Monday February 12th 2024
7.30am: Get up. Notice that the sky is cloudless, retrieve milk and newspaper from the doorstep and make tea. Banana for breakfast.
10am: After exercising cycle to the tennis club for a singles match. This is played in our own ladder format, 13 games completed whatever the score. A brilliant way of organising things because it usually takes an hour. I am in division 18 with ten divisions below. My opponent is everything an opponent should be, fair and friendly, but competitive. He is also everything a man of the Midlands should be, a Villa fan and in the motor trade. But he is better than me so even though I lose for the first time this year in my sixth match I am pleased to pick up five points for losing 5-8. The game lasts longer than an hour because I have to leave to go and get sunglasses as the sun is angled and fierce.
11.30-12.30: Faff around in my study and make prawn sandwiches for lunch. Always think of Roy Keane when we have prawn sandwiches because of his castigation of relatively passive middle class football fans as “the prawn sandwich brigade”.
I pm: Back to the tennis club, this time for doubles. It’s a pick-up session organised by coach Ed. All 12 courts are full again, three of them by the event. It’s nearly all retired people. This format is simply eight games so you can draw. In fact I win two and lose one, the score in every case being 5-3 which speaks volumes for Ed’s ability to organise the matches. It does occur to me that there are times and places where old people cower indoors, but here and now we are playing and laughing in the sunshine. When I first joined the club there was very little tennis at this time of year and most courts would have been unplayable. Many things have changed for the better including the climate.
3pm: Home to discuss Ann’s remarkably detailed plan for a holiday in June in Northumberland. She’d have made a great general. (They’re all still men, aren’t they?)
5pm: Make the tea: beans on cheese-on-toast. We eat such comfort food when we have an evening out that doesn’t involve being fed. It always reminds me of the old Fabian slogan, “Plain living and high thinking”.
6pm: Off to Stratford to see the new RSC production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. The theatre is entirely full which is pretty good for a Monday night in February, but it is half term so that the many children in the audience don’t have to go to school tomorrow.
I’ve seen this play dozens of times, but there’s so much you can do with it in terms of casting, accents, music, technology etc. This is a good production and gets better as it goes along. The four young lovers are far from the best I’ve seen, but the music and the conjuring tricks are exciting and the rude mechanicals are up there with the best I’ve seen. I like the conceit of turning Peter Quince into Rita Quince and Mathew Baynton is an excellent and original Bottom. It’s a more effete and arty version of the character than I’ve seen before, but it works well. When transformed into an ass he has expressive ears and an excellent bray. Anyway, the audience loved it – roaring with laughter and on their feet a whoopin’ and a hollerin’ at the end.
And so to bed, as someone once wrote. If this sliver of diary has a purpose it is to suggest to the moaning metropolitans who talk of broken Britain that there are many things that work well and lots of people having a good time and that for some people life is better than ever. History is mostly based on the records left by miserable gits, so this is intended as a tiny antidote.
Lincoln Allison February 2024