When I found that the very tall shrub growing in the joint front border was a Common Elder, it had to go. The cuttings filled one and a half of my large garden rubbish bags and will be on their way to the tip in the next day or so.
So thanks to Alison's sister Anne for the advice on what it was. I saw plenty growing alongside the canal at the weekend.
"British cinematographer Roger Deakins is one of the greatest artists of light and shade in movie history and he turns 75 today. In our April 2020 issue we picked ten shots that show off different facets of his genius".
My post of the 16th March 2018 reflected on him winning his first Oscar for Blade Runner 2049 after thirteen previous nominations. Then on 31st December 2020 I recorded his knighthood in the New Year honours lists.
The ten shots below are from 1984, The Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, The Assassination of Jesse James, Kundun, O Brother, Where Art Though, Skyfall, Sicario, Blade Runner 2049 and 1917 which won Deakins his second Oscar.
The article mentions lots of other films shot by Deakins. These include The Big Lebowski (remembering that bowling ball), A Serious Man, No Country For Old Men, Prisoners, Jarhead, Revolutionary Road and 2012.
In 2019 I reviewed Mary Oliver's "A Poetry Handbook" where I said: Over the years I have acquired a few books of poetry, mainly by my favourite writers. However, in the main I have struggled with the modern poets: Larkin, Pinter even Muriel Spark. Although the last of these is better known as a novelist she says "I have always thought of myself as a poet".
I started on her book of "Complete Poems" a while ago and gave up. But a couple of weeks ago I found it languishing on a shelf and picked it up. I started where I had left off, halfway through, and read two poems a day. That worked quite well as I could concentrate on those which I liked. Here are the eleven I picked from the 79 poems in the book.
Going up to Sotheby's
I guess this is free verse, but for once it's completely fine. A tiny story about an old manuscript.
Complaint in Wash-Out Season
All that rain in April is given a dressing down. "Call off this protracted intransigent deluge, it's hackneyed".
Fruitless Fable
A simple rhyming poem about a tea machine!
The Empty Space
Free verse but wonderful. A picture has been removed. By whom? It was a scene in Rome.
Hats
Short but sweet. "I was writing a poem about hats. Hats for a garden party, hats for a wet day, hats for a wedding party, a memorial service" and so on.
While flicking over the pages
A strange title that refers to looking through "Who's who". Finding an educated man, a celebrated first novel, but reduced to being just a critic.
Victoria Falls
Another short poem, but I liked the description of how the quiet Zambezi river gradually becomes violently loud.
Conversation piece
What it would be like to leave all your problems and just have a brand new set. Interesting free verse.
The Card Party
A simple rhyming poem with a twist.
Evelyn Cavallo
A character from a book, some words on a grave:" this person never came to pass .....".
Bluebell among the Sables
"No need for alarm - those dead pelts can't cause Bluebell (the cat) any harm.
The Editorial this month is a kind of obituary of Eleanor Coppola by Mike Williams. The wife of Francis Ford died in April at the age of 87. However, the central theme of the piece is her co-direction of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. This is the 1991 documentary about the making of this classic movie. And then her directorial debut in 2016 at the age of 80!
In TV Eye, Andrew Male looks at This Town and other rock movies, particularly how they should avoid actual song writing. He picks out the Daisy Jones adaptation on TV. But back in the 1970's, Rock Follies did have passable songs, courtesy of Andy Mackay (Roxy Music) and Howard Schuman. Never missed an episode.
Jessica Kiang in The Magnificent '74 looks at road movies from 1967's Bonnie and Clyde through to how 1974's Bring Me the Head Of Alfredo Garcia brought them crashing down.
The big interview (twelve pages) is with Richard Linklater, the director from Austin, Texas. All very interesting even if I gave up on most of his movies. All except the terrific School of Rock. Next week his new film Hit Man opens which looks very promising. In School of Cinema, Linklater talks about his favourite movies in four separate categories. One of which is "On Orson Welles" where he says his Othello is the best Shakespeare on film. And Chimes at Midnight not far behind.
Risky Business has director David Leitch talking about his movie The Fall Guy with references to other films such as Grosse Pointe Blanc. Then how many rolls a car can make for one of the biggest stunts. In Six Sublime Cinema stunts, those named include Buster Keaton, Jackie Chan, True Lies and Mission Impossible - Fallout.
Alice in Wonderland is all about the Italian director Alice Rohrwacker's La Chimera, a kind of folk fantasy set in the Italian countryside. It is filmed in three different camera formats: 35mm, Super 16 and 16mm (the amateur format). (I will check out her Cannes Grand Prix winning The Wonder from 2014. The star of La Chimera, Josh O'Connor is interviewed and alongside, in Cine Archaeology, a run down of Alice's six films that inspired her including Federico Fellini's Roma.
The Film Reviews this month include Hit Man, Civil War, Challengers, The Fall Guy and La Chimera. All the others are foreign films. In the reviews of DVD and Blu Ray comes the 1931 Quick Millions in the Lost and Found section. A Spencer Tracy gangster film.
In From the Archive, Lindsay Anderson's 1989 interview is repeated. He said at the time that he avoided going to the cinema as it was "a gruesome experience". Much better twenty five years later. His film If .... might be interesting.
Last of all in Endings, there is a superb piece by Anne Billson on Jacques Tourneurs' Night of the Demon. Scary or what.
One of our favourite restaurants is The Akeman in Tring. Until Saturday we had only ever visited in the evening. However, Alison was impressed by the different lighter lunchtime menu so we gave it a try. It was not too busy, we had a quiet table and the food was great. We are going again on Alison's birthday
Wandering down the High Street, we saw some gates into a park that we had never seen before. This turned out to be Tring Memorial Gardens. Only small but there is a lovely lake (pond?) with lots of fish and moorhens with their funny chicks. There are now more benches than that in the photo and we sat for ages in the mild weather. Altogether, a perfect day.
In the middle of May I dug over that part of the bedding border where I plant annuals. Then the bulb foliage from the early daffodils was cleared last week. Just leaving that of the late narcissi.
Then on Sunday, the hardest job of all, hoeing and raking, and then planting the 30 Dahlia Figaro Mixed, half the number from last year but still too much. But come the summer, it should be worth it.
Alison was given this plant for helping at one of her events. It might be a Hydrangea so maybe not the best for our soil. But it's doing OK at the moment.
The Clematis Montana flowered at the beginning of the month.
The tall tree just outside the back of our garden, the Robinia Pseudoacacia, has flowered again. So it still looks quite healthy. Maybe not quite as good as the photos on my post of 7th August 2009, but doing OK. Next to it and just behind the laurels is the last elder, also in flower and hanging on. At the bottom of the photo is the lilac.
Of all my shrubs, the Weigela is the most dramatic. It was pruned hard in the Spring of last year as it become weak after all the previous years of flowering. The photo at the top shows light green leaves sprouting from the branches that were left. It obviously like being cut back as this year it has put on a wonderful show.
My favourite rose is the Blue for You. This is how it flowered last year and now has an abundance of flower buds like never before.
Unfortunately, the Delphinium Pacific Giant is no more, but these are a couple of cheap replacements that are about to flower. Of course I love the Alliums (see post of the 14th May) and some of the Geraniums. Will update later next month.
This was the main border in January, looking very bare and sad. Then in March below a few bulbs were coming to life.
And now in the second half of May, all the shrubs and perennials have covered the border. It will be even better in June.
As for many years, the Campanula around the conservatory grows across the path. This week I could hardly get past. So they were in for a trim and now have even more flowers thank goodness.
I also planted the bedding Lobelia around the other side.
It was a few years ago that I grew these Iris bulbs in pots and then after flowering transferred them to the wildflower border. Every year they grew leaves but no flowers. So I did some research and found that they need feeding every two weeks from when leaves first appeared. And what do you know, they have flowered beautifully.
When Challengers ended we never knew the outcome of that tennis match. Somewhere it said "it was never about who won". But that is exactly what tennis is all about. I enjoyed director Luca Guodagnino's Call Me By Your Name and A Bigger Splash, but this three hander was not my kind of film. Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O'Connor do their best with a good screenplay but awful story. Worst of all was the awful music, if you can call it that, because it overpowers the dialogue. Thank goodness there was not too much tennis, although the director's trick of filming the tennis balls coming right at you was, perhaps, the most memorable thing in the whole film. Beatrice Loaza in Sight and Sound says it is " a hot and heavy drama, but it's also full of breezy wit and bizarre, borderline uncanny touches that, if they don't always work, at least keep you on your toes, entertained".
Beatrice Loayza in Sight and Sound Magazine June 2024 - a hot and heavy drama .... full of breezy wit.
Another movie where the sound dominates everything else was The Fall Guy. But what I liked best were all those scenes where we see all the people involved behind the camera. And there were lots of them. Of course there was the undoubted chemistry between the two stars Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. And the selection of songs was fine. It was just that the one over a sequence of clips showing the pairs early relationship was over far too quickly. However, I thought the main plot that only involves Gosling was pretty pathetic so there was not enough of the two stars together. And then the ending is pretty daft even though it just wants to show us what a stunt man can do. Reasonable fun. Jonathan Romney in Sight and Sound adds "They all bring characterful flesh-and-blood mischief to what could otherwise have been a calculated mirror game of reality and illusion".
Jonathon Romney in Sight and Sound Magazine June 2014 - characterful flesh and blood mischief.
Director Rose Glass is on a roll. I watched her creepy Saint Maud on TV even though I normally avoid these kinds of movies. And now her latest Love Lies Bleeding is the closest to a Coen Brothers film I have ever seen. Kristen Stewart brings that kind of unease we saw in Personal Shopper. Why she would fall in with bodybuilder Katy M. O'Brian is anyone's guess. Well we are in 1989 where Kristen's father (Ed Harris is streets ahead in acting terms) owns a gym. As expected, things turn nasty. Tom Shone in the Sunday Times said it was a "hard-knuckled, hard-boiled B-movie on steroids". As different as it could be to Glass's Saint Maud.
Nicolas Rapold in Sight and Sound Magazine May 2024 - surge with passionate extremes even if it's bones can be brittle.
I planted Alliums at least six years ago, maybe more. They appear every year with little fuss. I do nothing to encourage them and the foliage is just removed after the flowers fade. These photos were taken last week and they may even be better in a couple of weeks.
In my post of 15th April, I extolled the virtues of the Tulip Spring Green, thirty of which I grew in pots. However, I ignored the fact that this was now too much for me and I had previously noted, "no more bulbs". This week I knew why when I had to dig them out with the old compost and replant them in the garden. Here they are now in the long border.
As this was far too much work, I hope that this will be a lesson for next year. Watch this space.
Friday was a gloriously warm and sunny day and Alison and I took the train from Princes Risborough ( only a 15 minute drive away) to Oxford that stopped only at Bicester Village and Oxford Parkway. This is far more pleasant a journey than driving to Oxford and waiting for the park and ride bus to arrive.
We headed first for John Lewis where we had a voucher for free tea and cake for two. Then stopping at a few shops on the way to the University of Oxford Botanical Gardens. We had been there before a couple of times but never in May. And we had a two for one voucher. There were not that many plants in flower but the Alliums were at their best. That is Alison's hand getting in the picture.
Fortunately we did find a couple of benches on our way round as the sun was very warm. The map below was invaluable.
Before we reached the gardens, we had walked down Cornmarket to Christ Church and then taken the Broad Walk along Christ Church Meadow arriving at the River Cherwell. Then leaving the gardens I wanted to look at the plaque just outside where the Jews of Oxford buried their dead from 1190. The reason being, I am currently reading Magpie Lane by Lucy Atkins. Halfway through there appears someone who acts as a guide for the main character, taking in unusual places in the town, this being one. But also all the popular sites as well.
