I was reviewing an older posting of mine earlier, about my first backstage trip to a super-cinema. (Shades Nostalgia alert!) There are clips online from the 1961 Cliff film The Young ones, much of which was filmed in the long gone Frank Matcham Finsbury Park Empire Theatre. I googled for an image and didn’t find a lot, although this could well be it. (Image via Google from this site, no obvious link).

The best bit in the Young Ones is when they get in to the theatre and perform an inpromptu show. It isn’t on Youtube, but these two snippets are. The second one features the theatre.

Wikipedia says that the plot for this movie was used for the Blues Brothers. In a way, it was…

When looking around for any jokey reference to a sub-region name/number to back up my Morley Christmas lights article, I subsequently stumbled onto the North sea Region Programme Website A huge amount of info is there, but some things resonate.

Look out for muted blues, yellows and pinky reds on their webheaders and in their literature, diffuse colours in a sort of watercolour swirl, accompanied with high sounding bureaucrat-speak which actually comes down to nothing specific, such as “Preparing for Tomorrow Today” and so on.

(Nourishing Obscurity)

Curious that Norway is heavily involved, they are not even in the EU…

In retail, Christmas unofficially starts on November 6th (the night after Guy Fawkes)  but it is a gradual  escalation of stock, music and tinsel so that by December 1st it is in full swing.

The Morley lights switch-on starts officially this coming Thursday, but wandering through town this afternoon, as dusk approached, we were surprised to see the ones on the side of the Town Hall were lit.

We were also slightly surprised to see a couple of well known local characters erecting a banner on the building- for something being held elsewhere in the Town.

The signage that was lit was new, which is just as well as the one from last year was a bit poorly.  The new one is somewhat plainer, with just a couple of bells instead of a fairy. Also, the Morley bit looks detachable. (Maybe it might say North Sea Region Division 43 one day). Unsurprisingly, in this day and age, restitution of the C word (or even the X word) in the wording has been avoided. We wouldn’t want to offend any invisible frienders, would we?

I bought a plunger today from Morley Handyman, £1.70 for cash. David immediately grabbed it and stuck it on his face, asking if it left a ring. The reason he did this is that a long time ago, before he was even born, Karen & I visited some old friends of mine called Les & Geraldine who lived in Bedworth. The last time I had visited them, I had been impressed at their new 4 bedroom double garaged house and the minimalist lounge with plush suite, telly, top end Hi-Fi & artwork. (When I first met them, they lived in a council flat in a tower block but Geraldine was determined to move in to a new house one day, she definitely didn’t want to live in a “used” one.)

Fast forward a decade or so and they now had a four year old little girl, called Jennifer. The spartan lounge was now full of toys, including a substantial plastic Wendy House. Amongst the toys was a clear plastic ball full of beads on a short pole with a plastic sucker on the end, a leftover from her toddler days. To amuse Jennifer, I moistened the sucker and stuck it on my forehead, letting her chase me round the room. All was well until i took it off again, at which point everyone burst out laughing. I now had a three inch red circle on my forehead which stayed for several days…