Again, Vanessa Redgrave's voice.
We would give children anything at Christmas, their passing fancies or their heart's desires, their frenzied crazes or the things they yearn for. We want to fill their hands because it fills our hearts. That is the secret of grownups everywhere.
I am currently watching The Last Detective on Britbox. A character called Mod played by the late Sean Hughes quoted the last two lines of this poem. It is the eighth of Auden's Twelve Songs - April 1936.
At last the secret is out, as it always must come in the end,
The delicious story is ripe to tell to tell to the intimate friend;
Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire;
still waters run deep, my dear, there’s never smoke without fire.
Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
For the clear voice suddenly singing, high up in the convent wall,
The scent of the elder bushes, the sporting prints in the hall,
The croquet matches in summer, the handshake, the cough, the kiss,
There is always a wicked secret, a private reason for this.
I wish I'd written down the date I began watching all of Call The Midwife on Netflix. It has been a few weeks now. I've put aside The Great British Baking Show (still known to most as GBBO!) and Gardeners' World. It has been a supreme joy to see the episodes one after another. I have filled many post-it notes with quotes.
This is from episode 8 of series 9, spoken by Vanessa Redgrave at the start of the show.
"When autumn starts to dampen into winter, should we say, 'the nights are getting dark'? Should we thrust our hands into our pockets and anticipate the chill? Or should we say, 'light the fire, draw close, it will not be as cold as you imagine'?"
And at the end of the episode.
"The seasons will always turn, the clouds will gather and the cold will come. We will survive them. We will grow regardless of the weather. We will know wonder where there has been despair. There will be happiness, and we will remember it. There will be friendships which we won't forget. Love is the constant whereby we endure all winters and all storms. It is the climate in which all things can thrive. Welcome the darkness. Embrace it as a canopy from which the stars can hang. For there are always stars when we are where we ought to be, amongst the faces we love best, each with our place, each with our purpose, as fixed and familiar as the constellations. The darkness is beautiful, for how else can we shine."
I saw on instagram that the first episode of As Time Goes By premiered on January 12, 1992. 30 years!! I can hardly believe it. My children turned 10 and 7 that year.
I decided I would start watching it all over again beginning tonight. I own the boxed set, and have watched many times. I have a note that the last time was 2017.
Long time readers will remember Mrs Bale making many appearances, and I am thinking she might again this year. She has her own letter topic on the sidebar, with 80 entries!
This is quite mind-blowing. Because I copied and pasted right from the site, you have to scroll over a bit to read it all but it is worth the trouble. Wow!
I've just started watching my DVDs of Goodnight Sweetheart - third time I will have seen it, I think.
A woman in 1940 lights up a cigarette. A man who has time-traveled from the 1990s says it is "very bad for your health."
She says, "Everyone knows they're good for your nerves. And there is no point worrying about a cough carrying you off when a bomb could land on you any second."
The quote du jour was spoken by the Griffiths character, Henry Crabbe.
"I rarely plan more than a day ahead and even that usually ends in disappointment."
A lot of wisdom in those words, methinks.
I'm watching the British television show New Tricks for maybe the sixth time, and every time I see it I wonder how Mike Moran, the man who wrote the theme song got away with such a copy of The Traveling Wilburys song, End of the Line.
I have searched and searched and can't find any controversy about it, though I did find this:
A version sung by Dennis Waterman was used as the theme too for the pilot of another BBC production, New Tricks, although this was soon replaced by a similar-sounding song, "It's All Right", by Mike Moran, which is easily mistaken for End of the Line.
Yet, apparently, there was no brouhaha, no lawsuit, and as I've found, barely a mention.
What do you think?
And after I wrote the above sentence, I went to YouTube and tried to insert the video of both songs, but something has changed. This may be to do with the new Blogger. Anyhow, as with most things in life there is good and bad about it. I can now "share" immediately on a blog post, but I don't seem to be able to insert into a blog post. The only solution I have for right now is to put up both videos in separate posts, and hope you come back here to see why in the world they are there!
