It was always going to be a lazy kind of weekend and staying up finding MySpace friends until the early hours was not going to change my sleep cycle. Then although I tried to sleep I could not and got up and made myself a milky coffee and a toasted sandwich with grilled tomatoes. It was five am before going back to bed and sleeping and therefore not surprising that it was 11 am when I rose.
I missed all the live sporting events the Formula I important race in China when Lewis Hamilton could win the World Racing Driver titled for 2008. I watched a recording in the afternoon and although he won, his nearest rival came second and therefore the points difference is only 7 and the decision goes to the last race in Brazil the home turf of his rival. This is the same situation as last year when his closet rival finished sufficiently ahead, so lose and yet so far. In this race unlike two weeks ago, Lewis was able to stay in the lead throughout, driving hard but without having to take risks. The packed course in Shanghai was only able to watch a procession with no thrills and spills, paying fortune for the privilege, but they may remember watching the 5th win in the year of the man who became the youngest driver ever to win the championship.
I also missed Andy Murray winning his second Master's series title in succession beating France's Gilles Simon in Madrid.
He has rapidly established himself as the world number 4 and presumably these wins may have moved him into third position. He is the first British driver to win four of these races in a season and will go next to St Petersburg next which he also won last year, having qualified already for the Master's Cup which takes place in Shanghai the fastest growing economy in the world and clearly the place where it is all happening.
Newcastle United is not playing until a Monday so the match can be televised Live on Satanta Sky when they play Manchester City at home, so I will have torn loyalties although nothing line next weekend when Sunderland entertain Newcastle at midday with the match again on Sky, Today Hull continued their dream start by beating the Hammers away and Tottenham's woe continue as they lost again to the other club at the bottom, Stoke. I was able to watch the highlights of both on BBC TV after watching a new Frost which lacked originality and would have been better condensed into one of its two hours.
The greater part of day was spent in project working, broken up only by food, two under cooked lamb chops for lunch with a small tin of new potatoes and garden peas followed by mixed black grapes which were delicious and green which were not.
I made two visits to the Southwell Minster this year in May and August so it was a good surprise when switching over to the Antiques Road Show there were pictures of the outside of the Minster where the show was being held and of the nearby workhouse one of the biggest and best preserved of the Victorian monuments to Oliver Twist.
I was not in the mood for serious news but there were two developments which cannot be left without recording. The first is the announcement that that the Chancellor and his advisors have found their copies of the General Theory of Employment by John Maynard Keynes, one of the works I was required to read during the term when I studied Economic Theory under the guidance of Henry Smith the Vice Principal at Ruskin and established Economic Theoretician whose book I have. The Chancellor is bringing forward major public building projects. I used to be accused of being an empire building when I worked in local government for South Tyneside because I was always looking for ways to create useful jobs. It is simple arithmetic. If someone is in work they are able to buy things which keep other people in work and the government gets income tax and VAT tax and the local authority gets rates paid and rent and so on. If a person is not in work then the government has to pay benefits and in many instances this includes paying rent as well as rates as unemployment and family credit
The Conservative party is about to commit temporary electoral suicide and prove what many suspected that what they say cannot be trusted. As little as a week ago the leader and front bench were pretending that they were going along with the measures taken by the government as it was in the national interest and it was not the time to debate how the situation had arisen and their view that the government was an author of its own misfortune. It had seen the public opposition to the government giving them a twenty point lead in the opinion polls begin to fall and this weekend one polls showed that the lead had dropped to under 10 pounds. The tactic was quickly abandoned at last week's Prime Minister's Question Time when the deputies stood in and thus weekend the Tory Leader opened fire with both barrels. Now, in fact what he said had substance, but it will be lost on influencing the public at a General Election because it showed that he was putting personal and Party interest before the national and exposing himself and the Front bench as hypocrites. What was worse is that the Tory central office put up a junior Treasury spokesperson to attack the Keynesian spending plan. The public are not interested in how we got ourselves into the situation at the moment but how do we get ourselves out and only then should the issue become how the situation was caused, which is about the fundamental flaws and inequalities of free enterprise capitalism and nears to be handled carefully to avoid a swing to the extremes of socialism and other fundamentalisms of the dialectic. History will record that the last few days marks the time when the Conservative threw away their chance to become the next Government, mark my words. And free advice, sack whoever advised you, they fouled up big time and you are a fool for not realising.
In the USA the McCain Palin ticket was given a kick in the teeth by the influential former Republican Minister Co-lin Powell who declared that in his view Senator Obama has the potential to become a great President unifying the nation at a time of crisis and threat. Previously he had given as much funding to McCain as the USA law on personal donations allows. American's version of political insurance.
The was a great radio interview with Dawn French at the weekend timed with the publication of her Memoirs Letter to Fatty which include pieces on the relationship with her father who died when she was only nineteen. As usual someone does better what it has been in my mind to do. As she said Memoir are better than autobiographies which usually have to follow a chronology and include all the important things in a life, some of which are usually better left unsaid or un remembered.
I also watched Goldie Hawn, sexy, bubbly a great comic actress, mother of four children and campaigner for the rights and interests of children generally on the Graham Naughton Show.. It should have been a splendid way to end the evening. But I was not ready even thought it became quickly past midnight.
Just as well because the organiser of the Myspace site on Frederic Fellini had confirmed my friend request. This is a wonderful site created by Carletto di San Giovanni which list and writes about all his work and then has dozens of stills from the films. Thus instead of my writing ending at this point reflecting just another day I was catapulted back into my time of searching for the Dolce Vita including a trip to Rimini where Federico was born and then on to Rome and Sorrento.
I have recently, 2006 and 2007 experienced some of his films on DVD in England or seen at the theatre on TV my first thoughts went back to the time when I first saw my first film in Italian with someone who was no more or no less than a female friend at the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street London and who was at the cusp of London Society after finishing her degree in art history and between a passionate love affair and a parentally approved marriage.
We had met at the offices of the Committee 100, the Bertrand Russell Committee which organised major civil disobedience demonstration against the possession and potential deployment of weapons of mass destruction. I had then asked one of the officers of the Committee for her address and telephone number as she had shown great interest on being told that I was one of the Foulness thirteen, having spent six months as guest of Her Majesty rather than agree to stop participating and working for the cause. I had then be appointed a field worker for the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War making the final arrangements for a combined operation against the deployment of the Polaris submarines at Holy Loch.
I was too shy to ring so I wrote a short note asking that she telephone me immediately if she would like to meet for lunch. In those days, I tended to stay in bed until mid morning so I had to be woken up by my mother or aunts to find that she had immediately picked up the telephone upon reading the letter and I had to rush to get dressed and take the train to Victoria and then the tube across London to Hampstead where we walked the health. We met occasionally, before she became engaged and I went to Ruskin, a visit to look at Leonardo drawings at Windsor castle, a visit to see Beyond the Fringe, and I have a thank you volume of Balthazar, one of the Alexandrian Quartet novels by Lawrence Durrell, for taking her mind off contemporary problems and dilemmas, and we had also gone to see La Dolce Vita.
I will add that the young woman was and has no doubt remained beautiful and intelligently, and through her family part of fashionable London society which was in general wealthy and carefree as it moved into the swinging sixties although we were both too serious and too interested in the welfare of others to be part of that and therefore while she could have become Madalena, she did not.
The film which I now know I did not understand, so impressed that I acquired a photobook with 96 pages of stills and the film script published in the United States by Ballantine Books of Fifth Avenue in 1961 and translated by Oscar DeLiso and Bernard Shir -Cliff . I experienced the film several time on TV subsequently and then two years ago I was able to experience again on DVD together with three other's.
Such was the importance of La Dolce Vita that of the 200 odd films I have viewed since joining the DVD club that it was among the first ordered and the second to arrive in August 2006, with La Strada and Amacord viewed in September 2006, Roma in April 2007. il Bidone has been in my list to see for over a year, I have also seen Boccaccio 90, 8 and a half, Satyricon, Guilletta degli spiriti on screen and some on TV usually Film Four. I may have seen other such is my memory.
It may surprise that the film which moved me most is La Strada with Anthony Quinn and Guilletta Masina the extraordinary wonderful actor and the wife of Fellini. Looking on Amazon I find there is a four film set and on E Bay several others are available inexpensively. I now will add these to my Christmas wishes list as second to Ingmar Bergman he is the most interesting and at times challenging Director during my life time of over sixty years film experience.. I have not always enjoyed his films but they are always worth giving close attention.
I was still not ready for bed because I read on the MySpace site that his home town had been Rimini. It is only a matter of days, since talking about Brideshead Revisited that I was reminded of the day I had spent in Venice after which I and my companion on a trip which had taken us through Belgium, Germany and Austria before travelling to Milan, Venice, Rimini, Rome, Naples and Sorrento then returning home via adventure in Switzerland and France. It had been a tiring drive although it was only disk my companion wanted to stay at the camp site and go early to bed whereas I wanted to see what there was to see and had driven off as night descended
As I drove along the coast road a woman on an unlit bicycle pulled out before me and fortunately I was travelling slowly. Although I braked I hit the rear of the bike and the woman came off on onto the bonnet which broke her fall to the ground and also shattered the windscreen, but not broken it, with her backside. Amazingly she was not hurt or had a scratch. Although this was a quiet road the whole of Italy arrived included an English speaking Italian working at a hotel who explained what was happening. I was held at the scene while the woman was taken to hospital for a check and on confirmation that there was in fact no physical injury I was allowed to return to the camp site having provided details, and later my insurance settled the claim for repair to the bicycle and a small amount for emotional damage. I was very lucky otherwise I would have been taken into police custody and prison, and despite all the subsequent adventures in search of La Dolce Vita, I did not return to Italy for over thirty years, and although I have drive all over France and into Spain, I travelled by plane and coach. Leaving the car at home.
After this disaster I returned to the campsite having knocked out the major part of the windscreen so I could see, and promptly drove the vehicle into, what the following day was discovered to be a storm ditch. I awoke my companion, a fellow child care officer, and he was none too pleased by the situation. We saw a tent with a light on and found four strong English lads and together with the help of some wood we managed to get the car out of the ditch and back to the tent. The following day was to have been our only day sunbathing on a three week plus grand tour but had to be spent on cleaning out the car of windscreen and arranging a replacement via the Italian AA who amazingly located one at a village garage on our way across country to Rome the following morning. We had arrived at the beach in brilliant warm sunlight around 2 pm and after less than hour the sky had darkened and it rained cats and dogs, which always reminds of the Oh Brother where art thou, the Coen brother film where they depicted the saying. We made off to the cinema watch an Italian film in Italian where as a week later we were watching Von Ryan's Express in German and dubbed Italian at the Sorrento film festival in the company of two beautifully dressed and made up English roses we had first met in Rome when my companion mended the boot of their car at the campsite and over breakfast the following morning they had told us of the camp site in a orange grove overlooking Capri and agreed that we would meet up their while they did Rome and we met up two Wrens stationed at Malta who had hoped to meet one of their parents and who amazingly of amazements we had passed by going up the free back route to Mount Vesuvius in my small Mini estate as the they came down the same road in their Jaguar. Have you ever turned a car round and gone down a mountain side chasing a Jaguar in a Mini? We caught them up, reunited the girl with one her parents. I cannot remember which set of girls we were supposed to be going with to Capri but all of this is another story. One of the iconic scenes of La Dolce Vita is the helicopter flying the Holy statue above the city and a feature of Fellini is his fascination with the bizarre and with ladies of the night. In fact, though, as I walked from the campsite situated on one of the hills down into the city for a public Papal audience outside the Vatican and then on into St Peters where he said mass, while I clutched a picture and a cross I had hastily bought for him to bless as gifts for my birth and foster mothers, I had passed the said ladies already at work in the early morning sunshine. Such is Rome and its Dolce Vita.
I missed all the live sporting events the Formula I important race in China when Lewis Hamilton could win the World Racing Driver titled for 2008. I watched a recording in the afternoon and although he won, his nearest rival came second and therefore the points difference is only 7 and the decision goes to the last race in Brazil the home turf of his rival. This is the same situation as last year when his closet rival finished sufficiently ahead, so lose and yet so far. In this race unlike two weeks ago, Lewis was able to stay in the lead throughout, driving hard but without having to take risks. The packed course in Shanghai was only able to watch a procession with no thrills and spills, paying fortune for the privilege, but they may remember watching the 5th win in the year of the man who became the youngest driver ever to win the championship.
I also missed Andy Murray winning his second Master's series title in succession beating France's Gilles Simon in Madrid.
He has rapidly established himself as the world number 4 and presumably these wins may have moved him into third position. He is the first British driver to win four of these races in a season and will go next to St Petersburg next which he also won last year, having qualified already for the Master's Cup which takes place in Shanghai the fastest growing economy in the world and clearly the place where it is all happening.
Newcastle United is not playing until a Monday so the match can be televised Live on Satanta Sky when they play Manchester City at home, so I will have torn loyalties although nothing line next weekend when Sunderland entertain Newcastle at midday with the match again on Sky, Today Hull continued their dream start by beating the Hammers away and Tottenham's woe continue as they lost again to the other club at the bottom, Stoke. I was able to watch the highlights of both on BBC TV after watching a new Frost which lacked originality and would have been better condensed into one of its two hours.
The greater part of day was spent in project working, broken up only by food, two under cooked lamb chops for lunch with a small tin of new potatoes and garden peas followed by mixed black grapes which were delicious and green which were not.
I made two visits to the Southwell Minster this year in May and August so it was a good surprise when switching over to the Antiques Road Show there were pictures of the outside of the Minster where the show was being held and of the nearby workhouse one of the biggest and best preserved of the Victorian monuments to Oliver Twist.
I was not in the mood for serious news but there were two developments which cannot be left without recording. The first is the announcement that that the Chancellor and his advisors have found their copies of the General Theory of Employment by John Maynard Keynes, one of the works I was required to read during the term when I studied Economic Theory under the guidance of Henry Smith the Vice Principal at Ruskin and established Economic Theoretician whose book I have. The Chancellor is bringing forward major public building projects. I used to be accused of being an empire building when I worked in local government for South Tyneside because I was always looking for ways to create useful jobs. It is simple arithmetic. If someone is in work they are able to buy things which keep other people in work and the government gets income tax and VAT tax and the local authority gets rates paid and rent and so on. If a person is not in work then the government has to pay benefits and in many instances this includes paying rent as well as rates as unemployment and family credit
The Conservative party is about to commit temporary electoral suicide and prove what many suspected that what they say cannot be trusted. As little as a week ago the leader and front bench were pretending that they were going along with the measures taken by the government as it was in the national interest and it was not the time to debate how the situation had arisen and their view that the government was an author of its own misfortune. It had seen the public opposition to the government giving them a twenty point lead in the opinion polls begin to fall and this weekend one polls showed that the lead had dropped to under 10 pounds. The tactic was quickly abandoned at last week's Prime Minister's Question Time when the deputies stood in and thus weekend the Tory Leader opened fire with both barrels. Now, in fact what he said had substance, but it will be lost on influencing the public at a General Election because it showed that he was putting personal and Party interest before the national and exposing himself and the Front bench as hypocrites. What was worse is that the Tory central office put up a junior Treasury spokesperson to attack the Keynesian spending plan. The public are not interested in how we got ourselves into the situation at the moment but how do we get ourselves out and only then should the issue become how the situation was caused, which is about the fundamental flaws and inequalities of free enterprise capitalism and nears to be handled carefully to avoid a swing to the extremes of socialism and other fundamentalisms of the dialectic. History will record that the last few days marks the time when the Conservative threw away their chance to become the next Government, mark my words. And free advice, sack whoever advised you, they fouled up big time and you are a fool for not realising.
In the USA the McCain Palin ticket was given a kick in the teeth by the influential former Republican Minister Co-lin Powell who declared that in his view Senator Obama has the potential to become a great President unifying the nation at a time of crisis and threat. Previously he had given as much funding to McCain as the USA law on personal donations allows. American's version of political insurance.
The was a great radio interview with Dawn French at the weekend timed with the publication of her Memoirs Letter to Fatty which include pieces on the relationship with her father who died when she was only nineteen. As usual someone does better what it has been in my mind to do. As she said Memoir are better than autobiographies which usually have to follow a chronology and include all the important things in a life, some of which are usually better left unsaid or un remembered.
I also watched Goldie Hawn, sexy, bubbly a great comic actress, mother of four children and campaigner for the rights and interests of children generally on the Graham Naughton Show.. It should have been a splendid way to end the evening. But I was not ready even thought it became quickly past midnight.
Just as well because the organiser of the Myspace site on Frederic Fellini had confirmed my friend request. This is a wonderful site created by Carletto di San Giovanni which list and writes about all his work and then has dozens of stills from the films. Thus instead of my writing ending at this point reflecting just another day I was catapulted back into my time of searching for the Dolce Vita including a trip to Rimini where Federico was born and then on to Rome and Sorrento.
I have recently, 2006 and 2007 experienced some of his films on DVD in England or seen at the theatre on TV my first thoughts went back to the time when I first saw my first film in Italian with someone who was no more or no less than a female friend at the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street London and who was at the cusp of London Society after finishing her degree in art history and between a passionate love affair and a parentally approved marriage.
We had met at the offices of the Committee 100, the Bertrand Russell Committee which organised major civil disobedience demonstration against the possession and potential deployment of weapons of mass destruction. I had then asked one of the officers of the Committee for her address and telephone number as she had shown great interest on being told that I was one of the Foulness thirteen, having spent six months as guest of Her Majesty rather than agree to stop participating and working for the cause. I had then be appointed a field worker for the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War making the final arrangements for a combined operation against the deployment of the Polaris submarines at Holy Loch.
I was too shy to ring so I wrote a short note asking that she telephone me immediately if she would like to meet for lunch. In those days, I tended to stay in bed until mid morning so I had to be woken up by my mother or aunts to find that she had immediately picked up the telephone upon reading the letter and I had to rush to get dressed and take the train to Victoria and then the tube across London to Hampstead where we walked the health. We met occasionally, before she became engaged and I went to Ruskin, a visit to look at Leonardo drawings at Windsor castle, a visit to see Beyond the Fringe, and I have a thank you volume of Balthazar, one of the Alexandrian Quartet novels by Lawrence Durrell, for taking her mind off contemporary problems and dilemmas, and we had also gone to see La Dolce Vita.
I will add that the young woman was and has no doubt remained beautiful and intelligently, and through her family part of fashionable London society which was in general wealthy and carefree as it moved into the swinging sixties although we were both too serious and too interested in the welfare of others to be part of that and therefore while she could have become Madalena, she did not.
The film which I now know I did not understand, so impressed that I acquired a photobook with 96 pages of stills and the film script published in the United States by Ballantine Books of Fifth Avenue in 1961 and translated by Oscar DeLiso and Bernard Shir -Cliff . I experienced the film several time on TV subsequently and then two years ago I was able to experience again on DVD together with three other's.
Such was the importance of La Dolce Vita that of the 200 odd films I have viewed since joining the DVD club that it was among the first ordered and the second to arrive in August 2006, with La Strada and Amacord viewed in September 2006, Roma in April 2007. il Bidone has been in my list to see for over a year, I have also seen Boccaccio 90, 8 and a half, Satyricon, Guilletta degli spiriti on screen and some on TV usually Film Four. I may have seen other such is my memory.
It may surprise that the film which moved me most is La Strada with Anthony Quinn and Guilletta Masina the extraordinary wonderful actor and the wife of Fellini. Looking on Amazon I find there is a four film set and on E Bay several others are available inexpensively. I now will add these to my Christmas wishes list as second to Ingmar Bergman he is the most interesting and at times challenging Director during my life time of over sixty years film experience.. I have not always enjoyed his films but they are always worth giving close attention.
I was still not ready for bed because I read on the MySpace site that his home town had been Rimini. It is only a matter of days, since talking about Brideshead Revisited that I was reminded of the day I had spent in Venice after which I and my companion on a trip which had taken us through Belgium, Germany and Austria before travelling to Milan, Venice, Rimini, Rome, Naples and Sorrento then returning home via adventure in Switzerland and France. It had been a tiring drive although it was only disk my companion wanted to stay at the camp site and go early to bed whereas I wanted to see what there was to see and had driven off as night descended
As I drove along the coast road a woman on an unlit bicycle pulled out before me and fortunately I was travelling slowly. Although I braked I hit the rear of the bike and the woman came off on onto the bonnet which broke her fall to the ground and also shattered the windscreen, but not broken it, with her backside. Amazingly she was not hurt or had a scratch. Although this was a quiet road the whole of Italy arrived included an English speaking Italian working at a hotel who explained what was happening. I was held at the scene while the woman was taken to hospital for a check and on confirmation that there was in fact no physical injury I was allowed to return to the camp site having provided details, and later my insurance settled the claim for repair to the bicycle and a small amount for emotional damage. I was very lucky otherwise I would have been taken into police custody and prison, and despite all the subsequent adventures in search of La Dolce Vita, I did not return to Italy for over thirty years, and although I have drive all over France and into Spain, I travelled by plane and coach. Leaving the car at home.
After this disaster I returned to the campsite having knocked out the major part of the windscreen so I could see, and promptly drove the vehicle into, what the following day was discovered to be a storm ditch. I awoke my companion, a fellow child care officer, and he was none too pleased by the situation. We saw a tent with a light on and found four strong English lads and together with the help of some wood we managed to get the car out of the ditch and back to the tent. The following day was to have been our only day sunbathing on a three week plus grand tour but had to be spent on cleaning out the car of windscreen and arranging a replacement via the Italian AA who amazingly located one at a village garage on our way across country to Rome the following morning. We had arrived at the beach in brilliant warm sunlight around 2 pm and after less than hour the sky had darkened and it rained cats and dogs, which always reminds of the Oh Brother where art thou, the Coen brother film where they depicted the saying. We made off to the cinema watch an Italian film in Italian where as a week later we were watching Von Ryan's Express in German and dubbed Italian at the Sorrento film festival in the company of two beautifully dressed and made up English roses we had first met in Rome when my companion mended the boot of their car at the campsite and over breakfast the following morning they had told us of the camp site in a orange grove overlooking Capri and agreed that we would meet up their while they did Rome and we met up two Wrens stationed at Malta who had hoped to meet one of their parents and who amazingly of amazements we had passed by going up the free back route to Mount Vesuvius in my small Mini estate as the they came down the same road in their Jaguar. Have you ever turned a car round and gone down a mountain side chasing a Jaguar in a Mini? We caught them up, reunited the girl with one her parents. I cannot remember which set of girls we were supposed to be going with to Capri but all of this is another story. One of the iconic scenes of La Dolce Vita is the helicopter flying the Holy statue above the city and a feature of Fellini is his fascination with the bizarre and with ladies of the night. In fact, though, as I walked from the campsite situated on one of the hills down into the city for a public Papal audience outside the Vatican and then on into St Peters where he said mass, while I clutched a picture and a cross I had hastily bought for him to bless as gifts for my birth and foster mothers, I had passed the said ladies already at work in the early morning sunshine. Such is Rome and its Dolce Vita.
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