A Streetcar Named Desire at Almeida Theatre

I am something of a fan of Tennessee Williams but I had seen and heard versions of A Streetcar Named Desire a couple of times in recent years so the production at Almeida Theatre did not appeal immediately. Then the late casting of Patsy Ferran as Blanche piqued my interest mostly because she had been superb in another Williams play Summer and Smoke, also at Almeida.

A lot of other people were interested too and the complete run was showing at as Sold Out. I kept checking availability and a decent single ticket popped and I went for it. Seat B3 (front row) in the stalls cost me just £25 thanks to a generous discount for older 65s.

I had good plans to fit in some walking and eating before the matinee performance but things went a little wrong due to engineering works on the railways and I ended up walking there from London Bridge and having to miss lunch. No problem there, I just had a very expensive can of beer before the performance.

The arrangement of the theatre was different from usual with a square raised stage and seating all around it, that explained why row B was the front row, There was a gap all around the stage to allow actors to move easily around it and that gave me plenty of leg room and also made the look up to the performance area more comfortable.

The empty stage was a good sign as I like productions that use few props.

The opening of the play explained some of the stage arrangement and set the mood for the production with the cast all coming on stage which was then flooded with rain. I have no idea why they did that.

I found the production very mixed and am finding it hard to write about in a way which fairly reflects how I feel about it.

There were a lot of strengths, I loved the quieter moments where one or two actors on a bare stage let the words do all the work, the performance of Paul Mescal as Stanley was perfect.

Unfortunately there were some weaker elements and while these did little to detract from the overall drama they did enough to annoy, like a scratch on a new car; some elements of the production intruded on the drama, like the use of drums (!), and while Patsy Ferran got everything right I do not think she was old enough or, sorry, glamorous enough to be convincing in the role, the last person who I saw play Blanche was Gillian Anderson who had both the seniority and glamour.

I also think this production underplayed the main scene (no spoilers) and I am not certain that I would have guessed what had happened if I did not already know the story. And that matters because without the full import of that scene what follows makes little sense.

In list form there was more wrong with this production than was good about it but the good elements lasted much longer and I really enjoyed it overall.

A quick trip to Fortnum & Mason

My usual walking friend wanted to buy some salmon from Fortum & Mason so it was an easy decision to walk there on our next longish walk.

As always the first, and biggest decision was where to cross The Thames and we went for Putney Bridge as that was the most direct route.

I thought about trying to find a slightly different route there but there were no sensible alternatives so we took the route we always do.

We also had a break where we always do, at Putney Pantry just to the south of the bridge. The coffee and blueberry tart were most welcome!

There was more room for exploration on the other side of the bridge, and that is what we did. Out usual route, taken several times is along Kings Road but this time we tried to find a quieter away between that road and Fulham Road.

And that plan worked pretty well too. The route we took this time is the blue line and the purple lines are routes taken previously as recorded on CityStrides, Incidentally, the cluster of lines in the middle is around Finborough Theatre, a regular haunt.

Walking along new roads worked very well (apart, from possibly the bit where we went through the industrial part of a hospital) and we saw many new interesting things, notably houses we could not possibly afford and parks we could not possibly afford to live near. There was also a large number of blue plaques, mostly of people I had never heard of, especially in Eton Square.

The last part was the hardest with Piccadilly thick with tourists and Christmas shoppers and Fortum & Mason even busier. Luckily we were only buying one thing, my friend knew where to find it and the queue fot the till was not stupidly long so we were out agin in about ten minutes.

Shopping done and 21km covered in four hours; that is what I call a good morning's work.

The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary! at Jermyn Street Theatre

With a worrying number of versions of A Christmas Carol on at theatres across London it was nice to find some different seasonal fare to savour.

I like Jermyn Street Theatre for various reasons and that was a strong pull in this case. I was also familiar with the tale of Madame Bovary, having listened to an audio drama of it a couple of times I knew that while it is a tragedy there was a lot of good humour along the way.

Some things change and some things change. It used to be a moderate walk from my office in Kings Cross to Jermyn Street and it is now a pleasant longer walk of just under 20km. The restaurant above the theatre used to be a nice Italian and now it is an interesting African called Papa L’s Kitchen. The walk and the food were an excellent start to the evening.

The play opened towards the end of the story with Madame Bovary in the pharmacist getting arsenic to kill herself only to find that a couple of rat catchers had just bought it all. We were told that this was a framing device to enable the tragedy to be turned into a comedy.

We then went to the true beginning with the first encounter between Emma Rouault and local doctor Charles Bovary, and the story took a familiar route from there.

A familiar route but one twisted into great humour, the seeds of which were already in the text. Milking the humour for all it was worth was a fabulous cast of just four playing all the roles with melodrama, panache and a flamboyant array of props and costumes.

It was a lot of fun every step of the way.

Then there was the ending. I will not spoil it but the tragedy/farce dilemma was resolved in an unexpected and very satisfactory way.

The long walk and the fine meal set the evening up well and The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary! exceeded that build up, it was the ice cream with glacé fruit piled lovingly on top of the cake.

Christmas at Kew 2022

Christmas at Kew was such a success that I was quick to book again for 2022. I actually booked it in January! In 2021 I had a late drop-out (covid) and the missing person was keen to give it another ago and after a little bit of asking around I got 6 tickets. As a member of Kew Gardens they were only £23 each which I thought was very reasonable.

Again things wen't slightly awry, including a son having his work's Christmas party on that night, but we had a full set of six on the nigh, four of whom were always meant to be there.

The first part of the evening went wrong too. We arranged to all meet in The Railway Tavern beforehand and some of us planned to eat there. We ordered food at 6:15 but at 7pm (our timed tickets were for 7pm) our food had not arrived and so we got a refund and left.

Luckily Kew at Christmas saved the evening.
 

As with 2021, it was a long route through the gardens and it took as about 90 minutes to get around which included one short queue for hot drinks.

There were several large set pieces, like the one above, and lots of pretty lights between them. All of the settings were good and some were magical and I paused many times to take in the experience. And the best bit was walking through some of the displays and being engulfed by them.

I will be buying tickets for Kew at Christmas 2023 as soon as they go on sale. The only question is how many.

Martin Turner Ex Wishbone Ash at The Eel Pie Club

My Google Calendar, which only goes so far back, informs me that I have seen a version of Wishbone Ash 9 times, Martin Turner's version of the band 7 times (at Eel Pie Club 4 times) and heard the complete Argus 4 times. These are all underestimates due to my unreliable record keeping.

So it should come as no surprise that I went to see Martin Turner Ex Wishbone Ash on their lates visit to Eel Pie Club, an event I booked many moons ago but which had been rescheduled due to covid.

The gig was sold out, proving the value of buying the tickets over a year in advance! £17 well invested.

We got in just after the doors opened but were far to late to get a seat, not that we particularly wanted one, but we did get a good standing position on the raised section where we usually stand, the only difference this time was that there were people sitting in front of us. The photo shows how good our position was.

The venue was rammed which made getting to the bar more difficult that it was worth so this was an unusually dry concert.

The music was just as good as expected, and as it always is with this band. They have great material to work with and they know how to make the most of it. Argus was a very familiar treat and they followed this with their subsequent album Wishbone Four. I did not know this as an album but they had played some of the tracks before and it sounded much the same anyway so that was fine.

Martin was in a talkative mood and gave us introductions to several of the songs explaining how they were inspired, composed and recorded. We also got a few jokes.

The good vibes started with the band and spread through the very appreciative audience. It was another excellent evening. And it's only a few months until I am due to see them again.

Richmond to Vauxhall via Streatham

I like it when a plan comes together and this one certainly did, though admittedly it was a rather simple plan.

Streatham had come up in conversation on an earlier walk. It is a place we had both been to a few times but only to specific areas and neither of us knew it at all well so I was tasked with planning a route that took us through Streatham.

We had walked in the Wimbledon area not that long ago and on that occasion we had finished at Clapham Junction so it made sense to aim for Vauxhall this time. The first draft of the route came out at something over 20km so that was job done.

I mapped the walk from home but we met at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park, as we often do, which accounts for the odd spur just after the start. Having met up we followed the road (mostly closed to cars) across Richmond Park to Robin Hill Gate.

Normally we follow Beverly Brook through Wimbledon Common but this time we followed the map's instructions and cut across. Some of the route looked familiar but some were definitely new for us, and that's always good.

Wimbledon looked wimbledony which was good too, and then we were in new territory and hunting for a coffee. Natas Coffee Bar in (probably) Tooting did just what we wanted, which included an almond croissant.

The entrance to Streatham from Tooting Graveney Common was impressive with large house which were built in parkland and still manage to maintain a sense of grandeur despite the busy road.

Streatham itself was a pleasant walk helped a lot by the consistently wide pavements and the lack of traffic on side roads. I like to compare neighbourhoods and would love somebody to invent a simple model which captures the cultural mix and the prosperity or an area but, before then I'll work on instinct. In this case my impressions of Streatham were that it has a vibrant cultural mix and has a reasonable economy but it is a bit middle-of-the-road with few, if any, trendy (does anyone say hipster anymore?) cafes and few scruffy shops selling phonecards for Africa.

Somewhere Streatham became Streatham Hill but the change was not obvious and probably only matters if you are buying or selling a house.

The rest of the walk was familiar territory for me as I worked in Brixton from 2003 to 2006 and it was interesting to see what had changed over the last almost twenty years, obviously that included several new tallish blocks of flats. The street art in Brixton also lived up to expectations though it was sad to see that one had been vandalised.

The final part of the plan also worked brilliantly. We were looking for a basic cafe for lunch and I knew of one near Vauxhall that I had walked past several times when not looking to eat. It turns out that this is Kennington Lane Cafe and the Veggie Brunch was excellent. A great way to end a great walk.

Best of Enemies at Noel Coward Theatre

Picking which plays to go to is a very inexact science and I am inspired by several different things. For Best of Enemies it was the presence of Zachary Quinto who I had been a fan of since Heroes in 2006. The play winning a few awards was the clincher.

I wanted to make something of a special occasion of this evening out so I went for a good seat, A14, in the Grand Circle which cost a fair £55.

Helping to make the evening special was the usual visit to Govinda's vegetarian and vegan restaurant just north of Soho Square where the paneer option did the trick.

The play was set in America during the 1968 presidential campaign and covered the ground-breaking debates between the best of enemies William F. Buckley Jr., and Gore Vidal. This was something new to me which helped as I could appreciate the history lesson as well as the drama.

To reinforce the history lesson, the production cleverly incorporated some video from the time and while this was, at times, a little loud and brash it worked well and was a distinctive feature of the play.

The most distinctive feature was the performance of the two main actors Zachary Quinto and David Harewood who we saw both inside their discussion sessions and outside as they prepared beforehand and analysed afterwards. Perhaps it was my left-wing politics, perhaps it was my predilection for Quinto but I thought that Gore Vidal won the arguments but Buckley was still likeable. The play was a balanced portrayal of the debates and was not simple battle of good v evil.

There was a short coda to the story which was told in the present looking back at the impact of the debates and some of the broadcasting milestones since then. It tried to make a point of the change in approach from using informed analysts telling political stories to using personalities but I am not sure that it was a point worth making, it didn't detract from the play and it did not add a lot either.

Best of Enemies was great theatre and was thoroughly entertaining due to those performances, the neat production and the interesting history lesson it gave.

Harvest Time

Harvest is, I believe still Neil Young's biggest selling album having been first released in early 1972. I got into Neil Young a few years later, with 1979's Rust Never Sleeps and while I then bought everything I generally prefer the rockier albums, particularly those with Crazy Horse, to the more country ones (Old Ways is an exception because it had Misfits on it) so Harvest has never made my best-of list.

Of course a not the vest best Neil Young album is still a pretty good thing, it does have Words on it after all, so I was obviously going to see a film made during the recording of the album, a mere fifty years after the event.

The film had a limited release so I went to a showing a Kingston Odeon and willingly paid £15 for.

The film was delightfully casual with nothing (overtly) staged for the camera and it was like being alongside the musicians as they rehearsed and relaxed.

And because these were proper recording sessions the quality of the music was excellent even if the video was commensurate with the handheld cameras of the time.

The music carried the film and there were long sessions with Alabama, Words (hooray! and A Man Needs a Maid, the later being recorded with LSO in, of all places, Barking Town Hall.

I especially enjoyed the many close-ups of the musicians playing and seeing they ease with which they did so as a group.

It was a nice bonus to see Crosby, Stills and Nash recording backing vocals and a bit of a shame that we did not also get to see James Taylor or Linda Ronstadt who were mentioned in the contemporary introduction to the film that Neil recorded. 

There were some lovely little snippets in the non-music sessions too, such as Neil confessing to being a "rich hippie", saying that he had never heard of Pink Floyd (this was just before Dark Side) and comparing the approach to the final Beatles and Buffalo Springfield albums.

As with the Sparks documentary, The Sparks Brothers (now on Netflix), there was so much more that I wanted to see, things like the composition process and the reasons for working with LSO, but there is a limit to what you can include in a film running to just over two hours and in choosing to focus on the music Harvest Time got the balance right.

It is only 18km from Brentford to Waterloo

Like most of my walks with my regular companion, this one started with a vague plan that we adopted as we went along.

His suggestion was to walk from Ealing to Central London and I amended this slightly to start in Brentford (PokemonGo is to blame here!) and to end at Waterloo Station as that gave us the fastest route home.

The plan then became Gunnesbury Park, Ealing Common, Acton Park, Hyde Park, Green Park and St James' Park.

After my series of small disasters on my last walk to West Hampstead it was good to have a plan that worked, as they always used to do.

The walk was a good example of what walking through London is like with an interesting mix of areas including some very grand, some very new and some a little shabby. We also found some attractive coffee shops, Rada Cafe in Brentford, Dada's Diner in a part of Acton that is apparently called The Vale despite any evidence of hills, and Benugo on The Serpentine.

Despite these three leisurely stops we covered the 18km in a respectable four hours (i never pause the tracker these days because I forgot to restart it too often in the past).

The sunny windless weather helped but the real star of this very enjoyable walk was London, particularly the parts that were new to me; there was architecture, open spaces and a fest of culture.

From Kingston to Mayfair

This year's BCSA Annual Dinner was held at a new venue, The May Fair hotel in, er, Mayfair so it was an easy decision to walk there.

As with all walks north of the river the big decision I had to make was where to cross and I chose Barnes Railway Bridge because the walk from there to Hammersmith is pretty direct, follows the river all of the way and is car-free for large sections.

It had rained heavily and I was dressed smartly so I avoided Richmond Park and took the more practicable but less interesting walk along the road instead.

At least that gave me the opportunity to walk along Clydesdale Gardens in North Sheen (probably) which I had not done before which means I have now walked 36% of the roads in London Borough of Richmond (three people have done 100% so I still have a long way to go).

The second decision was where to stop for coffee and as I was looking for somewhere upmarket and trendy that rules out a surprisingly large amount of the route and I was not able to have my break until I got to Orée Kensington High Street. They have a branch in Richmond so I knew what to expect and that the Raspberry Croissant was a good option.

The cafe was welcome but the number of pedestrians was not and the section along Kensington High Street was quite slow. I would have gone down side streets as I usually do but I had to tick off the street sometime and this was the day to do it.

The final quarter quarter also meant a depressing amount of time waiting at pedestrian crossings, as it always does in Central London. Cars still get far too much priority over the far greater number of people trying to get around using more sensible methods.

The final statistics were 21.38km walked in 4 hours and 43 minutes.

Mrs Warren’s Profession at Richmond Theatre

Mrs Warren’s Profession was written by George Bernard Shaw so of course I went to see it. My usual seat Dress Circle A25 was a nicely modest £23.5.

As the image makes clear, the production made much of the casting of real-lift mother and daughter Caroline and Rose Quentin as the mother and daughter in the play, something I had seen done well before with Killing Time at Park Theatre in 2027 with Brigit Forsyth and her daughter Zoe Mills. This play was rather different in that the mother/daughter relationship was not very close (because of Mrs Warren’s Profession) so their real-life relationship mattered less.

While on casting, it is a shame that the Richmond Theatre website lists only four of the six cast members when the two missing actors both had substantial roles and played their parts very well. It was the mix of characters and their relationships that was the heart of the play.

I am sure that Mrs Warren’s Profession was very shocking when first performed in the 1890s but times and attitudes have changed and it is less so now, though some current moral red lines were still stretched and broken.

Deprived of most of its shock value, Mrs Warren’s Profession now relies on its humour more and while there is plenty of that it is not the constant stream that Wilde delivers and some of it seems very obvious today.

All that lead to a thoroughly satisfactory evening which was never exceptional but which was always competent, engaging and entertaining.

The Lavender Hill Mob at Richmond Theatre

I have to address the elephant in the room first.

The Lavender Hill Mob concerns the robbery of gold being transferred from Royal Mint to Bank of England and this is a part of London that I know very well as both my sons live in flats in Cartwright Street which is part of the Royal Mint site (once owned by The Crown and now by People's Republic of China). So it annoyed me intensely when the play described the passage of the gold down Cartwright ROAD! An error it made twice. They also turned left into East Smithfield when they should have gone right.

It also annoys me a little that the play describes itself as a "side-splittingly funny, fast-paced comedy" when it is no such thing, and nor should it be.

But I'll begin at the beginning which was an email from the theatre announcing the show and being a fan of both the original story and the theatre I was quick to book and got my usual seat Dress Circle A25 for an extremely fair £22 thanks to my loyalty card.

I hoped for something that mimicked the mood of the film with amiable thieves gently committing an audacious crime and that is exactly what it was. The humour, like the action, was maintained at a constant level that was certainly high enough to be good entertainment but which never made the claims made for it in the publicity. There were a few obvious funny bits added to try and justify the "side-splitting" claim but these were too contrived and completely unnecessary, the play was doing fine without them.

The staging was a real positive with the story told as a retrospective with the people in the room playing out the various parts so, for example, we only met one of the actual criminals and the others were played by other people who also played other roles. It worked well.

If you liked the film of The Lavender Hill Mob then you would also like this stage version and should forgive it its occasional dalliance into slapstick. Getting that street name wrong still hurts though.

A loop through Bushy Park

I do far too many medium distance walks to document them all (though I can find them all on MapMyWalk) but I liked this one enough to say something about it.

The reason I liked this walk is that it covered a reasonable distance (20km) mostly along a river or through a park and did so without ever getting that far away from home.

The heart of the route was a simple loop starting at Teddington Lock and following The Thames upstream all the way to Hampton Court, then through the old part of Hampton to enter Bushy Park by a side pedestrian gate, through a couple of woodland areas to a cafe for lunch and then back through Teddington.

The weather was ridiculously good for the middle of November with plenty of low sun and enough warmth to make walking comfortable. The light enjoyed dancing on the water and weaving through the trees which made the whole walk delightful. And all this is on my doorstep.

Not Now at Finborough Theatre

I love the programming that Finborough Theatre is doing at the moment and so I see most things that are on there and any shows that I miss are more down to a lack of time than to the particulars of the play.

In this case it helped that Not Now is written by David Ireland because I had seen a couple of his plays previously, at Finborough, and loved them.

I have a routine when going to Finborough but that was blown apart by a tube strike that day which meant that after a lot of walking and a couple of slow buses, my evening meal was a sandwich bought at a nearby Sainsbury's and eaten on the way. Still, despite everything, I got to the theatre not that long after 7pm and was able to claim a seat in the front row.

The premise of the play was simple, a young man in Northern Ireland is about to go to London for an acting audition (the play opens with the opening of Richard III) and he gets involved in a discussion with his uncle who wants to be helpful but isn't. That conversation soon veers off, as all conversations do, and soon covers the relative merits of Shakespeare and Stephen King, Irishness, The Troubles and being gay or not.

It's a normal conversation from which we learn much about the two men and their family. Some surprising secrets are exposed through the tensions between the two. But they are family and this is good natured stuff, each wants to explain their point of view and not just belittle the other's.

A pleasant surprise for me was that the uncle is played by Stephen Kennedy. The name meant nothing to me (to my shame) but I recognised the voice immediately because his real name is Ian Craig and he's the chef at Grey Gables in The Archers. He also appears to have gone to school in Strabane where my mother grew up and many of her family still live, and to be Actor-in-Residence at Kingston Grammar School which is just down the road from me and where my younger son went to school.

Matthew Blaney played the nephew and together the two actors gelled magnificently, they looked and sounded like a nephew and uncle having a normal if slightly awkward conversation.

Not Now was short, just under an hour, but packed so much into that time that it felt like a full evening at the theatre.

Finborough Theatre and Not Now was a perfect match and I am glad I was there to see it sparkle.

Ek/ Forsythe/ Quagebeur at Sadler’s Wells Theatre

One of my worst kept resolutions is to see more dance. Seeing the Ek/ Forsythe/ Quagebeur triple bill at Sadler’s Wells Theatre was only a small step in fixing that but it was a very enjoyable step and one that confirmed sense of my resolution as well as the stupidity of my failure to keep to it.

The only part of the triple bill that had any recognition for me was the final part, The Rite of Spring choreographed Mats Ek. My first encounter with Ek is lost in the midst of time but it, and a few subsequent exposures, were enough for me to make the booking, Second Circle Row A Seat 5  for £35.

Being a matinee meant that I had to find somewhere to have lunch and Fox Garden Court Cafe, in the Sadler’s Wells complex but accessed through a different door, proved well up to the mark and I had a lovey spicy vegetarian mulligatawny soup. Having found it I shall be using the cafe again.

I love dance but have no idea how to describe it! The three pieces had some similar tropes in that they all used several dancers in varying numbers, were all modern in style and all focussed mostly on the limbs. The different styles of the three sets of music was the main difference between the dances, though I am sure that somebody who knows more about dance than me (not difficult) would spot significant stylistic differences.

I went primarily to see The Rite of Spring by Mats Ek and that was my favourite piece. The Stravinsky music, played by a live orchestra, helped as did the more astute choreography, there was just more going on and more of it was unusual. That said, all three pieces were thoroughly entertaining and very well received.

And I got a boost to my more dance resolution too. Sadler's Wells had screens in the front of house (and cafe) trailing some forthcoming shows and I was excited enough at the prospect of Bat out of Hell and their sister theatre, the Peacock, to book that for next February.

Spike at Richmond Theatre

I like to support my local theatres and as their programming is pretty good it is more a matter of choosing which date to see a show than of choosing which shows to see. At Richmond Theatre this decisions is eased as my ATG Theatre Card offers discounts on some performances, and so it was that I went to see Spike for an extremely reasonable £23 in my usual seat Dress Circle A25.

I was not sure what to expect, having studiously avoided reading any descriptions or reviews, other than it was about Spike Milligan. What Spike turned out to be was the story of Spike during the period when The Good Show rose to national prominence. This included lots of scenes from the show as well as the story behind the show from Spike's perspective, which was mostly a battle against the authority of the BBC much as he had battled against such authority, from the same class of people, in the Army.

Spike was shown to be as funny in real life as he was on the radio, though his personal life had its bad moments too.

Basically the play was a series of scenes of either The Goon Show, Spike trying to write the show and get due recognition for doing so, and of recollections from his Army days. These fragments were strung together skilfully to make a coherent and entertaining story.

Spike was a great deal of fun and was informative too. Lord Reith would have approved, as did I.

The Importance of Being Earnest at Rose Theatre

I made a News Year's Resolution for 2022 to restart my blog by writing something, however short, about every theatre trip, gallery visit or other signifiant event and here we go!

What finally drove me back to blogging was the fantastic production of The Importance of Being Earnest at Rose Theatre.

I was not that tempted to see it at first as I had seen and heard several productions of Earnest over the years and while the whimsical bon mots are entertaining I had never fallen in love with the play. What persuaded me to go in the end was a loyalty to Rose Theatre, I see all the main theatrical productions there, and there being no real reason not to see an Oscar Wilde play. So I duly forked out my £35 (I now qualify for a Concession Senior Citizen rate so getting old is not all bad) for seat J40 in my usual area.

That this was a different production was made clear at the start with the cast making entrances and exits to music before the actual play started. The tone was set immediately when the manservant, Lane, came in carrying a tray of cucumber martinis arranged in a pyramid. There were numerous acts of humour added to the play like this and they all added nicely to the scenes being played out before us.

What really made the production so brilliant (aside from the obvious strength of Wilde's words) was the cast and each and every one of them was excellent; I particularly liked Abiola Owokoniran as the outrageous dandy Algernon Moncrieff, and Phoebe Campbell and Adele James as the two young ladies. 

What made the performances so remarkable is that this was a young cast and for several of them it was their first major stage role. You would never have guessed this, I certainly did not.

The direction of the play took it towards pantomime, but not too far to be childish. There were lots of exaggerated gestures and expressions, especially from the young ladies, to push the humour along. Reinforcing the idea of pantomime, the formidable Lady Bracknell was played flamboyantly by a man.

The continual humour in the staging matched the continual humour in the script and Earnest was a delight throughout. I never do star ratings because theatre is so subjective but this Earnest is most definitely a five star show.

I averaged 26,128 steps a day in 2021

While 26,128 steps a day sounds a lot, and for a lot of people it is, it is almost 2,000 steps a day fewer than I managed in 2020.

The main reason for that is the cruel way that averages work in that when I have had a low day, say 15k, it is very hard to find the extra time on other days to pull the average back up.

And I had a few more low days this year thanks to the gradual reopening of cafes, pubs and theatres etc. that gave me other things to do in the evenings.

With the resurgence of the pandemic in the later part of the year I have been avoiding pubs etc again, despite the government letting them stay open for unfathomably reasons, and that has again let me walk more; a quick pint is half an hour or just over 3,000 steps.