Not Gardeners' Question Time: Broadbean Trouble

I posted this in another place just now, but I'm reposting it here in case anybody reading it has a clue about what's going on. (For the uninitiated: "umra" = the usenet newsgroup uk.media.radio.archers: "umrat" = a denizen thereof.)

( Here is the technical problem )

Film Diary: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café (Jon Avnet, 1991)

A story within a story film which attracted rave reviews when it first came out and which I managed to miss until last night. On the one level, the contemporary tale of middle-aged frump Evelyn Couch with a disastrous marriage, who befriends the elderly Ninny Threadgoode in an Alabama nursing home while visiting her ghastly husband's even more ghastly (but mercifully unseen) mother. She is inspired to grasp hold of her life and rebuild through Ninny's telling the story of her feisty sister-in-law Idgie, Idgie's friend and lover Ruth with whom she runs the eponymous (in the British version anyway) eatery, and Ruth's violent and abusive (and subsequently dead) husband, in 1930s Alabama

Lots of food as symbolism, as you would exect. I've long known that this was a bit of a lesbian classic, but I wasn't really prepared for just how powerfully erotic it is. Left me quite in a tizzy, it did! Mary Stuart Masterson is terrific as Idgie. A fine film, a great example of what independents can do while big studios fall more and more deeply in thrall to the bean counters (can you imagine the big boys getting enthusisatic about a lesbian love story?) and I'm sorry I've missed out on it for so long. Bound to be a favourite from now on though.

Oh, and a word about titles. I don't like titles being changed. I'm not even happy about translations from original languages, but sometimes needs must. This one was just Fried Green Tomatoes in the US - O didn't know thgat, always known it by its extended British name, but I don't know what it adds other than verbiage.

This afternoon at the Rugby

It was a gorgeous afternoon, sunny with a real scent of spring about it. So I took myself off to do something I intended to do from the time I first moved back up here: I went to see Barrow's traditional entertainment, a game of Rugby League.

Craven Park is a ramshackle sort of place, but that's fine by me because you can still stand within a couple of metres of the touchline and enjoy the proper smells - grass, mud, sweat - and fruity language from the pitch. You just can't do that at the round-ball game these days. Fellow spectators are friendly, chatty, and informed which was just as well since the game has changed a good deal since I followed Hull FC at The Boulevard in the late 70s.

It was the first round of the Northern Rail Cup, Barrow Raiders v Blackpool Panthers. A game which, I gather, Barrow would be expected to win at a canter. In the end, although Barrow did win 28-20, it has to be said that Barrow looked like a good team playing badly and Blackpool looked like a modest team playing above themselves, but the upshot was that this was a real treat, a cracking game of rugby, exciting and even heartstopping. Fortunes swung back and forth, action swept from end to end, and either side could easily have won. Indeed, Blackpool could have sewn it up in the last five minutes when, trailing 22-20, they looked set to score a try between the posts only for the player to fumble the final pass.

I'd forgotten how much I like rugby league. It's not just Northern partisanship, although I admit that's involved. It's a fast, furious game played non-stop - I read somewhere that of all the codified[1] football games played around the world, rugby league has the ball in play for the highest percentage of the playing time. There's certainly no messing about; when a ball is kicked into touch there's no waiting for it to be retrieved; a new ball is ushered in straight away. The only time this is a problem is the occasion when there are multiple balls on the pitch! Anyway, it's a game that deserves a bigger audience, though the quietly ramshackle atmosphere at this kind of game is all part of the enjoyment.