anef

I had plans for this morning. They involved doing my physio exercises, making a stew for this week’s dinners, having a leisurely breakfast and setting off in good time to meet friends at Cambridge station to go up to London to see King Lear at the National Theatre. They did not involve a trip to the emergency vet.

However, when I got up Freddy did not rush to greet me demanding fuss as is his wont. I looked around, couldn’t find him and assumed that he had not come home last night. A little worrying, but something he does occasionally in the Summer.

Then as I glanced into the back bedroom I noticed him sitting quietly on a floor cushion. I went to say hello, and he got up to be stroked, which was when I discovered that he was limping badly on one hind leg and couldn’t in fact put his foot on the floor. Cue a visit to the vet, who discovered a deep cut on the top of the foot, though no broken bones, and a slight fever. Then cleaning, bandaging, antibiotics, anti-inflammatory juice, and a great deal of protestations from monsieur. So now he’s confined to the back bedroom until the foot heals up. Antibiotics twice a day, anti-inflammatory once a day, and absolutely no going outside. But he seems better already, in that he can now put the foot down and limp around on it. I am hoping that the bandaging will last until Wednesday, when I have to take him to my normal vet for a check up. I’m not betting on it, though.

Visit to M’s parents’ flat to go through stuff.  M finds books and a picture he would like to keep.  I also find some books.  We lug back to flat on the bus.

Lunch at an Italian restaurant on Broughton St – Locanda de Gusti.  We order a mixed platter, and are astonished by a huge number of small dishes, some hot (pepper stuffed with couscous and pesto, grilled vegetables with tapenade, fried sausages and potatoes), some cold (spicy sausage, anchovies, seafood salad, rocket salad).  While we are eating some other people come in and order the day’s special, which seems to be an enormous assortment of crab, crayfish and prawns.  It looks amazing.  Maybe I will have to come back another time.  Having cleaned all our plates, we go on to Italian desserts (I have a cannolo, M has sfogliatella and K has plum and almond cake) and coffee.

Then up to the Spiegeltent in George Square, for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  The company start off as a group of teenagers in detention, forced to read the play by their dynamic teacher, Mr Goodfellow.  But then the scene opens up and we get to Athens.  It’s an excellent production, probably one of the best that I’ve seen (and that includes my visit to The Globe in London).  The text has been expertly cut, including the fairies who are only present as a murmur of sound in the background.  The cast deliver their lines with clarity and understanding.  There’s a lot of physical comedy.  The rustics are funny, Oberon and Titania are sexy.  Thoroughly enjoyable.

Then we have a couple of hours before the Les Clochards in a different tent about 50 yards away.  We sit on a bench in the sunshine and eat spicy bahn mi baguettes.  The Les Clochards are a band dressed as tramps, who perform high energy versions of songs that they complain bitterly were stolen from them.  Standout ones were Like a Virgin, Girls just Wanna have Fun, and Sledgehammer (“Do you know where that Peter Gabriel lives?” they ask plaintively).  For an encore two of them came out wearing only their tattoos and very holey underpants, and sang The Number of the Beast, which was just gob-smacking.

Then off to two less successful performances, the Trojan Women (but not unfortunately the Euripides version), and Tania Edwards, a stand-up comedian. The flyers for her show, Killer Instinct, picture her holding a tabby cat, and the blurb refers to an unhappy ending with a cement mixer.  “I bet the cat gets it” I mutter as we and the other six audience members head into the venue.  And indeed it does.

The first show this morning is Female Gothic.  The tickets say Assembly Three, George Square.  We turn up at the Assembly Rooms, in George Street with 20 minutes to spare, only to find that this was not the Assembly we were looking for.  We leap into a taxi which delivers us, fifteen minutes later, to George Square in the Old Town.  Then we have an anxious few minutes searching though the various Assembly venues here before we finally discover Three, tucked away along a walkway, round a corner and down a flight of steps.  The queue is just going in. 

Female Gothic is three gothic tales, originally written by women writers, and narrated by a lady in black Victorian dress.  Her props are a leather armchair and a candelabrum with three candles.  The tales are not quite chilling enough to counteract the overheated nature of the venue, and I nod off for a few seconds in the second one.  The third is quite scary, though, and afterwards we spend some time discussing the subtext of infidelity and betrayal.

We had a plan to go to La Garrigue (favourite French restaurant) for lunch, but nobody is very hungry, and it is starting to rain.  Instead we find ourselves at the Brasserie in the new undercroft of the Chambers Street Museum.  I remembered the museum café as having reasonable food of the soup and sandwich variety but very lackadaisical service.  Things however, have changed.  We are briskly ushered to a table and offered a short but interesting menu.  The place clearly caters to mothers with small children, as the place is packed with them, but service is efficient, the food fresh and beautifully cooked, and the wine list short and well chosen.  There are also two person carafes of wine, so it is plainly a place where ladies who lunch go to meet each other, with or without their offspring.

There is just time for a short visit to Transreal Fiction before heading off to our second show, at the same venue as the imprisoned concubines.  Eurydice is a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice story, with puppetry, dance and physical theatre.  It’s a student production, but has some interesting and entertaining moments, and a genuinely touching ending.  The world of the dead and of the living exist side by side, invisible to each other, and Eurydice’s dead father dances next to her, unseen, at her wedding.  Messages pass between them pegged to a clothesline or pushed through the earth, but the dead and the living speak different languages and can’t understand each other.  In the end Orpheus and Eurydice are united in death but they have forgotten each other (sorry if that’s a spoiler).

Shopping at books and games shops, and then we have different plans for the evening.  In order to be Cultured, M and I have booked a concert at the real Festival, and Karen has arranged to meet up with C, an old friend from Cambridge.  M and I go and have tapas at Café Andaluz on George St (standout dish for me was the pig’s cheeks in red wine, honey and chilli sauce – the pork just falling apart, and coated in the thick, sweet and hot barbeque sauce). 

The concert is the Cleveland Orchestra performing Lutoslawki’s Concerto for Orchestra and the first four parts of Smetana’s Má Vlast, at the Usher Hall.  I had never heard of the former, and have to admit that I chose the latter because we had done it at school, but both were dynamic and exciting.  You could tell that we were in the posh seats by the amount of scent that was wafting over us from the surrounding audience.