Surfacing...

...glub glub glub...

It's nearly seven years since my first post here. I've posted very little lately; for some reason nothing seems interesting enough to tell people about. This probably means that the serious blogging blahs have finally hit me, but is possibly also related to having been so sick a couple of months ago, and the usual end-of-year kind of busy-ness and malaise. I won't say that my New Year's resolution is to blog more often, but maybe I should.

Of course we have done interesting things lately:

I took Sandra to Assiette for her birthday the week before Christmas. We had the degustation menu and the whole experience was just tops. Wonderful service and just perfect food. Their two hats are well-deserved.

We continued our subscription to Sydney Theatre this year, and it continues to be a great investment. Standouts for 2010 were the last two productions: The Wharf Review (as always) and Uncle Vanya - Richard Roxburgh was brilliant, as was Hayley McElhinney. We also enjoyed August: Osage County, although we found A Long Day's Journey into Night to be just that, despite Robyn Nevin's stellar performance - tedious, especially the apparently endless last scene. Kafka's Trial was brilliant. I'd looked forward to seeing a production of Our Town - the last one I'd seen was when I was at school - but I was strangely disappointed with it. We definitely enjoyed Honour (although it felt rather dated), The Walworth Farce and Spring Awakening, but saw them so many months ago It's hard to remember why in detail, and Optimism, an updated version of Candide, was great fun. We've subscribed to fewer plays for 2011, partly because it's getting rather expensive, but because we feel we'd also like to start seeing plays at Belvoir too. Maybe I should resolve to always review plays here as I used to.

We went to the Gold Coast to spend the Christmas weekend with Sandra's mother, which is never easy. She will be 90 next year and likes things to be done in a certain way - food especially. Unfortunately it rained pretty much all day every day we were there (see photos), so we were glad we had an extremely comfortable apartment, good books and our knitting. But it was good to be home. We cooked our preferred Christmas meal (roast chicken and trifle) on New Years Day, and we were joined by my younger son Daniel, who lived with us for a large part of 2009 and is now settled in Sydney. We spent the afternoon laughing at a DVD set that Sandra gave me, composed of clips of Movietone newsreels featuring New Zealand from the 30s to the 70s. That felt like our 'real' Christmas.

On New Years Eve we took a road trip to the pretty town of Berry, with a stop in Thirroul to have coffee with Ailsa. Lunch at the Sourdough Bakery and Cafe was all we'd been told to expect, and the local yarn shop, Sew and Tell, is completely amazing - despite its twee name. It sells a quilting supplies, including designer fabrics (Amy Butler! Kaffe Fassett!), as well as interesting yarns. A treasure trove, and I was captured by aome New Zealand bamboo yarn for a summer top. A hint for the future: the roads were almost completely empty on New Year's Eve, making for a day of extremely pleasant driving.

And that's your lot for now. I'll do a knitting blog tomorrow, and I'll be back at work on Tuesday. I wish you all a Happy New Year, and that 2011 is all that you wish it will be.

Comments

[Shawjonathan.wordpress.com]

Happy New Year, M-H. Clearly your relative absence from the blogosphere is a symptom of Having A Life. I agree that Richard Roxburgh was brilliant in Uncle Vanya, but then the whole play just swept me away. I liked A Long Day's Journey much more than you did, possibly because my companion told me about her own spectacularly dysfunctional family at interval, and I could FEEL her living the whole thing in the second half

[Jan]

Thanks for the memory. I'm fairly sure the last time I saw Our Town was when I was also at school.

[www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawmS9Fkr33DGZyXMEoiO8A9TE904iUkIGQs]

I'm very envious of your seeing 'Uncle Vanya'. I've had a Belvoir subscription for some time and it's been wonderful. Always interesting and often challenging, even when things are imperfect.

Please keep blogging - and yes, reviews would be wonderful.