The interesting thing about this election is of course the prospect of a hung parliament, because there is probably nothing else that could possibly shake up the political system to the same degree — although there’s no guarantee that it would, even so, because the establishment which works behind the scenes will be doing everything possible to ensure that it doesn’t. Read more
And now here’s my video diary of the workshop at Lucca which I wrote about earlier (see Creative Therapies in Lucca)
[wpvideo tsPinwMY]
Phototherapy—the therapeutic use of photographs—goes back well before the arrival of digital technology, but as in other fields, digitisation has produced its expansion and extension. In the community mental health programme in Lucca, a small town in Tuscany, it is now one of a battery of therapeutic activities, including art, drama, music and journalism, as well as video and an online multimedia magazine. I’ve come here to participate in a workshop, led by Carmine Parrella, along with people from Finland and colleagues from Roehampton University, to learn how it works, invited by Del Loewenthal (of Roehampton) with whom I’m planning a possible video project. I’m therefore an outsider, since unlike almost everyone else, I’m not a therapist or psychologist or someone involved in using these techniques. Read more
I was looking forward to being able to report that I’d had my second cataract operation, and am now ready to go out and face the world again with fresh sharp technicolor vision. It was not to be. I’ve just got home from St George’s in Tooting following a wasted day. After arriving in good time for my noon appointment, around 5pm Sister and one of the surgeons came to me—separately—to say that unfortunately there was no time left this afternoon to perform the surgery. (And me not having eaten since the crack of dawn because I was supposed to have sedation.) Almost the same thing happened on my previous visit a month earlier for treatment to the first eye. On that occasion the operation was carried out only at the very end of the afternoon. Read more
Two letters in the Guardian this week past caught my attention. The first concerns the pauses in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Murray Marshall of Salisbury writes:
I also have a story about this, which comes from the horse’s mouth, or anyway, Peter Hall, who directed that first production in 1955. Many years ago, when I was taken to visit him at his house near Wallingford, he told us what happened when they played in Blackpool before coming to London, and the audience was mystified and bored. Someone noticed that the last train back to London on a Saturday night left before their scheduled finish, so in order to catch it, they decided to eliminate the pauses. The play went by like a flash, the audience found it very funny and laughed a lot, and they got their train!
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The second letter is an altogether more serious matter. This is from almost 200 student union officers warning MPs that unless they sign a pledge to vote against an increase in fees, they will be named and shamed. Read more