Merrily We Roll Along

These all too infrequent contacts are really very precious to me but in recent weeks I have been so very busy advising the Pope on his retirement plans that I just have not had time to sit down and communicate with the little people in my life.

Let me remedy this oversight by taking a little of my valuable time to disseminate some wisdom very much as a seagull disseminates wisdom on unsuspecting holiday makers in Blackpool.

Life has this habit of just happening, no matter our plans life just shows up at the door and no matter how many security bolts we have, we eventually have to let it in.

This week, for example, Mrs B has had a terrible cold. Her headaches and blocked nose, her difficulty in sleeping, her general feeling of poorliness have been hard to witness...so I tried to look away as often as I could.

I had suffered an even worse cold the week before but of course nobody would have known as I never mentioned it and bravely battled on being the proud Guru you all love and respect.

In the midst of all this misery and suffering, the tumble drier started to play up. Goodness knows how we managed to dry clothes before the invention of tumble driers?

I found a solution - I decided to dry the clothes outside on a line stretched between two poles. I used these clips or pegs to secure the washing in place and I really had to pat myself on the back for having the ingenuity for solving this problem. I think I might take this invention onto The Dragons Den.

First minor emergency avoided but then at 10.30pm on Friday night, the dishwasher died. It didn't go with a whimper either, a real bang, blowing the fuses and issuing a smoky cough from within its 10 year old machinery.

I immediately contemplated hanging the plates and wine glasses from the newly invented washing line in the garden but decided against it after struggling to peg a saucepan up.

Mrs B was having a panic attack which on top of her cold was making drinking wine almost impossible so I promised her that she would not have to put her hands in a washing up bowl and we would buy a new dishwasher. She calmed down.

I wish someone had been there to calm me down earlier in the week when I had to fork out for two new tyres!

So, it had been a stressful week and now we arrived at the weekend and we decided to take the advice of Petula Clark and go down town...to London.

A real treat, one of our semi-regular theatre trips to the West End - or in this case Southwark.

We drove to East Midlands Parkway, we boarded our train (First Class of course) and 90 minutes later we arrived in London. We found a friendly London cabbie who drove us to St Paul's Cathedral where we found a Pizza Express. The restaurant is not in St Paul's just nearby.

Using Pizza Express on these trips to London is a tradition but I can totally recommend that you avoid this branch like the plague! We had a very pleasant waiter and the vino arrived quickly enough but Mrs B's pizza was terrible. Luckily there was an M&S food shop over the road.

We then walked down from St Paul's, over the Millennium Bridge to the South Bank, walking past the Tate Modern and Shakespeare's Globe. In the shadow of The Shard, we navigated the sides streets until we emerged at our destination, The Menier Chocolate Factory.

In the basement of this building is a theatre, it seats 180 patrons on benches that really only fit 165 patrons! It was a tight squeeze.

The show was Merrily We Roll Along by Stephen Sondheim.

It's a very simple story of three friends but being Sondheim he tells the story backwards, so we start at the end of the friendship and the story gradually progresses backwards.

The end of the play is the  beginning of the story and it finds the three main protagonists on a rooftop in New York. This final scene when the three friends are looking forward to a life where they will do it all is very poignant considering that we know how it ends.

The songs are good, the acting was super...it was all terrific and spoiled by just one thing. The seating.

The fact that Mrs B and I had to cuddle throughout the show was no problem although it did make reaching for the sweets a little harder - what bugged me was the woman on my other side who jiffled all the way through the show! She was a big girl too with huge...shoulders.

Anyway, we loved the show and after it ended we walked back over the Millennium Bridge in the gathering darkness, the surrounding sights of London now illuminated, lovely to see. We found another friendly London cabbie and returned to St Pancras railway station where with an hour to spare we sat ourselves in the bar and ordered two glasses of wine...£28.

That sort of finished the week nicely.

Going to the theatre is very much part of our lives and no matter what life brings to the front door of the ashram here on the hill, Mrs B and I will never give up on these treats...even if we have to save up for a glass of wine!