Meandering and Musing on Monday

At the end of another long day with no idea what to write about, I decided to look back on what I had been thinking and writing about ten years ago.

“Overeating regularly eventually leads to under-living.”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana, South African philosopher, social critic, and satirist.

In May 2012, I wrote a blog that discussed amongst other things, the fattest man in the world.  He was Keith Martin a British man who at his heaviest, weighed 70 stone (980 lbs. or 445 kg).  When I wrote my post, Keith Martin was 42 years old. he hadn’t been out of his house since 9/11.  He was too large to go out.  He was recorded as eating 20,000 calories a day, nine times more than the recommended amount.  To read the rest of that post click here.

Then having read that post I decided that I would find out what had happened to the young man since.

Later in 2012, he was part of a documentary 70 Stone and Almost Dead, which featured him dropping 25 stone to qualify for a gastric band operation.  However, health complications arose from the surgery and Martin discharged himself from the hospital against the doctor’s orders. He said it was because he was homesick. He finally succumbed to his health issues and died, aged 44.

What a very sad life that young man lived. 

After reading what I had written and feeling very upset and disturbed, I thought I should look at a happier post written in that same year.

On the morning of February 13, 2012, I received an email from my sister in Los Angeles asking if I remembered the day that a neighbour’s lilac tree fell down.  She went on to say how she remembered the neighbour commenting that she was unaware of how dark her kitchen was. Over the years, the bush had completely covered the window, and suddenly there was sunlight in the room.

Once again this ancient mind untethered itself from today and on thinking about lilacs I remembered the song “On the street where you live” from My Fair Lady.  This was a great hit in the late 1950s (Oh I know that was long before many of you were born but please bear with me).

“Are there lilac trees in the heart of town
Can you hear a lark in any other part of town?
Does enchantment pour out of every door?
No, it’s just on the street where you live”

With my mother, I attended the opening night of My Fair Lady at Covent Garden in London.  What an excitement that was.  There had been an embargo on the music until opening night and there we were.  How lucky could a 20-year-old young woman be? And how did we come to be there? 

My husband had been given the tickets by the chairman of the NZ Meat Producers Board, John Ormond (later Sir John).  Whenever Sir John was in Britain, he always had my husband drive him around.  Of course, all that time ago, we had no inkling we would end up living in and becoming citizens of New Zealand

Here is the post from the BBC on 29 April 1958 recording the opening night.  How I loved that play and all the songs.  Has there ever been a better Professor Higgins than Rex Harrison?

In that post, I went on to reminisce about some of the other musicals I had seen.  If you are interested, here is the post.

So now Pollyanna is back in her usual place.  Not too sure about this untethered brain though.

“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things,
you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you
is quite different when it gets out into the open
and has other people looking at it.”

Oh wise little Pooh Bear.

JB June 27,2022

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