Glimpses of Greatness
May 12th, 2007 by Eats Wombats
After a leisurely Saturday morning breakfast I set off with my very own Mrs.Worthington for the Hampstead Theatre, to see our daughter on the stage. We were basking in the warm glow of the end of school fees and a sunny day. The Youth Theatre production was a series of short pieces inspired by the play Kindertransport which had just been on in the theatre, about the rescue from Nazi-occupied Europe of some Jewish children.
There were some startling resonances in the lines of the rescued child we went to see, but she was far too preoccupied with the acting to be bothered with that. Why did I have to make a conscious adjustment to the young black kids playing Jewish children but not, initially at least, for our blue-eyed blonde–who has taken to the stage like a duck to water? Indeed, all the ducklings were good, and youngest was the most precocious of all. Lots of glowing faces afterwards, happy that it had all gone so well.
Post mortems longer than performances are not for me, so I wandered off to the market outside where I found French farmers selling French cheese, and locals conversing with them in fluent French. Either that or French people in London make a pilgrimage here. There are enough here–200,000 or so–that Nicolas Sarkozy recently paid a special visit to solicit their votes.
At the neighbouring stall I bought some Roman Marching Bread to go with the cheese. Organic, traditional, overpriced Roman Marching Bread, baked in a tin with spelt flour and possessed of a “unique nutty flavour”. A great empire was built with this, “I should know what it tastes like.”
Next, at a bookstall I found that the theme of eating, doing something, and leaving grinds on. As I browsed the snowclone, I pitied the bookseller. He was being subjected to the cosmological and anthropological theories of a crashing bore. Apparently, we are aliens from another planet. That was enough nutty flavour for me. We went home for a late lunch with some sparkling cider, brown bread and Bleu d’Auvergne. Perfect… Roman sleeping food.
The Telegraph contained this gem, in a report of a memorial service for Frank Johnson, a former editor of The Spectator and parliamentary sketch writer for the Telegraph:
David Cameron, the Tory leader, read an article by Mr.Johnson in which he recalled how, as a schoolboy, he appeared in operas at Covent Garden. During one performance, the diva Maria Callas had clutched him to her bosom.
“There are few men who can truthfully say that their eye made contact with the right nipple of Maria Callas,” Johnson wrote.
“So it is not necessarily true that someone who has passed much of his adult life in the press gallery of the House of Commons has never glimpsed greatness.”
