Jeni Barnett

The ‘oosbind of thirty odd years left for Warwickshire this morning.
He took a bag of clothes, a basket of wine bottles and his lap top. He left at 9.30 and gave me a perfunctory scratch with his Royale. Thats the little tiny rock ‘n’ roll beard that aging rock ‘n’ rollers have. A kind of simplistic vanity for old gits. The facial furniture adopted by so many men reflects there relationship to their manhood, like the trident missile it’s a perfect deterrent, never used and almost certainly obsolete. In my husbands case his Royale is perfectly pruned and tended and gets ever longer by the day thus becoming a ‘Chin Shrub’.
To beard or not to beard that is the perennial question.
My ligament is still hurting in my left ankle, all walking is out of the question until after Wednesday.
So it was the bus and tube again.
I miss my ramble through the park and over the bridges.
I went to see THE CARETAKER last night. By golly but Johnathan Price is sensational. If you sat next to me you will have noticed my head snap back and forwards. I was snoozing, not out of boredom, but because I had driven up from Sussex at 6.33a.m.

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I’ve just come in from ‘The Wolseley’, the posh restaurant next to the Ritz.
I was treated to liver and bacon courtesy of a wonderful man I have known for years. He works for a publishing house and represents Jackie Collins and Adriana Trigiani. He and his partner go to Florida every year to drink Vodka Martinis and hang out with the retired, we talked about life and the art of publishing.
‘The Wolseley’ is noisy and starry and perfect for an evening of indulgence. We shared cheesecake and gossip, then he went off to Sarf London whilst I walked down to Hyde Park Corner and grabbed a taxi to get me back to the flat.
Two nights in a row I’ve had cabbies that told me about the five bridges that are closed in London. The hold ups, the water works and the Blackwall Tunnel closures. Getting around London is proving to be a nightmare. Please can I blame Boris Johnson?
Thank you I will.
‘Boris pull your finger out’.

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So I got there early having been to a caff next door where I downed the biggest baked potato since the famine, more baked beans than Heinz, a coconut cake and a pot of Earl Grey tea. The proprietor called it a herbal tea and I didn’t want to disappoint so I kept quiet, the eleven quid it cost me for my pre-theatre meal was worth every carb.
I waddled into the ‘Apollo’ on Lower Regent Street, having walked the whole length of Upper Regent Street before I realised that the ‘Apollo Cinema’ was not a moon walk away but literally round the corner from LBC.
I sat down in the second row and gobbled up the popcorn that had been left for us BAFTA members, then started on the sweets, another pot for the privileged.

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Everything is fine.
This morning a big, plump South African rung my bell.
He came upstairs and with notebook in hand, took down fastidious notes about cleaning my carpets.
Then a young man from the Far east, and I don’t mean Leytonstone, arrived with a big machine, bottles, mops, and a look of deep concentration, had words with his boss and set about shifting a rug here and an armchair there.
I left.

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Thank you all for your supportive comments. I think this blogging lark is remarkable, even if I am a twit when it comes to the workings of it.
I watched a wonderful documentary about the world wide web, the internet, and freedom of communication. For a long time I have harboured a bitterness towards Mr. Stephen Fry, his refusal to acknowledge anything that isn’t SCIENCE, with a capital ‘S’, but every time I see him talking, so eloquently, about things I can scarcely understand I really have to bow down to him.
His comments about the webs possibilities and Sir Tim Berners Lee, who created the www, made my heart sing. Anything that enables people to have freedom of speech and access to knowledge has to be applauded.
I watched ‘QI’ as an act of redemption, as I laughed I felt the liberation that comes with finally letting go. Mr. Fry believes what he believes and I have my own set of values. Hurrah that we can share the same air waves.

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Apart from talking to Roger Reese and Sir Ian Mckellan, wonderful men who made me miss being an actress, I talked to people about what they fed their pets.
An article in the newspaper shone the spotlight on the tins of muck we feed our dogs and cats, many include eyes, cereal and stuff picked up from the floor.
Two men turned off and wrote to tell me that that’s what they were doing. They failed to see that how we feed our pets is part of the advertising stanglehold that multi national companies have over us. How we treat out pets, our animals, our children, our elderly is all part of the same thing and if they cant get it i ‘m happy they are no longer part of my audience.

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