Beryl

And so to the theatre. I missed 'Beryl' at the West Yorkshire Playhouse during it's first run last year - timed to coincide with the Tour de France - and came within a whisker of missing it again on its revival this year, but just managed to get a ticket for the penultimate performance. As an aside I somehow ended up with a discounted senior citizen ticket. Upon picking it up I tried to pay the extra, but the box office clearly thought I was fantasising about my lost youth and wouldn't take the money.

The play itself is simply wonderful. Given the relative lack of media coverage that Burton got during her life (although I for one had actually heard of her prior to the play being mounted) there was a lot of exposition, but it never dragged or became too much. The four person cast moved as effortlessly through the moods as our heroine moved through the gears; humour was ever-present, but so was a recognition of the impacts on others of her driven personality.  The staging was extremely well done as was the physical theatre. There was a round of applause only ten minutes in for one effect which marked her marriage. The fourth wall was broken a number of times, mostly scripted but also on one occasion to allow a member of the sell out audience to display his knowledge of the main crop produced in the triangle between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell. Anyway, I am not ashamed to say that I left the theatre with a tear in my eye.

It is not the healthy who need a doctor

"It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognise that we live not alone, but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body." - Marcel Proust

I have been ill again. I checked my symptoms online and came to the conclusion that I had malaria. Fortunately it can only have been a mild version because after a good night's sleep I am recovered. Indeed I am recovered enough to cook and eat this lot: asparagus, sweet potato and leek hash topped with fried egg, caramelised rhubarb.

I was invited to Headingley by a business contact to watch the cricket, but was equally rapidly uninvited. I wasn't as miffed as I might have been because the weather has been truly dreadful here in what the locals insist on calling God's Own County. If they weren't Yorkshiremen I would suspect them of having a sense of irony.

However, the second test has been the catalyst for my magic hat to be taken down from the peg for its first outing of the 'summer'. It still works.