The odd dreams strike again...

One of my favourite books when I was a child was called “The Complete Book of Fortune". It was a huge compendium of fortune-telling methods, oracular games, popular superstitions and sayings, descriptions of amulets and their supposed powers, and so forth; all the myriad ways that we have tried to see the future, encourage good fortune and escape disaster, over the course of human history. Some of it (“Napoleon’s Book of Fate”, the Mystical Art of Phrenology and Physiognomy) is seriously daffy; on the other hand, I’ve found the chapter on how to analyse someone’s character from their handwriting very useful on occasion, and the results impressively accurate.

A whole section of the popular superstitions chapter concerns superstitions associated with weddings, including “How to divine the future with wedding cake”. When given a slice of wedding cake by the bride, you are meant to eat all bar one last crumb, wrap that crumb in soft fabric, and place it under your pillow when you go to bed that night. Then take a careful note of your dreams and interpret them in the usual way (ie with some confusion), as they will tell your fortune in love and marriage.

So of course, when I got given a slice of W’s incredibly rich wedding cake yesterday I had to save a crumb, didn’t I? I mean, come on – a dyed-in-the-wool old singleton like me - I’ve got to know my fortune in love and marriage!

Guess what - I dreamed I was having coffee with several Kew colleagues, funnily enough including Marinated Artichoke Man. Clearly my subconscious hasn’t completely got over that earlier dream yet. This was all very mundane, though; just a bunch of people chatting in one of the Kew restaurants. It was so normal and un-dreamlike I was quite surprised when I realised partway into the conversation that it was a dream.

Then the dream took me to a marvellous antiques shop specialising in Edwardian cookery equipment. I was looking round very thoroughly and taking notes, as I was preparing my Wedding List. Yes, it seems my subconscious wants to spend married life not just in the kitchen, but in a kitchen without electric mod-cons!

So there you are; a tribute to the power of suggestion. I tell myself I’m going to dream about my future in love and marriage, and I then dream about something that might actually happen in the future (=coffee in the Orangery) and then about something I might actually do if I were getting married (=buying kitchen equipment). At least Mr Marinated Artichokes featured, which is some consolation.

Subconscious mind, you’re hopeless.

Thank you, dear gods and little fishes!

I just got my blood test results. No idea why i'd had a dodgy result before, but i am in the clear - I am officially confirmed as Not Diabetic.

Thank you, Dear Lord. Thank you, Dear Goddess of Life. Thank you, thank you, thank you...

Back in London, back at work...

It doesn't feel as much like "back to reality" as perhaps it should, though. The whole Festival experience is so intense that it feels almost more real than daily life. I sit here in the office now and I feel as though I've been off a lot longer than four days. So WOMAD was the reality and this is the dream, not the other way around...

It was a good WOMAD. Interestingly, I'd been a little concerned beforehand by the line-up as there wasn't much I'd heard of or that really stood up and grabbed me. But in the field (as it were - quite literally in a field!), that simply meant I skipped a lot of the headline acts and went to the less well-known ones.

Result: Mongolian rock rocks; Finnish new-folk/jazz fusion is dreamy (& the double bass player was incredibly cute); Stornoway are excellent, so was Khyam Allami, so was Javier Conde, so were Bibi Tanga and the Selenites, the amazing Muntu Valdo, and the Hungarian gypsy string orchestra. Gil Scott-Heron was excellent; but so were the (to me) unheard-of Cedric Watson and Bijou Creole, and Dan Sultan and his band. I spent Sunday morning in a choral singing workshop, part of one evening learning how to make Finnish Summer Vegetable soup (at a cookery workshop hosted by the cute bass player! - ah, sweet...), and danced so much that my feet are still sore today.

WOMAD!!

I'm off on holiday for the next couple of days, going to the WOMAD festival in Wiltshire. Good music, decent weather (hopefully), crazy food at crazy mealtimes, dancing in a field till all hours, and probably too much good hard west country cider. Have a great weekend, everyone!

Latest medical...

Well, yesterday I had my glucose tolerance test; results should be available either tomorrow or the day after. My left arm was sore for the rest of the day after having needles stuck in it by the very nice but rather heavy-handed nurse. This morning I have a spectacular blotchy pair of bruises in the crook of my elbow. I look as though an elbow-fetishist vampire has had a go at me.

Meanwhile, though, there is good news from Mum. She went to see the eye specialist at the local hospital and discovered that her mild Dry Macular Degeneration has suddenly morphed into Wet Macular Degeneneration, which sounds nasty but is treatable (unlike the Dry form, which just quietly gets worse over the years). The treatment involves having a series of injections into her retina, through her eyeball, which she is horrified about, but it's apparently a very good treatment with a high success rate. Because it is most effective if done quickly she is having her first session later this week, so at least she doesn't have time to get herself too worked up about it, and the friend who is taking her to the hospital had his cataracts done six months ago and is being very reassuring about how easy and painless eye surgery is.

So I am still concerned about myself, but very much relieved for Mum.

Dreams odd and dreams odder

I dreamed last night that I was given a whole bunch of bicycle safety reflective dangly things. It seems too obvious, to say “This must be a dream about cycle safety…” so I guess it is about safety or caution or risk-taking in some other context. I’m still struggling to sort out what lay behind my dream on Friday night, which was a good deal weirder; it involved bondage (not of me, luckily) and marinated artichoke hearts, and someone I have never thought of in, um, that sort of context… The guy in question is a nice, courteous, friendly bloke of about my own age who is a mine of information about hothouse plants, and he’s perfectly presentable, but I’ve never looked at him going by and thought “Phwoar!”. I’m a bit baffled to have dreamed about him. Oddly enough, this morning he sent me a cheerful email with a beautiful picture of a sacred lotus attached. Spooky…

To add insult to injury (in a manner of speaking), I have been unable to shake the memory of this dream all weekend. Even during "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg"; through six and a half glorious hours of Wagner in the sweltering gallery of the Royal Albert Hall, even as I listened in awe and delight to Bryn Terfel and Christopher Purves being utterly, utterly wonderful, there in the back of my mind was this image of the, ahem, marinated artichoke scenario.

Am I in lust with X without ever having noticing it? Can the subconscious hanker after someone without the conscious mind realising? Did my brain pick this chap to symbolise something else? If so, what? And why bondage? – bondage is pretty extreme, even the, ahem ahem hem, clearly consensual bondage in the aforementioned dream.

I don’t need to wonder about the artichokes. I love artichokes. They’re one of my very favourite foods. If I were into kinky activities involving food I’d be a lot more likely to use marinated artichokes than chocolate body paint, which is sugary disgusting stuff…

Oh, this is all too much for me. I’m going to make a nice cup of green tea and get back to the chaos that is registering Community Groups…

Movie Adaptation...

One of those fraught subjects! Adaptations seem to be one of the trickiest things to get right in the whole entertainment business. For every perfectly-judged “Let the Right One In” or “Gone with the Wind” there are a dozen Horse Whisperers and Cats in Hats who should never, ever have been allowed to see the light of day, and the odd “Cold Mountain” that veers sickeningly between brilliant and utterly dire...

I've got this on my mind because I was watching the film of “V for Vendetta” on tele last night. I should explain straight away that I have not read the original graphic novel. I don’t read graphic novels. I don’t even think of them as graphic novels, to tell the truth; to me they’re comic books. If that confirms my intellectual snobbery, so be it. But because I haven’t read the paper version, I can’t make comparisons, though I gather the original author didn’t like the film at all.

I did. It has stayed in my mind all day. It’s an exciting and intelligent dystopia, and a lot more subtle than the reviews I remember had implied. The heroine is strong and brave, and she grows, instead of quailing, as events overtake her. There are a few massive explosions, but they serve the plot rather than being the reason for it – they are also decorated with fireworks, and fireworks are always A Good Thing in my book. The “superhero”esque hero is not really a superhero (though he is marvellously weird, which is almost as good). When he gets shot up at the end, he actually dies. Think about it; heroes who die aren’t that common in blockbuster SF movies.

The top-notch acting is another thing to enjoy. This is one of those casts that bat right down the order. I bet Roger Allam had fun playing that hideous fusion of Rush Limbaugh and Jonathan Ross. Stephen Fry creates a beautifully rounded and moving character out of what is in essence barely more than a cameo rôle. Tim Piggott-Smith is great – he’s been giving good villain ever since “The Jewel in the Crown” (but tucking in a few nice guys round the edges, like the heroine’s kind but silly father in the BBC adaptation of “North and South” and a lovely turn as Pliny the Elder in a drama-doc about Pompeii a few years ago). I won’t list everyone but, believe me, it’s worth seeing this for the acting alone. And it stars Hugo Weaving, who would be watchable if all he did was sit on the end of the bed and eat an apple (>sigh< I should be so lucky…). I remember noticing him years ago in a tele series about the bodyline controversy (I like my cricket) and thinking he had terrific dramatic presence and a nice quirkily handsome face. The moment, near the beginning of the first “Lord of the Rings” film, when he appears as Elrond was the moment when I felt able to settle back into my seat with confidence that this was not going to be a disaster.

Now there’s an adaptation that could have gone badly belly-up. Hugely long, hugely ambitious, huge need for special effects of every kind known to man, cast of thousands, original text that to many of its fans is bordering on holy writ… Peter Jackson could so easily have c*cked the whole thing up roundly. I remember my horror when I saw a picture of Viggo Mortensen in the months before the opening. A blond man was playing Aragorn? Aargh! Sorry, but No Way is Aragorn blond. My relief when Mortensen first appeared, with his fair hair appropriately darkened, was considerable.

Overall, I think Jackson’s film versions are terrific, and an enormous achievement both in their own right as films and as adaptations. Almost all of the casting and almost all of the design is so spot-on as to be quite uncanny. But there are bits in each of the three films that irritated me when I first saw them – and these same bits still irritate me now. And they are all changes to the original. I know that adaptation necessitates making some changes; these are the changes that don't work.

Making Arwen an elven warrior woman at her first entry is fun, and politically correct, but it detracts from the courage and determination of Eowyn. It also makes the further changes to Arwen’s rôle nonsensical, as well as unnecessary, since the tough-but-tender cookie we meet in “The Fellowship of the Ring” subsequently becomes wet and submissive. At least Tolkien’s original Arwen is consistently wet.

The temporary rupture between Frodo and Sam is terribly contrived. The complete omission of the Scouring of the Shire is infuriating (for my money it is one of the most crucial episodes of the whole story).
Faramir nearly turning to the bad because of his proximity to the Ring is a direct contradiction of the whole way the character is drawn. Faramir is not like Boromir; he is wiser and more self-aware, and it’s mean to undermine this for the sake of a little extra tension.

Then there is the bizarre transformation of Denethor from a flawed and tragic figure into a slavering despot who sneeringly sends his only surviving son to certain death. This is pointless and frankly rather nasty. In the books Denethor is worse precisely because he is not so obviously bad. If this change is partly intended as a way to give Faramir a bit more to do, I would have preferred to see his courtship of Eowyn filmed instead – it’s a lovely little scene in the book, and it would have been nice to see David Wenham and Miranda Otto share an onscreen kiss.

And the Shire looks all wrong. It does; it looks as if it was colonised a generation or two ago. The Shire should be a complex agricultural landscape with all the visual markers of somewhere that has been farmed for centuries.

And there are no hop fields and no oast houses. But hobbits drink beer – hobbits love beer! Beer without hops – does such a thing exist?

On which ranting note I may go home and drink a little beer of my own, and wish I had Hugo Weaving sitting on my bed and eating the contents of my fruit bowl…