10 Gentle Spells, 12 January 2025
Every Sunday from now on...
A new year, a new drive to note ten uplifting things from my week every Sunday – from culture, art, music, radio, life – and share them with you.
Nothing more, nothing less. Here are this week’s ten short, sweet spells.
1. Kieran Culkin’s win at last week’s Golden Globes (for A Real Pain: on my watchlist) swirled me into a joyful rabbithole of his award speeches (with him being the favourite part of Christmas at the back of my mind.) But Brian Cox got me most, at last year’s Emmys: watch his mouth moving at 41 seconds, then asking the woman in front of him if we can pass at 51, then that kiss on Culkin’s mouth just after the minute mark. Passing on the baton, with delight.
Seeing the River Phoenix sequence at the beginning of Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade for the first time on Friday evening, which I’d never known about or seen before. This was part of the afterschool film club I have with my boys when we manage it (we’re currently working through the Indy films). The rush of remembering the teenage girl that I used to be in the early 1990s, obsessed with Running On Empty after seeing it on TV..and recalling how little we could find out about artists we loved in those years just before the world wide web changed everything.
This real-life intrepid Indy story from this weekend’s Saturday Guardian is just wonderful.
I’m midway through a project for the incredible Theatr Clwyd in North Wales,, exploring the history of their old film and TV studio, and a sound engineer I interviewed on Friday mentioned a project he did a few years ago to take a random photograph every day, which he made into a frame at the end of the year. I checked my phone (this was on January 10th) and thankfully I had taken one every day (not all of them zingers, but that’s part of the point), and I’m going to continue this year. Here’s a highlight from Tuesday 7th: Maud, daft cat, named after the Worst Witch’s best friend. And yes, her more sensible feline sister is Mildred.
On an icy cold drive to the office this week, I adored the Gavin and Stacey special of Joanna Page and Natalie Cassidy’s BBC Sounds podcast, Off The Telly featuring Jo/Stacey’s mum Gwen (Melanie Jenkins) and Natalie’s teenage daughter, Eliza. This was like being in the Kardomah cafe in Swansea (via Loughton) with so many bubbly X chromosomes.
Rico Rodriguez’s trombone on this John Martyn track rolling through the house as I did the washing up. (Context: my 10-year-old is learning the trombone and friends have been suggesting me songs featuring it – and yes, of course the playlist I made it begins with the Jonny Briggs theme tune).
Do work through Radio 4’s New Year’s day shipping forecast programming on BBC Sounds – I heard previews of it for this piece I wrote before Christmas, but there are so many other beautiful programmes. The Poetry Please shipping special co-hosted by Roger McGough – one the first poets I knew, from TV, as a child, who’s now 87 – had me barrelling back through the years with so much fondness.
It also made me go back this poem in a book we bought for my son, thinking he wouldn’t be interested, a few years ago, in Hay-on-Wye’s lovely poetry bookshop. He has grown to love McGough, which makes me happy. Do buy this.
9. Even more beautiful is the writing of Seamus Heaney, which in these few paragraphs below, holds my soul close, tasting of air, water, fire, earth, everything (from this book, my favourite Christmas present).
10. Pick an artist this year you love and try to experience as much of their work as you can. I’m saying this to you to make a vow to myself to keep doing it too. Yesterday afternoon, my Thomas Denny year began with his Ivor Gurney and Gerald Finzi windows at Gloucester Cathedral, on the 41st anniversary of my father’s death. Finzi’s words show the power of art that can be experienced, and held onto, over the decades and the centuries.
Take that with you, and see you next week. xxx
I sprayed my hair bright green behind the bookshelves in the school library, thinking that it would add an air of authenticity to my lunchtime performance of Nooligan by Roger McGough. I was 13. The reading had been arranged by my English teacher, Mrs Lenkiewicz who was stereotypically Dutch and who I liked a lot. I remember Bettina Berman, who was in the year above me, reciting the lyrics to Train of Thought by A-ha. Then it was over and I was out in the playground with bright green hair. I didn't think it through. Mrs Oakman went berserk.
In the toilet that was used by the school secretaries, I attempted to rinse it out half a can of cheap hair dye, purchased from That's Bizarre (opposite what was then Golden Disc; later HMV) before double-French.
Love this!