Hooptedoodle #456 - Very Quiet Start to 2024; More OCD, plus Von Richthofen & Falstaff

 Happy New Year to one and all! I hope you had a chance to enjoy the holiday.

The weather here has not been very good, it put paid to my customary New Year's Day drive in the Scottish Borders, and walking (squelching) through the countryside nearer to home didn't appeal much. Never mind; I've spent a useful few days sorting out cupboards and tidying up some of the accumulated clutter.

I've chucked out some things that should have been gone a while ago, and re-organised most of the lead mountain in large plastic boxes which slide neatly under the couch in my soldier-painting room. This frees up a lot of useful space in my other cupboards, and I've even updated my lists of what is in each box, so that is all gratifying in a rather specialised way!

Other than that I have spent my evenings watching DVDs. First off, I watched a BluRay I obtained of Las Aguilas Azules - it may not be obvious that this is The Blue Max, which I hadn't watched since it was released in 1966 (which is not yesterday). 

 

I spent some time fumbling with the Spanish instructions to get it to play back in English, but all was well eventually. Apart from the necessary alliteration in the Spanish title, it is not obvious why this was considered an acceptable translation; I assume the marketing people didn't know what it was about..

Visually, it is a delight - I spent a lot of time wondering how they had filmed the in-flight sequences. It is not a period I know a great deal of, so I will bow to those who are offended by the inaccuracies in the 'plane conversions or the uniforms, but it looks terrific. The script is woeful; there was a novel somewhere in the background, I understand, but it has been well dumbed-down to ensure that audiences will understand the plot. The dialogue is frequently embarrassing - budgerigar level - and the stereotypes on show, the class issues and the general treatment of female characters are fairly moronic; I guess that "of their day" would be fairer. 

Having said all of which, I enjoyed it; two and half hours well spent. I recall that back in 1966, for some reason I can't really remember, I watched it in a mid-week afternoon matinée at a cinema in Galashiels. The audience consisted largely of pensioners, I recall, and it seemed to be acceptable to converse at normal levels of volume in the theatre during the show; I was probably glad that the dialogue didn't need a lot of concentration.

I am, of course, continuing with my alphabetical Shakespeare campaign, working my way through the BBC's colour TV series circa 1980. Since Xmas I have watched Measure for Measure and The Merry Wives of Windsor, both of which were really very good. Merry Wives in particular is a riot, and the BBC deployed many excellent actors (in 1982); Richard Griffiths, Ben Kingsley, Alan Bennett, Prunella Scales and Michael Bryant, along with some lesser personal favourites of my own, including Richard O'Callaghan and the magnificent Elizabeth Spriggs.

I got through Merry Wives in a single sitting, hugely entertained, and reinforced only by a quart of black tea and the odd Digestive biscuit. Great stuff indeed, though the end does get decidedly weird, doesn't it?

 

Hooptedoodle #455 - Everything in Order

 Many years ago, maybe 40 years ago, a relative of mine, whom I shall call Wilson (since that was his name), told me in the pub that he had invested in a personal project which he hoped might change his life. 

Wilson had until recently been one of the older students at a Teachers' Training College (Alnwick College, in fact), and among his age-group peers he made some close friends who were very seriously intellectual - at least they seemed so to Wilson. He enjoyed the company and the elevated chat, but secretly was always rather humbled by his own lack of learning.

The week of our pub conversation, he had signed up for a new, weekly-instalment colour magazine which would build up, week by week, into a fine encyclopedia. Wilson was smart enough to realise that having an encyclopedia sitting on a bookshelf gave the chance to look things up, but didn't necessarily make you any wiser. However, a weekly magazine was a different thing altogether; if he read each magazine as it arrived then, in a large (but finite) number of weeks, he would eventually know everything there was to know. A superb plan, you must admit.

Sadly, it didn't work out. He paid up his subscription, bought the special binders which would hold his collection, and proudly showed me the first few instalments as they arrived. After about 7 weeks the magazines stopped, the company went bust, and Wilson and a load of other unfortunates were left with very little to show for their brave investment.

During a subsequent pub session, he told me that it was especially frustrating, since everything had started so well, but he ended up knowing an awful lot about aardvarks, abalone and Aberdeen, but not very much more. As he said at the time, he would have to pick his conversations carefully.

This story has nothing going for it at all, except that I remember it with affection and it impressed me at the time with the futility of owning part of the first volume of an encyclopedia, and I liked the idea of knowledge and enlightenment arriving in alphabetical order. [If anyone reading this doesn't know what an encyclopedia was, suggest you look it up on Google.]

I had a recent reminder of Wilson.

At the end of last year I treated myself to a few BBC DVD box-sets - they were on special offer - and one of the things I bought was the complete set of Shakepeare's plays, which were filmed by the BBC between the late 1970s and the mid 1980s (I think), with really excellent casting. I had seen a couple of them over the years, but I really fancied buying them in, and the challenge of living long enough to watch them all was another driver. I'm actually getting through them pretty well, and enjoying them - well, most of them. I've filled in a lot of gaps in dodgy periods of my historical knowledge, been absolutely thrilled by some of them and had some good laughs. The only plays which I have given up on thus far have been Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Love's Labour's Lost, mostly because I didn't find the actors sufficiently engaging. 

I don't propose to attempt my own spotty reviews of Bill S's back catalogue, which seems to be generally regarded as OK. The important point here is that there are an awful lot of DVDs in the set, and they are packed very cleverly in some special plastic cases which require careful handling. Since the plays are arranged alphabetically in the packaging, and I have already had a few minor disasters dropping DVDs all over the floor, I decided that by far the easiest way to approach this challenge was simply to watch them in the same order. That's the punch line - that's as amusing as this gets, though personally I find it very funny indeed. I am so delighted by the hysterical idea of "doing Shakespeare" in alphabetical order that I am sticking with it. I've just finished Part 1, which gets me up to Macbeth.

I'm going to have a week or two's break before I carry on with Part 2, but am looking forward to it. In the meantime, my specialist topic for Master Mind could be "Shakespeare's Plays, from A to M". I think poor old Wilson would have been impressed.