Unattended Moments

The lack of posts this year does not mean that there was nothing I wanted to write about; I also have photos to post, so I’d like to attempt a kind of review of the year at some point.  We’ll see.  I’ll start with something more recent, however - an outing to Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake at Sadler’s Wells theatre just before Christmas.

Swan Lake, with Tchaikovsky’s beautiful score, has always been my favourite ballet.  Matthew Bourne’s production is a modern retelling of the story which famously casts male dancers as the swans (though it is not, as sometimes incorrectly stated, an all male Swan Lake).   I had seen it on dvd, and jumped at the chance to see it live.  It is intensely moving (few films will make me cry on repeated viewings, but this production on dvd does every time and the live version was no exception), but nevertheless there are plenty of humourous moments. The dvd is excellent, but the action becomes much clearer on the stage, and there were several bits of background action - often adding to the humour - which aren’t seen by the camera.  The programme noted that there had been a number of changes since the dvd was filmed; these seemed to be in the details and the production in essence remained the same, however there were some moments that were changed and some that I did not remember seeing before.

The new cast also brought a different feel to the piece.  The current run has a number of dancers in the principle roles, at this performance we saw Dominic North as a youthful Prince - he captured the yearning to escape from the dull routine of the court and the longing for affection.  Jonathan Ollivier as the Swan / the Stranger superbly conveyed the power and potential fierceness of the swan tempered by his protectiveness and gentleness towards the prince, as well as the mysterious and almost savage charm of the Stranger.  The Queen (I think we saw Nina Goldman) was also excellent and presented a moving conflict between suppressed love and distaste for physical contact with her son.

It is 14 years since the premiere of this production and, judging by the packed theatre, the revivals should continue for many years yet.  I would certainly recommend seeing it.

More about the show at the official website: http://www.swanlaketour.com/

So, nearly one year with no posts - Christmas has come and gone, and it is nearly time to wish you a Happy New Year again.  This is not a good blogging record.  The reason - the job that I started last November continued to be frantically busy through January and into February (not good for spare time, but not bad for overtime pay). At that point I got an assistant, who was very good, but initially that meant time on teaching her a job I was still learning myself.  At the beginning of April I was interviewed for and offered a job in the University IT Service, which I decided would give me wider experience and better prospects than staying put - which meant another round of tidying loose ends and getting a job into a fit state for someone else to take over, and then on to another steep learning curve as I started the new one.  At the same time as I started the new job (July), I put an offer on a house.  The purchase went through quite quickly, and by September I was moving - admittedly only a few hundred yards,  but didn’t reduce the amount of packing / unpacking / sorting of boxes and chasing of banks and utility companies.  And by the time I was settled, the year was pretty much gone…

The new house has a small garden, which brings me to the main subject of this post: the wormery.  I hadn’t previously had any way of recycling kitchen waste - the council doesn’t collect it and I’d had no use for compost before.  With a garden, despite the small size, composting made sense, so my Mum gave me a worm cafe, complete with composting worms.  All well and good, we thought - but for the first week or so the worms seemed to want to be anywhere other than their food tray, and had to be rescued from the sump below, from on top of the lid, and from corners of the shed where I’d put the cafe to keep them out of the cold.  Reassured by Wiggly Wigglers that this was normal behaviour - worms are inquisitive, and are likely to explore their environment thoroughly before deciding that the food tray is the best place to be - my first task on returning from work each day became to check the wormery and restore any roving worms to their proper place.

Having acquired enough bubble-wrap to surround and cover the cafe in order to keep the wind off,  I put it back outside, hoping that daylight would encourage the worms to stay put.  As advised, I gave them plenty of shredded paper to keep the moisture down and all seemed well, until the next crisis arrived in the form of unusually seasonably cold weather and snow: despite the bubble-wrap cover, the moisture blanket inside the cafe froze and the top layer of food looked decidedly frosty.  Strange as it may seem I had grown rather attached to my worms and was rather dismayed by this turn of events, but as I was going away for Christmas I had to put them back in the shed and hope for the best.  On my return there was still ice on the lid and no live worms in sight.  Consulting wiggly wigglers again I brought them just inside, leaving them in the coolest part of the house by the back door to let them defrost slowly.  Within a couple of hours the first worms emerged, and it seems that most have survived the cold.  I’m now wondering what the next mini wormdrama will be - and waiting to see whether the composting is successful.