the sweetest things

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A good cast helps what might otherwise be a bore despite its short running time. Frankie Howerd, making his movie debut, plays a relief coach driver tasked with taking passengers from a grounded plane to an airport where the weather is better. However, it soon becomes clear that someone on the coach is wound up in dodgy goings-on. Margaret Rutherford surely had enormous fun with one of those "Listen here, young man" roles, while Petula Clark features as a bright stewardess.

Howerd does Howerd things, with slightly less aplomb than he did a few years later, but the promise is there. Some wonderful period details of coach and airport, not least a minor plot point whereby passenger names for Ireland can't be checked because such passengers often don't book but just rock up to the airport and take the first free seat! The comedy is better than the drama. it's all very British, but so am I so that's all right then. ★★½

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Well, not actually in the rain. I and a couple of other people met in the George Hotel in Bewdley this morning for breakfast and coffee. It started raining just after we'd all got there – win! It was surprisingly busy for a Monday, and I never really worked out why. They can't all have been going the same pub to get out of the rain, surely! Happily the rain didn't last for all that long, so by the time we broke up the weather had improved considerably. I popped into Sainsbury's on the way home, but nothing jumped out at me.

In honour of the great man's 100th birthday, I got David Attenborough's Further Adventures of a Young Naturalist out of the library. This is a slightly abridged reprint of a 1981 book in which he wrote about his 1950s/60s Zoo Quest trips to Madagascar, New Guinea and the Northern Territory of Australia. It's old-fashioned in tone at times: the only real edits have been to remove certain details of Indigenous Australian ceremonial practices now understood not to be suitable for a general audience. But once you allow for that tone, it's fascinating.

What's remarkable is how much these places have changed in the intervening years. The 1960s NT of Quest Under Capricorn, for example, was a place where Darwin was still a small settlement, bizarre (white) semi-hermits lived in shacks on the edge of the desert, and genuinely nomadic Aboriginal life still just about survived. New Guinea was still largely unexplored by Westerners, and Madagascar was only just gaining independence. The book is a time capsule, but fortunately the Attenborough-ness of it all comes through well.

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I was in Droitwich Spa today to meet a very good friend who'd kindly agreed to ride up from the southeast. Fortunately the weather played ball and we had a very nice, relaxed day which consisted of eating, ambling, more ambling, poking through charity shops, then finally more refreshment.

It turned out to be the local Food and Drink Festival in the Lido Park (this hadn't been planned by us!) but in the event that was really just a cramped assemblage of twenty or so food trucks, so we didn't linger and spent much more time wandering vaguely through the park. Other than my train being late at the end, it was a lovely day. :)

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1971 Alpine A110, Bewdley
I was pleased to see this in Bewdley: a 1971 Alpine A110. There aren't that many of them still around, and it's a nice little thing that looked very appealing sitting in the parking bay in Load Street. These cars had Renault engines, so you often see them referred to as Alpine-Renaults. Under that title, and using tuned versions of cars like this, the manufacturer ran away with the 1973 World Rally Championship, winning six of the year's 13 rounds.

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I grabbed a coffee this morning and managed to spill the last inch or so. Naturally the rich brown coffee went all over my fawn-coloured trousers! Go me. I had no choice but to dash into a nearby charity shop and buy half-decent replacements to change into. Fortunately I found a reasonably nice navy pair by Tu (Sainsbury's clothing brand) so at least I fell on my feet a bit. Even so, it was annoying I hadn't done this when I was wearing black trousers!

Not a lot else to report about the day: that was pretty much the highlight, or at least the lowlight. The rain held off, though it looked a bit threatening briefly in the late morning and really wasn't very warm for May. I also had time between boring stuff to pop into B&M to see if I could find a new power bank that wasn't either overpriced or some garish colour. (Answer: no.) I'll have a look in a different discount shop at some point in the next few days, as I'm not in a rush for it.

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A pretty ordinary day, despite it being Bank Holiday Monday. The weather was dry but mostly cloudy, and I didn't do anything interesting. I did watch a documentary on the making of Life on Earth, which was interesting, and after all it's hard to find anything David Attenborough does boring. Quite a different world in those days: once you'd set off to the other side of the planet, you could literally go weeks between contacts with your employers back home. Not even satellite phones back then (late 1970s) let alone the internet!

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...is "Poor Ginger", and it is devastating. I sometimes wonder how many parents buy Black Beauty for their kids under the impression that it's a "cute fluffy animal" story, only to find those children traumatised by details of Beauty rediscovering her former friend suffering a slow and painful death doing the lowest rung of cab work. Anna Sewell was of course writing mainly for adults, and with the intention of her book being a campaign for more humane treatment of horses. Pulling her punches would not have done that job.

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One last nice day today, although it went very dark in late afternoon and I got the feeling it might be about to rain. It just about held off, though the forecast for the weekend isn't particularly good. Hey, it is a Bank Holiday! I await some local gardener saying, "We could do with the rain" – albeit safely out of earshot of the cafés and pubs in town... on the whole the weather hasn't been too bad recently, and in this country you have to take the rough with the smooth a bit. With a little grumbling, of course!

Another day, another startling revelation regarding Sandra Peabody's mistreatment on The Last House on the Left. I discovered an obscure 2022 YouTube interview (under 400 views in nearly four years) with Jeramie Rain, who played the female gang member Sadie in the film. In it, she says that Sandra and her fellow victim-actress Lucy Grantham still will not talk to the villain-actors. After half a century. That really isn't normal, even after difficult shoots. There's no evidence Rain knows about any of the abuse, but it's an extraordinary comment nevertheless.

Some depressing news about the scourge that is the dodgy mini-mart industry. A few weeks ago a BBC team visited four towns not far from me and were offered cocaine and prescription drugs, and were intimidated by dogs at times. Then we got this story about Trading Standards officers being threatened with murder, rape and arson, and sometimes needing to wear stab vests. Many of these dodgy shops are linked to organised crime, with the violence that often entails. TSOs do not have police powers, and they need far better protection immediately.