It is almost one in the morning, and I am in bed.
We are all in bed, except for Mark, who is in the shower. It is wonderful to have a camper van which is equipped with all of these modern conveniences, I am glad that we have bought this and not a tent.
We have had an ace, and truly adventurous day. We have been so busy that we are all agreed that the rest of the holiday would be best spent sitting quietly on the shore of somewhere, reading books and eating holiday chocolats.
We have just come away from York, where we went to see Macbeth in the pretend-Elizabethan theatre that they have built there for the summer.
The theatre was brilliant. In all my years of working and visiting in theatres, never before have I seen a production in a built-for-purpose Elizabethan theatre, and it works very well indeed. You get an ace view of the stage, and during boring bits you get a jolly good view of the rest of the audience fidgeting and trying to eat their popcorn discreetly as well.
Unfortunately there were several boring bits. I am very sorry to report that in fact the production was rubbish. I like Shakespeare, when it is done by Judi Dench and Ian McKellan, but it wasn’t. It was done by some excitable enthusiasts with a great deal of shouting and grimacing and arm waving. Here is a clue as to how bad it was. The audience laughed when Macbeth was stabbed at the end.
I frowned at Mark and the children, to indicate to them that it was bad manners, and they shouldn’t, but they laughed anyway, and pointed out that the lady next to them was laughing as well. This was partly because MacDuff had put his dagger in one pocket and his blood capsule in another, and some rooting around was necessary before he struck the fatal blow, and then some further faffing about in order to get the blood capsule into Macbeth’s open mouth. It is not easy to be discreet in front of an audience of two hundred people.
I was sorry that it was so rubbish, because I had wanted Oliver to be inspired with a lifelong love for Shakespeare, but he wasn’t, and did impressions of the Three Witches all of the way back. Also they tried to be politically correct, and so the liver of the Blaspheming Jew became the liver of Blaspheming Sue. King Duncan had a daughter instead of one of his sons, and one of the three witches was a man. It was not polite to laugh at these things, but we did.
If you go, avoid the Yorkshire red wine at all costs. It was so bad that we actually took it back and changed it for some decent foreign stuff. The fudge, however, was superb, and Oliver said the same about the popcorn.
The theatre was in fact the end of a very happy day spent at Lightwater Valley, which is a low-budget Yorkshire version of Alton Towers. We did not mind at all that it wasn’t Alton Towers, and in fact the things that we all enjoyed most were not the rides. The children found a game that gave you instructions about jumping around on numbers painted on the ground, and Mark and I liked the falconry displays.
I have done quite a bit of falconry, and hence can admire somebody doing it really well, which this chap did. He had owls and hawks and flew them to the lure properly and not just from the perch to his glove. Flying birds to the lure is hard. Also they were all beautifully kept and looking very healthy indeed.
We talked to him afterwards, and he told us falconry stories, which was ace, and made me long, briefly, to have the sort of life where there is time for hunting rabbits with birds, but of course I wouldn’t want that really. It takes me all my time to run round to Sainsbury’s to buy things to cook for dinner. My days of hunting for dinner are long past.
We rode on roller coasters, and none of us were sick, despite the huge pizza dinner which had been included in the entry price. There was a dinosaur ride, and Oliver, who has been there with school, told me untruthfully that it wasn’t scary. It turned out to be a roller coaster in the dark with occasional dinosaur attacks. He can be very rascally sometimes.
I am in bed, as I think I told you, and my eyes are closing slowly. Mark is in bed next to me now, and reading a book which we have both enjoyed very much, an autobiography written by a retired football hooligan who became a QC.
I am going to find a photograph and say goodnight.
I don’t know where we are. Somewhere near Harrogate, I think.
