Young and Old

It's rather fun to change things around. Having had a little play with the look of the blog, and fiddling with templates, fonts and layout,  I wondered what a new small test post would look like. 
I spent last evening at a rather jolly little restaurant at which a frighteningly young colleague's band was performing, I felt a little like the Oldest Member at the golf club, trying hard not to bore the surrounding youth with too many tales of past, long-forgotten gigs and opinions about equipment. They listened kindly, the music was loud but mostly well-crafted  and the food was really quite good, in spite of having to eat it crammed like a lemming in a corner, surrounded by steins of beer.

Watching "Quartet" this afternoon, Dustin Hoffman's directorial debut,  at least had the effect of renewing my youth to some extent, insofar as the stellar British cast were even more superannuated and wrinkly than me. Michael Gambon had, it seemed, stolen his Dumbledore costume from the Harry Potter set. Even a mightily articulate and unashamedly lecherous Billy Connolly had had a haircut and a wide-eyed  Pauline Collins teetered dangerously close to benign, forgetful dementia. Maggie Smith, inevitably, just looked like Miss Jean Brodie, but older. Tom Courtenay stole the show with the best line five minutes from the end.

The film revolves, improbably, around a very comfortable retirement home (read 'Best Marigold' transposed to a well-heeled country house in rural England), inhabited by luminous opera divas and past musical masters all with egos as desiccated as parchment, but still able to turn a bar or two. It's delightful, quirky, quintessentially British and full of people who clearly had huge fun making it.