Holidays

All my holidays since the children grew up, left home and didn't come with us any more, seem in memory to merge into one long tedious stroll - along beaches, through streets littered with trinket shops where rubbish is sold, along promenades that all seem, in retrospect, to be the same promenade, up hills and down dales none of which I can recall was there in Majorca or there in The Algarve or wherever.
A couple of years ago we did have what can be described, I suppose, as a reasonably interesting holiday, visiting The Loire Valley and its chateaux. But after a few days the chateaux all molded into one, sort of thing; someone said "When you've seen one chateau, you've seen them all," and I had to agree.
Then something marvellous happened. We came to a chateau which had birds nesting in the sides of the building. They were martins, I believe, which build nests out of, I think, a sort of cement. They flew down and out and past us and swept back up to their nests, speedily, gracefully.
And I thought of the speech in "Macbeth" by Banquo when he arrives at Macbeth's castle:
"This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve
By his lov'd mansionry that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle;
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observ'd
The air is delicate."
So, I thought, right - next time we'll do something interesting - I know, go to Chichester to see Patrick Stewart in "Macbeth".
We did. It had rave reviews but I thought it dreadful (apart from him and Lady Macbeth). And when it came to Banquo's speech the man just blared it out as if he was, as in "Hamlet", the town crier.
The speech is so beautiful that you know, dramatically, it has sealed Banquo's fate. He's a gonna.