Recycling

My wife held in her hand a broken light bulb. "What do I do with this?" she asked.
"Throw it out," I said.
"Where? In what container? Black bin, green bin or green bag?"
I pondered a while then said, as if a light bulb had come on in my head, "Electrics!"
"So?"
"It's electrical," I said. "So it goes with electrical material."
"And where is 'electrical material'? Black bin, green bin or green bag."
"None of them," I said.
"So what do I do with it?"
"Mmmm," I said unhelpfully. Then the light bulb in my head shone brightly again. "Down the dump."
She went to put her hands to her hips to emphasise what she was going to say but the bulb she had in her hand made her think twice about it.
"I know what you're going to say," I said. I can read her like a book after n years of marriage (I've put 'n' because I'm not sure of the right number). "You're going to say: 'Do we (i.e. me) have to go all the way to the dump for us to get rid of this light bulb?' Am I right?"
She nodded.
I took the light bulb from her and placed it on a shelf in the porch.
This conversation occurred some months ago; the light bulb is still there on the shelf. I'm getting fond of it; between a small cactus and a cardboard box that has something in it (can't remember what) it looks rather nice - artistic, Damien Hurst-ish.

Adrian Mitchell

I was a theatre reviewer for a few years covering the Cardiff area. One production I recall was a pot pourri of scenes got together by Adrian Mitchell who was, for a year, resident writer at Cardiff University. It was watchable but not outstanding. The only thing I recall from it now was a group of people singing, to the tune of Zipper de doo dah, the words "Zipper de doo dah, zipper de ay, tell the world we are glad to be gay" - something like that.
Another more ambitious show he staged was loosely based on three artists, two of which I knew of, Bix Biderbeck and Hoagy Carmichael, the third person I can't bring to mind.
When Adrian Mitchell finished his year at Cardiff he said to a friend of mine who was, like him, a poet, "While I've been here no one in the English Department has seemed to want to know me." My friend said "Perhaps that's because you're not dead yet."
Now he is. I wonder if his work will now be taken more seriously by the department of English at the University.
An American writer died, can't recall who, and it inspired a journalist wag to write: "So and So is dead; great career move."

Welshness

I wrote a play, Horseplay, which won a competition but was never produced. I was close once when a member of the writing group I used to be associated with, a rather formidable lady of a certain age, took the play to The Bristol Old Vic and told (probably ordered) the Artistic Director to read it. He phoned me and I went to see him about the play. He was interested but it was, for Bristol audiences he felt, "too Welshy".
So it was - is.
There is an actress in Gavin and Stacey who, according to an interview in a colour magazine, could not get a job for a long time because she was told she was "too Welshy".
You can have a Midlands accent and be acceptable, or a Scottish accent, but not a Welsh one.
This girl is in a comedy and I wonder if, because it's funny, she can succeed because her accent is, to some people who aren't Welsh, also funny.
Yet Richard Burton succeeded, and Anthony Hopkins too. So....... ?
I don't have an answer to this riddle.

Pop Songs

In an army barrack room you sometimes get friendly with men you otherwise wouldn't want to socialise with. There was a young man, a few years younger than me, who had been a member of a London gang. He was not the sort I normally had much time for, but I got to know him quite well, we seemed to like each other, we hit it off. Rarely he'd talk about his experiences in London and rarely did I mention having attended university and intended to be a teacher when I'd left the forces. I can't remember what we talked about but he was always helpful to me and I to him. When we went our separate ways we lost contact.
One thing I remember about him was that if he wanted to say something serious he usually quoted the words of a pop song to substantiate his argument. "Look what The Beatles say in their song," he'd say, and quote something relevant - maybe "all you need is love".
It struck me then how potent the words of popular melodies were to young people, especially those with not much education, with none of the great poets or philosophers to quote from.
I recalled that bloke today when I read an interview in The Spectator that the editor did with Lilly Allen. She writes meaningful songs, she said; they meant a lot to her and probably were meaningful to others.
I have never thought that there much sustenance in pop songs; surely they were suitable for dancing to, not much in the way of depth.
Maybe I'm wrong. After all, there is no poetry written now that appeals to ordinary people; the poetry written now is written for a small elite group, usually other poets. I remember a pop singer saying many years ago that "we are now the real poets", and I'm wondering if he's right.

Van Johnson

A very likeable guy; you could never imagine him playing a villain. The sort of "boy next door", not like Rees Witherspoon, "the girl next door who can't wait to get out of town"; no, the boy next door who likes living next to you.
He walked heavily with a sort of roll like a sailor, so I could not think of him as a dancer. So I was quite surprised to see his name at the head of an advert for "The Music Man" many years ago in London. This would be after his great successes in Hollywood - on the downward path after great success like many actors who then trod the boards in America and London.
I don't consider him a great actor - I cannot visualise him playing any of the great theatrical roles - but I see him as a second star, a backup actor supporting a greater actor as with Humphrey Bogart in "The Caine Mutiny" and Gene Kelly in "Brigadoon".
His blind detective in "10 Paces to Baker Street" was not mentioned in The Times obituary: I thought that was one of his best roles.
It always struck me that when he spoke it was as if he was about to make a speech, somehow it wasn't a natural way to speak. This too I always felt about Walter Pigeon. The result was that neither could never debase the character they were playing, they were always a trifle grand in their roles. Neither would play tragedy. Nor comedy. They were both themselves. Always. Not dull but it was as if they were afraid of making fools of themselves.

Holidays

Dr. Johnson said of The Devil's Causway: "Worth seeing but not worth going to see."
I know what he means. Too many times have I travelled a long distance at great discomfort to see something touristically famous only either to think something like that or, worse, to think "Not really worth seeing."
Now that I'm ageing I find visiting famous places, seeing famous pictures in art galleries and so on, rather a chore (sometimes a bore). And, these days with the hordes of tourists abroad, I often find that I am in a queue or crowd that is so slow moving that I want to sit down and rest a while, and often, in such a crowd, not able to see that which I had come to see. In Amsterdam I found the Van Goch art gallery so full with people who lingered a long time on each painting, listening to the info over a commentary on cassette borrowed at the front desk, that I could not move along at the pace I wished to go and, therefore, missed a lot of the exhibition by going round groups.
My grandfather used to say "O I don't want to travel anymore, I can read about the places I would like to visit and look at pictures of them." That was fifty or so years ago. I can only imagine what his reaction would be now with all the technical facilities we have at our dispoal: TV travelogues; David Attenborough's nature documentaries; the internet; films......
I used to dream of a holiday I would have liked to take: a Rolls Royce to the South of France, staying at top class hotels of course throughout; a stop at Menton for their small scale music festival (a swim in the clear sea - it was clear once when I was there, don't know if it is now); drive up to Lucerne for the music festival there (I once went up to the box office there and asked for a ticket for that evening's concert - the girl at the box office dropped her jaw and shook her head slowly as if I were a lunatic or a leper); from Lucerne to London, via Paris (to dine of course) for The Proms; from there to Edinburgh for the Festival and then back home.
Dreams, dreams, dreams.

Film Music

Sometimes the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra, made up of professionals and amateurs I believe, perform a concert of music from films. I have been to a few of these concerts but I find them, usually, unsatisfying. Some of the pieces have been made by composers or arrangers into quite good works in themselves: they have the structures of tone poems in that they unify around a theme. But often the music is slight.
Music for films early on was used to act as a dramatic accompaniment to action so that in a mystery you would expect sounds which enhanced the mystery; for comic scenes you would probably have "comic like music", light of touch, breezy. And so on.
A good deal of this music was simply sounds that of course were musical but which underlined the main action going on; the action and dialogue were there to be seen and heard, not the background music.
One of the worst examples I have seen and heard was in Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train" in which the composer (Dimitri Tiomkin maybe?) underlines practically every piece of action with what he thought was suitable musical sound. I don't think the score of that film would make an enjoyable work to be played on its own.
But some can: John Williams's can; so can Elmer Bernstein's; so can, of course, Arthur Bliss's as for "Things to Come".
Two examples of music used most successfully in films are two in which already well-known compositions by famous composers were appropriated: "Death in Venice" with Mahler's 5th. and "Brief Encounter" with Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto.
I think film music is most successful when you are not aware of it or, when you are, when it adds excitement to the drama: "The Magnificent Seven"; "Shane"; "The Horse Soldiers"; "City Lights".