Ultimate outing

Last week saw what is going to be our last outing for a while: Educating Rita at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre at Guildford. And I now know that Arnaud was a French lady who did both piano and luvvie and who lived near Guildford for many years - although I have yet to find out whether she worked in retirement to promote local theatricals. It seems quite likely, given that she has a theatre named for her. See reference 1.

Poster

Jessica

I think the advertisement caught my eye as a result of our having seen it on television in the last year or so, with Bing suggesting that this must have been the Michael Caine version of 1983. And, as it happened I saw the Guildford advertisement before the Kingston one, so Guildford it was. So we had a two hander with Stephen Tompkinson and Jessica Johnson. The former being slightly known to us as Detective Inspector Slack in the McEwan version 'Murder at the Vicarage' and the latter being from Newcastle upon Tyne. It so happened that the people behind us came from Liverpool, who thought that she did quite well at faking the Liverpool accent, did quite well for a foreigner, but was not nearly as good as the real thing, which they had been to at some point. While I muddled her up with an actress from the US, which I am now puzzled about as the only candidate either Bing or Google turns up is a black actress from New Orleans.

Took a nearly empty train from Epsom, so it being cold, we elected to eat our bread and hard boiled eggs on the train, rather than taking a chance on a seat by the river at Guildford. Spotted some sort of raptor in among the trees at the side of the line at one point, but not a tweet as I had no idea which one.

Curious window

At Guildford, in Park Street, BH noticed a curious window in what looks as if it was built as a house, something over a hundred years ago, but now has some connection with Pannell House next door. With this last including sash windows and such, possibly a heritage refurbishment, possibly a heritage fake, actually fairly new. With the top part of this window being blocked off with masonry, perhaps something to do with fiddling about with the floors and ceilings.

Asbestos?

On down some alley to come across what looked very like corrugated asbestos to me. A widely used building material when I was small, but I had thought that H&S signs were mandatory now. Not to say total enclosure in blue plastic tents, larger versions of the things that forensic people like to deploy.

Booklovers' library

We popped into the Britannia by the water to take further refreshment and to book a table for after the show. They sold the sort of Brazilian rum I had come across recently and noticed at reference 2 and the barman told me that it was very sweet and more or less undrinkable unless cut with something. We opted for a sauvignon blanc, also from the southern hemisphere, instead. During the course of which BH lighted upon the book snapped above, which caught my eye as my mother had been a customer of Boot's Booklovers' Library for many years, with one of my Saturday chores being to call in the large branch of Boots in the middle of Cambridge, at that time pretty much a department store without the clothes, to get the next week's book. I remember a wide counter, right across the end of one arm of the shop, with pictures of sunlit elephants and such all around.

Judging by references 5 and 6, we should perhaps have made off with it. A regular pot-boiler.

Onto the theatre which was reasonably full. The usherette - probably not far off our age - told us that usually the place would be full for such a matinée, drawing in coach loads of pensioners from miles around. As it was, there was more coughing than was proper from the back; people who should, perhaps, have stayed away.

The OU getting its Royal Charter

The play was in two halves, with each half being made up of a succession of short scenes, some scarcely a couple of minutes. Which I found a bit irritating and which I did not remember from the film. Each scene was, I suppose, intended to stand for one of the weekly tutorials that the working class wannabee was taking with her decent but slobby tutor, quite possibly Oxbridge educated but actually teaching in redbrick. Presumably inspired at least in part by the invention of the Open University (OU) in 1969. I was also puzzled about the weekly tutorial, I which I had thought a prized feature of Oxbridge, but not of the OU - nor, indeed, of the LSE where I was.

The set, well before the off. No flash

The slobby tutor was also allowed a room which I thought rather large. Not the sort of thing that a redbrick lecturer would usually be allowed. At least so I thought - and certainly not the sort of cupboard that rank and file lecturers get now.

But an interesting play for all that. And there were some funny bits. With two take-aways for me. First, a reminder that we all deserve a decent education. Second, that teachers, along with parents, have to understand that their pupils will grow out of them. From being god-like people dishing out the tablets to their star-struck pupils, they have to step back and become their equals. Garnett, the publisher's reader noticed at reference 4 had to learn something of the sort too, with his protégées.

And one period detail being the tea chests used to pack the tutor's books, by then on his way to penal servitude (as it were) in Australia. With tea chests full of books in the attic being yet another feature of my childhood. With my having a strong memory of it being very easy to cut ones hands on the things, full of nails and sturdy, jagged foil (foil to seal the flavour of the tea in) as they were.

Flood protection

Lack of flooding

Collapsed footbridge, upstream

On exit, we puzzled over a row of flood protection devices along the side of the theatre, not unreasonable given the proximity to a river which was prone to flooding. Lifting the panel revealed what looked like a four inch earthenware drain, so perhaps some serious storm drain had been included in the foundations of the theatre to take the water off the pavements around the finished theatre.

The channel leading to the locks had been drained, perhaps while the collapsed footbridge was repaired, revealing a trolley which was beyond redemption. Even supposing that the grappling iron (of reference 7) could have stood the strain of hauling the thing out, in no fit state for return to sender.

Onto the Britannia to dine. We had a choice of girl chat about personal relationships with over-excited heater overhead and man chat about work relationships - and chose the latter. I think it was the heater which clinched the matter, my not thinking that sitting under a hot air blower inside on a cold evening outside was a good plan.

And as it happened, with starter and wine the same as last time, as noticed at reference 8. Which I notice today includes a presciently topical scratch card, towards the end. I followed with steak and chips, with a respectably large piece of steak, but rather under cooked to my taste. While BH had salmon in some kind of complicated sauce involving lobster, also rather under cooked. Which last, as on the previous occasion, I mentioned, tipping generously enough that they were polite about it. We thought that the whole menu suffered a bit from the dishes being rather over complicated: you couldn't just have a burger, you had to have a burger with 57 varieties of added flavour. I blame all those television cookery programmes, for which superfluity of complication seems to be de rigueur. Maybe also we had the apprentice cook, filling in between the luncheon and dinner shifts proper.

Nevertheless, a good atmosphere and we shall, no doubt be back in due course.

Sanbags by the river

Just missed a proper train to Epsom, so elected to get a fast train to Wimbledon and come back via the Raynes Park platform library, which probably worked out slightly slower than waiting in the cold for the next Epsom train.

And it was not the case that snapping the sandbags by the river was the cause of our missing the train. On my computation that snapping took 30 seconds and we missed the train by 60. A computation which gave rise to some difference of opinion.

And so ended what is clearly going to be the last normal outing for a while.

PS: on this occasion our two luvvies did not take advantage of the smoking exemption awarded to luvvies on the job. This despite their clearly being in big puffing roles. And probably of an age to have once enjoyed smoking.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvonne_Arnaud.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/more-civic-duties.html.

Reference 3: http://www3.open.ac.uk/documents/1/vs19080444243116.pdf. Strain on suburban broadband starting to show this morning, with BT not delivering this page for some minutes? Still not all there after 15 minutes.

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/01/midwife.html.

Reference 5: The wicked and the fair - Henrietta Drake-Brockman - 1957. A fictionalised version of a shipwreck in 1629. See reference 6.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batavia_(ship). Plenty of scope for pot boiling here.

Reference 7: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/trolley-407.html.

Reference 8: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/11/a-woman-of-no-importance.html.