Sunday 20 October 2013

Elektra and a bloody pasty

Find the Sunday School book in Cornwall on a windy sunny afternoon. En route back from a shopping trip in Penzance, stop at a beach cafe in Marazion and buy a pasty to eat by the sea. The chapel on St Michael's Mount was of course a pilgrimage site (some people thought the Holy Grail was kept there). But I wasn't thinking of pilgrimage.

















My thoughts in fact turned to Elektra - the play - that I'd been reading in the garden before I left. Since I saw the Covent Garden production of Richard Strausss' opera a few weeks ago I've not  been able to get crazed Elektra out of my mind. Other opera seems light-weight compared to this .

And then the pasty disintegrated in my hands: it must have been frozen but not fully thawed before being baked. The pastry was cooked on the ends but not the meat in the middle. Everything fell to the sand. Blood in my hands. A visual metaphor for the themes of the play....
Couldn't even bring myself to take it back to the cafe.

Later, en route to the Star Inn, Porkellis, listened to this on the car radio. Mary Coughlan.





Reading and watching

  • Foot by Foot to Santiago de Compostela/Judy Foot
  • The Testament of Mary with Fiona Shaw at the Barbican
  • The Testament of Mary/Colm Toibin
  • Schwanengesang/Schubert - Tony Spence
  • Journals/Robert Falcon Scott
  • Fugitive Pieces/Ann Michaels
  • Unless/Carol Shields
  • Faust/Royal Opera House
  • The Art of Travel/Alain de Botton
  • Mad Men Series 6
  • A Week at The Airport/Alain de Botton
  • The Railway Man/Eric Lomax
  • Bright Lights, Big City/Jay McInerney
  • Stones of Venice/John Ruskin
  • The Sea, the Sea/Iris Murdoch
  • Childe Harold/Lord Byron
  • All The Pretty Horses/Cormac McCarthy
  • Extreme Rambling/Mark Thomas
  • Story of my Life/Jay McInerney
  • Venice Observed/Mary McCarthy