Whew! What a week. We’ve had the full gamut of weather this week from sleeting down rain and sleet to glorious, glorious (and warm) sunshine to impenetrable fog and mist. We’ve also been compelled to provide unrelenting amusement opportunities to a most splendid visitor as well as somehow fitting in all the other events and diversions in our ceaselessly entertaining lives.
Saturday of last week Ms Playchute and I made our way up to London to meet up with friends for the Painting the Garden: Monet to Matisse exhibition at the Royal Academy. All I can say is that it was simply stunning! My favourite style/period/genre of art – Impressionism – organised around the theme of how gardens were portrayed by a selection of great Impressionist artists.
Using the work of Monet as a starting point, this landmark exhibition examines the role gardens played in the evolution of art from the early 1860s through to the 1920s.
This exhibition was a “who’s who” of impressionism with some fabulous paintings on display including (to quote the web site) pieces by “Renoir, Cezanne, Pissarro, Manet, Sargent, Kandinsky, Van Gogh, Matisse, Klimt and Klee” as well as several pieces by Monet including the monumental Agapanthus Triptych, reunited specifically for the exhibition. We’ve seen Monet’s huge water lilies at the Orangerie in Paris and nothing quite prepares you for the scale and beauty of those paintings. But the variety of stunning pieces in this exhibition as well as the opportunity to see the Triptych as well as Renoir’s Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil makes this quite a sensational exhibition.
On Wednesday this week the real fun began. We started the day with another screening at the Silver Matinee for old codgers in Banbury – this time we were able to enjoy Bridge of Spies with Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance. Absolutely wonderful! Beautifully filmed, it’s the story of the arrest and trial of a Russian Spy, Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), during the Cold War. He is defended by James Donovan (Tom Hanks) who then goes on to negotiate the prisoner exchange of Abel for the U2 pilot, Gary Powers. Catch it if you haven’t seen it yet.
a wonderful entertaining film scripted by the Coen brothers, superbly directed by Spielberg with wonderful acting from all the characters
The Moreton Pinkney Picayune
Then, on Wednesday afternoon we made our way through the sleeting rain and around the various flooded roads to Luton airport to collect our special visitor for the week, my nephew Greg who is currently studying at Lund University in Sweden. He had a bit of a break so we persuaded him to visit. And boy, is he sorry he did! (Not really, I hope, but who knows!)
We have crammed the usual seventeen days of activities into the three days he has been with us and the poor boy hasn’t stopped walking! We went up to London on Thursday and dragged him around the Tate Modern, St Paul’s and the Tower of London. We then took a river cruise from the Tower to Westminster and then walked some more, past the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Downing Street eventually finding ourselves at our favourite restaurant, Wahaca, which was excellent as always. We then wandered around Covent Garden for a bit before finishing the afternoon in the National Portrait Gallery. I think we all snored a bit on the train home.
Friday we decided Greg hadn’t yet done enough walking so we set off to Oxford and dragged him around that fair city. We wandered around several dozen of the colleges, tromped our way across Christ Church Meadow and ended up in the Pitt-Rivers Museum which holds one of the most amazingly eclectic collection of stuff you could ever hope to encounter in any one place. He was just about worn out when we returned to Banbury and threw him on a train so that he could meet up with Nick and go to a comedy club in Birmingham. I don’t think he quite believed us when we told him it was an open mic night and he was third on the bill but I’m sure he did well.
He travels back to Sweden today, sadly, so it’s back down to Luton to throw him on the plane to Copenhagen. Poor boy will be so exhausted he’ll need to get back to university to have a break. It’s been a lot of fun having him here.
Love to you all,
Greg