and that burnt-orange sky

     Dear Harriet Walter,

    Hrrrrrrg. Have you ever been in a situation where you're suffocating and you desperately need to breathe but you're being held back by your sister who is like "no, I don't want to breathe, I'm bored of breathing, I want to go off and do this other thing instead" and you're like "WOMAN I MUST BREEEEEATHE OR ELSE I MUST DIIIIIIIIIIIEE"?

    And then she's like "pff whatevs" and then you only get to breathe for, like, 40 or (if you're lucky) 80 minutes every day.

    Of course, in this case I could go off and breathe on my own but it would be so much lonelier and less fun.

    (I'm metaphoring about watching Doctor Who. Can you guest-star on it? Please? In fact, you should just be the next companion. For a few seasons. That would be paradise to a brain-'sploding degree.)

This would be my face when I woke up every morning.

identify

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I love Lord Peter Wimsey. I am in love with Lord Peter Wimsey.

    I can't really identify with Lord Peter Wimsey.

    I am female. I am way younger than he is in any of the stories. I am poor. I am not universally fabulous. I am not talkative, quick-witted, a fast thinker, highly educated (yet), British, a war veteran, good with people, romantic or good at detection.

    I can't identify with Lord Peter as portrayed by Mr Ian Carmichael. Ian Carmichael is old and fat and made slightly creepy by the incongruity between his fattened oldness and his light, bouncy adopted speech, which flings Gs away with the maddened velocity of denial. (That is to say that he sounds rather affected and fake.)

Huuuu boy.

    I can't particularly identify with Lord Peter as portrayed by Mr Edward Petherbridge. Edward Petherbridge has, through his youtube videoblogging, become something of a cinematic British grandfather-figure to me. I adore him, but I watch his portrayal of Lord Peter as a grandchild would have their grandparent's old photo album from younger times shown to them and say, "gosh, Grandpapa, you were a looker back in the day!" if they had a habit of saying things before thinking those things through.

Yuss.

    I could almost identify with Peter-bridge through his devotion to a character (an awesome character) played by you, Ms Walter, except that he has a rather unusual and offputting method of expressing adoration and love and smitten-ness and so on with his face. Like, he looks kind of like he wants to stab you.

Umyeahaboutthat. (image taken from here.)

would you kindly get out of my personal space, miss vane?

                     

 (This is, I am more than happy to admit, a perfectly wonderful moment of loveface. I often think that the two of you had agreeable chemistry most of the time and completely devastating chemistry at certain well-placed moments.)

    Anyway. To get back to my theme.

    The times when I can best identify with any Lord Peter, be he literary, Carmichael or Petherbridge, is when I am watching Petherbridge as Peter and he's looking at (I want to type "loving on") a photo of you.

    At those times I am, like, one with the man. One and shining. Because I've just been there so many times. It's like "hey I'm not the only one!"

(iamsuchadork)

(let the reader note that I do in fact adore Edward Petherbridge)

more of The Price

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    So, as one might expect, my sister and I have been watching your miniseries The Price (1985) over the past week or two. It's been...interesting.

    Like, it was all super slow moving for ages, all middle-aged men yakking and your character being beautifully kidnapped and goin' slightly loopy locked up in a dirty Irish basement, then suddenly the end of episode 4 comes and we're like OHAAAAAAUUUUUGH NO OHEMGEE TRAUMA ALERT TRAUMA ALERT TRAUMA TRAUMA TRAUMA ohhhhh the bastard's gonna use that knife oh girl

    And tonight we watched episode 5. I AM SO TRAUMATIZED RIGHT NOW ABOUT THE FINGER AND THE ENDING I WOULD HAVE BEEN CRYING AND BLEEDING FROM THE EYEBALLS AT THE SAME TIME IF I WASN'T TOO STUNNED TO DO ANYTHING MORE THAN CHOKE WITH SPEECHLESS MISERY ON MY ANTI-TRAUMA HAM AND PICKLE.

    Fuck.

    My sister and I agree that there is not much to be done at this point for a proper ending except kill everyone. We'll probably watch the final episode, 6, tomorrow, but before we do I think I need to try and record parts of our traumatized consultation over ham/cheese/pickles. (Asterisks denote a skip to a different part of the conversation.)

    Sister: Frank needs to die.
    Me: Violently. With lots of blood and pain and slow suffering.
    Sister: Who should kill him? Clare?
    Me: Clare. With bits of the jigsaw puzzle.
    Sister: But they've already got Harriet's shiv.
    Me: All right, she'll kill him with Harriet's shiv and then stuff the jigsaw puzzle bits in the wounds.
    *
    Sister: Nobody cared that Andrew died!
    Me: Yeah, nobody gave a damn about that! They're like oh yeah whatever it was an accident, let's talk about money.
    Sister: Poor Andrew.
    *
    Me: Frank needs to die. Everybody should die.
    Sister: Clare should just kill everyone.
    Me: Including herself. And her mom.
    Sister: And Geoff. And Margaret.
    Me: And the police.
    *
   ****(edit: further speculative bit removed - 7-21-11)

    I expect that the actual end of the actual series will not be anywhere near as satisfying.

kill, clare, kill!

                                                     

Jeremevangelism

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Best Friend has recently seen "Sherlock". You know, the recent miniseries starrin' Benedict Cumberbatch.

    She was rather obsessed with it.

    She has, this evening, asked me if there were any good older Sherlock Holmes shows.

    "Like, before Sherlock?" I said.

    "Yeah, and before the bad one from 2009."

    "Oh, well, there're the Jeremy Brett ones, those are the best. And the other famous ones are the movies from the '40s that had Basil Rathbone, but Jeremy is better."

    "Cool. Can you show me one of those sometime?"

    WIN.

    She's gone home now and I don't think I'll see her over the weekend but that is ok, I will just decide which episode to show her.

    Yay! I get to expose another person to the holy light of Jeremy!

[UPDATE about a week later: She and I have now watched "The Solitary Cyclist" and "The Dancing Men" together. I believe she's enjoying the show very much. winnnnnn.]

nurrrrr. <3

                                                       

The Tempest

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    So yesterday my sister and I were over at my best friend's house. Best Friend has recently been cast in a high school production of The Tempest. She's playing Ariel, which is awesome, I am envious.

    Anyway BF was supposed to read the play through cover-to-cover. Instead, she and her sister had me and my sister over to hang out the whole afternoon after church.

    BF told me about the supposed-to-read-the-play thing. She didn't sound like she really wanted to just then. More fun things to do and so on.

    I was like, "well, we could watch a movie of it instead!"

    And that is exactly what we did.

    We watched the one from 1960 that had Maurice Evans and Richard Burton and Roddy McDowall. It was super cheap and fruity and ridiculous. Those costumes, oh my goodness. (It was actually the first time I'd ever seen any version of The Tempest. I haven't read it, either. Hahaha oh I feel bad.)

    Anyway Richard Burton with webbed hands and webby claw-feet was pretty amazing but what I really want to say is that Roddy McDowall was amaaaazing amazing. I couldn't take my eyes off his - can one really call it a costume when it is mostly paint and sparkles and things rather than clothing? I expect one can. In any case I adored his insane sparkly blue/white almost-nude-but-for-the-discreet-matching-fairy-underpants getup and his super nifty fin/spine things on his head and back. He made a fantastic sprite. Moved and spoke wonderfully. Some of his expressions and hand-actions were a little gigglesome, but it was the sixties after all.

    Best Friend now wants to take inspiration from Roddy-Ariel's colors and sparkliness. I have promised to aid and abet her, especially if helping involves helping her cut her hair, dye it white, add blue streaks and spike it to high heaven. I adore hair dyeing and showering people with glitter and sparkles.

How DO the spikes stay on? Is there some discreet Spandex thing going on that I'm not seeing?

I could take pictures of this forever.

This, to deviate from the theme, is Ferdinand.

Ferdinand has absolutely no pants on. His Ken-doll loins are modestly covered, and he wears calf-length boots, but not a shred of pants as far as the eye can discern. Not a thread, not a smidgen. He is Ferdinand the Trouserless. Presumably he enjoys drafts and breezes upon his manly leg hairs and so on.

             


    Anyway so between this and Cleopatra I think I might have a tiny crush on Mr McDowall.

The Price

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Yessss!

    I totally just found The Price (1985) on youtube!

    I did last night, anyway. The joy has not worn off yet. I watched the first episode with my sister.

    YOUR HAIR WAS SO AMAZING AUGH.

    You were wearing a FEDORA.

    And you wore a white suit with a WHITE BOWTIE. And you looked RIDICULOUSLY ADORABLE.

   You managed to make the line "I can't stand the way you brush your teeth" sound like SERIOUS BUSINESS.

who is a fox? you is a fox.

    I've wanted to see it since I read about it and the whole kidnapping scene thing in your book Other People's Shoes, which was a while ago!
    So happy.

Cat Among the Pigeons

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I watched Poirot: Cat Among The Pigeons with my sister last night because you were in it.

    My sister was like "I want to go to the school where Harriet Walter is the headmistress"

    And I was like "and they wear those awesome uniforms"

    and she was like "mmmm"

    and we were in perfect accordance.

yes please.

                                                    


(screencaps from here)

Star Trek

 (written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    One of my favorite things to do is as follows:

    Step 1: Go over to my best friend's house.
    Step 2: Watch an episode of the original Star Trek series with her (she's seen almost all of those) and/or her sister and/or my sister as well.
    Step 3: Come home and, when I next see my mom that evening, say to her, "So we watched an episode of Star Trek at Best Friend's."
    Step 4: Mom always, always says "Oh yeah? Which one?"
    Step 5: Fail to remember the episode title and summarize the episode in the absolute sparest, vaguest terms I can think of. (Such as "Like, there were alien shenanigans and Kirk and Spock went back in time and there was this girl," or "There was this alternate universe and Spock had, like, a goatee.")
    Step 6: See how long it takes her to figure out which episode I'm talking about and declare the episode title. (She was a huge Trekkie back in the day. Huuuuuge.)

    The last time I did this, the conversation was like

    Me: So we watched an episode of Star Trek over at Best Friend's.
    Mom: Oh yeah? Which one?
    Me: Umm, I dunno what it was called*, but they were, like, abducted, and then there was this guy in a silly coat.
    [three seconds pass]
    Mom: TRELANE
    Me: Yeah that was it

    I love what a nerd my mother was in her youth.

*This is honest. I hadn't been paying attention at the beginning of the episode due to knitting difficuties.