So, here’s a question for you: What have Tallulah Bankhead, Carol Channing, Minnie Driver and Justin Timberlake all have in common? Apart from being in films I mean. I’ll tell you later.

Today was a great day! I went to the fracture clinic at Frimley Park and was discharged! They don’t want to see me again. I was told, if I needed to see them, that I knew where they were but, basically, I just have to keep up the physio (forever, I assume). I think I’m their wonder patient. They are very happy with my progress and healing abilities. I told them it was the vodka.

I asked if I could have a copy of my x-rays and they let me photograph them but, stupidly, I didn’t take the one with the break! I blame the guy controlling the screen because he missed it. Anyway, this is what it looked like when the plaster came off.

Take my hand, it no longer comes off

Meanwhile at home…it was bitterly cold up the park this morning. Actually, it was bitterly cold everywhere. we even had small flurries of snow when I was at the hospital. But, in the aprk, the icy chill from Moscow was making itself felt. not that it stopped the girls running around like lunatics. Or, maybe that was the idea.

Running back to me in their winter coats...and coats

At one stage, this dog spotted them and sneaked up on Carmen. Scared the living daylights out of her, making her scream and run around my legs. Day-z, leaping to the defence of her big, cowardly sister, then chased the poor thing across the park and back to its owner.

The rare Bat Eared Corgi wants to play with the bashful poodle

Cold or not, it was still beautiful and the girls loved it.

I also had fun with mum, when I rang this morning. Using a wonderful little web-tool called join.me, I was able to control her PC across the Internet. Sadly I wasn’t able to fix her Skype problem but we’re investigating other possibilities. We were able to play with the PC because poor dad was once more in hospital. Hopefully he’ll be out in a few hours.

And, finally, what do Carol Channing, Minnie Driver and Justin Timberlake have in common? Well, they all had a birthday today. Tallulah would have been 110 (had she not died in 1968), Carol was 91, Minnie 42 and baby Justin a very young 31.

I promised to write some more about that amazing mountaineering woman, Elizabeth Alice Frances Le Blond and, not wanting to disappoint anyone, here’s part two.

It’s important to note that she wasn’t just a woman for climbing big rocky hills. She also found time to write books on genealogy. She wrote a two volume work based on Charlotte Sophie, Countess Bentinck, an ancestor of hers. Charlotte was born in 1715 and was a descendent of William the Silent*.

The book is made up from letters that Charlotte wrote to her niece, and which Liz found in 1907, safely locked away in an old Dutch chest in Killincarrick House in Ireland. According to Liz, these letters were written by a “…highly cultivated, highly educated, widely read and brilliantly clever woman of the world, who was on friendly terms with many of the best known people in Europe.”

Liz hints at mysteries and scandals in the introduction, indicating the Dunkelgraf as being one of them. This is a wonderful little (possibly) urban legend which you can read about here.

Charlotte of the amazing hair and impressive dress sense

In order to complete the books, she carried out extensive research in the Netherlands and Germany. She did nothing by half!

We all know about Florence Nightingale but Liz was there too! Volunteering during WWI at a hospital in Dieppe and then, after returning to England, took charge of the appeal department of the British ambulance committee. At the conclusion of the war, she founded the British Empire Fund for the Restoration of Rheims Cathedral.

Always the one for gender equality, she went as far as to create a club for women called The Forum. It would appear that this no longer exists. At least I’ve not been able to find anything out about it!

She died in far flung Wales – Llandrindod Wells, to be exact – in 1934. An amazing woman with an equally amazing zest for life. She’s my hero!

Stopping for a quick breakfast on a mountain in Switzerland

* There’s a number of given reasons why William the Silent was called ‘the Silent’. The one I particularly like is because he refused to talk openly to the King of France about the hated protestants in France at that time, preferring to remain silent on the matter.

This weekend was the time for the RSPCA Big Garden Birdwatch. The rules are simple. Choose an hour over any of the two weekend days and count the birds. You then record the most of each type of bird that you see at one time. Mirinda recorded our count today between 12:45 & 13:45. Here are her results:

That’s 18 different species! Though we often get another 9 or so. This is a bigger amount than last year which, I hope, is a sign that the birds are returning to the countryside.

Before (and during) the count, I had the camera set up in the garden to try and get a photograph of maybe a woodpecker…or a wren…but all I managed was lots of tits and this siskin.

A siskin saying grace before eating

And then, five minutes after Mirinda had finished the count, I was standing at the kitchen sink and noticed a bird in the banana tree. it didn’t look familiar to me. I grabbed my camera off the dining table and called Mirinda to approach slowly and quietly. She identified it. It was a red wing. I’ve never seen one before, let alone get a photo. It’s nowhere near a good shot but it’s nice to see new visitors to the garden.

A very rare visitor arrives too late

At one stage I switched the camera to watching the floating table. I quite like this show off.

Showing off

After lunch, we popped over to Thursley Common (the place where Carmen decided to have a primeval mud bath last year) for a lovely walk among the swamps and sand. Carmen, just in case, remained on the lead. At the beginning of the walk, just beyond the car park, is a lake. On the lake there was a whole bunch of ducks. All in pairs…except for this chap who was quite keen to show off in front of the girls. I wouldn’t be surprised if the other males eventually saw him off.

Handsome looking chap

We walked for ages. Once you get across the swampy bits, the path is all sand and over soft rolling hills. We saw a few people but not enough to be annoying. Eventually we reached the top of a hill and Mirinda decided we should walk back. For some reason known only to her, she stood and took a close photo of this tree. I managed to get her as she turned towards me.

In the nature reserve

It was a lovely walk but was almost dark by the time we returned home.

On Friday night, Stevie introduced me to a brilliant app called ‘Retro Cam’. It’s a series of different types of camera within the one app. it creates images as if they were taken with the particular camera. I had a bit of a muck around tonight. This is a Polaroid shot.

Scowling in the kitchen

One of my favourite (for there were a few) roles was that of Norman in the brilliant Norman Conquests. I was very lucky to play Norman in all three. Most of the cast reprised the parts each year around Christmas to the delight of themselves and the same audience (I think). Truly Alan Ayckbourn at his best. Tonight we saw him at his worst.

Neighbourhood Watch, which finished it’s two week run at the Yvonne Arnaud, is his 75th play. That’s a pretty amazing canon of work. Is it any wonder that occasionally he gets it wrong. I have read a couple of quite generous reviews but, honesty, it wasn’t very good.

There was even a horrendous actor in it. The guy was appalling. I’m not going to name him because he wasn’t good enough for ANY publicity.

Worst of all though, was the play itself. Not up to scratch and certainly not clever enough. It had lots of laughs – we both had a jolly good chuckle more than once – but, on the whole, the dialogue wasn’t very clever. If anything, the laughs were a bit forced and sometimes just obvious.

Oddly, I have read a whole bunch of good reviews for the plays world premier performance. It’s like they watched a difference play. Seriously!

For the acting, I thought most of the cast did a good job given the material. Particularly good was Alexandra Mathie as Hilda. She was all very nice on the surface but there was something quite scary hiding just underneath. That something peeked out a few times and was ghastly to behold. I felt a bit sorry for her (the actor, not the character) because I thought she was wasted.

I also felt her pain when she had to mime locking up a double set of sliding glass doors. I felt it even more when she had to unlock it the next morning. This sort of thing is all well and good for students or actors learning mime but not for a mature actor working in a ‘straight’ play with a normal set.

Possibly the worst thing about the play was the direction. There isn’t a word bad enough to describe it. A lot of upstaging, uncomfortable and meaningless moves, characters picking up things for no reason…just awful. It made quite uncomfortable viewing.

I’m not going to bother about the set.

The play is transferring to London in April. Dionysus, help them!

We had a funny episode at work today. Nick (at work) has just started life with a smartphone and has been struggling to come to grips with it. He’s not that keen on a touch screen, particularly for texting, so I suggested he try Swype. He loves it and had spent the week getting used to using it when it suddenly disappeared.

Sometimes it does this – I don’t know why. It’s not a major thing and is easily fixed. Of course that is always going to be dependent on the user knowing how to do it. Nick didn’t so I fixed it for him and showed him how in case it happens again.

While we were discussing the wonders of modern technology, Leona (Head of Something or Other in the Office Next Door) walked by on her way to the coffee and just said in passing that she’d never put petrol in a car and would be hard pressed to know where it went.

Further revelations were forthcoming after this outrageous admission. She has never changed a light bulb…EVER! I have no idea how old she is but she’s at least 30. That’s a long time to have not changed a lightbulb. She actually admitted she didn’t know HOW to change a lightbulb.

This makes her sound a bit dim but she’s not at all. She’s very good at her job and has a bubbly but intelligent personality. She is also well liked. She’s just not very good with ordinary, every day things like the replacement of light bulbs.

This was all before lunch and caused great hilarity in the basement. After lunch, Leona paid us another visit to tell us she had just done something really silly.

She was walking through the museum when her phone rang. It was her dad. They chatted for a bit as she walked along. Apparently they chat quite often. She was probably telling him that he had been remiss in not teaching her the basics of household survival.

As she walked and talked, she reached into her back pocket for something when a cold shiver ran through her body. We all know the feeling. You expect something to be there and it’s gone. A wallet, a £20 note, gold watch. It’s a horrible feeling.

Leona stopped in her tracks, patting herself down, starting to feel quite desperate. She told her father she’d call him back later, she’d lost something and had to go. He, naturally, asked her what she’d lost.

“My phone! It was in my back pocket but now it’s gone!”
“I think you’ll find, you’re talking to me on it.”

After we’d managed to calm down, having all exploded into uncontrollable laughter, this episode sparked the usual conversation about losing glasses when they’re on your head, something I do quite a lot.

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At lunchtime I popped into the V&A, deciding this week to visit the Chinese and Japanese galleries. While there, I discovered the work of Ah Xian, a Chinese artist born in 1960. His work (in the museum at any rate) features four porcelain busts. Given this one is called ‘Bust 34′ I have to guess there’s more than four!

Bust 34 by Ah Xian

I think they are all strangely beautiful but this one was my favourite.

Interestingly, Ah Xian moved from Beijing to Australia in 1989 after Tiananmen Square. He moved to Sydney in 1990 and I think he’s been there ever since. He spent eight years in Oz working as a house painter and five years trying to get political asylum. This display of his porcelain busts was supported by the Australian government via the Arts Council. I’m not sure if that means it was financially or emotionally supported.

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Now, I think it’s about time I admitted the truth. It’s come to my notice that it is a bit of a struggle going out on a Friday night these days. It may be an age thing but after getting up at 6am, slaving over a hot computer for six hours then going shopping for my wife, I felt pretty chilled and not ready for a night on the lash with Stevie B! Of course, that all changed when I saw him.

Last time we met up, Stevie couldn’t drink because he was driving and had work the next day (it was, after all, only his second week there), which was why we planned a Friday night. However, the non-drinking night had been so good that I’d decided not to drink as much as usual, pace myself a lot slower and just enjoy the company and chat. I have no idea whether Stevie decided the same thing but he matched my drinking pace and we both remained delightfully sober.

As usual, we chatted about everything and anything and all ports in between. And then the bombshell that wasn’t, given I have been waiting for it since they were married. Lara’s pregnant. He showed me the 12 scan of ‘Bubbie Beattie’ which I refused to go gooey over, telling him it looked quite weird with it’s teeth on the outside of it’s head. It’s too early to know the gender but Stevie wants a boy. Mainly because there is already an awful lot of girls born in his family and he wants to go some way to redress the balance.

Here he is begging Lara to bring his (forgotten) wallet down to the pub just after she’d dropped him off.

Please Babe!

Most of today was spent doing some research for Mirinda. For her work. I enjoyed it but it took up a lot of my day! The rest of the day was spent doing housework and walking in the park.

Being Australia Day, my blip was quite Oz specific so it was with a bit of sadness that I spotted a whole load of little coloured flags strung up between the trees near the castle. Had I only known. Or had I waited to blip. Still, I have a blog for that sort of stuff so…this is the bunting from a distance:

Bunting between the trees

When I reached the first tree, I realised that the flags had something printed on them. The same thing on each one. None of it was in English and there was a picture of what looked like a mythical horse creature in the centre. The writing looks like Hindi to me but I could be wrong.

A close up of one of the flags

There was nothing to indicate what they meant or who’d put them there. I’ve just had a look at religious festivals over the last few days but the only non-British one isn’t until January 28 (Vasant Panchami – a festival celebrating the first day of Spring). Maybe they were hung by some Hindu Australians to mark Hindu Australia Day. I may never know.

Still, they made for some lovely photographs as they fluttered gaily in the breeze, sometimes the sun beaming through them.

My favourite shot from beneath the flags

Other than that, it was all pretty much a day for reading the computer screen, every now and then looking at something green to readjust my vision.

Looking across the Queen's Bottom

As I left Mirinda at the office after lunch (a delicious scrambled eggs and smoked salmon on toast) she asked if I was going to a museum. I said no, explaining that I just wanted to go home. Little did I know I would spot this:

The Southbank does death

It’s not the biggest exhibition but it’s an odd little surprise as you walk by. Not content with that, I also walked in.

There is an exhibition of six strange coffins, all seemingly ready for occupation. Some are the work of a Ghanaian called Paa Joe who has continued a practice that was started in the 1950s by his uncle, Kane Kwai. They construct coffins to order. The process of buildings them can take up to three months and, given the fact that the customer is generally already dead, the new tenants are kept on ice while they wait. Literally.

A high status coffin

The Ga people from Ghana have a strong tradition of carved coffins. They are also strong believers in reincarnation. How these two facts relate, I’m not sure since the theory is that you are reincarnated into a baby at birth (or a cockroach, etc) which maybe anywhere in the world. The chances of being close to where you are buried would seem astronomical. Quite apart from the fact that the coffin would have probably rotted away by the time you were old enough to see it…which you wouldn’t because it would be buried in the ground. Anyway, the relatives of the dead decided long ago to honour their dead by creating these strange coffins.

I'd quite like to be buried in a banana, please

Here’s a quote from Jack Bell, who owns the gallery that commissioned the coffins in the exhibition:

Paa Joe once told me that he’d been commissioned to create a coffin for the queen of a neighbouring tribe. It took rival factions of the tribe two years to decide on a theme for the great woman. In the end, she was given a piece that was half a fish and half a chicken – a conclusion that satisfied both parties.

I’m not going to comment on that except to say if I saw such a creature I’d call it a ‘ficken’.

I quite like this video of a salesman at Paa Joe’s workshop, explaining how they sell and make coffins:

My favourite coffin though was not one of Paa Joe’s. It is called the corkscrew and was made by a company called Crazy Coffins in Nottingham – they have a great website. It features a cork (where the body goes) and the stem and handle of the top of the corkscrew protruding from the top. It looks remarkably real.

Special scented, indeed!

Anyway, it was a brief but enjoyable and delightfully unexpected way to break my short walk to Waterloo.

Apart from talking to my mother for an hour and a half, today has been full of working out finances. Seriously dull which goes with the weather. It’s been a long day of rain and cold and grey skies. In fact, on Breakfast this morning, the weather map showed the whole of Great Britain completely covered with rain. Feels like February.

So, nothing really happened to me today. For that reason, I thought I’d post a few photographs I took of birds yesterday. Some I’m quite happy with.

Just about to take off

I’d set the camera up in front of one of our feeder poles. Mirinda told me that the wrens sometimes perched on the top and, because I’ve yet to photograph (or even see) a wren, I thought it would be a good place to start. I didn’t get a wren.

Coming in for a landing

There was an awful lot of gold finches (as usual), blue tits (as usual) and coal tits (even more so). I kept the ones showing them in or preparing for flight.

Fast out of the blocks for this little blue tit

As Mirinda says, it’s great to see them like this because they are so fast, it’s not something you normally see. Sadly they’re all a bit blurry (or not completely in frame) which spoils them but it gives you an idea about how graceful and beautiful they can be.

A coal tit, almost gone

I did manage a couple of nice gold finch shots (there’s one in blip) and a particularly pretty blue tit but they were motionless and, dare I say, a bit dull.

Barry looking rather dapper

One highlight was getting a shot of a gold finch with an id ring on one leg. I’ve never seen one of these before and thought it rather exciting. I do wonder how the person who did it managed to catch him though.

A bird with a history

Anyway, tomorrow I’m having lunch with Mirinda so, hopefully I’ll have a little more to post!

There’s a dog we sometimes see in the park who has something wrong with his back legs. I might have posted about him before. His owner’s have rigged up a wheelchair for him so he can still go for walks in the park. The poodles always leave him alone which is strangely empathic of them. Anyway, we saw him today and I managed to get a photograph.

Looking wistfully at the poodles as they frolic on four legs

He always seem very happy, trundling along behind his humans. They have another dog which has the use of all of it’s legs, which bounces around all over the place.

Speaking of bouncing…this little chap suddenly appeared out of no where and surprised the girls. He looks a wee bit manic if you ask me.

Come on! Take the ball! I dare ya!

After Day-z had run away, Carmen went over to say hello and they (sort of) did a bit of socialising, though Carmen is never too sure what to do.

I'll just check that you're a girl...

That was about it for today (apart from an agonisingly dull amount of time spent on the accounts) so I thought I might talk about the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks.

It all started in 1735 in (where else?) London. There’s a few thoughts about how it started but the one I’ve chosen to go with is this: This guy called John Rich was, more or less, too busy to go home to eat so he’d sit in his office in the Covent Garden Theatre. he had a simply little gridiron upon which he would sear his beefsteaks. A friend of his, George Lambert thought this a jolly sort of jape and wanted to join in. So they decided to make it a regular thing.

Very quickly word managed to move around those that listen to these sorts of things and soon they were entertaining quite a few publicans, actors, dancers, painters, etc. “Visitors ‘of the first consideration, both in rank and talents’ called on him, and were invited to share in his beef.” And they all decided to form themselves into a club. They made all sorts of rules but the mainstay of the Beefsteakers was simplicity of fare. This meant they just ate beef steaks when the society met.

Word soon spread even further and suddenly, the toffs wanted in. A new rule was created. Anyone with pretensions to grandeur must serve as butlers to those that did not. The toffs all thought this was great fun so, each meeting, they would remove their costly coats, top hats and gloves and hand out beef steaks to the smelly masses of theatre folk.

The society lasted for many, many years and had some very well known members – William Hogarth, John Wilkes, John Montagu, fourth earl of Sandwich. In fact it was probably Wilkes who came up with the motto “Beef and Liberty”. They even had special songs they’d sing at meetings, Roast Beef of Old England being their traditional hymn. This was superseded by The Song of the Day. Here’s some of the lyrics:

No more shall fame expand her wings
To sounds of heroes, states or kings
A nobler flight the goddess takes
To praise our British beef in steaks
A joyful theme for Britons free
Happy in beef and liberty
A joyful theme for Britons free
Happy in beef and liberty

And so it goes. If you want to hear a recording of it, there’s one here – just click the little play symbol when it appears.

There’s another three verses, all praising the joys of beef. And all of this is absolutely true.

When I read this sort of thing, firstly I’m so glad I’m English, secondly, I begin to wonder whether Monty Python’s Flying Circus was really comedy and thirdly, I really, really want to join!

It’s not exactly what you’d describe as the most evenly matched battle but then it wasn’t a match suggested by the swans. I’m pretty sure it was all Carmen’s idea and even Day-z was along for the ride.

Carmen telling the swan how she intends to eat it

Clearly smarter than a poodle, the swan stayed in deeper water and just laughed. Actually it hissed and lifted up out of the water, menacingly.

Be off with you, silly black fluffy things

We yelled at the dogs to get out of the water but they just wanted to eat the swan. And then a second one turned up looking even tougher than the first. The poodles decided that retreat was the safer option.

In fact there was quite a lot of bird activity on Frensham Little Pond this afternoon. A huge flock of seagulls, two big swans, some moor hens (as opposed to some more hens) and a crow…which I managed to capture taking off, albeit away from me.

I'm out of here, buddy

There was also a lot of people there. Always the way – nice weather, Sunday, hordes of out-of-towners enjoying our ponds. To be fair, most of them were friendly (not the usual surly London brigade) and there weren’t any when we left the immediate environs surrounding the pond. In fact, Mirinda commented on how that’s one of the reasons she wants a house in the ‘country’ to come home to weekends – because we can go for a walk and not see another person for large sections of it.

For me, it just proves that city folk are scared of trees and the isolation a whole wood full can bring…ironically. For this reason, the tend to congregate around bodies of water with sand, both of which keep the nasty woody things back a bit.

City folk observing what real country people are like in the wild

Actually it wasn’t that bad today (though crowded) and, on the whole, people smiled, said hello and had dogs. That’s always a good sign. The dogs especially.

We left the house quite late so the light wasn’t all that good for most of our walk. I did manage to get this rather arty shot across the pond as the sun was sinking beyond the horizon. I haven’t manipulated the picture at all – this is exactly as it came out of the camera.

The sun sitting low in the sky over the reed beds at Frensham

And, basically, that was our Sunday. Glorious.