Shocks and Sparks

What a difference a day makes, 24 little hours. So the song goes, true to life. Heavy mist lifted early to reveal a view as tidy and organised as patchwork. The sun shone on the brown fields, tilled and tilled again until they nearly glistened, everything worked over ready for the next stage in the farming calendar. I watch the tractors making their slow passage up and down the fields and marvel at the transformative neatness of their work. There was just enough breeze for a fire, and so I set one in the drive again. Within a few hours all my garden rubbish had turned to ashes. It's astonishingly enjoyable, burning rubbish. I had to remember not to park the car on top of the embers when I returned much later, the dark so impenetrable I had to feel my way to the gate, and then the door. My torch battery was dead, neglected in the car all summer.

And then a phone call from my sister to tell me she'd broken her leg. Only a few hours earlier she'd emailed to wish me a good day in the garden and now she'd fallen while stepping from a wall to a chair. It turns out the leg is very badly broken on and just below the knee joint, and a conservative estimate is three months on crutches. And so her planned visit tomorrow will take on a different hue: instead of her driving up here I'll go down there and bring her back when her leg has been pinned. Being single again, the scariness of what happens when something goes badly wrong is not lost on me, and so I completely understood her emotional phone call this morning, thanking me for being there.

At least we're not Blanche DuBois. God, her plight was wretched. Gillian Anderson, her voice a classic Tennessee Williams high-pitched Southern drawl, part Plantation heritage part booze part fags, brought her to uncomfortable, agonising life last night in the cinema live from the Young Vic. Her reputation ruined, her teaching career gone to the dogs thanks to a fling with a young student, her beauty ravaged, alone, penniless, increasingly unhinged, and now humiliated by her brother-in-law, the vile Stanley, she faced a terrible future. Her raw delivery tore into the audience, pinning us to our seats in horror at what we were witnessing. Great theatre - it mirrors and magnifies our lives and imperfections. There's nothing to beat it.