Simian Substitute Site for April 2021: Medicine Monkey

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR MARCH 2021

Books: Two months into our audiobook-at-bedtime regime, The Belated Birthday Girl came up with a perfectly valid point: "could we have a female voice for a change?" So after Buxton, Mortimer and Whitehouse, our next book was The Lottery And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson, inspired by that recent film that was kinda sorta about her. Our first attempt at listening to fiction in audio form, and to be honest short stories are perfect for the 20-30 minutes a night we're allocating to the task. Narrator Francine Brody does a decent job of making all these tales distinctive, although inevitably certain voices keep popping up again and again - the buttoned-up housewife, or the whiny teen. As for the stories themselves, they're a fascinatingly diverse selection, ranging from whimsical tales of petty inconvenience to out-and-out psychological horror. Jackson's sense of place is extraordinary - the homes where her characters live inevitably come to define who they are, which is what makes Like Mother Used To Make such a wicked little tale. The fact that she was even prepared to discuss race out loud in the late 1940s is something I wasn't expecting, although the way in which Flower Garden announces itself as a story about race halfway through comes as a jolt these days. The odd little themes and motifs that reoccur throughout these otherwise unconnected stories give the collection an implied throughline, making the whole thing a very satisfying listen. We finished it a couple of weeks ago, and now we're back to non-fiction and men again - but that's a discussion for next month.

Music: March 2021 has been notable for people looking back at their naive predictions of how things were going to pan out after March 2020. Here are mine, if you're interested. (And as we started the first year of this mess with a monkey-themed cartoon from Private Eye, let's start the second year the same way.) Many of these monthly roundups since then have been full of reports on online gigs. We don't do as many of them as we used to, but they're still very much happening. Here's a good one from this month: Kid Carpet, live from the Town Hall in Trowbridge. Alarmingly, it appears to have been almost exactly a decade since we last saw the Kid play a gig for grown-ups: theatre shows and stuff for children have been keeping him occupied since then. Some of the songs from those shows end up in this set, along with a couple of unreleased ones and some old favourites. (He even plays Gordano! Thank you oh Lord and Baby Jesus, as a wise man said in some YouTube comments once.) It's all as ramshackle and entertaining as ever, and it's almost in keeping with the music to have it videoed by a company that normally does weddings. It's part of a whole series of gigs shot in and by Trowbridge Town Hall, because they'd like people to give them some money while they can't put on live shows. Maybe you could consider doing that.

Travel: Last month's posts were all about online film festivals: and next month I'll probably say a bit about online beer festivals too. Is there any kind of festival that can't be held on the internet? Well, if anything was going to test that theory, it was the St Patrick's Day parade in Dublin. Magnificently, this year the parade was replaced by a YouTube-based arts festival that literally occupied a six day weekend. The theory was meant to be that all the video they produced would be taken down a few days after Paddy's Day itself, but it's the beginning of April now and it all still seems to be here. Two highlights stood out for me, both coincidentally involving artists who were on last year's Pick Of The Year compilation. Mary Coughlan contributed A Song And A Chat, a mixture of leisurely interview and greatest hits set, both of which were extremely enjoyable. And Blindboy Boatclub was all over the shop, delivering a set of five nightly short lectures on the subject of Creativity And Mental Health, topping it all off on the final night with a reading of his short story Jo Lee (content warning: contains content). To be honest, those are the only ones that I saw, but there's hours (if not days) of other stuff available, and the big traditional finale live from Whelan's has to be worth a look.

In the meantime, your Simian Substitute Site for April 2021 is Medicine Monkey. Got a child who doesn't like taking their medicine? This little blue fella might be able to help with that, along with all of his assorted backup materials. If your child's an anti-vaxxer, though, sod them.

As hinted above, if last month's posts were all about movies, this month's will be all about beer. I'll have a few online beer festivals to report on, plus - if everything goes to plan - you just might see the return of a regular feature that's been on hiatus for the past year or so. Ooh, the suspense. It's all dependent on us behaving ourselves, though, so take it carefully as we slowly emerge out of lockdown, and we'll see how we get on. Comments on your personal progress welcomed below.