Three days in Harrogate

 

It was in June that we originally booked the hotel in Harrogate as a base for our nephew's wedding. We then  had to cancel when I developed those nasty hives. Fortunately the Crown Plaza Hotel allowed us to change the booking to this week. I guess because the hotel was very quiet with no conferences in the next door centre. 

So in Sunday morning we first headed for Hardwick Hall (free with our NT cards), our usual stop off on the way north. Just as we parked the car, the heavens opened, the only rain during our stay. We had brought lunch with us thinking that on a Sunday the cafe would be busy (it was). So we had our rolls in the car while it lashed down with rain. The heavy shower soon passed and headed for the hall.

The displays inside were better this year with lots more information.

However, much more interesting were the remains of Hardwick Old Hall. There was no access last time we were there, but now we were able to get close to the ruins.

We had a fairly trouble free journey and arrived at the Crowne Plaza around 5pm. Quite a new and smart hotel, we were on the tenth floor! Lovely and quiet. The footbridge is for access to Harrogate Conference Centre. 

We had dinner at Stephano's Pizzeria, a short walk from the hotel.

Monday was to be our big day in York. Just over ten minutes walk to the station for the 9.30am train to the centre of the city. (I remembered the station from the times I went to Shepherd's head office. A good few years ago. Over the bridge of the River Ouse and on the other side the Lendal Tower.

 But our first port of call was, of course ...... Betty's! 

We could live there! I was reminded that we actually visited Betty's many years ago when we last stayed in Harrogate. I found the photos labeled as 1993, (none of Betty's, it may have been their place in Ilkley?) so that's thirty two years ago. It didn't seem familiar at all. The photo below is from this week.  

We were there three quarters of an hour (no queue) and only had to rush off as our tickets for York Minster were for 11.30pm. It was a beautiful fresh sunny day, we were so lucky. We just made it in time for the start of a tour. Our guide was absolutely amazing. He took us all round the Minster with stops to talk about the history. Well over an hour that he made it so interesting. 

We were then able to wander around on our own and look at everything there. We bought the small essential guide and followed their tour.  The photo below from the Five Sisters Window.

To many more spectacular windows.

The Chapter House.

And The Quire.

We were pretty tired by the time we left, just to take in the views outside.

With last of all the new statue of Queen Elizabeth.

Time for a rest on a bench in Museum Gardens.

On our way back to the station, we stopped for tea and a toasty at Costa before a short walk by the river. Not a single bench was free. The train back to Harrogate to pick up some goodies for tea at a huge M&S Food store on the way back to the hotel. A long day as we left at 9am and back at 6pm. 

We were meeting up with Alison's sister and her husband on Tuesday afternoon, so a quiet morning. Starting with tea and buns at the Yellow Chair where we sat outside in the sunshine.

We then found the Royal Pump Room. 

Before heading into Valley Gardens and lots of benches.

We picked up Anne and Chas from their B&B and drove to the RHS Garden Harlow Carr just outside Harrogate. A quick cuppa before starting a full tour of the gardens.

Obviously taking lots of photos.

I particularly liked the Old Bath House with the grilles for the six wells that once provided restorative sulphur smells.

Only a short rest at the hotel before off to find the Mykonos Greek restaurant for dinner. Good food (kebabs of course) and great company.

On Wednesday morning we packed the car and vacated our room before finding Betty's (this time their Harrogate cafe) for breakfast.

Alison and her sister were bound for the shops so Chas and I walked down to Valley Gardens where we found a bench under a shelter as it looked like rain. Chas has now retired so we compared notes.

Met up with Alison at the hotel to find the car for our journey home. Three hours 45 minutes with lots of rain but no hold ups. Tired but having had a great few days.

A wet start to Autumn

After one of the driest summers on record, the rain over the last ten days has worked it's magic in the garden. The only rain we had from the very beginning of June included three short showers in  two at the beginning of August. Everywhere was parched, all the lawns and all the grass verges. Then came some heavy rain on 27th August, so almost three months of drought. Then rain on the 28th, 29th, 30th, 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th September, some of it very heavy. Now we see green grass everywhere. It's marvelous. I actually spread three tubs of the Pro Kleen Grass Green fertilizer on 6th June and it has taken two and a half months for it to start working. The lawn behind the house is actually thick and lush! 

My post of the 27th August included a comparison of the lawn with how it looked in June. Now I can compare it with how it is today.

Not a lot of colour in the borders, just the dahlias and the odd rose.

However, the impatiens in the post at the front are some of the best for years.

Movies at Home: An Ideal Husband, Lust, Caution and Campbell's Kingdom

 

For American audiences, Cate Blanchett pushes her way to the front of the poster for An Ideal Husband when really it should be the main star Rupert Everett. Based on the  Oscar Wilde play of 1895 and directed by Oliver Parker, it has the cast to die for. Minnie Driver, Julianne Moore, Jeremy Northam and others. Even Simon Russell Beale. The plot concerns a story of blackmail, but it's the scenery that I liked best. The shots of carriages in West Wycombe Park and even at Waddesdon Manor. Even RAF Halton in winter. 

I loved the first half of Lust, Caution. Ang Lee is one of my favourite directors, it was just a shame his adaptation of Zhang Ailing's novel had to (maybe) stay faithful to the book for the violence later on. The film starts in Shanghai under Japanese control in 1942 where a group of wealthy women, are playing Mahjong. But within minutes we are back to Hong Kong where Chia Chi is at university and joins a drama club. There is "a typical director, never listens to anyone else". (This is Ang Lee having fun). Here Chia is drawn into a plot to assassinate a main collaborator with the Chinese, a Mr Lee played by Tony Leung. 

But what I really enjoyed were all the exterior scenes, the marvelous locations, the crowds and the costumes. The cinematography is exceptional. However, the story is centered on the relationship between Chia and Mr Lee as the group need her to set him up to be assassinated. This is when I became less than impressed with how this is portrayed, their relationship is almost abuse. There are graphic scenes that seemed out of place, and I never got to grips why the director wanted to show these. 

Then we are back in Shanghai those three years later, the same women playing the same Mahjong. We wondered why at the very beginning, and now here she seems well off when all along she wasn't. A new plan as here again is Mr Lee. Only for the ending, maybe true to the book, is not a happy one. And that will stick in the memory rather than all those wonderful images from earlier. There were awards for the movie. At the BAFTA's of 2008 it was nominated for best foreign film and best costume design. There were more for the Golden Globes, but it was the the Venice Film Festival where it won best film and best cinematography. It did not even get nominated at the Oscars.

The poster for Campbell's Kingdom is so old fashioned, befitting a film from 1955. One of the first films I saw at the cinema when I was ten. Top drawer British acting talent was on display with Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker, Barbara Murray and the ubiquitous James Robertson Justice. however it has not worn well, all pretty hammy to say the least. 

Freakier Friday, The Life of Chuck and The Roses

 

Well it was certainly freakier. The first half of Freakier Friday was so noisy, shouty, fast and gross. Whoever decided to put in a massive food fight? I was just about to leave when things began to calm down. So much so that the second half was actually quite good as the body swopping settled down to become a reasonable drama. Lindsay Lohan was actually quite good, even if Jamie Lee Curtis is too old and never changes. Tom Shone in his review said she was the best reason to see this movie. No. It was Lindsay that I thought held the whole thing together. Who would believe that. She did seem to have a bit of trouble when she has to play her daughter, but who cares. Tom Shone in the the Sunday Times says "in the latest movie you spend a lot of time trying to work out who is swapped into whose body because it's a four way exchange". But they had to do something different from the original

The Life of Chuck is actually one of the best films I have seen for some time. Who would have thought that of a Stephen King adaptation. The three acts are told in reverse, so at the beginning we have a kind of dream sequence. Nothing feels real. Why are all these posters about Chuck. Then his image in all those windows. Who is he? We find out a little in the second part as our narrator (Nick Offerman) reveals this man walking through the city is indeed Chuck, in middle age. This short section starts with Taylor Gordon setting up her drum kit in a pedestrianised part of town where she is a busker. It's Chuck who is passing by and he starts to move to the beat. What we have then is a seven minute dance sequence when Chuck invites Annalise Basso,who is watching, to join him. 

Now I'm not an expert in drumming, only that I have some listening experience. At Dunmow Jazz Club in the early sixties, the drummer would occasionally have his own prolonged solo. At some concerts at college or on stage we would get the same. So what happens in the film, to me, was quite extraordinary. One of the best things I have ever seen on film. As Taylor changes the beat or adds a riff for the different rhythms, so too do the dancers change. You can see this sequence on YouTube, but you really need to see it in the cinema with great acoustics. I was thrilled. Here is Ashley Boucher talking to Tom Hiddleston in the Entertainment website. 

Next came crafting the perfect piece of music for the routine, which Hiddleston calls "ingenious" in the way it "progresses through different rhythms and styles of dance."

"The whole sequence contains within it all of the dance styles that Chuck will have learned as a young man that his grandmother taught him, that he learned at the twirlers and spinners dance class in middle school," he says. "They're radically different rhythms, to go from jazz to swing to the cha-cha and then to bossa nova and the polka. The rhythm of the beat completely changes, and the rhythm of how the body has to move in accordance with that beat."

The final act takes us back further to Chuck as a boy. We get to learn how he started to dance and found this huge talent inside him. He has a great relationship with his father (an unrecognisable  Mark Hamill). The locked door of their Cupola is typical Stephen King. Mark Kermode thinks that the film is "really lovely" and is about an idea, not a traditional narrative. A long review in Sight and Sound Magazine by Roger Luckhurst concludes that director Mike Flanagan "has become King's most sympathetic interpreter on film". 

some

I was not sure at all about going to see The Roses. Benedict Cumberbatch and, particularly Colman, did not strike me as a comedy duo. However, it was better than I thought it would be. There is enough warmth in their marriage for some time before things go pear shaped. The two are great actors and the repartee is interesting. All down to a fine screenplay by Tony McNamara. The novelty is the fact that the husband stays at home with the kids and the wife becomes a celebrity chef with a growing number of restaurants. We see what can happen when the children are brought up by a fitness fanatic father, and how the busy mother never gets to see them. The time lapses were unusual as we belt through the years. Not for me a laugh out loud comedy, more black than that. There are the odd funny moments and touching scenes, but havoc in the later stages becomes predictable. The supporting cast were awful. Or was that their characters? No review in Sight and Sound Magazine. A few good songs on the soundtrack starting with Happy Together and later Love Hurts. A little obvious. 

A hundred years of Winnie-the-Pooh

A wonderful article in this week's Sunday Times celebrating one hundred years of The Hundred Acre Wood. Lots of pictures and sketches over six pages that I'm keeping. James Campbell has published The Men Who Created Winnie-the-Pooh: The Lives of AA Milne and EH Shepard and he opens the sketch books of the latter. 

There is also a reference to a picture from the 1960's edition of When We Were Very Young (first published in 1924). I have just ordered a copy of the book.

My Shakespeare by Greg Doran - Parts 4 to 6

 

Part 4   The Merchant of Venice

- 1997: Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon; Barbican Theatre, London; Theatre Royal, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; Plymouth Theatre Royal

Greg talks about his first season at the RSC at Stratford with The Merchant of Venice in 1987. Anthony Cher plays Shylock together with an amazing cast. Then ten years later Greg is directing this play with Philip Voss as Shylock. He gives another hugely detailed examination of the play before he talks about directing a production in Japan.

28th May 1988 at The Barbican Theatre, London and 20th August 2015 at The Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford

See post 24th August 2015

Part 5  The Winters Tale

- 1999: Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon; Barbican Theatre, London - Heritage films

Greg starts with an interesting story about how Anthony Sher came to play Leontes and particularly an incredibly novel piece of physicality he produced in rehearsal and then in every performance. After the now expected forensic analysis of the text, he tells us how they used an unusual piece of stagecraft for their "exit, pursued by bear". 

Greg talks about Act 5: "surely one of the most powerful and moving scenes in all of Shakespeare". This chapter, I think, is a must for anyone putting on this play, and for anyone going to see it. I had to go back and read the six pages again. This time I noted that when Greg first read the play all the way through he says "as I finish reading, I want to burst".

30th June 2009 at The Courtyard Theatre, Stratford  (See my post of 7th July 2009 and a trailer on the internet. This production also performed at the Lincoln Center in New York in 2011) and 2nd March 2017 at the Oxford Playhouse

See post 7th July 2009

Part 6  Timon of Athens

- 1999: Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon; Theatre Royal, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; Barbican Theatre, London

Alan Bates is engaged to play Anthony in the RSC production of Anthony and Cleopatra as well as alternating with Timon in the other production in that season Timon of Athens. But that became too much and instead the brilliant Michael Pennington was drafted in at the last minute to take over as Timon. He was virtually word perfect by the first rehearsal. We are told this is a "very bleak, dark play". Again the cast is amazing. Greg explains all about the big argument that takes place and the superb one liner "Were I like thee, I'd throw away myself". Greg tells us the play is about "the moral degeneracy of mankind". No wonder these plays can be seen time and time again. There is an interesting part about how the music by Duke Ellington from another production was adapted for this one. 

14th August 2012 at The National Theatre's Olivier 

See post and my glowing review of 16th August 2012 on this blog with Simon Russell Beale as Timon)