Bras

Don't you just love 'em? I realised it wasn't just a personal deliciousness recently, when in the middle of her office a friend whipped up her top to show me the well-fitting bright fuschia bra she had just bought. I don't know if the sparkle of her smiley face was brighter than the colour of her new undergarments, but it was a close run thing. Years ago, when we visited Brazil together (working trip, honest, and it really was Brazil) the same friend was so intrigued by my collection of all black bras that she tried them on even though you could fit several of hers into.............you get the drift. On our return, finding an example of a black one in her company's lost property basket (well, it is a theatre company), she parcelled it up and sent it to me anonymously. It caused what I can only call a ruckus in the post-room.

Larkin with Women

Went to The Belgrade Theatre to see Larkin with Women by Ben Brown. Came away feeling it had been a worthwhile evening and that doesn't happen enough, for sure, and at home looked again (briefly) at Larkin's poems, which led on to Marvell and then Donne..........

The difficulties with "biopic" plays is that the actor may not be portraying the person as we had envisaged them. Sometimes the essence of the individual is overridden by the supposed need for facial and physical verisimilitude. I always, perhaps mistakenly, thought of Larkin as someone far more prickly and difficult, not just in his insistence on how he wanted to live his life - that was more than well displayed through the writing - but as an enduring part of his personality (altho that would apparently contradict with his attractiveness to women, but we are meant to be a contradictory species; that's all humans, not just women). I felt that John Arthur who played Larkin was not quite there, and in particular didn't click with his readings of the poems. Perhaps the diffidence in the readings was reflective of the man - but I'm not entirely convinced.
There were some lovely bitchy comments on Ted Hughes and the nature of poet laureateship. I see in my mind's eye a shortened version, but a two-parter, counterbalanced by seeing Larkin through Ted Hughes' eyes, both poets enlivened by their clutch of intriguing women. Did the men ever meet I wonder? The bitchiness would suggest so.

Geese

Our gander has lost the lead in his pencil. After two or three years of more (and often less) successful reproduction, all the eggs the goose is laying remain unfertile, and friends are peeved at the absence of their Christmas goose. The pair must be seven years old by now, but as they live for about thirty years, I don't see any reason for this sad state of affairs. After a fox scared the goose off her nest last year and she refused to sit as a potential self sacrifice on the offchance of hatching the eggs herself, investment was made into an incubator but still no joy. She keeps squirting out those eggs every other day in an ever hopeful fashion and I hate to disabuse her. The hunt is now on for some fertile eggs, but my small ads research is failing to bear fruit.