I feel I should at least note this significant day….but…breathe easy…you’ll all be relieved to know I’ve no more to say…my November posts have probably already said too much on the subject….
But in the New Year I hope to have interesting news for long term sufferers about ATOS, the government’s expert medical assessors who are apparently costing the dear old taxpayer a small fortune…….but enough bad news…nothing less than cheerfulness in the best seasonal tradition from today and until twelfth night is done and dusted….
Done and dusted might also cover the great recipe I’ll put up for Pecan Pie this weekend….as a final grace-note to the Thanksgiving menus and I will also try to give you my mum’s recipe for mince pies which I must make over the weekend…then I’ll make some proper suggestions for Christmas…my cake is so full of whiskey just smelling it makes you tipsy…I’ve also been meaning to put something up on jams….I made a killer plum jelly earlier in the year…and a not too bad smoky Christmas chutney…
I propose to do a weekly post starting at the end of December on the course of the US Presidential elections….in addition to my usual stuff….a sort of Letter to America….but shorter…more a postcard…
There will be various reviews including Juno and Peacock and Belshazzar’s Feast…I’m planning once more to venture into Derbyshire though sadly with no hopes of meeting my Mr Darcy…but Buxton looks interesting…and there will be a visit to Stratford next year…with I hope half a dozen reviews from the plays there…I’m also planning on Der Rosenkavalier at the ENO and there’s something on at Covent Garden that caught my eye… a new production of Falstaff….Verdi’s absolute master-work… and as I missed Somnambula through ill health…I think it will be my treat to me…
And as I’m writing the last third of my current book…..’Friends in Deed‘…the third in the series of novels set in Tudor England….I’m toying with the idea of actually writing the next one on-line….each day….posting what I’ve done…so readers get to read free but also get to see how I write and how bits get re-worked…almost like being here in my study and looking over my shoulder….I’ve a working title ‘A Class Act’ and it will be set in 1980s forward….the nearest an old fart like me gets to the contemporary…
….Though I will confess to you a few years back I was taken to a late night club in Vauxhall by younger friends and after the usual performance about queuing to get in and queuing to drop off your coat and queuing to buy a drink and queuing to have a pee…I was led by the hand to the dance floor – with its blue white flashing lights and music thudding like an express train whizzing between your ears…and there on the floor, beautifully lit, were all these guys in blue denim button fly jeans, stripped to the waist, showing off their gym trimmed bodies with a narcissism Narcissus would have envied….and if it wasn’t for the fact that there was more ink on them than Conway Stewart might bottle in a year…it could well have been any time since the the 1980s….and almost any where in any gay dance club in the world…and in its own way…as one faces one’s face each morning to review the ravages of time…it’s nice to know that somewhere time stands still…and for someone there it is all terribly new and exciting….