A Trip To The Movies At Last

This glorious summer does have its drawbacks - the near constant dry and sunny days have meant no time for cinema, one of our favourite pastimes. So, with heavy rain forecast yesterday, we took advantage of the break in the weather and drove to Ipswich for the 11.30 showing of Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes. It was good to be back at the movies and, for once, we sat through a pile of trailers that we hadn't already seen three times. Although the film is ostensibly about a clash between humans and apes in a dystopian not too distant future it is really an allegory on good and evil. The message that not all humans (for that read any aggressor nation you care to pick) are bad and that not all apes (for that read any victim nation or race you care to choose) are good was hammered home in a very obvious way. It didn't spoil the film but it did feel very much as if we were being given a history lesson. 

The film is visually stunning and the cgi apes quite convincing - a good way to spend a rainy Thursday lunchtime.

For the rest of the week we've been getting on top of the garden and Marion has been planning lots of new ideas for it for the next planting season. I've been doing a bit of my business mentoring but overall we've had a relatively relaxing week. We're off to London for the weekend to see the highly acclaimed The Crucible at the Old Vic. We've just discovered that the return trains tomorrow are stopping at Colchester and being replaced by buses so we're driving down to Colchester and travelling to London from there.

Having a relaxing week involves, of course, a few hours out with the detector. After searching the field I've been on recently I would expect the finds to start drying up but there are still plenty turning up.

This was what I tipped out of the finds bag last time. And here are some of the individual pieces.

Medieval Vessel Mend

Tiny Post Medieval Thimble

Charles I Rose Farthing

This one has me stumped. I am sure it is Medieval. Looks a bit like a dagger scabbard fitting.

A Late Or Post Medieval Jetton 

Don't Know What Percy Allen Of Framlingham Did. I Know That There Was A Shop - A Saddler Perhaps

A Damaged Queen Elizabeth Silver Penny

Another Charles I Rose Farthing

A Medieval Cut Half Penny Probably Henry III

A Mixture Of Bits And Pieces. The Bottom Left A Fragment Of An Old Silver Coin

There's nothing spectacular here but it's all very interesting and I will be taking it to Bury St Edmunds for recording in a few weeks time.

Busy Times

You may have noticed that it's been very quiet on this blog for a week. After going to Cineworld in Ipswich to see Her on Monday it was time to prepare for the visit of our daughter Sarah and her two daughters Rose and Melody. Sarah teaches baby yoga and enrolled on a course in London to qualify to teach toddler yoga too. So we booked an apartment in Vauxhall which was the nearest accommodation we could find to her classes in Stockwell Green and headed down to London to help out.

The apartment run by Think Vauxhall was well fitted out and very handy being right next to Vauxhall Station but the area is not particularly nice. We spent most of our three days of helping walking the mile and a half between flat and classes to deliver and collect the grandchildren as Rose was involved in a couple of the lessons and Melody is breast fed so we needed to be nearby when she was hungry. We were fortunate to find a Portuguese cafe near the yoga studio (there's a big Portuguese population in the area) and the owners were very welcoming and accommodating as we sat for long periods over a couple of cups of coffee.

We spent a bit of time in the excellent Clapham Mary Seacole library.

Rose had a couple of interesting journeys on the underground.

On Sunday we found ourselves with a couple of hours free so we headed off to the South Bank. Marion took Rose on a merry-go-round but a few minutes later we found that Sarah's class had ended an hour earlier than expected so it was back to Clapham before driving home to Framlingham.

It's the first time that Sarah and her children have visited us here in Framlingham. We've had a couple of relaxing days. We've had a look around the shops and had coffee in The Crown and The Lemon Tree and hopefully if the weather stays fine it will be a trip to Southwold Pier tomorrow. 

But the kids have been happiest being dragged around the wooden floors on blankets. Great fun and It's keeping the floor nice and clean too.

Busy Doing Nothing

We're having a couple of weeks off from our hectic schedule of driving from one end of the country to the other. The caravan site in St Andrews closes its doors for the whole month of February so we can't head to Fife for another three our four weeks and our son is visiting family in LA so we won't be visiting him in Kent for a while. So it's the ideal time for the bump on the new car to be repaired and we drove it down to the Mercedes body shop in Essex on Thursday to have it sorted out. 

If it wasn't for the damp patch above the lounge window, everything would be just right for a relaxing few weeks but as I write, the plastering expert Tony is chipping away outside in an attempt to discover the cause and hopefully effect a remedy. The builders made a temporary repair to a crack in the render and since then the wallpaper has dried out and despite some torrential rainfall the water ingress appears to have stopped.

On Friday we had some friends round for a meal. I think it was a success and the smoked salmon with prawns followed by home made chicken pie, chocolate dessert and cheeseboard went down well with them. As did the wine. I felt a little embarrassed to be depositing so many bottles in the bottle bank on Saturday morning. I put a nonchalant "haven't emptied these since Christmas" look on my face as the bottles kept coming and coming. We ended the night well into the small hours.

With no plans for Saturday and Sunday nights we had a marathon session with Series 2 of The Bridge and got through seven episodes before finishing off the final three last night well after midnight. This really is a classy series. The leads Sofia Helin and Kim Bodnia are outstanding and their relationship is what makes this such a compelling drama. As with all television crime drama (Silent Witness, Morse,Midsomer ) I have an issue with the number of victims but the beauty of this one is that the motive was unclear right until the excellent finale. If you haven't seen it, you can still catch up on iPlayer and, if you've got a spare ten hours or so to kill, it's a perfect distraction.

I haven't had the chance to get out with the metal detector for a few months now but I had a letter from the Lowestoft Coroner's office yesterday notifying me that the silver brooch I found in the summer has been declared "Treasure" and they will be holding an inquest. It's not a valuable item but it's over seven hundred years old. If the farmer agrees, I will donate it to the Colchester museum who have expressed an interest in acquiring it. But on the subject of the hobby, I saw this advert in The Searcher magazine. It's wrong on so many levels implying that if you go fishing you might catch a fish but if you go detecting you can run away to Las Vegas on the spoils. I've been using a detector for twenty five years and if I sold my finds (which I wouldn't) they would not cover the cost of the detector let alone the fuel and other travel expenses incurred over the years. If people are encouraged to go detecting for financial gain, most of them will be disappointed but, more importantly the damage to our heritage will be enormous with the finite supply of metal artefacts ending up on eBay. Most of the detector users I have met are decent and sensible people but unscrupulous use of these machines is a very very bad thing.

And speaking of eBay, I've not been selling on it for three years now but was asked by one of the family if I could help dispose of an unwanted Christmas present so I've given it a try and, whilst listing the item, decided to try selling an old jug that I found in an Antique Centre near Dundee last summer. I'll see how well those two sales go before deciding whether or not to start selling regularly again although  I'm not sure that I can be bothered with all the bookkeeping for the taxman and the packing.

This weeks film is Lone Survivor starring Mark Wahlberg. There aren't very many war movies around these days. When I was growing up there was nothing else (apart from cowboys). So we're off to Cineworld in Ipswich later. I'll let you know what I think.

An Acting And Directing Masterclass x 2

We're at that time of year beloved by regular moviegoers like us; the big Oscar hopefuls are all released over a couple of months and, like the proverbial London bus, arrive at the cinema in rapid succession. So we went to the pictures twice this weekend.

On Friday we did something almost unheard of for us and went to the cinema in the evening. Being retired we don't need to wait until 7.30 to watch a film but Nebraska is  one of those movies that won't get much of an airing in the multiplexes and when we saw that it was on at Aldeburgh Cinema we had to fit in with their evening showing. The Oscar nominations won't be announced until 16th January but I will be amazed if Bruce Dern does not get onto the best actor list for his role as Woody Grant. Woody is an old man; he's been a heavy drinker all his life and his mind is not what it used to be. One of those ambiguous prize notification junk mails arrives in the post and Woody takes the $1,000,000 winner headline as fact without reading the small print and decides to head to Lincoln Nebraska to collect his prize in person.

Saddened by his father's condition and realising that he is not  going to give up on his conviction that he is a big winner, Woody's son Davey (Will Forte) decides to drive him to Nebraska to claim his prize. Directed by the acclaimed scriptwriter and director Alexander Payne (The Descendants, Sideways and About Schmidt ) the film has all the elements of Payne's earlier work - the road trip, the disfunctional family and a large helping of humour. The stark environment and Woody's bleak outlook are darkly emphasised by the black and white cinematography but the film is not all darkness and there is both the touching relationship between Woody and Davey and the humour of their relationship with a myriad aunts, uncles and old acquaintances who refuse to believe Davey's insistence that his dad is not going to be a millionaire.  With fine supporting performances by Bob Odenkirk and June Squibb as Davey's brother and mother, this is a wonderful film that will not disappoint.

It was another odd viewing time when we went to Cineworld in Ipswich yesterday and saw the 11 a.m screening of American Hustle. This is another film that is heavy on acting and light on stunts and special effects. Set in the 1970's it's based on real events and tells the story of con artist Irving Rosenfield (Christian Bale) an out of shape chancer who teams up with Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), a loner with no cash and big ambitions, to make money from scamming desperate people. I won't give the plot away but they become involved in something much bigger as the law gets involved and the scams spiral out of their control. Films like this don't come around very often - I can only think of The Sting and Jackie Brown (both firm favourites) by way of comparison and, in my opinion, this is superior to both. 

What impressed me most with this film was the outstanding level of performance from the entire cast. Christian Bale and Amy Adams are brilliant in the lead roles but so too is Bradley Cooper as FED agent Richie DiMaso, Jeremy Renner as Carmine Polito and Robert De Niro as a hugely convincing and scary Mafia boss. Despite all these magnificent performances Jennifer Lawrence in her role as Irving's dim, dizzy and needy wife manages once again to upstage everybody - she really is a fantastic actor and this is a dream part for her. We both loved this film and I wouldn't be surprised to see Oscar nominations for Bale as actor in a leading role and, Cooper and Lawrence in supporting roles along with script and directing nominations - and not forgetting an amazing seventies soundtrack.

It was goodbye to the Christmas decorations today and everything looks a bit bare now but I suppose it's time to move on after a lovely Christmas.

We've got lots coming up in the next couple of weeks and are looking forward to heading north for a couple of 60th birthday parties and to see my mum, Sarah and Duncan and family and Mark and Nita in Ribchester. 

Meanwhile our diet continues. I baked a pizza for a neighbour today. It was quite hard taking this round to him knowing that I had a salad waiting for me at home. 

Welcome Visitors

We're delighted to have friends staying with us in Framlingham this week. We've known Dave and Jane Haworth since before our children were born and have missed seeing them after moving away. We're cramming in as much as we can in the short time that they are here and today we headed to the coast and had a walk around both Walberswick and Southwold where we had a great lunch on the pier.

Despite rough seas the weather was kind enough for us to walk down the pier and have a look at the famous water clock before strolling along the beach to the town centre.

Although we aren't far off November a few foolhardy people were braving the water including a couple of surfers who were riding the waves quite expertly.

Yesterday we took Jane and Dave for a quick look around Framlingham. We showed them the castle, the church and the market but with heavy rain forecast decided on an indoor activity for the afternoon and headed to Cineworld in Ipswich.

We saw Tom Hanks' latest movie Captain Phillips on the amazing IMAX screen. It's a very powerful film that draws you in completely and leaves you emotionally drained. Hanks is brilliant as the level headed captain and the actors who play the Somali pirates are totally convincing to the extent that it feels like we're watching reality. It's an excellent and unmissable film.

Last night we ate at our local The Crown. We eat at The Crown quite often and it is going from strength to strength. It's wonderful to be able to walk to somewhere serving good, interesting food and not having to worry about drinking and driving. Last night we tried the new menu and were impressed with all the food. The celeriac, duck terrine and boneless quail starters and the loin of pork main course were favourites.

We've done the rest of the cooking. On Monday it was lasagne and tonight it's chicken pie. I might not be up to Crown Head Chef Matt Ransome's standard but I'm trying.



  

To Ipswich To The World's End

There was a change of plans today as our child minding stint in Rochester was postponed. So we found ourselves with time on our hands and, after doing a pile of ironing, we decided to head to Woodbridge and get some of the miniature paintings that we bought at Westhall on Sunday framed. 

It was pouring with rain - ideal for a trip to the cinema - so we looked for something light and decided on The World's End which was showing at Cineworld down the road in Ipswich. It felt like the world's end when we arrived at the multiplex and found it heaving. It seemed that half the parents in Ipswich had, like us, taken the rain as a prompt for a movie trip and it was bedlam in the foyer as they queued with their kids for tickets for Monsters University and Despicable Me . Fortunately buying online (well done Cineworld no booking fee plus discount for members), we bypassed the mayhem and went straight in to the screen.

We like Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and loved Shaun Of The Dead. Hot Fuzz was okay. The cast of The World's End includes Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman and Rosamund Pike which is a pretty strong line up by any measure. The screening was full but we were about forty years older than 99% of the crowd which perhaps suggests that we are not quite the target audience Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright were aiming for. I would love to say that it was hilarious but I'm afraid that it was more "alright" than "great". 

Pegg plays his Peter Pan role as Gary King a forty year old looking to recreate a pub crawl that he and four friends failed to complete in their home town of Newton Haven when they were just eighteen. His friends now have respectable middle class lives but alcoholic King hasn't changed. He just wants to have fun and he persuades them to (reluctantly) join him. Like Shaun Of The Dead there's a lot of chasing and being chased as they discover that the inhabitants of Newton Haven are not quite what they seem. There are plenty of pretty corny jokes and some visual slapstick but I wouldn't go to the world's end to see it.

The weather forecast for tomorrow is good. Perhaps we'll be able to get out on our new bikes for the first time.

Man Of Steel? Man Of Noise More Like

We managed a trip to the excellent IMAX screen at Cineworld in Ipswich yesterday. We've missed out on the cinema lately as we've had so much going on but things have calmed down a little now and we've planned a cinema binge with another three outings planned over the next five days.

Like Superman, I'm a bit bionic now with my built in hearing aid. Having been to IMAX before I suppose I should have known to switch it off but I simply set it to minimum and ended up with my head pulsating in a way unexperienced since standing next to the amplifiers at a Strawbs concert in the late sixties. 

We both enjoyed Man Of Steel but that's as far as it  goes. It's all comic book action from start to finish and seeing it on an IMAX screen gave us the very best of the CGI special effects. There's not a lot going on apart from crash bang wallop. But it is superior crash bang wallop. There is a story of sorts - evil baddies from Krypton want to take over the world - and Russell Crowe is Superman's good dad spouting morality and benevolence - but its all just a good excuse to show spectacular spacecraft and a million explosions. Good fun but take your earplugs or leave your hearing aid at home. To sum it up in a word - BANG

Today I'm off to see something a little more sedate - John Sheeran's talk on Chagall at St Michael's rooms here in Framlingham. I've been to four of this series of talks now and I have learnt a lot about Bonnard, Kandisnky, Klee and Matisse. I think that today's is the last of this season's lectures and another starts in the autumn. If you are in Framingham they are well worth attending.

Tomorrow it's a trip to Bury St Edmunds to see a business person who I am mentoring under the Suffolk Chamber Of Commerce's scheme. I've volunteered to help businesses with management accounting and financial advice as it seems a pity to let my forty years of training and experience go to waste. I hope that they find it useful. 

After that it's a trip to Shire Hall to meet the county archaeologist and discuss recording metal detecting finds with him and then to the garage to pay for the new car. I'm looking forward to picking the car up on Monday and hoping to have a bit of comfort when we head up to Scotland next weekend.

  

It's Not All About The House

If you've dipped into this blog any time over the last six months you will probably be of the impression that our life has revolved around little more than an endless stream of home improvements and the world's longest ever landscape gardening project. And you would be forgiven if that is the impression you've gained as, in all honesty, it has been something of a preoccupation. But there has been life away from the project and we've been taking in a fair bit of what's on offer locally during the past week.

We've seen two very different films at two very different venues. It was Cineworld Ipswich first. The Place Beyond The Pines is an excellent film about family values and morality. Ryan Gosling is a bit of a drifter -a stunt motorcyle rider whose life changes when he discovers that he has a son. Bradley Cooper is a young ambitious cop whose life changes when his path crosses with Gosling's. It's finely acted by all the cast and is very much a film of two halves - half action movie and half moral drama. The two halves make a very fine whole.

Last night we went to the totally different Ipswich Film Theatre Trust - a small community based independent cinema. It's an extremely friendly place and it shows a great choice of films many of which are unlikely to ever turn up at the multiplex. We saw Love Is All You Need which stars Pierce Brosnan as a sort of Man From Del Monte who owns a lemon grove in Italy. His son is marrying Trine Dyrholm's character's daughter and the action takes place over the long weekend of the wedding celebrations. In a mix of both English and Danish, the film is subtitled in part and has a mostly Scandinavian cast. It's a very warm and gentle movie and mixes comedy, romance and a little drama together to make a thoroughly entertaining couple of hours.

We've also been to have a look at Sutton Hoo - very interesting and well worth a visit even if just to get a sense of what it was like to haul that ship all the way up from the river way down in the distance. We've been to the local book club and had an interesting discussion on Gone Girl and on Friday we had a great meal and very enjoyable time at the jazz night hosted by The Lemon Tree Bistro here in Framlingham

We've been reading plenty. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson was fascinating and I enjoyed Dave Eggers' A Hologram For The King. At the moment I'm reading Karen Campbell's This Is Where I Am the story of a Somali refugee in Glasgow who is mentored by a recently bereaved volunteer - powerful stuff.

And today we went to the Alde Valley Festival. This is a celebration of art and nature held just down the road from Framlingham at Great Glemham. It runs over a few weeks in April and May. There is an exhibition of painting, sculpture and ceramics by some outstanding artists (including Maggie Hambling) together with a varied programme of events. We took in a walk led by artist and farmer Jason Gathorne-Hardy. Jason showed us a huge variety of local trees and explained how to interpret their placing in the landscape. Some magnificent oaks were up to 800 years old. A fascinating couple of hours in a lovely setting ended with some great tea and cake in the old farmhouse. At the weekend there's a big picnic at an enormous 100 yard long picnic table. Highly recommended.