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The Virginia Monologues or How the sex and drugs an rock 'n' roll generation are finally learning to love their bus passes

The Virginia Monologues: The Studio Theatre, Lighthouse, Poole

Virginia Ironside

Virginia Ironside was a Fleet Street rock writer in the sixties and the outspoken  agony aunt for Woman magazine in the sexually liberated seventies. She interviewed The Beatles, The Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and by her own admission slept with quite a few unsuitable men.

It’s perhaps not surprising then that more than 40 years on, this one-time professional wild child regards breakfasting on a cocktail of pills to be one of the ‘pleasures’ of being an old person. Only these days of course they tend to be statins, beta-blockers, warfarin and glucosamine sulphate. Getting old may not always be a barrel of laughs but Ironside makes it clear that there is a much positivity to being a pensioner.

 Indeed listening to her hit Edinburgh Fringe show The Virginia Monologues, which played Poole Lighthouse at the weekend, one could be lulled into thinking that ones dotage is divine.  At 68-years-of-age  she is clearly determined to grow old disgracefully but she does so with such gentility and good humour that little old ladies and gentlemen in the audience chuckle politely as she riffs on subjects that veer between crack-cocaine, skunk and blow-jobs to bird-watching, gardening and stair-lifts. 

It’s a neat trick and one that Ironside -  all cut-glass accent and dressed like a dotty old dear from a Miss Marple mystery - pulls off with considerable aplomb. It’s a clever show directed by Nigel Planer of The Young Ones fame (how deliciously ironic is that?). It’s based almost entirely on the fact that the original sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll  generation are now fully paid-up, bus-pass enabled old farts. 

That fact alone is a myth-buster. What Ironside does in her inimitable way is to prove that old does not necessarily equal boring, though it does involve quite a bit of slowing down. The message is clear. If you’re attitude’s right then being old can actually be quite a hoot.

Jeremy Miles

Flesh eating plants in the wild west

A butterfly lives dangerously in Derek's deadly garden. Picture: Hattie Miles

 

An encounter with flesh-eating plants in the wild west

Drove all the way to Cornwall to see Derek Clavell-Bate, cultivator of a weird and wonderful collection of carnivorous plants and keeper of the National Collection of Nepenthes. We then drove all the way home again and wrote a magazine feature that eventually saw the light of day in October 2011.
It did get published eventually and more than a year later I have returned to this blog. It wasw an interesting piece and wound up in Cornwall Life magazine.