deal with and we’ll finally be able to move on…

Part of my past also resurfaced on Saturday morning when I got an email requesting if I could remember anything about the first ever prop I built as a shiny new member of the theatre group I was once signed up to, and the future good friend asking me to make it was still nothing more than a faceless voice on the telephone. Someone knew someone who was working on a new production of the same play and was wondering how we’d solved the tricky little problem of having a great big meat carcass on stage for a week or more.

I think the carcass was a hollow chicken wire frame covered in plaster bandage and painted to look "meaty…" It was staged so that the outside always faced the audience and I believe that other meaty gubbins and stretchy balloon things were put in the cavity by props. On reflection, I seem to recall a "spare" might have been handy because someone put a foot through it midweek, and seven nights was about the limit before it fell apart... So maybe a coat of varnish might have helped with giving it a longer life...?

Ah well, it gave me a nostalgic moment or three, especially when I had to call upon the great and the good of FizzBok because I thought that some photos might help, even though that less than unique “bright idea” was already well in hand, although the subsequent “tappity-tap” did distract me from episodes six to eight of “Elementary” enough that I had to ask quite what happened at one point.

Sunday evaporated, as it will, with yet more telly and cricket, including a swift trip to the supermarket to pick up the stuff I’d forgotten to pick up on Saturday and to post those all-important forms off to the various places that they had to go. After that, amidst all of the cooking and the bathing and the chatting to the builder when his face unexpectedly appeared at the window, and all of the other basics which tend to fill up the average Sunday, somehow we had a marathon catch-up of all of the other telly we’d recorded across the week including “Columbo” (with a guest cameo from Vincent Price!!!), a Ralph Waite episode of “NCIS” (Awww…), the return of “The Mentalist” and “Jonathan Creek” and that last “Web” episode which I mentioned… as well as a rather disappointing edition of “Top Gear…”

And after me being so nice about it last week as well…

So, as you can see, nothing spectacularly exciting - Just another lost weekend in a terraced house in Blogfordshire as Lloyd Cole would almost certainly never have put it…