At this point in the campaign I hadn’t made my mind up which way I was going to vote. After a few weeks in which the Remain campaign spent most of their energy exaggerating the apocalyptic scenarios that would happen if we left the EU, while the Leave campaign just flat out lied about everything, I ended up plumping for the Remain side.
(Press release for The Hastleons, written by myself and published unedited, including the mysterious extra ‘the’ in the fourth Paragraph by the Hastings Observer who obviously just copied and pasted it into place without reading it.)
The Hastleons, Hastings and St Leonards’ premier amateur musical theatre group are celebrating a milestone in their existence this week.
They have been putting on shows now for 90 years.
This weekend sees ‘The Hastleons at 90‘, a variety show celebrating the past 90 years, being staged at the Stables Theatre in Hastings.
Songs and routines from previous productions will be presented, using the original cast members from the when the shows were originally staged by the group. They will be aided and abetted by an ensemble chorus of current members.
The Hastleons will be delving back to shows they put on as far back as the 1970s, like ‘Oklahoma‘ and ‘South Pacific‘ plus more recent shows put in the last decade such as ‘Beauty and the Beast‘ and ‘Bugsy Malone‘.
Many old names will be returning to grace the stage, such as Steve Corke, now putting on shows at St Mary’s in the Castle with the Renaissance theatre company, and Lucy Andrews, who first played Belle from Beauty and the Beast with the Hastleons, and has just returned from a year in a theme park in Japan where her job was essentially to be Belle.
Devised by the Hastleon’s Chorus Mistress, Clare Adams and choreographed by Chloe Hurst, the show will be compered by veteran Hastleon, Michael Woodhams.
The Hastleons first show was the 1989 piece ‘Veronique’, staged at the Gaiety Theatre on 10th May 1926. The Gaiety was the Hastleons’ home until 1932 when it was converted in to the cinema that is now known as the Odeon. Their production of The Desert Song was the last live show performed at the theatre.
The Hastleons then moved on to the Cinema DeLuxe (now DeLuxe Bingo) on the seafront until 1935. Since 1936, their home has been the White Rock Theatre, apart from a break between 1940 and 1946 when the war interrupted proceedings. Those Hastleons not on active duty abroad spent the war as a concert party entertaining the troops.
For a numbers of years the Hastleons have rehearsed at a number of venues such as the Adelphi and Castle Hotels before moving to Newgate Road in 1971 for nine years. They arrived at their current home, the Hastleon Hall in Bexhill Road, St Leonards, in 1980.
The Hastleons’ next show after this is planned to be ‘Annie’ in October 2016. Audition and rehearsal details will be released shortly.
The main picture is based on the curtain call for Beauty and the Beast, and the proscenium arch and surrounds are based on that of the Hastleons’ usual home at the White Rock Theatre. I’m in the front row, third from the right.
Photo by Peter Mould
Drawn on the iPad. To me it’s really obvious, as the lines are freer and more painterly, and the lettering isn’t as precise, but most people can’t tell the difference.
For the next month, the strips will all be drawn by hand, as you’ll see I’m having to add a lot more detail into the settings…
Maybe it hasn’t hit the States yet, but at the moment, everything in the UK is now available in spiralized form. Or you can spiralize it yourself with a very expensive spiralizer that you’ll use twice and then put in a cupboard next to the Breville toaster never to be used again. It’ll keep the foodies entertained until they rediscover fondue again (that must be due its once-every-two-decade revival by now, surely?)
When we first discovered that Sunday had injured her tail and was bleeding all over the sofa, we improvised a bandage of our own to try to stem the flow before we took her to the vets. Of couse she coyldn’t feel anything, but she knew there was an unwanted weight at the end of her tail. So, using the remaining working muscles at the base of her tail she just gave the tail a swift flick and sent the sodden bandage flying across the room, much like what you see in panel two. After the third attempt we gave up – she was treating it as a game and her aim was getting better.
Once again, a remix of an old Millie strip – in this case it’s the last one from this sequence…
If there’s anyone who is unfamiliar with Millie, the strip I wrote for the Daily Mirror in the 1990s (so that’ll be all of you, then) you can find scans of the first few years of it on the old blog, starting HERE.
Once again I’m indebted to Sunday for this. When she was annoyed or agitated she shouldn’t thrash her tail around in the manner that Smudge is demonstrating here. Instead all she’d do was raise her tail once and let it hit the ground again with a resounding THWACK!
As this series of strips progresses, Jones’ bandage will gradually morph into a plaster cast…
My first cat, a beautiful tortoiseshell-and-white girl called Sunday, was injured when she was a kitten. We don’t know what happened, whether she was involved in a car accident or kicked by a drunk from the pub down the road, but I remember coming home from school one day, and having Sunday run up the hill to greet me as normal. But something was wrong with her back legs – she couldn’t keep upright and kept flopping over as she ran.
We took her to the vets and discovered that something awful had happened to her hind quarters. She was no longer able to pee unaided, and her tail was paralysed. She should have been put to sleep that evening, but the vet thought she appeared to be unconcerned about it, and she was such a lovely cat that she was given a second chance. She was given painkillers and we were taught how to squeeze her bladder to make her pee mechanically.
After a few days, a miracle happened. She learned to pee by herself again, and she could walk and run without falling over. After a month you wouldn’t know that anything was wrong with her apart from her tail which remained paralysed apart from the muscles at the base of the tail, which meant she could raise it to half mast in greeting. Also, she couldn’t feel a thing that happened to it.
Fast forward 14 years. Sunday’s an old lady now (and she would live a good few years longer yet) but she’s still as lively as she was when she was younger. We’ve moved out to a house in High Brooms, and she’s having great fun patrolling the fish pond and the gardens around us. One evening she came in through the French windows, chirruped a greeting and jumped up onto the back of the sofa for a pet and a nuzzle. As I stroked her I realised her tail was wet. No, not wet… covered in blood. And Sunday is completely unconcerned and purring her head off.
She ended up with the kind of heavy bandage that Jones is currently sporting. Sadly, her tail went septic and half of it had to be amputated, but once again she made a full recovery, and was just as happy with half a useless tail as she was with an entire one.