Pantomime time!

 

Ooh, missus. Now this may be hard to explain to anyone who has never seen a British pantomime: The Ugly Sisters in Cinderella, played by two beefy men. For us locals, there's an added frisson in knowing that Trevor, in the polka dots, is our village postmaster and Steve in the fetching stripes and feathers is a builder and undertaker.

 

The months of rehearsals are over and they are finally live on stage this February half-term, as light flurries of snow fall outside. They're getting rave reviews, as is the panto itself, with its geeky, camp Prince Charming, mournful French chef Les Miserables and a murder mystery to solve along with the riddle of the shoe. As ever, Rob the Panto King has excelled himself with gorgeous original music along with the wit and wonder of the words.

 

And if I haven't been able to concentrate properly on book writing - blame them! 

Embrace the Goth!

Hi, I’m Maddy, and no, I haven’t hacked the blog. While my mum is lying down in a darkened room (after all the rushing around involved in running ‘a small hotel’), she’s left it to me to write this post.

Traditionally we go by the philosophy that the three vital elements for a successful holiday consist of working sanitation, a swimming pool that generally manages not to resemble Listerine and a working WiFi connection.

I took this to mean we would jinx the Internet.

No sooner had our problems with septic tanks and the swimming pool’s aggressively expansionist algae had been sorted out, we were cast into a whole new dimension of stress. And this time it was not due to my pantomime-composing father sitting at a malfunctioning laptop laughing uproariously at his own jokes and thrashing power chords onto a piano – echo pedal all the way down of course, or the dramatic effect would be lost on the walls.

Normally, a theoretical collapse of the internet would be a major annoyance, but this time it was a matter of life and death: this was the day of our most ardent online-shopping campaign to date, a triple-flanked assault on the LiveNation presale. The reason for this chaos? Evanescence (a gothic rock band for anyone that doesn’t know) had decided to cast aside their usual far-flung haunts that constitute a tour and come to Wembley.

At 9.15 in the morning, the race against time began. By 9.30, one credit card (and seats in Row H) had already been rejected. Dreams of finally seeing Amy Lee and co. had been crushed ruthlessly by Barclaycard and their idiotically precise password verification system.

Trying again, we found that most of the arena had been taken over by people with kinder banks. We gave in and asked for seats somewhere in the northern hemisphere. They found us some in Row W. Victory from the jaws of defeat!

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the aforementioned algae had spread out of the swimming pool and were now attacking the neighbouring field. Even mum and dad had stopped laughing at the theatre’s oldest jokes, and of course, it was only a matter of time before the pool vacuum cleaner failed…