Dentures

I am soon to have a new set of teeth, not all of them - I still have some left; I hope they fit better than the ones I have now. I told my dentist in a jocular fashion though not without some element of truth in it that I blamed my parents for the state of my teeth. He said "Well in the old days.... (he meant my days of course).... people had their milk teeth which fell out then they had their next teeth which went bad, then they had false teeth". I thanked him for that - as if I didn't know that already.
There's a good deal of fuss in America at the present time about a national health service; the Democrats want it, the Republicans don't. One Democrat Congresswoman, argueing in favour of the service, drew attention to the state of one of her constituent's mouth without teeth. She said:"I even had one constituent - you will not believe this, I know you won't, but it's true - her sister died so since she had no dentures of her own, she wore her sister's teeth."
I was once told of a woman who was waiting outside a factory entrance for her brother to appear. Why was she waiting? To borrow his false teeth of course. I never believed it but now, with the testimony of Louise Slaughter, the Congresswoman, before me I begin to wonder if I was right.
I once had an essay to write on "Teeth"; I began it with "The teeth are in the mouth....."
I crossed that out and started again.

Hotels

We didn't stay at hotels when we went on holidays when I was a kid (a long time ago); we stayed at houses that said they were hotels. This was mostly in Western Super Mare which had hundreds of such places. To wash in the morning you were supplied with a bowl and a jug; I can't remember if the water was hot or cold but it was certainly not the sort of wash I liked. Can't recall anything of the food we ate; of course, there was no menu from which we could choose our meals - they were supplied by someone or other: the wife or husband or one of their kids.
I have stayed in worse places since. Ramsgate. The hotel was either running down or being repaired: the owner spent all his time hammering things. Dreadful.
Like the place Jack Benny said he stayed at when he came to London. Known for his meanness he decided he wouldn't stay at the large, posh place he fancied but the small place across the road. "One thing about it," he said, "was that staying where I did, I had a good view of the grand hotel across the road; better that the view they had of the dump I was in."
There's a comedian at the beginning of Woody Allen's film "Broadway Danny Rose" who says that somebody is stealing one of his jokes. "Which one?" asks a fellow comedian. "O, you know, the one where I book into a hotel and ask the price of bedrooms and the manager says $50. I say $50! He says well you can have one in the basement for $10 but you have make your own bed. Done I say and he hands me the wood and nails and a hammer....."
Which reminds me of a joke told by a comedian and repeated by the reviewer of his performance. "I went on a once-in-a-life-time holdiay. I tell you what - never again."

Walking On

Freddie Kempff is a superb pianist but he doesn't yet know how to walk on stage - or off. He comes on walking but you have the feeling that he wishes to run, as if he is putting on a sort of inner brake to prevent him accelerating. When he's sitting at the keyboard he is at ease and master of his instrument: this week I heard him play Beethoven's Appasionata sonata perfectly it seemed to me and some pieces by Schumann which I was not at all familiar with. At the end he almost rushed off.
Must be over ten years ago I saw Vlado Perlemuter give a piano recital in Cardiff. He could hardly walk and needed someone to escort him on and off stage. But looking him up in Wikipedia I see that he lived from 1904 to 2002 which means he must have been in his eightees or maybe even his ninetees, so it's it's little wonder that he needed help to get around. Yet when he played he was transformed from Old Age Pensioner into young, brilliant artiste. Defying his age and look of frailty he ended the recital with an encore - Chopin's Revolutionary Study, no less.
I recall hearing a critic once saying that comedians need to have or develop a characteristic walk. Jack Benny had one: a rather exaggerated lifting of the arms while he strided up to the microphone. It wasn't a natural gait but a sort of prop; it said "here I am with the walk you recognise". Bob Hpe walked on in a leisurely way as if he was, well, on a golf course.
I once interviewed Dickie Henderson; after we had quaffed quite a few gins and whiskies I watched him, from the wings, walk on stage for his evening performance; he did it as casually as Bob Hope and did not waver intoxicatingly at all (unlike yours truly who almost fell down the stairs).
There's a Welsh pianist who comes on as if he is attending a funeral and a French pianist who walks on as if he's on his own in a park not giving a damn about anyone; but when he plays he is magnificent.

Dinu Lipatti

A couple of weeks ago I bought from an Oxfam shop a recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; it was in a stack of ye olde vinyl records. There, I noticed, also in the stack was a record of Dinu Lipatti playing mainly Bach and Chopin. He was famous for his playing of Bach I believe. I already have a record of him playing Greig's Piano Concerto. Today I returned to the shop hoping Lipatti's record was still there, but it wasn't. Why hadn't I bought it when buying the Beethoven? Because I'm mean, that's why.
Today I suddenly realised that perhaps I could get some Lipatti on "Spotify". And there he was. Heaps of pieces he had recorded: Bach and Chopin and Liszt among others. So I clicked the first on the list, Jesu joy of man's desiring, and heard that marvellous transcription by Myra Hess. Then a Chopin Nocturne - beautiful.
I recall hearing of Arthur Schnabel visiting Walter Legge at EMI studios, Legge being the Director of EMI. Legge asked Schnabel if he had heard Lipatti play. Schnabel said no. "I'll give you a taste then," said Legge. "Greig's Piano Concerto." "O no, not that," said Schnabel. "OK, then just the cadenza." Schnabel listened and sat up amazed at the brilliance of this young performer.
Later they met again. Legge had arranged a concert at which Lipatti was to play a concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Herbert von Karajan; he wanted to know if Schnabel would be at the ready to stand in for Lipatti in case he was too ill to perform. Schnabel said "Yes, I'll do it even though Karajan is conducting."
I'm not aware that he did but soon after Dinu Lipatti died of Hodgkin's disease at the age of 33.

Rembrandt

Ivor Newton, famous in his day as an art critic, wrote that he had a blind spot when it came to Rembrandt. I thought of this when I went to Cardiff museum today to see an original painting by Rembrandt:Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet. It's a well composed, well painted picture of a middle aged woman who evidently is quite well off and has a certain plain dignity. But I thought to myself "why should I find anything interesting in looking at this work?" She sits on the chair and reminds me of my grandmother, not of the same period of course since the portrait was executed in 1657 and my grandmother lived until the 1950's; but there is the same air of quiet authority without there being any animosity or hate there, just that acceptance of life's pleasures and troubles without celebrating the pleasures or letting the troubles bring you down.
We were in Amsterdam a couple of years ago and went to the large Van Gogh exhibition there. I am not too keen on Van Gogh's earlier paintings of workers eating potatoes etc. and by the time I had got round a couple of the rooms, needing most of the time to have to crane my neck to see the pictures over the crowd of admirers, slowly, inch by inch, making their way with their tape recorders but then I was whacked and needed a seat. So, even if I had known that a large Rembrandt exhibition was down the street from this one I don't think I'd have managed to see it. In short, I needed a seat and a drink. No, not coffee.
Cardiff museum it seems to me, has been transformed from the rather dull store of tresaures to a place which is alive with art and history. There is now so much to see and it is all presented so well that even that which I thought uninteresting has now become worth seeing.
The restaurant is good too: an attractive menu which I didn't sample and good coffee which I did.

Cats

Cats are in the news. Cats and their owners - though one doesn't actually own a cat, it owns you.
Someone, probably a scientific researcher on a government grant at one of our superior universities, has declared that the owners of cats are more intelligent than the owners of dogs. Since I have never owned a dog but have had a couple of cats over the years I'd like to think that there's some truth in it.
Two letters appeared in The Times on the vitally important topic: "Cats do not have owners. In return for food, cats lease their services to gullible people." And "I'm sure I am not more intelligent than dog owners, but I do know for certain that I am regarded as staff by the small furry family members."
My father used to say: "a female cat in the house becomes the owner of the house." I can prove that. One female cat whose name escapes me - actually I wonder if it did have a name because it was a stray that sneaked into the house and just would not leave. The tom cat we had when I was a kid seemed to tolerate us. She didn't, she just sat there looking miserable and "in charge". He would play a bit - fight, that is - and liked going out of an evening - for the night. She never went anywhere.
A friend of mine, an ex copper, had about eight cats, most of them strays. I have the feeling that when a cat finds a sucker like him he goes out to tell his mates and they all arrive on the doorstep.
One day when I gave him a lift home from playing badminton, he said "come and have a look indoors at my cats". I told him I was allergic to cats' fur. He said: "just pop your head round the door of the front room". I did and was presented with the spectacle of his eight cats sttretched out on every chair and settee in the room. "Where do you sit?" I asked. "There," he said and pointed to the carpet.
By the way, they all stared at me as if I had just crawled out from under a stone.

Godot

Sunday Telegraph's theatre critic, Tim Walker, gave "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett only two stars. He said he just didn't see the point of it. He wrote: "I am afraid I am still, even after seeing this distinguished cast (Ian McKellan, Roger Rees and Matthew Kelly) give it their all, waiting to see what the point of it is. It is indeed awful."
He has pretty well summed up the point of the play in that sentence - it has no point. To Beckett life had no point, it was meaningless. People pretend that there is a purpose in life but there isn't.
Like Tim Walker I find the play "indeed awful". I have yet to see a production that is enjoyable. This production apparently is enjoyable but, Tim Walker suggests, the knockabout goings-on are really these actors giving comic performances that the play itself doesn't have.
Beckett can be funny but not I think in the way these actors play him; he is funny like Chekov. Chekov is at his funniest when his characters are moaning about the triviality of their lives. The ageing actress in "The Segull" when asked why she is dressed in black replies "I am in mourning for my life". You won't like Chekov if that's not amusing. And you won't like Beckett if the character he is portraying isn't moaning about life being utterly pointless.
When a production of "Waiting for Godot" was staged in an American prison in 1957 the worried producer thought he ought to introduce it; he compared the play to a piece of Jazz music "to which one must listen for whatever one may find in it". He thought there'd be a rsuh to the exit soon after the start. He was wrong. They all stayed to the end and they all enjoyed it. In their pointless existence they could see the point of it.

Languages

The government is urging schools to devote some time to Mandarin because China is "the country of the future". However, Mandarin is not, it seems, an easy language to teach or learn and the High Master of St Paul's School, Martin Stephen, writing in The Times today, thinks it would be preferable if pupils learnt the language after school and that it should be taught with regference to Chinese arts, history, music and so on; in other words it shouldn't be taught as "a language subject" in the curriculum but as a sort of cultural experience. One reason is that if learnt as another language, a student can get it wrong. He cites a case of a man who learnt it on his own for a year, then when he greeted a local dignitary in China, instead of saying thank you, he appeared instead to compare him "to something rather unpleasant associated with a pig."
I recall a visit to the west of France and, in my schoolboy French, asking at a butchers' shop for a small quantity of meat only for the grateful butcher to come from a back room with a lump of meat the size of a bull's chest.
On another occasion I wished to know if there were any mosquitos in ther area and having to resort eventually to a mime of a flying creature buzzing about the room and landing on my arm. No one knew what I was trying to convey. Then someone said "an aeroplane?"
In general on the continent I usually found it more satisfactory to mime rather than speak. Tea of course is easy; sandwich is quite easy (slap one hand on the other and bite the invisible sandwich); wine is too easy.In Rome I asked for a half carafe of wine only to have delivered a whole carafe. It's not only easy, it's fun.

Amateurs

We had booked a few nights in Torquay and wondered what was on at the theatres. Mostly rubbish, except for an amateur company doing Arthur Miller's "All My Sons". I couldn't believe it: amateur companies don't do Miller. Or Ibsen. Or Shaw. Or Pinter. They do Aykebourne and "Sailor Beware" and farces and such things. I wondered if times were changing for the better so, later, I looked up what amateur groups were doing in South London (since we were going there on a visit). To my amazement one group was doing "My Son Jack" an excellent play George Haigh about Kipling and his son who got killed in WW1. Another company was actually looking for new plays. Another was doing a play by Shakespeare.
I go back many years to seeing Blackwood Drama Group doing plays by Shaw and Euripides and Shakespeare as well as, of course, the general staple diet of amateur groups - no Aykbourne then of course.
But Blackwood had a very good company and an enterprising set of people in charge. I recall Sybil Thorndike doing Lady Macbeth there with a small company which was added to by local actors. Also I recall a performance of "St Joan" by Bernard Shaw which was excellent.
I write plays for amateurs - actually I don't write them specifically for amateurs, professionals are welcome to try them out too! What I mean is that I write plays and that only amateurs perform them. Sometimes. Not often.
Incidentally the production of "All my Sons" at Torquay was superb: acting and (what often lets down amateur comapnies) the set. It was..... I'm looking for the right word...... it was "professional".