Saturday 30 December 2017

Arise...



...Dame Darcey Bussell!

A class act, you will agree (as is the divine Mr Solymosi):


Dame Darcey Andrea Bussell (born Marnie Mercedes Darcey Pemberton Crittle, 27th April 1969)

[My Damehood obviously got lost in the post...]

Saturday 23 December 2017

Thursday 21 December 2017

Sing, heigh-ho!



Blow, blow, thou winter wind
by William Shakespeare

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.

Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
That does not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remembered not.

Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.


It is Midwinter's Day; the Winter solstice; the longest night.

It all gets better from here. Spring is just around the corner...

Sunday 17 December 2017

Graceless dingbats



According to Luke Buckmaster, writing in The Guardian:
...the actual film is 10 times as batshit crazy as the marketing materials suggest... Swinging Safari is set in a satirical, whitebread Australian yesteryear, circa Sydney in the 1970s. Or as narrator Richard Roxburgh puts it: “A decade with too much time, too much money and too much cask wine.”

The audience are whisked into a suburban cul-de-sac, which would be quiet and peaceful were it not for the many graceless dingbats who inhabit it...


Starring an almost unrecognisable Guy Pearce and Our Princess Kylie in a pudding-bowl wig, alongside a host of Aussie character actors, a dead whale and lots of polyester, sunshine, wife-swapping and booze - I reckon Swinging Safari may turn out to be the "must-see" movie of 2018...

Tuesday 12 December 2017

Friday 8 December 2017

Meanwhile, in Arizona...


Dolly Parton look-alike competition, 1979

One of the classiest photos from the new book Arizona Trips by British photographer David Hurn, as featured in today's Guardian.

Yee, Ha!

Tuesday 5 December 2017

It's a Scandal



"Discretion is the polite word for hypocrisy."

"I took on the sins of everybody, of a generation, really."

"No one else knows the whole story. I was there. I lived through it."


RIP the notorious Christine Keeler, the "model" whose revelations were at the centre of the "Profumo Affair" that brought the government of Harold Macmillan to its knees in 1963.

A tribute...