The Lost Weekend - not like that, the computer ate my text!

Friday July 11^th

Bit of a cock up on the computing front, Reggie. 

It seems I have a lost weekend. No, not one of those drink fuelled sex orgies where you wake up two days later with no underwear; a very sore vagina and no recollection of how it all happened. TBH, I have had one of those in January of 2007. I will not go into the grisly details except to say I am glad no-one took pictures or filmed what we did or I would be eternally seen as a harlot of the first order. [I will let your little, sordid imaginations work overtime on that.]

My lost weekend of the current inst. has been occasioned by some sort of computer glitch which ate my last weekend’s entry. It is nice having your entry eaten but probably not by a computer! I deffo typed the thing out and saved it but with amazing legerdemain my trusty old Lenovo has somehow lost it all. Hey ho.

Work was as usual except the Matriarch of the Family phoned the said work at about 10am with breathless news. She had forgotten to tell us she’d got tickets for tonight’s West Side Story at the Lyceum. It is the version on national tour and was brilliant. I digress. She had completely forgotten all about it until this morning when she spotted the theatre envelope pinned to her notice board and opened it to see what it was! 

‘Dozy woman’ was my initial thought and then I told her she ought to pin the actual tickets to the board not leave them in the envelope! She said she knew that and didn’t need a lecture from me about forgetting thing. I bit my lip as she has several embarrassing tales to recount of Yours Truly forgetting all sorts of things during her 27 years on the planet. This is another instance where I will let your little, sordid imaginations run riot!

The upshot was I phoned Dom to see if he could allow Laura to cry off tonight, with the full explanation. Dominic couldn’t believe my Mum would be so forgetful. I told him about the time they had got as far as Marienborn before they realised that baby Victoria was still in Magdeburg! He thought I was joking, but it is true. I was too little to have even been aware of it, of course. He was quite happy for Laura to have the night being cultured.

The show: A May Zing. The dance routines were stunning. I was over awed by it several times over. The set was brilliant too. I was sort of scaffolding towers on wheels, with real R & J balconies on them also in scaffolding type stuff (that's a technical term, BTW). Katie Hall’s Maria was excellent, she had the power and control to bring out all of the Pathos of the role. Tony (played by Louis Maskell) was a little over shadowed by Maria, in my humble opinion, but still pretty good.

But the songs! The songs! I came away humming America. Everyone there will have moved here! And the Sergeant Krupke section was great too. The most amazing thing was the audience, they were totally moved by the entire show and the place was packed to the gunwales. I have never seen so many people crammed into the Lyceum. More crowd pleasers like this will put the books firmly into the black. If they get the run of Les Mis to hit Sheffield I predict that will sell out too.

Our next theatrical excursion is to the Crucible, a week on Wednesday (23rd July), to see Mansfield Park. It is usually our ladies’ night but we all decided a trip to some Austen would make an interesting change. That will be out last bit of culture, perhaps, until we get back from Western Australia. It is a bit of a cultural desert to be honest. That isn’t to say we won’t try and broaden our host’s horizons if we find anything worth seeing.

Laura, yet again, hadn't got  West Side Story on her radar and she was enthralled by it. I am hardly surprised. Theatre presented this well would win over anyone’s heart and with a glorious source script, and libretto, there is no reason not to fall in love with the show.

We hit the charp at about midnight after I had dug out my old OST recording from the film which I haven’t played in years.

Saturday July 12^th

Once again we regaled Sarah with more artistic reviews this morning, after our swimming session. She had heard of West Side Story but had never seen it. Laura, with quite atypical vim and vigour, insisted that if she got the chance she must go. I have not seen her so fired up about something for a while. Even Sarah seemed to take note that Laura’s passions had been aroused by the show.

When we got home, she insisted on playing my OST recording while we ate breakfast, which is so unlike her too. She then asked, after breakfast and Russ Tamblyn's singing, what other musical soundtracks I had stashed away. [There was a tale that Tamblyn’s voice was actually Tucker Smith’s but I have never found out if that was true or not.] I told her I had very few really: they include Mary Poppins, Singing in the Rain (Moses supposes his toeses are roses, but Moses supposes erroneously, as Moses he knows his toeses aren’t roses, as Moses supposes his toeses to be!), West Side Story, Oliver (I am reviewing the situation, must a fellow stay a villain all his life?), Rocky Horror Picture Show, Kiss Me Kate (Brush up your Shakespeare, start quoting him now!),  Moulin Rouge, Shrek and The Reduced Shakespeare Company’s Millennium the Musical (Déjà vu, it’s happened before, dju va it’ll happen once more, you can’t be sure of when, but it’s déjà vu it’ll happen again!). I don’t have The Sound of Music, you’ll be pleased to know, or Les Miserables!

I do have a lot more recordings of Operas to be honest. They are probably more of an acquired taste. I played her the Reduced Shakespeare Company one before we zoomed off into the wilds of Derbyshire for a walk along Monsal Dale (to the Monsal Head Inn) and then back again. I know a brilliant, sort of,  circular walk which has the pub as its mid-point. We parked up at Miller’s Dale and walked the low level route following the River Wye all the way to the Monsal Head Viaduct. We climbed up on to the viaduct and I got pangs for abseiling from it again! We hadn’t brought climbing gear with us so we yomped up the path to the pub where we had a really tasty and filling meal. So filling in fact we had to sit outside and let it settle properly before we set off back.

I guess having a bottle of wine with our lunch wasn’t a good idea really. We were seated for a good hour at the car park view point, opposite the pub and watched hundreds of people come struggling up from the viaduct on foot or up the road on a bicycle. Our route back took us along the Monsal Trail section to Miller’s Dale. It is Granny Walking really, but I just wanted some gentle exercise not to be sweaty Betty all day.

The effect of the wine had worn off by the time were were opposite Ravenstone Tor, apart from the pressing desire to micturate! There were just so many people about it wasn’t easy to find a discrete spot to relieve one’s bladder. We managed by climbing up the hillside a little way and then finding suitable screening bush. I was a little careless however and tumbled over after I had performed, this sent me into a horrid patch of nettles where I stung all of my left side. My arm, shoulder, neck, cheek and ear!! If, when I felt myself going, I had simply rolled over I would probably have avoided the bloody things altogether. As it was  I did what everyone tends to do when falling; I put my arm out to steady myself but ended up right into the edge of the nettle patch. The shock of being stung in the hand and wrist just sort of propelled me over into the patch almost in slow motion.

I am sorry to recount that the rufty tufty, derring-do, all action woman actually sobbed as the stings hurt so much. I felt a complete idiot for falling into them and for crying. Laura seemed to produce a whole bunch of burdock leaves from thin air and we spent the next five or ten minutes rubbing them vigorously over my stings! I think the worst bit was the area from my T-shirt strap to my ear. If I hadn’t turned my face away as I fell I would have taken a face full too! I had some antihistamine in my rucksack and took two of those to help ease the pain and swellings and we lumbered back down on to the trail and to Miller’s Dale. Luckily this was only about 10 minutes away.

In the car we decided we’d drive straight to Mum’s and I’d let her mother me. Laura drove us to Holmesfield and by good fortune Mum was in. She was surprised to see us and shocked that I had so many nasty looking stings all over my left side. They were throbbing by now and extremely unpleasant. I had to fight off a nagging, maddening desire to scratch at them as I knew it would only make them hurt more.

Mum found some solution to dab all over my arm, shoulder, neck and cheek which seemed to be quite soothing, if a bit smelly. I think it was tea tree oil judging by the smell and then she gave me a packet of frozen peas to put on my neck and cheek. This was an almost instant relief. It must have looked quite silly; me sitting in Mum’s kitchen in only my bra, clutching a bag of frozen peas in an oven mitt clamped against my neck and cheek! (She had made me take my T-shirt off in case the liquid stained it.)

She was pleased I wasn’t anaphylactic or it could have been much, much worse. I remember having to stab an epi-pen into a classmate’s thigh once when she had been stung by a wasp (several times). It was a pretty scary experience but fortunately when the girl started with us our form tutor had explained about the anaphylaxis and she had shown us how to use the pen if it was ever needed. [I can’t for the life of me remember her name. She didn’t stay long, only about 18 months. I can clearly picture her looking like the typical athletic sportswoman (girl), so it was a surprise to learn that she had the condition.]

After a while I started to feel much better and Mum insisted we had to stay and have our meal with her instead of rushing away to Oughtibridge and then preparing our meal when we arrived. Laura explained that she was working at Dom’s; but we had plenty of time to eat, digest and drive at Granny-pace across the city. That is almost exactly what we did. I relinquished the peas for a freezer block for a cool bag on the journey home and we seemed to avoid any hold ups.

Laura went off to work and I sat and tried not to scratch.

When she got back she told me she had the ideal way to take my mind of the pain. It worked a treat!

Sunday July 13^th

Mum called at about 7.15 this morning, so early in fact I thought we were going to be receiving bad news. She wanted to know how I was doing this morning. The swelling has all but disappeared but the area is still quite red and sore looking – even though it doesn’t feel sore at all either. I told her Laura was being a brilliant nurse and was taking care of me. I didn’t explain exactly how she was taking care of me but suffice to say an orgasm takes your mind completely off everything else!

BY lunchtime there was distinct danger that I may be having an ecstatic overload so I told Laura I would see if helping her would also take the pain away. It did. Apart from one time when she squeezed her legs together, trapping my head between her thighs and I thought my head was going to be crushed. Apparently I had hit a perfect spot. I told her that if it happened again she had to warn me in advance that I was heading in that direction so I could slip on my crash helmet!

I felt fit enough to have a shower after all our morning exertions but despite repeated scrubbing I couldn’t seem to shift the smell of the tea tree oil.  Laura said she couldn’t smell it all but I was sure it was still lingering.

We passed a quiet afternoon working our way through my Musical Soundtrack CDs and remembering just how bad (or good) some of them were. Dick Van Dyke’s singing in Mary Poppins was absolutely terrible. The verbal dexterity displayed in singing in the rain was quite surprising to our “modern” ears. Listening to Kiss me Kate and watching Laura’s reaction to the songs and then my summary of the story was amusing. She was appalled that such a play could have been written. I explained that a lot of Bill Waggledagger’s themes would upset contemporary audiences if they were written today. The misogyny in The Shrew or the anti-semitism in The Merchant or the sheer Quentin Tarantino horror of Titus Andronicus would never be performed if they were written in the 21^st century.

She expressed (as she always does) astonishment at how much literature there seems to be in my head, I had to tell her that I am always equally astonished when she performs some feat of mathematical genius in her head. I think hers is the harder to do, she thinks mine is. I told her I would arm-wrestle her to see who’s right. I am afraid I had to use my right arm, as my left is still not up to a wrestling match, and she won – so it appears that the genius is in knowing masses of literature not in being able to do amazing sums in your head!

We had a relatively early night, for us, as Laura asked if I needed any more pain relief and I said that I thought I might, to help me manage to get through the night. She obliged, then so did I. I wonder if this kind of treatment is available on the NHS?