STOP THE FRONT PAGE: DAVID CAMPTON GOT ON HIS FEET TO APPLAUD A SHOW IN BELFAST! It really does take a lot to get me out of my seat to give a play a standing ovation, yet it seems to be expected here these days. I’ve discussed this a number of times online and in person with fellow thespian curmudgeon Trevor Gill, so I suspect he was surprised, to say the least, when yesterday afternoon he saw me lifting my backside off the pew in the Sanctuary Theatre and loudly applauding Bright Umbrella's “Stuck in the Middle with You”, the play written by Sam Robinson and Trevor himself, who also directed the show… Actually it was an even bigger surprise to me, because after sitting on those pews for 2 hours I wasn’t entirely sure that my legs would work! I had agreed to chair a Q&A for the audience afterwards, which is always a dangerous thing to promise without seeing the show first… an actress friend of mine says that when I meet her after one of her shows, despite my background as an a
Currently enjoying a few sun-blessed days in Arrecife, the capital of Lanzarote for the second year. Today Sally and I took a short stroll around the current exhibition in La Casa Amarilla, a small municipal gallery in the town. Last year it was an exhibition focussed on rituals around death and mourning which we visited on our last day here, preparing me for my return to porridge, though I have applied few of the more local rituals in the year since. Today I thought we were visiting an exhibition called "Gateways to Macronesia", assuming these were the lesser known (and indeed non-existent) big brothers of Micronesia in the Pacific, without knowing why such an exhibition would have wound up here... But no, I had missed out an "a" and "Gateways to Macaronesia" was actually an exhibition of old photographs of ports and airports across the Canaries, Cape Verde, Madeira and the Azores, with the name going back to the ancient Greek "Isles of