{"id":7932,"date":"2016-10-06T00:38:49","date_gmt":"2016-10-05T23:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/?p=7932"},"modified":"2016-10-06T01:03:05","modified_gmt":"2016-10-06T00:03:05","slug":"good-bye-sir-arnold-wesker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/good-bye-sir-arnold-wesker\/","title":{"rendered":"Good-bye, Sir Arnold Wesker"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the\u00a0hardest things\u00a0about being away from home is when you find out news entirely by accident, especially sad news.<\/p>\n

I was right\u00a0in the middle of organising the\u00a0promotional blurbs given to me by\u00a0fellow authors for my upcoming book Oysters and Pearls: Collected Stories<\/em><\/a> when I decided\u00a0to check something on the Internet. Well, I received\u00a0quite a shock when this Telegraph<\/em> article about Sir Arnold Wesker<\/a>\u00a0came up at the top of my search:<\/p>\n

(http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/obituaries\/2016\/04\/13\/sir-arnold-wesker-playwright—obituary\/<\/a>)<\/p>\n

I suppose we\u00a0always think people will remain\u00a0exactly the same as they were when we\u00a0last saw them. If they were young and vibrant, they will forever remain young and vibrant (or older and vibrant) until the next time we’re with them and can see the changes wrought by time. Alas, on the last occasion\u00a0I’d chatted with Arnold, he’d told me that his health had deteriorated significantly. And he hadn’t sounded encouraged about any potential for improvement. I can only hope he found some enjoyment\u00a0in\u00a0his remaining days.<\/p>\n

It’s quite curious\u00a0how we came to meet. I’d just released\u00a0an anthology of short stories (Erotic Travel Tales 2<\/em><\/a>). One of my contributors was\u00a0a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Somewhere in the promotional material it said that this\u00a0was the first anthology of erotica to feature a FRSL. I’m not entirely sure how Arnold came to hear of the book, but I had an email from him not long afterward, telling me that he (also a FRSL) had written his own collection of erotic short stories.\u00a0His book The King’s Daughters, <\/em>which he’d signed for me,\u00a0holds pride of place on my bookshelf and has done since he’d first given it to me during our visit to his charming thatched cottage in Wales.\u00a0Perhaps it was our shared genre or perhaps it was our shared Hungarian blood or perhaps it was plain old serendipity\u2014something had prompted him to reach out a hand in friendship.<\/p>\n

\"Arnold<\/a><\/p>\n

When Arnold first invited me to visit him, I’d told a poet\u00a0and academic friend of mine about the invite. She immediately issued a foreboding warning that Sir Arnold\u00a0was considered “difficult” and one of the “angry young men”\u2014and on my head be it! I had to wonder why someone so difficult and “angry” would bother to invite me (and Teddy Tedaloo<\/a>) to come stay with him, let alone\u00a0cook us dinner! Not knowing what to expect, I threw caution to the wind (as I so often do) and got the train to Abergavenny, where he was to pick us up.\u00a0Well, Arnold was there as promised, and in true British style, the first thing we did was head down the pub!<\/p>\n

During our stay, Teddy\u00a0was on his best behaviour (as one might expect), though I’m afraid I can’t say the same thing about Arnold or myself. We started on the wine in the garden\u2014it was a lovely sunny late\u00a0afternoon, and \u00a0the bees were having a fabulous time terrorising me. This was followed by lively conversation in the kitchen, where Arnold\u00a0began preparing us a delicious meal. We scarfed it down in no time, because after desert we had a date with the Scrabble board. Now let me tell you, there’s nothing quite so\u00a0amusing as two authors engaging in a game of Scrabble with a bottle of wine. We quickly\u00a0became\u00a0annoyed with our pathetic collection of letters\u2014none of which seemed to add up to any word that followed the rules. By mutual agreement,\u00a0we decided to relax the rules a bit and allow words that didn’t exactly\u00a0conform to what the game’s inventors had in mind. We even threw in some proper nouns while we were at it. How we both laughed at the hilarity of the situation\u2014two authors cheating at Scrabble. Can it get any better than that?<\/p>\n

It was probably a good thing I was\u00a0sleeping over, because at some point during\u00a0the night we had a bit of a downpour and if I hadn’t been upstairs, the leak in the roof might not\u00a0have been discovered until some serious damage had been done. We were running around like proverbial headless chickens, moving things out of harm’s way and trying to wedge\u00a0cloths along the wall to soak up\u00a0the water that was trickling down. After all that wine, the situation was\u00a0the stuff of slapstick comedy. Though I suspect the bill Arnold eventually received from his\u00a0roofer probably wasn’t a laughing matter. Those thatched roofs are an absolute bitch to maintain.<\/p>\n

The next morning after breakfast, I sobered up by watching one of his “kitchen sink” dramas\u2014a televised play that had been done\u00a0for Welsh television. Then\u00a0it was time for us to get the train. Arnold got us packed into his car to take us to the station, though not without first giving me an introduction to living in the Welsh countryside. I was assigned the task of\u00a0opening and closing of gate, which provided\u00a0me with my first encounter with\u00a0stinging nettles. How he managed to deal with that gate every time he came and went I’ve no idea, but a gauntlet would have\u00a0definitely\u00a0come in handy.<\/p>\n

I found this man to be warm, funny and truly delightful company\u2014and he genuinely liked Teddy! I will always remember our visit with fondness.<\/p>\n

RIP, Sir Arnold Wesker.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the\u00a0hardest things\u00a0about being away from home is when you find out news entirely by accident, especially sad news. I was right\u00a0in the middle of organising the\u00a0promotional blurbs given to me by\u00a0fellow authors for my upcoming book Oysters and Pearls: Collected Stories when I decided\u00a0to check something on the Internet. Well, I received\u00a0quite a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2355,2354,33,69,2352,2353,2358,2347,2359,2356,292,2351,875,2348,2350,2346,580,2349,444,2357,489],"class_list":["post-7932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-angry-young-men","tag-arnold-wesker","tag-authors","tag-books","tag-british-playwrights","tag-british-writers","tag-chicken-soup-with-barley","tag-fellow-of-the-royal-society-of-literature","tag-frsl","tag-kitchen-sink-dramas","tag-mitzi-szereto","tag-novelist","tag-novels","tag-plays","tag-playwright","tag-sir-arnold-wesker","tag-teddy-tedaloo","tag-theater","tag-theatre","tag-working-class-drama","tag-writers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7932"}],"version-history":[{"count":43,"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7976,"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7932\/revisions\/7976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}