SHERINGHAM DIARY No 55 - Say Hello To Barbara

In the right royal realm of Peppa Pig nothing is going awry in the world.......until if course it does.

As I write we are returning to mandatory mask wearing in shops and public transport. So, it looks like we are not yet beyond selling the face masks that Jnanasalin has been making consistently over the last eighteen months or so. Eight hundred of them and still rising, as we currently sell around fifty a month on average. Its not something we ever imagined Cottonwood Home would hold as a standard stock item. That our best selling line would be a handmade decorative fabric face mask. This is a strange retail world we live in.

November, has been a month of stark contrasts. Extremely mild weather and fresh sunny days, interspersed with heavy rains, winds, storms and wintry blasts. Consequently shop takings have mirrored this chopping and changing.  In the off season we draw more from local residents, whose appearance in town is notoriously more weather dependent.  But overall, though lower in key, its had a heartening flavour to it. A lot better than our pessimism might have allowed us to imagine.

Thursford's Christmas Show has returned this year. So daily, around 11am, a coach party or two of the still ambulatory semi retired will stop over for a couple of hours in Sheringham. On their way to their yearly injection of high camp, courtesy of the two o'clock matinee.  As is ever the case, where the coach is coming from dictates whether we get any trade from it. If its from the Midlands or the North, then the visitors are often dressed ready for Winter weather, elderly eskimos clad in white padded jackets with fur edged hoods. They get waylaid by next doors 'rude' cards, laugh long and hysterically,. Then, barely giving our shop anything more than a desultory sideways look over their shoulder, they leave. 

If the coach is from the Home Counties, well, they behave like wasps drawn towards a bowl of sugar. Bringing an assorted middle class coterie of Hinge and Brackets across our very welcoming portal. So far there's not been that many of these. Which perhaps says a lot about the type of demographic the Thursford show generally draws its audience from. The sort that remember with nostalgia Saturday Night at the London Palladium, or never saw anything at all wrong with the Black and White Minstrel Show.

After four and a half years of reliability, Nigella, our fourteen year old black Vauxhall Corsa, passed over to the great scrapyard in the sky. We'd been returning from a Sunday jaunt to Diss and the gears and clutch were not working together smoothly in lower gears.  Having carefully got us home, Jnanasalin drove her the next day into our usual garage. Whilst they were taking her out on a test run, what was left of the gears cracked open like a Cadbury's Easter egg, and that was that.

There had been some indications she'd been nearing the end of her useful life. Becoming noisier, her suspension weaker and the electronics had developed some random idiosyncrasies.  Nevertheless, any demise takes you by surprise. Suddenly we had to buy another car, a second hand Vauxhall Meriva. 

So what would we name it, would it feel masculine or feminine to drive.  Thinking Meriva sounded vaguely latin, we toyed with perhaps calling her Gloria ( as in Estefan ) Once we had experience of her first hand we realised she wasn't really that exotic a car. Much more practically headed and conventional machine, so we said hello instead to Barbara ( as in Good ).

Whenever Jnanasalin is away I make the most of the opportunity to watch an art movie. So recently whilst he was on a weekend visit to his family, I watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a film by Celene Sciamma well deserving of being called ravishing. A sensitive and sensual portrayal of the developing intimacy between a female artist and her initially reluctant sitter. Its framing and visual quality is astonishing. Its as though you are watching all the subtle placing of figures and items in a Dutch interior, staged with the dramatic quality of light of a Caravaggio. A truly marvellous film. 

Jnanasalin also has a regular weekly meeting with fellow Buddhist order members. This has become my night for indulgence in The Fassbinder Film Club. Currently working my way through his back catalogue. In my art school days in the late seventies he was considered the edgiest of cutting edge German cinema. Hugely influential but perhaps overlooked these days. You can stream many of them from Google Play for £1.99, which speaks volumes I guess.

Over his career the films are highly variable. The earliest ones like The Holy Whore are self-consciously stilted and avante guarde in style. They glory in their quirks and oddities, But here are the experiments that his later films are founded upon. Highly political and provocative, often executed in a heightened melodramatic style of symbolic realism. Rainer Werner Fassbinder emerged out of experimental theatre in the late sixties. His films continued to possess a contrived theatricality of feeling, of being deliberately arche, stagey in acting. Exquisitely posed in set, dramatic use being made of doorways and mirrors to frame scenes.

His better films focus on a strong central female characters. Many played by Hanna Schygulla whom he referred to as 'the driving force.' They are frequently quite beautiful to look at but brutally honest. Sympathetic to characters who are invariably outsiders, betrayed both by love and society. Fassbinder's films explore  knotty moral issues in a raw, quite unfiltered manner. At the same time they are frequently touchingly human in the complex frailties they portray. Fassbinder himself was a deeply conflicted man, who thrived on living up to the idea of being the enfant terrible. One is left an impression that, as a person, you may not have always found him convivial company. A drug overdose brought his career to an end at the age of 37.

His films create a Brechtian distant unease.  What you are shown is human behaviour that is not always kind, tasteful or pleasant. Fear Eats The Soul,  Effi Breist, The Marriage of Maria Braun and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant are the best I've watched so far.

Meanwhile, in another alternate universe altogether, our Prime Minister has successfully completed his public transition into Mr Bungle. Who didn't hold parties during covid restrictions. But he is a lying toe rag after all.  And everyone appears to be quite fine with that............until they are not.