I have been looking at the reading list for our next term. I mean the Lent term at Cambridge, where I am a student in between taxi customers, did I mention it?
Here are some of the best-selling page-turners included therein:
The Theatre of Wole Soyinka: New Frontiers in Performance Theory and Post-colonial Discourse
Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance from Confucius to the Present
Transgressive Itineraries: Post-colonial Hybridization of Dramatic Realism
There are lots of others.
I don’t think I will be purchasing any of them since the starting price on Amazon seems to be about thirty quid, which is an awful lot for a book that you know perfectly well you will never, ever read. I haven’t yet looked in Windermere Library but I think it is unlikely that I will manage to unearth any of them from in between the historical romances and True Crime Shockers.
Nevertheless, I am often asked Wot You Readin? by taxi customers, and it might be very tempting to secrete some of this stuff in the door pocket to flourish at them and thus conclusively terminate the conversation without further ado. They almost always say I read a book once but I didn’t finish it, it were when I were at school. I can’t remember wot it were called.
I always smile politely and comment on the obvious intellectual capacities of my customers, most of whom would not be able to identify irony if it were packaged in the Complete Works Of Shakespeare and dropped on their toes.
In any case I have never heard of Wole Soyinka, certainly he was not in this year’s pantomime, and there is nothing at all on the list written by my own personal theatrical hero, who was a chap called Fred Bentham, and who wrote The Art Of Stage Lighting, which was once my absolute bible. Indeed, I once knew a chap whose father had worked with him, and we discussed his pearls of filtration-wisdom in hushed tones.
I can’t remember a word from The Art Of Stage Lighting any more, although in my youth I could have quoted entire passages verbatim, especially concerning the magnificent products of Strand Electric and their three-way dimmers. Indeed, there were three hundred and fifty shades of filter for theatre lanterns, and I could identify any one at the barest casual glance by its catalogue number. Aha, I would say, that’s a sheet of seventy nine, cut for a Patten Twenty Three. No wonder I did not have a boyfriend. How life moves on.
Anyway, our next module is about writing for performance. There is a lot of screenwriting and television involved, and I am supposed to put together a pitch for a television show. I haven’t yet thought of one, but I am sure I will come up with something. So far all I have dreamed up is a monologue with the title Speaking Truth To Power, and it is about all the things I would like to say to Jeremy Hunt. He does not need to be in it, I could say them all on my own, it could be like Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. I could post it to him and he would have to listen if it said it was from Cambridge.
I have been pondering this, on and off, for a few days, without much success, and this evening Mark has gone to work on his own leaving me to get on with my literary contemplations undisturbed. He was quite insistent about this, because he has got a good book and wants to watch a film on Netflix about car chases.
He knows perfectly well that when next we have an evening at home together we are going to have to watch some of the intellectual films listed for next term, and I don’t think there are car chases in any of them. One of them is by somebody called Bong Joon Ho, who is either foreign or afflicted with completely mental parents, it is called Parasite. One of them is called Mother I Am Suffocating This Is My Last Film About You, and one is called Galdem Sugar, which I can’t watch because it is on the BBC and I don’t have a licence. I thought I might find somebody with a very high boredom threshold and watch it at their house, but then decided that would be a waste of a happy opportunity to socialise for an evening, so probably I won’t bother. There was a review in The Guardian, I will just read that.
In other news we have bathed the dogs because of the dead seagull smells and the dried sand, and Rosie is in disgrace because she broke into my sewing box and ate the reels of cotton. She is wearing them hung round her collar to remind her of her shame. I would not have done this only it is the second time and now she has eaten the navy blue, the red and the pink, and the cost is starting to mount up. Roger Poopy does not do naughty things any more. He is still in mourning.
Poor Roger Poopy. It is very sad when the creature you loved best was an abusive old misery who growled at you when you just sucked his fur even the littlest bit.
Lucy considered pet insurance for her cats and discovered that it also covered bereavement counselling when they snuffed it, not that I can imagine needing it at the demise of the cats.
Perhaps we should see if they will offer it to Roger Poopy.
