Ep27 Disporting ones-self & the highland moose - Belinda Connolly

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Luke 00:00:06  Welcome to another episode of the Impro Pod podcast. This is the first time we've done it in the sitting room with the fire. My guest today is Belinda Connolly. Thank you for being on the podcast. How would you describe yourself?

Belinda 00:00:21  I do and have done lots of things and yeah, I have a profile up on on Airbnb, which is what I do quite a lot of the time. At the moment, I think I call myself on that, an author, chef and therapist. My biographical quip is something like standing on my head. Yeah, that's probably enough.

Luke 00:00:40  So I'm going to play you a piece music, and I want you to tell me what it makes you think of anything that comes into your mind.

Belinda 00:01:44  Reminded me of Debussy, actually. So I was transported way back to those halcyon, glorious days of my childhood playing in the garden alone, which I did a lot of, and it always seemed to be summer. This particular moment And put me in connection with all of nature. I remember playing in little nests, which I'd make for myself.

Belinda 00:02:08  I was obsessed by clothes, and I have those little press out children's books where you could get a little figure, and then you put the clothes on the dolly. And I was making fairy dresses out of the petals, which I gathered from, and I used to take the dandelions juice out of the dandelions and use them to stick the petals on the dresses, which worked momentarily, and then they'd all fall off. Just that feeling of peace and security and beauty and timelessness. No pressures of anything, just completely in the moment, happy in nature. And the sound of bees I seem, was there as well.

Luke 00:02:58  So I'd like you to tell me a story of some kind.

Belinda 00:03:01  I'm in my home with two children and partner in the loft bedroom, which has large Velux windows, and it's in the afternoon. I'm relaxing and then I hear something resembling cloying feet of seagulls. Suddenly I'm aware that these cannot be seagulls feet because they don't go on and on. They fly off. So there's something of a clawing sound nature, continuously and periodically stopping and then continuing outside on the roof, at which point I think, oh my God, that sounds like a cat.

Belinda 00:03:47  So I leap out of bed stark naked and open the window, and we live in the middle of the country at this point, so there's not many people around to find my black cat tinkle hanging on by his claws to the guttering, staring at me with no sound. But he's clearly been in the state and has ended up in risk of his life. Is a high house. So I scream for my partner Brian to come upstairs and he rushes up. What's the matter? What's the matter? I said, tinkles outside on all the things that are happening. He's. I'll go and get a ladder. I said. No, you will not get a ladder. Hang me out of the window now! He's that. I can't do.

Speaker 3 00:04:28  That. I can't do that. I said you're a strong man.

Belinda 00:04:30  I can't do that. I said, do it now. The voice of command slipped easily from my lips. And yes, he actually did hang me out by my ankles at the window and low enough that I could grab tinkle by the scruff and pull him back in safely.

Belinda 00:04:52  I was shocked that I could be this powerfully commanding. It's a bit like out of Dune and the Bene Gesserit, using the voice, and he obeyed.

Speaker 4 00:05:00  I'm gonna break the story.

Luke 00:05:01  Down into sections. You're just having a good time hanging out, and then you hear the scratching noise. And then there's the. What is that? There's a sense of questioning. This isn't quite right. And then calling your then partner, and then the commotion and then the rescue.

Belinda 00:05:20  Look.

Luke 00:07:26  So you have telling me another story.

Belinda 00:07:28  I was in the Highlands, the Scottish Highlands, working for lady McLean, who was the wife of Sir Fitzroy McLean, who wrote Eastern Approaches, which was his amazing journey as a diplomat from Russia through to Samarkand. To the east, he wanted to see Russia as it was disappearing into communism. He was one of the founding members of the SAS and responsible for putting Tito into power through the British government, etc. so he was a kind of adventurer person, and I was interested to to meet the guys as well as work as a chef up in the restaurant, which they ran the Creggan Inn.

Belinda 00:08:09  I end up there in the middle of nowhere in the Highlands, which I'd never been before, and lady McLean had this wonderful system of getting Cordon Bleu girls to work in the restaurant in the summer, and little did she know, it was a recipe for disaster because there were the very Scottish Highlands people who would love to have their own way, and they had their own way of running things, and they knew how the kitchen ran. And then suddenly to have some poncy English person come and tell them how to cook didn't go down particularly well. I remember one evening we had a house where all the staff were living, and there were about 5 or 6 of us who lived there, and in the evenings it was cold and there was a fire, and I was into keeping fit at that point, and I'd be doing lots of Jane Fonda type exercises, and for some reason I ended up again with no clothes on, and it was on the ground floor and there was no one around. It was a very isolated house, so I just finished my exercise session and the curtains were open and suddenly a shadow passed by the window and I freaked out because it was quite high and I suddenly thought, oh, it's a moose.

Belinda 00:09:23  Geography not being my or my main point, because the only image that made sense of somebody outside my window was a creature with long antlers. So I just thought moose. So I then, still with no clothes on, stick my head out of the window to see what was going on. So there was me topless dangling out the window, and I saw below the window a crouching figure, at which point I let back about six feet. Luckily, I managed to grab a dressing gown. I was on the ground floor, ran into the sitting room where other people were, and I said, there's someone outside my window, crouching, and everyone looked up. Horror. One guy got the poker from by the fire, and as I was saying this, you could hear the windows slowly opening. At which point everyone's blood run cold. The head office was alerted. Up the road, the police came. I was told to leave my room and go and sleep up at the main house. And there was a lady who ran the whole operation called Mrs. Huggins.

Belinda 00:10:28  I remember her well. She probably remembers me well too, and she was very angry with me, accusatory. What are you doing? Spotting yourself in front of everybody to see. And I was stunned because I'd been deeply scared and I said, I am no Jezebel, Mrs. Huggins. And she said, that's your words, Belinda. So eventually I went back. Nothing was stolen. And I just think someone was having a real laugh in the neighborhood. So I never was able to go into the pub after that and not suspect one of the locals.

Luke 00:13:04  What do you think? That.

Belinda 00:13:04  Yes, I really like the almost ominous, like, almost jaws. Like, dude, it dude.

Luke 00:13:09  I tried to get the sense of isolation. You can imagine the mists of drifting over the mountains and stuff, and then introduce this sense of, what the hell is this? This this shadow.

Belinda 00:13:40  Yeah. Lulled into complete relaxation and then all was not well.

Luke 00:13:55  So what did you get from this podcast.

Belinda 00:13:57  Just such a great way to raise memories, and then for them to be beautifully translated into a deepening or a re-experiencing it through someone else's imagination, and it creates a richer experience for me.

Luke 00:14:16  So when you think back on those memories now, do you think the soundtrack will have an influence?

Belinda 00:14:20  Yeah. The beauty some level has been enhanced in terms of it just being real life at a distance. Now it's not like I'm reliving the trauma of it. The atmosphere in the countryside in which these things happened, that reimagining it makes me want to go back to Scotland anyway. And my dear cat, I will always miss him. The early memory of my childhood playing in the fields that will stay with me for a while.

Luke 00:14:49  So do you have an association with Debussy with that kind of memory?

Belinda 00:14:52  Very much so. Being in nature and the imagination of a child intertwining with the natural world. This made me feel part of that in a way that disappears with childhood. I was very fond of Grimm's fairy tales and the Arthur Rackham frustrations. I have them around my house even now were very strong imaginative realms that I pletely absorbed as a child. And those beautiful romantic pictures helped me deal with night terrors and all those sorts of things.

Belinda 00:15:28  Not everything was beautiful, but it was real and part of its musical. Listening to my mother play the Moonlight Sonata as a child, hearing her grief in a way because the marriage wasn't working very well, come through with that as well as music was part of my childhood and image and my fairy tales, which were really important to me.

Luke 00:15:52  Thank you very much for being on the podcast.

Belinda 00:15:54  Thank you.

Luke 00:15:55  Join us next week for another episode of Impro Pod. Thanks for listening.