Drama on screen and on court

Clare went to her study group after breakfast and I did the first of two shopping trips of the day, to refill a couple of bottles with laundry and cleaning fluids, which are available locally. The specialist shop in the Corp turned out to be closed, and not reopening until early next year. No idea why. Thankfully Beanfreaks also offers refills, so mission accomplished. I improvised a pasta sauce with aubergines, carrots, onions, mushrooms and pinto beans, as I found a can of them tucked away in the cupboard.

After lunch on impulse, I read a chapter of 'Invierno en Madrid', instead of reading in bed and nodding off. I'm nearly at the end now, and enjoying the climax of the story. It's taken more than a year to get through this six hundred page novel, but I have learned a lot from doing so. Then I walked in the park for an hour before dealing with emails and preparing supper, while Clare was out at meditation group.

I watched the last in Iolo Williams's series of wildlife programmes on Anglesey on catch-up while waiting for the last episode of 'Sherwood' to be broadcast live. It was superb, powerful in the way it focussed not on the ultimate arrest of the murderer, but on the community meeting which followed, in which the shared memory of divisions and wounds generated during the 1980's miners' strike were aired. A five minute long scene in the same room, with minimal changes in camera shots. You could have been looking at a film of a play on stage. Definitely the best piece of British crime drama I've seen in recent years. There was a lot in it that echoed the impact on community life of the loss of the pits in South Wales, persisting still today.

With nothing better to do just before and after this I dipped into the  tennis match between Harmony Tan and Serena Williams at Wimbledon with some exciting tennis played between a rising star and a veteran champion who eventually lost in what was only a first round match, Well, eventually the older must make way for the younger, no matter how we feel about that.