Drawing In

There are lots of unspoken rules over here. It is now late September, and even if it was warm, it would not be seen to be appropriate to sit out in the garden with friends. Nor should you have doors open to the fresh air. This is because "the nights are drawing in", whatever that means. To an Australian, it sounds very Enid Blyton, or maybe Tolkein. This is when you need to start protecting yourself from the weather, when the darkness holds a perceived threat, when you feel glad there are all those bricks, blinds, curtains, shutters, wallpapers, rugs etc between you and the night. Oh well, give me a few weeks, and I'll no doubt be glad, too!

Theatre Moment

The other night we went to the National Theatre and I had a very scary moment. I realised that the majority of the audience not only had the same immaculately coiffed grey hair (male and female), the same grey clothing in luxurious fabrics with appropriate touches of jewel colours for ties and scarves, the same politely understated body language when edging past to get to their seats... and spookiest of all, the same laughs at exactly the same moments. It's hard to communicate the similarity of the laughs... not like the variety in canned laughter, but the exact same intonations rising and falling with the exact same... there's only one word for it... smugness. It's enough to make you want to burst out with a big donkey guffaw at a very serious moment, just to shatter that smugness! You'd probably be ordered out by one of the actors, though, as happened to a man whose mobile phone rang repeatedly in "The History Boys" the other night (he deserved it though!!!!!!).