The insulin is kept in the fridge.  Its in a small bottle with the nail varnishes - the small, clear bottle, NOT the green and red ones with brushes.  Rotate the bottle gently to make sure the insulin is spread evenly through the liquid.  It should be a cloudy suspension.

Take a hypodermic, remove the caps at top and bottom, and insert the needle into the rubber circle over the top of the bottle.  Holding the bottle above the needle like they do in movies and draw down the dose (3.5 iu at the moment, but this might change, so check on the bottle).

Find Thelma, and hold her somewhere comfortable for both of you, perhaps on your lap, or sit beside her on the bed.  Take a fold of skin at her shoulder or hip, and gently but firmly insert the needle before pushing the plunger.  The needle is very small and very sharp, so if you’re confident and have a steady hand, she will barely notice.  Remove the needle, and gently stroke the area to help circulation.

It’s much, much easier than giving a cat a pill, and not difficult unless you’re nervous of needles.

Make sure she gets each dose between 22.5 and 25.5 hours after the previous one (ie. 90 minutes either way, each day).   Write the date and time on the sheet on the boiler.

Hypodermics can be reused 2 or 3 times.  When one is finished, put it into the bottle with the other old ones, not the bin (that’s illegal and very unsafe for the binmen).

If you prick yourself, don’t push the plunger.  If you do push the plunger, call a doctor or the NHS helpline immediately.  It’s not likely to be damaging because its a very small dose, but it isn’t a good thing.

The story is well-known.  Oedipus, King of Thebes (played by Ralph Fiennes), discovers that he has murdered his father and married his mother in unwitting fulfilment of a prophecy made at his birth.  Freud thought it represented a common male fantasy, and Tom Lehrer had great fun with it.

Reviews of this have been mixed.  As with most Greek drama, is very wordy, with events explained more than they are shown.  Fiennes himself is almost unbearable to watch at times, so intense is the tragedy, but   Clare Higgins as Jocasta is the one who really seems to get to the heart of it and draw the audience in  As Oedipus works out what has happened, she sits silently, the truth slowly dawning, shaking in horror.  The chorus of middle-aged, besuited men is a little odd and occasionally seems more church choir than Greek chorus.

The set is a large, bronzed dome, with huge doors at the back and a long wooden table.  The doors move round through about 90 degrees and back during the performance, perhaps trying to illustrate a day.  Behind and on either side of the doors, trees are occasionally revealed and also used as an entrance.  The leaves fade from full summer to deepest winter as the tragedy unfolds.

Seat H26 in the stalls was perfect.  Oedipus runs until 4 Jan, returns only.

Today I found myself sitting in Blackwells bookshop looking at a differential equation and very concerned to realise that it meant almost nothing to me. You may well ask why I didn’t just find another book, and that’s a good question. I’ve enrolled in a course about wind power, at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales, and they say the absolute minimum prerequisite is A level maths and physics, which I blithely told them that would be fine.

This is one of my regular forays into finding a better way of earning a living than corporate IT project management, and my idea of how to save the planet from impending climate doom.  I suspect its going to be a long, dark winter.  I bought the book.  I refuse to get a bicycle.

What plot there is, is very simple. The King of Navarre and his courtiers (above) swear to study for three years, forsaking women, good eating and even a decent nights sleep for the sake of learning. This has barely started when the Princess of France and her ladies show up, with inevitable consequences.

The play is truly an ensemble piece, and the cast do a brilliant job of turning this difficult play into something very funny and accessible. Although Berowne (Tennant) has twice as many lines as anyone else, they are concentrated into more long speeches. If there is a star, it could as easily be the hilarious Spanish Duke Don Adriano de Armado (Joe Dixon) all pompous strutting and atrocious accent proving that Fawlty Tower’s Manuel and ‘Allo ‘Allo have ancient precedents. Tennant is wonderful, but the entire cast made this performance worthwhile.

In one of the most obscure parts of the play, with puns on l’envoy and geese which you’d have to have read a critical edition to get, let alone find funny, Armado, his page Moth (Zoe Thorpe) and the villager Costard (Ricky Champ) break into a rap, and have the theatre in stitches. It sounds odd, but works brilliantly. As Oliver Ford Davies (Holofernes) pointed out in the Q&A afterwards, rapping helps bring out the rhythm of the verse, as well as forcing clear diction.

And yes, this has to be one of Shakespeare’s filthiest plays, knee-deep in innuendo and often smellier stuff. I doubt there was a straight bloke in the audience sitting calmly as the milkmaid Jacquenetta (Riann Steele) worked her churn.  More scatological references are funny (Berowne pronouncing faces as faeces when, dressed as a Russian, he asks the ladies to reveal theirs) or really rather odd, as when Don Armado says that the King likes to run his finger through his excrement and mustache.  My text suggests the word refers to facial hair as well, but I wasn’t quite sure how to take that.

One of the strong themes of the play is the cruelty, and essential emptiness of wit, and Rosaline’s final request to Berowne to use his wit to good purpose if he wants to win her is strikingly apt this week.  ‘A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it, never in the tongue of him that makes it’ would be a useful lesson for Johnathan Ross.

You wonder really what, if anything, the women see in the men.  They have failed to keep their vows, try to win the women over with clever games while also deriding them.   They cannot even respect their grief when the death of the King of France is announced.    The only time they seem to really respect the women is in Berowne’s speech to the other lords justifying the breaking of their vows.  Tennant delivers a beautifully nuanced performance, balanced between self-serving cant and a genuine, more mature, reflection on the nature of love.

Although the set is minimal, it seems sumptuous.  A huge tree dominates, and is used by Tennant to hide and watch the others.  Long strings of coloured polygons give the idea of a forest park.  The costumes are rich, with the men in traditional doublet and hose.  In an early interview for the season, director Gregory Doran said he wouldn’t put Tennant in hose, but I’m sure a fair few female fans were grateful he did.

In all, well worth the trip to Stratford.  I probably wouldn’t have bothered if it hadn’t been for Tennant, and his performance alone would have made it worthwhile, but I’m now determined to make sure I see the plays the RSC don’t bring to London.

Despite the seat being much cheaper, I had a better view than for Hamlet. In the gallery, in B55, I could see everything, though I’d prefer to be down in the stalls (but in the middle, not right at the edge).  Love’s Labour’s Lost runs at the Courtyard in Stratford upon Avon until the end of November, and is a complete sellout - returns and day tickets only.

If you’re in the UK, pop over to iplayer and pick up ‘The Story of Maths‘ for a 4 episode trip through the history of maths from the Greeks, via the middle east to eighteenth century Europe and beyond.  They’re presented by Marcus du Sautoy, who has apparently just been appointed to Richard Dawkins’ Chair for the Public Understanding of Science*, and a very interesting geek he is too.

But it’s not just this series.  A couple of weeks ago, we had ‘High Anxieties: The Mathematics of Chaos’, introducing chaos theory and its implications.   Its easy to think of science presenting a definite, mechanistic view of the world, but chaos theory suggests that not only are some things unknown, but perhaps unknowable.  In a sufficiently complex system such as the weather a very small change in initial conditions can send the system into unpredictable territory where it may be impossible to predict the outcome.  Is that what’s happening to the climate?  Or to financial markets?  James Lovelock thinks the greenhouse effect is already irreversible and we watch the stock market gyrate wildly.    Who needs gods and demons when this is around?

*hat-tip to Ben Goldacre on his del.icio.us feed

I discovered British Sea Power back in March, and have become rather enamoured of their eclectic, eccentric style. They put on a good show.  Lots of odd props, including the bits of tree which are a trademark, old sirens and a bloke on a bicycle.  Their fascination with coasts and seabirds dominates the videos behind the band.  The addition of the London Bulgarian Choir appearing ghost-like in the mist added an ethereal quality.

But does it have to be so loud that their beautiful, lyrical songs disappear into an overamplified bass?   What’s the point of losing voices and violin in the other instruments?  The Great Skua is a soaring instrumental rolling like a bird in stormy skies but live became a blanket of noise.   Maybe I’m just getting old.  And maybe I am really more Barbican, and should just stick to cds.

British Sea Power played the Roundhouse on Friday, 17 October and are at the Forum on 29 October.

Courtesy of the Observer, I watched Zeferrelli’s 1980 production starring Mel Gibson, Glenn Close and Helena Bonham-Carter this evening.  It seemed so much less intense than the version I saw recently at the RSC, and while Mel Gibson is better than I’d have expected, he isn’t a patch on David Tennant.  Gibson’s Hamlet is far more balanced, less angry and less passionate.  Glenn Close’s Gertrude is a treat though, more calculating and ambiguous than Penny Downie’s.  It’s also a lot shorter.

As Noma Dumezweni’s Producer tries, and is failing, to complete a docu-drama (or is that a drama documentary) about the euthenasia of a teenager, six people appear and demand that she tell their story instead.  She is drawn further and further into their tale of incest and death and we spiral down into an intense consideration of the meaning of existence and the way in which theatre, or film, relates to reality.  Ian McDiarmad is a creepy aged Father, guilty but continuing his incestuous relationship with his Step Daughter, played by Denise Gough.

The boundaries between reality and fiction unravel as the Producer runs behind the stage of Les Mis next door, before reappearing on the stage.  Throughout, the play examines theatre as a more accurate portrayal of reality.  The opera of the crucial moment when the Mother discovers the Father and Step Daughter in the act is far more dramatic and powerful than a realistic staging would be, hitting the audience with their trauma.

Hamlet is the play of the moment with even a free DVD of Zeferrelli’s 1980 version in my paper this morning.  This production draws parallels with the play within a play and questioning of existence, using  ‘Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I‘ to make the point that there may be more passion in a play than in real life.  It tells us that there is something of Hamlet in all of us, but starts to take it a little far when self-indulgently going on about the David Tennant and Jude Law versions crowding the London stage this winter.

In all an excellent production, although it runs on about 20 minutes too far at the end, almost as if they are trying to find their way back out of the thing and losing some of the impact in the process.

Six Characters in Search of An Author plays at the Gielgud until 8 November.  There seem to be lots of cheap tickets at the TKT booth, partly perhaps because it is a challenging play rather than the normal, easy West-End musical.  We had good view, despite being at the end of the sixth row of the stalls (F3-4)