Jill Esmond

            On Wednesday morning I finished posting my translation of “L'homme à la tête de chou" (The Man with the Head of Cabbage) by Serge Gainsbourg and began memorizing his second song from that album, “Chez Max, Coiffeur Pour Hommes”.

            I worked on my journal.

            I took down the basket that I keep on my upper storage shelf, dumped all of my daughter’s Lego and Meccano parts that I’ve been saving for her into a bucket and then washed the basket inside and out.

            I had crackers and cheese and pie and skyr for lunch.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. They rehashed a lot of previously done stories in 1951. This one was very similar to one from a couple of years before. The only difference is in how Andy meets Susan Bennett before becoming engaged to her. In this case she is a bus driver and he keeps flirting with her while she keeps telling him to move to the back of the bus. Finally he moves to the back of the bus but so does Susan. Within weeks they are engaged. Kingfish is approached by Susan’s father and offered $100 to break up the engagement. He succeeds by hiring an attractive burlesque dancer to pretend to be rich. But then Kingfish finds out Susan is really rich and has only become a bus driver to find a man that doesn’t want her for her money. Kingfish lets Andy know Susan is wealthy and so he tells her he doesn’t care about that. She believes him and so she gives all her money to charity

            I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor, south to Queen and home. I dressed comfortably this time with my jacket and a scarf.

            I loaded the video footage of my July 20, 2017 song practice into Movie Maker and edited it so I just had one video with God Goes to My Head and One Hundred Hookers. I published the video and then deleted the rest of the footage for that day. My performance was not good enough to upload to YouTube but I thought I’d just keep those two songs at that stage for posterity and as a record of my progress because I clearly play both songs better now and will probably be able to upload better versions this year. Plus the Movie Maker files are much smaller than the videos made by the Nikon. The whole song practice was about 2.5 gigs in the original format while the video I made was just 60 megs.

            I had an egg, two sausages and naan with a beer for dinner while watching two episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hood.

            The first story was from season four and it begins with Robin and his men seeing the sheriff’s soldiers and someone dressed as a nobleman escorting a prisoner through Sherwood Forest. The outlaws stop the escort and release the prisoner. The nobleman tries to get away and the released prisoner stabs him in the heart, claiming that he was going for his knife. They examine the body and find the papers of the deputy lord high sheriff of Nottingham. The freed prisoner says he is a yeoman named Ralph. Alan-a-Dale is missing and Robin suspects that he may have been captured by the sheriff. Since Robin freed Ralph he offers to help him to free Alan by putting on the clothes of the deputy sheriff and by delivering his papers to the sheriff as his own identification. Robin is still uncomfortable with the way that Ralph stabbed the deputy sheriff but as there seems to be no better plan for freeing Alan, he goes along with it. He questions however whether Ralph can pull it off since he has no idea how to behave like a sheriff. Ralph argues that he has dealt with enough sheriffs to know their manners.

            A yeoman in medieval times was basically middle class. Ralph would have been higher than a serf but lower than a nobleman or a knight. His manner around Robin Hood stands in striking contrast to his behaviour upon meeting the sheriff and it is immediately suspicious to me how he could play the part so well. He tells the sheriff that he fooled Robin Hood into thinking that he was a yeoman and that now he plans to use Alan-a-Dale as bait to catch Robin Hood. Ralph goes to see Alan and presents him with a talisman from Robin Hood to show that Alan can trust him. He tells Alan that he will be moving him to a room where is to play his harp for Marian and that Robin will climb to that room to rescue him. He arranges for a rope to hang down from the room so that Robin can climb it. Outside of the room there are two spy holes, one of which Ralph asks the sheriff to look, assuring him that it will provide proof that Marian is an accomplice of Robin Hood. But when Robin climbs in the window Marian does not fall for Ralph’s trap and she immediately shouts at Robin like he is an enemy. The sheriff, his men and Ralph burst in. There is swordplay and Alan also joins in, using his harp as a weapon. Suddenly Ralph holds a knife to Marian’s throat and demands of Robin that he admit she is his accomplice. The sheriff won’t stand for anyone threatening Marian and so he knocks the knife away. Robin catches the knife and grabs Ralph, threatening to kill him if he and Alan are not set free. The sheriff says “Kill him” but Marian convinces him that since Ralph was appointed by Prince John that would not be a good idea. Robin and Alan are allowed to leave.

            The second story is from the first season and involves Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine who was travelling around England collecting donations for the Third Crusade, in which her son King Richard was fighting. As the sheriff serves Prince John his job is to prevent the treasure leaving England without doing so in an obvious way. The queen tells Marian about when she herself fought in the Holy Land in the Second Crusade when she was Queen of France, leading a brigade of female soldiers. As she is the mother of the evil Prince John, she advises Marian that when she has had nine children she should stop, because the tenth could be a frightful mistake. The queen has accumulated a considerable treasure to deliver to the ship and the quickest route to the coast is through Sherwood Forest. The sheriff advises her against that route because her treasure could be taken by Robin Hood. Marian reminds him that Robin does not rob women or supporters of King Richard. Marian sends for Robin and he comes to see her. Robin advises her to send her knights by the sheriff’s recommended route, pretending to carry the treasure, while she Marian and her most trusted servant take the treasure through Sherwood under Robin’s protection. But the queen’s servant Bruno secretly serves Prince John and informs the sheriff. Some of the sheriff’s men disguise themselves as outlaws and wait in ambush along the Sherwood route. They try to behave as outlaws and rob a passing baker for his money and bread but this is not what Robin’s men would do and so when the baker reports of this Robin knows the sheriff’s plan. He sends Tuck to inform the sheriff’s foresters of outlaws waiting on the road and so one group of the sheriff’s men fight another group of the same and the queen has free passage. Bruno tires escapes from the queen through the battling men but is killed by a thrown knife.

There’s a distinct contrast between how Marian is portrayed in the first season and the fourth. Early on her sympathies with King Richard are not concealed but later she puts them undercover and behaves as a double agent.

Eleanor was played by legendary British stage and screen actor, Jill Esmond, who was married to Laurence Olivier from 1930 to 1940. In those years she was far more successful than Olivier.