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"Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family ––– in another city."
– George Burns (1896-1996)
[Caricature by Dave Woodman]
"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."
– Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
[Cartoon: David Low (1891-1963)]
"If the aunt of the vicar has never touched liquor, watch out when she finds the champagne."
“There comes a time in every woman’s life when the only thing that helps is a glass of champagne.”
– Bette Davis
“I drink it when I’m happy and when I’m sad. Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I’m not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise, I never touch it—unless I’m thirsty.”
– Lily Bollinger, Owner of Bollinger Champagne from 1941-1971
"The House of Lords is like a glass of champagne that has stood for five days."
– Clement Attlee
"Come quickly, I am tasting the stars!"
“Champagne is one of the elegant extras in Life.”
– Charles Dickens
“A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes…and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
With the repeat of 'Titus Alive', the final episode of my radio Classic Serial, The History of Titus Groan tomorrow, Saturday (BBC Radio 4 at 21:00) my most ambitious project for very many years will come to an end.
Titus Groan, the first Radio 4 Classic Serial in ages to be given six parts, ended on Sunday. I have listened to every episode, admiring the acting, Brian Sibley’s adaptation of a complex work, the pace of Jeremy Mortimer’s direction. I still couldn’t understand what was going on. At all. The minute I thought I had, off it would go again into another dimension of fear, temptation, betrayal, each so vivid it flooded the mind’s eye, all adding into a dream I didn’t want to enter. If anyone can offer me the key into this version, pray tell. Just don’t say “the book”. If the book is the key, what’s the point of a radio version?Hmmmm...
In 1985, Brian Sibley adapted Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan and Gormenghast for Radio 4. I had only recently discovered both Peake and Radio 4, but I wasn't sure I wanted them to meet. Peake's extraordinary writing it felt to me then, was all about a solitary, personal flight of imagination where the reader makes the pictures to match the soaring, peculiar prose. Someone else's version would surely feel like an intrusion.In fact, it was brilliant, so much so that I quite got the jitters on hearing that Sibley was tackling Peake again. Instead of worrying about my images while reading Peake being replaced by radio ones, I was concerned about the two radio ones competing. And it was a hugely ambitious project: Peake's three novels plus the concluding volume by Peake's wife, Maeve Gilmore, rediscovered last year, made into six hours of Classic Serial.
The terrific new adaptation ended at the weekend (but the whole series can be heard online until Saturday), and shows just what radio drama can do in the right hands. It captured every brilliant thing about Peake: the glorious writing; the strangeness; the collision of voices and realities; the satire of now – whenever now is as you read or listen – and the beautiful, vivid conjuring of fragments of the past.
And actually, it added to the brilliance, which in Peake's case takes some doing. Roger Goula's music and Peter Ringrose's sound production are outstanding, as memorable and transporting as the exquisite words. Luke Treadaway, as Titus, has the exact voice Titus always had as I read, while David Warner as The Artist has just the right weary omnipotence yet glittering turn of phrase, drawing you into scenes; very movingly indeed in the last moments with Titus.
I listened to these alongside whatever each weekend presented (lashing rain, allotment duties, coastal walk) and they were a huge treat. With really good writing, and an exceptional adaptation such as this, it does rather occlude everything else.
During the edition of Quote... Unquote... on which I appeared last week, I quoted Robert Benchley's famous quip on Venice, and then went on to read a short, but highly evocative, passage from what is probably my favourite book written about the city: Watermark by Joseph Brodsky.
In winter you wake up in this city, especially on Sundays, to the chiming of its innumerable bells, as though behind your gauze curtains a gigantic china tea-set were vibrating on a silver tray in the pearl-grey sky.Superb!
You fling the window open and the room is instantly flooded with this outer, peal-laden haze, which is part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers.
No matter what sort of pills, and how many, you've got to swallow this morning, you feel it's not over for you yet.
Because one is finite, a departure from this place always feels final: leaving it behind is leaving it forever.
Or, to put it another way, courtesy of song-writers Richard and Robert Sherman, from the 1971 Walt Disney film, Bedknobs and Broomsticks...Youth is not entirely a time of life it is a state of mind. It is not wholly a matter of ripe cheeks, red lips or supple knees. It is a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life. It means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of an appetite for adventure over love of ease...
Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair — these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust.
Whatever your years, there is in every being's heart the love of wonder, the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite for what next, and the joy and the game of life.
You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.
In the central place of every heart there is a recording chamber; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer and courage, so long are you young. When the wires are all down and your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and then only are you grown old...
You cannot stray far in Venice without encountering images of the lion, the companion-creature of the City's patron saint, St Mark.
A – Age: 59 --- for five more days only!
Many years later - I sang and (sort-of) danced in To Sea in a Sieve, a musical play based on the life and verses of Edward Lear (right) written with my composer friend, Dave Hewson, and performed with Polly March (playing everyone except Edward Lear, including Queen Victoria and a parrot!) at the Edinburgh Festival and then at the Westminster Theatre, London.
