The heat was a shame because it makes everything so difficult. But it didn't really spoil the two events we attended.
First up was Tony Vale's 50 plays in 500 minutes event. We enjoyed five or six plays before having to move on to our next event. Tony has a great ability to write in many different genres. So we had plays about knives and forks, plays about cash machines, plays about pigeons and even plays about human beings. It was a monumental undertaking in the heat.
We then moved on to one of the great hidden Norfolk villages. It's not actually secret or hidden it's just I've never been there before which is absolutely ridiculous given the fact it's around 10 mile from where we live.
I loved Great Ellingham. It struck me as a particularly pretty village with a huge heart. Fellow Norfolk Family History volunteer Heather Etteridge was mounting a heritage display on some of the dubious characters from the village's past.
It was held in the Crown Pub which gave us the chance to have lunch there. We also had a couple of short walks in the village. It was too hot for long walks.
I thought today I would catch up on photographs from the past week. Firstly we have the Home Farm Gin festival last Saturday which was followed by my friend Richard Headicar's 90th birthday do. Then there are a couple from the play day in Wymondham and finally a load from our visit to Great Ellingham.
We stayed up late on Saturday night to watch the ladies singles tennis final in the US Open. For me American player CoCo Gauff has always promised much but delivered relatively little. She seems to have been around such a long time that it's difficult to realise that she's still only 19. But on Saturday she realised her potential by winning the title. It wasn't a classic match against Sabalenka with both players making a hatful of mistakes. But while the tennis didn't impress me much (cue a Shania Twain song there) her after match interview certainly did.
We had all the standard tripe of telling her opponent what a wonderful person she is and thanking her opponent's team and thanking the crowd and liberal use of the word guys to describe everyone. Then she took hold of the microphone and spoke from the heart in a wonderfully mature way about her past and her future and how she had answered those people that said she would never win a major tournament. Certainly this Co Co was no clown (older bloggettes will get that comment).
I sometimes cringe at these pre and post match interviews with players. I think at times they go too far. Sabalenka for instance obviously wanted just to get off the court and have a period of reflection but there was an interviewer asking her how she felt. How on earth did he think she felt? She looked and sounded devastated. She did manage to praise her opponent, her opponent's team and the crowd despite the fact that 90 per cent of the crowd wanted her to lose. Then she burst into tears and mixed that with hysterical laughter and I wanted to shout at the screen "enough. Just leave her alone."
Before the formal presentation we had the head of the organising committee or something like that thanking what he referred to as " the greatest crowd that has ever attended a sporting event."
Now I'm going to use a bad word because that claim was absolute bollocks. We watched a lot of the tennis and quite often matches played to very small crowds. Apparently the ticket prices were high. I wish people wouldn't make hyperbolic statements that have no basis in fact.
Take the men's wheelchair event for example. Wheelchair tennis has been growing in popularity and at Wimbledon attracted good crowds. It is a hugely skilful game because not only do the players have to hit shots, they also have to manoeuvre wheelchairs. The only difference between it and able bodied (is it okay to use that phrase) tennis is that in wheelchair events the ball can bounce twice.
Alfie Hewett is one of the best two players in the world and comes from Norwich. At Wimbledon he played to a packed crowd, in the USA he played to what looked like a maximum of about 20.
Yesterday I got the date wrong for the library presentation about the Mid Norfolk Railway. I put September 17th and should have put September 21st. I quickly altered it but some of my early readers might have got the date before it was changed.
Sad to say the voices of Saturday night television Mike Yarwood has died. I used the word voices in the plural because Mike was an impressionist famed for his jokey portrayals of politicians of the day. He always seemed to be on television with his cheesy grin. Another good un no longer with us.
I mentioned my dream about a mellotron. Can't remember the context of the dream at all but somehow I had a mellotron which is one of the most difficult musical instruments to ever find a home on the stage. A keyboard, it relied on programming and loops and many other difficult things that are tough to comprehend for the layman.
The mellotron was beloved by prog rock bands and beloved by me. I can only describe the sound it made as swirling full on music that completely took over. I loved it. I have a keyboard and setting 20 sounds like a church organ and a little bit like a mellotron. It's my most used setting.
Caught up on the Last Night of the Proms where the usual panel frothed and again proved that they had swallowed the Oxford Book of Hyperbole in describing tuneless modern classical music as amazing, incredible, unbelievable, awesome and much more.
Surely the word unbelievable shouldn't exist. If something is unbelievable there cannot be any concept of what it actually is as there's no factor of something we know or have experienced about it and that's more than enough drivel for one day.