Well, the plan for today was to get up and walk the half hour to the market in Uppermill. I woke up and looked out of the window to see ... yet more snow, falling gracefully from the sky. Proper goose feather flakes! None of that thin sleety stuff! Judging by our path and pavement, now covered again after our good citizen clearing and gritting the other day, it's been going a while. 
The road is beginning to be covered as well. It's a good job I didn't have to take the small grandson to school today. I would not have relished waiting for a bus at 7 am in the snow. I wonder, though, if it was snowing when my daughter got up to drive to Ormskirk in the small hours. If so, she may have difficulty getting back. We shall wait and see what the rest of the day brings.
The centre of Manchester yesterday had no snow. I know this because I was there. A good number of us came in from outlying bits of Manchester to the Italian conversation class this afternoon. Most of us left snow behind us and returned to it at the end of the afternoon but in the centre there was nothing. It was still pretty cold mind you. This did not prevent young men from going around in shorts. Where did that fashion come from? All muffled up with warm jackets, hats, scarves, gloves and then legs bare from knee to ankle! Even in my mini skirt days I used to wear warm tights when the weather was cold. Crazy young men!
We had been asked, in preparation for the Italian class, to research interesting facts about the Italian city of Bologna and talk about it to the group. Amazingly none of us chose the same as anyone else. So we had the unsolved mysteries of the bomb in Bologna railway station and the plane that went down into the sea off Sicily on a flight from Bologna to Palermo, both in 1980, a treatise in the canals of Bologna, a list of Bolognese food, the rather obsessive artist Giorgio Morandi who painted mostly pots, bottles, jars and vases (in fact in his museum in Bologna you can see the pots, bottles, jars and vases that inspired him!) and stuff about the university.
Not only is Bologna University the oldest in Europe but it was the first to allow women to graduate and the first to have a female professor, and that hundreds and hundreds of years ago. In fact she was the first woman to work from home in a professional capacity. That's pretty impressive considering that, according to the lady who talked about it, the University of Cambridge didn't properly accept women students until 1948. What's more, the Bologna lady professor also had 12 children - hence the need to work from home! I wonder who did the washing up in her house!
On the subject of women, I was reading about "Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios", Pedro Almodóvar's wonderful film. It has been made into a into a musical with the actress Tamsin Greig. I'm not sure I want to see it, although Almodóvar probably appreciates the weirdness of it. One of the wonders of the original film was the homage paid by the cinematographer to earlier works that had gone before. That and the splendidly outrageous storyline.
I do wonder about the desperate need to remake everything. The sequels and prequels are surely enough without having to do a revamp of a perfectly good film. Perhaps live theatre is different since it is a fleeting, impermanent thing. But a film is set in stone, or at least in celluloid.
My other query is why there seems to be the desperate need to make a song and dance of stuff. There's opera, high brow stuff with classical stories and music written specially. Some lovely music but the peasant in me finds the whole thing quite hard to comprehend. And it's not because it's in a foreign language! Then you have "musicals", which always seem a bit like the poor man's opera. Not quite so high brow, a story with some good songs thrown in. Opera for the common people?
Sometimes I have my doubts about the stuff that has been made into musicals. There has been some inspired work, like "West Side Story" reworking the Romeo and Juliet story. But how did they ever turn "Les Misérables", the book, into a musical? Surely the most unprepossessing material you could think of for a musical entertainment. Unless, of course, you go back further to "Oliver". Who would have thought that you could make Oliver Twist into a musical. And yet "Les Misérables" goes from strength to strength and schools all over the place put on productions of "Oliver"!
I remain baffled. Maybe we should all just go back to watching panto!
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