Cocktails at six

It was said a while ago that younger people were beginning again to drink cocktails, out of fashion for some time. Certainly long lists of sometimes very peculiar brews can be found in most pubs and restaurants, but I rarely see anyone drinking them. Julia and I for many years now have enjoyed a cocktail at six in the evening - a pleasant signal that the day's work is done. Well mixed, they can both give you a lift and/or prepare you for a relaxing evening.
The classic dry martini goes without saying (but not without drinking): a measure of gin and the merest glimpse of a dry vermouth - the old story was that the perfect martini consisted of allowing the sunlight to pass through a bottle of vermouth onto the surtface of a glass of ice-cold gin. Ourt favurite cocktail at the moment however is the Bartender: 20 ml dry vermouth, 20 ml sweet vermouth, 20 ml gin, 20 ml dry sherry, 5 ml Grand Marnier -  maybe a touch sweet for some palates, but a gorgeous effect.
We're fond too of the Sidecar - 60 ml brandy, 7 ml Cointreau, 7 ml lemon juice. Actually, there are several good cocktails with Cointreau, including the Kamilkaze (30 ml vodka, 30 ml Cointreau, 30 ml fresh lemon juice, 5 ml lime cordial) and the simple Sidecar (60 ml brandy, 7 ml Cointreau, 7 ml lemon juice). Even simpler, the gimlet - just a measure of gin with a splash of lime juice - the good old gin-and-lime, with plenty of ice.
Oh, dear - 9:05 a.m., and I feel like a . . . no, no - only nine hours to wait.
P.S. - my own invention (names for it welcome) is 60 ml vodka, 20 ml blue curacao, 20 ml sweet vermouth and a splash of lime juice. Maybe just the SixOclock?

A message from Saint Augustine

Idly turning the pages of St Augustine's De Civitate Dei (as is my wont) I come across the following:
'There are those who can move their ears, one or both, as they please; there are those that can move all their hair towards their forehead, and back again, and never move their heads. There are those that can counterfeit the voices of birds and of other men, cunningly; and there are thiose that can break wind backward continually, that you would think they sang.'
This is clearly an important message to the faithful; I am not personally sure of its application.

The so-called 'martyrs'

Thinking about the bombing atrocity in London a decade ago - and also of the more recent atrocities of IS - it seems to me an insult to civilisation describe the silly young men (and indeed women and children) who strap bombs to themselves and detonate them among their brothers and sisters as 'martyrs'. The suicide bombers, and those who machine-gun shoppers in supermarkets and holidaymakers relaxing on beaches are themselves innocents persuaded to kill themselves for the mythical god of a religion (including, in the past, Christianity) created by the wicked to prey on their fellows. The IS 'martyrs' in particular go happily to their deaths because they have been persuaded that they find themselves in a happy land of milk and honey where naked virgins will wait upon them to provide every delight they have rejected on earth. The tragedy - though perhaps it is for them a happy chance - is that they will never know that they are in fact going to simple black oblivion, having thrown away, it seems, every pleasure less gullible people get out of life.
Even worse, it seems that they have been taught that their main pleasure and accomplishment in life should be the elimination of anyone who does not worship their particular god - it is the Old Testament view of religion, that anyone who does not subscribe to My idea of god is not worthy to live. Simple and undiluted idiocy - and profoundly anti-Life. An attitude which has of course appeared from time to time in almost every civilisations, from ancient Rome to 17th century England and the Puritans. Nothing is new. But that the phenomenon of IS has appeared and proved so forceful makes any optimism about the progress of mankind towards genuine civilisation extremely difficult to summon.

No, no, f-secure

It seems that the more successful a company is the less likely you are to be able to get any help from them when something goes wrong. At least, on-line. They have taken to refusing to give you an email address which you can contact, but instead put on-line a long, long list of things thast might have gone wrong, not one of which (of course) applies to you. There may well be a system by which you can talk to 'one of our experienced engineers'. This means that you click on a contact button and get a message telling you that an engineer will be on-line to you 'as soon as possible.' This morning, I hung on to one of those messages for over half an hour, with no response whatsoever. (The guilty firm in this case was f-secure, a very highly regarded company that keeps your compouter secure from anyone wanting to barge in on you). There is of course the telephone option, but this means that you find yourself either talking to someone whose accent (all too often Indian or Pakistani) is so thick you cannot understand him/her and he/she cannot understand you - or the telephone connection is so tenuous you might be spoeaking, for all you know, to a Martian with a severe head cold.
All right: I've vented my spleen. I shall now put on a recording of 'No, no, Nanette' (see a past blog) and try to calm down.

Tea for Two

One of the two or three best evenings we ever spent in the theatre – competing with, say, Fonteyn and Nureyev in Giselle and Olivier’s Otehllo - was, you may think ludicrously, a revival of the 1920s musical No, No, Nanette!

 It was the producer Harry Rigby who conceived the idea of reviving this very popular show, over half a century after its first production in New York in 1924. All that audiences of the early 1970s knew of it was the awful 1950 film starring  Doris Day – and that was retitled Tea for Two, with most of the numbers cut. The show was considered rather scandalous when it was first produced; Rigby excised any suspicion of slease, and the evening was simply the best possible example of a good night out in the musical theatre. Julia and I were fortunate enough to get seats during the first week or two of the show, and from the first notes of the overture (a huge orchestra, with grand pianos to left and to right) it was a riot. The production was by Busby Berkeley, probably the greatest of directors of stage musicals (53 of them, from Whoopee in 1930 to Rose Marie in 1954). He came out of retirement to direct and choreograph No, No, Nanette! and whatever the degree of his participation (it’s said he actually did little of the work) the magic rubbed off. The other great star of film musicals who leaped lithely onto the stage was of course Ruby Keeler, who came out of retirement to play the lead, and who at the age of 71 did two tap numbers - in ‘I want to be happy’ and ‘Take a little one-step’, and having finished the latter, came on to ringing applause and did it again! Bobby Van was remarkable in ‘Call of the Sea’ and Helen Gallagher’s ‘You can dance with any man you like’ brought the house down about her ears and properly won her several awards - as did the show itself.

Alas, as far as I know there is no visual record of the show, though the original cast recording is excellent (and four DVDs have been worn out in our house). The real joy of the evening was that sublime silliness which no modern musical embraces – thirty chorus boys coming on dancing and playing ukuleles – and the wonderful idiocy of the whole thing. You can keep your Miserables and Phantoms and the rest of the productions which seem to emanate from a production company entitled Gloom Inc. Where’s all the pleasure gone?

Two musicals

Spent a lazy Sunday afternoon watching a couple of musical films on DVD - both alas rather seriously flawed by casting mistakes. I'd forgotten that, of all people, Francis Ford Coppola directed Finian's Rainbow. This has never been a favourite of mine, though it has a couple of good numbers by Burton Lane -'How are thing in Glocca Morra' and 'When I'm not near the girl I love', which got a Tony award for David Wayne as Og.. Alas, Og is played in the film by Tommy Steele, unutterably winsome - butter could not only melt in his mouth but covers him from head to foot. Not keen on Miss Clark either; but nice to see that Fred Astaire, nearing the end of his career, could still twinkle a toe or two. Actually the whole show seems very clunky now; what on earth persuaded Coppola to direct it, I wonder?
 The other film was of Hello, Dolly!, with that wonderful score by the great Jerry Herman - remarkable how it was dismisssed by some critics as being without any tunes!  Gene Kelly's direction, as one might expect, produces excellent dance numbers, and he deals with the crows scenes very adeptly (striking opening to the film, too). But oh dear, Miss Streisand is almost a caricature of herself in the title role - cast no doubt because  Carol Channing wasn't a big enough international star. Channing was stunning in the first spage production: it's a real ragedy she didn't get the screen part. I remember the critic Walter Kerr on her: 'Channing opens wide her big-as-millstone eyes, spreads her white-gloved arms in ecstatic abandon, trots out on a circular runway that surrounds the orchestra, and proceeds to dance rings around the conductor . . . With hair like orange sea foam, a contralto like a horse's neighing, and a confidential swagger, [she is] a musical comedy performer with all the blowzy glamor of the girls on the sheet music of 1916.' But Even dear Dora Bryant, in the London stage production, was a great deal better than the squeaking, squealing, gesticulating over-the-top-in-the-wrong-way Miss Streisand.The film well worth watching for the immortal Walter Matteau, however, and interesting to see Michael Crawford, with little tatters of his best-known TV character still sticking to him, and little sign that within a few years he was to play a sensational Phantom in the first production of Mr Lloyd Webber's little piece. And however much the producers paid Satchmo for his tiny appearnce, it wasn't too much.

Don't just sit there . . .

For some reason - and I don't know whether the Good or Bad Fairy was active at my birth - I simply can't 'do nothing.' When I was working full out, in the '60s and '70s, writing and broadcasting four or five programmes a week, I used to fantacise about sitting in a chair on a nice warm patio sipping a cool drink and thinking of nothing. But it was never going to happen, not in real life, and still hasn't. I can sit on the patio with a cool drink and a book for perhaps an hour, then I get the nagging feeling that I should be doing something - whether it's compiling a concert for finemusic - you can listen on your computer at finemusicfm.com - or writing an article to (hopefully) sell to someone or even just writing a blog. Reading is sometimes, maybe always, 'doing something', as is listening to music (or used to be before my hearing let me down) - provided there's an intention, provided one is learning someting fromthe boook or really feeding one's soul with the music. Even reading or listening 'for pleasure' is in a sense 'doing something'. But just being 'busy doing nothing', though it isn't exactly a sin - there's no moral dimension about it at all - isn't on. It's being mentally or emotioonally inactive that I can't stand.
I don't suggest this is in any way something praiseworthy; life being what it is, five minutes after I breath my last I cease to be of the least impoirtance, and nothing I have written or done is likely to be read or remembered for longer than - what, ten years? I don't in any way feel I should be working, or doing what passes for work. So whence the compulsion? And to how many people does it apply? If someone is'bored' does it mean they really need to be 'doing something' - even if it's just putting a washer on a tap? And why do we, alone among the animals, feel this?
Answers on one side of a postcard, please.