Too Long No Blog

I know I really need to get the hang of this blogging thing, not to mention 'tweeting'. Although it made me feel better when I had a conversation with an eighteen year old who was having difficulty getting her head around it too.Yay!There is hope for me yet. I picked up The Times at the weekend and read the supplement with thirty great poems everyone should know. I was familiar with the majority yet the one that stood out for me was'Invictus'by W.E. Henley.Then I read that Bill Nighy ( yes my TWC Bill Nighy) was recording a reading of it. I've listened: it's lovely, so is he.For me the last two lines resonate and represent what I need to remember if I am going to push myself to achieve my goals in 2012 :

 'I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.'

So onwards and upwards as they ( whoever 'they' are) say.

I'm wondering what my critical writing friend Cath is up to.Rumour has it she has just been on a road trip , by way of a coach, with another writing friend, freeing me up to make merry with my commas( sorry I went to a medieval banquet last night and indulged in a lot of  'wassailing').
I am so looking forward to hearing tales of no doubt mass destruction of the itinerary, not to mention caricatures based on fellow travellers .Little do the latter know what they were letting themselves in for when they assembled at the crack of dawn outside some dark and brooding religious edifice, cold fingers clutching coach boot battered cases.These people may never set foot on a coach again for the rest of their lives. Then again they will be a lot richer for having the experience of meeting my mad writing friends and may well become lifelong buddies. We'll see. The writing class await their return to the fold on Monday with baited breath ; I may even be early for a change.

Thinking Woman's Crumpet Time......

Hmm.I have pondered a long while on my next subject. It's the mouth you see. Again. What is it about mouths?I guess you focus on them a lot when the subject is an actor. This man came into my life when I was a teenager and like so many of my contemporaries I possessed several  iconic shots of James Dean, mainly, if not all in black and white. Of course I loved Rebel Without a Cause, yet it was Giant that really drew me in: watching his performance and how he aged on screen.The irony being that we never saw him age in real life of course.
James Dean is such an obvious one that I mention him merely in passing to my real subject:
Stephen Mc Hattie, born in Nova Scotia in 1947.He is a film and tv actor with many performances under his belt including some of the most popular tv series.In 1976 McHattie played James Dean  in the film  James Dean: Portrait of a Friend, a tv adaptation of the biography written by James Dean's friend and writer Bill Bast. At some point I came across this film and it has stayed in my memory all these years, Stephen McHattie has stayed in my memory as he was then : the sculpted cheekbones, the thin lipped curve of the mouth which verges on the edge of a snarl, yet teases you with the smallest hint of a smile, the piercing eyes. Check him out on wikipedia/google. He may be in his sixties now, but I say the man still has it: in spades.