On a Weekend of Snow Affecting Play

[danieldwilliam]

 

A snow affected weekend but none the worse for that.

I knocked off a bit early on Friday. The streets were still clogged with snow and the buses were only running a Sunday service. I was keen to get  home during the daylight and I had to pick up some groceries from Waitrose.

Waitrose had pretty much been cleared out of milk. Whether this is a result of panic buying, or prudent buying ahead or snow affected deliveries I shall leave to the judgement and prejudice of the reader. The journey home was actually pretty straightforward. The most direct bus home turned up after a three minute wait and was actually quicker than usual getting home. This gave me a nice positive feeling about the weekend.

I returned to discover that there had been sledging and that inbetween sledging the Captain had continued to watch The Greenhouse. I fervently hope it is over now. He had also made a den using pretty much all of the furniture in the family room. It was quite an impressive den with its own lighting system. MLW turned my groceries into a fish pie which was delicious. We are approaching the end of the great freezer clear out where we consciously use any thing that is in the freezer. I think we're down to a lamb shank, two bags of pumpkin puree and some naan breads now.

The evenings largely involved television. Largely the television is detective fiction. Strike, which made me a little sad for the characters. Endevour which was a bit fanciful and made me cross about Oxford. I also watched the first Episode of Troy: Fall of a City. I'm not sure I much cared for any of the characters. I'm not sure if this is deliberate or not. I'm not sure I cared for the cinemagraphic style either. I'll give the second episode a go tonight and see if I feel more engaged.

My level of engagement is much less than the Iliad which I saw with MLW a few years ago and which I still think about.

https://lyceum.org.uk/whats-on/production/the-iliad

On Saturday I took the Captain out to clear the pavement around the flat. He worked really hard and was genuinely helpful. After a bit he decided he'd done enough and went off to look at icicles. We got quite a lot of the pavement clear and it made quite a difference. The curse of a ground floor corner flat is that there is quite a lot of pavement to clear. 

MLW went on an expedition to Blackwells and came home with a new board game, called Hey, That's My Fish.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/8203/hey-s-my-fish

Described as Penguin Chess it is very simple but quite clever and requires a nice mix of planning ahead and improvisation. We played about a dozen games of it over the weekend and I'll bring it along to Board Game Lunch Club.

There was more sledging. I took some nice video clips of the Captain and MLW sledging down the Links on his new sledge. He's pretty good at it. He's a generally physically quite ept person. MLW and I recalled how he used to scoot down Middle Meadow Walk at great speed, weaving in and out of the pedestrians until one day someone spoke to him whilst he was waiting at the bottom of the hill for us to catch up and he was freaked out. His Australian cousins are very excited about the snow.

Spoke to my mum on Sunday. Her village in Cornwall is quite hilly and there had been quite a few mobility issues. I don't think she'd left the house for a week which is fair enough. She's been up to see my sister quite a lot and needs to spend some time looking after herself a bit now I think.

We managed to miss the school snow clearing working party through the magic of conflicting email notifications. Bit of a shame as I'd have liked to have helped for an hour particularly after working on my technique on Saturday.

MLW and I cooked a week's worth of food on Sunday. I made a very nice beef stew with dumplings and there is some mushroom soup.

I'd hoped to take the Captain sledging on  Blackford Hill on Sunday but he wasn't up for it. He's been sledging since Wednesday and I think he'd done enough.  Then he and I curled up in the sofa-den and watched Despicable Me films / had a nap before it was time for some more Penguin Chess.

By Sunday evening the temperature had rizen above zero and the snow had turned to (relatively) warm rain and the big slow melt was on. By this morning most of the road and pavements were clear. The walk to the gym had only about 30 metres with snow underfoot. I think by Tuesday morning it will be pretty much all gone.

Comments

[andrewducker]

I quite enjoyed Penguin Chess when I played it with my nephew a few years ago. Easy to pick up, and deeper than it looks.

[danieldwilliam]

It is deeper than it looks.

I've been quite enjoying the gambit of getting myself cut off about mid-game but on a large block of one fish tiles.

[danieldwilliam]

By chance Emmaanuella Cole, who played Hera in the Iliad has a guest role in Strike.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2383341/

[alithea]

The Boy and I have not tried Troy, aside from a few minutes while I was looking at the TV guide, which didn't grab us. We briefly discussed that no-one seems to be able to make a decent TV series or film out of the narrative - I have yet to see a version that didn't disappoint me. It seems likely this would continue the trend if I watched it.

I watched 'Call the Midwife' and then needed another episode of Miss Fisher to recover because it seems I still need trigger warnings for bereavement :( I've been recording Endeavour but have yet to actually watch any of this season.

[danieldwilliam]

You'd think that someone would be able to make decent film or television out of something that has a legitimate claim to being the Greatest Story Ever Told but so far, not so much. It's like Dune.

I think the reason might be that very few of the protagonist characters in the Iliad are sympathetic being a bunch of arrogant, blood-thirsty warlords and the virtues they embody are a bit alien to the us.

But then, Trojan Women is one of my favourite plays and I loved the play of the Iliad that I saw at the Lyceum and if I were to direct only one play it would Simon Armitage's version of the Odyssey.

Miss Fisher is an ever ready cure for all ailments of the soul. Unless what ailes thee is homesickness for Melbourne or the unrequited love of a 1920's detective.

[alithea]

I am not familiar with any of the plays. It makes me wonder though, if the problem is that TV and movie writers aren't getting the POV right and the actors they employ think they are making an action & adventure story where no-one has time to worry whether they care about the characters or not. Hmmm.

She is indeed - I'm just over half way through season 2 and it has definitely hit its stride - no weak episodes at all so far this season.

[danieldwilliam]

Trojan Women is an Athenian play written in about 415BC about the women in Troy and what happens to them after the sack of the city. IIRC it was written as a response to the sacking of an allied city by the Athenians and the message is pretty much "Turns out *we're* the bastards here."

The version of the Iliad I saw had some lovely singing and focused more on the relationships of the Gods than on the mortals, which was an interesting take on it.

And Armitage's Odyssey is a pretty straight version of the story but written by Simon Armitage so very, very good.

I think you make a good point there about the point of view. And it's not particularly an action adventure story. There's plenty of fighting but, other than a horrific roll call of dead soldiers, it's not very conclusive - the action doesn't lead to anything much and certainly not to anything good.

[danieldwilliam]

I thought there was a little wobble in quality back end of Season Three or early Season Four I think - nothing disasterous - and it might just have been that MLW and I had watched too many back to back episodes in too short a time.